Pro Commerce

Gorilla suit

Iris, Nancy and Kendra have sued Koko. Koko is accused of sexual harassment in the workplace for asking to see Iris, Nancy and Kendra's nipples.

Koko is a female gorilla who knows more than 1000 words of American sign language and respnds to 2000 words of spoken English. Iris, Nancy and Kendra are some form of female homo sapien Puritan who's knowledge of English or reasonable human behavior is unknown.

I know Koko and her human trainer, Penny Patterson, from the mid-1970s.  Penny came to me for help. Penny is so good looking she didn't need to ask ... I was willing no matter what she needed. 

Penny had borrowed two monkeys from the San Francisco Zoo and taught them how to use American sign language and to interact with images on a computer screen.  After more than a year, the monkeys knew enough language to tell Penny that they didn't want to be returned to the Zoo.  Imagine not wanting to go back to a cage in a zoo?

Penny wanted my help in getting the S.F. Zoo to free the monkeys for research, indefinitely. She was willing to pay and I was willing to raise the money. 

I knew the Park and Recreation Commission, which spoke for the Zoo, would not listen to the pleadings of two disgruntled monkeys.  So I mounted a campaign with hundreds of young school kids, two hundred of whom showed up, in a packed hearing room, to testify at the Park and Rec  Commission on behalf of the monkeys.  We won.  Penny and the monkeys were grateful.

I occasionally took friends down to meet Koko.  Koko was most affectionate with a bull dike friend of mine.  Koko was most affectionate with females.  How she knew my friend was a female is beyond me.

One of the things about Penny that I liked was that she named one of the monkeys Noam.  Noam Chimpsky. She chose the name for the simple reason that the great Marxist Noam Chomsky was famous for the linguistic position that humans (specifically humans) are hard wired for speech. Also hard wired for class hatred and greed.

I'm sure that Koko's request to see the nipples of the female employees will be treated with the reasonable perspective that our legal system is capable of showing.  This    lawsuit should be a great step forward, as the case goes to court, for all females suffering from sexual harassment in the workplace.

Or maybe the sexual harassment laws may have to be changed when their obvious inanity becomes visible to the public.

 

Juan Trippe

In the movie Aviator, the bad guy, played by a genuine bad guy, Alex Baldwin, (see the movie Team America to understand why Baldwin is a bad guy) is supposed to be Juan Trippe the late president of the late Pan American World Airways. Trippe is portrayed as arrogant, a man who owned Congress. He did own Congress.

I flew Pan Am many times and loved it. I flew around the world several times on Pan Am 1 and 2. 

The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last Thursday by Harold Evans on the contribution that Trippe made to modern flight.  I can't comment on the Evans' material, except that I don't trust Evans. 

I can add my own experience as a Vice President of Bank of California in the late 1960s.  Bank of California was the snooty bank of the upper-class of America that existed at that time.  The CEO was Charles de Brettville, scion of all the old San Francisco families and true elitist.(President of the Pacific Union Club, and a member of the Burlingame Country Club and Cypress Point Club.)

Juan Trippe and Pan Am were clients of the Bank for a long time. One of my friends was the banker assigned to the Trippe account.  My friend was the ultimate elitist, hired only for his upper class contacts; he visited Trippe twice a year. The official report from my unbelievably snooty friend was that Trippe was one of the most arrogant people he ever knew, who used his upper-class contacts to the max. It worked in those day.

Sanity and gasoline pricing

The photo at the right shows a gas station at the corner of Market and Castro where the price for regular is $2.089, a little below the local market. The price for medium and high octane is one dollar more, far above the local market.

Consequence: few people stop for gasoline even though regular is the lowest price gasoline within a mile.

Reason: even for a commodity as standardized as gasoline, people require trust in the business that provides a flammable liquid that goes in their precious automobile. Seeing a price differential as incomprehensible as the one on this station, leads potential customers to doubt the managerial competence of the station operators.

The coupe de grace for this line of reasoning is the light blue sign at the bottom of the price stanchion. The light blue sign, hand painted, offers "psychic readings … no appointment necessary."

Happiness

I often wake up happy.  One reason, today, is that there are four ikebana arrangements in the house.

My partner has been studying ikebana for more than ten years in Tokyo at the Sogetsu School.    She has been creating arrangements for the past year in San Francisco with a teacher in the Ikenobo School tradition.  Being a student in both traditions is a crudely American thing to do.  To the Japanese it would be like supporting two different baseball teams in the same locale.

Ikebana is Japanese flower arrangement that apparently grew out of tea ceremony. The values of ikebana and tea are the same: conviviality and immediacy.

Some schools of ikebana are four hundred years old.  The formal structure of flower arrangement at each school is different, but there are similarities.  Each school also has a free-style form. 

The Sogetsu School in Tokyo is in a building with a lobby designed by Isamu Noguchi, the great American sculptor.  The flower displays in the lobby, which I see when I pick-up my partner for a luncheon after her classes, are always startling, contemporary and quite dramatic.

Ikebana is an extraordinary art form. Each creation is new and temporal.  All the human senses are involved.  Power, spontaneity and imagination interact.

Lefty losers

Robert Mailer Anderson (photo on right) and Zack Anderson

Two local boys show their Lefty loser colors.  These guys, one of whom is on the S.F. Opera Board and the S.F. Jazz Festival Board,  published an op-ed piece in the S.F. Examiner demanding that all good people support Cuba as a strong show of opposition to President Bush.

I've been to Cuba  and studied it carefully.  It is the least oppresive communist country I've visited thanks to color, music and ice cream.
 

I call these boys losers for one simple reason.  The people of Cuba are imprisoned on their island by a tyrant who jails them at will. Castro won't let ordinary Cubans leave the island. The Cuban people do not support him in any way shape or form.  Only a loser would support such civilian slavery for ideological reasons. These guys are proud of their loser credentials as indicated in their op-ed.

Too bad Robert Anderson who is on the Board of the S.F. Jazz Festival doesn't ask Randall Kline, the executive director, how Cuban musicians are paid. Anderson, this sycophant of tyrants would find out that all money for Cubans musicians is paid directly to Cuba.  Cuba then pays the expenses of the musicians while they are traveling to make sure the musicians don't defect. 

 

Go nuke?

A friend asked, in regard to an earlier blog about removing Iranian nuclear weapons, whether the U.S.  would use nuclear weapons against Iran.  There is a technical and a moral answer.

Technically I have no idea whether nuclear weapons are needed for bombing Iranian nuclear weapons sites.

Morally, my answer is yes.  I consider it a moral equivalency when a nuclear nation uses nuclear weapons to keep a rogue nation from creating a functional nuclear arsenal.

It should always be easy for a rogue nation to avoid having a nuclear weapon used against it.  Agree to international inspection.  That forestalls attack. 

This moral equivalency doctrine has not been announced nor accepted internationally but it should be.  Into the foreseeable future we should make it clear that a rogue nation that tries to build a nuclear weapon but is not technically able to defend itself against a nuclear attack has crossed a dangerous and unforgiving threshold.

Every effort and threat must be used to keep rogue nations from becoming nuclear.

Rogue nation is easy to define: it is any nation that violates the millenia old rules of international order.  Iran seized American embassy personnel and has never apologized nor made amends.  Iran is an international outlaw --- a rogue state.

Woolibluster

I recently read an article in Dissent by Clifford Geertz and just finished a book by Theodore Bestor about the great Tokyo fish market called Tsukiji. Both of these men are prominent anthropologists, Geertz at the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study and Bestor on the faculty at Harvard.

Geertz’s article is intricate, arcane, wildly syncretic, obtuse and completely obscure. It is probably incomprehensible to any honest person.

I am now beginning to understand that Greetz’s famous anthropological notion of thick description is a synonym for obscurantism.

The Bestor book is over 400 pages in paperback and never delivers an interesting observation about a fascinating locale. Tsukiji is made up of 50,000 people swirling in exotic chaos to sell and prepare thousands of tons of fish daily. The book is focused on imaginary and hypothetical arguments with other anthropologists. One of Bestor’s constant references is Marshall Sahlins who writes about commerce in primitive tribes, just as obscurely as Bestor.

Bestor is trying to use anthropology to describe commerce. A nonsensical endeavor. Anthropology applied to commerce is like anthropology applied to mathematics, engineering or physics. Yes, some small percentage of math, engineering and physics is culturally determined but that percentage is insignificant and adds precious little to our knowledge.

My esteem for anthropology has fallen from 9 (out of a possible 10) to 2. Commerce is about efficient use of resources, reduction of cost and problem solving to respond to the whims and needs of consumers. The whims and needs of consumers are culturally determined but are largely irrelevant to commerce. Commerce responds automatically to a shift in taste from high fat maguro tuna to lean bluefin, regardless of the cultural reasons for the change.

Many people in the fish market marry other people in the market. Not because of kinship issues, as Bestor suggests, but because of proximity. It happens in the General Motors finance office too.

I have been so distressed by the indecipherable, enigmatic and opaque writing of Geertz, Bestor and Sahlins that I have coined the term woolibluster to describe their presentations. I should also add that Simon Schama, at Columbia, belongs in the same group of wooliblusterers. Men who are perceived as brilliant, highly respected, preening academic prima donnas in their fields but who are unintelligible to me. These men offer bluster while they pull the wool over my eyes.

Terror of Petaluma

I got a parking ticket. I’m sure. I was in a 2-hour zone for 3 hours, having a wonderful lunch, but there is no ticket on my car. A friendly storekeeper explained that the parking terror comes by every fifteen minutes and the video cameras on top (see photo at right) record the license plate.

When a violation occurs, the city mails the ticket to the offender.

So next week I will presumably get a parking ticket in the mail. I don’t like this ex post ticketing. I dislike it more than an actual ticket on the windshield.

Highly efficient law enforcement seems offensive to me in some way.

We are responsible

Kim Jung Il fires a nuclear weapon at Tokyo and kills several million people. Including my friends.

What do we do?  Do we kill millions of Kim Jung Il's people who are innocent?

We, the people and government of the United States have the responsibility for preventing this scenario in the first place because we are the global suzerain. We also are legally bound to defend Japan.

The only response is the one President Bush appears to be taking this week.  We are seeking to convince France, Germany and most importantly, Russia to support us in our plan to bomb all suspected, non-urban, underground nuclear installations in Iran.

There is no need for hysterics about war.  Iran does not have the capability of stopping us.  We make our intentions clear, carry out the bombing and agree to pay for any innocents harmed.  Bombing the vast unpopulated parts of Iran is a necessary preliminary step to disarm North Korea.  The message would be loud and clear. North Korea can be hiding nuclear material in urban areas (Iran doesn't appear to be so callous) and radioactive debris could drift to Japan.  Two negatives.  So we have disarm Iran first.

I expect Europe to support us, I'm not so sanguine about Russia.

Another obituary

I described the first obituary for the left in an earlier blog, it was in Dissent and was written by Andrei Markovits. The second obituary appears in the current New Republic written by editor-in-chief Martin Peretz. Among Peretz’s great lines are:

“Ask yourself: Who is a truly influential liberal mind in our culture? Whose ideas challenge and whose ideals inspire? Whose books and articles are read and passed around? There's no one, really. What's left is the laundry list: the catalogue of programs (some dubious, some not) that Republicans aren't funding, and the blogs, with their daily panic dose about how the Bush administration is ruining the country.”

“So let's admit it: The liberals are themselves uninspired by a vision of the good society--a problem we didn't have 30 years ago. For several years, the liberal agenda has looked and sounded like little more than a bookkeeping exercise. We want to spend more, they less. In the end, the numbers do not clarify; they confuse. Almost no one can explain any principle behind the cost differences.”

President Bush “…may be the first president who apparently does not see individual people in racial categories or sex categories. White or black, woman or man, just as long as you're a conservative. That is also an expression of liberation from bias.”

“But, in the Democratic Party, among liberals, the usual hustlers are still cheered. Jesse Jackson is still paid off, mostly not to make trouble. The biggest insult to our black fellow citizens was the deference paid to Al Sharpton during the campaign. ….. Sharpton is an inciter of racial conflict. To him can be debited the fraudulent and dehumanizing scandal around Tawana Brawley (conflating scatology and sex), the Crown Heights violence between Jews and blacks, a fire in Harlem, the protests around a Korean grocery store in Brooklyn, and on and on. Yet the liberal press treats Sharpton as a genuine leader, even a moral one, the trickster as party statesman.”

Great obituary. Do you still worship this dead body?

 

Destroy us

There are Lefty groups that consider our lives to be expendable if it is a step towards achieving their goal of abolishing Capitalism. 

One of these groups has an office in a church that doesn’t pay property tax in the middle of San Francisco’s wealthy Pacific Heights. They prefer not to work in a black neighborhood near public housing. Photo of the building at the right, Franklin and Clay.

The foundations that support this movement, that considers our lives expendable, include the Ford Foundation, Open Society Institute (George Soros) and Working Assets.

The organization that considers us, American citizens, collateral damage is Critical Resistance. They are clear on their website that prisons should be abolished because prisons and jails wouldn’t be needed in a true communist society, which we must become.

The group got some press by opposing Mayor Jerry Brown’s Oakland curfew on parolees. The group wants prisons abolished and opposes parole too. Mayor Brown contends that the curfew of parolees is effective and has significantly reduced crime in Oakland.

Opposite of anthropomorphism

I find the concept of the computer as an analog of the mind to be wrong.

And yet, when a computer boots-up, going from a cold physical object to a human-responsive device --- I see parallels to the way humans wake up in the morning and re-constitute their identity.  I call the reconstitution daily ontogeny.

An expert on Tibetan Buddhism tells me that there is a similar teaching that waking up requires the recreation of the ego, daily.

The evidence for me personally has come when I have been awaken by a phone call in the dead of night and I feel like I am climbing out of a well to get to the top in order to talk on the phone.

Does that match your experience?

Rhetoric

I described the thesis of Jane Tompkins' West of Everything to a drama professor at dinner last night and her reaction was “I don’t find that convincing.”

My problem was the low quality of my presentation. I forgot the rules of rhetoric that date from the early Greek teachers. To convince another person of a thesis requires the following:

• Establish the argument clearly and simply
• Give the context in which the argument exists.
• Flesh out the argument with examples of its impact in the world.
• Give evidence that support the claims.
• Give evidence of prior research.
• Show that the thesis has good analytic power.
• Provide a summary and a conclusion.
• Consider the broader implications or wider significance of the thesis.

Utopias

I wonder where we are going to find utopias for the next generation of young Americans. 

The Marxist communist utopia makes the advocate seem righteously defiant but clearly stupid.  The same is true for the Ayn Rand advocate; government does many things right and vital.  Hippies had a back-to-the-land, Luddite model; they were modern Amish.  Ecotopia was a subset of the hippy utopia. Back-to-the-land was quickly tested and found wanting.

How can a young person be defiant, angry at hypocrisy and have an ideal these days? What is the new Utopia?

On the other hand, how could a young person understand that ideology (utopia) is a dead end and that rational thought is hard work?

Anecdotal

A friend of mine found that his wife had just returned from dinner with a wealthy young donor to her non-profit. The donor had just married an older beautiful well-known woman that we both knew. My friend phoned to ask if my opinion matched his about the beautiful woman.

I said that I had traveled with her once and was shocked when she got bored with the business of the trip and decided to return home promptly.  While I watched, she told airline staff that there was a death in her family, and that she needed immediate seating at the family emergency rates (that airlines had in those days).  To me that was a sign of dishonesty in the woman's character.

My friend asked whether I had any other personal stories about the woman, cheating a corporation, he said, wasn't a problem for him. 

He's a Lefty, so I left it at that.  To me, dishonesty is a personal trait not modified by the victim of the dishonesty.

What do you think?

Commend to you

I wish to commend two magazines to you. One is the Dubliner.  The URL is to an excellent article by Michael Ignatieff, one of my public intellectuals. He does a great job of explaining why the U.S. is both the global leader in human rights and an outlaw at the same time.

The other is The New Atlantis, a publication of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.  This appears to be a group dedicated to using moral values to evaluate science and the political issues of our day in the light of intelligent thought. The scientific community is far too often politically wrong and morally incompetent.  This is a minimum step on the road to improvement.

 

 

New post war thinking

My son pointed out that there is a new realm of thinking that has arisen since WWII.

The world views of our best minds before WWII were embedded in four large domains. Religion was dominant for several thousand years. Aristocracy and class structure was the dominant reality for most of the world prior to WWII. The same was true for the ideology of Marxism and for Machiavellian realpolitik, though for shorter periods. I find that philosophy, even Kant, was a subset or a substitute for religion.  Adam Smith built his world view as a substitute for religion.

The pioneer post-war thinkers escaping these four dominant world views were Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler who established the Committee on Social Thought at the U. of Chicago to create a fresh world view based on the teachings of Socrates and Aristotle. The work of Raymond Aron reached outside of Marxism and Daniel Bell declared The End of Ideology.  Isaiah Berlin fleshed out the world view outside of ideology.

Out of these post war strands of anti-ideology have grown three new visions of the world.  The first is relativism, a pervasive non-ideological world view, developed by many thinkers. The second is social thought, the recognition that all institutions, including language are built on concepts, ideas, metaphors and images. Mary Douglas is the preeminent name in this realm.

The third is familiar mostly to readers of this blog.  It is appreciation of commerce as a pervasive human creation that is amoral.

We are in a new era of thought.  The implications are just beginning to unfold.

 

 

Come die in San Francisco

No, this is not a political rant against San Francisco.  The S.F. Examiner has published some mortality data that hadn't been put together before. I've taken it and put it in perspective.

Most people in San Francisco die in bed of old age; their heart stops. That is true of almost any city, but particularly in this city which has the highest proportion of old people of any major city, including Miami and San Diego.

If you look at the bodies in the morgue in any one month, which excludes people who die of old age, or die from a fall which is associated with old age, you will find the largest number of bodies are young people who overdosed on drugs. Next most common are people who were murdered, mostly by a spouse. These people and a  few other people with dark skin are from the Southwestern part of the City. The “few other” were killed by fellow gang members.

Drugs, murders, suicides and vehicle related accidents each bring in about five bodies per month for a total of about four fresh bodies per week in the morgue.

Suicides and auto accidents are the next largest cluster of people. Suicides have a tendency to be males over 50.  Auto accidents tend to be people over 65 killed when they were walking across a street. There are about two pedestrians killed by cars each month and one of them is over 65. Car accidents kill slightly more than one car occupant a month, so stay in your car.  Lastly, there are motorcyclists and bicyclist who are killed.  Dead motorcyclists come into the morgue about once every three months and dead bicyclists about once every five months.

Your chances of getting hurt from guns or vehicles are about ten times as great as your chances of dying from guns or vehicles. That is some consolation.

Right now, you really shouldn't worry about dying in San Francisco.  Our half a million cars seem to be harmless from a mortality point of view and accidental death, in general, is quite rare.

 

 

State secret

Until last week, when the New York Times revealed it, it was a state secret. President Bush reads a great deal. He reads most evenings in bed and always reads on Air Force One trips, which are frequent. He loves Tom Wolf and  read the most recent Michael Crichton. He prefers to read non-fiction and intensely read Ron Chernow’s Hamilton. He recommended Natan Sharansky's Case For Democracy to everyone who came to the Oval Office.

This has been a state secret for more than a dozen years and was only revealed because the Constitution bans Geo. W. Bush from running for reelection. Could the president be as demonic as the photo on the right suggests?

What is it about being a big reader that must be kept secret? Answer:

Most people don't read any books after high school or college. 80 million homes have five or fewer books including bibles and cook books.

Regular readers of books, other than pulp fiction, constitute less than one million people (the subscription level of the New Yorker). Regular readers of non-fiction are less than half of that number.

It isn't just that regular readers are an insignificant number of voters, and that readers probably have little or no loyalty to other readers, the reality is that American voters are much more able to identify with a leader who is berated as a non-reader.

The Bush reading state secret probably got Bush five votes for every one he lost.

Jews and Amish

I read a lot of the Jewish press and the hand wringing over the disappearance of American Jews (mostly by intermarriage) is a never-ending rant. From my point of view, this disappearance is not a surprise.

I find it hard to bemoan the loss of a people, American Jews, who are out of touch with the world around them. The majority of American Jews, at least two-thirds, are part of the Lefty tradition and have been for more than a century.

The Jews of America are Diaspora remnants.  Most are stuck in the 19^th century Liberal reaction to ghetto Judaism, mouthing the words and ideas of Karl Marx (one of the great anti-Semites) and blind to the realities of the 20^th Century where Lefty ideologies, especially those based on Marxism, killed tens of millions.

American Jews are not unlike the Amish -- attached to ideas and a political ideology that is archaic, an ideology that has been passed over in the modern world.

The traditions of Israel, Solomon, the prophets and Talmud are alive and vibrant in Israel today. The people who are connected to this 2500 year-old tradition are increasingly attached to Israel and increasingly going to be calling themselves Israeli-Americans, not American Jews.

Tenure (continued)

My friends are flogging me for not continuing my anti-tenure campaign and they cite Ward Churchill and Larry Summers as evidence that I should be expanding my anti-tenure campaign.

I disagree. The two most potent arguments against tenure are (1) any school having a large proportion of tenured faculty is imprisoned in high fixed costs that cannot be reduced. The consequence is that the school cannot compete in the market for the best potential faculty. (2) The most competent thinkers of our time prefer to work for research groups and think tanks because they can associate with creative and open-minded peers. Tenure makes sure that tenure-based-schools are always stuck in an ideology that is thirty years old.

In the case of Summers, he gets to stew in his own tenured juices. His mother and his wife are tenured professors. Being attacked by a tenured female professor would have been best handled by a counterattack by tenured women. Such anti-PC guts in tenured professors is oxymoronic.

Churchill is an incompetent, dishonest scoundrel. A trivial consequence of tenure. He could only have been hired and tenured by other people who were on the faculty because the U. of Colorado had a long history of hiring and giving tenure to incompetents and because the University was stuck in a thirty year old outmoded ideology about ethnic victims.

Still going on

Today’s AP poll shows Bush’s popularity at 50%. Yesterday’s CNN-USA-Gallop poll shows Bush at 57% approval. That is a big difference.

The explanation, in simple English, from a court established expert witness on survey research: the AP poll today and for the past eight years has been “b-llsh-t.”

Only one national poll was accurate for the past eight years, during which time we had three presidential elections and three off year elections. That poll was the CNN-USA-Gallop poll.

An election is a good way to calibrate a poll. Gallop clearly understands that. Why every other poll in America is incompetent and unable to adjust to reality is something I don’t understand.

Makes my life easier. Ignore any and all polls other than CNN-USA-Gallop.  (I don't really ignore them, it usually leads me to think how pathetic mainstream media managers are.)

New comment

This comment just arrived. It refers to my blog on an Iraqi survey report.

IP Address: 145.254.138.180
Name: hopless 
Email Address: [email protected]
URL: 
Comments:

hi I´m a kurdish girl! And yes it is true my people feel better if they
are american in Iraq because we love them they are heros for us we call
them in Iraq gods on earth..
godd bless america 

We are creditors

The photo at the right is my video store that is now out of business. They closed one day without notice. I still have credit for ten videos, about $25.00. (Goodbye $25.00)

Which brings me to the subject that we are all creditors. The obvious big businesses that borrow our money are banks and mutual funds. The money we have loaned these businesses is federally insured.

We are also creditors anywhere we pay in advance or make a deposit, such as wireless telephones, utilities and cable services. If you buy a card for espresso at Starbucks or Peets you are a creditor. If you have accumulated mileage with an airline or bought an airline ticket you are a creditor until you use the ticket. Even buying postage stamps makes you a creditor of the US Postal Service, though we can reasonably assume that the stamps will be usable for a long time.

I estimate that I am currently loaning American corporations close to $2,000 excluding banks and mutual funds.

I have tried to get included in a few bankruptcies where I am a creditor, such as United Airlines and Pacific Gas & Electric. Not possible. The bankruptcy courts are arcane and secretive medieval star chambers where only big creditors are admitted.  Being admitted to almost any case means making big money if you are a bankruptcy law firm. Someday that  must change.

Visa has a claim on so many miles at United (really, they are our Mileage Plus claims) that they were admitted to the United bankruptcy case. However, Visa was worried about their claims and made a supplemental loan to United for $280 million.

Irony or blindness?

The photo on the right shows five banners hanging from Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore. The words on the banners are from Pablo Neruda: “Tyranny cuts off the singer’s head but the voice from the bottom of the well returns to the secret springs of the earth and rises out of nowhere through the mouths of the people.”

Ferlinghetti is a widely renowned poet, who in my opinion is a political hack writer of doggerel. Mr. Ferlinghetti is a lefty fundamentalist who thinks that these banners with Neruda’s words are a call to lefty revolution.

Today, Neruda’s words ring out in joyous praise of George W. Bush’s defeat of Saddam Hussein and the liberation of the Iraqi people.

Arab officers

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had an op-ed by Mark Bowden reporting on emails from an American training and leading Iraqi troops.

“Maj. Lechner noticed that the Iraqi commanders in his battalion tended to equate rank more with privilege than with responsibility. They were reluctant to stay on duty with their units for any length of time without "special passes or extended leaves," he said. The higher up the chain of command, the worse the problem. Just prior to going into action in Samarra, the Iraqi battalion commander took a leave. He didn't return until the city was secured. Up and down the officer ranks Maj. Lechner found a marked propensity to steal from their units, falsifying records, embezzling funds and even extorting money from their own men.”

So now Americans are dispensing with Saddamite (I love that term) officers, relying on Sergeants and promoting a few good sergeants to officer.

Mark, it is not Iraqi officers, it is Arab officers. The entire Egyptian officer corps ran way or stayed home during the 1967 Six Day War of Israel against all its neighbors. Read a description in the spectacular Six Days of War by Michael Oren.

Unethical snake pit

In one week San Francisco showed itself to be the snake pit of ethics. First, the Secretary of State, Kevin Shelley, resigns in the midst of a swirl of ethical violations charges and FBI investigations. Kelley is the son of a former mayor and is himself a former S.F. Supervisor. No one has suggested that Kelley might have been accidentally ethical. The only support he got was an assemblyman who said “Kevin was trying to act like John Burton” another San Francisco politician. (Photo of Shelley in a non-partisan office with a Dean button on)

San Francisco’s viper’s nest of unethical behavior proved unstoppable. The Board of Supervisors voted 7 to 3, yesterday, to make Eileen Hansen the chair of the Ethics Commission. The purpose of the Ethics Commission is to advise on ethical breaches, particularly concerning the Board of Supervisors. Hansen was a campaign manager for one supervisor and ran against another of the supervisors. (Photo of Hansen with a friend .. Hansen ran for office as a lesbian)

When she was running for supervisor against Bevan Dufty (who won) she had put up false posters all over the Castro saying “Willie Brown endorses Dufty.” The statement was false and intended to be a kiss of death by an unpopular mayor.

A few days after the posters appeared, I personally asked Hansen why she put up the posters with the false statement. Eileen Hansen replied: “those were put up by some union with their own money.”

She lied about a lie. She is the new chair of the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

Iran is cooking

It is worth noting that Iran is growing economically almost as fast as China.

The significance of this is that a theocracy can be an economic engine in a way that nobody, including me, could ever have expected.

The interesting point, for me, is that Iran is a democracy in the public arena, with elected officials in open elections and also in the theocratic arena. The Persian mullahs must be acclaimed by consensus as spiritual leaders in order to reach their high positions.  (click to enlarge)

The other shoes drops

Today’s Wall Street Journal reports that Kenneth Langone was forced to resign from the Board of General Electric because of his involvement in giving Dick Grasso, of the New York Stock Exchange, an outrageous bonus and retirement package.

This is the loudest signal to CEO’s that their outrageous executive compensation frenzy has come to an end. This marks the end of an era.

Every outside corporate director in America now knows the name Kenneth Langone, not as a co-founder of Home Depot, but as an ally of Dick Grasso. Langone is now known as the first man who was publicly humiliated for his malfeasance as a director. 

A dozen other former directors of the New York Stock Exchange will be next as more shoes drop. Humiliation, of the friends of the high and mighty, is the punishment for greed and excess.  It really hurts.

Ask the economists

In response to my blog on global warming a friend gave me an article from PNAS about the effects of global warming on California wine grapes --- trouble for the zinfandels in 2100. PNAS is a publication of the National Academy of Science.

I read the article and found it was based on two computer simulations of the atmosphere.

I was trained as an economist and I ran a number of economic simulation models for the Bank of America forty years ago when we took economic simulation seriously. Economists stopped taking simulation models seriously for predicting economic futures very quickly when we found out they were unreliable for even one year out.

Now I admit that economic simulations are much easier to do than simulations of the atmosphere, which includes many unknowns such as water vapor, ocean currents and solar output.

Why did we economists stop making economic forecasts of more than one year after we got used to computer simulations and scientists bravely make predictions for one hundred years based on the same math?

That is a rhetorical question. I can’t believe that scientists get any respect for such absurd behavior.

Historic point of flux

I want to call the attention of historians to the Ward Churchill story. Churchill blamed America for the 9-11-2001 attacks, the first direct attack on the mainland since 1812. Churchill was banned from Hamilton College and is having his tenure threatened at U. of Colorado – Boulder. This is 2005, 3.5 years later. Hamilton College and U.C.-Boulder are as Lefty as San Francisco.

A few days after the 9-11 attack I kicked an anti-Semitic Egyptian-American* out of my coffee group for circulating and defending an email saying the same thing as Ward Churchill.  I was roundly attacked for my stance by nearly a dozen San Franciscans. Times may have changed.

The most popular commercial on the SuperBowl 39 show was a patriotic piece by Budweiser;  soldiers being cheered at an airport.

I see this month as an inflexion point where Americans no longer tolerate blatant anti-Americanism.

My observation comports with David Gelernter's view that a war against terrorism will generate American patriotism because the enemy is against the whole conception of America.

*Essam Elmagob