Pro Commerce

Looming economic disaster?

Two men I respect have written articles about the dangers inherent in the current globalization.  Niall Ferguson has written in the current Foreign Affairs and Peter Drucker has done the same in the current National Interest.

Both point to the similarities in geometric growth in global trade at the end of the 19^th century and again at the end of the 20^th century. Both point out that this stunning development ended with WWI and could end abruptly again.

I respect both men and would never be the pollyanna who says it can't happen again.  I would say it can't happen for the same reasons as before.  It would have to come from a source we have not recognized.

There are a number of lessons that we learned in the 20^th century that have increased global economic stability. We got rid of the gold standard which served as a propagator of depressions, inflations and deflations.  Japan had a severe recession for the decade of the 1990s and it didn't propagate. The U.S. recession of 2001 and the EU recession of 2002 were not transmitted to other countries.

We have learned to disentangle central banks from government economic policy.  This has been a powerful buffer.  The monetary shocks of Mexico, Thailand and Indonesia were not propagated to their trading partners.

Trade barriers are a tiny fraction of the levels even two decades ago, and orders of magnitude less than four decades ago.  The WTO continues to mediate effectively in this domain. 

I don't see 2014 having parallels to 1914.  I suspect that both Ferguson and Drucker, being Europeans at heart, are like most Europeans ... sentimental about the old days before 1914 and they are afraid to lose so much again.

Arrived: Charles Antell

A reader of my earlier blog where I endorsed Charles Antell Formula #9, a hair product that hasn't been on the market for fifty years, sent me a sample he still had.

I will get it analyzed and report back to loyal followers of this product, that turns out to prevent baldness.

Our enemy defines us

Our Cold War enemy was totalitarian godless communism ... for forty-five years. 

At the beginning of the Cold War we didn't know what America was.  Our initial effort was to get rid of the Communists in America.  That effort didn't get far and finally we acceded to just trying to get rid of spies and scare the remaining communists into the woodwork. We created an anti-communist loyalty oath for teachers and government employees.

Early in the Cold War we put under God in the pledge of allegiance. About twenty years later we replaced centralized-social-action mainstream Protestant churches with decentralized-charismatic and evangelical churches.

To be a better democracy we got rid of Jim Crow and made sure blacks had the right to vote.

Most importantly by the time of Ronald Reagan we knew we had to be a country that loved commerce.  We started lowering taxes, getting rid of progressive taxation, deregulating, spinning off and outsourcing government agencies and promoting free trade.

Today our enemy is Islamic Wahabism.

We are already beginning to be defined by our new enemy.  Our enemy considers us to be lacking in wisdom, sacrilegious and immoral.

First we are promoting public intellectuals to make clear to the rest of the world the deep intellectual roots of American society. Second we are recognizing the close relationship of democracy and our form of industrial commerce.  We are promoting the value of both. In a few decades we will better understand both democracy and commerce.

Third, and I thank Janet Jackson, Congress and Terry Schiavo for this, we are examining and debating the moral underpinnings of our society.  We got one part of the debate started with Janet Jackson's nipple and now we have started another part of the debate over Schiavo's feeding tube. There is much more ahead.  Get used to moral debates.

One hero of our time could well be Dr. Laura, the radio moralist, who has struggled with hundreds of moral issues and is very confident of her moral code. She is on national radio to a large audience three hours a day every weekday.

This is the era of moral debate.  In a few decades we will have a much clearer national moral identity.  The minority that loses in this moral debate will end up sidelined much like the Lefty Fundamentalists are sidelined today.  The Lefties are out of the game, sitting on a pile of pro-Soviet pre-Cold War values that the mainstream has discarded.  A similar group will be left with our discarded moral values in a few decades.

Summers vs Sharon

When leaving Harvard, the anti-Semitic professor Cornel West, accused Harvard President Larry Summers of being Sharon.

An essay in the NYTimes Book Review by Rachel Donadio covers the story of Harvard and Summers by reviewing two books. Ignoring the severe lefty bias of Donadio, the facts come through in her essay. Summers has publicly been trying to bring Harvard in line with the world of today and tomorrow. As he said, he is trying to bridge the: “post-Vietnam cleavage between coastal elites and certain mainstream values.”

I am confident Summers will fail and along with it, Harvard will become a second tier university. He will fail for two reasons: first he relied on old Clinton buddies for advice. David Gergen told him the way to deal with the feminist hysteria was to be humble and eat crow. That is nonsense. Before a group of acid warped academic pit bulls, humility is pure meat. The faculty is eating Summers with relish.

Second, Larry Summers is no Ariel Sharon. Sharon is a brilliant politician with fifty years of experience, always in leadership, for a long time as a general … most of all Sharon is infinitely shrewd and patience. Summers has none of Sharon’s qualities, which are what is needed to bring Harvard out of its Jerry Rubin/Abbie Hoffman dream world.

This is a continuation of what I wrote in an earlier blog.

Front lawns

Front lawns in suburbia and nearly everywhere in America are distinctly American. I took the photo on the right in a middle class neighborhood in the heart of Salt Lake City. Michael Pollan in his most recent book Second Nature argues that front lawns date back to the post Civil War era and were promptly recognized as being democratic.  Everyone has the front of their home open along with everyone else.  The back yards are private and secluded.

I read Second Nature because I loved Pollan's earlier book The Botany of Desire.  Pollan is a superb writer and Botany was a masterpiece.  Unfortunately being a good writer writing about a subject of minor interest to me (gardening) left me with the book half finished.

Finance fun

Business Week has the latest list of S&P 500 corporations.  The fun findings are that the biggest vehicle company is Caterpillar ($32.4 billion market value); Harley-Davidson ($18.1) is about to pass General Motors ($20.1) in size.  Close on their tail is John Deere tractor company ($17.6).

The majestic New York Times ($5.3)  is about the same size as Toys r'Us and Liz Claiborne.

Starbucks ($20.1) is the same size as General Motors; It is also bigger than Office Max, plus Office Depot, plus Delta Airlines, plus Nordstrom.

Hersey Foods ($15.5) is bigger than Sears-Roebuck; its also bigger than Molson-Coors Brewing Company combined with Clorox.

Smoking

My uncle, on my father's side, once took me to the home of an inventor friend of his. This was in 1962.  The man lived on Belvedere Street, here in San Francisco.  My uncle told me this man had invented the Touch Tone phone.  I don't know how I knew about the Touch Tone phone, because it wasn't rolled out publicly until 1962.  The Touch Tone phone is technically a dual-tone multi-frequency, as I learned later when I worked with Capt'n Crunch the king of the 1970s phone phreaks.

What struck me as bizarre is that this great inventor was fanatic about his “greatest invention,” the electric cigarette that would some day be mounted on top of taxi cabs.  When the cigarette was lit up, with a red light where the burning end was, the taxi was available.  When the cigarette wasn't lit the taxi was occupied.  The photo on the left  shows a current taxi with an illuminated message sign on top. (Cigarettes on the top of taxis never made it.)

Somehow I knew, back on Belvedere Street, that I would rather have royalties from the Touch Tone than from a potential cigarrette sign on a cab.

Tenor of the times

I was talking to an emergency room doctor who had been an activist in the early 1990s.  He had worked to create state motorcycle helmet laws.

I pointed out that more than a dozen states had rescinded the motorcycle helmet laws and asked him why the tide had turned against him.  His answer was blunt.  Without helmet laws we get many more brain dead motorcyclists who are generally healthy young men.  Perfect organ donors, for which the demand is increasing.

Why should we in medicine look a gift horse in the mouth?

Right this time

On Tuesday I wrote a blog that suggested the U.S. has a new policy on China... real pressure. Yesterday the results were announced.  China is demanding that North Korea return to the Six Party talks.

Simple living and commerce?

More questions from friends and readers.  This one is usually in the form: “How can you be a simple liver and love commerce which seems to be about buying?” ( I wrote the classic Simple Living in 1984... it is still selling.)

Commerce isn't about buying, its about exchanging. Buying can be one of many by-products of us producing something that is sold. With money as the medium, our options to buy, save and invest are highly varied.  It is clear from economic data that as the amount of money we have increases, the amount of buying goods and services decreases and savings increase.  We also see that as people get older (over age 50) and their family needs decrease, they buy less and save more.

This is where simple living comes in. At any age, we can decide we don't need to buy more, we can buy less. The most important consequence is that we need to earn less. The need to earn less gives us the freedom to do what we want, whatever we want.

Last Saturday I had my morning cappuccino next to a fascinating woman in her mid-50s.  Michelle makes her living as a freelance barber (she only cuts men's hair). Michelle has lived everywhere from Hollywood to the backwoods of Idaho.  It was immediately obvious that Michelle is a strong, independent, confident and happy woman.  She is also a simple liver. She can be independent and happy because she is a simple liver.

Simple living is a dynamic.  You need to be strong to do it and it makes you stronger.  You need to be a generally happy person to do it, and it makes you happier.

Simple living is a blessing.  That blessing is available to all people at all times, but the wealth that abounds in a commercial society makes simple living a comfortable realm for anyone interested.  The abundance of marketable portable skills makes simple living easier.

Can a "lefty" group help commerce?

I get the most readers of my blog on Fridays; which is the reason for this second notice.

I wrote a blog last week that will be of interest to anyone who asks this question.

I put the blog with my answer to this question on my site: Commerce, the book.  I put it there because it deals with one of the implicit questions about commerce.  Are there things that need change?  My answer explains why I have worked with a "lefty" group for thirty years.

Trustfund kids

Michael Barone has written a great article on the political role of trustfund kids, he calls them the trustfunder left.  The article is pretty much what you'd imagine. These guilt written folks are mostly Lefty Fundamentalists ... a perfect ideology to give their life meaning and style.  I doubt that Barone has solid data to work with, the IRS data on dividends by county wouldn't be reliable.  Trustfund kids don't necessarily live near their trust fund managers.

My contribution to this issue is that I have known many hundreds of trustfund kids personally and been a financial advisor to a few. (They came to me because I wrote The Seven Laws of Money.) I gave a talk to and spent a weekend meeting an entire family of 130 Weyerhauser heirs. I dated a few trustfund kids too.

Having a trust fund is a curse in 99% of all the cases I've known.  The trustfunders rarely know who they are, have personalities without affect, seldom know what joy is, are very confused about life and  most trustfunders are overwhelmed with guilt about their money.

The greatest source of pain for trustfund kids is that they are suspicious of everyone. Everyone, they believe, is trying to get their money. Often they are right. Their only friends, consequently, are other trustfund kids.

Trustfund kids have my sympathy.  I hope Barone is wrong about trustfund kids having any influence on political life.

Small business?

Today's news carried an item about the Small Business Administration considering some small changes to their definition of small business. The SBA generally uses a definition of under 500 employees is a small business. 

In my banking days I set up a conference for all the “small businesses” in San Bernardino County as a marketing tool for the bank.  I found out a week before the conference that no one was planning to come.  I quickly went out and interviewed prospective attendees.  Any business that had more than 50 employees considered themselves a “big business”, certainly they were big for San Bernardino.  All the one to three person shops considered themselves to be too small, “mom and pop” operations. The one to three person shops had the SBA, “under 500 employees” definition in mind.

The definition doesn't really matter. What matters is that the SBA and the minority MSBA are the two most irrelevant agencies in the Federal government.  Most truly small businesses, 90% of them will fail in the first year and shouldn't have a loan (unless it is a family member willing to lose money). The small number who survive starting a small business, more than a year, have to make it through two or three years before their revenue can warrant a loan and cover the associated interest.   Any business that would qualify for an SBA loan would qualify for a bank loan.  Go to the bank, it has fewer restrictions on the way you run your business.

The SBA gets customers by offering slightly lower interest rates and longer loan periods.  In return the small business applicant has to fill out more papers and more complicated papers than would be needed to get zoning for a whore house a block from the Supreme Court.  In order to get through the paper work and the ultimate restrictions on the loan, nearly all applicants need a loan-greaser.  The greaser does the paperwork and gets the loan. Problem is that greaser fees usually cost more than is saved in lower interest payments.  We don't need the SBA.  (I said the same thing twenty years ago in my book Honest Business and nothing has changed.)

New China policy?

I'm certainly no foreign policy wonk, although I have been involved on the extreme periphery.  I see a dramatic change in our (U.S.) China policy. 

In one day we announced that we favor a new global embargo on North Korea, a client state of China's.  We announced that the Chinese balance of trade surplus is now a problem for the U.S. We told the EU that the recent Chinese legislation authorizing war against Taiwan was proof that China should not be allowed to buy arms.

My guess is the policy changed from: encourage Chinese economic growth and keep warning China of the need to be part of the global community. Our policy now is: China is big enough to be treated as an adult. Adult medicine and candor are needed in dealing with China along with clear American action. No more paternalism.

Crime rankings

The City of Salt Lake is offering rewards for information on crimes.  They published a list of rewards for information on different crimes:

Homicide                up to $5,000
Rape                               $4,000
Kidnapping                      $4,000
Armed Robbery                $3,000
Aggravated Assault          $3,000
Arson                              $2,000
Illegal gun sale                 $2,000
Toxic dumping                 $1,000

I was first struck by the political nature of the list.  Rape is ahead of kidnapping. Rape is hard to prosecute and kidnapping frequently becomes a federal crime. Toxic dumping made the list, but high speed driving through red lights which is more common didn't make the list. 

But my second thought was that this list is implicitly based on crimes where the victim is a stranger. Most homicides are within a family and they are hard to rank with other crimes related to money, unless it involves a stranger.  Most rapes are between people who know each other and they present a similar problem. With rape there is a greater problem because the victim is usually still alive and able to testify.

For every kidnapping by a stranger there are 1,000 family abductions.

All in all, I do think the idea of rewarding tipsters and advertising that fact is good public policy. Nearly all crimes, where the victim was a stranger to the perpetrator, are solved are solved by the police following up on a phone call tip. 

By the way, what about email tips?  I just checked the S.F. Police Department and for tips they only give you a telephone hot line.

Harvard like San Francisco?

It looks to me like Harvard is badly divided. Larry Summers is trying to make changes that would keep the university a leading institution and the tenured faculty is resisting strenuously.

Part of the reason may be that tenure makes all real change impossible. Another part of the reason may be that the academic world is rent asunder by the Lefty Fundamentalist whose views have petrified and putrefied a large part of most faculties.

Whatever the case, America is going to see a decentralization of higher education. The academic ranking is already shifting. The U of Chicago is already in rapid ascent thanks to alumni who graduated many decades ago. The same is true of swarms of colleges and universities that have escaped the death grip of Lefty Fundamentalism. Schools such as the Scripps Colleges, Colorado College, Stanford and a few others.

Decentralization is a main force of commerce, now it is spreading to education. New York was the financial center of the planet in 1947. The advent of low cost national phone rates spread financial operations across the country. Air conditioning spread it to the South.

FedEx and UPS decentralized manufacturing around the globe.

The same decentralization has happened to San Francisco. San Francisco was the undisputed commercial capital of the Bay Area in 1967. A major new downtown commercial building hasn’t gone up in San Francisco since then; a third of a century ago. The commerce and pulse of work is now decentralized in the S.F. Bay Area thanks to Bart, good telecommunications, freeway expansion and the decentralizing power of FedEx and UPS.

The University of California at San Francisco has been the driving force in biotechnology, yet all seventy biotechnology companies that UCSF has generated are outside of San Francisco.

Things are so bad it looks like San Francisco will lose the new Stem cell Foundation headquarters to Los Angeles. LA was already a large decentralized city located mostly in one county and it is able to offer unlimited free private plane service as a perk to entice the Stem cell Foundation. LA has plenty of major corporations that can work together with the polity to make such a generous offer. San Francisco has no major corporations. The big corporations, which were formerly in S.F., have either left the Bay Area altogether or just left San Francisco.

Why help a "lefty" group?

I wrote a blog that will be of interest to anyone who asks this question.

I put the blog with my answer to this question on my site: Commerce, the book.  I put it there because it deals with one of the implicit questions about commerce.  Are there things that need change?  My answer explains why I have worked with a "lefty" group for thirty years.

No peace on the agenda

Abu Mazen was elected leader of the Palestinian Authority in a general election and chosen leader of the Palestinian Liberation Organization by its leadership council.

Don’t confuse Abu Mazen with Ahura Mazda also called Zarathustra, the Zoroastrian god. The names sound alike.

Abu Mazen is the successor to Adolph Arafat, Mazen seems to be more wily. He has been in power for seven weeks and has sent every possible signal that he wants to look like a peacemaker and is completely unwilling to negotiate any form of peace treaty.

Abu Mazen has gotten the killer brigades to stop killing Jews, something Adolph Arafat claimed was not possible. Just after his election he began saying that he supported the Road Map plan for peace negotiation. The Road Map is based on the early creation of a Palestinian State within tentative borders, with central issues (Jerusalem, final borders and refugees) to be worked out later. Beginning in mid-February, in an interview with the NYTimes, Abu Mazen began saying he wanted to move to an Oslo Accord structure, with final settlement worked out before a Palestinian State is created. He can’t negotiate from both positions.

Then the week before Israel was to transfer Jericho to the PA, he said he would free the prisoners who are currently being guarded by Americans and Brits.  The prisoners were murderers in the compound when Arafat was surrounded by Israeli troops. Based on an Internationally supervised agreement with Arafat the prisoners were moved to prison in Jericho in order to allow outside visitors to see Arafat in Ramalah.

The Israelis know Abu Mazen is a fake, but they have to pretend to be willing to negotiate. In fact the Israelis are going ahead with their non-negotiated moves out of Gaza and finishing the barrier.

I expect to see Israel demand to negotiate only with the PA, not the PLO and to ask sympathetic countries like the U.S. and India to replace all PLO consulates with PA consulates. Israel is unified and has no further patience for Arab lies.

Doubting Darwin

Peter Slevin, in today's Washington Post, reports on a new national movement to install intelligent design into evolutionary teaching in public schools. We should all welcome this discussion.

Intelligent design is the belief that evolution has a plan and a desired outcome built into it. This should be an easy thesis to reject if one has a definition of science that is based on the theoretical work of Karl Popper.  Popper in 1959 advanced the thesis that the definitive quality of scientific theory is falsifiability.  If a theory does not offer a mechanism for its own falsifiability, then it is not scientific.

The reason I welcome this debate is because scientists do not understand or accept Popper's definition. If scientists accepted Popper's definition then no one who calls themselves a scientist could teach or advocate intelligent design as a scientific theory because it isn't falsifiable. 

You can't falsify evolution by intelligent design. Especially since any evidence you present in your argument against intelligent design will be met with 'we just don't fully understand the design plan.'  That would be the response to the proposition that no intelligent designer would create mosquitoes that carry malaria and kill millions of children every year. Response: 'we just don't understand the purpose of the design plan.'  That is not a falsifiable theory.  That is not science.

Unfortunately, more than 90% of scientists accept, as good science, a completely unfalsifiable theory: Global Warming. Global Warming is so unfalsifiable that every piece of evidence that is presented to falsify it has forced the theory to migrate to a new, unfalsifiable home called Global Climate Change.

So long as scientists don't accept and live by Popper, they deserve to get into an argument with religious folk, which the scientists keep losing. The only way scientists can get out of this box is to become honest Popper people. 

No wonder the public can't distinguish science from religion, 90% of scientists can't do it either.

Union has tight grip

I wrote a blog awhile back about the built in fraud on the cable car lines.  This is the latest report:

“Get a grip: The two cable car gripmen whose potential firings for pocketing fares led to a 2 1/2-hour strike on the system March 2 are back at work at the Municipal Railway.

"That's right -- after serving their 30-day maximum suspensions allowed under city rules, the gripmen are appealing their firings.

"In the meantime, they've both been put on "light duty."

"Their new assignment: keeping riders from ducking fares on the 14-Mission bus line.”

Chronicle columnists Phillip Matier and Andrew Ross appear Sundays, Mondays and Wednesdays.

No comment needed from me.

 

St. Patrick's parade

I watched an eclectic St. Patrick's Day Parade in Salt Lake City.  Eclectic because most of the marching bands were bagpipes, there were several brigades of cars (Mini Coopers etc) plenty of Shriners, Civil War groups Union and Confederate, Harley riders and one transvestite on roller skates. Interestingly there were many beer truck flotillas and Irish bars represented.  I'll come back to that.

One guy with an IRA t-shirt walked by me in the crowd and I yelled “murderer, murderer” but he didn't stop.

All of which led me to think about how the Celts were the main population of Europe in 200 BCE at the same time as one fairly homogeneous ethnic population covered the American continents. 

Starting in 200 BCE, a small group of Etrusco-Romans grew large and powerful enough, over several centuries, to attack and dominate most of the Celts and drove the remaining Celts to the far Northern parts of Albion.

Similarly, starting in 1600, a small group of English speaking-Vikings grew large enough and powerful enough to dominate most of the North American natives and drive the rest to the Northern reaches of the American continent.

Both groups that were defeated and driven North seem to have a great affection for alcohol. The Celts are certainly different in their celebration of alcohol than the Chinese who don't celebrate bars in the Chinese New Year's Parade.  The same would be true for Japanese, Turks, Indians and Israelis if they had parades.

The more significant common quality of the Celts and the North American natives was their intense tribalism. The story of Vercingetorix is about the last battle of the Celts before being over run by Julius Caesar.  Vercingetorix was surrounded at the present day French village of Dijon in 52 BCE by advancing Roman legions from Southern France. Winter arrived and Vercingetorix had the chance to gather reinforcements from all the Celtic tribes from Spain to Switzerland, which he tried to do. Very few tribes would help him.  He was defeated in the Spring along with all the remaining Celtic lands.

The same story of tribalism, isolation and poor cooperation defines the battles of the North American natives against the slowly advancing, Westward moving, English speaking population.

I will speculate more in future blogs about the surviving tribalism in the world, from the IRA (who should not be permitted to use R, Republican, in their name; they are anti-republican fascists) to the Arabs.

Starbucks in Salt Lake City

Surprise, the previous blog led me to a little research.

I found that there is very little Starbucks business in Salt Lake.  Neither Mormons nor Lefty Fundamentalists use Starbucks. I found there are roughly one fifth the number of Starbucks outlets in Salt Lake compared to San Francisco.

In Salt Lake County the population is about equal to San Francisco on a weekday; one million people each.  San Francisco has 55 Starbucks and Salt Lake County has 10.

Double taboo

I'm in Salt Lake City, as indicated by the blog below.

One of the fascinating things I see here is, what appears to be, the local non-Mormon reaction to the Mormons. I see a large community of Lefty Fundamentalists who have created the secular anti-thesis to Mormonism.  Lefty Fundamentalism is a lifestyle (wine, trips to Europe, foreign cars, etc) and a set of taboos (WalMart, MacDonald's, Bush and Haliburton)

The proof of the pudding is the one taboo that both religious groups have in common.

Starbucks is coffee, a taboo for the Mormons.  Starbucks is a successful global corporation, a taboo for the Lefty Fundamentalists.

----------------------------

Side-note:  When I first used Lefty Fundamentalism in 2003, there were no Googles on that combination of words.  Today, there are 17,000 Googles.

I know that there aren't 17,000 places where the words are combined but the two words are getting closer and closer together in Internet writing.

Kids conviviality

On the right is a photo of a public square in the Gateway Mall in Salt Lake City.  I particularly like it because it is convivial for adults who enjoy watching the dancing waters all day long.  It is also appealing to kids who run in and out of the spouts with abandon and glee.

I see no reason why much more public space in our cities can't be convivial for people of all ages, teen agers as well. Good policy is possible, but we seem to be subject to the whims of each new batch of urban planners who in turn are subject to the fads in their graduate schools.  I know because I have help start one urban planning fad, a questionable one.

The photo on the left shows names on bricks.  Donors to public projects get their names on bricks in the project. I first saw this brick idea in Seattle in the renovation of Pike Place Market.

Years later I was watching an ancient temple being remodeled in Tokyo.  The temple was roughly 1,000 years old.  On the inner side of the roof tiles were painted names of donors.  The idea probably did originate in Japan, it most likely came to Japan from China.

 

Rise of new intellectuals

It is axiomatic in commerce that birth and destruction are two sides of the same coin.  It was Joseph Schumpeter who brought the term creative destruction into our language.

The same is true in the intellectual world.  David Brooks calls to our attention the ending of Public Interest Quarterly.  This is the magazine that created the current intellectual ferment.

 

Public Interest began in 1965 among a circle of intellectual friends Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer, Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Daniel Bell. The first two are alive and have remained active on the magazine for forty yearsAmerica, from education to working conditions and to the economic welfare of the bottom income group.

They all began as Democrats supporting Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.  They all shared the Liberal belief that the Great Society would bring with it welcome improvements in

These men and the coterie that gathered around them had three defining qualities: intellectual openness, honesty and intense interest in policy. 

Combine these three defining qualities with the actual outcome of the Great Society implimentation, as measured after ten years, failure, and you get intellectuals who were forced to reject the utopian ideas of Liberalism and find a new basis for policy.

These men and a dozen more created the modern intellectual world.  They published the core ideas in Public Interest.

Today, more than twenty years later, Public Interest can retire.  There are now so many innovative policy ideas in America, influential public intellectuals and vast new media outlets that support fresh thinking, that the parent of this movement can retire.

The Berlin Wall

In a comment on an earlier blog, the writer wanted to know why the fall of the Berlin Wall didn’t trigger disillusion among lefties.

I find my answer in the Dawn Bible Students Association.  The Dawn Bible Students Association was founded by C.T. Russell in 1872.  It was a Christian sect with several distinct and unique teachings.  Russell began predicting the Second Coming of Christ in 1889 to a growing group of followers.  The predict Second Coming was to occur in 1914. The prediction gained Russell and his group a large and devoted following.

My blog readers already know that 1914 was probably not the year of the Second Coming; just as they know that the ultimate scientifically forecast triumph of Communism over capitalism was unlikely to be credible after 1991.

C.T Russell died two years after his prediction failed.  Before he died, Russell explained that the correct interpretation of his 1914 prophecy was that the Second Coming would occur during the life of those alive in 1914. 

Russell was succeeded by Joe Rutherford. In 1931, at the beginning of the Great Depression, Joe renamed the organization: Jehovah’s Witnesses.  You probably know them from their publication the Watch Tower. 

About fifteen years ago the Watch Tower announced that the Second Coming date was not knowable.  The announcement came at the time when more than 90% of the people alive in 1914 had died.

Jehovah’s Witnesses number over 4 million today. 

The Left saw the failure of communism in China, Vietnam, the Soviet Union and a few other places in a very short period 1989-1991.  Yet the number of Lefties, fifteen years later, is large. They tend to hang out together just as Jehovah's Witnesses do.

There are psychological explanations for Lefty survival, there are sociological explanations; my explanation is based on Social Thought.  All institutions, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Lefty Fundamentalism resemble a tent with several tent poles to hold it up.  The nature of the tent poles defines the structure and appearance of the tent.  When any tent pole burns down, it is replaced with a new tent pole of similar dimensions and the tent continues to stand. 

Utopia on earth is the main tent pole on the Left.  That idea never fell.  The idea of the triumph of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie, another tent pole, did burn down.  It was replaced with the triumph of the underdogs over corporate global giants and imperial nations.

The failure of the Left was not even noticed by the Left, anymore than the failure of the Second Coming was noticed by Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Religion is a bad word

My friends and I have made great progress in our dealings with Lefty Fundamentalism.  Recognizing it as a religion means it deserves our respect as much as Mormonism or Scientology does.  It is particularly good to think of Lefty Fundamentalism as a religion because sensible people don’t bring up religion in convivial gatherings and sensible people easily resist the proselytizing efforts of a religious person.

The problem is that we can’t publicly refer to Lefty Fundamentalism as a religion because the appellation religion is odious to Lefties.  Lefties consider themselves secular, non-religious. This is the same problem Buddhists, Daoists, Shintoists, Orthodox Jews and many others have.

The term religion only applies accurately to Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Bahai, Islam and a few other theistic teachings.

Trouble is, I can’t find another term.  The truth is that Lefty Fundamentalism is a denomination of monotheism and should just be called a denomination. This was pointed out half a century ago by Raymond Aron. Still, Lefty Fundamentalists have trouble understanding their roots in monotheism.  Lefty Fundamentalism has clear distinctions between good and evil; in communism it was the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.  Now good and evil are underdogs (Palestinians, women, lesbians, nature etc.) and big corporations (Wal Mart, Starbucks, McDonalds, Halliburton, etc.)    The call to faith, god, the-here-after is a belief in a utopian future on earth.

Can’t we find a term for secular and non-theistic religion?

Zanity

Several people were discussing a new woman we had met.  The woman had been married a few times and is quite attractive.  The question arose about the woman’s prospect for remarriage.  This led the group to discuss the spontaneous elements in a woman that invariably makes her appealing to men.

We concluded that this quality of vigor, defiance and enthusiasm should be called zanity.

The word is created from zany, just as vanity comes from vain, and sanity comes from sane.

Chemical train wreck

Last summer I gave the Homeland Security Agency a good rating for immediately finding the men who stole tons of explosives from a police storage site.

Now I have to give Homeland Security a negative rating.

Yesterday we had a railway tanker car with several holes eaten in the outside by the acid contents.  The acid began spilling out.  This was in the heart of Salt Lake City and 6,000 people had to be evacuated. (Photo: woman and dog being evacuated.)

The shock to me was that the chemical or chemicals inside the tanker were not flagged on the outside and the investigators, after many hours, could not find the shipper who knew the contents.  Insanity.

That tanker could have had phosphate inside it, parked next to an oil tanker and we could have an explosion ten times anything the U.S. has experienced before … in the middle of a large city.

No one to blame but Homeland Security.

By the way, another incredible story, that no one will believe.  I am slightly responsible for the Toxic Safety numbers on truck/railroad trailers and tankers.  In the late 1970s I was dating a San Francisco Supervisor.  I got upset with the tanker trucks on the freeways cruising through San Francisco with no way of telling the contents.  Traveling nuclear fuel was an issue at the time.  I brought my girl friend a draft of legislation requiring all trucks coming into San Francisco to have a contents sign on the outside.  My legislation had attached to it a Xerox page of suggested toxic code numbers from the Handbook of Chemistry and Physics.

The Supervisor introduced the bill and a week later was contacted by the Department of Transportation.  DOT told my girl-friend-supervisor that DOT was drafting regulations on the matter and the Feds had jurisdiction (we knew that).  About six months later DOT announced the new toxic contents system that is still in use … except for the tanker in Salt Lake Citys.

Improve our recycling

I had coffee with a friend yesterday who is an expert on recycling.  San Francisco has one of the best recycling programs as measured by weight.  Portland, where she runs the program, is second.

She explained the three main problems in the current sorting of trash: glass in the paper slurry, glass in the compost and film plastic from grocery bags. 

There is no easy way to get the glass out of the paper slurry, so the people doing the sorting only sideline paper when it clearly isn’t in contact with glass.  The same is true for compost.  Any compost that could possibly contain glass is sent to the landfill.  The plastic bags are a problem because they get stuck in the conveyor belt wheels.  The best solution is what San Francisco is now considering, penalizing all bags at grocery stores to encourage bring-your-own bagging.

Two things each of us can do to improve recycling.  Put our paper in paper bags or tie them in bundles so that are easy to take out of the sorting stream. Tie the plastic bags in knots or bundles if they aren’t being recycled to the store they came from.

Cable car strike

Did I make the cable car operators go out on strike? Of course not.

At Thanksgiving the whole family went on the California Street cable car. My partner chewed me out after the ride because I accused the fare-taker of pocketing the ticket money. My partner said I embarrassed the whole family. I probably did. The cable car driver and the fare-taker joked with each other about the accusation of stealing. They joked like it was an inside-joke.

On Tuesday, this week, all 52 cable car drivers and fare-takers went on a three-hour wildcat strike. The reason: two fare-takers were going to be fired for stealing money.

My reason for accusing the fare-taker of pocketing cash is because the entire system is cash ($3.00 per person, over $3 million a year) and there is no way to check the number of fares collected. The last time I rode the cable cars, a few years ago, the fare-takers had a counter that made a ding for each fare collected. It was easy for customers and hidden observers to detect fraud. There is no counter and no ding these days.

Phillips’ rule of business, and everyone else’s rule if they have any money sense: Leave the door open to fraud and you publicly invite fraud into your business. The cable car system is open to theft and theft is inevitable.

The fact that all 52 cable car employees went on strike together means that the stolen fare money was being shared with everyone.

My observation won’t sound so extreme if you know that back in the 1970s I worked at Glide Church. I had close contact with the street underworld.

The cable car operators, back then, had a great system. People who lived near the line (“players”) would order stolen goods to specifications, such as a 17” Sony model 233J for $200 and pay the cable car operator. The operator would order the set from the local burglars and the set would be delivered, by cable car, to the buyer the next morning.

A major management change is now required because fraud among the 52 cable car operators is endemic and can’t be stopped with a slap on the wrist or a new ding-ding system.