Pro Commerce

More on global warming

I looked at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN)  global temperature data for the past 140 years, a period during which actual thermometer measurements have been made. 

The data suggests that most scientists can't read data. 

From 1905 to 1945 the average global temperature increased at .008 degrees C per year.  Looked at from the single extreme year 1904 to extreme year 1947 the rate was .02 degrees C per year. 

This period, roughly 40 years, was during an insignificant time of global industrial output.

Global temperature then proceded to decline until the extreme low year of 1963, a 16 year period when industrial output was several times greater than the previous 40 years.

When temperature began to rise again, the average from 1966 to 1997 was .02 degrees C per year. Again looked at from the single extreme year 1963 to extreme year 1997 the rate was .03 degrees C per year.

So we have three periods: roughly 40 years of trivial industrial growth followed by roughly 20 years with a significant burst of industrial output and then 20 years of very high global industrial growth.

This first and last periods have global temperature going up at very similar rates, while in the interim period global temperatures went down.  Nothing in this picture shows a connection between industrial activity and global temperature.  Nothing.

Following

I’m going to follow two issues on a regular basis. First is global temperature that comes from a wikipedia site. You will note that global temperature is virtually the same for the past seven years. Definitely no warming since 1997. How long do we go before deciding that Global Warming is a religion not a scientific theory?

I also track my anti-PC portfolio. The portfolio was purchased Jan.1 2004 and contains Microsoft, WalMart, Starbucks, Halliburton, CitiCorp and McDonalds. As of today, the anti-PC portfolio is up 16% while the DowJones Industrials is down nearly 2%.

Black rednecks

Thomas Sowell wrote an excellent op-ed in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal.  He points out that Northern ghetto crime came with the black immigrants from the South and the black migrants have brought the Southern redneck culture with them. Further, contemporary black culture and language are 100% derivative from Southern redneck culture and language.

To fully understand and appreciate Sowell's position it is necessary to read Albion Seed, David Hackett Fischer's masterpiece on the origins of the American people. It is a sine qua non for an educated person.

In addition to Albion Seed it helps to know that our urban black crime rate is the same high rate and the same mixture of crimes that are found in rural redneck counties, where the current culture of crime comes from. 

It  helps to note that every belligerent black reference to “respect” (to being "dissed") is a direct borrowing from the ideas and stereotypes of the Southern Plantation gentleman. The same idea of lack of “respect” for a white person (especially a woman) back in the South, used to get colored people lynched from a tree.

(Photo of Thomas Sowell)

Truth and the civil society

Welcome Pope Benedict XVI to the world stage with your message that we need to recognize and appreciate the existence of “Truth.” 

We need a global discussion of this issue.  This issue is at the core of a functional and functioning society. 

We need more open debate.  We must get rid of the idea of Truth once and for all.

No American believes in Truth in the sense that Benedict XVI means it.  I couldn't talk to any American for more than a moment without hearing “I know that my truth may not be the same as your.”  That is not Truth. That American position is the core of relativism.

Civil society is based on common values, in our case about equal opportunity, self reliance and justice.  We also believe that there is no Moral Truth, that each issue of law, etiquette and criminality must be examined in a context from which a reasonable moral outcome can be derived.

The pervasive American notion of relative truths is widespread in the world and makes most of the functioning civil societies possible.  It is societies based on Truths that have Sharia, communist dictators and tribal warfare. 

We are battling Truths in the war on terrorism and the new Pope will help us understand that perspective, inadvertently.

(Of course there are syllogistic truths; I didn't mean to ignore my philosopher friends.)

Health and laughter

Laughter is empirically found to be good for your health.  For a specific laugh that will increase the length of your life, read David Brooks' column in yesterday's NYTimes.

Brooks goes into the ballistic humor zone about the recent Journal of the American Medical Association article that finds people in the overweight (but not obese) category of BMI body size have exactly the same lifespan as people in the ideal BMI body size.

I've read the article and find it empirically and statistically sound. First rate, in fact.

How do we interpret the article. Combined with other, earlier, good research, your weight in your 30-45 year old period is all that counts.  After that, weight doesn't matter much.

BMI body size is given in a table that shows that the average American male at age forty is 5'10 and the average woman is 5'5”. Most people are in the normal and overweight category at this age, but 20% of men and 25% of women are in the obese category and need to loose weight.   

Put another way, a male at age 40 can be roughly 5'7” and 175 lbs without any worries. Over 5'7” add five pounds for every inch of height and still be worry free.  A woman can be 5'3” and 155 pounds without worries and add five pounds for every additional inch of height and still have a long lifespan.

Seder report

I could have been killed at a San Francisco Seder. I read my Prayer of Gratitude for all who have helped the Jews, among the greatest, I mentioned George W. Bush.

I barely caused a ripple. Were people giving me leeway? Has the fact of Bush’s outspoken hostility to anti-Semitism and incomparable support for Israel seeped into Lefty consciousness?

There were only two cogent opposition comments on my reading. One focused on the presumed identity of Lefty Fundamentalism and Judaism, the other questioned the President’s motives. The second was easily dismissed, and one supporter of my Prayer of Gratitude went so far as to suggest that President Bush (and others) now equate terrorism with anti-Semitism. So anti-terrorism  has become a defense of Israel policy stance.

My father, a rabbi, viewed the Democratic Party and Judaism as synonymous. My father left the country when Nixon was elected president. I see that people, like Bill Moyers, equate his Southern Baptism with the Democratic Party; a century long alliance that is just now dying. I see where that form of Lefty conflation with religion comes from and I discuss it in Esoteric exoteric below.

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I chuckled at the Haggadah story of Jacob’s son, Joseph, who became a powerful advisor to the Pharaoh because he could read dreams. That may have been the tradition that Sigmund Freud was drawing on.

Esoteric and exoteric

There seem to be two distinct traditions in Judaism as there are in many ancient traditions: the esoteric and the exoteric.

The traditions, among Jews, can be called the Karl Marx and the Sandy Weill strains. Karl Marx is the esoteric, the one that sees evil as the world of commerce we live in and dreams of a perfect Messianic age (disclaimer: Karl Marx’s aunt was married to my ancestor, a Phillips who was the grandfather of the Dutch Phillips Electronics company.) Sandy Weill comes from the tradition that sees evil as incomprehensible and strives to live life in the world of commerce, fully and intensely. Weill created CitiCorp, the first truly global financial giant. He did it through sheer personal drive and business genius.

Today the two strains are struggling in the secular world of Jews. Israel is coming to recognize the incomprehensible evil of the Palestinians and the need to build a great wall of separation. Most Israelis now fall into this exoteric camp and are struggling to change the Israeli government, to appreciate commerce, and remove the Karl Marx strains of esoteric anti-commerce ideology.

There are opponents in Israel who still cling to anti-commercial Marxism as do the majority of American Jews, the Jews who equate Judaism and Marxism (read Lefty Fundamentalism.) The exoteric Jewish business community of America is still the minority but that is changing.

The Vulcans

A book that came out last year deserves special recognition. It is the Rise of The Vulcans by James Mann. I read every word of it with intense interest. Mann is an excellent writer and does a superb job describing the history of Powell, Armitage, Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz, the people who became G.W. Bush’s war cabinet.

The biggest surprises in the book, for me, were Armitage’s history in Vietnam and his love of the people. He is a fluent speaker of Vietnamese and he and his wife have adopted dozens of Vietnamese children. I was surprised by the early role of Cheney, Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz in shaping the We Need Democracy policy that was solidified by the early 1980s and became established national policy in 2001. The secret surprise that stunned me were the quarterly trips of Cheney and Rumsfeld to head the government-in-hiding that rehearsed a post-nuclear attack with 60 other Washington officials for nearly a decade.

Wonderful as the book is, the book is unable to convey the power of the ideas that were brought to American policy by Paul Wolfowitz. Wolfowitz was heavily influenced by The Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago, Dean Acheson and Albert Wohlstetter.

Social Thought is the discipline that recognizes ideas, metaphors and concepts as the core structure of all institutions (including nations, peoples and governments.) That understanding is what led to the recognition that America needed to raise a flag, after the Cold War, that Americans can rally around and that could attract the support of other nations, especially nations under tyranny. That flag is democracy. We, at this blog, know that democracy also connotes modernity and commerce, but the pure flag of democracy, representative elections, is the one around which the most people can rally and from which the other concepts derive.

Wolfowitz is the idea hero and the cohesive group of friends, who called themselves the Vulcans, are the founders of 21^st Century America.

Business media

The NYTimes phoned me last week to find out why I canceled my subscription (more than a year ago.)  I said it boiled down to one word: misery. The front page of the Times deals with death, destruction and misery.  The front page of the Wall Street Journal (which I subscribe to) is useful information and curious stories. I'd consider re-subscribing to the Times if it promoted Ed Rothstein, David Brooks and Virginia Postrel to senior editors and put them on the front page.

As do most people who follow news, I get most of my news from our Internet, the one we are using right now.

What I want to point out is that business news is radically different from mainstream news.  We all know the cliché “bad-news is good news.”  In business, news is “what is changing”. Reading business news leaves me feeling up-beat, whether it is the Wall Street Journal or BusinessWeek. Last week's BusinessWeek had a story about the challenge and excitement about blogs for business, about Verizon getting into media content as it changes phone lines to TV lines, how Fannie and Freddie are thinking about becoming de-regulated, Airbus and Boeing competing for India, ABC news  streaming on the Internet and the question of breaking-up GM (something most business people are thinking about.) 

Business news is up beat.  It suits me. Let the academics and lefty fundamentalists of the world spend their days being miserable, or wallowing in schadenfriod.

Not moral and short-sighted

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and many of its allies such as the Wall Street Journal are complaining that the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Justice Department and New York AG Eliot Spitzer are being too aggressive in finding, indicting and prosecuting corporate crime.

The Chamber of Commerce proves my point in Commerce that business is not moral, otherwise the Chamber would be seeking more aggressive prosecution.  (I'm glad commerce is not moral otherwise we wouldn't have recreational drugs, people earning a living in the sex field, smuggling of  high-tech adult toys, booze in grocery stores, stores open  all night and shopping on Sundays.)

However, the current type of prosecution benefits business in general while making life more difficult and sometimes more expensive for individual corporations.

Investors, a key source of capital, are the people who want open corporate books, reliable financial statements and financial transparency. This wave of prosecution benefits the investment community and commerce in general.

Because individual companies place their own self interest over the interests of the broader commercial community we get the unfortunate shortsighted behavior of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

This needs to be fixed.

I suggest that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and similar entities create special executive committees with senior members appointed to long terms. Such a committee would be designed to represent the investment community and the long-term interests of commerce.  Call such an executive committee the Long-term Growth Committee.

A longer post with a slightly different perspective is on my blog Commerce the book.

Union crisis

San Francisco is going to have a union crisis in July.

The hotel workers have been without a union contract and will probably go out on strike when the tourist season picks up. The hotels still have no interest in being unionized and having a contract that expires at the same time in hotels across the country. The same is true for Sutter Health, which owns a large hospital, St. Luke’s. The St. Luke’s union plans to go on strike in July. St. Luke’s is running at a $1.5 million per month loss; partly because it is in the Mission district with mostly Medicare patients and partly because of union work rules. Both of these groups of union workers are part of the SEIU, a service workers union, whose leader is a boob.

The Chronicle is also going to have a strike at the same time. The Chronicle is owned by the Hearst Corp. and losses $1 million per month. The Chronicle circulation is now below the 160,000 level of the competing free Examiner tabloid, which is non-union and operates on a skeleton staff.

The mayor of San Francisco blew his chance to be a reliable mediator in any strike when he joined the hotel union picket line last year.

More to report on this when it happens in July. I expect the radical left Board of Supervisors to muck everything up and I expect the Chronicle to come out with its new tabloid format and call it a “strike edition.”

Japanese company

A blog reader, Michael C., called my attention to the photo on the right from the Japan Times. What we both see in this photo is the pain of the older men on the right who are classic corporate leaders in the Japanese mold. Both are from Fuji TV, which is trying to form a holding company of media outlets and was stymied by the young fellow in white who bought a chunk of stock to block the purchase of a radio network.

Japan is lagging the U.S. by about twenty years in the merger and acquisition business. M&A, as it is called, became a core part of commerce in the U.S. in the mid-1970s. M&A is a pseudonym for the creation of a marketplace that trades in entire companies. You buy and sell companies. The actual process is still cumbersome and expensive but many individuals are active in the M&A marketplace, buying and selling companies.

Before the M&A market could mature, interchangeable managers had to exist and a whole bevy of consultants had to learn their trade. Companies are not yet homogeneous enough for all sales and mergers to work … about half don’t work. 

I’ve worked on several companies that wanted to sell themselves (the owners were worn out) and the process of making a company into a saleable commodity is arduous. For family owned companies it is usually a nightmare. I also worked as a banker buying small banks. That was much easier since banking has been quite standardized in processes and function for a long time.

Over time I expect the workplace, everywhere, to become much more homogeneous so that mergers have a higher success rate.

The China dragon

This may be a very radical view.  While China is a truly ancient and continuous civilization, it is a genuine newcomer to the international scene.  I believe China is naive about global relations and should be treated as such.

The only reason China was made a member of the U.N Security Council in 1946 was the imagined potential threat of its large population. Fifty years later this threat is still imagined.

China has had virtually no government that dealt with the international scene for the past two centuries. China has had a large army on the Soviet border but that is not dealing with the major nations of the world. I'm not ignoring the role China played in the Korean War (with a standing army) or the Viet Nam War, but selling military supplies is not a major role. 

When China made the mistake of trying to play a role in the European theater, by voting against UN forces in Macedonia intended to protect Kosovo, the U.S. had to bomb the Chinese Belgrade Embassy to teach China the simple lesson that she must stay out of European politics. 

It is time to begin teaching China the lessons she needs to learn about Asia: 

* China needs to force North Korea to the nuclear bargaining table, soon. China has the political and economic power. North Korea is a threat to the democratic nations of South Korea and Japan.

* China must not provoke Japan into re-arming. China is being dangerous and imperious.  Re-arming Japan is a long-term threat to every one, most of all China.

* China can not be allowed to threaten the independent democratic nation of Taiwan. Another Chinese show of force on islands near Taiwan must be met with an overwhelming show of force by the U.S.

China can learn to be a stabilizing force in Asia as well as a useful contributor to regional pluralism. That will only happen if the U.S. assumes a mentor role.

Perplexed

Retail versus Internet shopping was the issue for me, last week.

I looked up a pair of shoes, online, that I wanted to buy.  The shoe was a replacement for a pair I use every day and love.  On the Internet the price, with shipping and sales tax is $118.   

Looking in one of my favorite neighborhood shoe stores, I found the same pair in stock for $146. Out of what I now view as pure sentimentality, I bought the shoes at my local store telling myself I wanted to help keep the local shoe store in business.

I now believe I was wrong.  No retail business can survive on sentimentality. There are a number of factors that favor a local retail store: immediacy of possession, no anxiety about delivery not being left at the front door by FedEx when I'm gone, ease of return, ability to compare products and try them on for size and color. 

None of these factors justify the $26 price differential. On calm deliberation I should have only been willing to accept a $5 differential.

The whole point of this blog is that local retailers must compete with the Internet on abundance of product, depth of inventory, good return policy and a price differential that is quite modest.  Stores that depend on impulse purchase and a good sales pitch and other factors related to immediacy, can charge more.

Update

Several items need updating.

First I’m not so down on San Francisco City Hall, any more. The politicos are doing less and less damage. The mayor is now widely seen as politically inept and so devoted to sex (with women, including four on his staff) that he doesn’t waste time with city administration. Go Gavin go. Sex is fine with me.

Second, the Jewish vote for Bush went in the right direction and more extensively than was first reported. Jewish men were nearly twice as likely to vote for Bush as women and men under 30 went 35% for Bush. That number was probably an underestimate, the real number was closer to 30% for all Jewish men and 40% for men under 30. Goodbye yenta, hello mensch.

Third, the German translation of the Table of Contents of my book Commerce has arrived and been posted on my Commerce-the-book page. All of you who can read German, please tell me how it looks. I had a long interchange with the translator about the right words for Commerce, business and trade. She settled on Handel, Profitgeschaeft and Gewerbe. There is an amazing English-German dictionary online.

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Last, I wrote an entry on the Marketing Without Advertising page about the end of wearable art, in case you didn’t know that it has disappeared from the scene.

Consensus

Americans have reached a consensus on two issues: abortion and gun control. 

Survey data told me about the first one as early as 1994.  Now Abigail Kohn claims she found the second one around 1996. (Shooters: Myths and Realities of America's Gun Cultures)

The consensus on abortion is that 'I wouldn't have an abortion but others should have the legal right to have one.'  More than two thirds of Americans would agree with this statement.  Politics confirms it ... that is what most national candidates say.  The policy problems remain on the issue of how late one can have an abortion. Over-turning Roe vs Wade would still leave 18 states with nearly all the U.S. Population with legal abortions. The pro-choice lobby should spent its money letting every thirteen year-old know about the morning after pill. Nothing could stop this information from getting out and being ubiquitous.

The consensus on guns is 'the Second Amendment protects the right to own guns, but criminals shouldn't be able to buy them.' Again, more than two thirds of Americans would agree with this statement. In most states and all but a few cities, citizens can buy and carry concealed weapons. The policy problem that remains is to stop rogue dealers from selling guns to people (or the representatives of people) who have a criminal record.  Both presidential candidates took this position.

Americans are not as divided as they are made to appear.  Democracy can resolve moral problems, given some time.  The courts may not be the best way to resolve policy differences.

A little jealous

Kevin Helliker wrote a wonderful article in the Tuesday Wall Street Journal about swimming as exercise.  I swim for exercise three days a week (and walk two days). I never thought to write an article about it. I started off with a distaste for swimming laps, as did Helliker.

Swimming was difficult for me to start doing, having been a runner for thirty years.  I started in a small pool, early in the morning, doing the breast stroke one way and a breast stroke on my back the other way.  For more than four years I did this daily, enjoying the stars and the clouds.

Finally I was forced into a real pool in a lap lane and I learned to crawl one way and do a real backstroke the other way.  I learned to love it. It turns out to be more meditative than other exercises and also good for thinking. I like the camaraderie of the locker room and the strange stilted abbreviated language that prevails there.

I love swimming wherever I travel in the world.  I've been in many oceans, lakes and know the ceilings of dozens of pools on many continents.

Hero

The New York Times phoned yesterday to find out why I cancelled my subscription more than a year ago.  I said it could be summarized in one word: "misery".  The front page of the Times is filled with misery.  I always felt miserable when I read it.  That is never true for the Wall Street Journal.

The front page of the Wall Street Journal, on Tuesday, reports a new global hero.  The man who combined nutritional powdered milk with Nutella to form a low cost food that is easy to transport and consume. The food, called Plumpy'nut is given to starving children.  The kids like it and it works. Andre Briend is the hero.  The WSJ article gives much credit to Michel Lescanne for bringing the product to market with his non-profit company, Nutriset. 

For the record, I've worked intimately with hundreds of non-profits and there is no significant difference between a non-profit and a profit making business except for:  public attitudes which are different toward each, and the many operational restrictions that hinder non-profits.

Lescanne clearly deserves credit.  Inventing and marketing are inseparable attributes.

Preparing for the Seder

The house has to be thoroughly cleaned and the Passover dishes and utensils have to be brought out.  Passover dishes are separate from the daily milk and meat utensils in a Jewish home.

Passover starts at the end of next week.  In my own preparation I have written a short prayer to be said at the end of the reading of the Haggadah, the story of the exodus from Egypt three thousand years ago.  An addition to the Haggadah has occurred in my lifetime.  It is a remembrance of those who were “annihilated in chambers of fire, in factories of death.”

I offer another addition to the Haggadah, feel free to use it:

"Yad Vashem

"Isaiah 56:5 which promises everlasting remembrance: "And to them will I give within my house and within my walls a memorial and... an everlasting name."

"Born in the shadow of the Shoah, of a powerful family, was a man who rose to be the leader of the most powerful people on earth. This man, at a time when the enemies of Israel were stirring the old hates of the Shoah and new hates among the neighbors of Israel, spoke out loudly and clearly for the rights and freedom of the children of Abraham, Issac and Jacob. This man was among the strongest friends of Israel since the times of Moses.

"We, Israel, shall remember our friends, on this day of celebration of our freedom; we shall honor the great as well as the small. This man, George W. Bush, the 43^rd President of the United States of America, joins with tens of thousands of friends of Israel we already honor by name."

(Image: 1695 Haggadah from Amsterdam)

Downhill for downtown

I missed the long-term downward trend of American downtowns because the HTML boom of 1996-2000 hid the reality.

First, it was an HTML boom that we mistakenly call the Internet Bubble. It wasn't a bubble because the NASDAQ stocks went up at the same rate they came down ... over a year-long period. Second, downtown urban areas like S.F. Seattle, Denver, Boston and Atlanta benefited because what was really happening was that graphic artists and programmers in central cities were  creating more than one million business websites, nearly all static HTML.  After one million businesses bought their HTML website, business people didn't believe they needed anything more. The market was exhausted. The substantial Internet hardware and technology was developing in the suburbs and was not a main part of the false financial exuberance about HTML static sites.

The trend to downtown urban growth in the 1960s resulted from the decline and geographic flattening-out of phone rates from $7.00 for ten minutes S.F. to N.Y. in 1950 to $2.00 in 1960.  Fourteen urban downtowns began to grow as financial centers while N.Y. began to decline. The downtown urban growth slowed in the early 1970s as businesses faced the hostile and stoned-on-pot urban youth labor market.  Businesses began moving to suburbs where the labor force wasn't stoned (maybe some worker used cocaine instead).

The suburbs began to grow rapidly as the technology of faxes and UPS  changed the dynamics of freeways. Freeways had originally helped bring suburban workers into the urban downtown.  By the mid 1970, the freeways into downtowns were clogged and outer-ring freeways remained the only functioning transport surfaces.  UPS and FedEx created non-downtown hubs to move commercial paper.

Wireless phones, pdf files and email were the final blow to downtowns.  Outer-ring suburbs (see David Brooks'  Paradise book on this subject) finally became the home of commercial growth and reliable workers.

I saw downtown San Francisco grow from 10 million square feet of office space in 1960 to 58 million in 2000, of which 11 million is now vacant.  Offices are being converted to condo-lofts rapidly.

Wrong again

For several years in the late 1980s I worked on a national holiday remembering the internment of Japanese Americans. At the time, I believed that only one person had been a spy, Hagiwara Makoto, a Japanese national who created and ran the Tea Garden in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park.  He had a short wave radio transmitter in his office in the tea garden.  When the publicity hit, his American daughter committed suicide at the entrance to the Tea Garden.

I was wrong.  Hagiwara-sama was not the only Japanese spy.  Michelle Malkin (her blog) in a recent book gives the translation of code MAGIC deciphering of Japanese cables pre-December 1941.  On pages 192-196 it is clear that useful military information was being transmitted by a number of spies on the West Coast.  MAGIC was declassified in 1977.

Lose lose

My second friend has disappeared into the international abyss. The first friend, Tom Smith, was clearly a mercenary who last phoned me from Chile.  The second, Marc Bender, had been working on elections in Iraq and sent only one email in three years, during a break he took in Australia.  Trouble is, Marc and I succeeded in keeping our weight down with pure male competition and a standing bet about our target weight.

Without Marc my weight started to climb and I joined Weight Watchers.  Weight Watchers was an automatic choice.  It is the only program that has been scientifically tested with a control group over a three-year period (the outcome was statistically positive, but modest).  All the instructors on staff are successful alumni of the program.

I have been to Weight Watchers in San Francisco where members are encouraged to talk to the person next to them and the subject is often about resisting pressure from friends and work associates to eat “just a little piece of this cake.” In Salt Lake the subject is recipes and the problems of cooking for large families with low-calorie, store-bought prepared food.

I put up a website with my favorite commercial products I've found that help keep calories down.  If you go to the website, one Weight Watcher point is 60-130 calories.

Universe within

The Universe Within is a variation on the Body Works exhibit that is now in Chicago and was recently in Los Angeles.  The Universe Within is about one third the size, has more of a scientific feel and less claim to be art.  It comes from China and the figures are Chinese, not European.  There are no animals nor fetus. The exhibit is at the Masonic Auditorium in San Francisco until September.

I recommend it highly. It is one of the best exhibits I have seen in years. What I learned is that my son, who teaches Chinese martial arts and Chi Gung, is right.  He emphasizes the importance of physical structure for power, not muscle.  It is clear that a human body can stand up-right with just bones and ligaments. Our power derives from the position that we place our bones in, not how muscular we are.  It's pure mechanical leverage.

It is further clear that the muscles of the body all twist and intertwine, meaning the turning and twisting exercises we do in Chi Gung are highly relevant to health and vigor.

Lastly, my son emphasizes that the shoulder is not a ball and socket structure, it is a ball near a socket with dozens of cross webbed muscles pulling in every direction. The shoulder requires special exercise and caution.

Nerves, digestive, blood and urinary systems are delicate but are shown in the exhibit.  I personally think that one of the most important systems is not shown because medicine barely understands it. The lymph system ... which pumps nearly as much fluid as the blood system,but is not red or blue and is rarely taught about.

I cannot imagine anyone with an ounce of curiosity missing this exhibit.

Film

Unless you have lesbian friends you may not hear about a light hearted film that is very funny.  Its DE.B.S, a comedy based on Charlie's Angels around a lesbian love affair.

I was pleased to see that Joe Morgenstern got a Pulitzer for his film reviews in the Wall Street Journal.  I have no idea why any particular film reviewer gets a Pulitzer.  I like Joe because he is one of the rare reviewers who loves action films.  He loves them enough to make a serious effort to separate the great from the terrible. His taste and mine usually coincide.

In case you missed it

In case you may not have noticed, the "Castro Community" has a number of flags.  It is hard to classify this material ... it is sex, gender, relationship and "whatever."

San Francisco reporting

The annual Macys-at-Union Square flower event had a theme of a Chinese Dragon Garden this year. (It was inspired by an old garden in Shanghai.)  The flowers filled every window and spilled out onto the street as they do every year.  The unusual creation for 2005 was the construction over the entrance on Union Square.  Photo on the right.  (Like all photos on this blog, you can click on the image to see a larger photo.)

April 1st is the annual St. Stupid's day parade here. It starts casually when the crowd is ready from the Embarcadero and stops at the Federal Reserve Bank, a statue honoring mechanics, then to the Zellerbach plaza (where the photo on the left was taken), and on to the old Pacific Coast Stock exchange (which is now a gym) for a throwing of socks into the crowd (the sock exchange). The three Doggie Diner heads joined the crowd as usual. There were only one or two political signs this year in the 400-plus people having fun.

My favorite ARCO station at Market and Castro had a great day with its pricing sign.

I met another person, Emily, who represents the new wave of San Franciscans.  She owns an apartment in a well-to-do neighborhood.  Emily lives in Napa County during the week, where she works as a CPA, and spends the weekends in San Francisco.

By my rough estimates there are 40,000 people like Emily, for whom San Francisco is a weekend resort.  Of the 40,00 people I estimate one-third have rent controlled apartments.

Problem with intelligence

David Brooks explained an inherent problem with our intelligence. We rely on data analysis, content analysis and  equations from social science.  When unclassified data on China, done by the CIA, was compared with a comparable analysis done by historians and anthropologists knowledgeable in the field, the broadly trained thinkers did much better than the analytic CIA committees that currently do all the work. 

Brooks favors thinkers over analysts for top level intelligence work.

There is another problem standing in the way of good intelligence, assuming Brooks is right. 

Gabriel Schoenfeld reports in the March issue of Commentary that after Aldrich Ames was caught reporting everything the CIA knew to the Russians, the CIA cracked down and gave everyone a polygraph (lie detector) test.  Two hundred people were fired.

Problem is that the polygraph has a 10% alpha and beta error.  Meaning that many if not most of the 200 people let go were innocent people and 200 potential spies are still working for the Agency. 

A friend of mine, who is as honest as humans can get ... a pure Eagle Scout, worked on a contract with the CIA and failed the polygraph three times. Consequently the CIA was forced to let my friend work without any higher clearances than he already had from another agency that doesn't use polygraphs.

Any business or government agency that relies on the polygraph to evaluate honesty in personnel is so incompetent as to be unredeemable.  The CIA could never hire the thinkers it needs; they wouldn't tolerate a polygraph test.