Pro Commerce

Defenseless

I continue to think about the XXX. A doomed people.  Defenseless, without any modern organizational experience and confronting an ideological enemy who treats them as sub-human.

Who are the XXX?  It could be the Rom people (Gypsies to the unPC), it could be the European Jews, the Tibetans or even some of the native American tribes in the 19^th Century.  The XXX I’m thinking about are the modern day Balinese. Their enemies are the Indonesian Islamic Wahabis. The Balinese have nowhere to go and probably won’t survive.

When I think like this I am forced to consider the one group of people who ended their role as defenseless victims.  It happened in my lifetime, I watched it, I experienced it. 

Fear factor

In the comments of an earlier blog, there is a discussion of the fear-based nature of our society (Anglo-Saxon-American.) You may find it interesting.  The discussion is between me and Charles Roll, the genius who wrote the poetry in The Seven Laws of Money and told me about the Chinese concept of 7 Laws.  He wrote under the pen name Jug’n’Candle.

There is a popular TV program called Fear Factor that presents half a dozen young people with three major categories of fear and tests their speed and lack of fear in trying circumstances.  The program uses extreme height, high speed, gross foods, creepy crawlers, dangerous animals and claustrophobia as the vehicles of facing fear.  One segment of the show often has the contestants eating something frightening like goat’s testicles, live scorpions or pigs nipples.

The photo on the right is me trying out for my proposed new show: Senior Fear Factor. I laughed when I realized what I was doing.

(I’m eating a whole sardine.)

Rotten politics

I had dinner with some friends including a Dutch friend and his wife.  When the subject came up of how bad politics was and how bad politicians were, I had to call attention to my Dutch friend.

I pointed out that his ancestors in Amsterdam (mine too) were the key people to blame for our current plight; our modern way of thinking  and our dislike of real sausage-making politics.

Amsterdam is the source of modern......

Two doorways

Two doorways give my readers a sense of life in the Castro District in San Francisco.

The first on the right is a travel store with suitcases etc. Apparently many people must step into the doorway to use their cell phones.  The small letters make an exception for the people who treat the doorway as a phone booth.  They are welcome if they are Superman or Superwoman changing clothes and want to enter the doorway without their clothing on.

The image on the left is a flower shop specializing in orchids.  It seems that orchids and the delicate storeowner who sells them are sensitive to the milliamp radio waves transmitted to and from cell phones.  Small print makes it clear this anti-cell phone position is an environmental statement. "Dogs and bikes are welcome."

Universal Hero

Diogenes  has survived as the name of an Athenian who spent years searching for an honest man.  An “honest man” being a stranger who would not attempt to deceive Diogenes  A great way to make history.  This act was especially noteworthy in Athens a small city where very few people trusted each other, largely because Athens was one of the early urban areas where tribal and family structures remained the prime dictates of behavior.  Not so different from Arab culture today.

We know that Athenians didn’t trust each other.  That is why they created a boule, a legislature made up of randomly selected citizens.  The boule lasted 200 years.  In the boule, the chief officer was a position that rotated every month because nobody could be trusted with the power.

I am the modern Diogenes.  I have found the honest man, his photo is on the right.  I asked this young man for permission to take his photo.  He was terribly reluctant.  He wanted to know “why?”  No answer would suffice. Finally he relented and explained that he wore the shirt because it accurately reflected his feelings. Click on the photo and see how accurately his face reflects the shirt.

I have argued in this blog for years that Lefty Fundamentalism is usually nothing more than a young person’s reaction to the world.  It is rebelliousness incarnate in ideology.  On this young man it looks cute and honest.  On the tens of millions of older people “anti” is just a statement of a brain frozen in time.

I am not mentioning what country I took the picture in.  This is proof, in photographic form, that Lefty Fundamentalism is pure intellectual and policy emptiness.  Without knowing the country this young man is in you can’t know what policies and ideologies the “anti” refers to.  In Cuba or China he is anti- Fidel or anti-Mao; in Europe his is anti-American, in the U.S. he is anti-commerce.

Reality may be out of focus

I keep reading polls that show Gov. Arnold to be in the tank and his four reform initiatives failing at the ballot box.  This includes the usually reliable Field Poll.

I detect nothing of the sort.  Arnold is one of the two most successful governors since Hiram Johnson. I await election day, Nov. 8th, in California.  If I am wrong, I'll apologize and re-examine my sources of California political information.  If I am right I plan to make it very clear where the polls and the press have gone wrong.

Bold ikebana

Earlier this summer I announced my plan to organize an exhibition of Bold Ikebana.  I’m still planning it and am looking for the appropriate artists to invite. Send me suggested names. I have several wonderful friends who have agreed to help put the exhibition together. 

Imagine my surprise at finding a store in Tel Aviv on Dizengoff St. that specializes in imaginative flower containers, many of them perfect for bold ikebana.

Migrating style

It is fascinating to me to watch fashion migrate around the world.  I was heavily involved in the early migration of blue jeans around the planet and especially pre-bleach-spotted and used jeans, which were generated by my hippy clients.

Now I notice an interesting chain store in Tel Aviv called Castro.  From the graphics in the stores, it is clear that the theme and the name come from the Castro district in San Francisco (my gay neighborhood.) The stores are fashionable and successful. (Photo on the right.)

There is a street fashion that migrated to Tel Aviv from Tokyo.  I first saw heavy leggings in Tokyo about five years ago in Shibuya on girls 13-16 years old.  The colors were black, white and pastel.

Now I find them in Tel Aviv on women 16-20 years old.  Hot weather in Tokyo and Tel Aviv do not discourage the use of leggings.  In Tel Aviv the colors are bold and the fabric is fuzzy. (The photo on the left was taken at a Love Parade with hundreds of thousands in attendance.)

Bird flu?

The ironic twist to the bird flu story is that the greatest risk is to free range chickens.  Free range chickens are exposed to migratory birds, and the tens of millions of non-free range chickens never see the outdoor skies.

My authority, a professor at Beersheba University, doesn't consider the current bird flu fever to be built on solid biology.  She says the only current communication of the fever to humans is through the lungs.  So you have to live with the bird to get the bird flu.  Eating chickens or birds cannot convey the virus.

Moreover, she points out that few labs in the world can directly detect the virus; all the positive detection involves finding anti-bodies.  Since we only test sick or dead birds, we don't know how many birds have the anti-bodies without the actual virus still being virulent in the bird.  More over, a vaccine can't be made readily available.  The fastest possible vaccine takes several years of growing and safety testing.

Cities

Its fun to comment on a book that was published the same year I write the comments.  Joel Kotkin's The City was published in April of this year.

I learned three things of contemporary relevance from Kotkin's book.

First, that Islam grew so rapidly and to such a great geographical extent because of its practice of protecting the cities it conquered. Something that was never practiced before. That meant that the extensive trade networks of the 7th-8th Century were kept intact and because of a common religion, protected routes and a common language, commerce could grow rapidly and spread Islam even further.  I know Islam came to Indonesia as a commercial religion.

Second, since Kotkin recognizes the historic importance of Amsterdam in the creation of global commerce and democracy, I don't need to beat that drum anymore.  The knowledge must be fairly widespread.

Third, we finally have an explanation of why China never joined the Enlightenment or the Industrial revolution.  She never had real cosmopolitan cities.  China's cities were always the sacred centers of government and could move at the will of the emperor.  Cities are commercial, diverse and based on middleclass meritocracy.  China never had it.  China was entirely an agricultural universe and is only now, in the past two decades, slowly becoming urbanized.

What lessons are to be learned from Kotkin?  I will write more on this later.  Begin with the fact that the world's greatest city is Tokyo which has neighborhoods, multiple centers, 43 million people, superb transportation, is exciting and growing.

Anti-anti

A Board of Supervisors vote is coming up next week on allowing Home Depot to open a store in San Francisco. The Planning Commission approved the store, in July, with a few absurd restrictions. The Supervisor's vote may be postponed based on behind-the-scenes maneuvering, as it was last month.

This raises three issues for me.  The majority of San Franciscans want a Home Depot in San Francisco.  We also want an Ikea, a Target, a WalMart, a Lowe's and many other big box stores that our small-fishing-village-minded Lefty Fundamentalists are organized to stop

First, we don't get a representative government .....

More on education data

I looked up the 2005 national data testing results for public schools.  I compared California's 8th grade reading scores to New York, Texas, Illinois and Pennsylvania for size and Colorado and Washington for regional similarities. If you can't read by the 8th grade you can't read.

California is embarrassing. California was the lowest of the group with an 8th grade overall reading score of 250 compared to 265 for NY, 258 for Tx and 264 for Ill. Blacks in Colorado and Washington had higher scores than the average of California: Co 254, Wa. 255. Latinos equalled California's average in New York getting 250 and beat California in Ill. where Hispanics got 253.

These are large samples so the differences are statistically significant...they have policy significance too.  California has had a Democratically controlled Assembly and Senate for 45 years, run with iron discipline by the party and teacher's unions. Except for the unions, California has been just like most of the Old Dixie South.

Airport art

The photo on the right shows part of an art exhibition at the Frankfurt airport.

One person deserves credit for this: Ruth Kadish.

Ruth, a forty-five year close friend of mine, was on the board of the San Francisco Airport Commission a few decades ago.  When a major airport expansion was underway Ruth saw in the plans a long boring stretch of walkway in the United wing and decided to put a linear art gallery in the space.  She had to fight off the San Francisco Art Commission who heard about Ruth’s idea and wanted to control the space.  Ruth had to fight off the incompetent group, the Art Commission, so that a first class level of exhibition, and a first class group of curators could be created to handle the exhibits.

Ruth succeeded and her gallery became the model for every other airport art exhibit on the planet.  Over 10 million people a year see Ruth’s art gallery, more than any previous art gallery in history.  Ruth was partially and inadequately rewarded by naming a small gallery at the S.F. airport in her name. 

When you fight to win on something important don’t expect to be fully appreciated.

California 1st

I went to public schools in California in the 1950s and believed what I was told and read in the press... that our schools were first in the nation.  Now we are told, and have been told for decades, that California is somewhere near the bottom in educational test scores.  Not a possible change.

Four things have changed.  First, there were no reliable national achievement test data before 1969 and there was no requirement that every state participate in a standard testing system until 1996.

So any statement that California was first in the nation was pure ......

Family matter

One story that continues to raise its head, periodically, is the story of J. Robert Oppenheimer.  Oppenheimer was a great man, the lead scientist on the Manhattan Project who was later disgraced by xxx.  Many of his peers turned against him.  What was xxx?

XXX is what makes the Oppenheimer story interesting.  We get to debate the mystery of xxx. The latest authors to bring up the story are Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin in American Prometheus: Triumph and Tragedy..  James Nuechterlein reviews the book and the history in the October Commentary.

My contribution to this issue is first hand........

Lefty fundamentalism

I have many new readers and some have not encountered the term Lefty Fundamentalism.

The term is not a curse word, though it may sound as though I am using it that way.  The term is fully explicated, most recently in the following blog.

I estimate the number of Lefty Fundamentalists at more than ten million Americans. That makes this religion one of the top two in America, right after Catholicism. 

While several Protestant sects together claim more members, their claims are nonsense. Mormons get their large numbers from including the whole planet. Methodists are not a cohesive group ... just ask about lesbian clergy.  Baptists, Christian fundamentalists and Evangelicals can only agree on Billy Graham who has become ecumenical in order to get large audiences.

Lefty Fundamentalists are a large religious, self-righteous group that is big enough to have many of their own newspapers, television programs, syndicated cartoons and spokespeople.

Check my earlier blog and you will clearly see why Lefty Fundamentalism is a religion, unaffected by reality or empirical evidence.

A failed idea

In the early days of the women's movement I heard a lot of complaints about the wrong ratio of toilets in women's bathrooms to men's because men have urinals and each woman generally takes longer in the toilet.  The demand was for more stalls for women so their waits in line would not be longer than men's waits.

The photo on the right is an Italian solution to the problem... a women's urinal named the Lady P.  Is it a solution?

I asked the question of women and got several explanations for why it is not a solution. Women want more privacy than is available with a bank of urinals because they usually have to pull down pants and underpants, men have zippers. Many women have not trained their sphincter muscles as carefully as men. Men can generally piss or poop with complete muscular distinction.  Some women are used to doing both at the same time.  That should be enough to eliminate the idea of women's urinals, but there is more.  The sanitation on men's urinals need not be as good as would be needed on a woman's urinal because men, unless they are pretty old, can aim much better than most women and therefore woman need to be closer to the urninal and it consequently needs to be more sanitary.

Those are pretty strong reasons why the photo is about a dead subject.  Somebody had to discuss it.  Maybe it shouldn't have been me.

Claremont Review

I’m so happy with the Claremont Review of Books that I want to call your attention to several articles.

Adam Wolfson jumps directly into today’s intellectual fray: the serious part of the debate on American foreign policy.  This would not appear to be a battle royal.  The die was cast five years ago with the emergence of a full blown Bush doctrine that grew out of the thinking of Paul Wolfowitz, the first clear mind concerned with statecraft in several centuries (maybe since Machiavelli.)  The Bush doctrine.....

Continued socialization

A few blogs back I wrote about what has made our lives more hectic and time-consuming.

I said that the solutions would likely be social.  The following comes from two paragraphs in an article by Clive Thompson in the NYTimes discussing the way people deal with their computer desk work.

"Michael Mann...We've got 20,000 digital photos instead of 10 we treasure. We have more TV Tivo'd than we'll ever see." In the last year, Mann has embarked on a 12-step-like triage: he canceled his Netflix account, trimmed his instant-messaging "buddy list" so only close friends can contact him and set his e-mail program to bother him only once an hour. ("Unless you're working in a Korean missile silo, you don't need to check e-mail every two minutes," he argues.)"

"Gloria Mark (talks about..) the way that people work when they are "co-located" - sitting next to each other in cubicles - versus how they work when they are "distributed," each working from different locations and interacting online. She discovered that people in open-cubicle offices
suffer more interruptions than those who work remotely. But they have better interruptions, because their co-workers have a social sense of what they are doing. When you work next to other people, they can sense whether you're deeply immersed, panicking or relatively free and ready to talk - and they interrupt you accordingly."

I learn late

I know most of my blog readers won’t believe that I have never before seen Fox News.  I know that I’m not the last person to have seen it.  As in Suzuki Roshi’s book Beginner’s Mind, a newbie can have fresh insights.

In San Francisco, the Holy City of Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot, none of the...

No WWII

I read a review of a book by Margaret Macmillan, Paris 1919, in the Canadian National Post (sent to me by Alex.)

I was always ready to change my mind about WWII.  John Keegan showed how the Germans didn't actually lose WWI, they were defeated by influenza and arose to continue WWI twenty years later.

Now Margaret Macmillan shows that Keynes' book about the unfairness of the Peace Treaty was actually wrong and was used by the Germans as propaganda to foment the unique German post WWI paranoia about being robbed of a victory by politicians.

I personally read both of Keynes' books carefully and find John Maynard Keynes to be the most overrated Marxist theologian in the last century.  His General Theory is pulp fiction, pure neo-marxist trash and bad economics with no trace of his supposed theory of consumption.

Thank you Margaret Macmillan.

Prejudice versus racism

I have heard blacks talk about white drivers locking their doors when they drive by a group of black kids and describe this as anti-black racism.

I think there is a distinction between prejudice against black male teenagers dressed in ghetto clothes and anti-black racism. 

Imagine the same group of young blacks, now change the age.  A group of black males in their 40s or 50s would not be frightening, nor would a group of black 10 year olds.  Change the gender, girls, and few people would feel it threatening.  Now put socially acceptable uniforms on the same group of males; police uniforms, military uniforms, tuxedos…conservative suits, etc … definitely not threatening.  Now put the same group in front of a police station, a military recruiting station or in a university gym … not threatening.

Some prejudices against a group of young black males in ghetto clothes is not necessarily anti-black racism.

(Photo is in front of San Francisco City Hall)

Patience

Please be patient. 

For the next two days I am traveling internationally.  Even with my own computer I am not adept at the issues of wi-fi, which isn't everywhere and certainly isn't on one billing system.  The same is true for electric outlets. I marvel at business travelers who figure the ins and outs of this global puzzle.

I'm also greatful to the global travelers who created the free showers at the Frankfurt Red Carpet Club.  That sure feels good.

American malaise

The first time I became aware of the American Malaise was in 1991.  My running partner, a socialite, told me she would publish a simple living calendar if I would write 12 simple living statements to put on the calendar (I had written the classic book on the subject: Simple Living Investments for Old Age.)  I wrote the 12 statements (you can read them) and she promptly rejected them as much too serious and far off the mark.  The simple living that my friend had in mind was the subject that later became the material for Time’s Simple Living Magazine.

The Time magazine called Simple Living is really about preparing fast but yuppified meals, creating a wardrobe with more matching clothing and having a house full of cut flowers instead of clutter.  Simple Living Magazine, with its beautiful Zen-like photography, reminds me of the recent weekly Onion parody of a 25th anniversary issue of Cosmo with the cumulative 8,129 previously published ’ways to improve your sex life.’

What my running partner had in mind.....

Check my arithmetic

In the first week of August I received my United Mileage Plus Visa monthly invoice from the current owner of the card business, Chase Bank.

The statement was for $1,241.93.  I am a terrible customer, I have always paid my bills in full and on time. This time I decided to see what happened if I only paid $1000.  What would the interest charges on $241.93 be?

You will not believe the interest rate. I guarantee you will not believe the interest rate that I have been charged.

Don't be embarrassed

I got angry with a good friend last fall when he said that our national debt was a burden on our grandchildren. I rashly said (to this PhD) that he must have flunked Econ 101.

Then I heard Mark Shields on NPR News Hour say the same absurd thing. The Shields/ Brooks part of the program is perfect synecdoche. Brooks is handsome, brilliant and neo-conservative, Shields is an alcohol besotted Democratic political hack.

Please don’t embarrass yourself. Saying the national debt will.......

Beautiful day on the Bay

Clear sky and light wind.  I saw my first air race.  The pylons were on barges set about 200 yards away from Greens restaurant at Fort Mason.  The planes were single engine,  which I can identify with as I fly them.  They were one passenger, high powered, specialized for aerobatics and racing over a tiny course.  A plume of colored vapor trailed behind each of them.

A big crowd in the Marina and anywhere with a vista of the Bay.  I could move around like a bumble bee, with my motorcycle in the frozen auto traffic jam.

Everyone around me was excited and so was I.  I know I had a different feeling.  It was the barrel rolls, inside loops, inverted flight, slipping turns and worst of all the hammerhead stalls that made my stomach approach the vomit level.  I’ve done everyone of these maneuvers in my youth and I got sick then.  I still have to do stalls about once a year, usually quite modest ones, but they still unnerve me.

An airplane stalls when the air passing over the wings is going slower than the airplane requires to remain in the air.  The airplane falls. A stall can occur when climbing, descending or in any position.  Most often when climbing. A hammerhead stall is at the top of a steep climb.  The plane just falls.  It can be tail first, as many planes did today, or sideways or nose first.   If the plane is high enough and balanced properly, the weight of the engine will have it moving nose first toward the ground (the bay) and it will gain enough airspeed over the wings to fly and regain control.  But the feeling is always sickening.

Back in the swim

I am saving my blog readers from an extensive piece on ‘We are alone.’ I’ll just say that the Existential notion that we are alone and hopeless is way off the mark. We are in reality totally alone, no one could possibly have a deep understanding of any one of us (I have written on some of the unique ways we are alone) --- given that core reality, it is best to have an open mind an open heart and live with the reality of aloneness comfortably.

What inspired that rant? I had been losing the community of literary thinkers, over the past decade, which nourished me. I lose friends too, often to mortality, and I find new friends. Being deeply alone is unrelated to having friends, associates, partners, family, community and compatriots. All of the latter can feel wonderful. They don’t mitigate the former.

Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s when I produced the public radio program Social Thought, I found hundreds of thinkers to interview by reading the New York Review of Books, the New York Times weekend Book Review, Science magazine and a scattering of journals (that was before the Internet.) By the late 1990s all these sources were useless. Science was the first to go as its political bias and tolerance for fraud became unbearable, next to go was the NYTimes Book Review as the quality of the reviewers declined and the editorial rigor disappeared. The last to go was the NY Review of Books. The political bias and overt hatred of anything non-Lefty became grotesque. In the literary world, the source of stimulus, for me, was bleak.

So I was left with little or no literary dialog outside of the Internet.

That has changed, fortunately. First I found Commentary Magazine, then New Criterion, and most recently the Claremont Review of Books. I recommend all of these for literary and intellectual stimulus. It feels wonderful to again see a vital dialog and hold a paper copy of it in my hands.

Badge of rebellion

A few weeks ago I saw a movie about Ron English a billboard graffiti artist. Ron, a New Yorker, replaces existing billboards with his own graphics. The real artists in the film are the Billboard Liberation Front, a San Francisco group that selects large freeway billboards, not just ground level innocuous ones. I patiently sat watching dozens of messages, all stupid, all Lefty Fundamentalist nonsense.

I left the theater realizing that the American version of Lefty Fundamentalism is contentless. It is merely a badge of rebellion and highly contextual.

Think about a person wearing a Che Guevara t-shirt. It says rebel in much of the U.S. but in Miami it means you are looking for a fight. In Cuba it means you support a fascist regime.

The same goes for wearing a Stalin t-shirt in Poland, Hungary or the Czech Republic -- it means you support a murderous tyrant. Rebels in Germany wear some version of a swastika while in France or Belgium it will still get you killed.

Rebels need a symbol of their rebelliousness but strictly in context. In the U.S. it is Che Guevara and the whole package of Lefty Fundamentalism. Rather obvious but the point is that Lefty Fundamentalism is contentless except as a badge. That badge only has meaning in the U.S.

Anti-war movement is dead

I’ve called a number of turning points accurately. I got the end of the population explosion right, the end of the women’s movement and the end of the environmental movement.

Now it is time to call the end of the anti-war movement in America. The anti-war movement had life since the mid-1960s and some life at the beginning of the current war in Iraq. It is finally dead.

The give away was an observation by Lawrence F. Kaplan in the Oct. 10^th New Republic. He said that only one in twelve demonstrators in the Washington D.C. anti-war march were 18-25. That was true here in San Francisco at the last march I saw early in 2004.  Few people in the most vital age group --- that makes for a zombie movement.

I won’t miss the anti-war movement. It had no substance, merely pacifist sentiment, inherently childish and dreamlike in its fantasy views of the world.

Miracle on 24th Street

On Monday there was a table on the corner of 24^th St. and Noe in San Francisco. Two young men with yarmulkes were blowing rams horns and selling them at a table.

The men were from the neighborhood Chabad, which recently opened in Noe Valley. Chabad is part of the esoteric traditions of Judaism. The larger category of Chabad is Chassidic. I would guess that there are some common roots with Sufism. In some parts of Chabad there are ecstatic rights of wine, song and dance.

I asked both men what reaction they were getting, standing in the capital of San Francisco Lefty Fundamentalism … one hundred feet from the Global Exchange, a store owned by Medea Benjamin, mother of sandbox anti-Americanism (and long time supporter of Adolph Arafat.) They said: ‘lefties can be nice as individuals on the street. They are fine, decent people, if they aren’t showing off in a group.’