Pro Commerce

Fundamental

I get both sides.  Lefty fundamentalists complain about the vigor and robust expansion of Baptist and fundamentalist churches.  At the same time some of them ask me to help revive their dying mainstream churches.  I can’t help; the Lefty Fundamentalists are the reason their own churches have been dying for four decades.

What happened in the mid 1960’s is that Lefty Fundamentalism, a politically based religion, took over most of the mainstream American churches.   The National Council of Churches became a leading anti-Vietnam War organization and took an active role in all Lefty issues of the day.  By 1971 the invocations at the start of Congressional sessions, which had always been delivered by a mainstream church minister, were being delivered by Baptists and fundamentalist ministers.  The membership of mainstream churches has been in steady decline while Baptist and fundamentalist churches have been steadily growing.  We have plenty of old mainstream churches in San Francisco that now house fundamentalist congregations.

People don’t go to church for politics, they go for religion.  The Baptists and fundamentalists doesn’t have the same problem.  They avoid politics.  Only the giant TV congregations are political and their members usually attend local churches that aren’t political.  Billy Graham was the penultimate successful Baptist and he stayed far away from politics.

On the other hand, it is hard to think how a religious Christian could be a part of a mainstream church, especially be a member of a Presbyterian church.  The Presbyterian church is so anti-Semitic in its international politics that Jesus today would face a Presbyterian church that wants to make sure his carpentry business in Samaria fails and that he and his followers get blown to pieces by Palestinian suicide bombers. Poor Jesus, he might see Mary Magdalen blown to tiny bits at a sidewalk café in Jerusalem, thanks to his disciples church efforts.

Rebate fraud

Beware.  If you are applying for a rebate on a product or service you bought, the rebate world is mostly fraud.  Rebate processors sell themselves to marketing people on the basis that 50% or less of rebates on store shelves are fulfilled.  That makes rebates look much better to the seller.

Two of the three common techniques for foiling customers who file for a rebate are (1) to claim part of the submission is missing, usually the UPC bar code from the box, (2) forms were filled out wrong or dates were inconsistent.  Most people don’t bother to re-file their rebate claim which is why the scam rejection is sent to the customer, months after the original filing. 

Lastly, when checks actually are sent to the rebate-customer, the rebate processors makes the envelope look like junk mail in the hopes the envelope with the check will be discarded.

If you file for a rebate, make copies of everything.

In my limited experience, HP is good, D-Link and Radio Shack are bad.

Happy?

I was in Seattle for a week. Thanksgiving with the extended family and plenty of time to walk around.

Using reasonable survey research methodology I can state that middleclass Seattleites are much happier than San Franciscans. They really smile much more, laugh much more and do little dances spontaneously.

All this with their outdoor Patagonia sharp looking cold weather clothes.

Be provocative?

If you are disturbed, as I am, by the rising tide of anti-Semitism, you can send an email to [email protected]  Paul is the publisher of a pretentious Irish literary magazine who published an anti-Semitic screed in his November issue. 

Paul published a piece by Justin Keating that announces Israel is illegitimate because the father of the Jews, Abraham, didn’t live in Israel, that the Balfour Declaration did not create a Jewish state, and the 1947 UN resolution was illegal.

All of which are true but nonsense.  Abraham lived in Syria, but his descendents lived in Israel for thousands of years, non-stop.  The Balfour Declaration was a policy paper for the British mandate. Just policy. The U.N. didn’t create Israel.  The U.N. ratified the British partition and the U.S gave diplomatic recognition to the new State.  For Israel to exist, it fought for its very life for over a year against all the well-funded well-armed invading Goliath Arab neighbors who were defeated and forced to sign a peace treaty to accept the creation of Israel. (Israel did this twice.)

Bloodshed and military victory created Israel. 93% of all other nations in the world were created with peace treaties. The rest are islands.

What you can email Paul about is to ask whether he published anti-Protestant libels as encouragement for the IRA when the IRA was blowing up civilian Protestants in Belfast.  Paul’s anti-Semitic brain blows a fuse when you ask that question. 

(I keep saying: anti-Semitism is a brain poison.)

Empirica

I used the word “Empirica” in a comment below. I think it is a useful word to describe the world we live in.  It has overtones of utopia, but it is exactly the opposite.  People who believe in utopias invariably get destroyed by Empirica.  Utopias are dreams, Empirica is the unseen reality.  Empirica rises up occasionally and slaps us down: tsunamis, 8.0 earthquakes and giant meteors. It also slaps us down in lesser ways: prison, death, divorce, business failure….etc.

It turns out the word is used by Nassim Taleb as the name for...

Steven does it again

The news reports that Steven Avery, in Wisconsin, was freed after 18 years in prison based on DNA.  He spent a year being the darling of the “free the innocent” movement and filing a wrongful incarceration suit against the State.

Now he appears to have raped and killed another woman.  The press offers strong evidence of Steven‘s guilt.

It is hard for most people to understand what is going on. 

Mao-maoing Mao

One member of my family has a very large Andy Warhol painting of Mao on the living room wall.

How long will it remain there? 

Mao, for five decades, was the symbol of utopia and the great socialist future.  Warhol was right in the mainstream of Liberalism when he painted his beatific idol, with original serigraph versions running into the thousands of hand-signed copies.  What are those prints worth now?

The problem arises with the authoritative biography of Mao by Chang and Halliday.  This book is widely reviewed and even more widely respected.  Mao, as history now sees him, ranks among the most horrific mass murderers of the Second Millennium. Estimates of his slaughter range up to 70 million people. It is hard to believe anyone wants to look at the face of an all-time champion of mass murder.

Cent versus decent

Centralization versus decentralization is what I wanted to blog about but the photo on the right, which should be an example of my subject, turns out not to be.  The photo on the right is the Seattle blue monorail that crashed into the only other monorail, red, going the opposite direction, because of bad timing.

The photo on the left below, shot from the bottom, shows that the two trains were in a turn that was too narrow for both to pass and they now seem to be permanently joined at the hip. I believe Seattle should just leave the trains in place, close the 40 year-old system that is mostly a tourist attraction, and let the two cars in the air be the tourist attraction.  Monorails were a technology that didn’t work out.

It turns out the real reason the trains crashed was ....

Insights from Seattle

I saw three government functions in Seattle that I commend to other cities.

It begins at the airport.  On the right is a photo of modern day life in exile.  When we arrive at our destination gate there is no one who cares about us to offer a warm welcome.  In fact, since September 2001 there is no place for our caring associates to meet us.  In most airports our welcoming committee is assigned to oblivion at some banal or hideous “exit” area.

Not in Seattle.  The “exit” area is now...

Esthetics

Every era has its esthetics.  It is the most defining element of time.  You know you are in 1937 from the design of the cars.  You know you are in 2000 from the reception space of a Marriott Hotel.

Public objects and public spaces define the esthetic of the time and place.  Today, restaurants tend to be the leading edge of esthetics.

I would like to make a call.  We have moved from the Martha Stewart era into the Google esthetic era.  Martha Stewart was a Fall bouquet of flowers.  It was nostalgic for rural life, sentimental for an imagined leisure community and homey.

Google is a clean bright calm space. The feeling is information under control, relaxed and casual.  It is an environment that is serious but thoughtful.  Brash is out, reasoned is in.

Do you see the change?

Idiot design

The current media flap about Intelligent Design and Darwinian evolution accepts the term Intelligent Design at face value.  By implication Darwinian evolution is Idiot Design.

Actually, Idiot Design is a good characterization of evolution by selection from random variation.  I will happily defend Idiot Design as should others who understand what Darwin discovered.  There are many elements that characterize Darwin’s evolution and the part that is hardest to understand is that an idiotic process over a long enough period of time will give you the highly functioning and diverse inhabitants we live with.

Several concepts are not easily taught nor grasped.  First, the selection processes in Idiot design is not selection of the fittest as generally taught.  Survival of the fittest evokes the idea that the handsome high school footballer would get all the women and have the most children.  He wouldn't.

Can’t decide

I can’t decide the appropriate title for this blog between “Hidden agenda” or “Self -immolation.”

The subject is the startling way that the nomination of Justice Clarence Thomas in 1991 has dramatically shaped the Supreme Court nomination in 2005-6.  The notion of affirmative action on the Supreme Court was well-established with the continual reappointment of women, Jews and Blacks to fill positions allotted to them. At least that was the case until Justice Thomas.

The black community did not consider Thomas a suitable appointment for the black position because he was anti-affirmative action in his judicial views.  Although Thomas was a great example of affirmative action and openness in America, a man everyone should admire, having risen to the top from a hard-scrabble dirt farming background, his politics made him a non-black and a non-hero.

Consequence: conservative politicos in Washington concluded that if you are black but anti-affirmative action, you aren’t considered black by blacks.  If you are a woman opposed to Roe v. Wade, you aren’t considered a woman by women activists and if you are a Republican Jew, you aren’t a Jew to the majority of Jews.  So, now there is no need to appoint a black, woman, Jew or the first Latino, because no conservative appointment is considered affirmative action unless the appointee is a Lefty. 

Hidden agenda revealed; only Lefties are considered affirmative action appointments.  Opponents of Clarence Thomas ended affirmative action on the Supreme Court: appears to be self-immolation.

Repetitive

I have friends, usually a bit New Age, who are always “finding” themselves.  They show great amazement at their new discoveries.  I, on the other hand, remember that they made the same discovery five years ago and ten years ago.

Thanks to Google and blogging, I can avoid the problem.  When a wonderful new idea arrives I can Google my own site to see if I have written about the subject before.  On this subject I have.  It is a recurrent theme: Why did the hippies disappear?

I formerly cited one reason as the rambunctious uncontrollable and socially destructive forces of sexual license (which I personally enjoyed during the hippie era … to the max.)

Sexual license is what led the hippie leadership to act as alpha males charging at each other, reeking havoc and (unlike many other species) driving away other supporting male actors and many of the females as well.

My current additional insight is that the hippy disregard and distaste for strong institutions (such as corporations and military academies) and support for pathetic ones like Spirituality and pacifism made sure that sexual energy was socially destructive.

Ie: a naval officer is much less likely to risk the success of his carrier group with a sexual romp than would be a popular self-help guru.

Protestantism and religion

In the Summer 2005 issue of Azure there is a review of Gertrude Himmelfarb’s book The Road to Modernity, in which she argues that the French Enlightenment and the Scots Enlightenment were different.  The French were purists who believed reason trumped all other forms of insight.  The Scots saw enlightenment as a process of empirical testing and learning.

There is also a major article by the founder-publisher, Yoram Hazony who shows that the democracy we have inherited was not purely secular, it had moral roots in religion.  Religion and the state should not be considered as separate and distinct as many contemporaries believe; the roots are not antagonistic.

Dust-up

I’m surprised at the strong reaction I’m getting to the suggestion that introducing universal military service would create a positive birth rate in developed urban countries. 

My evidence that this would happen is based on Israel, the only developed urban country with a positive birth rate.  The evidence can also be found from WWII which was followed by a baby boom as was the Civil War (Union side), but not WW1.

The thesis is that universal military service is an act of socialization that creates greater communal identity which in turn produces families.

I’d be happy to see contrary evidence.  I’d be happy to find that the issue has been examined before.

Good editing

Leon (Wieseltier) did a good editing job in the latest issue of the New Republic.  He asked Benny Morris to review an Arab Atlas of Palestine 1948.  What is good is the selection of Benny who is a first rate historian. Benny had the honesty, a few years back, to admit errors in his book on the Israeli War of Independence when he saw that his material was being misused by Arabs and that his tilted interpretations were tilted in the wrong direction. 

In the New Republic, Benny is reviewing an Arab Atlas and finds that the entire atlas is a fabrication of lies, distortions and non-existent quotes from non-existent references.  When Benny looks up references the quotes are wrong or non-existent.  Often the references are non-existent. 

This is common among Arab scholars as it was among Communist scholars (lying and distortion went wild with an Arab-communist scholar like Edward Said.) 

A society that lives so comfortably with academic lies can not be considered part of the modern world.  On the other hand, Columbia University never fired Edward Said.

Internet and political parties

I think the lesson of Howard Dean in the last election is that the Internet is capable of creating one or two new parties.  Dean rode the wave of a group of people on the Internet who were looking for a spokesperson.

The Dean people got co-opted by the Democratic party because the Deaniacs hated President Bush more than they hated military action in Iraq.

That won’t happen again.  Next time the Internet will give the Lefty Fundamentalists enough organizing power and money (small donations) to form a new party.  They probably will.  This time the party line Dems won’t be willing to let Michael Moore be the key figure at their convention.

The same possibility exists on the Fundamentalist Right that is dissatisfied with the Republican “cultural” agenda.  The right supported the twerp from Texas, Ross Perot, in 1992 which resulted in a defeat for Bush 41.  The Internet will make it easier to create a party in the future.  Only the chance to loss an election will mitigate the strength of the new Right Wing religious party.

The political scene

How can Karl Rove win the Senate for sure next year and the presidency two years later? 

I suggest that he commission three or more books by prominent and influential people like Henry Kissinger, David Brooks and General Powell.  Maybe, Michael Crichton too. The books should come out next Labor Day, 2006.  The books will each have a way of ascribing the loss of the Vietnam War to the Democratic Party. 

The facts are straight forward.  Nixon and Kissinger signed a peace treaty with the North Vietnamese after the North Vietnamese defeat in the Tet Offensive (yes, the North lost.)  The peace treaty held for more than a year, it guaranteed the South Vietnamese military and financial support for defense.

Then the North Vietnamese started military probing and found the Democratically controlled U.S. Congress was so anti-Vietnam War that it wouldn’t authorize $1 for South Vietnam.  So the North moved in and took over the country.  By the time it was vital to send money and weapons to South Vietnam, Nixon had been forced out of office and the administration was in disarray.

Most Americans don’t know how the Democrats lost the Vietnam War.  It is time, probably urgent, that the message get out, since the Dems are doing the same thing again (losing a new war.)

Anti-Semitism is poison

I wrote a blog earlier this year suggesting that anti-Semitism is a disease that destroys the brain of the anti-Semite or the culture of anti-Semitic peoples.  As I’ve churned this idea around in my head I now find it more appropriate to think of anti-Semitism as a poison.  When people accept anti-Semitism they are drinking a poison that leaves their brains dysfunctional. 

For Arabs and Hitler era Germans, blaming the Jews for all their problems and accepting no responsibility for anything creates a dysfunctional society.  You can hardly consider yourself a true Arab if you don’t blame the Mossad and the CIA for all your problems.

I’ve seen it happen to one of my old friends, Fran Peavey, who became increasingly anti-Semitic as her lefty pacifism became more anti-Israel.  The rest of her work became confused and ineffective in parallel. 

Of course, some anti-Semitism is to be expected with a pacifist.  The Holocaust is the towering granite mountain of evidence that pacifism is nonsense. The Jews surviving in Israel, in the middle of 100 million hate filled Arabs, by building a great military, is a second Himalayan mountain of evidence against pacifism.  The Jews are living and dead proof that pacifism is fantasy. Ipso: pacificists readily become anti-Semities.

End of politics

The composition of Congress is pretty much conservative Republican for the next three elections, thanks to the California Lefties.  How’s that?

The House and Senate are pretty will fixed.  The Senate is drawn from 26 red states meaning fifty-two red senators, with a maximum of 5 senators who can change at any time. The House is perfectly gerrymandered for a conservative Republican majority until the 2012 Census results in demographic changes.

The only chance to change that structure was the California initiative on re-apportionment that was defeated by Lefties last week.  That is the second defeat for re-apportionment reform, Colorado was the first.  So there will be no Congressional re-apportionment; conservative Republicans get full control and a free ride.

The government we have now will be in power in Congress for six more years.  That is the end of politics for a long time.  Talk to me again in 2011.

Tel Aviv for a month

I just returned from a month in Tel Aviv.  I didn’t write much on this blog about Tel Aviv while I was there.  I learned my lesson this Spring when I wrote a byline from Tokyo and lost 2/3rds of my readers.  About 2/3rds of them have returned and the numbers are growing steadily. I assume they never personally expect to go to Tokyo and dropped my blog. I wish I could explain that I don’t write tourist accounts, I report sociology and business.

There are several elements about Tel Aviv that are similar to Tokyo and make it appealing to me.  It is very safe.  The immediate feeling of safety that I get when I step off the plane in Tokyo is felt in Tel Aviv too. The transportation is clean and excellent.  The Japanese rarely say good morning or hello to strangers when they pass on the street (I am not a stranger in our Tokyo neighborhood)… Israelis are the same.

The differences are noticeable......

Distance

I notice that my friends who had served in Jerry Brown's administration began to distance themselves from Jerry when he decided to run for mayor of Oakland. They have kept increasing the distance after his eight years as mayor and as he plans to run for a Statewide office again.

The same is true of my friends who were in the Carter administration. Today, they won't return his phone calls.

Jerry was quirky but.....

Reproduction rate

I was surprised to read in the Jerusalem Post  that the birth rate for non-orthodox Israelis is 2.5.  Israel’s non-orthodox Jewish population is growing (the orthodox is growing even faster.)  The 2.5 number is above neutral population reproduction rate of 2.2 and far above the declining reproduction rates (1.3 to 1.6)  of most equivalent populations that are in developed countries, urban and upper middleclass as the Israelis are.  (I won’t give a detailed explanation of what a neutral 2.2 reproduction rate means because the math is actuarial. In summary 100 people who started having children 50 years ago and today are all dead, have left 100 offspring alive today.  A number higher than 2.2 means that more than 100 offspring are alive today.)

When I combine this piece of startling (2.5 Israeli reproduction rate) information with the words of a good friend who is a global tour guide, I come up with an original explanation of the phenomenon. 

My friend, Michael E., says that the worst people to travel with....

Wedding ceremony

I saw the dress in a window (photo on the left.) It was a very sexy and provocative wedding gown.  I wondered what the meaning was.

Was a white virginal bride attempting to send a confusing and seductive message to the wedding guests? Was the message for the groom, with everyone in the wedding party given the roll of voyeurs?  The most reasonable explanation for me was that the dress was ironic: the pretend virgin actively giving-up her pretensions of innocence.

Then I saw a similar dress

Wrong, wrong

I was wrong about the California referendum: wrong, wrong, wrong. 

I didn’t detect the strong movement against the governor’s reforms and I disbelieved the surveys, even one done by the reliable Field Research.

Don’t turn to me for an explanation when my predictions were wrong. Don’t trust people who made wrong predictions to explain what went wrong. 

My best guess is that the zeal of moderate voters for reform, that was originally stimulated by Governor Davis’s meddling in the Republican primary and his failure to control the regulated utilities, has since dissolved back into the general morass of hating all politicians. (Dislike of unions got the most votes on yesterday's referendum.)

Stewart Brand

Stewart is an old friend of mine and one of only four friends capable of changing their opinion.  Everyone of my many hundreds of friends still think the way they did when they were in their 20s. Only four don’t.

Stewart wrote an article about the changes that are needed in the environmental movement. 

First he wants enviros to understand that the population explosion is over. 

History not written

There is a part of history I don’t expect to find written.  The photo on the right has two historic events that are unlikely to be recorded.

The first concerns the pier that sticks out into San Francisco Bay.  I ran daily on this path, now called Crissy-waterfront  Path, for over twenty years.  One morning in the 1980s I saw a stunning sight.  Nearly 200 Chinese running wildly caring small bags into the woods on the left side of the image.

What happened is that a small cargo ship moored itself to this tiny pier and told the hundreds of illegal immigrant Chinese on board to leave all their belongings on the ship, jump onto the pier and run South until they found other Chinese people who would hide them.  The instructions would have worked....

Poverty?

Poverty will always be with us. 

There are four reasons poverty will always be with us.  First the term is empty.  Poverty can be anything anyone uses to define it.  Cross cultural and cross national comparisons make poverty evaporate.  The poorest homeless black man in Boise, Idaho has more food, available shelter and health care than the richest man living in an Iranian mountain village.

Second, the U.S. Government .....

Can America keep its word?

President Kennedy solved the Cuban missile crisis by promising not to attack or assassinate Fidel Castro. The U.S. has kept its side of the agreement for forty years.

Can the U.S. keep its written agreement with Israel for forty years after G.W. Bush is out of office?  The agreement, written in April 2004, promises that in return for the Gaza disengagement, the U.S. will never support a Palestinian right of return to Israel, the U.S. will always support defensible borders including large Israeli population centers in the West Bank and will never expect Israeli cooperation with Palestine except based on Palestinian suppression of terrorism.

French problems

It is easy to sympathize with the French over weeks of Muslim riots.  America had similar urban riots in the 1960s from a black underclass that was not adequately represented in business, emergency services or politics.

But the French have too elements that evoke schadenfreude for  me.  First, they have had a ferocious anti-Israel bias for twenty years, one reason was to placate the Arabs in France.  Sorry, too bad it didn’t work.

 

Second, they can’t turn to the  nation, the one nation in the world with the most experience in assimilating Arabs, Israel, for advice and help.  France has already poisoned the well with Israel hatred and is driving Jews out of France at a high rate.

Israel assimilated nearly a million Arab-Jews who were exiled from their homes in Morocco, Algeria, Iraq, Yemen and Iran.  Israel did a great job with poorly educated and dark skinned immigrants.  Unfortunately, France is on a road to perdition with no opportunity to publicly ask for help from Israel.

The same of course goes for England.  Unlike France, England’s anti-Israel bias is entirely anti-Semitic and is found mostly in the upper class, a group not known to have positive moral qualities.

Connection

I only casually mentioned in the Sharansky blog below that Cuba didn’t respond to the Jackson-Vanik kind of pressure and I suggested that democracy was not a stunning success in Latin America.

I learned from my friend Susan G. who lived in Latin America for nearly a decade wrote a book about it, and  has lived in Israel for a similar length of time, that there are many similarities between Latin Americans and Arabs. 

The connection makes sense considering that the Moors were driven out of Spain and Portugal at the same time the conquering of Latin America was underway. Many Jews escaped by ship with the conquistidors, probably many Moors did too.