Pro Commerce

Take the vote away

An article in The New Criterion by Kenneth Minogue raises the humorous issue to taking the vote away from people who don’t have useful experience for a democratic society.  Minogue offers his argument with tongue in cheek.  But it makes sense. Why shouldn’t the future of democracy be based on taking voting rights away from people who don’t accept responsibility for democracy in their society? Isn't that why we originally restricted the vote to property owners and why we still don't let teen-agers vote?

In Lebanon and Palestine people who were armed militants should not have been allowed to vote, they didn’t accept the democratic process or the commitments of past democratic governments.  The same is true anywhere that democracy has been replaced by voting coups as in 1932 Germany and 1978 Iran.  Members of the Communist Party should never have been allowed to vote in the U.S.

The people who should lose their vote in contemporary America are people who are tenured.  My blog readers already know that I think academic tenure creates a hostile and counter-productive atmosphere.  There are other forms of tenure including eight million government and postal employees who can’t be fired.  Many unions have lifetime employment for their members.

People who accept tenure in their work are de facto placing their lives outside the mainstream of a democratic society.  They should have nothing to say about the governance of the tens of millions of their fellow citizens who have real lives with workplace and revenue uncertainty.  The tenured elites can’t understand and identify with their fellow citizens.

It is more than rhetorical to ask why your neighbor, who is exempt from the vicissitudes of the work-a-day world, should vote on your taxation and your welfare.  I don’t think they should.

It would be an interesting precedent if America were the first country to start taking voting rights away from people who chose tenure in their life and exempt themselves from the market that the rest of us live in. 

BHL

The three cryptic letters stand for one of France’s three leading intellectuals: Bernard-Henri Levy.  Levy’s new book is American Vertigo.  He spent ten months following in the footsteps of an earlier intellectual aristocrat, Tocqueville.

In an previous blog I chastised the NYTimes Book Review for their insulting cover review of the book.  I may have been a tad unfair.  BHL’s book is truly an intellectual enterprise.  It is not reasonable to expect the NYTimes to cope with anything intellectual.  They only have two intellectuals among their hundreds of staffers: Ed Rothstein and David Brooks, who probably don’t hang around the office.

I needed several...

My blog readers are intellectuals so I can recommend this book unconditionally.

Update on QuickHealth

I described the potential revolution that QuickHealth is offering health care in an earlier blog.

My partner went to QuickHealth for a minor surgical matter (splinter under the nail).  The alternative was an emergency ward with a long wait and sneers for bringing in such a trivial problem.  My partner has complete health insurance coverage so cost was not a consideration.

The cost was $39 (on a credit card) and the whole procedure with an MD and anesthetic took 15 minutes.  The doctor did an intake of pulse, blood pressure, oxygen saturation, questions about major diseases and allergies…all of which, along with treatment information was put on a computer and a copy handed to my partner.

The key issue that every health business practitioner in America is looking at is whether this can be a profitable operation.  It doesn’t even have to cover rent, getting patients into a doctors office in a pharmacy is a self liquidating proposition. 

This fifteen minutes was good medicine, low cost, efficient and hopefully a step toward our health future.

Two forthcoming books

I await the arrival of two books.  One by D.B. Cooper the other by Frank Morris. 

D. B. Cooper hijacked a Boeing 727 passenger plane in 1971 and with 21 pounds of extorted $200,000 parachuted out at night into the wilderness of Washington State.  Never found, he would be over 60 years old by now.

Frank Morris escaped from Alcatraz prison in 1962 with two other men.  Morris was the brains and would be roughly 70 years old by now. 

Neither Cooper nor Morris has ever been heard from.  A book by either man would have to be judged on its literary merits because authentication would be difficult.

I recommend that...

John Brown redeemed

A few months ago I let my readers know that I was reading David Reynolds’ John Brown, Abolitionist : The Man Who Killed Slavery, Sparked the Civil War, and Seeded Civil Rights.

I’ve had time to mull on my thoughts about the book.  Most importantly, this is a great, important and beautifully written book.  I highly recommend it.

The book needs to be understood in context.  The South won....

Conversation

Steven Miller has a book out this month called Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. Absurd title because conversational art has always been a precious skill of interest to a small minority of people, the idea of measuring it over time and space makes little sense.

The numerous reviews of Miller’s book has provoked my response. 

I was recently at a party with a dozen people, ten of whom were strangers to me but I had a marvelous time.  One reason: everyone who came was gregarious and conversationally talented.  Some were conversationally gifted. 

I vowed after that party....

Dore’s sad expose'

This is a partial book review.  I had time on an airplane to read Dore Gold’s Tower of Babble : How the United Nations Has Fueled Global Chaos.  I read less than one third of the book.

The book is an excellent work of history, recent history, on the series of turns that made the UN an ineffective and often harmful institution. 

I put the book down when I realized that the reforms proposed for the UN, over the last year, which last week continued to show that they will never be implemented, are irrelevant.  The UN is a dysfunctional institution that will not change in the foreseeable future, at least while I‘m alive.  Why read about the details of the train wreck, regardless of how well written?

Poverty

Poverty is a core subject in understanding the world and I have a different perception. Fighting poverty can be hurtful.

Good hearted people are often moved by the issue of poverty and if they can't find it in their neighborhood they will scour the world to find it and try to cure or alleviate it.

I find few subjects with the emotional....

Hazony’s Struggle

This is a partial review of Yoran Hazony’s The Jewish State: The Struggle for Israel’s Soul.  Partial, because I read only the first half of the book.

Hazony is an important Israeli intellectual who’s work can be followed in the magazine Azure.  The book is a well written brilliantly argued history of the Israeli State and the establishment of what Hazony perceives to be a secular state with concepts that are out-of-line with Jewish tradition. 

I gave up reading half way through the book because Israel is truly a continuation of the Jewish tradition, alive, exciting and vital.  Hazony’s is just one tiny part of an extensive and ferocious ongoing debate in Israel.  The book, in English, is for outsiders.  The real debate is in Hebrew among Hebrew speakers.  I’m not a part of it and with negligible Hebrew, a pathetic lack of traditional knowledge and a full life outside of Israel, I am not a viable participant.

Read the book if you want to be an informed outsider.

Darfur

We are all in luck.  I’m getting email notices from Lefty Fundamentalists that they are focusing their efforts on stopping the genocide in Darfur.  Fund raising, cookie bakes….bumper stickers, parades; you know the riff.

Why is this good news.  Of course the genocide is bad news, tragic news.  The focus of the Lefty Fundamentalists on this problem could mean they will stay out of the many other issues where their meddling is destructive. 

The Left has sent peace provocateurs to Palestine to make daily life more difficult for hard working brave Israeli soldiers.  They have sent peace provocateurs to Iraq to get kidnapped and put brave American soldiers in harm’s way to save them.

Darfur might teach the Left something about the world.  The U.N. has been totally unable to act in Darfur, blocked by the Security Council even when Kofi Annan wants action.  The African peace keepers already present in Darfur are inadequate, under supplied and not authorized to stop anything.  The E.U. has made sure that NATO can’t be used in Darfur to protect the innocents.  The United States has been begging for international action for years but won’t act unilaterally in this genuine quagmire.

Most importantly, the tragedy in Darfur is armed terrorists, Gangaweed outlaws, inter-tribal fighting, the very kind of non-state terrorism that the Left has been saying for five years should be handled with laws and courts.

Could anything be a better lesson for the Left than their certain failure in Darfur?

Kelly and Minsky

Two people are evidence that solid knowledge is not pervasive in our society.

Kevin Kelly wrote a book of his extensive observations of the Internet world and the way it was changing the world of business and perceptions. The book was widely praised as brilliant and innovative. The outlandish title was Rules for the New Economy: 10 Radical Strategies for a Connected World.

At the time the book was published I remember reading a scathing criticism by an economist (probably Krugman, but I can’t find the reference) who pointed out that nothing Kelly had discovered was new, it was all described fully in commonly used econ text books.  Kelly didn’t know the rudiments of what was well established knowledge in economics.

The same was true for a book by Marvin Minsky, Society of Mind.  The book was about Minsky’s concepts of the mind as it related to artificial intelligence and was widely praised as brilliant and innovative. 

I interviewed the philosopher Hubert Dreyfus and his brother and engineer Stuart Dreyfus, both of whom worked with Minsky at MIT.  They said that Minsky didn’t know the rudiments of philosophy and hadn’t a functional knowledge of Plato or Aristotle or he could never had written such a book.  Minsky was ignorant of two thousand years of philosophical work and research.

No lessons here, just a description of reality.  Today’s brilliant new insight may have been discarded chaff thousands of years ago.

Living with

In thinking back on the several women with whom I lived and the larger number of past lovers, one response endures.  My accommodation to that incredible variety of partners was always unique and surprisingly different.

That observation, in and of itself is not interesting, but it has relevance.  I find it relates to my ideas of child development.

From my experience with raising children, observing grandchildren and observing the children of friends, I have always been struck by the unique qualities of each child from birth onwards.  Children seem to be born with something I humbly call character (others call it propensities, disposition and temperament).  Character evolves into personality.

Using the experience of my lifetime of partners I feel helps describe the conditions of child rearing.  Child rearing is about the interaction of the character of the child with the personalities of the key people who raise the child (usually parents). 

I have seen children with mild character interact with parents with harsh personalities, the outcome is usually a meek directionless grownup.  I have seen children with bold character and harsh parents often growing to adulthood with defiant and aggressive personalities; sometimes broken personalities.

I have seen many other outcomes, and especially with multiple children in a family. We have all seen a wide range of outcomes.

I just wanted to pass along the connection between adult partnership observations and an interesting way to related it to child parent interactions and the resulting personality outcomes.

Comedy on the right

Last night I heard a comedian who is working the Republican Jewish Coalition circuit.  Evan Sayet is developing his shtick as an hour long standup comedian with conservative groups.

Sayet is a great comedy writer and his material is really impressive.  As a comedian, where timing and delivery are everything, he is mediocre.  I look forward to the day a really great comedian comes along and uses Sayet’s material.

One of Sayet’s observations is that Jimmy Carter was the first president with a child’s name.  Carter was a cowardly incompetent president and remains a petulant bad boy.  Another of his observations is that Lefties have only three words in their platform: 'liar, Hitler and stupid'.  He got the audience to repeat those words by asking the audience what the Lefty platform is on: social security, national security, the environment, Katrina and health care. 

He noted the Lefty hypocrisy in naming their TV programs: Hard Ball with Chris Mathews (never hard ball), Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (always politically correct) and Larry King Live (live?).

(Sayet used to write for Maher and describes Maher as incredibly arrogant.)

The relevance of last night’s show is that the Left is now in a phase of being ridiculed.  Ridicule is the prelude to demise and sometimes to rebirth.  I can’t see today’s Left being around in its current form several years from now.

Fear Factor and Abu Ghraib

There is a connection between Fear Factor, an NBC television program, and the recent release of Abu Ghraib photos.

Fear Factor is a reality program in which individuals and teams of people compete in three segments to show how much fear they can endure.  The first and third segment deal with falling from heights, risk of drowning, speed and combinations such as dropping from a helicopter into a cold ocean after walking a tight rope in mid air, sliding down the outside of 50 story slanted building and escaping from locked cages underwater.  Some programs have had wild animals as the fear factor including vicious dogs and crocodiles.  The middle segment deals with eating gross objects such as live scorpions, raw bull testicles or worms and being immersed in live animals including poison snakes, piranha fish and hornets.

The Abu Ghraib photos are now on line by the hundreds.  I looked at all the photos on the Salon site, despite the hysterical and Loony-Left Salon warning that looking at the photos could damage my psyche.

Fear Factor and the photos are related.

China and Google

I keep hearing people whine about Google giving in to Chinese censorship. 

There seems to be no sense of culture, no sense of hypocrisy in suggesting that American forms of censorship are OK, but Chinese censorship isn’t.

American censorship?  Yes, a search engine couldn’t operate in the U.S. if it didn’t include the option to filter porn. Option yes, banned by law no.  But we also have plenty banned by law.

Our laws make it illegal to have websites devoted to any form of sexual graphics related to our large population under 18, and it is certainly illegal for search engines to make it easy to find such graphics. The same applies to prostitution, recreational drugs, dog fights and many other subjects.  But those are our censors who are righteous, not Chinese censors who are evil (aren't they?).

Many concepts are so far beyond our Puritan boundaries that nobody even considers the idea of censoring search engines that could find blind prostitutes, a phenomenon I once saw in Hong Kong. (It was a group of 10 blind Chinese women, holding hands, out for a morning stroll.)

Most Americans are certain that our censorship is based on some standard that exists outside our moral structure and the Chinese should abide by it.  Can you see through that hypocrisy?

(Yes I know the upper photo has Japanese writing on it.)

Military

If you are interested in military issues you will be fascinated by yesterday’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) report that Lt. Col. John Nagl, who wrote an influential counterinsurgency book: Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam, was assigned to be the third-highest-ranking officer in a 700-soldier battalion in Iraq.  He also played a central role in opening an officer training school for Americans in Iraq that uses his book.

I just recently learned that American forces in Iraq have no access to alcohol in deference to Muslims.  We have never fought without alcohol before.  The report by Max Boot also says that nearly all our troops have taken up cigarettes.

Soccer

Soccer has caught on among kids under 18.  They seem to drop it after that age.

One reason I don’t see soccer becoming important in our American future is that soccer players help each other get up, both sides. Very un-American, it never happens in professional sports.

Starting now we will be getting TV instant replays for critical decisions in tennis, and soon after tennis we will be getting instant replays for basketball, just as we now have it in football.  Which brings to mind the fact that tennis, basketball and football all have multiple referees on the court or the field.  Soccer only has one decisive referee in the game.

Hypothesis: Americans are much more concerned about winning and the rules for winning than the rest of the world.  Sports and games are a simulacrum of society.  Americans may be more focused on winning by merit and less winning by chance.

Socialism and democracy bad combo

The current demonstrations and riots in France are in protest against a change in the law that would make it easier to fire college graduates on their first jobs.  Good for the society...  bad for the underperforming new employees.

It seems hard for a socialist program to be modified or reversed in a democracy.  It would seem a to be bad policy to have socialism in a democracy. Good policy requires flexibility.

Come to think of it, that happened in the U.S. last year with proposed modifications to a social security system that nearly all young people believe will fail.  The old people majority refused to allow any changes.

Tragedy

I don’t know how to put this ... just looking at raw numbers, not picturing the humans behind the numbers:

One way to picture the number of American soldiers who gave their lives for our country so far in Iraq is to compare it to the number of Americans who die in auto crashes.  The number of all the American military personnel killed in Iraq in three years is less than the number of deaths in three weeks in domestic automobiles.

Of course, both are tragedies and horrible to contemplate.  The numbers show the comparable metrics, not the moral relevance of the comparison.

Report on parade

I had three separate reliable reports (one from a marcher) on the San Francisco peace march.  None of it was reflected in the local newspaper or TV coverage.

The peace march was a dramatic failure.  For a bright sunny day, the highest estimate of participants was 15,000; actually it was probably closer to 10,000. This compares to 50-60,000 protest marchers three years ago.

Now things are very different; there is significant opposition.  A pro-America group was there, made up largely of clean cut college students, many from the Berkeley Republican Club and a separate contingent of pro-Israel pickets (the Peace March is usually filled with pro-Hamas supporters).  Together the anti-marchers were over 1,000.  One side is declining in numbers and significance the other is growing.

Two weeks ago several hundred people had a lunch for Gold Star mothers in….San Francisco.

Free clinic?

Great story in the online S.F. Examiner.  The founder of the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, David Smith, is ranting about a corporate takeover.  Under Smith everything went wrong, including a large embezzelement.  This is a story you won't want to miss.

I won't draw any lessons from this story.  You can read it yourself and the conclusions are obvious.

The unstated issue deals with the future of clinic care which will be based on earnings from direct charges for low cost service and revenue from a pharmacy.  See an earlier blog of mine.

Mark Twain

I worry about having the Mark Twain judgment made about me in the future.  Mark Twain wrote so much over such a long period of time that it is possible to find something he wrote that will offend several of our modern sensibilities.  Twain was on the wrong side of many issues from our current perspective.

I write a great deal, I express opinions about many subjects and it is the necessary quality of history that I will invariably be on the wrong side of many issues and probably on the wrong side of some major issues.

I know my parents, being lefties, were on the wrong side of history, but they could not have known how socialism and communism would fail so pathetically.

Nevertheless, I have made a few major contributions and I hope my egotistical desire to be heard on nearly everything else will not condemn me to the future opprobrium of scholars and historians.

Why in America?

I have been to several Asian malls, but not the big one in San Jose nor the giant Vietnamese one in Orange County.  Asian malls are miracles of retail trade.  They are vast, imaginative, exciting and usually successful. They make me proud of my country.

Philippinos, Koreans and especially Vietnamese are able to come to the United States and become prosperous entrepreneurs.  We know the Vietnamese came to our country, only thirty years ago, with only the clothes on their backs.  (The same is true of the Cubans who created the Capital of Latin America in Miami.)  Go to a new and completely foreign country and prosper….how is that possible?

Arabs (Muslim) can do it too.  I had more than a dozen Yemenis who worked for me in the 1970s.  They ended up marrying Americans, opening businesses and owning real estate.

It happens because the United States is not a racial or ethnically prejudiced country and because our commercial system rewards hard work and merit. 

Reward for merit…that is not the structure of most European countries.  It is not the structure of most countries in the world with only a few exceptions (Canada, U.S. and Israel).

Send us your hard working, imaginative and entreprenurial failures...they will prosper in America.

If we want our society to work better we need to continually open the gates to business and remove the barriers that punish reward-for-merit. 

Executive discount

I follow the field of executive compensation closely because I get paid as an expert witness in the field. 

It seems that every three months there is a new disclosure of perverse behavior.  I say perverse behavior because it is usually the result of trying to get around a set of reasonable (and sometimes public) rewards for good management.

Today’s Wall Street Journal (subscription required) recounts the story of eight CEO’s who repeatedly took stock options at the lowest point in the stock cycle.  That is not possible with luck or chance.  It means the CEOs understood the cycles of their company stock and had the ability to manipulate the stock price.

(We have no idea who spilled the beans, probably a stock broker.)

What this means is that executive compensation should never be based on rewarding performance based on stock market performance.  Simple.  I never recommend rewarding CEOs based on stock performance. Now I have proof that it is a bad idea.

Same as me

It is not a surprise that Bernard-Henri Levy and I sound alike when we are talking about contemporary America.  Levy, affectionately known in France as BHL is one of the three top intellectuals.  (The other two are Pascal Bruckner and Andre Glucksman.)

We are in agreement because we have the same foundational observation: the Left and Lefty ideology were completely defeated in the 20^th Century. The same understanding is found in the other two leading French intellectuals.

Here are some quotes from...

Poor pharma

One of the most serious moral challenges I can imagine is to be CEO of a pharmaceutical company that has spent a billion dollars developing a drug that can save lives, alleviate severe pain or suppress a deadly disease… if the time available to recoup the investment is short and the costs of testing and production are high.

How do you reconcile the moral dilemma of good medicine that is going to be priced out of the reach of most of the poor people in the world? 

If you have the answer and it doesn’t involve the pharmaceutical company trying to be the moral tyrant of the world by taxing the rich to give to the poor… let me know.

It worked

I explained in an earlier blog what was going on in the Arab port investment blockage. I haven't read the same material anywhere else.

I said that we fired a shot across the bow of the Arab investment ship.  The Arabs lied (using the Western definition of lying) claiming they would end their Israeli boycott if we let them join the WTO. 

They (1) haven't ended the boycott, (2) they flaunt their bad behavior by holding a conference in support of the boycott and (3) the WTO is ineffective against countries that only export oil, terrorism and investments.  So we closed off one investment (6 American ports) and the message got through.

The Arab stock exchange lost 30% in a week, worth $130 billion. Good work beltway think tanks.

Loser metric

The following observations require a high degree of candor on my part and yours.

Let me begin with some questions.  Where are/were the pacifists or Papal pronouncements in the terrorist wars in Belfast, Spain, Sudan and the crumbling Yugoslavia? The answer: they were attacking Israel or defending the Palestinian terrorism.  The pacifists never held silent vigils at the outdoor pizza shops in Jerusalem. The Pope never spoke out against Irish Roman Catholic atrocities in Belfast.

Why is the Arab world the current hot-bed of anti-Semitism?  Why the Persians too?

Would Hitler be remembered today...

Buy Danish

Its time to start buying Danish cheese and Danish products. Let’s stand with the Danes, a brave and wonderful people.

Time to support humor and ridicule too.

Hit by a ….

A wonderful friend of mine let me know about a Global Warming bombshell.  He is worried that I may use the article in Terra Daily to unnecessarily hammer the Global Warmers.

The article contends that the Tunguska Event in 1908 in Siberia is the cause of global warming. Tunguska is the site of a giant object from outer space that devastated the landscape for thousands of square miles. Great fun.

Unfortunately the data doesn’t match reality and all the URL links in the article are phony.

UN science

Looks like the UN conducts its science the same way it does everything else: corruptly and incompetently.

The two most recent UN science problems are with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which has been severely criticized for over estimating the growth of greenhouse gases in its computer models (Henderson and Castles) with the Chair calling the scientific critics "Hitler" and World Health Organization’s secrecy in dealing with the DNA model of the bird flu viruses (Dr. Ilaria Capua). The DNA sequences are being kept secret by WHO.

Shame, Shame.  UN science could become an oxymoron if it isn’t already.