Pro Commerce

Nonmoral worlds

The word "nonmoral" is most commonly associated with Fredrick Nietzche. I am forced to use it because the more accurate term amoral, in English, has the overtone of immoral.

The basic statement of my book Commerce is that commerce is nonmoral and we should rejoice in that fact. Commerce delivers drugs, sexual pleasures, booze on Sunday, gay nightclubs and oil to Israel during a heavy Arab boycott. Commerce responds to real humans and real human desires without regard for the morally self-righteous who try to rule the world.

What are the other nonmoral worlds?

The most obvious are................

Flame vs rant

The word flame was used early on in web life. I see rant more often now.

In any case, I have deliberately created a website that will get a large amount of flame and rant. It is about dogs. A subject I know nothing about.

In an earlier blog I complained that there was no adequate material in books or on the web for helping parents deal with children and teaching about dogs.

So, fool that I am, I created one with the hope that someone in their fury will produce a decent guide book for parents to use in teaching their children.

Gates and Buffett lose

The big news lately is that Bill Gates is giving up his day job to become a fulltime philanthropist and Warren Buffett is giving most of his money to Bill to give away.

On the popular face of it these two guys are heroes. In reality, they just made the fatal mistake of becoming much more hated and despised than ever before and they have lost nearly all the support and respect they have had to date.
As great businessmen they were vastly loved and appreciated, with a small contingent of irrelevant Lefty antagonists who hate everyone anyway.

Now, only a few people appreciate them, very few, and hordes hate them. The Carnegie and Rockefellar names are not remembered as good people, nor are they loved as philanthropists. They were known then and now as robber barons.

Beggars (think recipients of grants) always want more or are angry that others got the grants they wanted.

Social peers know the game of quid pro quo. You give to my Opera and I give to your Purple Haired Dance Group. The donor is not appreciated, only viewed as a mark. Only your personal charity appreciates you, like a cat who knows who feeds it. Most cats pretend to like their feeder, but complain bitterly behind their backs.

Most people ascribe selfish motives to donors and there is only a superficial appearance of respect. Do you know any great philanthropists who are considered great people? Soros, Getty, Lilly, McArthur, Mott, Doris Duke, Hilton, Luce, Hearst or finally Howard Hughes?

Sorry guys. True donors are usually anonymous. You both lose. It's sad.

Jews in business

You won't find this anywhere else. It takes a Jew in Japan, who knows Japan, to tell you about it.

There is a best selling book here called The Jewish Millionaire’s Philosophy by Honda Ken. (The English title on the book is just The Millionaire’s Philosophy of Happy Life*). The book sold over a million copies and Mr. Ken created a second volume with the same title that is selling well. The book is mostly standard fluff about business success that combines the 1 Minute Manager, Rich Dad Poor Dad and Suze Oreman.

There has been a tiny Jewish population in Japan, 2000 in Kobe, for a century but Jews have always loomed large in the Japanese imagination.

The Japanese on the one hand know that worldwide they are often hated because they are so much like Jews in their commercial success. Some Japanese also have the classic paranoia that Jews are in a conspiracy to keep them from being more successful.

I don't expect to see a title like this in English. It is not because Jews would cry anti-Semitism; that might help sales as it did with the genuinely anti-Semitic Mel Gibson film. We won't see that title because Christians in their hearts know that (1) the Catholic Church forced Jews to survive by limiting them only to trade and (2) the deepest sources of anti-Semitism are anti-commercialism. One and two are connected. (Jewish Lefties can't see that the Left is anti-commerce and has no trouble becoming anti-Semitic as a consequence).

You read it here first friends.

*The Google computer translation of the title is “Judean Human Large Magnate Book.”

Blogs and therapy

One of the functions of psycho-therapy is to point out to the patient that he or she has been down the same path before. Our insights keep being the same ones.

Many of my New Age friends have said things to me like 'I've had some amazing new insights about myself' when in fact they have had the same exact insight many times before. And told me.

Now with blogs, we can all be self psycho-therapists. Just Google our own sites to see if we have already said the same thing before and are just in a deja-vu mind trap.

Churches

I've said many times in these blogs that Lefty politics has driven people away from churches. I just came across the numbers as I was looking at other data from the National Opinion Research Center.

While the U.S. population has increased from 175 million people in 1960 to over 285 million today (63% increase) the mainline churches, Presbyterian, Episcopalian and Methodists (I don't have the data on Lutherans) have seen their membership drop from 19 million to 13 million (a one-third decline).

Mainline churches don't seem to learn. The pastors, deacons and priests seem to think that anti-Israeli and anti-defensive-war messages are the core teachings of Protestanism.

Need immigration?

Japan needs immigration to grow, demographically, but does it need immigration to do the crummy jobs? America and Europe need immigration to do all the menial work.

Interestingly, Japan doesn't need immigrants to do menial work. There are a few foreign workers in Japan and they do menial work and sex work, but the reason is because those are jobs that they can do with inadequate Japanese language skills. (Or because Japanese find some foreigners exotic.)

Japan has a unique social structure. Everyone pitches in to do maintenance work. It is automatic in all schools, even the most elite universities. Students and faculty clean the halls, the bathrooms and empty the trash. This pattern carries on through-out life. Japanese retirees are regularly cleaning sidewalks, weeding parks and picking up trash.

To put it another way: the reason most countries need immigrants is because we are too damn snooty and too status conscious to clean up our own messes.

Happy

I frequently comment on the general unhappiness of Lefties. It is a distinct characteristic.

I found a comment that supports this obvious observation: "data collected on Americans in 2004 by the National Opinion Research Center show that self-described political conservatives are almost twice as likely as political liberals to say they are very happy with their lives. These differences are not due to demographics such as education, income, age, gender or race. Indeed, if two adults are identical in all these ways and only differ in their politics, the conservative will be, on average, 14 percentage points more likely to say he or she is very happy than the liberal.

"Political conservatives are also far less likely than liberals to express maladjustment to their adult lives. For example, adults on the political right are only half as likely as those on the left to say, "at times, I think I am no good at all." They are also less likely to say they are dissatisfied with themselves, they are inclined to feel like a failure, or they are pessimistic about their futures."

I never saw the study, but the NORC is America's most reliable survey research organization and has been for sixty years.

Moderate

My regular readers know that I am a moderate on most issues. I am stuck being a moderate on global warming at a time when people like Al gore and Bill Clinton are trying to raise the level of fear and hysteria to National Socialist Party levels.

It is nice to see a prominent climate scientist say there is no concensus among scientists in the field and what little that is agreed upon is precisely what I have covered in this blog. Look at what Richard Lindzen has to say. Also note he says the same thing I pointed out here: there has been no surface temperature increase in the past 8 years.

Sex, politics and religion

Before we entered the 60 year period of political quiescence, the norm of the day was that you don't talk about sex, politics or religion in polite company (see earlier blog).

Now, we clearly have to put politics back on the list. Also clearly, we have to put religion back on the list because the two are intimately connected. Lefty Fundamentalism is a political position tied to religious moral views. If you are talking to someone who is anti-religion or a non-practicing Jew or
a mainstream-religion person, you are 99% likely to be talking to a Lefty.

Does sex go back on the taboo list. Did it ever come off the list?

From my experience we can talk about breast implants, cervical cancer, nipple piercing and a hysterectomy but we are still out of bounds with penis and clit rings, how effective Viagra is for a specific person or whether a particular sex partner has a quick arousal cycle or multiple orgasms.

So sex is back on the list and probably never came off it.

"Hot" coffee

Everyone in America remembers the woman who won one $ million from McDonalds over a spilled cup of too hot coffee. She and her lawyer shaped our lives.

All Americans suffer from that case. In Tokyo, I was very aware that the main coffee chain Doutor's has very hot coffee. I had to let it sit for awhile before drinking.

Letting coffee sit while chatting with friends and sipping slowly is a pleasure that the American legal system appears to have taken away from us. Having a cup of cappuccino that is still hot after half an hour is a pleasure stolen from me by my litigious peers.

My only consolation is that Americans were litigious from day one. My hero, Alexander Hamilton, made plenty of money as a New York lawyer.

Does Doutor's have a competitive advantage by serving hot coffee? Yes it does, Starbucks in Tokyo does not serve "hot" coffee. A competitive disadvantage.
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Second thought: McDonalds is not a coffee shop, it has to deal with many products and the general public. Coffee shops could behave differently than McDonalds and other fast food retailers.

Coffee shops could easily serve 'hot' coffee with warnings and special cups that are harder to accidentally knock over. Commerce, do your thing!

Other structures

A Canadian named Wade R. has written a book about aliens who took over our planet in 1811. The aliens are corporations and they are immoral. I've only read two reviews of Wade R's book and it appears to be Lefty Fundamentalist poppycock. It is a good thing Lefties are begining to notice the role of commerce in our lives.

However, the eschatological and meanspirited worldview of Lefties means they can't examine or understand the genius and beauty of commerce...or anything for that matter.

I want to point out two things that reviews of Wade R's book evoke.

First, commerce is nonmoral....

Street people cost everyone

In an earlier blog I said that street people in San Francisco are a significant cost to the Bay Area. Every San Francisco street person keeps 50 people from moving to the Bay Area.

So here are the numbers and assumptions behind the calculation.

The core data comes from my study of Maui. Maui is 98% tourism. 2.3 million tourists bring $2.5 billion to Maui annually to support 115,000 people. The average stay in Maui is 7 days; in the continental U.S. the average tourist stay is 3 days. San Francisco has 12 million tourists from out of the Bay Area per year. 

Those core numbers...

Doonesbury

I have argued before that the reason so many Lefties, who don't read much, are always current on the PC ideology is because they read Doonesbury.

At a recent cocktail party I had the temerity to suggest that 60 Minutes was no more authoritative than a comic strip. One official Lefty piped up to defend 60 Minutes: "Comics can be authoritative, look at Doonesbury."

The big surprise

When I read that Orlando gets 48 million tourists a year, I was shocked. San Francisco only gets 12 million tourists per year at the most. San Francisco is far more faux that Disneyworld and ever so much more precious. The weak Disney imitation is outdoing the more authentic original.

This raises two issues. How much is tourism worth and what could be done to get more if San Francisco wanted more?

You've come to the only accurate source of information on the value of tourism. Why no one else has figured this out is a mystery. The way to calculate the total value of tourism is to do what I did which is to look at Maui, the ideal case.

Three days of tourism, the average stay there, is able to support 22,000 people per million tourists. So that means that tourism in San Francisco supports a quarter of a million people in the S.F. Bay Area.

We could support four times that many, a million people, if we were as appealing as Orlando.

How could we do it?

News you choose

We now have news media that reflect our own biases. We've had them for more than a decade. One side watches CBS, reads the NYTimes and Doonesbury; the other watches Fox, reads the WSJournal and listens to talk radio.

Much credit for this change has been given to the new media, cable and the Internet. But what we actually have is a return to normalcy. What we had was an anomaly over the previous sixty years.

The media in America had always been a case of "You read the newspaper that reflects your own worldview." San Francisco had six English newspapers in 1910; New York had dozens.

We got a strange dose of media centrism for sixty years that started with WWII. By the time the Allied forces landed on the Continent, after D-Day, the country had become unified in support of the war. That unity held together through much of the Cold War at the level of popular support (not at the level of draft-averse anti-war activists.) Though the unity was largely left of center, it could not hold after the end of the Cold War.

The end of the Cold War marks the return to the traditional "news you choose" American Way. We have always been a politically involved, contentious and litigious society. Thank god we have now gone back to our old ways.

However, be cautious: The old American ways required, and now again require, that we don't discuss politics in family or at social events!

Gay marriage

 

We have a weird political system. When the Supreme Court makes a decision that presumably wouldn't have been made by the Congress or the states, many people scream. The school desegregation decision was supposedly (the screamers thought) something that should have been done by Congress or the states. Never. It was a moral necessity because Blacks had served their country in many wars and the original separate-but-equal decision was already written into law earlier by the Supreme Court itself.  Only the Supreme Court could have reversed it.

The same argument was made....

Hawking behind the times

In my opinion, people who work in the sciences and are considered great geniuses are far down the genius scale from people who deal with society. Einstein, Bohr, and Darwin are down below tenth position on my scale. In my top ten are Adam Smith, John Locke, Sigmund Freud, Milton Friedman, Shakespeare, Max Weber, Baruch Spinoza, Alexander Hamilton and Joyce Appleby.

Therefore it should be no surprise that the recent call by Steven Hawking for new human colonies off the earth comes thirty years after I formed the International Committee for a New Planet. Hawking, the scientist, is behind the times compared to a humble unknown social activist from San   Francisco.

My organization was formed in 1971, had more than 100 members from around the world and put on a widely attended conference in 1974 at Green Gulch in California. I also funded, because of my New Planet Committee, the first work by Gerard O'Neill on the creation of a new planet in earth orbit at Lagrange Points L-3 and L-5.

I concluded, personally, that working on a new planet was a good metaphor for working on this one. Until we know how to get along, new planets won't be socially stable. Based on this observation, I made a prediction publicly before a small group of people entered Biosphere II for a two year test.

In spite of every effort to keep the news secret, Biosphere II failed because of the social interaction problems... which I predicted.  

The work of social thinkers is far more difficult than anything in science and far, far too undervalued. The former are culturally bound, the later are less so.

Death penalty

The issues related to the death penalty pro and con seem to be well established. The Left, some Catholics and most of Europe take the con side. The Europeans seem to be particularly venomous in their hostility toward America because of the death penalty. The Japanese aren't...they have the death penalty for extreme cases such as using sarin gas in a subway station.

I have recently become aware of another issue relevant to the death penalty. The issue stays alive with the murderer. 

Sirhan Sirhan, the Palestinian who murdered Bobby Kennedy, is alive, asking for parole and will be around the rest of my life. I will never stop hearing about Squeaky Fromm, Charles Manson and Abu babu Jamal -- all of whom are younger than I and will be coming before parole boards long after I am dead.

I know that mortality tables work on death row, but if I don't want to hear about heinous murders for my entire life (look carefully at the recent photos)...how about others who were closer to these events than I was?

Business-week weak

Business-week has a regular column by Jack Welch and his wife du jour.

Ordinarily this column serves to remind me that, Jack Welch, this great hero of commerce has no special skills. His long string of decades of success in buying companies to add to the portfolio and profit of GE and succeed in managing such a diverse work force and product line was the work of other highly skilled people.

Jack was largely a bright rahrah....

Traveling

I apologize for missing a few days of blogs.  My computer went completely dead in Tokyo.  It is exactly a month beyond warranty, no surprise; a Compaq and no help from HP, the current mother of Compaqs.

I tried to use the local cyber cafe,　but it is a such a wild trip, to be described in an upcoming blog, that I couldn't concentrate and get any work done on a Japanese keyboard.

The worst local problem is that all my friends use email to set dates and arrange meetings.

I've got another partial solution for the time being, so I'm back to cause trouble.

Two changes

When reading history one gets a sense of change that is inaccessible in daily life.   

If one depends on newspapers to get a sense of what goes on in the world one gets an erroneous picture.  Reporters and commentators are never held to any standard of accuracy or reliability for their published descriptions of the present or their projections about the future, even a prediction about tomorrow (Wall Street Journal excepted).  This was confirmed by a recent twenty year U. of C. Berkeley study.  No journalist or commentator has a number next to their name indicating their degree of accuracy.  If they did, you wouldn’t read 97% of them.

We who are over sixty have lived through two extraordinary historic changes that are never discussed.

Before 1938, for 150 years....

Macho statistician

I might appear to be a macho guy.  I’ve been riding a motorcycle every sunny day for more than fifty years and been flying a single engine plane every month for forty-five years.  That seems pretty macho, meaning I am a brave man comfortable flirting with death. 

A motorcyclist has six times the chances of dying as a person in an automobile and a private pilot is considered even more at risk. 

Lets look at the actual numbers. The chance that an ordinary American is likely to die in an auto fatality is roughly 2% during their lifetime; most people die of old age or the diseases of old age. 

If someone rode a motorcycle as much as they rode in a car, the percent of motorcyclists killed on their bike would be 12% instead of included in the general number 2%; pretty horrendous.  But people don’t ride motorcycles much, nor for such great distances, so the chance of actually dying on a motorcycle is about the same as dying in an auto.  Now, if you do what I have done for fifty years, which is never ride at night, never in the rain and never on a freeway….a motorcycle is safer than a car. And great fun.

The pilot of a single engine plane has virtually no chance of actually being killed while flying.  There are a couple hundred thousand licensed private pilots in the U.S. and less than ten die in plane crashes every year. Most of those ten either have had very little time in an airplane (John Kennedy) or are flying with instruments in bad weather. That is a high rate per license, but low in absolute terms.  Death for a private pilot has about the same odds as being burned to death by your pajamas if you wear pajamas.  I have personally reduced those odds even further by not flying at night, not getting an instrument license (meaning I can’t fly through clouds) and not flying inverted (doing aerobatics).  Of course, I love flying which is why I do it so much. Every year, as I get more experience, I love it more.

Now you got it.  Macho statistician.  A person who does things that only seem dangerous.

Sylvester and the Cockettes

Sylvester and the Cockettes; I had a connection to both, though inadvertent.

Back in 1967, when several movie houses that showed classic films had closed, I, who had been a fan of such films since I ran the projector for the Old Doc film series a decade earlier at the U. of Chicago, started a midnight classic film series.

I knew how to organize a classic film series, because I had started the same thing at S.F. State College in 1960, which was the origin of the film department there. 

I rented the nearly defunct Chinese theater in North Beach, the Palace, for after midnight on weekends. I almost never went to see my own films.  The business was prosperous and self-sufficient.

One night in 1971, late, driving by the Palace theater I noticed that the marquis with the Betty Boop listing had been up for months so I stopped to see what was going on.  Low and behold, the place was wild with dancing, drugs and a stage show.  The stage show was the Cockettes.  Raunchy beyond any imagination.  It was hippies, gays and everyone in drag.

I went a few times and fell in love with Sylvester the singing drag queen; truly the reigning queen of his era.  I was reminded of him by the great recent movie Kinky Boots.  I invited Sylvester to sing with the Glide Methodist Choir a few times.  He had a great voice and was much loved by everyone.

The most important part of this whole blog is to note the connection between the hippies and the gay-multi-sex community of San Francisco.  While these communities were neither separate nor together, the hippy free love ethos made life much easier for the rise of the gay community. 

Future of French

My good friend Alex is enjoying a quick twit for people who use proper French pronunciation to show how smart they are.  “Why are you using a dying language?” 

Alex is of course right.  French isn’t dead, but it is dying rapidly.  The next wave of $100 third world computers with qwerty keyboards will assure that English is linguistically about as dominant as America is dominant economically.

I raise the issue because the French Revolution...

Depression

The blog that follows was written several days ago but it is particularly appropriate today.  With al-Zarqawi killed, the local Lefties in our Castro District coffee shop were bemoaning the positive effect the death would have on President Bush’s popularity.

I found an unspoken reason the Lefties are depressed.  The Democrats controlled the House from 1955 until 1995 and four Democratic presidents had Democratic control of both houses.  Kennedy, Johnson and Carter  had both Houses in their own party their full terms.  Clinton had both houses for his first two years.

George W. Bush is the first Republican president in fifty years who has had his party in control of both houses … though only for four and a half years of his presidency. Most Lefties have lived their entire lives with Democrats in control of Washington D.C.

Such a radical shift in American politics is reason for Lefty depression.

Cultural arbitrage

I’ve never heard of such a term but there is a place for it.  Arbitrage is taking a price differential among multiple market goods and benefiting from the differences.  Arbitrage is usually done with currencies but it can be done with anything.

One year when I went to the Soviet Union I was told to take a Seiko watch that I could buy in Stockholm for $200 and sell in Moscow for the dollar equivalent of $400.  I did and I got $400 worth of ruples. 

Unfortunately, I couldn’t....

San Francisco report

The first photo on the right is a new store on Polk Street near Broadway called the Velvet Da Vinci with interesting crafts-art jewelry. Definitely worth a visit.

The photo on the left is from a street fair in the new park at the foot of Hayes Valley on the new extension of Octavia that replaced the old freeway off-ramp. This was a great street fair that attracted an appealing lot of new young people in San Francisco. The market goods (over 140 tables) were all made by real local artisans; unique at street fairs.

The bottom photo at the right is a fog bank hanging over Oakland. This is a unique and rare phenomenon caused by South winds. This year the jet stream is further South than usual. The jet stream has actually moved North, on average by 80 miles over the last two decades (no measurements existed before that time). We are in a La Nina year and the Japanese current is further off the Coast than in most years.

All the above changes reflect powerful forces that are not in any of the nonsensical “global warming” equations. For those readers who don’t know it, there isn’t a shred of good evidence to link humans to the recent twenty year period of warming. The cause is the sun. If humans have any effect it is from airplane contrails. The warming period ended about six years ago.

The bottom photo on the left is in front of this year’s Israel in the Park Party. Last year and for the three years before, there were 50-100 anti-Israel demonstrators. They are all gone. This year there were only pro-Israel demonstrators. Leave it to the Palestinians, the rare people in the world who could drive away their extremist supporters (as polling evidence in Europe suggests).

There were a few straggling marchers for Women in Black but who knows what they were about; they came for a few minutes and left. Women in Black are dressed appropriately. They are old ladies who personify death: The death of the Peace movement worldwide. The reason for the peace movement’s death was its House of David-like ideology.

The House of David was a mid-Western religious group of men who didn’t believe in sexual intercourse. So, but for rare new members, they died out. Same with the peace movement. Their ‘self-defense is unacceptable’ ideology means old members die out and new members slip away as they watch their friends, allies and supporters get killed by Palestinians, tyrants and tribal warfare.

 

Journal note

Blogs are sometimes considered nothing more than personal journals.  Well this entry is indeed just a personal journal note.

This morning at the Castro District Peet’s one of my friends described digitizing his old slides from graduate school before he came out of the closet.  I remarked on how interesting the past is from our current perspective.

Thinking about it later, I realized that looking at the past, to me, always reminds me that at any point, with sufficient awareness of my environment, I could have selected from a nearly infinite number of choices about my future.  Yet in the present I am rarely aware of this.

That is what I consider the reason for the relevance of zazen (sitting mindless meditation) in the modern world.  The earlier reasons for Buddhism, dealing with suffering, are largely gone for most of us.  The current reason for zazen is to help us see much more of our context and be more capable of creating our future with excitement and vitality.

Just a note.

Iron biscuit

The phrase iron biscuit comes from a Zen koan.  A teacher is described as handing a student an iron biscuit, meaning a concept that is inherently a paradox, incomprehensible in an ordinary context.       

I’m just having fun with similar terms and similes.  Low heartbeat humming bird.  Modest Ferrari.  Gregarious porcupine.  Authoritative comic book. (Yes, I know that Doonesbury is the Lefty bible.) Religious science.  Green thumb mechanic.

Got some good ones?

Oil and the ratchet tax

Many international commentators have been pointing out that the United States finances its enemies.  Our gluttonous consumption of oil pours money into the coffers of Saudi Arabia to support madrassas, Iran to support Hezbollah and a variety of terrorist groups; we give money via oil to Venezuela to support Castro’s tyranny and fund other anti-Americans and oil money goes to Russia to allow her to be defiant about the whole Middle East.

The are many proposals to wean Americans...