Pro Commerce

Lefties always shoot

The New York Times today, for the first time has had an article about anti-Semitism and mentions that anti-Semitism is rising.  This is the first time the Times has mentioned this dark subject of great personal interest to three-quarters of their readers. (The Times is anti-Semitic in case you can't guess.)

The mention is in the Arts section in a review of a pamphlet from the American Jewish Congress pointing out, with names, the outrageous level of public Jew hatred among Jews.  The twenty three page pamphlet is by Alvin H.Rosenfeld.

My only point in this blog is that people don't change once they become adults (99% don't change).  What we have is a case of people (including 98% of the NYTimes staff) who were Lefties when they became adults. They will always be that way, they can't change. Many were Jews by birth.  Like the turret on a tank that rotates, the turret of Leftism has put Israel in the sites of its cannon and Lefties automatically fire at whatever the turret is pointing at.   

If the turret of the Lefty tank points at their relatives, friends, peers, coevals... at anything, the Lefty fires the Lefty cannon because adults don't change.  They fire that cannon wherever it points. The fact that some of the Left are Jews means nothing to the Jews....as is evident.

The Lefty cannon points at Israel for several reasons: the Left hates anything successful, happy or prosperous.  That certainly describes Israel.

Personal flexibility

I have a close friend who has been uptight and terribly cautious all his life, never travelling anywhere.

Recently, he has changed and started flying around the world, moving to a new house that didn't have a finished kitchen and showing many signs of a calm and flexible persona. 

I asked him how this change came about. His reply: "I started being deliberately flexible.  I walk a different route to work every day, I drive downtown by a different route every time I go and when I walk my dogs, I never take the same route twice."

How's that for an amazing story?

I've observed that not one person in 100 or a 1000 changes once they reach adulthood.

Return of realism

Realism has been the big bug-a-boo of our current foreign policy debate.  It has been the Realists in foreign policy versus George W.Bush.  The Realists argue that the best strategy is almost always to balance foreign powers, with careful nudging on each side to keep the power structure relatively stable.  The Realists opposed removing Saddam and trying to create a replacement government.

Turns out we now have a Realist foreign policy.  We may have gotten here inadvertently.  We have the Shia fighting the Sunni in Iraq and potentially in Lebanon. All the Sunni governments are becoming strong allies of ours (Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Sunni Lebanon) and the major Shia forces in Iraq are on our side too. Syria is moving into our camp because the Allawite minority governs a strong anti-Shia Sunni majority.

Antennae

The previous blog hits on an interesting subject.  Empiricism in science.

One area where theory is relatively useless and technicians are paid very well for their empirical knowledge is right in your hand: the cell phone.  The antenna's in cell phones and most other radio receiving and transmitting devices are designed by a category of very valuable engineers.  Radio wave detection has a modest theory, mostly about wavelength, but engineers who have tried tens of thousands of antennas have a good sense of what works.

Antenna engineers are hired entirely on their past success, which is almost always the result of experimentation.

Empiricism in science

I have in mind four interesting cases of the relationship between empiricism and science that my readers should know about. 

None of these prove any point that I can see.

1. The prevailing theories explaining superconductivity were demolished by an IBM research lab in Germany in the mid-1980s when superconducting materials were demonstrated at much higher than predicted temperatures.

2. The Nobel winning physicist, Donald Glaser, created a machine at U.C. Berkeley in the 1980s that could grow a hundred thousand bacteria at a time and showed that by correlating bacterial growth patterns with controls for specific human diseases, the machine could be used to identify those diseases in humans from a urine test.  The NIH defunded the program because, though the empirical evidence was overwhelming, there was no theory to explain how the bacteria could be doing what they were doing.

3. I was brought to a lab in Tokyo of an Hitachi division by a scientist I met in the late 1980s. The lab had developed an x-ray microscope that was yielding images that didn't make sense to anyone.  These were very short wave x-rays, longer wave x-rays were already in use in x-ray crystallography.  The problem was that no matter what materials were put in the machines, the image patterns that the machine was generating didn't conform to any theory of what the material structure looked like.

4. Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, first detected the cosmic background radiation in 1965, when trying unsuccessfully to create an absolutely silent radio listening antenna.  They tried everything in their electronic handbag but in the end concluded the problem was not in the radio antenna, it must be something real the antenna was picking up.

Democracy doesn't work

Last week I introduced a new idea, that democracy only functions in a nation that has industrial exports. Before we further examine that idea, with empirical data in coming blogs, I want to point out  that in the past  decade we have had history's first proof that democracy, per se, doesn't always work.

Proof: Palestine, Lebanon and Venezuela.  In Palestine and Lebanon an armed force was allowed to run for office and participate in the government. Disaster in both cases.  In Venezuela we have the most classic case where a tyrant was elected and proceeded to abolish democracy just as in the short lived case of Post WWI Germany.

We have seen a small scale case of a tyrant eliminating democracy in Nicaragua in the 1980s and it looks like the same tyrant is back, by election again.

We have all lived to see democracy fail to prevent tyranny and misery.

The new intellectuals

Russell Jacoby published a book in 1987 called The Last Intellectuals in which he argued that for fifty years the support for public intellectuals had been magazines which no longer could pay enough to support intellectuals and the few remaining ones were forced into academia where they had little opportunity to offer free ranging, widely important views.

I want to point out that public intellectuals now, 2007, have a wide range of think tanks as homes for their free ranging minds, many new foundations that support broad intellectual thought, plenty of prosperous self-employment and consulting occupations that support intellectuals and lastly the combination of blogs, jobs, speaking engagements, magazines and books to offer support. 

Now, in an open successful commercial society, we have more public intellectuals and more opportunity for them then ever in the past. (Most of the anti-commerce Marxists are still in academia.)

Tiny museum

There is a tiny museum near the Embarcadero dedicated to the San Francisco street cars.  It is cute and worth a visit if you are in the area. The photos of 1906 are spectacular and the posters are great. The Jewish Museum nearby warrants a quick visit too.

I asked the people running the Street Car Museum (1) how many times were the new F line tracks on Market Street replaced before they got it right? (2) Which politician was most instrumental in creating the old street car revival and (3) was the Museum on track to break even?

Answers: they don't know or won't say.  Correct answers: twice, Dianne Feinstein, definitely no, even with free rent and volunteer labor.

Michael Oren

I recently finished Michael Oren's Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to the Present. The advantage of a blog is that I can say many things that the customary reviewer can't.

The book just came out so there will be a flurry of reviews and you will shortly know that the book is very well written, is the first of its kind to cover the subject and that the "Faith" part of the title will be new to nearly everyone. 

What I can say that can't be said in other venues is that every American Jew should read it or know the history it presents.

American mainline Protestants, during the second Great Awakening, as early as 1810 were adamantly in favor of the creation of Israel for the Jews in Palestine.  American Protestants aggressively, widely, with significant energy and funding sent missionaries to accomplish that task.  The powerful missionary movement to create an Israel for Jews in Palestine was an important religious force throughout America for the entire 19th Century.

I personally had seen and blogged about the Mormon and Templar settlements between Jaffa and Southern Tel Aviv created after the U.S. Civil War, but I had no idea of the depth, extent, vigor or importance of the movement in the U.S. and how early it started.

Oren makes it clear that many Presidents from Wilson to Truman to George W. Bush have been strongly shaped by this original 19th Century Protestant Zionism.

Many Lefty Jews have expressed fear that Evangelical Christians are not true supporters of Israel and would disappear overnight. Wrong! Wrong! Read the history.

Now the Lefty Jews will get their history right.  Evangelical Christians have been supporting Israel as a Jewish state for nearly two hundred years.  Jews are the ones who are late to the enlightenment.  Most American Jews were opposed to the State of Israel as late as 1958.  I remember.

Soon, American Lefty Jews will finally come to realize that Evangelicals are their true loyal allies. Hopefully, American Lefty Jews will also come to understand that "Let the Jews die" statements by Jimmy Carter, Wesley Clark, Al Sharpton, Cynthia McKinney, Michael Moore and other prominent Democrats, tell us who are the real people to worry about. 

The Democrat Left are the people that American Jews should fear.

Workers per billionaire

I created this table about the number of workers per billionaire because I was wondering whether the top-top of the wealth distribution might be based on an undiscovered law of commerce.

If there is a law it would read something like this: for every million people who participate in the labor force of an industrial society one will become a billionaire. That is pretty much what the table shows.

That is actually the average of workers per billionaire in twenty three industrial countries.

The interesting details are what you get after you take Hong Kong out of the table.  Hong Kong is too high because the number of workers in Hong Kong is grossly understated.  Hong Kong really uses much of the labor force in Qundong Province on the mainland.

The remaining countries with above average billionaires per million workers in order are: U.S., Israel, Switzerland and Sweden.  From my experience these are the most entrepreneurial industrial societies.

The two countries that should be at the top but aren't are Holland and Japan. Holland may suffer from the fact that many of their billionaires live elsewhere so they are less visible in their home country.  The U.S. probably benefits from the billionaires who come from Holland, from several small countries and from Australia. Very wealthy people often want to live immersed in the vitality of the U.S.

Japan is a different story.  In Japan, like Holland, the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.  I think Japanese culture tends to keep the top wealth hidden in the structure of Zaibatsu and maybe some of the wealthy people are still recovering from the economic disaster of the 1990s.

The data for this table should be looked at as a static photo in a dynamic world.  The cut off of $billion is arbitrary. Many countries are still growing and we have no idea how income distributions will look after many decades of growth. 

The table comes from the 2005 Forbes International Billionaire report and from the CIA Fact book.

Outsourcing creates middle classes

When we out-source we are creating a middle-class and the potential for democracy because out-sourcing from our vantage point is importing services and from the point of view of the country that does the out-sourcing work it is industrial exporting.  See the previous blog on the subject of industrial exporting and the creation of a middle-class. Industrial exporting creates meritocracy, resource efficiency and lowers costs for all involved.

The countries that are today's healthy and solid middle-class democracies are all countries that became what they are by creating industrial exports to the major industrial nations.  Think of post war Japan, think of Taiwan and South Korea which also created industrial exports for Japan. More recently the best emerging example is China.  Brazil, Chile and Mexico are industrial exporters to the industrial world, particularly the U.S. and they are the few Latin democracies with a growing middle-class.

The more we import industrially produced products from the world, the more we create middle-classes and democracies. We out-sourced to Mexico in an area call maqiladoros and we should out-source everywhere and everything we can.

Industrial export=middle class

Democracy and a middle-class are related and both exist on the base of industrial exports.

Where do we have democracies?  It is always where we have an established middle-class or a growing new middle-class.  We have a middle-class only in countries who's names are on the products we buy. If it says "Made in..." we either have a nation with an established middle-class or the middle-class is growing: Philippines, Taiwan, South Korea, China, Mexico, Vietnam, Chile, India, Ireland, Singapore,Thailand and Brazil.

Only industrial production is capable of creating the conditions of middle-class life: meritocracy, high output per worker, efficient use of resources and constant cost reduction.  No other human form of organization is comparable to industrial commerce in its productive capacity.  Shining examples are always Singapore and Israel, two countries with virtually no natural resources, extensive industrial bases and export driven output. Both countries are in the top ranks of education and income and along with Holland, these are the countries with greatest per capita income per square mile in the world.

All three countries also produce a few extremely wealthy people. Extreme wealth, generated by commerce, is probably a necessary part of creating a viable middle-class.

Commodities export=autocratic government

Countries that only produce and export commodities are either unstable or autocratic. The same is true for countries that have virtually no exports.

Columbia and Afghanistan produce cocoa and poppies for export (illegal and decentralized exports) and we get warlords.  Most of the rest of the 170 nations in the world produce a few commodities for export like tobacco, cotton, coffee, fish or major minerals like diamonds, gold, oil and gas; we usual get autocratic tyrants.

The grown commodity exporting countries are places like Cuba, Senegal, Argentina and Malaysia.

The mineral exporting countries are places like Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkmenistan and Libya.

There are no exceptions to this rule.  Commodity export=autocracy.

Most countries produce nothing for export, these countries just have local trade, like the entire non-oil Middle-East, much of Africa and Latin America.  They are all utterly poor, with migration into urban areas where imported food is cheaper than locally grown food.

For countries that export commodities the government becomes an autocratic tyranny because it is easy to get control of the exports which have to go through ports and usually require military protection for extensive agricultural or excavation output. A few autocrats get control of the exports and everyone else stays poor.

Income distribution and the middle-class

It is almost impossible to find empirical evidence that punishing the top earning income class is a failed policy.

But empirical evidence exists. Cuba.

The entire top class of entrepreneurs, probably no more than 10,000, were driven out of Cuba in the early 1960s.  Cuba had a fairly healthy middle class at the time.  The next forty years saw the middle-class fall into poverty along with the entire population of Cuba.  Cuba became and has remained a third world country.  I've been there. Havana has little or no decent food and except for tourist related buildings, the city and its infra-structure is in total disrepair, just like Budapest was when I saw it in 1991.

That is what happens when you punish the top economic class.  You probably don't have to drive them out, you just have to punish them with high taxes.

Learning about Vietnam

It appears that we are getting a national confrontation about supporting the Iraqi war; the President versus the main components of the Democratic Party.

It is my guess that part of this confrontation will involve a revision of the popular history of the Vietnam War with the Republican Party demonstrating that the Democrats lost the Vietnam War and ushered in a period of thirty years of American cowardice.

The revision of history will explain what happened in 1974.  President Richard Nixon ended the Vietnam War with a truce in March of 1973 that came after the North Vietnamese were defeated in their Tet Offensive. The truce specified that any resumption of fighting by the North would be met with American support of the South.

A majority anti-war Democratic congress had been elected in 1972. The Congress impeached Nixon in the summer of 1973.  He was replaced with Gerald Ford. Starting in December of 1973 the North began probing the American resolve to support the South.  Gerald Ford tried to get Congressional support for funding and arming the South. He failed.  The North saw the failure of America and proceeded with a full on assault that easily succeeded.  The North won. 

America spent the next thirty years loosing battle after battle, or in the case of the first Iraqi invasion, accepting a quick cease-fire with Saddam left in place.

That is the history, I expect we will begin learning, as the Republicans fight the intellectual war to paint the Democrats as the party of cowardice.

Footnote: Ironically, the Communist North that fought so hard for Commnism is rapidly becoming a market-driven society.

Muni failure

I get more and more reports that the San Francisco Municipal transit system is falling apart.  Buses, street cars and underground vehicles are increasingly clustered together, late and breaking down.

The history is enlightening.  There was a steady decline in Muni service from the early 70s on. No mayors during that period had any managerial competence. 

By the time Willie Brown became mayor in 1996 the system almost collapsed.  Brown knew that only five men in the U.S. could fix the system.  Michael Burns, the only one available refused to come and fix the problem until the Mayor, desperate for re-election agreed to create a separate and independent Muni commission plus a five year contract. 

Burns came, fixed the system to about 85% of operational level and Mayor Brown then proceeded to stack the commission with Labor hacks and Burns couldn't do anything more. 

The system has since then returned to its downward slope to collapse again.  The current mayor lacks both the political and managerial skills to fix the system.

The gossip channels tell me that Mayor Newsom spends much of his time laying gorgeous women in Hollywood.

Technology and culture

I have many examples of the way technology is shaped by culture but one stands out because it will surprise most people.

In nearly every case you flick the dimmer for your car headlights with your left hand on the turn signal. In many cars you can turn the headlights on with the same switch.  This technology came from Japanese culture. 

Before Japanese cars started making a dent in the U.S. auto market, the dimmer was a switch on the floor, activated by stepping on it with your left foot.

In Japan, this hand activated technology was required because of cultural tradition.  For a millennium, the top class of people traveled on palanquins carried by men.  At night the palanquin had a lamp.  Whenever the moving palanquin encountered people, the lamp was covered with a flap to protect the eyes of the people in front. The courtesy was essential for social stability.  The elite had to show respect for the common people on foot.

This courtesy was transferred to automobiles. Dimming headlights was frequent and had to be easy.  Today, even in large cities, drivers go so far as to turn off their headlights when they stop at a pedestrian intersection. It is always done in small towns and villages.

Thus, a Japanese cultural tradition, came to America and the rest of the world with the rise of the Japanese auto industry and the export of Japanese cars to the world, post WWII.

Global warming update

If you really want to follow the global warming debate carefully you will need this table.  The table relates to this graphic.  It shows global temperature on a monthly basis. It shows an annual average as well. Bless the honest climatologists at the Hadley Center at the British East Anglia University.

Last year's global temperature, 2006, was slightly below the previous year's, 2005, and exactly the same as the average for all the years since 1996.  So we have had zero global warming for a decade.

Interestingly, peak years have been El Nino years.  We are in an El Nino year now. No temperature rise.

How does that compare to the hysterical headlines we read every day?

Segregated San Francisco

My friend Alex G. (I have two friends named Alex) pointed out, when we were walking on Clement Street, (the most interesting and vital street in San Francisco) that San Francisco is segregated.

Yes, Asians are on Clement and in the Richmond, Blacks are in the Western Addition and Latinos are in the Mission with very little overlap.  Other areas of the City are mostly white.

There are some other smaller segregated districts: two Asian areas in the outer Irving and in Chinatown and a Black area in the Bayview.

The only integrated area is the Tenderloin and it has always been a melting pot of new immigrants and drunks.

Alive street scene

The Lower Haight around Fillmore is an example of a dead retail area that came back to life.  The street was once vital, pre-WWII.  The Eastern end of the street was dangerous because of the housing project at Webster and it is still dangerous there.

The post hippie, punk scene brought the Lower Haight back to life.  The sequence was: three dirty but spacious coffee shops, three raunchy bars and three above average but cheap restaurants (Thai, Indian and Mexican). By the time this cluster of punk stores were in operation, the foot traffic was enough to attract an organic grocery and several boutiques including jewelry stores.

The street continues to gentrify as the neighborhood does.  There are now clean coffee shops and a few fine restaurants.

That my friends is the sequence that brings a street back to life.

6th Street

I know 6th Street in San Francisco very well. 

A small non-profit group is working with the City to clean up 6th St. There is a good reason: the main freeway into the heart of the City comes to 6th Street from the South.  Sixth Street is a mess, with bums, graffiti, liquor stores and squalid hotels. A rather disappointing introduction to the City.

Can 6th Street be cleaned up enough to make it presentable as a City entry gate?

No! Emphatically no.  If anyone had ever asked me I would have said to divert incoming tourist and visitor traffic to another street and prettify the other street.

You can't change 6th St. unless and until you move the street people to somewhere else that is not far away that will appeal to them.  I know those street people. I built a park for them in 1979 at Sixth and Minna. They have a very solid, stable and viable social network on Sixth Street that can only be moved with great understanding and incentives.

The incentives that will work include a park that they can sit in, drink in and be safe.  They want toilets, a basketball hoop and a water faucet. That is what we had in 6th Street Park. Nobody in this political, Puritan, Protestant society will give them those things. Protestant Puritanism expects you to "clean-up your act" and get a job.

The next blog is about what it takes to change a dead street into a live one, but 6th Street isn't a prospect because it is alive with a resilient comfortable population of street people, who won't be moved.

Heads-up

Back in 1988 Peter Duesberg, a respectable biologist, said that HIV was not a  legitimate virus and could not cause AIDs.  Ever since then Professor Duesberg has been an outcast, a pariah. Possibly because of Duesberg, HIV got re-named a retro-virus.

This is a heads-up for my readers: Lynn Margulis, the biologist who showed how the mitochondria originally migrated into the single celled creatures of early life, has been saying privately to friends that Duesberg is an honest competent man who should be taken seriously.

Now comes an article in the December Esquire by an economist who looked at the AIDs data for Africa and says almost the same things that Duesberg said 18 years ago. In addition she says there are about a third as many AIDs cases as officials say there are.

Just a heads up. I don't have a dog in this fight, as Texans are fond of saying.

Terror war in decline

There is reason to be optimistic about the war on terror if my three observations are accurate.  The war has been in decline for some time and will be over in less than a decade even if the second wave of electoral cowardice arrives in America (the first was the  anti-Vietnam war Democrats elected in 1972).

* First the war of terrorism against the Industrial-world is run by tribal groups. 

* Second, those tribes have one main weapon, the sacrifice of their mentally retarded and defective teenagers as suicide murderers.  This tactic is being controlled by good border screening technology and having a magnet war, such as Iraq, that drains off the defective murderers.

* Third, the money the terrorists need comes from oil producing states.  As the oil producing states  see the price of oil drop as oil using nations rapidly move to non-oil sources of energy, they will understand the futility of harming themselves by continuing their terrorist support. Simple equation: continued support of terrorists by oil nations means more rapid abandonment of oil by Industrial nations.

Inconvenient again

I have an unexplainable sympathy for Al Gore.  First, he is married to a woman who attacks pop music because it violates her self-righteous certainty about moral influences on children. She launched her attack based on her spouse's prominence. Then Gore is taunted about a statement that he founded the Internet. Since the Internet owes some parentage to DARPA in the 1960s, Gore may have had some infinitesimal role in helping DARPA at a later date. Then he wins a popular election only to loose in the Electoral College. And lately he makes a phony and largely erroneous movie self-righteously called "An Inconvenient Truth."

Now the poor sucker turns out to be on the Board of Apple when it approved a non-existent Board meeting that approved an immoral and illegal back dating of Steve Jobs' stock options.

Poor guy.  He doesn't understand that being in politics is not the place to be if you believe yourself to be upright and moral AND you wish to be self-righteous about it.  That will always be seen as hypocrisy. 

Check the previous blog to understand why Gore's condoning of back dated stock options is particularly odious.

Back dated stock options

What is so morally outrageous about back dated stock options?   

The simile is a cookie jar that your mother offers when you have been good.  But you steal from the cookie jar when she is not looking.

That is back dating stock options.  If we had next week's newspaper today we would have perfect investment hindsight and could make a fortune.  That is back dating stock options.  The Board of any company can publicly grant a stock option and report it on quarterly reports to the Securities and Exchange Commission.  There is no legal limit on how much money any Board can give any company employee, none.

The immoral trick is to pick a date for the grant of stock options that has passed and was a particularly low point in the stock history.  That almost guarantees a stock gain that is not known to the government or shareholders.

That is both stupid, immoral and illegal.  The Board of Apple could have given Steve Jobs 5 million shares of the current priced stock at any time, but instead it gave him 4 million shares for a previously lower priced stock that was worth the same as the 5 million current shares.  Stupid, immoral and illegal because it was secretive. Illegal because it was intended to deceive shareholders.

Great fun

Friends have sent me a website that lets us create an avatar and script a message for the avatar to deliver.

I found the process fun and can think of many uses for it.  I am recommending it to brighten your day.

The site is SitePal and my message to you is here.

Take the ghetto out of the kid

The December 28th Wall Street Journal called to my attention a study by HUD of 1,700 ghetto families who were moved from the ghetto to safe neighborhoods, often in small towns or suburbs.  The families were tracked for ten years and compared to a control group that remained in the original ghettos.

The key thing about most people I know is that they don't learn from reality.  They didn't learn about the failures of socialism and government expansion in the last century and they certainly won't learn from this study.

This study was very well done and conclusive: you can take the kid out of the ghetto but the ghetto does not leave the kid.  Although there were a few trivial results, like the girls who left the ghetto smoked less than the girls left behind and the opposite was true of the boys; nothing of significance economic, educational or social importance changed. 

None of this will keep the social engineers from continuing to expand and remodel public housing, trying to move ghetto families out of the ghetto or any related counterproductive social meddling.

There is very little that will get rid of black ghettos other than time and assimilation.

On the positive side, my brother created a public housing project that works for creating a pleasant and safe environment for 1,500 families in a major American city. Several non-lefty ideas are built into my brother's project that few other housing or development projects will learn and certainly nothing the San Francisco supervisors will ever learn.  First, mix low cost housing, with market rate housing of high quality and sprinkle in a little subsidized public housing. Second, heavily weight the population toward hard working immigrant groups,Filipino's, Vietnamese, Koreans, etc and keep the black population small. Third, build in good retail chain stores including large groceries, Walgreen's, clinics and sport centers.

Summary: you can take the kid out of the ghetto but not the ghetto out of the kid.  Rebuild the ghetto in a way that no lefty will approve of with favoritism for hard working immigrants, few blacks and plenty of big box American commerce.

Tribal DNA

The military and political issues of this century seems to be the encounter of Global commercial states with tribalism. Tribalism makes its military impact with suicide murderers.

I was asked by a second generation Greek and a second generation Arab what I meant by tribalism.  I pointed out that both their parents could walk around the town they had grown up in and know nearly everyone they met and in most cases hundreds of people they met were their cousins. That is tribalism.

We don't know much about inbreeding, except in dogs where the consequences are quite evident and generally harmful.  With humans, one consequence of inbreeding is feeblemindedness, other consequences are damaged physical functions.

With high birth rates in tribal societies, with inbreeding and with modern medicine to help many disabled infants survive, we get the strange phenomenon of a growing number of disfunctional members of tribal groups.  The solution that Arab, Chechen and Tamil tribes have found: send the feebleminded and disfunctional teenagers off to be suicide murderers.

Isn't that what we are seeing in the world.  Tribal societies are sacrificing their feebleminded and disabled offspring to be suicide murderers?

Abuse

I have written about the inheritance issue of domestic partnership law in California (a will without a trust is a nearly worthless piece of paper). What I recently learned is the under domestic partnership law, the debts and bankruptcy of one partner is not transferred to the other partner.

This is apparently resulting in divorce among older people with re-formation of the relationship as domestic partners.

This answers a Halachic question that arose a few years ago when elderly Jews had dying spouses whose medical expenses were on the route to destroying the assets of the surviving spouse.  The elderly Jews wanted divorces so their spouse could be moved to the welfare roles for medical coverage.  The Halachic rabbis said "No!" marriage is for better or worse.

Now there may be an answer: replace the marriage with a domestic partnership.  The couple stays together but the medical bankruptcy of one spouse will not propagate to the other.

Non-moral progress

There can be no argument for moral progress as every thinker after WWII understood.  Hegel and all derivative models for moral progress were discarded after the high culture Germans, Austrians and French were found to delight in the cruel slaughter of Jews by the millions.

I doubt that any view of moral progress in history will return among educated people.

On the other-hand I see significant evidence of progress in non-moral systems.  I have identified six non-moral systems: Commerce, technology, legal/judicial, democratic legislative activity, compassionate professionals and science.  Science is last because it is so closely tied to morals that progress is not easy to detect.

Commerce continues to expand and the progress is evident in the rapid spread of wealth, the growth of the middle-class, the genuine emergence of a meritocracy and the widespread expansion of openness in the marketplace. Many citizens of industrial nations have more wealth and freedom than the top ten percent of their societies a quarter of a century ago.

Technology is undergoing the same expansion of its domain in direct conjunction with commerce, particularly as some elements of technology, such as communication, seem to enhance the expansion of other parts of technology. A technician on the phone in the countryside of Thailand can inspect and repair a customer's laptop in Austin Texas. 

The legal/judicial system seems to be showing elements of progress as better mechanisms for selecting juries emerge, as more specialized courts (patent and family law) are developed, as arbitration and mediation are introduced to judical processes and as commercial issues become more widely understood in the courts (cigarette and IUD decisions being overturned).

The democratic legislative system is showing progress as the mechanisms for communication between legislatures improves, as policy analysis gains an academic foothold, as blatant corruption comes under open document scrutiny and experiments in alternative election processes gain importance.

The realm of paramedics has been added to the domain of compassionate professionals and paramedic skills have expanded due to battlefront military progress.  The growth of life ending compassion in the form of the hospice is progress. The same has been true in the expansion of many medical departments such as emergency medicine.  Fire departments are more focused on merit and in public schools special education is expanding and improving along with the care, opportunities and facilities for the disabled.

Science shows modest progress, largely in the technical fields of molecular biology, space science and plate tectonics.

I believe the main feature of modernity and enlightenment, the belief in progress, is not unwarranted; it merely needs to exclude moral systems and include non-moral systems.

Partners in living

I was asked the other evening whether my partner was evolving similar political and worldviews to mine.

We both came to our partnership with a heavy dose of Lefty (but not Liberal) ideas. It has been our joint living experiences at the end of the Twentieth Century and the beginning of the 21st that have shaped our views, over the fifteen years we have been together. Therefore we do think much alike on politics and the world.

We have spent time in India and seen many failed development projects, up close, along with enjoying the vitality of Bangalore.  We have spent more than a year's time living in Tokyo and traveling Japan. In Japan we have spent much time with an array of commercial and foreign service friends.  We got lost in the hutongs of Beijing on a stormy night. We have walked many of the streets and alleys of Havana to see the true meaning of modern communism with an entire society imprisoned.  We've seen the luxury and squalor of Guatemala together. We spent time in Laos with UN friends.  We've dined with a woman who was at the excavation of thousands buried alive by Saddam Hussein.  We have been at the bedside of several friends who were dying. Together we have spent time with hundreds of my business clients, sole proprietors, artists and giant corporation executives.

We never travel anywhere without a list of people to contact, to meet with and to spend time with learning about important elements of their culture.

Recently, we have spent time together in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, with friends, staffers at think tanks and we have spent time on the beach, in Jaffa and walking the streets late at night. 

With a large number of friends, domestically and worldwide, with a vast array of experiences in the world, it is safe to say that our opinions have converged based on the real world we live in.  Our joint experiences are something people with a narrower range of experience don't have as an opportunity to learn about the world. 

Actually, most of the people we know are stuck in the closed minds they had when my partner and I first met each other.