Pro Commerce

China's future

Is China going to break-up because of the inherent instability of a one party monopoly?  Is the one party monopoly going to slowly fade as expanding Chinese capitalism encourages the growth of democracy?

Those are the two scenarios we hear about most.  But James Mann, a hero of mine from The Rise of the Vulcans, suggests a third alternative.  The government of China will maintain the status quo. 

I am inclined in the Mann direction, based on the length of China's history and the success of a commerce-one-party mix in Chinese Singapore.

Moderate party didn't work

I haven't reported on the Party for Moderates that I had a few weeks ago.

There was no discussion of politics.  Everyone took it for granted that they were at a home where they could talk about politics without being attacked and insulted so they just enjoyed the comfort and talked about a dozen other interesting subjects.

What I now understand is that a "moderates party" is like having a party without Catholics, only Protestants in the 18th Century.  The Catholics have one core religion with dogma and catechism (just like Lefty Fundamentalists) but the Protestants only have a vague cohesion with no common dogma.  Protestants in the 18th Century ranged from Quakers and Unitarians to Anabaptists and Episcopalians. Maybe they all considered the New Testament important but that was all they had in common.

The non-Left, moderates, have no politics in common.  Maybe they have a comfort and appreciation of commerce that Lefties hate, but that is all they have in common.

There's more. 

I told some of my Lefty friends about .....

Now open for non-business

S.F. now has opened a Small Business Support Center to help businesses getting started.  This is what I found when I entered the dirty, dank and poorly lit government office:

* At the entrance there is a hangman's noose about 8 feet in the air that can be reached by standing on a chair. The sign on the chair suggests that all new business prospects can practice suicide free on this equipment.

* In a bin on my left is a box of free plastic nose clips and rubber gloves.  This donated gear is courtesy of several earlier clients who started businesses in S.F. A note says these goods will help remove homeless who are encouraged to come to S.F. and malinger at local shops.

* In another bin are posters of four S.F. Supervisors posing with images of Trotsky, Stalin, Mao and Kim Jong Il.  The posters are required to be displayed prominently in all new S.F. businesses.  They are also required on the back of the menus in all new restaurants.

* I will only report one other table that offers a free three hole notebook with a dozen pages of suggested forms.  Several forms are for responding to lawsuits brought on behalf of alleged disabled groups for trivial but horribly expensive changes that are only expected in San Francisco. Another is for responding to Labor Department claims from the many people you have to lay-off after paying the many special San Francisco taxes.  Finally are a series of forms for posting on the walls and for responding to City requirements that control your health benefits, work schedules, time off, vacation and sick leave. I'm not kidding.

BBC harm

Now that PLO refugee camps in Lebanon are back in the news, for the same reason they were in the early 1980s, (Palestinians inside the camps trying to kill their friends and families by firing on the area outside the camps, thinking like most Arabs that there are no consequences to holding your own family hostage) it is worth a comment.

I was in Leningrad at the time and surreptitiously two brothers came up to talk to me and my partner as we walked the streets in the evening.  The two brothers were Jews, engineers in their early forties who had decided not to have families in order to make an escape from the USSR more likely to succeed. 

They had seen on Soviet TV that the Israeli Army was killing refugees in the Shatila Camps in Lebanon.  The TV footage, in English, was coming from the BBC.  Most of the time, these two engineers could read between the lines of the news and were usually accurate, but this time the BBC footage had them confused.

I explained that the Army attacking the Camps were Christian Falangists, allies of the Israelis but Israel was being blamed as it always is. 

Of course the BBC has never changed its vicious despicable prejudice in a quarter of a century. BBC is evidence that the Third Reich conquered England in spite of the US success in WWII.  I couldn't expect the two Russian-Jews, struggling to survive, to understand the English anti-Semitism at that time.

Shopping and bliss

I'm known as a simple liver; I wrote a book on the subject and have written several articles on simple living. I am also a male, a gender persuasion not always known to enjoy shopping. So it is unlikely that you will believe my statement when I say that I can understand how shopping can be a positive emotional experience. Shopping can generate a feeling of "bliss."

"Bliss" is a state of warmth, comfort and well being.  Shopping seems to induce this state by giving the shopper a purpose, a series of steps that lead to satisfaction and a sense of pride in accomplishment that follows from the satisfaction.  (Yes, cognitive dissonance may occur afterwards.)

From a business point of view, simple living values can be combined with shopping bliss.  The solution is to shop at second-hand stores and to spend time at a "pebble store".

A "pebble store" is my metaphor.  Any place that sells low priced nic-naks  is a pebble store. 

The actual pebble store is one I conceived but never opened.  It had forty velvet trays, like jewelry trays, arrayed around a retail store with several hundred small beach stones in each tray.  Each tray had pebbles from famous beaches and when the customer picked out the pebbles they wanted they got a small bag with a photo of the beach on the outside of the bag.  Prices ranged from $.50 to $1.25.

A pebble store is where you hang out making insignificant esthetic choices for as long as you want.

San Francisco FH's

 Christopher Hitchens gave a talk last week in San Francisco.  I didn't go but several friends reported back.  The San Francisco standard brain-dead audience booed Hitchens when he explained the obvious and overwhelming reasons the Coalition of the Willing went into Iraq. Hitchens, the rational, patient and usually polite speaker, only said about the audience "what else would I expect from these fuckheads?"

Real third rail

I think Al Gore is finished in American politics, despite his CO2 scare movie.  He is finished for two reasons.

First he is a bad loser.  When he lost the ballot count in Florida in November 2000, he complained, demanded a recount and was wrong. Even the Left-wing journal of record, the NY Times said he lost Florida after several legal battles and private recounts.  Americans hate sore losers.

Richard Nixon had his election in 1960 stolen by fraudulent votes in Chicago which gave Illinois' votes to Kennedy and stolen in rural Texas, Lyndon Johnson's state, which gave Kennedy the election.  Nixon was a "good" loser and many Americans knew it.  He was finally elected president in 1968.

Al Gore is finished for another reason too.  He is consistently wrong. Gore recently called Prince Charles, known in England as a sorry boob, "an intellectual leader."

Just like William Jennings Bryan who ran for president on a "base our currency on silver" platform and later supported Creationism in the famous Scopes monkey trial.  Bryan is remembered as a great orator, populist and political buffoon.

San Francisco traffic

There is a subject that never seems to come up: why we have more and more traffic scofflaws.  The reason is straight forward: it is the unintended consequence of uncontrolled stops signs.

We have a growing number of stop signs in San Francisco. Therefore, it takes longer and longer to drive anywhere in the city. The number of stop signs has been growing at a steady pace for fifty years, regardless of population or traffic.

Proliferating stop signs is a gnawing problem that is currently ignored. Stop signs are designed to slow traffic. As the length of time to travel within the city grows, the patience of drivers declines. The willingness to obey traffic regulations probably declines also.

Here is the data: In 1957, when stop-sign installation was turned over to the city (it was formerly managed by the California State Automobile Association), there were 1,786 stop signs in San Francisco. That number has doubled nearly three times in fifty years to 13,200 stop signs at the beginning of 2007. This is an increase in stop signs of 4 percent per year. The number of intersections, however, is the same as it was in 1957. In the meantime, the population of San Francisco has only increased slightly from 740,000 to 770,000. The number of automobiles has grown from 170,000 to 390,000, a growth rate of under two percent per year. Increase in cars is half the increase in stop signs. The average urban automobile is shorter than it was in 1957. Much shorter. The number of stop signs has far out paced the number of cars.

As the number of stop signs increases, traffic slows and drivers become more and more impatient. Is there a way to address this issue?

Ultimately, I hope there will be a supervisor's study of the necessary number of stop signs in San Francisco. With an upper limit established, the law should require that a new sign can go up only if an old sign comes down."

(Data: I got the data on Stop Signs by counting it myself at the Stop Sign office in 1997.)

Raising Kids

When my three kids were in their late teens I asked myself whether they had an adequate sense of humor to enjoy life.  The answer, upon careful investigation, was yes.  I had several ways to test their sense of humor and to expand it if it had been necessary.

The most interesting question about child rearing was one I only asked myself recently, far too late to influence my children but not too late to influence my grandchildren.  The question is: "Have we taught them to sleep well?" 

I can think of few acts of daily life that are as critical to happiness and success in the world as sleeping habits.  If you can sleep well, most other things in life are much easier to cope with.  You know the truth of this statement if you know people who have sleep troubles.

Two confessions: first, I have no idea how we pass on good sleep habits to children. Second, I think that just as mothers pass on their worldview to nearly all children, they probably pass on sleep habits too.  So how do good sleep habits get passed on and what are they?

Angry left

I'm always perplexed by the anger and viciousness of the Left. As individuals they are unremittingly mean spirited.  Up until now I have thought it was simply because they lost the 20th Century.  Everything the Left believed in got tried and failed in the 20th Century. (They would never admit that tens of millions of people died because of the Lefty anti-war positions and the Left's unceasing support of murderous tyrants.)

The trouble with that theory is that the failure of the Left in the 20th Century is never understood nor acknowledged by the Left.  They rationalize away their collision with the iron curtain of reality.

Now I realize, that at least in America, the Left had nearly a century with no opposition. The world almost became socialized in 1948. Except for the unexpected and unplanned need to oppose the Soviet Union, the world would have become socialized as Europe did. 

The big change came when Rush Limbaugh entered the national radio scene with the fall of the Soviet Union (he actually started in Sacramento five years earlier) and was soon joined by many others including the Fox Network and The Weekly Standard.  Before Rush the Left had no genuine opposition. Now, everywhere a Lefty turns he finds tens of millions of people with current ideas and opinions to challenge the Lefty credo.

This is not to suggest that there wasn't intellectual opposition to the Left from brilliant minds such as Raymond Aaron and Sidney Hook, there was even The National Review for the second half century, but that is nothing compared to thousands of hours of radio and TV a month attacking the farcical Left in a variety of highly personal, common sense and up-to-the-minute revelations.

Send it home

I am fascinated by this business.  The photo shows a stand in the Seattle airport where you can mail home the small objects you can't take on the airplane.

The business works by giving you a form to fill out that has a place for you to write your credit card number on it, (the cost depends on the weight) it includes a mailing label with your home address that you fill out and a plastic bag that you put the whole mess in.  The form, the label and your shipping objects, inside a plastic bag then go into a sealed mail slot.  Done, sent, great.

Uck

Eviatar Zerubavel in his book The Fine Line explains why we have a very clear distinction between secretions from inside our body and other similar products. We are not offended by hair, nails or tears which our body generates, but excretions from our mouth, nasal cavity, stomach, urinary tract and a few other places can be offensive. 

One secretion that is on the offensive side of the line is ear wax.  Which is what I want to discuss. 

The doctor who does my bi-annual pilots' physical looked in my ears and commented that he and I have a great deal of ear wax.  He stated further that he found a correlation between high IQ and strong earwax production.  Unfortunately, he said he hadn't had the time to write-up his findings and submit them to the appropriate journal.

Consider them published Dr. Brown.

Simple minded Senate Dems

The Democrats are very simple-minded in their attack on Gonzales.  They have to assume that nobody remembers Richard Nixon's forced resignation.

Here is Tod Lindberg's report of how the Democrats are replaying an old story:

Attorney General Kleindienst was forced to resign in 1974 for non-Watergate reasons; his replacement became the problem. Kleindienst's departure  "...created a job opening in an increasingly desperate time. Nixon looked to his recently installed secretary of defense, Elliot Richardson, to move over to the Justice Department. The confirmation process before the Democratic-controlled Senate Judiciary Committee was brutal. The price of confirmation for Richardson was his willingness to appoint a "special prosecutor" with a broad mandate and a grant of independence to investigate the Watergate crimes and unfolding coverup.

"It took a couple weeks of battle for Richardson to satisfy Sen. James Eastland's Judiciary Committee with the selection of Archibald Cox, who had served as solicitor general in the Kennedy administration and remained close to Massachusetts's premier political family as a professor at Harvard Law School. As Nixon noted bitterly in his memoirs, "If Richardson had searched specifically for the man whom I would have least trusted to conduct so politically sensitive an investigation in an unbiased way, he could hardly have done better than choose Archibald Cox.""

The Democrats are trying the same play-book again with Attorney General Gonzales.

League of democracies

John McCain is proposing a League of Democracies for the U.S. to create as an international sounding board when the UN fails to act responsibly.

I proposed such an organization in 2003, as have many others.

What I now realize is that the creation of a League of Democracies would quickly change the UN into a far more responsible organization when the non-democratic members of the UN realized they would be members of an organization without funding and without a role in the world unless they take their responsiblities seriously.

I personally suggest that the League of Democracies be located in a gorgeous new building in Tel Aviv.  Tel Aviv because that would be a statement to the entire world that Israel is a prime example of a great democracy, always to be defended by other democracies and to make the point that the UN has become an organization dedicated to monthly resolutions of hatred toward Israel.

The U.N. often seems more of a triumph of the Third Reich than the triumph of the victors of WWII.

The evil karma

The evil karma flowing from the work of Mark Felt is still spilling into our lives and will probably continue for decades more.  Jimmy Carter is attacking America, Israel and now England. What is the Felt-Carter connection?

Mark Felt was among the most evil men in American history.  Because of his training in counter-espionage and his role as deputy to his beloved J. Edgar Hoover, he became head of the FBI and began his plot to punish President Richard Nixon for not making him permanent head of the FBI.  Mark Felt was Deep Throat and because of his extraordinary power over FBI intelligence and masterful bureaucratic skills he was able to set up a controlled leak and bring down President Nixon in ignominy.

The fall of Nixon, with the concurrence of the Lefty Fundamentalist wing of the Democratic Party and the consequent pre-arranged elevation of Gerald Ford to the Presidency meant the end of the Vietnam Peace Treaty, the murder of a million Cambodians by the Pol Pot regime and the election of Jimmy Carter. 

(Two things most people forget: (1) the Senate appointed their friend Gerald Ford to replace Nixon after the Senate intimidated Vice President Spiro T. Agnew into resigning after a Maryland financial scandal was uncovered. (2) Jimmy Carter ran for president as a Baptist Born-Again-Southerner the last to keep the Dixiecrats in the Democratic Party.)

Carter is an anti-Semite and a man with the full colors of a traitor putting him in a class with the earlier President Tyler who helped provoke the Civil War and served in the Confederate Congress. 

Now we will be forced to hear the evil words of Jimmy for decades to come.

Never in politics

I spent most of my 20s deeply involved in politics.  I was a campaign manager, advance man in a presidential and in a gubenatorial race, I was a legislative analyst and president of the largest local party group.

I resolved never to hold public office, it was clearly not for me.  Consequently, over the coming decades I was never reluctant to pose for pictures that could some day damage my opportunity to be elected.

The photos on the upper right were taken (two out of the twenty-eight that are in the book) and published in a book about masturbation called When You Don't Make It by the National Sex Forum.

I also did another photo as a favor for my good friend Margo St. James who's organization, Coyote, was producing posters to legalize prostitution.  Margo couldn't find anyone to pose for this photo, so I stuck out my stomach and posed.  The little words down my front say "kiss, kiss.." The point of the poster was to suggest that prostitutes are really doing difficult work with a John like me.

I had been the main person who helped Margo start her organization so I felt some desire to help in a desparate situtation.  The poster ended up making the news on several national networks and was seen by one of my brothers.

I suspect, after the recent scandal about the San Francisco mayor having sex with his blonde staffer who was married to his campaign manager, which didn't diminish the mayor's popularity, that these photos would not keep me from being elected to any office in San Francisco.

Pin/needle button business

I occassionally suggest businesses for my readers to start.  I've suggest books and doctoral thesis which landed me on the Chronicles of Higher Education website.

The business I suggest is for the market of all those people who have to sew on their own buttons and, for whatever reason, can't thread a needle.

The product would be three cards with five needles on each already threaded.  Each card would have a different color thread, white, black and tan.  The product would be in a transparent folder, roughly 3x4", and sell for $3.50 retail and $1.00 wholesale.  Re-order with color of thread specification would be online at $1.25 per card. The whole package, cost of goods, should be less than $.05 to produce. There are several machines that can do the packaging. The start-up cost of graphics, a table at a notion distributor show, a web page and other 'miscellaneous' should be under $6,000.

I couldn't find the product on Google.

How networks work

A recent run-in of an auto passenger with some riders in the bicycle swarm, Critical Mass, in San Francisco led the city fathers to beg Critical Mass to police their members.  Which they did in the next monthly swarm.

Several friends raised the question of how an organization such as Critical Mass operates.  I know because I started and ran a group that had a peak active membership at one time of 600 businesses called the Briarpatch Network.

The chart on the right comes from my 1987 book Mental Snacks which has a chapter on networks.

All human interaction creates a network.  The nature and terminology that is applied to a network depends on its cohesion and complexity. See chart on the right for examples.

There is much that can be said about a network of the form taken by Critical Mass in San Francisco.  The most important is that such a low cohesion (meeting each other once a month and being open to nearly anyone) and low complexity association has a rudimentary structure.  This structure has the core kernal around the founder and founders whether or not the actual original founders (Chris Carlssen) still exist. Around the core are the elders, a secondary core, who know the history of the network and are likely to include a few people who feel a personal responsibility for the continuance of the network.  The members of the secondary core who take responsiblity and are viewed by their peers as competent are the prime movers when decisions need to be made.  It is the circle of friends and associates around this secondary core who convey to all the rest of the members the ideas, values and decisions that operate the network.

Some of you may notice that this structure is visible, but not formal, in most human associations. Right.

Actors' politics

I use the term "actor" as gender neutral.

The case of Alec Baldwin brings this issue to mind.  Here is an actor who is a leading spokesperson for Lefty Fundamentalism who has most recently been held-up as a person with a malicious temperament.  He was duly ridiculed in the film Team America.

My experience with actors, especially prominent actors is that they are seldom fully developed human beings.  The quality that makes a person a good actor, the ability to create a fictional character, is the very quality that requires the minimum of underlying personal character. Minimum personal character gives one the opportunity to create maximum fictional character.

So why should a person who seriously lacks a personal character be taken seriously as a political spokesperson?

The worst case of an actor that I know of is Marlon Brando.  In the few cases where personal friends of mine have spent time with Brando they reported that the man was incapable of the most rudimentary actions such as calling a cab, reserving dinner at a restaurant or buying an airplane ticket, much less getting to a public engagement on time by himself.  There was no "there" there.

Thank goodness Brando didn't consider himself a public spokesperson.

Divorce and custody

I've known several cases of divorce battles where the child custody issue resulted in decades of vicious bickering that had deleterious effects on the children involved.  In a number of these cases, the family had enough money to pay for an alternative solution.

The old solution for child custody battles, where the family had money, was to send the child to military school or to a live-in private school equivalent.

I would like to recommend to the family courts of America that a series of local homes be established for use where custody battles are ferocious and out-of-the home placement of the children would be beneficial.  These homes would be for children under a specified age (maybe 14) where the temporary custodial parents are accredited and the home is well maintained at a level appropriate to the finances of the divorced parents involved.

I have been to many custodial homes for children without parents and board and care homes for developmentally disabled children. I have always been impressed with the love and kindness I have seen.

Is this being tried in some jurisdiction, like West LA?

Dead Sea scrolls

My father was in Palestine in 1947.  He was interested in archeology and spent time with Yigal Allon.  Allon did not tell him about the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls, which may not have happened yet.  Allon did tell him about the most disturbing discovery the Palestinian Antiquities Group had found.

In a burial chamber in Jerusalem, that was just then under excavation, the archaeologists had found a sarcophagus with the name Jesus on it.  I assume Allon confided in my father in the hopes of getting political advice about the potential American reaction to the find.  I don't know what my father told him.

I know that for fear of political repercussions that would have had a bearing on the creation of the State of Israel, the crypt discovery was kept a top secret.  Five years later the discovery was announced because half a dozen other sarcophagi had been found with the same name on them.

Jesus' son

If Jesus had a son was the son circumcised?  I can answer that question. "No."

Jesus and his followers were a sect of Judaism that was responding to the demand by the Roman prelate, Turanus Rufus, that Jews give up all ethnic behavior including eating habits and circumcision.  Jesus clearly taught the message that Jews were to assimilate and end their behavioral ethnic differences. His well known phrase "Render unto Caesar..."(Mathew 22:21) is the core teaching that created Jesus' dissident sect.

"Dissident" because all the prominent rabbis of his time and the previous two centuries were refusing to follow the prelate's orders and the most famous, Rabbi Akvia, was put in prison and killed for his resistance.  The Jewish rebellion that began with the Bar Kochba Revolt and ended at Masada was the result of Jews refusing, for three centuries, to follow the "surrender path" of Jesus.

Hole in the moral fabric

The great arbiter of morals in America is Rabbi Dr. Laura, an afternoon radio personality who has more than 4 million regular weekly listeners.

I haven’t heard Laura’s answer to this question but I think I can guess. “Dr. Laura, I am in my early 40s, a successful self employed woman.  I gave up looking for a man who I could marry.  I want a family and I want children when I am older so I had invitro fertilization with sperm from a sperm bank.  Now that I’m noticeably pregnant and often get questions alluding to the father, I want to know what to answer.”

Dr. Laura would gratuitously chide any 25 year-old woman who called because she had gotten pregnant from promiscuity; she would also chide a woman who had children and got a divorce to find a better man…But I don’t think she would chide the woman I have in mind because we have a hole in our moral fabric.

Certainly it is immoral for a mature woman with a stable income and home to have a child without a father, but I think we are at a transition point where we would never moralize to such a woman, and we would be particularly sympathetic and supportive if we felt the woman would make a good mother.

That is a hole in our moral fabric that I believe suggests the emergence, over several coming decades, of a new morally acceptable category of motherhood: in vitro for potentially good mothers, self-supporting, over 40.

The battle of soy

Many people are lactose intolerant, particularly Jews and Asians.  I am one and I love espresso.  The solution is to use soy milk for cappuccinos and lattes. 

The issue comes up because a lovely little café-bistro in Seattle, serving a French breakfast said they didn’t carry soy milk.  I was polite and got up and left.

In Seattle, and in San Francisco, these days roughly 10% of all espresso drinkers ask for soy milk.  Most such customers probably accept milk in a situation like the bistro in the photo on the right and never come back.

That is not the right strategy.  One of the most beautiful coffee shops in San Francisco, Emporio Rulli (several shops) started out refusing to offer soy milk and taught their staff to say “this is an Italian café.”  I always responded with some statement, usually within hearing of a manager, “even MacDonald's in Italy serves olive oil” or “American food outlets in Italy respect Italian tastes” or “ I can’t believe someone who wants to be in business can reject 10% of their customers.”

It took Emporio Rulli about a year before they started carrying soy milk.

Science and democracy

Science, according to many philosophers of science, is a dialog in which new data and theories are presented, openly discussed and slowly accepted into the general discourse. The underlying structure of the dialog is rationalism and empiricism.

I think that science more closely resembles the dialog in a politically open democracy.

That is why I am excited and fascinated to watch the public dialog on almost a global scale, about a scientific debate on global climate.  There appears to be no significant difference in the level, skill or rationality of the scientists and non-scientists in this debate.  About the same proportion of both groups have perverted ideas about what science is (they think science is factual and conclusive) and about the same proportion of both groups are taking opposing sides in the dialog.

It is wonderful to see all the tactics used in political turmoil, libel, slander, lawsuits and wild hyperbole used in this scientific debate. It really is a wonderful form of entertainment.

Hopefully, a few decades from now scientists will come to appreciate the political nature of scientific debate and a far more non-scientists will come to understand that science is an open, flowing, changing dialog with no greater sanctity than any legislative debate.

Meat vs cars

Stay off beef and feel better about driving.

The average American eats 120 pounds of beef, lamb and other ruminants a year. That doesn't seem like very much.  It is just an average.  That ruminant meat consumption is nearly all beef. One hundred twenty pounds of beef is equal to roughly half a cow.  One cow produces 550 liters of methane per day; half of a cow produces 275 liters of methane per day or 100,000 liters per year.  By translating liters of methane to pounds we get 430 lbs of methane per cow per year.  Since methane gas in the upper atmosphere is 20 times as absorbent of heat as CO2, that 430 pounds converts to 8,600 pounds of carbon.  We use carbon as the measure for "carbon offsets".

8,600 pounds of carbon is roughly what a small car produces in a year, if it gets 27 miles-per-gallon of gasoline and only travels 12,000 miles per year. A little better than the average car in America.

So, stay off beef and you offset one year of driving a small car short distances.

Is Al Gore preaching that simple lesson or is he more concerned with white-washing Steve Jobs on the issue of back-dated stock options.

Bloggers conquer

Who really are bloggers?  Take a look at this list of the top ten neighborhoods where bloggers live who joined Outside-In. 

First, let me caution that I don't know how the list was made up but I'm told from a reliable source that it is  based on Outside-In's own list of bloggers.

In all cases, and I know everyone of these ten neighborhoods, well, these are neighborhoods (except for Newton) that are being gentrified and have been undergoing gentrification for the last several decades.  Bloggers who have found Outside-In are therefore gentrifiers.  Or possibly bloggers are the children of gentrifier's. Either way the conclusion is the same:

The kind of people who see the world with different eyes, see a marginal neighborhood as desirable, and set out to change it with their personal will are the people who write blogs and seek ways to get exposure (that is what Outside-In does). Wow. I'll buy that.

Sociology is not gone

A recent book review by Alan Wolfe in The New Republic of a book by a nobody-Lefty-sociologist raised the question of whether sociology had died.

Yes sociology died and it took much too long to die.  The great sociologists were Emile Durkheim and Max Weber.  Their work will survive for several centuries.  The problem is that academic sociologists in the 1960s ignored the contributions of a few worthy sociologists such as Daniel Bell and Seymour Martin Lipset and focused on a 19th Century economist who was totally discredited by economists.

Academic sociology in the 1960s fortress mentality was 100% Marxist.  Marx had been rejected a century earlier by his own academic peers because the labor theory of value, that he promoted, is meaningless in explaining 3/4ths of the assets in modern China and 98% of the asset values in the U.S. after 1900.  Could the price of a Richard Sera, a share of MacDonalds, or the price of an empty lot on Manhattan be explained by labor costs?  No!  Honesty and competence were rejected by academic sociologists for an outmoded and ludicrous economic ideology.  If honesty had survived in sociology the appealing college courses in 1970 would have had titles like "What comes after social classes have disappeared in America?" or "Why social class analysis doesn't work anymore." Those courses would have been packed. For ignoring reality sociology is justifiably dead.

However, the great thinking and clear-headed contributions of Max Weber and Daniel Bell have survived in the field of Social Thought.  Social Thought is the offspring of Weber and was reborn in the genius of Mary Douglas.  Douglas's first book on this subject was How Institutions Think.  Douglas has many followers and she is the leader of a vital field.  Many of the relevant names can be found on my website on the subject.

Sociology is justifiably dead but Max Weber lives on in Social Thought.

Rasberry reminded me

Occassionaly I make astute and useful observations of human behavior.  My co-author Rasberry reminded me of this the other day. Back sometime in the early 1970s the house next door to mine was bought by a developer who never introduced himself to me.  He had figured that the house he bought would be worth a great deal more on the market if he converted it from a quaint Victorian in a wooded vale into a stark suburban beauty with white picket fence. 

I came home one day, mid day, and a tree cutter was climbing the 50 foot high cypress that grew exactly straddling both sides of the property line. I yelled to the guy to come down which he did.  I asked him to stop until the matter was discussed by the two property owners. He just told me to go to hell, he was hired by the owner of the property.  He was clearly hired for his strong physique and belligerent confidence.

My solution, which Rasberry has always since called "Men love cars" was to park my car under the tree so that he couldn't possibly cut branches without demolishing my car.

He stopped and left.  The developer stopped everything he was doing and promptly sold the house to a nice old lady for her disabled son.

Service monopoly

I have written on occasion about service monopolies. The first place I wrote about service monopolies was in my 1984 Transaction Based Economics which is online.  It would appear that I discovered the commercial phenomenon which is not the same as the economist's "natural" monopoly.  More recently I was talking about the reason Google will be such a great success while most people fail to understand what is happening at Google including most of their management.

Google is a service monopoly and so is eBay.  So long as one company provides the best service to the majority of users it will grow to be nearly 90% of the market.  This was true (even without political power) for the Bell Telephone Company for over a century and with the Yellow Pages.

I first saw this phenomenon in the Briarpatch with a local quarterly called Common Ground.  Common Ground in the SF Bay Area was so good at reaching the entire market of New Age product and service users that all New Age and all New Age related sellers chose to be listed in the Common Ground. There was no need for a second product so long as Common Ground worked perfectly.

That is true for Google and eBay. 

The subject comes up now because I was in Seattle and startled to find that Craig's List doesn't break the real estate and rental listings into small neighborhoods.  Craig's list is a service monopoly because it works so perfectly.

Well it sure as hell isn't working in Seattle or any other city where it doesn't break down listings into small neighborhoods.  If Craig Newmark has become lazy, which often happens to business founders, he will be replaced solely for this failure.  No one who wants to live on Capital Hill or Ballard in Seattle will waste their time looking at listings that cover the rest of the city.

What is a moderate?

I keep talking about my small dinner party for moderates.  Nearly everyone considers themselves "a moderate" and wants to know what kind of person I am inviting to the dinner.

Its is quite simple. 

* If you are a black moderate you consider Condi Rice, Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell as good examples for your children, not Al Sharpton or Jessie Jackson.

* If you are a moderate Jew you recognize that George W. Bush is the best friend the Jews have ever had in their 2,500 year history and you support him.  You don't say your vote for the survival of Jews in Israel is justifiably offset by your support for government programs to all the incompetent, lazy and criminal groups that are the major occupants of our "bottom class".

* If you are a moderate Adult you know that the lesson of human history is that national weakness is always an invitation for other stronger and more malevolent nations to attack you.  You know that one of the major lessons of the 20th Century was that ideology is the greatest poison of the contemporary world and that commerce is the only antidote.

* Moderates know that WalMart has contributed more benefits to low income people at no cost to the taxpayers than any idealistic government program anyone can conceive.