Pro Commerce

Fences

When Jews do anything it is always a "human rights violation." Check out the Lefty media and Jimmy boy Carter on the subject of walls and fences.

What most of these anti-Semites fail to notice is that the Green Zone in Baghdad is defined by a fence. Thailand is building a fence across the entire Southern half of the country to keep Muslims from going north.

Then read the latest:

"India and Saudi Arabia are now major customers for barbed wire, ground sensors, night-vision equipment and jeep-like ground forces patrol vehicles because they have both invested in enormous passive defense; border-control systems far larger than Israel’s, Saudi Arabia's fences must guard it against incursions from Yemen and Iraq, and India's are along the line of control with Pakistan in Kashmir and all around its land border with Bangladesh."

Jerry Brown did good

Jerry Brown is still alive, so this is not his obituary.  I know Jerry, but not well and we have a dozen close friends in common.

I simply wanted to point to two great political acts on Jerry's part, done early in his political career, that are worthy of appreciation. Great appreciation.

The first was Jerry's act as governor to appoint Ed Roberts as Director of Rehabilitation for the State of California.  When Ed took office the budget was 10% for the disabled who needed full-time care givers, 10% for the deaf and 80% for the blind. 

Ed talked personally to the leaders of the deaf and blind communities and got their agreement to reverse the budget priorities.  With the support of the deaf and blind communities Ed changed the budget to 80% for the disabled who needed full time care and 20% for the deaf and blind.

Jerry's second wonderful act as governor was to invite in to his office all the leading anti-whaling activists in the country, most of whom were in California for a conference.  The anti-whaling movement was in the throes of becoming virulently anti-Japanese and was growing rapidly with an underlying racist tone.

Governor Jerry Brown had read an article I had written for the CoEvolution Quarterly providing evidence of the important contribution of the Japanese to the anti-whaling movement and to the growing unfounded racists antagonism toward the Japanese.

Jerry made my case to the anti-whaling activists, added his own insight and political weight, and effectively derailed the racists direction of the movement.

Insider's view

This was in yesterday's Jerusalem Post.  Is in an insider's understanding?:

President Peres to Ted Turner's delegation: "Iran's strength, he said, derived from the weakness and division of the West as reflected in its inability to impose severe economic sanctions to pressure the Islamic Republic to end its nuclear program.

"Peres said Europe was gradually realizing the perils posed by Iran. Europe was always right, but that Europe was always late, he said, citing European attitudes toward Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler as examples of Europe's tardiness. He expressed the hope that Europe would break this pattern with regard to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad."

The best organizer in history

The most powerful human organizer, for good, that I ever knew of or met, was Ed Roberts a key organizer of the Disability Independent Living Movement in the U.S. and worldwide.  I consider him greater than M L King. King had a moral cause based on the military service and sacrifice of lives over decades of the black community on his side and the blatant history of Southern violence. 

Ed Roberts created a movement out of whole cloth, with no visible community and no history of military service people to back him up.

Ed never talked about rights.  Ed only talked about why we all benefit from including the disabled in our lives.

This is a part of what I wrote after Ed died:

Ed spoke slowly, and especially for the first few minutes of listening to him, he was hard to understand because he had an air tube in his mouth, which he shifted around with his tongue. He also moved his head often, and reoriented his electric wheelchair erratically to deal with his physical discomfort. In a silent video, he would have looked like a bumblebee dancing.

When Ed talked to you, however, he spoke directly to your heart. Everyone listened, fully enraptured. He used a language that was deep; he had a heart that was clear and true, and the intent in his heart was communicated directly to the person he was talking to. He reached deeply into the most human, caring part of other people. Ed was incredible on a person-to-person basis, and he was also impressive in a public-speaking mode. When Ed spoke to you, you knew that you needed Ed to be part of your life. If there were other people like Ed, with disabilities, you knew that they had to be part of your life, too.

It is impossible for me to fully communicate the power of Ed Roberts to evoke humanity and caring in the people he dealt with, though I saw him do this time and time again. I don't know the source of this power. Ed could meet someone for the first time, and within minutes that person wanted to support Ed and his project with everything they had.

Wounded bird syndrome

Men are often attracted to women who are messed up, disabled in one way or another.  I learned that we men have a "wounded bird syndrome."

I learned this from Judy Heumann, one of the founders of the Disability Independent Living Movement. I always found Judy attractive because she is so strong, smart, competent, warm and universally wonderful. Judy had polio as an infant and has been in a wheel chair most of her life.

One day when I was consulting with Judy and one of the groups she co-founded, I asked Judy if she had to fight off many men pursuing her.  The answer was yes.  She said that she and other women with visible disabilities were often 'hit on' by men.  She said that her friends referred to it as the Wounded Bird Syndrome.  She believed that many men wanted a woman who would be highly dependent on them and would return their caring treatment with loyalty and love.

Some women respond to this syndrome, others don't.

Blacks causing their own murders

My headline is too strong but it is also too true. I apologize for the gross treatment of a whole people, but this point is too important to ignore.

The murders I'm referring to are the murders of black teenage boys by other teenage black boys and the occasional murder of a black teenage girl.  The murder rate in black neighborhoods has doubled in the past three years in every big city in America. 

You need only two facts to understand this phenomenon.  First, the total of teenage deaths for blacks and whites is the same.  The difference between the two is that whites are predominantly suicides in this age group and blacks are homicides. Black teenager get into gun fights at the same rate that white teenagers get drunk and drive into a tree or take an overdose (Source: Deborah Prothero Stith). 

So it is likely that some major part of the rise in black teenage homicide is really a black form of suicide.

Second, the black community that votes, votes 88% Democrat. Blacks have been aligned with the Democratic party's anti-America anti-Iraq War message for the past four years.  For more than fifty years, serving in the U.S. military has been the most effective way for a poor black to get out of the ghetto and rise in society.

Thanks to the black community's anti-Iraq Democratic politics, black enlistment has dropped 60% since before the Iraq War.

The black community has failed to show appreciation for the great examples of modern American black success: Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, General Colin Powell and Merrill-Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal.  Instead, the Democrats cater to a farce, Al Sharpton, who immediately supports scurrilous blacks making false criminal charges against whites. (I Googled 'black political buffoon' to remember Sharpton's name.)

Blacks have created their own teenage murder problem.  They don't praise the great blacks of our day and they vilify the very Army that has created the greatest hope for black teenagers. 

Truly tragic.

Arrived home safely

I went to today's anti-war rally in San Francisco with two signs saying what you see in the photo on the right "America has won the Iraq war."

I was a little anxious about the reaction of the crowd and promptly found the counter-protesters with American and Israeli flags. There were about 50 counter protesters, many of whom quickly understood my message.  There were about 15-18,000 anti-war protesters at the beginning.  They were joined by 5-7,000 union protesters arriving in a small parade.  Total 20-25,000. 

I'm not surprised to see the union support.  The unions made up the bulk of the Seattle anti-globalization demonstration. Unions are themselves losers and seem to be attracted to losing propositions.

I had nothing to fear from the anti-war demonstrators.  Nobody seemed to understand my posters.  Even some Code Pinkies came to ask me what my sign meant and they listened politely. About 200 people took photos of me and my signs; Channel 4 and an Internet site interviewed me.

Deconstructing Tundra

Deconstructing is usually a Lefty anti-commerce activity, borrowed from France (Derrida's term), and offering itself as an intellectual tool for applying crude Marxist analysis to literature and popular media. 

Since deconstruction is an empty concept I feel free to use it to analyze a pro-commerce billboard calling out to passersby on behalf of the Toyota (global top ranked corporation renowned for superior quality) made truck with the name Tundra (model name, referring to frozen dirt above the arctic circle, and alluding to the vast isolated openness of the Arctic world where brave pioneers venture).

A billboard is inherently a pro-commerce voice, broadcasting to anyone who looks at it, for no charge, without discrimination between high class and homeless, without regard to power or merit, calling to the penniless as well as the billionaire. 'Listen, democracy, listen everyone.' 

This particular billboard is owned by Clear Channel that sells space, by the month, to Toyota as part of a marketing promotion developed by Toyota's ad agency.  Clear Channel pays a local landlord, by the year, for a market rate lease on the land and air-rights of the billboard.  Clear Channel was recently taken private by investors from Bain Capital and Thomas Lee Equity. Toyota uses Saatchi & Saatchi as its ad agency in the U.S. but the main global agency is in Tokyo: Dentsu.

This media message carries the not well hidden statement that each person in a commercial society is powerful.  Each commercial person is more powerful than any unskilled human has ever previously imagined humans to be.  The observer of this billboard is told he or she, without special training, with only a driver's license, can move 10,000 pounds, five tons, with ease, something no plant or animal on earth has been able to do previously.  Moving 10,000 pounds, with ease, is a feat previously open only to skilled equipment operators, earthquakes, typhoons, tsunamis and volcanoes. A human, right off the street, can be a god with the help of this Toyota made truck.

While it is not mentioned, this truck is made of more than a thousand parts, produced and assembled by tens of thousands of people scattered all over the planet.  It required more that half-a-million people, working in cooperation to create a truck like this and produce this ad.

The graphics of this billboard speak to the super-human qualities that the advertisement promotes.  The billboard is lofted in the air on steel pylons, the viewer has to look up...to appreciate the super-human elevated message. The 'look up' super-human theme is carried further with the photographic prospective on the truck. The camera is placed near the ground looking up. The truck that offers super-human powers is portrayed as nearly divine.

The typography of the word Tundra, suggests that the word is stamped on a forge, with hydraulic power, into cold steel.  Another sign of super-human power.

Indeed, the meta-message of this Toyota-Tundra billboard is that ordinary human passersby, are, by dint of their ability to buy, without effort or hesitation, a tool that gives them super-human powers. Each passerby is a member of a commercial society, that distributes power of god-like magnitude, in democratic and individualized form to anyone who wishes it.

The billboard is making a true, respectful and insightful statement.

Trash the New Republic

In case you haven't been following the New Republic scandal, a good report is here.

In simple terms, the New Republic ran an op-ed piece by a soldier in Iraq (Scott Thomas Beauchamp) who is married to a staffer at the New Republic.  The op-ed was a mean-spirited, totally dishonest fabrication about badly behaving soldiers. When the Army investigated the entire article was found to be a lie. 

The New Republic, blinded by Lefty ideology, internal dishonesty, journalist arrogance and incestual nepotism....has never apologized to its readers....they just keep on lying and covering up.

As an embarrassed subscriber please log-on to my account an give them hell.  mp@well, password: trashit

Postscript: Today's Wall Street Journal (10/27) has Peggy Noonan with a superb attack on the New Republic scandal and closes with: (the editors should)" ... have looked at the half-baked, overcooked junior Hemingway of Scott Thomas Beauchamp and said, "That sounds like a buncha hooey."

Olafur Eliasson art

Yesterday afternoon I went to see the Olafur Eliasson exhibition at the San Francisco MOMA.  I went because of a great review by David Littlejohn in the 10/23 Wall Street Journal.

Would you like Eliasson's work?  I like powerful, emotionally moving creations that include my whole body and my entire range of perceptions.  Only the organ of smell was missing.  Many of the pieces were executions of ideas I had dreamed of such as an entire wall that was the reflection of the surface of a body of water with ripples in it.

If you like great art that is fun you will enjoy the room lit in special yellow light that leaves everything and everybody rendered colorless in only black and white with shades of gray in between. Or the two spaces that generate acrophobia.  Or the walk-in freezer with a global cooling race car.

Exhibit open thru February.

Fixing public schools

For some reason, my friends seem to expect me to have the answers to the world's problems. I don't but I have had experience with several of them and have unusual solutions based on my experiences.

I spent ten years working on improving the public school system (President of the Service Committee on Public Education and partner of Dick Raymond in the Portola Institute). In the end a solution came to mind but I didn't have the drive or life-focus to work on implementing the solution.

Schools systems, unlike other local urban bureaucracies don't have members of their constituency die from school incompetence.  The exception is where a kid comes in and sprays bullets.  The problem is that the education itself is terrible and plenty of law suits for wrongful education would result in bureaucratic change.  But there is no such thing as a wrongful education suit; just wrongful death suits.  Sewer systems get fixed with law suits for wrongful death and the threat of suits, so do parks, streets, electrical grids, transportation systems and traffic systems.

In lieu of law suits to fix education by demanding 'best practices' we have to change the bureaucracy so that good teachers migrate to the classroom environments where they can prosper and leave the classrooms where they are impediments.

The answer is a National Seniority and Pension Portability Plan.  The NSPPP would allow a teacher in a big city, with five years experience, who is bored and frustrated with her class and the violence she has to subdue, to transfer to a suburb or ex-urb and keep her seniority and her pension. 

The opposite will happen too. A teacher who is exceptional in a suburb and wants to try her skill in a more diverse and complex environment could transfer to a big city school with no adverse effect on her income, pension or seniority status.

The consequence of seniority and pension portability would be movement of teachers to the teaching environments they like and to teaching environments they find rewarding.  Teachers are the key ingredient in education. Teaching is what needs to be supported, rewarded and encouraged. Good, exciting, enthusiastic teaching that is.

(Footnote: I use teacher examples as female.  That is the way it has been so far in my life and will certainly be for the rest of my life.)

Kronos preview

I went to a preview of a Kronos commissioned piece last night.  The Kronos Quartet played a seven part composition by Glenn Kotche called Anomaly.  Mr. Kotche sat in for the performance as the percussionist using all the traditional percussion plus bells.

Would you like it?  I like most of what the Kronos does.  This was a brilliant piece specifically suited for the Kronos, with a great deal of lyricism, which I genuinely love, as well as great complexity of meter, harmonics and scales.

I was invited because I was one of several dozen people who donated to the Angel Stoyanof Commission Fund.  I will donate more in the future.  Angel was a wonderful friend of mine who loved business, got deep pleasure from a "deal" and always joined me in explaining that commerce had powerful and important traditions that are older than Buddhism and Christianity.

Emeryville

The question of whether government policy can fortify commerce or stultify commerce has a very simple answer: it can.  The empirical proof is the town of Emeryville.

Emeryville is a small political entity on the Bay between Berkeley and Oakland.  Emeryville, forty years ago, began to replace dying manufacturing plants with modern diversified commerce, retail, wholesale and light manufacturing.  The zoning and taxation were all favorable to business. Today, Emeryville has an impressive skyline, great schools and thriving businesses.

I couldn't find a good photo of Emeryville from the air, so I had to take this video myself (I don't have a good SLR digital camera). What is distinct is that Emeryville has the same geography, transportation and work force as Berkeley and Oakland.  But Emeryville thrives while the other two are commercially sick.  The difference: Berkeley is run on the principles of Cuba, by Left wing ideologues and Oakland is run on the systems common in Nigeria, corrupt-cronyism.

There you have it: empirical, visual evidence of what works and what doesn't work.  Pro commerce is prosperity, anti-commerce is crime, depression, boredom and malaise.

Translation problem

I heard Norman Podhoretz talk last night on a promotion tour for his book World War IV.  Good turn out, more open minded people in San Francisco than I could have believed. It was comforting to hear a great mind thinking like me.  He is much calmer in his presentation than I could be.

He raised an interesting point.  Many EU countries have laws punishing Holocaust denial.  But the EU has only occasionally been on the side of Israel when Israel's neighbors are trying to exterminate Jews again.  Worst of all, the EU and Germany in particular have been financially supporting Iran in its open determination to pursue a new Holocaust.

I blame it on translation of the word "denial."  In English to deny a fact of history is one meaning of denial and we use the same meaning to deny the intent to repeat history.  To us, the Germans are in "denial" if they think a future Holocaust is not something to worry about.  It is probably that the word "denial" has no present tense or future tense in German. Or maybe there is another new German word for denial about the next Holocaust the Germans are doing their best to create.

Mersing

I don't write about my family but the failure of Google maps to show a usable image of my father's island is enough to get me to write about it.

My father claimed to have been conceived on a train because he always wanted to travel and he did all his life.  When he was in his late sixties he set off from England in a British Ford camper van. He and his wife, Lu, spent several years traveling as far East as one can go driving.  For those of you who know geography, that, in 1968, was to the tip of Malaysia.  Along the way he taught cultural anthropology. He was also a rabbi.

When he could drive no further he bought an island on the coast of Malaysia off the town of Mersing.  I visited him there as did most of my family and many world travelers.  He knew that an island on the South China Sea, at the equator, would bring many visitors.  Some years there were 90 visitors who arrived by plane in Singapore sixty miles away.  He had to go to Singapore every two weeks, anyway, to get his Malaysian visa extended.

My father and Lu lived on the island for seven years.  The local fishermen sold them fresh fish everyday from their boats. They had a garden and coconut trees.  He used to joke that he was the only farmer in the world with a two week visa.

I wanted to see what had happened to the island since they left 25 years ago.  Google images barely shows the island, but not anything closer to the ground. (Photo on the left looks like the right island and the right beach.)

Hippy sexual explosion

I have often pondered the reason for the explosion of sexual freedom and experimentation that I lived with and enjoyed in the hippy era.  For years I thought the reason for the sexual experimentation was the large overhang of women in the baby boom wave who were two years younger than the men.  There were several million more women one, two and three years younger than each male.

Now I think I was largely wrong.

The reason for the sex explosion was the absence of life path constraints. The hippies were young, lived with no responsibility, no plans in their personal life...just a universal belief that they and the people around them were going to remake the world into a new utopia.

It was the absence of responsibility and a life path that created the sexual freedom.  The other places I've experienced the same license have been on a cruise ship and at college.

Child abuse

The mother of my new granddaughter attended some "mommy and me" classes in infant care recently.  She reports that a main subject of discussion was about getting or not getting childhood innoculations. 

The main innoculations these days are polio, tetanus, diptheria, mumps, measles, rubella, varicella, hep 1 and 2, type B flu and pertussis.

The reason many of these mothers, in a sophisticated new age, urban area, were discussing not getting these shots for their infant was the risk of causing autism.

If you haven't seen one of these illnesses in a fellow human, much less an infant, you might waste your time considering the incompetent nonsense that presents itself as showing an innoculation cause for autism.  If you had seen any of the life altering consequences of any of these diseases, you wouldn't consider any anecdotal evidence to dissuade you from getting the full set of innoculations.

My contribution to this matter is that any parent who fails to get their child innoculated against pertussis (whooping cough) is commiting child abuse.

I have seen a 3 yearold with pertussis.  You can see it online for yourself.  Any parent who has seen it has put it online to warn others.  A child with pertussis sounds like it is about to die every three minutes for weeks. 

The parents of the child I saw, close to death every three minutes for weeks, promptly got a divorce.  The parent who had decided against the innoculation was someone the other parent could never again live with.

To not get your child innoculations is child abuse....vicious child abuse that can last a lifetime, it the child survives the disease.

I say we call it victory

Here is an excerpt from today's Wall Street Journal:

"Victory Is Within Reach in Iraq

By MICHAEL A. LEDEEN
October 20, 2007; Page A11

"Should we declare victory over al Qaeda in the battle of Iraq?

"The very question would have seemed proof of dementia only a few months ago, yet now some highly respected military officers, including the commander of Special Forces in Iraq, Gen. Stanley McCrystal, reportedly feel it is justified by the facts on the ground.

"These people are not suggesting that the battle is over."

He goes on:

"...the late David Galula, the French colonel who fought in Algeria and then wrote "Counterinsurgency Warfare: Theory and Practice" in the 1960s. He argued that insurgencies are revolutionary wars whose outcome is determined by control of, and support from, the population. The best way to think about such wars is to imagine the board game of Go. Each side starts with limited assets, each has the support of a minority of the territory and the population. Each has some assets within the enemy's sphere of influence. The game ends when one side takes control of the majority of the population, and thus the territory.

"Whoever gains popular support wins the war. Galula realized that while revolutionary ideology is central to the creation of an insurgency, it has very little to do with the outcome. That is determined by politics, and, just as in an election, the people choose the winner.

"In the early phases of the conflict, the people remain as neutral as they can, simply trying to stay alive. As the war escalates, they are eventually forced to make a choice, to place a bet, and that bet becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. The people have the winning piece on the board: intelligence. Once the Iraqis decided that we were going to win, they provided us with information about the terrorists: who they were, where they were, what they were planning, where their weapons were stashed, and so forth."

I (Michael) believe it is time for non-officials to start declaring we won in Iraq.

Geography and Social Sorting

One interesting observation I made, using social sorting is that people select the cities, towns and neighborhoods they live in to accommodate their skills.

The people with the most social skills, skills for work and daily life, migrate to the dense urban areas.  From the center of a dense urban area there is a ring of clines reaching outward to the ex-urban areas where people with the least developed social skills choose to live.

The most important social skill is the ability to live, work and associate with people who are least like ourselves. If a person is willing to live with people of different political, educational, ethnic and social class qualities they live in the center of the clines.  The less willing they are, the more they feel comfortable with homogeneity, the further out from the central dense urban area they live.

This arises because it offers personal advantages.  I dated a number of women who lived in outer ring suburbs.  Invariably, these women found people like themselves, with the same level of social skill; their friends and neighbors were able to help them with housing, child rearing, daily life and finding jobs.

A few of my friends have confirmed this observation.  Have you?

Confessions

There are two books I couldn't finish reading. The writing was too powerful and too moving.

The one I put down yesterday, Clarence Thomas' My Grandfather's Son and the other I put down years ago, Ted Hughes' Birthday Letters.

I can not explain in words the power either of these books had on me but the tears in my eyes, swelling up page after page and the anguish I felt made it impossible to continue reading.  I can not bear my own suffering as I connect with the truth these two men speak.

Clarence Thomas' story means a great deal to me because I have lived many of my years with Blacks.  I know the story of Clarence, I know the truth he speaks, I feel the pain.  All the efforts I have made in my life have been to right the wrongs done to him and I am still fighting those battles.

Ted Hughes wrote with an intensity and beauty about the human condition, about my condition, that brought intense pain to my whole body, to my whole world.

Both these men, writing with extraordinary beauty and candor, left me empty and without words to cope.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Postscript: My friend David explained my reaction to the Thomas book with a reference to an interview with Shelby Steele.  I put it online for my readers.  Here is a key quote:

Using Social Sorting

My four international examples of social sorting deal with the issue of leaders and entrepreneurs in a society.

These people can be killed as they were in the USSR and China, or they can be driven out deliberately as in the case of the two waves of outcasts from Cuba.  First, three years after the revolution, in 1962 when property was confiscated, all potential anti-Castro leaders and entrepreneurs fled Cuba. Then again twenty years later when the gates to leave were opened a new generation of leaders and entrepreneurs left the country.

The USSR, China and Cuba succeeded in eliminating dissent and commerce by involuntary social sorting.

Sort to eliminate leaders and entrepreneurs and you get a bland nearly rebellion-commerce free society.

The case were social sorting occurred without a deliberate government decision was in the Palestinian territories. Over a period of 25 years from 1968 to 1993 the Palestinians with leadership skill and business skills left the country; there was no political stability and efforts by the PLO outside the country were always toward instability.  When Adolph Arafat arrived to run the country in 1993 a few business people returned but quickly learned that his corrupt government was no place for them. 

As a result there are virtually no competent people, no business people and few leaders in Gaza or the West Bank.

We have a problem

We have won the insurrection war in Iraq, just as we won the Cold War and just as Israel won the Intifida I and II insurrections.

We have to help the American people understand that we won but we can not brag for fear of re-igniting the conflict.

The best solution is to have military experts explain the victory to the American public, without having government or military officials make the relevant statements. 

I am writing to Max Boot, [email protected], Isobel Coleman [email protected], Steven Simon [email protected], Colonel Robert Ferrell [email protected], Edward Luttwak , Guy Ben-Ari , Bonnie Glaser, Thomas Henriksen [email protected] and George Friedman

Join me in writing these military experts and urging them to explain to the American public about the nature of insurgency and the evidence that we have won in Iraq.

We won but we can't proclaim victory

The Wall Street Journal has a summary of an article that is not yet on the newsstands.

It says what I say about winning a war against insurgents.

Winning the War on Terror May Mimic Cold War's End

• FOREIGN AFFAIRS -- NOVEMBER/DECEMBER

What would victory in a war against terrorists look like, for both sides?

Philip H. Gordon, who works for the Brookings Institution, a think tank, says in Foreign Affairs that an American victory over terrorists will be similar to the one the U.S. won over the Soviet Union. It won't end with Washington and its allies capturing and killing every terrorist on the planet, he says, just as the U.S. didn't end the Cold War by having NATO troops march into the Kremlin.

Instead, he says, Islamic extremists will lose the way the U.S.S.R. did, with their ideology and tactics discredited and their erstwhile supporters deserting them. Mr. Gordon says this will occur as a result of disgust at Islamic militants' use of violence against other Muslims, the economic failures of extreme Islamic regimes, and a fear in the Islamic world, evidenced in polls, of having al Qaeda-led governments.

In this version of victory, hard-line splinter groups will remain, but they won't affect Americans' daily lives in any significant way. Terrorists will be unable to launch attacks on the scale of 9/11, and when they do strike, they will be imprisoned as murderers, rather than as soldiers of an opposing side.

Focusing on completely eradicating terrorism rather than fostering its slow demise would drag the U.S. into precisely the costly wars abroad that Osama bin Laden wants the U.S. to fight. Mr. bin Laden and his ilk are unlikely to win in the long term in any case, says Mr. Gordon, but the war in Iraq will prolong the conflict as an effective recruiting tool for al Qaeda. The U.S. should instead focus on exploiting extremist Islam's weak points as an ideology, using diplomacy and economic development, and imprisoning terrorist leaders to bring about Islamic terrorism's slow death.

Maui faces Lefty troubles

I wrote a blog on the economics of Maui which led my Hawaiian corespondent to send the following report.  Remember, tourists get the word about a dangerous place very fast and Maui is in direct competition with Kawai.

Our greatest fear is that, after living here for 8 years, we see that the Hawaiian Islands are just on the brink of anarchy. When the "protesters" blockaded the Kauai port to prevent the Superferry from arriving, that was anarchy. The Coast Guard just gave up, and all arrested protesters have been let go. So much for securing our ports from enemies foreign and domestic. Other people have commented that the Islands are at a "tipping point", but they don't mean the chaos one.

Anyway, the veneer of order and civilization is very thin here, and the police are not interested in protecting white people (and the rest should not be so sure about their protection, either). When things start to degenerate because of terrible decisions by the leadership, there could easily be an economic collapse (see letter to the editor mentioned below), and lawlessness will reign. I have predicted similar if the Akaka Bill ever passes, since all land title would be nullified (in spite of what Akaka claims).

You know, you have written it before, but lots of people say "it can't happen here". History demonstrates that such a statement is just wrong.

Hope you can use some of the opinions I have provided. As I noted, the Maui News is an amazing source. The letters alone show that there are people who are truly living in the 1960's (and possibly on a different planet from the rest of humanity).

Regards,

Bob (My name is secret to keep my house from being burned down.)

PS: oh yes, add to the stupid decisions from leadership, we have an attempted ban on "big box" stores. These islands were ruled not so long ago by "mom & pop" stores that severely limited the choices of locals, and the prices were terrible. We pay a lot now, but they were much higher then.

Powerful analytic tool

In several blogs I have used an obvious form of analysis.  While my form of analysis is obvious, it didn't have a name and it wasn't recognized as an analytic tool until I named it and described it first in 1986.  I went to the Library of Congress to see if it had been written about before.  It hadn't, despite its obviousness.

I call my analytic tool Social Sorting and I identified the three main components: the flag, the screen and the overflow.

Social Sorting is the mechanism that determines the composition of all voluntary and commercial human institutions. 

*The flag is what attracts people to join, select-in or buy.  The flag can be a brand, a reputation, an historic association, an idea, a story, an image or anything else known about the institution positive negative or neutral.  Before we go to a particular Home Depot, a PTA meeting, a church, a job opening or pickup a free newspaper, we know something about the institution...sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. What we know is the flag that attracts us.

* We always encounter a screen.  For a job the screen can be a test, a series of interviews or a response to our resume.  The screen can be the price of admission to a movie or theater or to purchase an object.  Some screens are minimal such as we would encounter going to a political party rally or a new church.  Some screens are virtually impenetrable such as a university graduate school, the medical profession or frontline service on a space shuttle.

* Any organization or institution will have an overflow. We will become part of the institution because we want to, or we will leave; it will keep us or reject us.  We are likely to be part of the overflow for most organizations at some point, sometimes age sometimes as with the PTA because our children have graduated. We may leave the institution voluntarily because we don't fit in after weeks months or years, as with a job, a club, a neighborhood, a city, a country, a political party or even a telephone service when we miss too many payments. We can be fired or made to feel uncomfortable or unwanted and leave for that reason.

The people who are in an institution, all institutions, are the ones who came to the flag, passed the screen and haven't overflowed.

Several uses of social sorting are given in future blogs.

Starbucks example

The Board of Supervisors voted in September, to ban a new Starbucks on Geary and 5th Ave, an area that desperately needs foot traffic and retail stores. The decision is part of a permanent and pervasive anti-commerce politics in this city.

Starbucks generates new foot traffic, new business and more coffee shops.  Here are the facts.

The first Starbucks to open in San Francisco was in 1992. Starbucks currently has 80 outlets here. There are currently 250 non-Starbucks coffee shops listed in the Yellow Pages.

When Starbucks opened there were 55 "Coffee, Retail" outlets in the S.F. Yellow Pages. That is more than the actual number since many of these outlets didn't make espresso or open before 8AM.  Five of the 55 were Spinelli's and 3 were Peet's.

The presence of Starbucks increased the number of non-Starbucks coffee shops in San Francisco from 55 to 250 in 15 years.  Four times as many today.

Was Starbucks the reason?  Yes.  We have a perfect test area: North Beach. 

North Beach has no Starbucks shops thanks to the local anti-commerce political majority. (North Beach runs from Pacific Ave. to Octavia on two blocks surrounding Columbus Ave.) North Beach had 8 regular coffee shops in 1992.  I should know, I've been a North Beach coffee habitue since 1978.  North Beach today has 8 regular coffee shops. The same number.

Pretty good proof that Starbucks generates coffee shops that would not exist without Starbucks leading the way.

Here is a video of the desolate and hopeless corner where only a Starbucks could have worked.

Like Jews voting for Nazis

Today's widespread news coverage of a gay twins research project (Dr. Alan Sanders of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute) to find the gay gene, reminds me of the key issue here.

When gays vote for a Democrat they are like Jews voting for Nazis in 1932.  As I have pointed out in this blog, the main type of research that will be supported for human genetic engineering, worldwide, will be to genetically engineer offspring who are not gay.  The second most focused form of research will be to get rid of dark skin pigmentation.

The Democratic Party, top to bottom, nearly every Democrat in the Senate has been voting in favor of federal funding of stem cell research.  All the Republican senators and the President have voted against federal funding of stem cell research.  The term "stem cell research" is a synonym for human genetic engineering.  Stem cells are the pluripotent cells that can be manipulated into genetically altered human beings.

The Democrats have made this a political issue and refused to modify their legislation to do what the Republicans want which is to ban any significant growth of proto-humans.  The Democrats are voting to use genetic engineering to eliminate future gay offspring whether they will admit it or not.

Nothing I have said is other than totally verifiable fact. 

I repeat, a gay voting for Democrats is like a Jew voting for the Nazis.

(Look at the interesting issues raised in the comments.)

Blacks causing their own murders

My headline is too strong but it is also too true. I apologize for the gross treatment of a whole people, but this point is too important to ignore.

The murders I'm referring to are the murders of black teenage boys by other teenage black boys and the occasional murder of a black teenage girl.  The murder rate in black neighborhoods has doubled in the past three years in every big city in America. 

You need only two facts to understand this phenomenon.  First, the total of teenage deaths for blacks and whites is the same.  The difference between the two is that whites are predominantly suicides in this age group and blacks are homicides. Black teenager get into gun fights at the same rate that white teenagers get drunk and drive into a tree or take an overdose (Source: Deborah Prothero Stith). 

So it is likely that some major part of the rise in black teenage homicide is really a black form of suicide.

Second, the black community that votes, votes 88% Democrat. Blacks have been aligned with the Democratic party's anti-America anti-Iraq War message for the past four years.  For more than fifty years, serving in the U.S. military has been the most effective way for a poor black to get out of the ghetto and rise in society.

Thanks to the black community's anti-Iraq Democratic politics, black enlistment has dropped 60% since before the Iraq War.

The black community has failed to show appreciation for the great examples of modern American black success: Clarence Thomas, Thomas Sowell, Condi Rice, General Colin Powell and Merrill-Lynch CEO Stan O'Neal.  Instead, the Democrats cater to a farce, Al Sharpton, who immediately supports scurrilous blacks making false criminal charges against whites. (I Googled 'black political buffoon' to remember Sharpton's name.)

Blacks have created their own teenage murder problem.  They don't praise the great blacks of our day and they vilify the very Army that has created the greatest hope for black teenagers. 

Truly tragic.

Pin the tail on the University

We know how bad most American Universities are at providing intelligent political, historical and economic discourse for their students.  Thanks to Bernie Marcus, co-founder of Home Depot, that is going to change.

Here is Naomi Riley in the Wall Street Journal:

"How can donors be sure that the money they give will go to fund the things they want? Mr. Marcus says it is time to hold administrators' feet to the fire. Along with John M. Templeton Jr. and the John William Pope Foundation, Mr. Marcus has provided the seed money ($5 million) for the Center for Excellence in Higher Education (CEHE). The Indianapolis-based center, launched last month, aims to help donors "use philanthropy as a lever to reform higher education," says Frederic Fransen, its executive director. Reform includes a greater emphasis on core curricula, a free-market understanding of economics, a more balanced approach to politics, affordable tuition, tenured faculty who spend more time in the classroom, greater transparency in university governance, and an end to grade inflation.

"For a buck, universities would do anything," Mr. Marcus said in a recent interview. "We are seeing more anti-Western, anti-Israel and anti-democracy sentiment on campus" these days, he observed, adding wryly, "The Saudis are paying an enormous amount of money for that." Mr. Marcus would like to compete. He has found, unfortunately, that the universities are generally hostile to the economic and political system that has allowed businessmen like him to thrive. "My success in life is because of free enterprise," he says. But "colleges don't teach this." And the tales of Mr. Bass and the Robertsons give Mr. Marcus and his cohort pause.

"University administrations have often ignored "donor intent" when spending the proceeds from a particular gift. And thanks to an antiquated hiring system and a faculty that will scream "infringement on academic freedom" any time an outsider tries to exert some influence, the problems in higher education have become entrenched.

"There are donors with the money to get around these problems -- to create entirely new schools or departments within a university. But how do you get a university to agree to, say, starting a separate school devoted to the study of free enterprise? And make sure they'll stick to the plan once they cash your check? CEHE will help donors (free of charge) craft contracts with universities to ensure their money is used properly. It will also perform due diligence on these gifts once the agreement is complete."

We won again

The history of Western warfare is based on the metaphor of chess.  The winner is the one who has lost the fewest important pieces and the loser concedes defeat. Until 1955 that defined nearly all of our wars.

Since 1995, America has won four wars that don't fit the metaphor and we are confused. 

The Cold War was won by the U.S. but the losing side never conceded defeat.  Very few troops had been lost on either side.  The best metaphor for the Cold War is arm wrestling.  The winner pushed the loser's arm to the table after a forty year long battle of power.  But the winner could not announce victory, lest the Russian loser demand a rematch.  Eastern Europe was freed because the loser got up from the arm-wrestling table and left the room.

The Second Iraq War was won in April of 2003 when the U.S. forces defeated the Iraqi forces of Saddam Hussein, in six brilliantly executed weeks, but the losing army ran away and the Hussein government evaporated.  There was no government left to concede defeat.  No metaphor here.  Pure ancient military conquest with the responsibility for creating a new government left to the American forces.

America won two insurgent wars.  We won in Vietnam and in the aftermath of the Second Iraq War.

An insurgent war ends when: one side leaves the battle field or the insurgents lose the will to continue fighting. 

In Vietnam, the American forces and the South Vietnamese Army clearly won the army-to-army battle against the North Vietnam Army and vanquished the insurgents.  The U.S. and the South Vietnamese won the war when a concession of defeat emerged as a peace treaty with the North, which was signed in Paris.

Because Americans have no understanding of victory in an insurgent war, America turned victory into defeat by leaving the battlefield and left the North to sweep in and win the war unopposed.

The Second Iraq War Insurgency ended in September 2007 when Anbar province and Baghdad were cleared of insurgents, the insurgents realized they could not provoke a civil war, the Sunnis realized the Americans wouldn't leave and the Iraqi government gained the support of the entire nation.

America wasn't listening in September when the Iraqi Prime Minister thanked America for defeating Saddam and his Baathists, for giving Iraq an elected and popular government and for making Iraq safe from insurgents.

We won in Iraq! We won for the entire Middle East.

I know we won for three reasons: The Prime Minister of Iraq said so. All the major Arab nations are coming to a peace conference in the U.S. and Hezbollah conceded defeat by beginning a prisoner exchange.

WE WON. Toasts, parades and parties are in order.

Alzheimer's and nuns

We never seem to hear the end of reports on new research that promises to cure or prevent Alzheimer's. 

How is this possible?  Alzheimer's is based on some propensity of the brain that is established by the time one turns 21 years old.
 
A post-mortem study of the brains of nuns in a Tennessee convent were examined to identify which ones died of Alzheimer's...unambiguously. 

Then a double blind study was done to see if the original written applications for admission to the convent, written 50-70 years earlier showed any correlation to the later Alzheimer outcomes.  They did. High correlation between simple sentences on the admission application and Alzheimer's in later life.

So what is wrong with science, pharma researchers and big pharma companies that they can't understand the meaning of this study and focus on finding DNA predictors of Alzheimer's?  To prevent, diminish or derail Alzheimer's is going to require a genetic modification.