Pro Commerce

New Year's walk

Tomorrow I will take a three hour walk with a friend.  We have been taking this New Year's walk for thirty-five years.  It is a chance to carefully observe another person's life and to reflect on my past year.  I have found it worthwhile because it forces me to see my life with some perspective and particularly to judge some of my previous accomplishments as failures. 

It also gives me a long range perspective on life... I can see it reflected in another person with family, vocation, relations and avocation in a different context. 

The walk provides a contrast to my own life. I have more self credibility when I organize my story.  Its the difference between one person talking to a therapist and a couple doing it.  The latter includes the possibility of accuracy and reliable feedback.

Charlie's apartment

I saw the movie Charlie Wilson's War and enjoyed it.  I particularly loved the political advice at the end: don't abandon your allies after you help them win a war.  Films never have any effect in the real world.  Not one Democrat walked out of that movie and said 'my party and all of its presidential candidates are totally in favor of abandoning our allies in Iraq, cutting and running, just like we Democrats did in Vietnam in 1974 and 1987 in Afghanistan....I won't support such nonsense.'

That was not the point of this blog.  I just wanted to be on record as having been in the apartment building in Arlington, possibly the same apartment that is shown as Congressman Charlie Wilson's bachelor flat. I have looked at that same view many times and spent many dinners and evenings in an identical apartment on the same floor.

Moreover, the Jerusalem restaurant where the movie shows Wilson and Gust meeting with an Israeli to buy $35 million in Soviet weapons, is a restaurant I visited for lunch with my partner and my Jerusalem friend who was formerly the Israeli consul general in San Francisco.  The restaurant was just inside the Jaffa Gate.  It was just as empty for us as it was in the movie, but the Arab food was great. We were unable to get any of a dozen taxis to take us anywhere afterwards because they were all Arabs and we were not gullible tourists who could be cheated out of taxi fare (Israel puts up with this shit just to let the Arabs keep their traditional culture).  Our host had to phone for a taxi.

Photo on the left is the real Congressman Charlie Wilson who served 24 years in the House.

Genetic control

Who is going to be giving genetic advice?  That is a big question.  At the present thousands of unlicensed people are giving genetic advice.
 
There is a group of certified counselors trained and certified by the American Board of Genetic Counseling and there are tens of thousands of doctors who are giving genetic advice.

Genetic counseling is generally connected to genetic testing.  Genetic testing is simple and low cost for many applications.  The first question to ask of a genetic counselor is when and for what reasons should I get a genetic test.  At this point the answer is there are roughly 30 inherited defects associated with a single gene that can be avoided with a genetic test of both parents before conception.  Such a test is almost always worthwhile because the cost in time and emotion is low and the failure to do the test can be horrifically costly.  Few other circumstances warrant a genetic test. Very few.

My problem is that the medical profession has very poor understanding of statistics and research design.  There will be increasingly useful research connecting genetic tests with predictable outcomes and there will be increasingly good statistical evidence of the connections.  Who can be trusted?  What institution will develop to provide reliable counseling?

Homeless tourist disaster

The current CEO of the San Francisco Tourist Bureau is Joe D'Alessandro.  After a year and a half on the job he made an interesting statement: "tourism is the city's major industry, with visitors spending $7.76 billion in 2006." Followed by "The No. 1 complaint that we get from visitors is over the condition of the streets," he said. "Nine times out of 10 they say, 'How could this jewel of a city have gotten to this point?' "

This less-than-competent bureaucrat (he couldn't have gotten the job except by his lack of competence and his loyalty to the 1970s Democratic political hacks who run this city) can't bring himself to use the terms homeless or indigents...he has to refer to the 'condition of the streets.'

Hey Joe, couldn't you point out that a 13% increase in tourism, a mere acquisition of 3% of the millions of tourists who go to the homeless-free Disney World, would mean a billion dollars and 10,000 jobs.

Hey Joe, couldn't you cite one of my statistics: each San Francisco homeless person keeps 50 people from working and living in the Bay Area, or each visible homeless beggar in San Francisco keeps 125 people from working and living in the Bay Area.

You can change that statement into any form you wish from the same data: A 13% increase in tourism would support 22,000 more people living and working in the Bay Area.  A 13% increase in tourism would be 10,000 jobs in San Francisco.  Eliminate visible homeless beggars and create 50,000 new jobs in San Francisco from tourism.

The cost of homeless beggars in a tourist city is very high.  Talk about it.

Mein Kampf

For my wonderful blog audience I read Hitler's Mein Kampf.  Fortunately I am a fast reader.  The key chapter is Volume 2 chapter 1, the philosophy of the NAZI party.  Hitler's writing is obtuse in the extreme, he makes verbose 19th Century Irish politicians look blunt. Bloviated is a good descriptor.

I felt compelled to read this book because several conservative writers have recently said the the Nazis were a Left-wing party and a recent book by a Lefty Englishman says the opposite, that the Nazis were right wingers.  In a simple summary: both sides are disingenuous, dishonest wing nuts. They are both wrong.

I also read Mein Kampf because of my University of Chicago training.  The U.of C. believed, when I was a student, that college students are intelligent enough and competent enough to read and understand the original documents around which our civilization is formed.  So I went directly to the founding document of the NAZI party; Mein Kampf.

Hitler's NAZI party was organized around one principle: Germans were the master race. Everything else was secondary. Germans according to Hitler were Aryans, Aryans were the ordinary folk and folklore of Germany.  All other people were inferior. 

According to the Nazis, Reds and communists were promoting a Jewish racial agenda of hegemony.  Jews and Reds believed that there were universal human values and that all people were potentially part of a common society. To Hitler that was nonsense, the Aryans were the masters of everyone else.

Got that.  It is really simple and really clear.

The British appeasement of Germany could never have worked and the American military victory over Germany could never have been negotiated. Pacifists will never learn.

Wonderful source

I take more than modest credit for the current standards of corporate reporting of executive compensation.  Regardless of me, if you want the data it is now where it should be: online.  The SEC has posted the data and keeps it current on 500 U.S. corporations.

I required online access to data in the first executive compensation battle I won at Pacific Gas and Electric, three years ago.

Freud and psychology department

I recently saw an article somehow associated with the 100th anniversary of something Freud did.  The article pointed out that Freud has had an influence in every academic department except the psychology department.

Not surprising.  When Ernest Jones brought Freudian analysis to the United States after WWI where it was very effectively used to treat the returning vets with hysteria...visible as ticks, limps and distorted posture, Jones specifically trained MDs in psycho-analysis to deliberately avoid psychologists.  Psychology at the time was entirely in the thrall of William James' teaching.

That historic pattern remains in America today.

Real Jews

I wrote to the American Jewish Committee to ask for the cross tabs on their most recent survey of Jewish opinions.  So far in three weeks I haven't heard from them so I will give you my estimates of the reality of Jewish opinion which is much more favorable to my pro-commerce view than I expected.

First what are cross-tabs?  A cross-tab lets you take a group that answered any question in a particular way and see how that group answered the rest of the questions.  Usually we get cross-tabs on how Republicans or Democrats or people over 65 or Catholics answered questions.  That is a standard cross tab.

But you can roughly estimate cross-tabs by looking at multiple questions where the same group must be answering the same question because you are getting the same proportion.  Example:  28% of people who call themselves Jews do not believe 'caring about Israel is a very important part of being a Jew'. That is probably the same group that comprises the bulk of the 37% who say there will come a time when “Israel and its Arab neighbors will be able to settle their differences and live in peace.”

To me, the 28% of people who call themselves Jews and don't understand the necessary connection of a Jew to Israel are not Jews, they are Diaspora Fossils.  Therefore I ask myself the question what do Real Jews believe?  The answer is the following:

Real Jews: 22% Liberal, 43% moderate 'middle of the road,' 35% conservative.
Real Jews: 95% believe that anti-Semitism in Muslim countries is a serious or very serious problem, 5% don't.
Real Jews: 90% don't ever expect the Palestinians to live in peace with Israel, 10% do.
Real Jews: 90% expect global anti-Semitism to grow in the future, 10% don't.
Real Jews: 85% say there is a clash of Western and Muslim civilizations 15% say there isn't or are not sure.
Real Jews: 85% believe that being Jewish is very important in their life, 15% don't.
Real Jews: 85% are very concerned about Iranian nuclear threats, 15% are somewhat concerned or not concerned.
Real Jews: 85% say the U.N. treats Israel unfairly, 5% say it doesn't and 10% aren't sure.
Real Jews: 45% support U.S. military action against Iran, 45% don't and 10% are not sure.
Real Jews: 40% believe the Republicans will best handle the war on terror, 40% believe the Democrats will, 10% believe both, 10% believe neither.

Out on a limb

This seems to be the time of the year for me to write long pieces that are going out to my smallest reader base.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that American business cycles are over.

This is a bold statement for me because I was among the very few economists in America trained in business cycle theory.  I began graduate school as a devoted follower of Wesley Mitchell the father of business cycle theory and the father of the most prestigious economic institution, the NBER.

By the time I left graduate school in 1963 I knew there was no theory of business cycles.  What Mitchell had settled on was a methodology to describe business cycles.  Mitchell's followers made an effort to identify some of the patterns of economic movement associated with these cycles.  One, Solomon Fabricant, found a few elements of inventory behavior that might have been connected to business cycle theory but the correlation was too weak to be taken seriously.

Suffice it to say that I know the dates of every business cycle in American and world history. Since I went to grad-school there has never been a year in America where the GDP was lower than in the previous year.  There have been seven years where the growth rate of the GDP was significantly lower than the previous year. We call that a recession.  I call it a statistically random variation.

Now my bold statement: there are no more business cycles.  By business cycle I mean a year or more when the GDP is lower than it was in the previous year.  If such cycles return it will be decades off.

My reasoning is simple: as I've pointed out in a previous blog, 60% of our GDP is air, no materials are involved.  Air is in unlimited supply.  Most importantly, commerce is a positive sum game. Combine air and positive sum and there is no reason for the air to deflate unless it is intentional or caused by a comet.

We can keep growing as fast as we want.  China has kept our costs low and declining, so has technology.  Even with wildly fluctuating resource prices we see no output variation.  Resources are insignificant in the air economy.

There is no reason, other than outrageous exogenous factors, for us to have business cycles.

Is there a secular society?

We use secular to refer to that part of our society that is not religious.  We also talk about the non-religious people as being part of a secular society.

I want to raise a warning flag.  I doubt that we really have much of a secular society. 

What we have today is a large part of America that believes religion can and does play a meaningful role in our polity.  This is both the traditional civil religion that uses God carefully in our political life, and the enthusiastic religion that expects our leaders to be religious people.

What I want to raise a flag about is the perception that there is a secular opposition arrayed against the 'religion in public life' platform that most of America has signed-off on.

Many observers would locate that secular opposition in the body of urban atheists along with a few traditionalists who have 'separate church-state' ideologies from a by-gone era.

My problem is that I don't think there are many urban atheists except in survey data.  I would guess that among the 20% who say that they don't believe in a god and the next 20% who have only a nominal religious affiliation that close to half are Lefty Fundamentalists and fellow travelers for whom Leftism is a full blown religion.

I listened to Sam Harris one evening talking to a San Francisco audience in rapture to hear God and religion attacked. But nearly the entire audience were Lefty Fundamentalists for whom Armageddon is just around the corner with global warming and the satanic behavior of global big business is destroying the planet and exploiting the poor.

Sorry, I doubt there really is much of a truly secular class in America....or Europe for that matter. People who are mistaken as secular are just as religious as the rest, except that their religion is Lefty Fundamentalism.

The end of class in America

The most common explanation for the end of class in America is the introduction of merit based testing for college entrance to Ivy league schools around the time of the Korean War.

The problem with this explanation is that it wouldn't have broken down the class system.  The top class would have continued to associate with each other in prep-school and in college as they always had.  The same would have been true of all upper class institutions.

Moreover the end of the upper class was visible by 1960 with the last published copy of the New York Blue Book.  Such a short period, ten years of college time, makes no sense in terms of a social change of such great magnitude.

A better explanation would be that WWII produced several hundred thousand men and a few women, who's army service provided them with managerial skills that were desperately needed in the rapidly expanding post war economy. 

With hundreds of thousands of skilled managers entering the work force in the late 1940's we could expect to see a social change ten to fifteen years later as these men became the new meritocratic class and displaced the old aristocracy.

America was unique among nations in re-integrating its trained military managerial men back into a rapidly expanding society after a victorious war.  In addition, unlike the French, German and British societies, the upper class in America was weak, fairly permeable and much too new to have staying power in the face of the arriving postwar managerial meritocrats.

WWII training of men in managerial skills was the reason the upper class lost its role in America.

Government supports the Beach Boys

Lefty artists often worship the European model of arts supported by the government.  Presumably because artists like themselves would get government support if they lived in Europe.

Lefty American artists you are doubly wrong.

First, the American government does support artists through the National Endowment for the Arts and through the Public Broadcasting Corporation.  You already know that the NEA won't support you because it has been burned several times for giving money to artists who deliberately offended the government and Americans can't understand supporting deliberately offensive people.
 
But you forget that PBC gives plenty of money to artists, but those artists aren't you.  The artists are decrepit old Beach Boys and rock musicians.  The movie A Mighty Wind did a great job of parodying the educational channel's constant support for outmoded popular music.  But the fact is that our government arts funding goes to decrepit old pop music stars....not to young Lefty artists.

How long?

Now that the tide has finally turned against the Global Warming hysteria, it is reasonable to ask 'How long before we no longer hear this ideological script treated as fact?'

I have the answer.  In the early 1990s I was among the first to discover that the Population Explosion was over.  I found it because I read data for the fun of it and I ask reasonable questions (such as 'What is the current population of the part of the world that is above reproductive rate and what part is below?  The answer was that the part of global population below reproductive rate was much much greater than the part above.)  By 1997 population officials were starting to make the same statement: 'Population to stabilize in due time.'

By 2004 I found that most people understood that the Population Explosion had passed. So the reality took roughly ten years after the fact to sink in and seven years after the expert statements.

Most people still don't understand that the Population Explosion was caused by advances in medicine and public health.

What does that tell us about the Global Warming hysteria?  The hysterical part of the Population Explosion was the belief that resources, particularly food, would be exhausted in short order.

The hysterical part of the Global Warming is that humans will be inundated by oceans and food supplies will be harmed.

My guess is that we face the same period of accommodation of hysteria to fact: seven years.  That means by 2014 I can joke about living only 50 feet above sea level and people will see it as a joke. We still won't have respect for the trivial impact of humans compared to terrestrial and solar forces.

Lesson 4 of 4 for fixing Lefties

I think there is an experiential way to fix Lefties, at least those few with an open mind.

In the fourth lesson, the Lefty has been walking around London all day and arrives at a private park.  There are private parks for the British gentry in London, with nannies and children born to aristocracy, running around the park...carefree. Outside the parks are the limos driven by immigrants and members of the lower class. 

Our Lefty can't get in the park to sit on a bench.  He wasn't born to the right parents.

There are classes in many countries where the appropriate family for generations have had priviledge.  You don't belong. 

Point out to the Lefty that such inherited classes are long gone in the U.S.

More of the 4th Reich

The UN never falters in its role as the global heir to Hitler's Third Reich.

The first global Hate Jews Conference was sponsored by the UN in Durban South Africa in  August 2001. Now the UN is planning a follow-up in 2009.

This has to be stopped.  Time to read the details and write our Senators.  Both of mine are Jews of the old type (by birth and by marriage), but that little inconvenience will mean little to them. 

Lesson 3 of 4 for fixing Lefties

I think there is an experiential way to fix Lefties, at least those few with an open mind.

In the third lesson, the Lefty goes to a city in a third world country where the Lefty hasn't had a bowel movement in three days and has become desperate when the need for a toilet finally arises.

There is no Starbucks or MacDonald's around with the standard and ubiquitous clean public bathroom.  Now is the time to appreciate global commerce.

While our student is in a personally desperate situation, this is a good time to remind the Lefty that WalMart, Home Depot, CostCo, Target and Ikea save the average low income family thousands of dollars a year. 

Those are thousands of dollars of real effective increase in a family's living standard.

General Petraeus

I used Google and it looks like I am one of the few people in the world to say "America has won the war in Iraq."  I know I was right when I said it a few months ago.  Reality is very clear to anyone who can read numbers.  Other people must be afraid to speak out.

One of the benefits of being open and honest with myself, and able to read statistical data, is the ability to be clear.  What I see now is that the Republican Convention in Minneapolis should have a video of General Petraeus talking about the great job the American troops have done in Iraq. The rest of the convention should glorify the General's accomplishments.

General Petraeus should be celebrated and compared to two great Republican presidents Grant and Eisenhower.

Lesson 2 of 4 for fixing Lefties

I think there is an experiential way to fix Lefties, at least those few with an open mind.

In the second lesson, the Lefty goes to work for a worker owned co-op grocery.  What the Lefty will quickly learn is that co-ops don't survive in a society where other forms of business organization exist (grocery co-ops are an exception because they have a steady income, pay suppliers immediately and are the simplest form of business to run).

The reason co-ops fail is that nobody works hard.  When the earnings of all productivity is shared equally no one works hard and most people walk around all day angry at the people who are the laziest. Furthermore, no one wants to be a manager or supervisor because the committee meetings are endless, boring and management generates hostility from the underlings.

Lesson: merit with rewards is the only way to get people to do their best. Its the only way to have fun and be productive.  Private property is one of the way that rewards are generated for the appropriate people.

Not spam

For some unknown reason this blogsite, Typepad, treated the following comment as SPAM when it was posted to the Scientists blog below.    It isn't SPAM, it came from my wonderful friend Hans PD who is a scientist with a great deal of experience in environmental and atmospheric issues.

"Thanks for calling my attention to the UN letter.

"This website will also be of interest to you. It’s a long-winded way of saying what I’ve been saying for a few years: GCM’s (global climate models) are crap. When I worked with them, and what I’ve seen, and what this article states, is that they don’t predict the present, let alone the future. The funny thing for me was watching their users stand up and talk about their results as being really good, when at the same time they were showing the data/model results comparisons and they were poor.

"For example, on local pollution modeling (different than GCM) most models are happy to get a diurnal profile, even better if the highs are during the day, but almost nobody tries to get the actual pollutant concentrations correct. That’s what I did. And even that is a low standard compared to what one would call “agreement” between a theory and data in chemistry/physics/math. Yet people would stand up at conferences showing model results w/o a proper diurnal profile (e.g. high pollutant concentrations at night, low during the day, or something else totally wrong), and say the model was working well become it showed some sort of variation. It was sort of funny if there weren’t so many blow-hards."

Let me support what Hans says.  I worked for years with equations and modeling in economics.  No matter how good the data, and in economics we had a lot more relevant and better data than the climatologists have, our equations could not perform better than a "straight-line" assumption for data that was prior to or after the data used in the equations.  In other words, assuming that "things would continue as they were" was statistically more accurate than our complex, computer modeled equations.

Lesson 1 of 4 for fixing Lefties

I think there is an experiential way to fix Lefties, at least those few with an open mind.

In the first lesson, the Lefty has to be very sick, something as horribly painful as a burst appendix.

The Lefty now goes to a public hospital emergency ward in a large urban area for treatment.  The lesson will be learned while waiting for treatment in a room with homeless indigents who smell so bad, our Lefty will puck. These are indigents who regularly come to the emergency ward with self induced problems of over-dose and chronic alcoholism. 

Indigents are such a burden on our compassionate care givers that our Lefty will immediately see that there is a cost to every non-indigent from our Lefty wimp view that indigents have to be treated just like everyone else and given massive public subsidies and unlimited tolerance.

Scientists

I was beginning to have negative thoughts about "scientists" because all I hear is about the scientific consensus around global warming. Since global warming is a political hysteria I was losing confidence in the existence of any people who use the scientific method.

I'm relieved and can return to the belief that there are always a few genuine people who call themselves scientists...a few people who use empirical verification and test their theories on empirical data. One hundred scientists signed a letter to the UN pointing out the natural causes of global temperature fluctuations and making a very dramatic statement: "because attempts to cut emissions will slow development, the current UN approach of CO2 reduction is likely to increase human suffering from future climate change rather than to decrease it." 

Since I report the global temperature every year it is particularly heartening to me to see data used that exactly matches my own: "..despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998."  I always use the term "96-97 average" which happens to be the same as 1998.

One of the signers of the letter is Freeman Dyson who long ago wrote an article that influenced me.  He pointed out that a one-quarter inch increase in the top soil in the U.S. (which will occur naturally) would absorb all the excess CO2 that humans have produced in the past 100 years.

Environmentalists for Gift Cards

I have announced long ago (12 years ago) that the environmental movement was dead. But if it were alive and it were intelligent it would be wildly enthusiastic about gift cards.

Gift cards are the fastest growing segment of all retailing.  A gift card is a credit card of a designated amount for a specific business use or for general purpose use.

The reason gift cards are environmentally positive is (1) that they avoid the great waste of gift wrapping because gift card recipients use the cards generally without getting gift wrapping. (2) Far fewer objects end up in waste dumps because people buy gifts that they want with a gift card as opposed to the many they receive but don't want. Also (3) many more card recipients buy services rather than objects because services are more commonly tailored to the buyer than objects.

Berkeley

Today's Chronicle has an article by Carolyn Jones about the effort by Berkeleyites to come up with a plan to revive downtown Berkeley.

This is impossible of course since the homeless are more important to Berkelyites than jobs, safety or vital commerce.  Here is a great quote:

'Berkeley is one of the most affluent, lively cities in the Bay Area, but its downtown looks more like Tombstone, Ariz., on a slow day.

Shuttered businesses dot the streets like tumbleweeds in a ghost town: Barnes and Noble. Gateway Computers. UC Theater. Soon to join their grim ranks: Ross Dress for Less and Shoe Pavilion.

"Berkeley's downtown plan has resulted in a wonderful, vibrant, mixed-use community. It's called Emeryville," said Will Travis, chairman of the city committee charged with revitalizing the beleaguered commercial district around Shattuck and University avenues.'

I commented on Berkeley, Oakland and Emeryville in an earlier blog (with a flyover video).  Berkeley has modeled itself on Cuba, Oakland on Nigeria and Emeryville on 'The Best Practices of Real America.'

More on management

My congresswoman, Nancy Pelosi, was recently demanding, at the insistence of the badly misled Latino Democratic Caucus, that an English only business requirement at a specific business, be over-ridden by law.

Nancy, I had a client in your district, who ran a clothing manufacturing business.  My client would only hire people who couldn't speak English for the sewing jobs, and went out of her way to hire many different non-English speakers so they couldn't waste her factory time talking to each other while working or while taking breaks.  She was making money off their lack of English, and they were being exploited.

So much for your seeing benefits in avoiding English-only work shops.

Management

A recent discussion reminded me that bad management and poor supervision have a direct cost. 

A friend was describing his work environment where there are several indecisive managers and a supervisor who is never clear about his needs and intentions.  My friend, who is highly competent, quickly got out of the department where he was productive and badly needed.  He has been working as a contract employee and is only willing to go back to the company at a higher pay level.

That is a clear cost of poor management.

Second voice

 I wrote a blog about Thanksgiving being a celebration of the end to communal property and the triumph of private property and private initiative. During the Pilgrims' first three years  all property was communal and they starved.  They finally allocated land to each family and prospered.  A lesson learned in every generation and country ever since then.

What is relevant is that my blog was part of many blogs and a few articles about the historic re-appreciation of the description of Thanksgiving by William Bradford, one of the observers of the original Pilgrims.

This wonderful new interpretation of Thanksgiving is part of what I call the second voice.  The second voice is the voice we are hearing for the first time in the last few decades that is a fully developed, rational and powerful expression of a position that is different from the mono-vocal position of universal Lefty ideology that had previously engulfed us all of our lives.

We now hear about the genius of commerce, we now hear a second voice of human triumph.... audible against the thunderous backdrop of media telling us how miserable life in America is and how the market is a perpetual failure.

Awash in funds

In Wednesday's Wall Street Journal (Dec. 12), Alan Greenspan had a unique op-ed piece.  In the op-ed Greenspan points out that the global equity market (read stock and bond markets) is $50 trillion in size. This market has been growing at 12% per year for the past six years. The U.S. part of the global equity market is roughly one-third.

The current global savings rate in the developed world is 33% of GDP. Savings as a percent of GDP have been growing at 5% per year.  Such a high savings rate is only possible because wealthy people can not consume what they earn.  That is certainly the case for the tens of thousands of people who have incomes in the tens of millions of dollars a year. Those people provide the global savings and the funds for investment.

Greenspan puts the two points together to say that no government can head off a speculative bubble nor control the flow of funds.  There is so much money sloshing around the world that it almost makes up its own rules and it is desperately looking for investments.

Deteriorating cells

This is just a question.  How have we come to tolerate the terrible quality of our telephone service? 

We all get phone calls on our cell phones dropped on a regular basis, often in the middle of important conversations.

The level of cellphone service is not even comparable to landlines, which never get dropped. Are we so in the thrall of mobile communication that we tolerate it or is the reality that we haven't really been given a choice yet?  Of course the lack of choice is the consequence of our general government incompetence because neither Japan nor Israel has the disgraceful level of cellphone service we have.

Off the topic note: the term cellphone is now the common term for mobile personal phones, yet it developed in the 1980's when phones weighed a few pounds, were limited to automobiles, before the modern pocket pcs (personal communication system) was in use.  The old term has stuck with the new technology. Interesting.

The rape of a Teddy Bear next door

That blog headline is misleading. But it conveys the correct summary of this blog.

Careful readers of this blog will know that I never delete a blog.  But I deleted a blog about the Sudan Teddy Bear incident last month. I wrote the blog in haste and realized, after my son pointed out the logical flaws, that I hadn't thought the issue through.

Then I saw a press conference in which a journalist asked the President of the United States to condemn the Saudi Arabian government, in person, for a court decision about a rape in Saudi Arabia. A rape judicial decision that nearly all Americans found offensive.

That made the point to me.  The world is much too small for the current level of technology and the current level of human moral understanding.

It is obvious that technology now lets us know the daily stories of the thousands of tribes in the world today, on an immediate basis.  We can know the stories in high tech visual and audio levels and we can often have our fellow citizens on the scene commenting and interpreting for us.

The trouble is that our moral apparatus is wholly inadequate for this high tech world.  I'm not going to mince my words.  Nine out of ten Americans haven't the vaguest idea what cultural differences are.  I know that number 9 out of 10, because I've talked to and tested several thousand people about this subject.

Modern humans and 9 out of 10 Americans believe that our moral values are universal among human beings.  If someone has different moral values they are either primitive, backward, wrong or inferior.  And much too often, when they are no threat to us, we intend to correct them.

I am not going to explain cultural difference.  You either know it in your gut from experience or you don't.  My concern is the correct moral position to take in a world that is too small.

The correct position is to (1) confidently express your disdain or outrage over the behavior of the non-Americans and (2) to leave the non-Americans alone. 

In the Saudi Arabian case the President of the U.S. did exactly that.  He expressed his personal outrage and said 'the Saudi's know our strongly held beliefs about this matter.'  Meaning at the international level every state department knows that every other country is sovereign and has its own domestic values and institutions.

In the Teddy Bear case, which involved a Brit, the country of Sudan deported her out of harms way; appropriately.

Ten times

In the past three months we have seen financial consequences that are magnified ten times.

The so-called 'sub-prime mortgage crisis' in the United States and to a lesser extent in Britain was based on bond rating bureaus finding that $100 billion in mortgage loans had been at greater risk than the lenders who made the loans, believed. Nevertheless, the maximum extent of the possible risk, if every person with weak credit defaulted on their mortgage and the market value of the underlining home dropped to half, was less than $100 billion dollars.

Yet in the face of this $100 billion number, the stock markets of the world declined by ten times that amount: $1 trillion.

I just wanted to point that out.  I don't know the reason for such exaggerated volatility.

Beowulf

You will enjoy the 3D Imax movie Beowulf for the animation and the cinematography. I did. I had read the 7th Century poem many decades ago and reviewed it again.  It takes 20 minutes to read.

The movie and the poem are barely related, barely.  It is the difference that I want to comment on.  The poem is an heroic saga of an heroic Viking. The film is a modern storyline that I think presents a great metaphor.

The film story is about two kings who are allured by their youthful sex drive to have sex with a beautiful demon posing as a Angelina Jolie. The offspring of the coitus is a monster that attacks the followers of the two kings.

That metaphor, to me, is about the persistence of lefty-socialism-communism in our day.  The evidence of the last century is overwhelming that Lefty Marxist ideology always, yes always, degenerates into murderous tyranny and poverty.  Yet each new generation for the past 20 years has brought forth a new group of Lefty Marxist ideologs blind to the consequences of their ideological embrace.

Why? That is the theme of Beowulf.  Young people are rebellious, they often have heroic values and their raging sexual hormones seem to land them in the domain of Lefty Marxist ideology. An ideology that is really a demon that clothes itself in the mantle of excitement and passion.

Beowulf is an explanation of how sex driven young people can be engulfed in the horrid offspring of Lefty ideology which is tyranny and poverty for their fellow citizens.