Pro Commerce

Life Insurance sales

This is a story about one of my early ventures in the world of commerce.  I got a great reputation but never took advantage of it.

I had come back from a year in Israel ready to go to graduate school at U.C. Berkeley in economics in 1960. My plan was to focus on Wesley Mitchell’s ideas of business cycles. I arrived at Berkeley before the summer so I could take a two part course in statistics.  I was married and needed to work.

I thought selling life insurance might be a good job for me. I believed I could do it while in grad school.

I got a few weeks training from the Indiana life insurance (American United) firm in Oakland that took me on. My solicitation was based on sending out post cards to new parents based on birth records. 

I got a few responses to my post cards and was able to practice sales techniques on all of them.  One response was from a couple with both parents who were deaf.  The baby wasn’t deaf and I was fascinated to see that when he cried (he was about 6 months old) he made no noise but he pounded his hands on the floor and puffed up his lungs vigorously.

Being new in the business, I had nearly infinite patience to sit and write notes back and forth until the couple was satisfied with the life insurance package I was selling them. 

I took the sale back to my manager who told me it might be difficult to get the home office to cover life insurance for a deaf couple.  I was then, just who I am now, and told my manager not to worry, I would check with a lawyer to make sure the company couldn’t refuse to insure a deaf couple and certainly couldn’t charge a higher premium.

The policy went through in a week.  My clients were delighted and told nearly every other deaf couple in the Bay Area about the great agent they had found.  I was busy. 

I also got a reputation in the insurance sales industry as the guy who could only sell policies to the ‘deaf, dumb and blind.’

The marketing lessons here are pretty obvious.  It turned out that grad school was easy for me and I could easily have done sales, but the agency said "no" to a grad student being a part time salesman.

New Fed role

With the second Fed rate drop of 125 basis points in two weeks, the United States took on the role of Global Banker. 

The fast action in the world's largest economy now means that every other central banker has to look to the U.S. for guidance.

This observation of mine has been passed on the Ben Bernanke today by a mutual friend of ours.

Experiences to convert Lefties

This is a continuation of my earlier series.

I picture a Lefty at the San Francisco Airport trying to catch a morning flight to get to the hospital where his/her sick daughter/mother has been rushed.  The airport is socked in, with only half the number of planes taking off.  Our Lefty will have to wait two hours for a departure and will miss the connection in Denver adding another four hour delay to the trip.

Who is to blame for the Leftie's distress and anxiety? The beloved Lefty environmentalist.

The San Francisco Bay is over 100 square miles of water.  The San Francisco Airport could be expanded to triple the number of planes arriving and departing by just putting land fill in half of one square mile of the Bay.  But no, the Lefty enviros will not consider even one cubic foot of landfill.

Tell that to your sick or dying family member when you arrive too late to be helpful or comforting.

The terrible state of classic music

If you read anything other than my blog, you will have come across the endless rants about the decline of classical music.

Two simple observations.  One: the Japanese and the Chinese are still studying American classical instruments and doing well on them.  The same is true in Salt Lake City and other traditional parts of the country. A great conductor, like Michael Tilson Thomas, still fills up every performance he presents.

Second, I’ve heard this kind of rant before.  It used to be about the decline of reading by young people.  Then along came a 600 page book that every 10 year old kid had to have and read, along with the rest of the series. Ever heard of Harry Potter?

I expect, one day, to see the classic music world’s version of Harry Potter.  There is now a young audience that has a broader global taste in music than any before and a more eclectic palette  With the right music we will get a new classic music audience.

Victory report

I've been meeting more and more Americans outside of the psychedelic-Lefty-Coast and they uniformly understand that we have won the war in Iraq.  They are also aware that the mainstream-media have stopped reporting on Iraq because it doesn't fit their anti-American storyline. I'm not making this up as you will see in this blog.

What most people can't figure out for themselves is that in guerrilla warfare there is no peace treaty to sign, no surrender  and no event around which victory can be proclaimed.  I repeat what I've said earlier: England beat the IRA and never proclaimed victory and Israel beat two intifadas and never proclaimed victory.

Here is an actual count on newspaper stories from Iraq: 

"When I sat down at my computer on January 21, 2005, and counted all the stories indexed by Google News, I came up with a total just short of 11,000 negative stories to 407 positive stories, with 123 neutral ones.

This was the ratio on an average day of the Iraq war: 27 “bad news” stories about Iraq for every one reporting some positive developments from the Mesopotamian front of the war on terror.

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

"So a day (and three years) later, on January 22, 2008, I again sat down at my computer and scanned through news from Iraq, as indexed by Google. Here are the results, and they are quite stunning.

Firstly, it is true that Iraq has largely disappeared from the media radar, especially by contrast with three years ago. Whereas that one day in January 2005, some 11,528 stories discussed various aspects of the situation in Iraq and the political response thereto, three years later, only 3,552 did.

Secondly, the balance between the negative and the positive reports has improved dramatically. On January 22, 2008, there have been 1,944 stories published that dwelt largely on bad news from Iraq:

That was still a significant number, but the tally of positive news now stood at 1,160.

In all, there was one good news story for every 1.67 bad news ones. Certainly makes for an improvement on the one to 27 ratio three years ago."

The article goes on to support the data:

"As the recent study by the Sacred Heart University has shown, less than 20% of Americans believe the media all or most of the time. Specifically, the study found that

Nearly three-quarters of all Americans surveyed, 70.7%, indicated they strongly or somewhat agreed that negative media reporting damages troop morale. Over half of all survey respondents, 59.8%, agreed (strongly or somewhat) that negative media coverage damages prospects for success in Iraq because it encourages terrorists, and about half, 49.1%, agreed (strongly or somewhat) that things are likely going better for the U.S. than the U.S. media portrays.

No Cold War

I haven’t seen any comments or studies about the effect of the end of the Cold War on our society.

Let me point out a few.  First, global news is of declining interest to Americans because it can’t be connected to a storyline.  During the Cold War, every international incident had an American-USSR dimension to it.  Gone.

Second, we still took much of the socialist ’what about poor people?’ ideology seriously.  Nowadays income divergence is only an issue to Lefties along with welfare, domestic starvation and poverty lines.  Of course much of the media follow these subjects but Americans don’t.

Third, crime has dropped precipitously, family stability has improved noticeably and more people are voting in elections at every level.

Financial hysteria

I read Ben Stein in the NYTimes this morning and found a wonderful ally.

Stein concurs that the current bear market is irrational.  He asks how a $100 billion (I still estimate the underlining losses at $30 billion) risk in sub-prime loans can cause a multi-trillion dollar decline (25 times greater) in the market.  Let's add an equal amount of decline to the world market (50 times).  I call it financial hysteria that is occurring inside a bubble of gloom.

Stein says it is just the traders of the world who short the market and then feed the press negative news.  He quotes them as saying it is easier to drive a market down than to talk it up.

I already invested my free funds in this low market, but I am not foolish enough to borrow money to invest.

As the spectacular victory in Iraq becomes more obvious the bubble of gloom will disappear.

       

News nonsense

I constantly hear the ululating of the journalistic crowd about the declining newspaper business.  I read their incessant articles about the few options available to save their sorry asses.

What I never see is a panel discussion by management experts on the newspaper business. 

I’m a management expert and I’m giving free advice here.  Newspapers were conceived and developed in the 19th Century as was their management. 19th Century management is dysfunctional in the 21st Century.

The standard newspaper consultant is quibbling over the way to get on the Internet.  Forget it.  You are in the news business and the Internet is just one of many media. 

If you are aspiring to be a national paper, look at USA Today.  Profitable and far more widely distributed than the NY Times.

If you are local, look at the San Francisco Examiner and the Washington D.C. Examiner.  The USA and Examiner papers are heavy on color, heavy on short articles and unlike most other newspapers, (except the WSJ) these three are not afraid of numbers and charts.

Look closely at the two Examiners.  They are given away free and after a few years are probably profitable.  They thrive by covering the suburbs and local news better than anyone.

Worried about the Internet, look at the Jerusalem Post, entirely an Internet publication with ten times more global readers than local.

When some news organization finally gets their act together they will have one newsroom with output in half a dozen media, one of which will be the Internet and one of which will be a tabloid newspaper.

Gift cards redux

In an earlier blog I talked about the environmental benefits of gift cards (pre-paid credit cards).

Now I can report on the other, possibly darker, side.  Gift cards are currently a preferred form of bribery in pro-bribery countries. My reliable expert who works in China reports that it is very common for people shaking hands to be passing a gift card bribe between them. No record of the transaction and no tell tale piles of currency.

I am also told by another good friend that when her purse was stolen, her credit cards were used to immediately buy gift cards (because they are cash and untraceable). 

There is an obvious, but unconfirmed, potential for laundering money with gift cards. Just take a bundle of cash into a store, buy gift cards, then use the cards to pay employees.  Whatever the employees are building for you will show up as a miraculous capital gain that didn't cost you anything.  Now pay taxes on the capital gain.

You'll note that laundering money is about finding ways to pay taxes on cash so that the wealth can be public.  I strongly favor the government encouraging laundering money (instead of making it illegal) because it means more taxes paid, rather than kept out of the tax cycle.

Transsexuals

A recent WSJ article (12/28/07) about transsexuals and morality raised my ire.  The author, Naomi  Riley, said that transsexuals were generally confused about gender and as a consequence she relies on an author, Paul McHugh's, statement that transsexuals are no happier after surgery than before.

Naomi, Paul you are both full of unmitigated erroneous nonsense.  I worked with pre and post-op transsexuals and I found a dramatically different reality.

In the mid 1970's, working with the Human Sexuality team at Glide Church, I became interested in the problems, mostly financial, of the pre-op transsexuals.  I decided to organize the post-op transsexual community into a group that would help directly fund and loan money to the pre-ops.

My organizing effort was a 100% failure.  I met and talked with more than two dozen post-op transsexuals (all women in their new lives) who's names I got from their surgeons.  Every single one, every single one, was so successful and so well acclimated to her new life that she wanted nothing to do with her past life and she wanted no chance for the world to find out about her earlier life.  The post-op transsexuals were all successful in their transitions and they were all delighted with their new lives.

Naomi and Paul, I suggest you do some good research like I did before you propagate your bigoted unfounded nonsense.

Trash?

Back in 1981 when Greens restaurant was first opened in San Francisco one of the innovations was the Japanese urinal in a stark black tile men's bathroom (the urinal is the ceramic object on the left in the photo).  This small but interesting detail was mentioned in several of the early rave reviews. The restaurant, maybe the finest vegetarian food in America, has remained a success for 26 years.  I have been on the Board of Directors and one of the owners for the past seven years.  Greens was my original conception*.

The point of this blog is that when Greens first opened, the Japanese urinal was recognized by the cognoscenti of vegetarian food as just what it was...a urinal.  Since then the crowd has become more tourist and more middle-brow.  Result: the Japanese toilet is often used as a trash basket, with hand towels thrown into it.

* Footnote.  My readers may be getting tired of hearing about my contributions (I get emails to the effect that I do too much bragging...in truth, I've spent my life giving credit to others but now that I am getting old, I no longer see the need to pass the credit around).

In the late 1970s I was the business consultant to the entire Fort Mason complex (Ann Howell was the manager). Fort Mason and many of its tenants were members of the Briarpatch.  I told Ann that the complex badly needed a good restaurant and a copy shop so the 60 plus tenants would develop some sense of camaraderie and cooperation. Ann asked "How do we get a restaurant, it will have to be non-profit?" I said I would get her one. 

I went to my close friend, the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, Dick Baker roshi and talked him into it.  I showed him the space, an old vehicle repair shop, with a view of the Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.  He loved the idea.  I then talked the President of the Fort Mason Foundation, Rudy Hurwich, into the idea over breakfast at the Buttercup Bakery in Berkeley and Greens was born.

I called that one right

Thanks to the genius of President George W. Bush, Gaza is today part of Egypt.  I called that right in a recent blog.

We now have room for negotiation with the West Bank Arabs, especially with the help of Jordan and the other Sunni Arab states.

Cussing contests

Most of the time I love getting sales calls on my land-line phone.  Those are about the only calls that come on the land-line. If I have the time, I use it as a chance to practice improvisation.

Occasionally I am busy but answer the phone anyway.  That is when I think about cussing the caller or staying on the line until the tape message is over and cussing the live person. But I don't.

It just reminded me that most people have no idea that 100 years ago cussing was a competitive sport.  My grandfather was a regular at the cussing contests in Union Square.  The rules were simple: how long can you cuss without ever repeating yourself.  Great cussers were known to have reached 30 minutes, with great audience applause and appreciation.

I had a friend at the University of Chicago, a wealthy black guy, who said that creative cussing was still alive in the black community of Chicago's South-side.  He gave me a taste:  'You ain't nothin but a lying dilly-dapper, your heart pumps excrement and that forces you to breath through you large intestine; why you so bad, you'd even tie a dog to a bed post and lick him with pleasure till he dropped dead...

Maybe I should script one of these long cusses for the times I answer the sales call on the phone and I'm in a bad mood.

Is Sean Penn the wrong man?

Sean Penn is casting himself in a new movie as Harvey Milk.  Is Sean Penn the right man to play Harvey Milk?

I have two problems with Penn playing the role of Harvey Milk.  First, I knew Harvey Milk, he joined the Briarpatch as a retail camera shop owner, and I believe he would not have liked Mr. Penn's type of activism.  Harvey was a political moderate, a Jew who loved business, particularly small business and could never stomach socialist tyrants, Muslim tyrants or any other tyrants of the type supported by Sean Penn.  (Harvey would never have publicly mentioned his distaste for Penn because Harvey was a polite politician every minute of every day.)  Harvey loved American politics even more than he loved business.

Second, Penn is playing Harvey who was one of the most famous out-of-the-closet personalities of his era. Harvey Milk could never have publicly visited Saddam Hussein's Iraq the way Sean Penn did and a Harvey Milk movie can not be shown in Iraq.  Harvey Milk could not have visited Iran and spent time with Mullah Rafsanjani the way Penn did and certainly a movie about Harvey will not be shown in Iran.

The same applies to the way Harvey and a movie about Harvey could be welcomed in Hugo Chavez's Venezuela.  Sean Penn and Hugo Chavez are friends.

I suspect the reason Penn can't see the real life conflict between his pro-tyrant activism and his acting the role of Harvey Milk is that he lives in the fantasy land of movies where an actor's character can be killed in scene 12, stand up, go to make-up and then play the same character in scene 5. Films are not reality.

Should an actor who cavorts with tyrants, most of whom are intolerant of the Gay community, play the role of a great leader of the Gay community?  I don't think it makes sense.

Paper clip DTV

We have had a large flat screen TV for a year.It has been fine. Last weekend it became a Digital TV. How?

I went to the home of a wonderful friend who served a great dinner and introduced me to an Annapolis graduate. The Annapolis grad had helped my friend install her HDTV and told her she didn't need cable or satellite to get plenty of channels....only a paper clip.

I saw my friend's digital TV and I understood immediately.  Any digitally prepared TV that is currently receiving over-the-air (antenna) in analog can immediately do the same thing digitally over-the-air.  Analog transmission requires much more bandwidth and greater transmitter wattage, so the digital signal will be stronger. Many more digital channels are packed into the old analog channels so I now get twice as many over-the-air channels.

Give some thought to ignoring cable and satellite TV.  I save $40 a month using a paper clip and get 26 channels.

Hugo and the Jews

I've told many of my Lefty friends that Hugo Chavez has been steadily making life intolerable for Venezuelan Jews just as many past anti-Semites from Hitler to Stalin to Castro to Arafat have done.

Slowly the world Jewish community is taking note.  This from David Hazony: "last month, armed policemen raided the Jewish communal center in Caracas, looking for arms and evidence of subversive activity, which they failed to find. It was the second such raid in four years, and Jewish leaders, who until now have tried their best to maintain smooth relations with Chavez, have finally lashed out. “We’re facing the first anti-Jewish government in our history,” the head of the center told the Forward. Since Chavez’s election in 1998, the Jewish population in Venezuela has dropped from 16,000 to about 12,000, and the emigration continues apace."

Remember Kristallnacht. Look who is supporting Hugo all Lefties: Sean Penn, Danny Glover, Harry Belefonte, Naomi Campbell and Oliver Stone to name a few.

San Francisco defended

The wise City fathers, properly representing the hate filled Democrats, bureaucrats, academics and trust fund wimps who are the City's electorate, refused to allow a Marine Corp commercial to be filmed in San Francisco last year.

So the Marine Corp used Federal property on Chrissy Field and the Marin Headlands for the few relevant shots, done on an overcast day to make clear that the symbol of the West Coast is the Golden Gate Bridge, not San Francisco.

Enjoy the commercial here at Michelle Malkin's site. From the beautiful and moving spot, you will conclude that the Marines will defend ALL of America, even those ingrates who live in San Francisco and spew merciless venom on the young courageous defenders of our country.

Annapolis, possible evidence

I admit to being a fan of Annapolis, the Fall 2007 Middle-East Conference.  I'm convinced that getting all the Sunni Arab nations to a conference with Israel is of historic importance on the scale of Yalta. We have no idea what the meaning was.  I have often commented on the Arab /Muslim world's inability to deal with logic but I have also commended the extraordinary Arab/Muslim understanding of power.

Now that America has won the war in Iraq, we are the dominant power and we will be there for many decades, the Arab/Muslim world is accommodating us.

I see the hint of a pre-arranged agreement out of Annapolis.  Israel will be allowed to force Gaza onto Egypt as an Egyptian responsibility.  That will make Gaza an Arab problem.  It will reduce the Palestinian population in half and possibly allow a political solution in the West Bank.

Meager evidence to support this thesis: on his Arab trip President Bush slighted Egypt with a very brief visit, PM Olmert said of the recent Israeli cut-off of Gaza supplies 'they can walk,' a degree of contempt never seen before and Defense Sec'ty Barak said 'the Gazans can get their supplies from Egypt'.

Labor movement across borders

I was at a party and was challenged on the question of immigration of Mexicans.  The question was "Why do we believe in the free movement of capital and goods but not labor?"

My answer is that we don't actually have a conceptual problem with free labor movement, we have simply not honestly tackled the problem. The number and importance of the people involved is growing rapidly.

We have plenty of free movement of labor across boundaries.  I personally have earned income in more than a dozen countries as a business consultant, author and lecturer.  I paid taxes in each country on my earnings and I traveled on a tourist visa.  I would guess that private contractors, employees of consulting firms, American employees of firms operating overseas who are traveling on tourist visas generate overseas earnings of several hundred billions of dollars and that a comparable amount is earned by foreign professional workers working in the U.S.

What is the difference between me and the "illegal Mexicans and others" who work all around me?  Two differences:  one, my work is short term and can be done on a tourist visa, the "illegal Mexicans and others" are here for longer periods of time and there is no appropriate visa for them to get.  Two, I pay taxes to a legal tax account because I deal with corporations who can legally pay me or pay a business entity that represents me. The "illegal Mexicans and others" have to pay taxes to imaginary Social Security numbers because they don't have appropriate work visas.

As we become more honest and politically open about this issue we will battle out the issue in the political process.  There is no reason that I and other white collar and professional workers should freely travel the globe, earning money and paying local taxes when blue collar and agricultural workers can't.  Of course there is a middle group, white collar and professional workers on long term projects.  They are squeezed into a few hundred thousand limited American H-1b visas. That is a disgrace.

The whole issue must come into the open, be discussed, fought about and turned into a policy of open labor movement across borders with everyone paying appropriate taxes.

Yahoo fraud alert

I canceled a premium Yahoo mail account five years ago and so did my partner. 

We both just found a $19.99 bill on our credit card bills for the non-existent Yahoo mail accounts.  Fraud, incompetence or some combination.

Check your credit card account if you have ever given Yahoo a credit card number.  Don't waste your time phoning Yahoo, they will do nothing. Call your credit card company and have the charge removed.

Update:  After five phone calls, I finally got a supervisor who found the account I am being billed for.  Indeed, a Yahoo email account had been opened for a friend in 2002 and never used. Never used.  I've paid $100 for that account by now.

In banking the law requires that all account holders with accounts with no activity for three years be notified.  Bank of America lost a sizable class action lawsuit in the early 1970s when the Bank claimed that they couldn't find 100,000 customers.  When details of the 100,000 list was published it include Herb Caen and Joe D'Maggio among many notables.

Global warming annual report

Last year I summarized all the relevant data concerning global warming. 

Every year I will update the key data: global land and ocean surface temperature.  Based on the annual average number of Celsius degrees above 1940 from the Hadley Center of the UK Meteorological Office:

Yr.    C Above 1940
1997    .351
1998    .546
1999    .296
2000    .270
2001    .409
2002    .464
2003    .473
2004    .447
2005    .482
2006    .421
2007    .397

Reading these numbers: there is stunning temperature stability for the past seven years, all below the peak year of 1998

The data shows why 100 +400 (totals 500) real scientists signed a letter to the UN and to the U.S. Senate saying that global warming has not occurred since 1998 and was not caused by human activity.  Now you can be as smart as 500 real scientists.

If you can look at the data I have put together for you and updated and still take the Global Warming hysteria seriously, you have cause to doubt your ability to reason.

Starbucks bad choice

Starbucks probably made a bad choice in bringing back Howard Schultz as full CEO (as I suggested in an earlier blog).

Why? Because at this time the two main problems Starbucks faces are: (1) an America that is about to start celebrating its glorious triumph in the war in Iraq, a period of great patriotism and military pride is ahead of us in the next ten months and (2) McDonalds is a truly American patriotic organization that is planning to expand aggressively in the espresso business.  Starbucks, is widely perceived as a Lefty business, not a good place to be in this environment with this competition.

Why is Schultz the wrong person?  Because he has just made campaign donations to John Edwards. Edwards is the candidate most openly anti-free trade, most strongly in favor of pro-union tariff barriers.  How can Schultz, who runs a multi-billion dollar business with 10,000 outlets overseas give money to a candidate who openly wants to hurt Starbucks overseas business? The answer is simple: Schultz is blinded by his ideology.

Two disclaimers from me.  First, I have always been a great admirer of Starbucks for the way they run their business, the long standing absence of advertising, the bold and imaginative marketing. (The founders of Starbucks probably read my books and knew my work, the first Starbucks store is in Pike Place Market a member of the Briarpatch small business network that I started).

Second, I don't like any mixture of politics in business, it is usually bad for business. But Starbucks was never hurt in the past by its elitist-Lefty-pseudo-Italian-New York Times-organic-jazz shtick.  That probably attracted many lefties who are Lefty for style reasons rather than ideology.

I don't think Schultz is going to see the problem of a Lefty organization facing a patriotic American, Ronald McDonalds during a time of rising patriotism (Yes, helping the mentally disabled is much more patriotic than supporting third world organic coffee growers).

And I do think that when it comes to Iowans choosing between an EggMcMuffin with espresso over a Venti-espresso with heated egg sandwich they will choose the former if McDonalds tones down the colors, improves the wi-fis and makes the furniture more comfortable

Lefty contempt for Blacks

Wednesday night at a San Francisco Board of Appeals we got to see the kind of contempt that Lefties show to blacks. I needn't tell you that the mention of Dr. Thomas Sowell, Secretary Condoleezza Rice and Justice Clarence Thomas evokes vomit-level disgust on the part of Lefties.  That contempt carries over to other blacks, particularly if they are seeking jobs from a national corporation.

The Board of Appeals issue concerned a fully approved permit to build a Home Depot on a spot in the industrial part of San Francisco that had previously been occupied by Goodman's Hardware. Previously meaning more than 15 years ago.  Home Depot has been trying to open in San Francisco for 11 years.  Home Depot has paid bribes in excess of $2 million so far with more bribe money due.

On the right is a photo of the four Board members in attendance: Randall Knox, Michael Garcia, Katharine Albright and Robert Haaland.  Knox openly expressed for the record his hatred of large corporations, Haaland (photo on right) openly expressed his disgust with blacks who considered their interest in jobs of greater importance than traffic issues on a street few people will ever take to get to Home Depot.

On the left is a photo of the more than 50 blacks from the poorest neighborhood in the City who came to support the need for Home Depot jobs in their neighborhood. This group came at 5pm and was forced to sit patiently until 8:30 before the Home Depot issue was heard.  The young ones were allowed to leave at 9pm.  Four hours they were kept waiting by the Lefty Board of Appeals, while the Board heard four cases that were held over from previous meetings. These 50 people were kept waiting because the Left has contempt for blacks.  Absolute, mean-spirited contempt.

If you think that it wasn't mean-spirited contempt for blacks, you had to hear the cases that we all had to listen to. Cases that could have been moved to the end of the agenda, representing six people and trivia that no one could believe. 

Two appeal cases involved a permit for a fence, the second one was about a fence that was 6 inches too high.  One case was about taxi cab colors and the longest case dealt with a permit to remove plumbing and electrical fixtures in an illegal apartment where the permit holder had failed to fill in two boxes on the permit application.  I'm not kidding you.  The Board spent 3 and half hours on this trivia.

One reason for this outrage: Lefties hate Home Depot much more than they care about poor, job seeking blacks.

MIT or Harvard

One of my friends asked what provokes the subjects of my blogs.  He says they have the erratic sequence of a cocktail party.

The driving force in the sequencing of my blogs is the spontaneous thinking I do.  There are many influences on my thinking that do include interesting conversations, news reports, books, articles and incidents from daily life. 

I suspect I am also influenced by the larger questions that my society is asking itself a subject about which I consider myself especially sensitive (larger questions that are not verbalized).

The most perplexing question my society (American intellectuals) is asking is "How can people continue to be Lefties when an entire century of empirical evidence has demolished the whole Lefty ideology?"

I'm adding to my on-going answer with this blog.  We have a society where we separate people, educationally, into those who value empirical evidence and those who don't.  In Cambridge Massachusetts the division at the University level is between MIT and Harvard. 

* MIT is highly empirical, has an ROTC and is not known for its Lefty protests. 

* Harvard is not known for anything empirical, has banned ROTC, has fired a President for suggesting an empirically based fact about women and produces an endless series of proud, public faculty members advocating tenets of the Lefty Fundamentalist church.

We separate students into Lefties on the one hand and empirically driven people on the other hand.

End of class in America

The day I wrote the earlier blog about the real reason the Elite Social Class disappeared in America I ordered a copy of the last Social Register published in America.  The image of the frontispiece is on the right. While this book was referred to as the Blue Book, maybe because of the phrase 'blue bloods' it was clearly not blue; it was black with red type.

The book is the Social Register of New York and was last published in 1960.  The last Social Register published in San Francisco was 1958.

A list of the abbreviations that were used to refer to universities and clubs is on the left.

The three elements of note, in understanding the now disappeared elite class are: the three service academies, the British Army and the Marine Corps are listed; fifteen colleges and universities (but not Stanford University) are listed along with three prep schools; nine organizations for founding Americans are listed such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, Signers of the Declaration of Independence and Daughters of Holland Dames.

The image on the right is a sample of the two page spread.  The book has 841 pages of listings excluding the many additional reference and married name pages.  The average page has 22 names on it, often including spouses names and children.  The phone numbers, home address and country addresses are listed.  There are no Jews among the 18,000 names in the book.

Dissembling in the anti-whaling world

I've been an active opponent of the anti-whaling movement since the mid-1970s when I published an important article in the CoEvolution Quarterly presenting the data on whales (Minke stocks were almost fully replenished by that time) and calling the anti-whaling movement (anti-Japanese) racist.

Since then I have found the movement to be filled with liars and religious fanatics with nary a shred of empirical evidence to support their views. The Japanese government formed the International Whaling Commission to preserve the world's whale populations at a time when Americans were slaughtering whales indiscriminately and wastefully.

Why Americans can eat cows and pigs but Japanese shouldn't be allowed to eat whales, is a concept I can't seem to grasp....especially if you love cows and pigs as much as I do (really).

Here is an authoritative article that shows who the anti-whalers are.  They throw acid on the deck of a commercial ship, try to destroy its engine, board it without invitation and then scream to the world that they are the pathetic victims of Japanese brutality.

Medical care in Denmark

This hot news is just in.  The country who's medical research I consider the 'gold standard', Denmark, doesn't have such great medical care. 

Everyone in Denmark is apparently on the national health service.  But my friend, who lives in Copenhagen came to the Bay Area for medical advice and care because "the Danish medical service is notoriously light on anesthetics for serious operations, biopsies and ordinary tests."

Pain is apparently one cost of the Danish medical service. Honoring the brave Beowolf.

Arabs and logic

I regularly write blogs about the absence of logic in the Arab/Muslim world. My geographic software program indicates more than 3,000 of my readers are connected to the Internet via Saudi Arabia.  Maybe there is a connection.

Moreover, I am not judgmental about the absence of Arab/Muslim logic.  I am a cultural neutral in this matter.  The Arab/Muslim culture puts saving face and interpersonal accommodation at the top of social values.  When that is the case, it is also the case that logic in the Arab/Muslim society has to be subsumed. 

This high value of saving face and interpersonal accommodation that is found among Arab/Muslims is also found among the American native Hopi, who are also purported to reject logic.*

Logic is defined as syllogism. If All A's have the quality Green and B is a member of the class of A's, then B is Green.  That is logic.

To an Arab/Muslim, B may be Green or may not, depending on who the Arab/Muslim is talking to. If B is a cousin of the person being talked to and the person doing the talking is powerful and hates Greens, then the Arab/Muslim might insist that his cousin is not Green and being a B has no connection to the class of A's.

I didn't make this whole issue up.  This is from today's  Asharq Alawsat article:

“Does the problem (of complete failure in science and technology) lie in the fact that we are Arabs or is it because we are Muslims?”

This depressing and puzzling question was posed by the Egyptian scientist Ahmed Zeweil who, in 1991, won the Noble Prize in Chemistry. The question was put forward at the Al Yamamah University in Riyadh, during his recent visit to the Saudi capital. ..as quoted by Al Hayat newspaper, 6 January 2008.

* Incidental footnote: The Japanese, I know from 35 years of experience in Japan, also have these two top social values but never lying is an even higher value and the Japanese are consequently very readily able to handle logic...they are just enigmatic when confronted by a choice of logic or saving face.

 

Make money while you sleep

I doubt my readers will be overjoyed to learn that they can now buy a cap, like the one in the photo on the left with a logo of this blog on it (ProCommerce).

While I consider the conception of Pro Commerce as a new, deep, significant and powerful insight into human behavior (recognizing a core historic divide between pro and anti-commerce) I don't expect many blog readers to buy caps, coffee mugs, hot plate holders, clocks or miscellaneous with the ProCommerce logo on it.

I want to point out that the way these products are available is a business opportunity that many of you may find interesting and beneficial.  You can make money while you sleep if you come up with the appropriate and popular product logo.  My Pro Commerce logo products are at CafePress.com.

Cafe Press will take any logo you design and allow you to put it on your choice of nearly one hundred products.  My nephew, Jason, has done this for his rugby team at the U. of Arizona and is earning a nice pocketful of change while going to college.

You do the design and marketing, Cafe Press handles the production and order fulfillment with the net margin accumulating in your account.

Anti-Israel vs Anti-Semitic

This story is about Ms Magazine, acting on behalf of its readers, rejecting an ad (on the right) that simply pointed out three of the four highest governmental positions in Israel are held by women.  The rejection is not based on an anti-Israel stand by Ms and its readers, it is an anti-Semitic stand.  The feminist Left is anti-Semitic.  All we need is reason to understand what is going on.

The reasoning is simple: Israel is a country where the citizens have produced a government, that by hundreds of separate elections have put women in the top three out of four positions. Therefore, finding the behavior of these citizens politically objectionable to the Ms readers is not saying that Ms readers object to the military or policy behavior of the Israeli government, it is saying the Ms readers object to the democratic behavior of the Israeli citizenry.  Four-fifths of the Israelis are Jews. These Jewish citizens are voting over a sixty year period in such a way that 3 out of the top 4 positions are held by women.

Syllogism.  The feminist Left are anti-Israeli citizens; Israeli citizens are 4/5ths Jews therefor Ms readers are anti-Jews.

Food donations

All my friends in the 'feed the poor' industry are reporting that their donations for the holiday season in December 2007 dropped significantly. It seems to have happened in many parts of the country.

Why?  I'm sure we will get many explanations and many rationalizations, I just want to add my two bits.

I think that after 27 years of 'homeless' the general public is beginning to put two and two together.  This whole operation is a scam and it is an unpleasant scam.

First, the term 'homeless' was a political invention of the Low Income Housing Lefties in New York who started calling street people and indigents 'homeless'.  The term quickly spread throughout the country and then throughout the world. The early 1980s were a period of high inflation and the post oil crisis when an elevated sympathy for street people and indigents was possible. The new name helped.

Then the one two punch came.  In the 1990s America and many other countries experienced such rapid growth of employment that many urban areas with plenty of 'homeless' experienced 'negative unemployment', where employers could not find employees and many jobs went vacant.  A large part of the population observed that thousands of jobs were open but the number of 'homeless' remained the same.

Then came the early 2000s with aggressive middle-class efforts to find and create housing for the 'homeless' provide medical and social welfare service.  Still the number of 'homeless' remains the same.

That is where we are today.  Most people know that jobs, housing, social services are irrelevant to the presence of street people and indigents.  So, by cutting back on food donations, I think most people are hoping that the 'homeless' will start finding some way to help themselves.