Pro Commerce

Alert to a new play

A play by a self-hating Jew is scheduled to be read on March 24th in San Francisco.  The Magic Theatre commissioned and is promoting this piece of Jew bashing.  The play is a screed on how flawed Theodore Herzl was and what a terrible mistake the creation of Israel has been. 

Herzl was a brilliant young man in the late 1800s who could see that anti-Semitism in Europe would destroy the Jews unless they had a homeland to escape to. He died young but accomplished enough to save Jewry from extinction.

I'm giving you a heads-up. I'm also writing the next blog which is about the issue of people who hate their families, themselves and their birthright.

Did you know that self hatred is not listed in the DSM IV, the mental illness directory of the psychology world?  It is a subset of paranoia and personality disorder.

Magic Theatre

The anti-Semite (Jews don't mention the name of the Evil one)

Flash

I reported the average of 2007 global temperature as soon as the December data came in.

But I hadn't seen the January figures which show on the right.  We have been on a downward temperature slope for a decade but last year was a straight downward slope.  January was the lowest global temperature month in fifteen years. Click to enlarge.

We actually have global cooling.  All this is due to solar activity.  Who are the nuts in the news saying the opposite?

Getting close

An academic wrote a book two years ago that comes close to appreciating my Pro Commerce thesis.  It is Deirdre McCloskey's Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce.  I just discovered it in a review. 

The reviewer has a great statement:

"Much of McCloskey’s book is thus also devoted to debunking one curiously persistent strain of modern superstition: The widely held belief that commercial society limits, rather than expands, individual liberty; that it allows us to exploit rather than cooperate with one another; and that it impoverishes rather than enriches the poor. In the patient prose of someone making an honest attempt to persuade skeptics, McCloskey shows that each one of these tenets of the anti-capitalist catechism is, despite its centuries-old pedigree, demonstrably false."

Sorry I didn't find this book earlier.  She is on the right track.

Letter to the Editor

Today's S.F. Examiner published my letter that was a comment on yesterday's editorial.  I'm batting 100% in letters to the Examiner.

The subject of the letter is a California law that will require charitable foundations over $.25 billion in assets to report their board, staff and grants by ethnic and other PC criteria.  The subject is boring but I am no fan of Charitable Foundations, having been the president of two. Aside from grant making incompetence that dominates the charitable field, it is a very sick 'Old Boys' network.

Pop culture blindness

Three facts should be noticed by the people who program TV and movies: 1) In less than five years Jay Leno has more viewers than David Letterman.  Leno is a Bush fan, Letterman hates Bush.  2) This year's Oscars program had the lowest viewership in Oscar history. Maybe the public is getting sick of Michael Moore and Al Gore-loving Hollywood. Just seeing the host, Jon Stewart, for three minutes would turn off any patriotic American. 3) Disneyworld, a theme park based on a deep love of America, gets 50 million visitors a year.  There are Disneylands in Europe, Japan and China and they are much loved.

Got the message: the Left and its core anti-commerce, anti-Americanism is dying and dying before our very eyes.

In education management matters

I talked to a friend who is President of the Emeryville School district. This is a rare case of a district having only one high school, a very high tax base because the City has so much commerce relative to children and a nearly all minority school population.

This high school has gotten significantly higher test scores from 2003 to 2007, roughly a 30% improvement on the Academic Performance Index.

What accounts for this unique success with the same school population over five years?  A male principal was brought in from a private Catholic school who had superb management skills.

That simple explanation makes sense to me.

I can readily understand that management is a major issue in school success.  Most public schools were founded in the 19th Century or modeled on earlier schools and use 19th Century management structure without metrics, rewards, constant feedback, delegated responsibility or meritocracy.

Just an observation that makes sense to me. 

(I also note a separate problem, that there are few minority male teachers to serve as examples for male minority students. My anecdotal evidence suggests that males are terrified of teaching because sexual harassment laws will likely destroy their careers, regardless of how saintly they are.)

Global children with married parents

I was asked a great question recently: 'What percentage of children born in the world have two married parents?'

To give the right answer I first had to qualify the definition of 'two married parents.'  Did that include polygamous marriages with one husband and multiple wifes, a common practice in Africa and the Middle East?  The response was 'Yes.

The question came up because I have several grandchildren who were immaculately conceived (Invitro fertilization). 

My answer will surprise you.  Ninety five percent (95%) of children born in the world last year had two married parents.

That number looks high when we know that for white Americans the percentage is 70% and black Americans it is 30% with an average of 65% of American children born with married parents.  Many European countries have lower percentages than the U.S. Denmark and France have 55% of children born with married parents, and Sweden has only 40%.

In terms of children born, the U.S., Canada, Europe and Russia are not very significant.  Which is why America and Europe are outlyers on this issue.

Africa has 14% of the children born in the world, Latin America has 9%, Asia, including China and India have 62%, the nations of Japan, Philipines and the Middle East have 7% for a total of 92%. Nearly all the 92% have children born to two parents. The remaining 8% of the world probably has close to half the children born to two married parents.  That gives my estimate of 95% for the world, which is conservative.

Most of the world is traditional in having married parents of new born children.

True justice

John Burton is being sued for sexual harassment.  As I have suggested in an earlier blog, the facts I know suggest that John is not guilty.

However there is an element of true primordial justice in this case.  I personally consider the sexual harassment laws and the court cases surrounding them to be over-reaching and harmful to respectable social interaction in the work place.  They have virtually eliminated a wide range of playfulness, joking, joie de vivre and camaraderie and put woman at a great disadvantage for advancement. Men are forced out of schooling and all professional relations with children as well as many professional relations with women.

John is being sued for sexual harassment under the very laws that took shape while he was a Congressman from 1974 to 1982.  Hoisted on his own petard. Punished with his own legislation.

Bumper stickers

Scott, a regular contributor to this column, has been counting bumper stickers on cars in San Francisco.  There has been a significant and noticeable decline in the number of bumper stickers. Why?

Bumper stickers with strong political statements (other than candidate names) began appearing in about 1974, increased in frequency in the 1980s and probably peaked in the late 1990s.  The actual data for the number of bumper stickers would be fascinating.  I am going on the basis of statements by friends and clients in the printing business.

Scott suggest the reason for the decline is that we are in a period of greater conformity, bumper stickers are a form of antagonism.  More conformity, less antagonism.

I think that the rising turnout in elections indicates greater political sophistication, greater political give-and-take and less need for confrontational bumper stickers. I call this sophistication the rise of the Second Voice.  We used to have only the voice of status quo/pro-government-action, now we hear the second voice of pro commerce and we are getting more intelligent conversation.

What do you think?

Are PC foodies fading?

One of the new enviro-foodie causes to come along last year was the attack on bottled water.  The argument was that bottled water was resource costly because the bottles were excessive and unnecessary and the water traveled long distances for no good reason.

The environmentally PC foodie was supposed to reject Perrier or Evian and ask for filtered local water with their dinner.

I've followed this movement closely since I first became aware of it last July when four local restaurants dropped bottled water and installed high-test bamboo- charcoal filtered water machines.

So far the movement hasn't caught on.  Restaurant customers are still asking for bottled water, when given the option, and almost never asking for filtered water in lieu of bottles.

Is environmental PC coming to an end?

Unfounded gossip

The humorous rumor going around is that American Media which owns the National Enquirer is preparing a bid to buy the New York Times.

The reasoning is that the content of the two newspapers is very similar; false celebrity stories, insider leaks that are often unfounded, news stories that bear no connection to reality and advertising for content material that is created specifically for the advertiser.

The readers of both the National Enquirer and the New York Times know that they are being fed unreliable gossip....just that the New York Times readers have a higher average income and higher levels of education. The two newspapers make a good fit and could easily overlap their newsrooms.

The New York Times is definitely for sale because big debts come due in two years that can't be refinanced.

Quiz

You don't want the offer from Microsoft to buy Yahoo raised.  Who are you?

You are the 18 out of the top 20 institutional holders of Yahoo who own more shares of Microsoft.

Got it?  When Microsoft raises its purchase price for Yahoo you would be gaining a little value in your Yahoo stock but losing more in the shares of Microsoft you own.  A very interesting and peculiar factor in modern corporate buy-outs.

Source.

Super Crunchers

Ian Ayres',wrote Super Crunchers; for me he wrote two books in one.  One book I liked and the other I didn't.  The book I liked is filled with countless stories and volumes of data about myriad statistical subjects that fascinate me, just like Freakonomics (Levitt is a friend of Ayres).

Examples of what is included in the book I liked are data on number of days from human conception to birth  and delivery along with the standard deviation; he gives details on job assistance programs that provided good job search training (helpful) and on prison terms (length of term for the same crime has no effect on recidivism or post prison earnings.)

The book I didn't like speaks with a voice that sounds like his sub-title: Why Thinking by the Numbers is the New Way to be Smart.  It is preachy and breathless in telling us how extensive is the use of math, empirical testing and statistics in the modern world.

Cool it Ian.  The use of math, testing and statistics may be increasing but it certainly isn't new or dramatic. 

I used linear regressions on credit card customer default data working with an economist when we were both at Bank of America in 1964.  Together we developed the first credit scoring system.

I tested nearly every bank product and service by testing with matched samples.  I didn't just test three or four different designs of statement stuffers and bank statements, I frequently tested 25 variables at the same time (using a Latin Square design) which Ayres doesn't mention. This was in 1965.

By 1968 I had used nearly every statistical conception of testing that was known.  I presented my findings to management and to my professional peers regularly.  Nearly everyone understood what I was doing and appreciated the empirical results.

I repeat, cool it Ian...no need to be breathless about something that has been coming to the business and policy world at a steady and methodical pace for half a century.

My ox is being gored

Following is a letter to the editor of the February 25th Weekly Standard about an editorial on a bill that passed the California Assembly. The same argument was made in a Wall Street Journal editorial on February 4th.

The letter is self explanatory.  The Greenlining Institute has been a client of mine for expert witness work for over a decade. The editorial arguments against the California Assembly legislation is that the bill is (1) too politically correct, (2) unnecessary and (3) will drive foundations out of California.

Here is my letter:

"I am a longtime reader and supporter of the Weekly Standard and a friend of the Greenlining Institute that is blamed in your editorial for the California Assembly bill to require charitable foundations with assets over $.25 billion to report on the status of minorities on their boards, staff and among grant recipients. The Weekly Standard is on the wrong side of this battle. You should always give priority to transparency for investors and taxpayers.  This is precisely the issue in this case; taxpayer transparency.

If the editorial writer (M. Continetti) had described the subject correctly, the issue for Weekly Standard readers would have been clear. What is being made transparent by the proposed California law are public non-profit investment portfolios that pay no State or Federal taxes on their portfolio revenue because they ostensibly give their money to charity for the public benefit.

The First Amendment protects religious orders from taxes.  The First Amendment does not protect privately operated investment portfolio's that have no religious purpose.  When these portfolios are tax exempt they have a responsibility to the public that exempts them from taxes. If any investment portfolio wishes to pay taxes on their revenues, they can do whatever they want with the revenues and they can run their operation in any manner they wish. If they choose tax exemption they should expect some public scrutiny.

My fellow Weekly Standard readers also need to understand our own interests in restraining tax subsidized investment portfolios from being used as 'Old Boys Clubs.'  One of the great achievements of America in the past 40 years has been to replace the 'private club on top of the hill' and the 'Social Registers of the birth-right WASP aristocracies' with a meritocratic society.  This has been a source of American vigor and free market success since the early 1960s.

Most investment portfolios that call themselves public charities are in fact self-dealing 'Old Boys Clubs' that give most of their money to associations, schools, colleges and social organizations that are arcane relics of the sad WASP era. 

Transparency in public charitable foundations over $.25 billion in size is a long over-due movement to keep America on the meritocratic pro-commerce track. I believe that Weekly Standard readers will understand the value of this California Assembly legislation when it is fairly described and understood."   

Help for the Supremes

I want to help the Supreme Court on the current case before them on firearms, just in case they are reading my blogs.  The words of the Second Amendment are: A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

I have a suggestion that can resolve the conflict between militia needs and individual rights. 

Ownership of firearms will hence forth be limited to people serving in or who have served in the U.S. military or a State military or an authorized police force.

That resolves the conflicting interpretations and does it in a way that any individual can own a firearm simply by serving in a military or police organization.  I served in the Army so I think my proposal is fine.

Gossip is good

If you read anything other than this blog, you are likely to run into rants about how we get an endless barrage of gossip about Britney, Lindsey, Paris and O.J.  The rants are usually hostile to the gossip.

Not me.  I consider gossip to be part of the moral lessons that we are always trying to teach each other. 

The main structure of gossip is that the object of the gossip is behaving in some way that is outside conventional bounds. We then follow the object of the gossip until we see the consequences of the unconventional behavior, which is presumably the moral lesson if the behavior is bad and the consequence is a punishment.

If the behavior is particularly unconventional then we are particularly interested in the gossip and we wait anxiously to see the outcome and moral consequences.  We love to hear about poor Britney, money, fame and license, the same for Michael Jackson.  We are fascinated by O.J. and we are still waiting for the full consequences in that instance.

Anger turns to magic

We San Franciscans have seen the Obama magic phenomenon before.

In 2003, Willie Brown was being replaced as mayor and the citizens were furious at Brown for the corruption and bad administration that he had left in his wake.

Two candidates emerged in a run-off election for mayor: Gavin Newsom and Matt Gonzales.  Newsom was seen as a continuation of the Willie Brown corrupt machine.  Matt Gonzales was a relative unknown who started the run-off as the significant underdog.

The anger at outgoing Mayor Brown turned into a magic explosion of support for Gonzales that saw his vote climb every day up to election day.  Gonzales won the election at the polls carried by his magic support.  Gonzales lost the final vote when the absentee ballots were counted; absentee ballots having been cast before the magic campaign had gotten underway.

Gonzales was a nobody and remains a nobody with no admirable characteristics, but the anger at out- going mayor Brown was turned into a magic wave of support for Gonzales.

Translation to Obama today: Bush hatred has been converted into Obama magic.  Obama is only promising "change" from the Bush era just as Gonzales rode the anger at Willie Brown to a magic change movement in San Francisco.

If the Obama magic continues two more weeks, Obama wins and the Clintons will be finished. 

I know several people who personally know both of the Clintons, and we can expect a strong outpouring of contempt (with details) towards both of them, especially Bill.

Falling satellite

I'm sort of interested in hearing more about the falling spy satellite.

It is my hope that the press will use this collision to give us all some sense of how insignificant we are on the planet.

Two-thirds of the planet is ocean and water, ten percent of the surface is ice.  There are vast deserts South and East of the Mediterranean and in China and Siberia. There are vast ranges of uninhabitable mountains and nearly two-thirds of the U.S. is parkland or government preserve.

We can define danger of collision with a falling satellite as a human being actually being hit by a piece of debris. Then we need to know what proportion of the planet has no human beings within 100 yards of empty space.

I'd like to know the number.  My guess is that the part of the planet that is uninhabited is 99.9% or greater.

Postscript: Yes, I know there are plans to intercept the satellite and destroy it.  That is very risky because it would be embarrassing to miss it.

Another mind saw it first

I have suggested in earlier blogs that the reason that academics are Lefties at a ratio of 8 to 1 is because they were people who did poorly in socializing as children and did well academically.  Their failures at social interaction leave them hostile to the mainstream society particularly hostile to the commercial world.

Turns out that the wonderful thinker, Robert Nozick, speculated on this problem a decade ago and wrote about it in a long article (long compared to my two paragraph blogs). Nozick concludes  that academics think so highly of their value to society that they are resentful of the higher status that commercial society gives to business people in rewards as well as recognition and appreciation.  Pure resentment makes them Lefties.

Robert, I'm sorry I didn't know about your observations long ago.(I know Nozick died a few years ago...I'm apologizing to his ghost.)

Modern family

I wonder who is looking at the meta-structure of the modern family.  I see studies of children in families with multiple parents and sequential partners, divorces and custody battles, gay couples, single parents and sperm bank offspring, but the issue is broader than that. Because Americans move around a great deal in the years from age 18 to 25 and find mates from a a variety of geographic locales we have many unusual and unexpected consequences.

One consequence I have seen personally is that In-Laws often never see each other again after the wedding. Personally and in many families I know intimately, the parents of the married couple only meet each other at the wedding and rarely or never meet again.  This is a far cry from tradition.

Family dynamics by my estimate are positive in less than half of all cases. The majority of people I know view their family as dysfunctional, and they are only talking about parents and children.

Grandparents can be a release valve for families and children and can be a stabilizing force.  What is the consequence of simply being too far apart to play much of a role in the lives of the offspring and grandchildren?

What are the consequences?

Dynabook and eeePC

  I recently got a small book sized computer called the eeePC made by Asus. I got it from Amazon.  This computer has a good sized keyboard and a reasonable color screen.  It has wi-fi and meets all the specifications of the Dynabook, thirty five years later.

The Dynabook was a black box the size of standard laptop that staffers at Xexox's computer lab Parc carried around in 1971 as a model of the future ideal computer.  The Dynabook was going to give its user access to all the knowledge in the world and be portable.

What is interesting to me is that the sequence of events to get from the Dynabook in 1971 to the eeePC in 2008 was not possible to foresee.  Part of it was technical and part of it was human organizational innovation. 

The first invention that was needed was the Internet which came twenty years after the Dynabook. The Internet was an invention based on the popular acceptance of a standard computer language: HTML. The second invention was wi-fi which was based the adoption of  wireless standards and the relentless push by Intel to put wi-fi in every computer. The third invention was massive chip memory, the eeePC has barely enough at 2 gigabytes in chip memory.  The fourth invention was incremental improvement in computer color screens, small enough and efficient enough to keep power requirements low.  Finally, the eeePC, to be useful, had to await the development of lithium-ion batteries.

Who could have seen the long sequence of necessary steps from the Dynabook to the eeePC?  Standards are human consensus, technology was all corporate lab work.

More on Larry Summers

I've written about the Larry Summers debacle before but I learned something new from Ian Ayres' book Super Crunchers.

When Larry was speculating that women might be under represented in the top echelons of math he mentioned that the sigma (standard deviation) for male IQs was higher than for women.  He further speculated that at the top level of math academics, which he presumed is populated by people with 4 sigma IQs that the higher sigma variation between men and women would result in 20 men for every woman. 

That would be a statement of scientific fact except for two assumptions.  One is that math academics have really high IQs.  Two, that the highest math intelligence leads to an academic career, which I really doubt.

The most important point to me is the fact that journalists (except for the Wall Street Journal) don't know math, have no idea what sigma is, which means we never got the actual statement reported.

My sympathy for Bill Gates

Bill Gates told the audience at Davos that the world needed a kinder capitalism. He mistakenly thinks that there is a way that the 'poor" of the world can become part of the world of global commerce if the right people, the right minds and the right amount of money can be applied to the issue.  I call it an issue, he calls it a problem.

Bill has no idea that he is the victim of his social world...rich kids in Seattle who made gazillions of dollars in business in America and are invested in the American can-do, money can fix anything ethos.  Sorry Bill, that is sentimental nonsense.

First ,your reasoning by analogy is wrong.  You reason that the third world was able to absorb and incorporate medicine and improve their health. What they incorporated was sanitation, without the germ theory. Sanitation is the reason for the drastic changes in survival and life span that created the global population explosion.  But since the eco-nuts have claimed the wrong reason for the end of the population (they blame urbanization) Bill gets his basic facts wrong.  The expansion and final limits of sanitation are what created and ended the population explosion.

  Sanitation is easy to accept and absorb because it changes very little in the way of social structure. That is not true for commerce or technology.

Commerce thrives on five elements: meritocracy, diversity, honesty, open markets and love of technology.  Commerce does less well as each of those elements is missing.

Bill, let me let you in on a secret: the third world is mostly tribal. Most tribal values place these five pro-commerce values very low on their list of values.  Family is usually at the top of their list, so is loyalty to family and locale, so is saving face and so is social stability.  Commerce has hardly a chance.

Poverty, as you see and define it Bill, will be with us for centuries.

Old boys and the new meritocracy

Before the advent of the meritocracy that we now have most people imitated the aristocratic class old boys when it came to searching for jobs.  The aristocrats got their jobs from socializing and helping each other.

The rest of us imitated this behavior and joined clubs and had parties to create our own social networks. That is what is gone.

In the five techie areas where I have checked closely the in-person social networks for job seeking are long gone.  I've checked in the areas of West LA, Silicon Valley, Seattle, the Colorado high plains and San Francisco. The way you get a job is based on merit.  Merit is measured and relayed to appropriate employers via your working peers, current and past.  Social contacts, in person and on the Internet, with your professional and working peers is the source of all jobs for nearly everyone. 

You can join clubs, hang out at bars, golf or go to parties forever and never get a useful employment contact, unless you are doing it with a working peer.

The world sure has changed...for the better.  It also explains the drastic drop in club memberships and traditional forms of socializing. The most elite club in San Francisco, the Family Club, has had open membership for a decade as the club and its members slowly die (No website).

 

My sympathy for John Burton

Last month the local press announced that John Burton was being sued by the executive director of his foundation for sexual harassment.

First I'll tell you who John is then an analysis of the issue.

John Burton was president of the 400 member SF Young Democrats in 1963 when I was president of the 4,000 member SF Young Republicans (lots of single horny woman in San Francisco and we Republicans had the best parties and the most desirable mates). John spent years wandering in search of a life and being a heavy user of every known drug.  John's brother was the extremely nasty, mean-spirited communist Philip Burton who became a Congressman and built the San Francisco Democratic Party machine using the local SEIU maintenance union.

  John replaced his brother in the Assembly and joined him in Congress in the 1970s.  After sobering up, getting a choice retirement package from his brother in the form of development rights to the Marin airbase (Hamilton field). John returned to the Assembly, then moved up to the Senate where he was the leader for most of his two terms. 

John had none of the political talent his brother had, but he learned it on the job and he was always in control of the San Francisco party machine.

Now the analysis: someone is getting even with John or wants a bribe to retire on.  John can not say three words without one of the three being a swear word. Everyone who has known John for the past two decades knows this and lives with it.

John may have Tourette's Syndrome so he has too swear.  John also only likes skinny bleached blondes.  Unless his accuser, Kathleen Driscoll, fits that description, she is lying.

(The image on the upper right is not our John Burton, he is a man with the same name in the British Labor Party.)

Based on my friends

I have two friends who are the source of two observations. 

One friend in Israel speaks fluent Arabic from birth, was a senior intelligence officer, was a negotiator in the Oslo talks, was a leader of the Lefty pacifists.  That all changed when he was on the faculty of Hebrew University and walked into the cafeteria the moment a Palestinian blew up 60 students.  My friend was behind a concrete pillar and watched his students' brains, arms, innards and other body parts blow past him.  He help evacuate the living and left the Left.

My old report from Israel was that Israeli's were fed up with Arabs for good.  When I was there last it was 'we'll deal with the Arabs in 200 years, right now we have the wall and the fence.'  Now Israelis are saying it is time to 'forget measured response, the idiot Arabs don't understand that and World Public Opinion has always wanted us dead, the time has come to slaughter Arabs when provoked and teach them a real lesson.' There is also a desire to push Gazans by force into Egypt.

The second friend was very close to Hillary awhile back and reports that she circles the wagons, closes her doors and rejects alternate views when under siege.  Hillary is on the way to doing this now.

My view on the election is that Obama has only himself to lose the nomination and McCain has only himself to lose the presidency.  Meaning, both have won their respective races unless they make a serious blunder.

Commerce and core science

This is a continuation of the previous blog.

Commerce is wholly dependent on numbers. Well run businesses of every size and form are numbers driven.  What better example than the Wall Street Journal which is about business and is a numbers paper.

It is appropriate to note that core science and most good science is numbers driven, some is pure numbers.  Niels Bohr, a teacher I once had, claimed that all science was about constants.

Considering the parallels between the dependence of commerce on numbers and the reliance of science on numbers wouldn't it be appropriate to suggest that numbers and their deep connection to the empiric world are the key reason these two human paths are so triumphant?

Numbers are needed to grasp the empiric world.  The reliance of commerce and science on numbers is the reason they are so triumphant in the empiric world.

Learning math

I can't help but notice that learning math, understanding numbers, graphs and charts are essential to living comfortably in our society.

Just an observation.  I hope all my grandchildren learn math and get good at it when they are young.

I use numbers, statistics and algebra all the time in my thinking, my research and I can't imagine life without it. 

Anger at Jews

Bobby Fischer died last month.  He was Jew who hated Jews.  He isn't the first Jewish anti-Semite and not the last. 

I suspect one reason this poor creature, who was competent only at chess and was mentally ill by all other social standards, was an anti-Semite is because he expected the Jewish Community to appreciate his genius. 

We know this was the reason that Martin Luther hated Jews, and there is good evidence that Karl Marx, a Jew, also hated Jews because they paid no attention to him.

Two things to consider in this matter.  If you are a budding but unappreciated genius there is no such thing as the Jewish Community to appreciate you. There is simply no such thing.

At most there is the “majority of Jews” and they have no common agreement on major personalities such as Einstein, Freud, Isaiah Berlin or Disraeli. The only notable heroes for the “majority of Jews” are connected to Israel such as Theodore Herzl, Moshe Dyan, Elie Weisel, Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush.

Bubble of gloom

We are living in a bubble of gloom.

Since I am personally outside the bubble, quite cheerful in fact,  I can see it clearly. The bubble has had some harmful effects on government policy, such as unnecessary tax credits and the associated increase in the deficit. The bubble has had some effects on financial elements, particularly pension funds and business expansion.

But I expect it to be over when Americans begin realizing we have won the war in Iraq and that we have escaped the forty years of Vietnam induced misery.

The media and the popular world usually sees a period of great hope and inspiration as doom and gloom.  The 1960-70s were a period of hippy revolutionary fervor and optimism, involving 10-20 million young people.  During the entire revolution of hope, the media and popular world only saw riots, dirty hippies, horrible drug problems, college uprisings and anti-war violence.

Bankruptcy

Just to let you know that I have been looking for a bankruptcy lawyer.

Not because I am in need of bankruptcy protection but because I want to represent consumer creditors in bankruptcy hearings. I need a lawyer to teach me the ins-and-outs of being a representative in a way that pedagogic approaches could never do.

In blogs several years ago I pointed out that most large corporations need to be restructured to conform to the differences between industrial and clientric activity. Some of that work can be done in bankruptcy court if I can ever get into one.

The other need is to represent consumers.  Hundreds, maybe even thousands of businesses close monthly with outstanding debt to consumers that is ignored because the debit is made up of hundreds of tiny amounts. Video stores have been closing for years, with credit on the books from customers, the same is true for retailers with clothing and products on layaway.

All these customers are screwed because their money is trivial in the picture for each bankruptcy but it isn't for the entire field.

I see no reason why all creditors come before consumers and then consumers are left out in the cold.