Pro Commerce

Restaurant staff

It is very hard for new people in town to meet other people.  Old friends tend to associate with old friends because trust takes time to develop, new acquaintances are always difficult to assimilate into a friendship network.

As a consequence new people in town find it easiest to meet other new people. 

In San Francisco, restaurant servers are often the new people in town and the interesting people too.  Chain restaurants and new restaurants are the places where server turn-over is high and where new people eating out can meet other new people.

Coffee friends

A new friend who I met at coffee has pointed out that meeting new friends at coffee shops is the main way that many people make new friends these days.

The classic safe places to meet new friends are rather weak in urban environments: churches, casual parties and politics (the latter includes too many flakes, bores and fanatics.)

People I meet at casual parties have virtually never turned into friends.  The parties are ends in themselves.

I've met three-quarters of my new friends over the past two decades in coffee shops.

Dogs at Safeway

These two photos show a dog with its owner in Safeway on Market St. in San Francisco.  This is not an exception.  I see four or five dogs with their homeless owners wandering the aisles late at night.

The guards are told by Safeway management to ignore the problem because many people who aren't blind have letters from their doctors about 'necessary companions'.

I am frankly offended by any dog in a grocery unless it is a guide dog. I avoid Safeway when I can and have significantly changed the categories of food I buy from any grocery.  Meat and bread must be sealed among the many changes in my shopping.

I have seen dogs climb up and eat from deli racks.  I'll never buy from a deli, cheese or an open bread rack in any grocery.  I only have two concerns.  One, I've smelled what a plate that has been licked by a dog smells like.  Dogs perspire through their mouths and noses.  I can smell that.  Two, most dogs spend most of their waking hours licking their asses.

A retail food store policy against dogs (with few exceptions) would be easy to post and enforce.

Mental health and sports

I've raised the question of mental health recently because I have had a flurry of mental health problems around me. There is much that is wonderful that the general health community is doing and little that I am qualified to comment on.

What I can observe, that is relevant, is what I see regarding the upbringing of my grandchildren that can help them avoid mental illness.

First, a heartfelt disclaimer: many forms of mental illness are chemical, hormonal and biological...very little or nothing a parent can do will avoid the consequences of the biological imperatives.  Such parents have my deepest sympathy and my greatest appreciation.

On the other-hand there are three other sources of mental illness and mental anguish that are attributable to parenting and are avoidable.

1. There are combinations of biological child and parents that are unsuited for each other.  I have seen brilliant, curious children become paranoid geeks because the parents were authoritarian, not too bright, tyrants.  I have seen incredibly powerful, self-willed children raised by spineless ('whatever you want, darling') parental wimps create ten year old mental patients. Solution: listen to family friends and professionals about the familial relations, take them seriously. Also make sure that a child has outsiders (neighbors, grandparents, cousins, god-parents) as a way for the child to develop outlets for their extraordinary differences.  The reality of genetics is that your child has no personality traits in common with you, only enough appearance similarities to make you care for the child.

2. Never let a child grow up who is indecisive. Regardless of whether the parents are indecisive, the child must be around people who are decisive and must be rewarded for decisiveness. An adult who is indecisive is one step away from mental illness every moment.

3. Every child must learn that his or her mind and emotions are separate from their identity.  If you can't control your mind (by separating yourself from it) or your emotions, you are a future mental illness candidate and possible suicide. Sports, competitive and difficult, are the best tools I know for gaining bodily power and will power over your mind and emotions.  You win, you race, you push hard because your physical power and will power conquer your mind and your emotions. Vital necessities for healthy adult living.

There are many alternatives to competitive and endurance sports including musical, dance and martial arts training.  The goal is to help the child know that his or her mind and emotions are transient.  They are not his or her identity.

Greatest educational crime

There are probably many crimes against society that are committed in our schools whether it is permitting harassment of isolated students by gangs, angry/weary teachers, curriculum failures, sheer boredom or in-school violence.

To me, none of these rise to the level of crime that is apparently common at the secondary level in American history classes.

It looks like Howard Zinn's history of the U.S. is a widely used text book based on statements from high school history teachers. 

I have been unable to find the number of high school classrooms where this book is the main text, or where it is supplementary reading.  The book sells 125,000 copies a year and has been selling at that level for 25 years.   There are roughly 100,000 secondary level history classes in the U.S.. Zinn's book is in the top 300 books sold every year on Amazon. Those are the only reliable numbers I have.

I've read Zinn's book and have a copy in my library.  There are a few interesting insights into American history such as the firing of all black Federal employees (5,000) by President Woodrow Wilson in his first year in office (1913).

On the other hand the book has two serious flaws.  (1) Most of Zinn's history is wrong and inaccurate, (2) the rest of Zinn's history is delivered with such hatred of America and such bile that it should be consider intellectual poison.

If Zinn's book is used in school as an example of self-hating American historians, I am delighted.  I doubt that is the main use. I tend to believe that hatred of America is widespread among secondary (and certainly among college level) history teachers.  Such teaching is unwarranted, cruel and sadistic. Most students will learn little else of American history and most don't have sufficient critical skills to recognize evil teachers when they are being taught by such people in positions of authority.

I consider the use of Howard Zinn's history text, as reliable history, in U.S. history classes as the greatest educational crime in our country. Teaching American students to hate their history is disgraceful and apparently widespread.

Missing fathers

Possibly one of the most important questions about our civilization is 'What are the consequences of raising our children without the childrens' biological fathers?'

Many psychologists and other ostensible experts have written on this subject and many more have expressed their opinions.  No one has contributed useful guidance in a society where 70% of black American children and a similar proportion of Swedish white children are raised without a father.

Yet we have a large universe of good examples to study.  Such a study would give us very reliable and much needed information.

I propose that we draw a sample of American children born in the U.S. from 1940 to 1945 who's fathers died in World War II. We then follow the lives of these children throughout, against a matched sample of children who's father returned alive from WWII. 

Our sample would range in current age from 63 to 68 years old. Roughly 18% this population would have died by now.  The sample would be easy to draw because the Veterans Administration has the data and the Social Security Agency has earnings records.  A double blind study would be feasible if the group that draws the sample is unconnected to the group that does survey interviews and is unconnected to the group that compiles the survey results.

With an initial sample of 10,000 names we should end up with close to 1,000 respondents in the control group and 1,000 in the subject group.  I estimate the cost of such a study at $15 million including interviews with a sub-sample of the final groups....low by National Institute of Health standards which are commonly five times that expensive.

Lets get to it.  This is a vital civilizational issue and we need reliable answers.

Van Gogh freed us all

Great art, by my definition, changes the way we perceive.  I was thinking about the incredible popularity of Van Gogh and Picasso.  Both had all the appropriate balance, color and other associated aesthetics of their era and their peers.  So what did each of them do that was so exceptional?

I think Van Gogh freed us from the need to be careful with our brush strokes.  Van Gogh went wild with his brush strokes making them visible, bold and deeply integrated into his paintings.  He left everyone after him free to use their brush with wild abandon.

Picasso, while not the first to modify and distort his human and animal images, did so in a way that also freed everyone after him to distort and contort human and animal images in a grotesque manner. It was his grotesque distortions that freed us all to do the same.

Interestingly, the painter who freed us the most, Jackson Pollock, has not experienced the popularity of Van Gogh and Picasso.  I think the reason is simple: in the popular mind Pollock was not creating art, he was just making a mess.

Charitable foundations

It is hard to evaluate the social good that charitable foundations actually do.  The one area where the results of charitable foundation work should be visible is in the field of health.  In the past sixty years charitable foundations have spent the equivalent of a trillion dollars in current value on health research.  What have they got?

I'll start with my simple list of the most important medical contributions to human health and well being.  I nominate eight Penicillin, Salk polio vaccine, birth control pill, the contact lens, the anti-AIDs cocktail, the MRI image machine , erectile dysfunction pills and tamoxifen the drug that has successfully kept nearly all post-menopausal breast cancer from recurring.

*Penicillin was discovered by Alexander Fleming, working at a Catholic Hospital. The active ingredient was discovered by two academics, Dorothy Hodgkin and Howard Florey at Oxford University.  The production method was invented by Andrew Moyer an employee of an Illinois commercial lab.  No charitable foundation money appears in the long chain.

*Jonas Salk developed the final polio vaccine at the University of Pittsburgh Virus Research Lab and it was produced by five commercial pharmaceutical companies.  A small amount of the long string of research project funding ($8 million total) came from the single purpose March of Dimes.

*The birth control pill was largely the work of Carl Djerassi while he was a professor at Stanford University. A tiny amount of money for the original work ($150,000) came from Margaret Sanger's personal gift. 

The contact lens, the anti-AIDs cocktail, the MRI, the erectile dysfunction pills and tamoxifen were all commercial developments.  In a few cases the commercial developer paid royalties to patent holders of original research usually universities, hospitals and laboratories.  Charitable grants were irrelevant.

Looking backwards at the great leaps forward in medicine and health care the trillion dollars of charitable health care funding was like a few chunks of gravel thrown on the ground before a six lane concrete super-highway was built.

The rest of the charitable health funding is unaccounted for on a scale of human health or it competes with the well administered church religious care of the sick and the government care of the needy.

Romanticism

The Wall Street Journal had a long (approx. 6,000 words) Saturday (2/9) article about Toby Young and her love affair with John Manard.

Toby is a 48 year old mother of grown children, married to the same man (a fire chief) she met in high school.  She was a successful business woman and important community figure living near Kansas City.

John is 27 years old, serving a life sentence for his role in a murder. Toby and John spent a great deal of time together while Toby worked as a volunteer in John's prison.

Toby helped John escape from prison and ran off with him for a few weeks of raw sex before the two of them were caught.

The story will become a movie for those of my readers who don't have a WSJ subscription.

There is plenty of speculation in the WSJ article about what happened to cause Toby to give up her successful life for divorce, humiliation and a term in prison.  To me there is no question.  Toby was motivated by pure romantic love, which makes its victim blinded by passion.  If you haven't been there, you won't understand.

This blog is to point out what Romantic is.  Romantic is the worldview behind romantic love. The Romantic Era began at the founding of the United States.  Romantic is associated with Goethe, Keats and Rousseau (see Wikipedia ).  Romanticism is the intense set of passions surrounding the image of 'a strong man who acts as a protector of a sensitive woman, on a pedestal, who devotes her life to the delicate process of understanding the emergent world that lies behind reality...the sensitive world that appears out the fog like a ship at sea.'

In many ways romantic is the worldview of a 13 year old with surging hormones...the same passion that makes people very religious and drives some others to be suicide bombers (for the love of Allah.)

I have always found Romantic to be disconcerting but I live in a Romantic society.  Most films with an American ending have a happily-ever-after story line. Just what Toby was hoping for with John.

Obama is riding a wave of Romanticism.

Self-hatred as personality disorder

When I see a Jew who hates Jews and blames Israel for the plight of the Palestinians, or an American who hates Bush, the Republican Party, commerce and America's history, I have the sense that this kind of self hatred is a mental illness.  The illness can be mild or it can be severe. 

My concern is that the index of mental illnesses, DSM IV treats self-hatred as a sub-set of paranoia , personality disorder and a few other mental categories.  I think self-hatred stands alone and the other categories are a sub-set of self-hatred.

First, look at what it does.  Self-hatred selects from a wide array of one's social categories (employee, daughter, baby boomer, New Yorker, late riser, white, black, musician....etc) the one that already has plenty of hostile social antagonism and identifies with it.  That is why we have so many self-hating anti-Americans, so many self-hating Jews and self-hating whites.

Second, look at what happens in severe cases.  Self-hating people often become, depressed, viciously and uncontrollably angry, sometimes violent and often develop disorders such as bulimia, anorexia, paranoia and drug (alcohol) addiction.

Third, the illness has degrees of severity.  Many people with self-hatred are perfectly functional because their hatred finds others with the same illness, or they learn how to suppress their illness around others who are not sympathetic.  On the other hand, there are severe cases where the person destroys their entire life like Bobby Fischer.  I suspect that suicides include a large proportion of self-hatred cases.

I'm not a therapist.  I don't work in a mental institution.  I'm just a thinker who is making these observations but I suggest it as a Ph.D. thesis for those among my readers who are looking for a field of research.