Pro Commerce

A disgrace to his professor

I am beginning to hear myself rant.  I am deeply offended by Jeremiah Wright.  The man is a gross distortion of a decent human.  If he is any body's mentor they need serious new counseling.  Jeremiah Wright's worst distortion to date is the claim that he somehow reflects the thinking of Martin Marty.

I interviewed Marty for my public radio program and I have read several of his books. Marty is a good historian and a great appreciator of the religious inclusiveness of America.  He loves America and the role religion has played in our country. I will not be surprised to hear Marty disown and rebuke Jeremiah Wright.

Jeremiah Wright is the opposite of Martin Marty.  Wright's history is mean-spirited, vicious and nothing more than an ideological patchwork of blind ignorance.  His level of tolerance is minus five on a scale that only goes from zero to plus 5; he is the worst example of a demagogue, a racist and a bigot. Wright's claimed association with Martin Marty reaches a biblical level of abomination.

Is my message coming through?

Commerce and rewards

The great genius of B.F. Skinner and the highly effective behaviorism that he developed was his discovery that punishment doesn't work, only rewards do.

The problem with punishment is that it rarely or never clearly communicates what behavior is being punished.  When a dog poops in the wrong place and the owner squirts water on the dog, the dog doesn't know what the problem was: being in the presence of the human, being too near the water spray, being caught round the poop smell, being in the wrong place at the wrong time.  On the other hand, most rewards are very behavior specific.  A biscuit for pooping outside.  A bowl of food for sitting quietly while the humans eat. Rewards are part of behavioral training and they work.

The same is true for commerce. Commerce is in fact a reward based form of behavior.  When customers buy more or pay higher prices, the commercial agent provides more, or better goods and services. 

When penalties are established, such as taxes on cigarettes, prison terms for selling drugs, commerce generally  finds a way around the penalties and charges the buyers more to compensate for the economic cost of the penalties. The penalties rarely stop the behavior.

Commerce, like humans, responds to rewards and doesn't respond well to penalties. 

There is always the interesting combination of rewards and penalties.  As in the case of motorcycle helmet standards.  No government agency supervises the published helmet standards.  Helmet manufacturers can test their competitors helmets and if the competitor is below published government standards, they can be sued, put out of business and the company that brings the action can get a court ordered financial reward.

Commerce responds to rewards and not punishments.  It is a positive sum system.
   

Rising prices

There is an interesting element to observe about the rise in prices over the past 15-30 years.

The three components of the cost of living index that have risen, while the rest have fallen are: health care, education and housing.  All three have one thing in common.

All three areas are domestic.  They are not susceptible to the main element that has reduced the prices of everything else: international competition.  We can't make any of the three more efficient or more productive or lower costs because they are domestic, protected by the absence of outsourcing, protected in many cases by unions and in the case of housing and healthcare by government regulation.  Housing codes are rigid outmoded and make sure innovation is stiffled.  Healthcare is driven by health insurance which is regulated on a state by state basis, just like banking was 20 years ago.

While gasoline is high right now it will most certainly go up AND down.

When are we going to realize that we are hurting ourselves with policies that protect education, healthcare and housing?

Jeremiah Wright channels Jim Jones

A few days ago in a blog I said that Jeremiah Wright sounded just like Jim Jones (who seriously damaged the trademark Kool Aid).

Now I find that several of Jim Jones' sermons and speeches are on the web.  Jeremiah Wright is definitely channeling Jim Jones.

Wright is also a racist bigot for saying that an attack on him is an attack on The Black Church.  I expect this to result in the end of Wright and Obama as the black religious world slowly wakes up to this outright, malicious, bigoted and very damaging lie.

I've gone to black churches of every denomination for 40 years and I immediately saw the connection of Wright and Jim Jones because they are both far outside the mainstream black church.

Commercial threshold

I think that the United States passed a commercial threshold a decade ago.  What the hell do I mean by a commercial threshold?

The commercial threshold is the point in the history of a commercial society where nearly all participants are able to enjoy all the benefits of the society if they meet the commercial behavioral norms. In other words, we are now so rich that anyone, with a modest effort can enjoy all the benefits of the American commercial world.

'That sounds outrageous,” yells the Lefty. 'What about all the poor people and the people in prison?

The commercial threshold will never include that part of society that rejects education, sobriety, persistence and a willingness to work.  In our society, the outcasts are a tiny percent of the population...less than 5% of all adults.  A trivial number, probably a minimum for any dynamic human population.

How do I know we passed the threshold? I look at my life and those around me.  I personally never had to work at anything I didn't enjoy and I always had access to the abundance of a full life. I didn't inherit money or trade skill but I did understand simple living.

When the Hippies came along, they found the same reality that I did.  Their only constraint was that they had to live in groups in order to have financial freedom.

Recently I asked myself the question: 'Could an ordinary person, 21 years old, with a community college degree own a home in San Francisco, have a nice car, travel on vacations and raise a family.  The answer is yes. 

Almost any menial entry level job, checker at a grocery, barista at a coffee chain, front server at McDonalds can be in management within ten years and have a salary and benefits that will allow them to buy a home, if their spouse works too.

Moreover, anyone with determination and persistence in virtually any field from roofing to gardening will actually be rich in twenty years.

That is the level of prosperity of our society.  That is the threshold we have passed.

Long history

The FLDS story of children being taken from their compound and turned over to child protective services in Texas is not a new story.

The history is long and has one point: any group that separates itself from the larger society to practice unusual marriage, sexual, child rearing or other unconventional group practices will have serious trouble. Neither isolation, walls, deserts or mountain tops are protection.

I have observed this history since the original Mormon sect moved to a desolate desert far from everyone else and found the U.S. Army pursuing them. Synanon in California experienced the same thing as did the Branch Davidian's and a dozen other groups.  Usually the group finds itself surrounded by armed police, sheriffs, the FBI and occasionally an army.

I advised many religious and communal groups in the 1970s and 80s.  My advice was simple:  If your group has a couple getting a divorce living with you, if a family living with you has a custody battle underway, if your group has under 18 runaways get them out of your group or expect to be surrounded by armed forces with guns drawn. That is simply how our world works.

The reason is simple.  We appear to be tolerant but we are in fact a Puritan society.  Provoke us with your unconventional marriage, sexual and child rearing practices and we will bring down the Puritan wrath on you. We use child custody laws to carry out our Puritanism.

These days a communal group that lets children smoke and drink alcohol will get shut down too.

Your only hope is to remain very small and innocuous.

The FLDS never asked my advice.

Future of the newspaper

You don't have to know very much to know the sad future of the newspaper.  Just as long as you think of the newspaper in its current incarnation, it has no future.

However, the newspaper in a new incarnation has a great future.  I hate to do this, since I virtually never give business advice to anyone but a client, but I will describe the future for my readers because I don't have a current relevant client and don't anticipate one.

The future of the newspaper is the newsroom. It will be a main office in New York, Washington DC, London or Tel Aviv, one of the news centers of the planet. The newsroom will have sub-offices in a few other capitols and many stringers. There will be no sales offices.  Sales will be part of independent companies that work for the separate media. 

The function of the newsroom will be to take in all relevant news stories in a variety of media.  The stories will be a mix of commissioned and unsolicited.

The function of the newsroom staff will be to format the stories into the various appropriate media.  The media will pay for the newsroom service.  All media will be paying for the service which will provide the story in the appropriate form: radio, TV, Internet, press, magazine, journal etc.

Picture the future newsroom in Tel Aviv.  A story comes in from Salt Lake City about the mayor having an ear replaced after being attacked by a bear. The story comes from a stringer.  The stringer is told to get video immediately.  The short report is written up for the Internet and a quick voice segment is added to the revolving radio feed.

When the video gets back it is broken into a small segment for the Internet, a larger segment for the global TV feed and the radio feed gets live audio added. A photo and background column is prepared for the press and a small insert is made available for the weekly magazines.

That is it.  The same story is sold to every medium.  That is the future of the newspaper...the newsroom survives.

You asked the wrong person

Don't ask me who this man sounds like. (See the end.)

This is Jeremiah Wright on PBS claiming to paraphrase extreme lefty Edward Peck claiming to paraphrase Malcom X:

"America's chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black....

Cultural explanations

I am always faced with the sad reality that very few people have the vaguest idea of what culture is. Virtually no one to talk to about the subject.

My father was an anthropologist in his later years and one of my daughters is.  I didn't learn what culture was until I was 33 years old on a trip around the world.  It was 17 years after my first visit to another culture and 17 years during which I traveled extensively.

The following is a question based on understanding cultural difference: 'Why do the Chinese find gambling so important?'

The photo on the right shows San Francisco Chinatown residents boarding a bus to an Indian gambling casino. There are dozens of such buses every day, always free, often to Reno and Lake Tahoe resorts.

Commerce knows it should provide free buses, commerce does not need to know why Chinese gamble.

Do you have an answer to the question?  I don't because I'm not Chinese. There are very few third generation Chinese-Americans who go on these free bus trips. The cultural structure doesn't survive assimilation.

Check the first comment below for a fascinating explanation.

Teaching math

The NYTimes reported on an article in Science magazine.  A rare double blind randomized test was done on college students between the equivalent of a math word test and a simple math equation test.  The subjects who were trained with the math equations did much better did at math.

First, I never trust research on college students, but I'll make an exception where the subject of the research is school based learning methods.

Second, anyone should have been able to figure this matter out (anyone, unfortunately wasn't me.)  Translating a word problem into the underlying algebra (a donkey versus a mule walking backwards going 3 mph ...etc) has never taught me any math. It doesn't teach anyone else math either.  It only teaches how to translate word problems into the algebra you already know.

My guess is that solving word problems in math is a skill independent of math.

Every single person in our society must know math to be a full participant.  There are no two ways about it. This math education finding will help us out of the educational quagmire we have been fighting for half a century.

Modest consideration for Obama

I definitely don't support Democratic candidate elect Obama but the effort to suggest that his relationship with white American terrorist Bill Ayres is an unreasonable charge....it doesn't fly with me.

I have been on many boards profit and non-profit and I would hate to be judged by my association with some of my fellow board members.

I know Obama and Ayres were on the same board for many years.  Doesn't matter, you can go many years without really knowing other board members in many instances; you can go for a long time without any meaningful social relations.

It may not have been Obama who solicited Ayres for the initial Obama campaign kick-off at Ayres' home.  It could well have been the other way around, and Obama was just being his regular-poor-judgement self.

The fact that Ayres and his fellow terrorist wife are professors in Chicago is unfortunate...both should have been in prison but that is not Obama's fault.  They are on the street, have respectable jobs and the one thing I know about all far lefties...they assume that everyone thinks like they do.  So Obama thought Aryes and  Dohrn thought like he did and vice versa. 

That is my problem with Obama (in addition to my earlier blog where I pointed out Obama's slander that many other Black churches are repositories of anti-American hate like his church...they aren't).  Obama is a Lefty stuck in the failed policy ideology of the mid 20th Century.

Modern concrete edges

These small stainless steel knuckles in the photo on the right are to be found all over America on the edges of concrete. Will anthropologists of the future know what to make of these?

I'll make a record for them.  America has always been a society where teenagers are rebellious against their parents and society.  Teenagers rebel in many ways and are virtually uncontrollable by adults.

In the late 1970s a flat board with four wheels on two flexible axles came into common use by teenagers.  It is called a skateboard.

Teenagers were able to ride their skateboards on most flat smooth surfaces. Since the range of surfaces for riding included the edges of all concrete withing four feet of the ground, the adults, via their local governments, began putting metal clips on the concrete to keep skateboarders from using them to skate on.  A sign saying "no skateboarding" or "respect public property" would have been incomprehensible to teenagers of the period.

Swim meet

I took the photo on the right when I went to see two grand daughters in a regional swim meet. 

I loved the swim meet for two reasons.  It had 1,200 swimmers racing 20 at a time from ages 10 to 18 for four days, including some relays. The entire meet ran like a highly efficient machine, entirely the product of humans (mostly strangers) working intimately together in split-second precision.

Second, competitive swimming is and always has been a middle-class sport (unlike tennis, sailing, golf and horseback).  The people at the meet were healthy, enthusiastic, sweet, ethnically diversified and proud.  Just what I love about the American middle-class.

Modernity

There are four societies that have acclimated well to modernity.  The Nordic society, America, Japan and the Children of Israel.  Just making that list is helpful. 

Knowing history helps understand that the Dutch (clearly a source of modernity) are linguistically and culturally part of the Nordic people and to the extent that the Vikings conquered England, England is too.

Knowing that the Children of Israel and the Japanese entered the modern world at the same time sets the stage for understanding that both societies exploded  with vigor in the new milieu.

Lastly, Americans are the pinnacle of modernity and we deserve to be viewed as a unique society because we have such radically different institutions and traditions.

Think for a moment...what do these superstars of modernity have in common that can't be found in the same proportion among any other people?

My answer is a cluster of attributes that are all part of one reality. These are societies that move readily, adapt aggressively, are open to change, have weak social hierarchies and have the weakest family structures on the planet.

All these points are true for these four societies and only these four. Move: the Vikings, Dutch, English, Americans and the Children of Israel are the world champions in traveling, trading and exploring the globe.  Less known is the extensive trade and travels of the Japanese before 1640. Better known are their ventures after 1860. Unknown to most of the world (except to Hawaiians ) is the extraordinary internal movement of the Japanese.  Most Japanese have visited every part of their own country and much of the world outside.

Adaptation and openness to change probably needs no explanation.  The weakness of the social hierarchies and families in these four societies (particularly in Japan) is not so widely known. I'll save it for another blog.

Put these four societies together with their four common attributes and what single word fits the cluster and is a synonym for modernity? Open.

Bad book

Stewart Brand had a policy of not wasting his reader's time on negative reviews in the Whole Earth Catalogs or any of its progeny.

I learn from negative reviews and I hope you will.  I loved Charles Taylor's previous books, Sources of the Self in which he does a great job of dealing with the question of individual authenticity.

But I'm furious with myself for spending $40 dollars on his current 775 page Secular Age.  What we have is a Roman Catholic trying to find the roots of modernity in the dark ages.

Max Weber correctly connected modernity and commerce to Protestantism. Protestantism is about the power and validity of the individual outside of social hierarchies in the search for worldly meaning. 

Robert Bellah tried to apply Weber's thesis to Japan and failed.  Now Taylor does the outrageous in trying to find the mental framework of individualism and anti-hierarchy in 12th Century Roman Catholic monks and scholars.

The Roman Catholic Church for 1500 years has stood for the status quo and it does to this day.  At the peak of its power the Church launched the Inquisition to murder all deviation from the Church's catechism of status quo.

Of course it took 775 pages for Taylor to fail at his efforts to rewrite history.  It would have taken him only 600 pages to show that the Catholic Church discovered the Copernican solar centric model, Darwin's evolutionary model and modern contraceptives.

I have an alternative approach to seeking the roots of modernity.  Look at the societies that have most successfully adapted modernity and examine their commonalities.  No Catholic or Muslim society would be on that list.

See my next blog.

Things you probably didn't know about (3)

There was extensive trade and communication in the 6th through 8th Centuries from the Middle East to Japan. Uniform gifts of silk were sent from each leader to each other head of state.

I visited Nara, the capital of Japan for that period, and was taken by Jay Gluck, a Persian anthropologist to one of the Emperor's storehouses that was open on one particular day.

I was invited to see a stack of 4 foot wide by 4 foot long silks that were each separated by a piece of newspaper.  This was the day that the entire stack, 5 feet high, was re-stacked from the top, aired out and new paper interleaved between the silks.

This stack of large square silks had been gifts to the Japanese emperors on their ascension to the throne over a two century period from the 5th to the 7th Century.  The silks came from every empire between the Mediterranean and Japan.  The silks were marked with a small tab of fabric.  Many came from Persia and the Sogdian empire as well as every part of India, every Chinese province and many Mongolian tribes. These silks were beautiful and fresh.

Most of the Japanese emperors at that time and earlier were women.  Here is a list of the Japanese emperors going back three millennia.  The ones who received the gifts I saw were in the range of 44th to 50th emperor.  We are currently on the 125th Japanese emperor. 

I once listened to a Japanese friend on a late night cross country drive from Tokyo to Kanagawa recite all the Japanese Emperors to me...it was a feat of memory required of all Japanese High School students.

Things you probably didn't know about(2)

The image on the right looks like any highly realistic portrait done in the most recent two centuries.  Oil on canvas with a sense of depth and subtlety.

This image is in fact from the 2nd Century in the Eastern Mediterranean when the Christian Gospels were being compiled.

I saw two similar images of Egyptian women from the 2nd Century BCE. The Egyptians apparently had such realistic images painted before 1,000 BCE.

I happened to see my two Egyptian originals in a private shop in the Toronomon section of Tokyo when I was with Jay Gluck.  The small third floor shop was devoted to restoring originals.  Jay had brought in a ceramic from 4th Century Persia to be put back together after it had been broken in a Kobe Gallery.  When he went to pick it up he took me along and I saw the Egyptian portraits on a table and asked about them.

Non-disclosure

A few years back I started writing my blogs with a Tokyo byline.  I saw my readership fall, so I dropped the byline and vowed not make it obvious when I am in Tokyo.

Wrong interpretation. Turns out my readership climbs rapidly from March to June and falls from then on for a few months.  It took years for this pattern to emerge and I don't know the reason or reasons. I came to Tokyo in June and misread the reasons for the readership decline.

Now in Tokyo, as my friends all know, I read fewer blogs and only rudimentary news stories. Deliberately, so I can enjoy Japan and focus on life in Tokyo.

This is just to report that I get more information and a better screen of world news from Bookwormroom than from any other site. Some of the other sites I read are so focused on Obama-Hillary that it is boring.

Photo on the above right is a six year old girl on her way to school alone.  You tell me how a society can do this...how could New York (a tiny town compared to Tokyo) possibly be safe for a 6 year old to walk and take the subway to school? 

Things you probably didn't know about (1)

The next three blogs are about rather stunning elements of history that virtually none of my readers know about.

Did Diderot create the first encyclopedia?  Absolutely not. The Chinese have been creating encyclopedias for roughly 2,000 years.  It is part of running a large country with a complex bureaucracy.

I saw my first Chinese encyclopedia from the 15th Century on a visit to the Library of Congress in 1983. The Library has about 14 volumes of an original 27 volume Chinese encyclopedia.

The subjects (in Chinese of course) cover the geography of country, with detailed town maps and names of prominent structures.  It also includes descriptions (with illustrations) of all manufacturing and technology of the period with local extraction sources and details.  Just like Diderot's. An original Diderot is in the Library of Congress too.

Now you won't be surprised to learn that there was over a century of contact between Europe, China and other Asian countries at the time of Marco Polo's (and his father's) travels.

Dimensions

People tell me they have trouble understanding the concept of multiple dimensions.  We supposedly live in a 4 dimensional world (the 4th being time).

Dimension as mathematicians use the term means orthogonal. Each orthogonal means 90 degrees away. Each higher dimension is orthogonal to the lower dimension. A line is one dimension a square is two dimensions and a cube is three dimensions. The square has two lines that are 90 degrees off of the original line.  The cube has sides that are 90 degrees off the square.  Higher spaces can be drawn but are harder to envision.

For me, I think of dimensions and orthogonality as meaning 'really different.'  My conception has us living in a high level of dimensions.  In addition to the three standard dimensions I add color, sound, smell, touch, vibration, temperature, uprightness, concepts and infra-red radiation.

In my conception, people who lack any of these dimensions live in a slightly different world than I do.  A blind person doesn't perceive a bell the way I do if I can see it, except that the blind person uses many other dimensions to approximate my standard American perception.

Many animals and insects have very different senses than I and they live in other dimensions as a consequence. Elephants can feel vibrations that are much lower than we can feel and many insects can see in the infra-red and ultra-violet spectrum.  Sharks can detect small fluctuations in electricity and birds can sense fluctuations in gravity.

I put concepts in the list of dimensional senses.  That is because without words, I doubt that the world around us is perceived the same way.  If you know that the Japanese and other linguistic groups have two words for blue compared to our own, you will not be surprised to see that a rainbow has a blue and light blue region that are each the same size as our one blue...we only see blue as having a slightly wider region in the rainbow because we have rainbow words that are not as distinct as the Japanese. So concepts, as embodied in words constitute a dimensionality.

The image above right shows five dimensions of a rectilinear object as shown to you in two dimensions.

Frustrating

The photo on the right is a new building that is almost finished in the core of the Shinjuku district in Tokyo. Shinjuku is the crossroads of the densest transportation hub in the world, with more than one million people arriving and departing every work day.

This building is just as dramatic for me as the Alcoa building in San Francisco was in the early 1960s.  The popular press joked that someone forgot to take the building out of the box. (Photo on the left).

The Shinjuku building looks like a construction made of popsicle sticks.  Yet I love it.

What is with the Japanese?  I ask because the parents of many of my friends in Tokyo are dying...nearly all in their 90s. These are Japanese who were born before our World War I.  Their average lifespan is the longest in the world. Five years, on average longer, than Americans.

Why do these Japanese have the longest lifespans?  They do everything wrong by American standards of common wisdom.

The Japanese who are just dying spent their entire 90+ year lives eating white rice as their main nutrition, the air in their cities was badly polluted for fifty years (until 1973), they starved for five years (WWII), they were exposed to the only two nuclear weapons dropped on human populations, they smoked cigarettes heavily and still do, they were not allowed to crawl as infants and they never had much beef or pork in their diet.

Among their distinctly unAmerican behaviors they were never sexual Puritans (men and women often had lovers while they were married), they nearly all masturbated from early childhood, their parents chose their spouses for them, they hated lying on the beach getting sun so they never did, they bathed in very hot water (107 degrees) everyday and they loved riding bicycles, eating seaweed and fermented soy beans.

Why did they live so long? What don't we understand about health and lifespan?

Cuss it

I don't have any objection to the appropriate use of cussing or swear words. I use them infrequently for the obvious reason that they can be powerful, full of emotional impact, if they are used only when needed.

It is just fun to see that someone has a site that can screen my blog for cussing.  This image reflects the result. I cuss less than 88% of the blog sites they have examined. I am far out of the cussing loop for blogsites.  Probably because I believe reader's emotions are best incited by describing what I know with authority rather than reading me rant.

You can click on the image to get to the site for your own blog review.

Comments on the Whole Earth (part 4)

This is a continuation of comments on Andrew Kirk's history of the Whole Earth movement Counterculture Green.

Kirk appropriately includes in his history the role of Gerard O'Neil's space colonies and the huge disruption it created in the environmental movement as the Luddites confronted the techno-enviro futurists. Gerard O'Neil, the father of the American space colony movement, was a physicist at Princeton who had a geek following for his idea of creating a human inhabited satellite made out of moon material at a stable point in the orbit between the moon and the earth (it is called Lagrange 3, the L3 point, after the mathematician who discovered it).

What Kirk didn't know about was the origin of the project. Gerard O'Neil was at a physics convention at the Hilton Hotel in the Spring of 1973. Based on a comment by another physicist O'Neil took the chance to walk across the street to the Point Foundation office on the roof of Glide Church.  I (as president of Point) had hired one of my former hippy staffers (Dick Austin) from the Bank of California to be the executive director of Point and turn-away all the grant seekers. Dick was great at turning people away and making them feel we loved them nevertheless. But when O'Neil walked in and talked about a space colony, Dick called me up immediately, knowing I had already started an organization called the International Committee for a New Planet.  I took Gerard O'Neil to lunch, said I'd gladly give him $600 (and more later) for a conference of his geeks on the subject of space colonies. 

Space colonies were a sci-fi fantasy at the time.  No one, but no one considered the possibility that it could and should be done.

I set up one condition for my grant to O'Neil: the check would be made out to Princeton.  O'Neil was baffled about my condition which I explained.  This grant will make your project an official project of Princeton University and their administrators will treat it as matter-of-fact which is what we want.

Sure enough, I was right.  Princeton treated it matter-of-factly, included O'Neil's conference in their ordinary conference press releases.

A month after the conference some New York papers picked up the story, then some New York magazines did too.  They all laughed and ridiculed the idea. 

That is how all new and innovative ideas enter our society, being laughed at. Within two years O'Neil was hired by NASA to start work on the design phase.

Portfolios

A long time regular reader (Bob S.) asked me about two portfolios I've created over the years.

The first was the anti-PC portfolio created in January 2004. I created it because I had made money buying Halliburton when it had done just the opposite of what the Lefty-Marxist ('wars are done for profit') PC meme claimed: it had fallen with the election of George Bush and fell further with the war in Iraq. I bought it at the bottom in 2003 and it doubled. It doubled again since then.

I created the anti-PC portfolio made up of Citibank, Microsoft, McDonald's, WalMart, Starbucks and Halliburton. Citibank is down 50%. Microsoft, WalMart and Starbucks are right where they were in January 2004.  McDonald's has more than doubled.  The overall anti-PC portfolio is up 19% since January 2004 but the Dow Jones is up more: 22%. 

No political or investment conclusion to draw from this lesson.

My perfect portfolio is the same as the Dow Jones, up 1% today over January 2007. I no longer recommend this portfolio as I said a month ago. Global diversification doesn't work.  The world is now one stock, thanks to global instantaneous arbitrage.

We are not in a recession, despite the hysteria in the global financial sector and among the political busybodies. I commented on this a month ago.

Comments on the Whole Earth (part 3)`

This concerns Andrew Kirks history Counterculture Green of the Whole Earth Catalog and the growth of modern environmentalism.

The second part of the movement that Kirk isn't able to cover is my creation of the Briarpatch Network.

The Briarpatch was founded in May of 1974, when I was still a president of Point Foundation.  Briarpatch was the mother organization of hippie businesses and the entire entrepreneurial movement that grew out of the hippie world (and was spread to Sweden and Europe later). The Briarpatch had over 1,000 members over a decade; it required that all businesses that joined have an environmental purpose, love their business and have open books.

Nearly every environmental project in the S.F. Bay Area, we are talking many hundreds of businesses, was a member of the Briarpatch and enjoyed the benefits of sharing resources with others and getting superb business advice, help and support.

While fifty or more of these businesses became influential in the environmental movement and fifty more in other movements, one in particular had a significant and lasting urban environmental impact.  It was Fort Mason, a Briarpatch business under the leadership of Ann Howell who took over the deserted Army base in San Francisco and turned it into a thriving congery of more than 120 non-profit business (many were also part of the Briarpatch). The Fort Mason model became the exemplar for nearly all the urban Army bases that were abandoned by the Army in the 1990s at the end of the Cold War.  All were shaped by environmental visions based on Ft. Mason.

History is important

I confess to never missing Edward Rothstein in the New York Times. His history of the Olympic torch run, which was begun by the Nazi's a decade after Germany had been banned from the Olympics and just four decades after the Olympics were first revived, is not to be missed.

I'm never one for sentimentality....the Olympic torch issue is just proof of my point that sentimentality (about the universal brotherhood of sports) is misleading and itself provokes hostilities.

Great photo.  Click to enlarge.

Comments on the Whole Earth (part 2)

This is a continued comment on Andrew Kirk's book Counterculture Green.

Kirk does an excellent job of connecting the dots between the Whole Earth, the Point Foundation and the entire environmental movement that followed.  Two parts where I played a central role are not included. The breadth of our activities were far too great for any historian to grasp or examine.

One part that connected my activities and the Point Foundation was my role in the corporate social responsibility movement.  I played a major role in starting this movement.  The movement was in its inception when I became business manager of Glide Church which was also a foundation with a multi-million dollar portfolio.   I did several things.  I went to New York in my role as a foundation treasurer to personally call on all the major foundations (Ford, Rockefeller, New York Foundation, Carnegie  etc ) and talked to the treasurers in each foundation. I  explained how I was using my foundation portfolio to support social activism both in the choice of companies to put in the portfolio and in supporting proxy fights for social issues. I was laughed at...really.

I did support many proxy fights and paid for many with my Point Foundation grants. I was also the first investor in several later socially responsibe mutual funds.

The most useful outcome of my New York visit was to meet Alice Tepper Marlin (founder of the moving force in the corporate social responsibility movement the Council on Economic Priorities). I later funded Alice's activities directly with a major Point Foundation grant. With Alice's help I convened and paid for a conference of all the key American organizers in the corporate social responsibility movement in the hills of Inverness (Tomales Bay North of San Francisco) in Fall 1972.

By the late 1970s I personally no longer supported the ideas of the corporate social responsibility movement and frequently argued against it in private.  I concluded that no corporation could ever be environmentally pure, could never meet many social responsibility criteria (certainly not the multiplicity of criteria, women, health, minorities etc.) and that the whole movement was an ideological fantasy. I frequently said and wrote that individual simple living was the most effective form of environmentalism, in my opinion.  Only wise regulatory legislation could direct the flow of funds to benefit the environment and shape corporate behavior in a democratic industrial society, not shareholders.

A second part of my activities that bore on the Whole Earth and the environmental movement was the creation of the Briarpatch.
Next blog.

Comments on the Whole Earth (part 1)

I just finished Andrew Kirk's Counterculture Green: The Whole Earth Catalog and American Environmentalism. The book is a few months old but it will be an authoritative resource for the next fifty years.

Kirk does a masterful job, the first one, to examine and understand one of the roles that the Whole Earth Catalog (and the unnamed movement I was a key part of) played in modern America.  Kirk focuses on one role, the shaping of the modern American environmental movement.  He gives due credit to the two great figures in this movement, Stewart Brand and Huey Johnson.

Kirk's most viable thesis is that the Whole Earth Catalog and its various progeny, changed the environmental movement from a wilderness saving, Luddite exercise in Sierra Club conservation to a vital, technology accepting, forward looking, consumer driven personal living movement. The hippies via Stewart's extraordinary vision in the Whole Earth Catalog, radically shaped and defined the contemporary environmental movement.

Since I played a central role in the whole history I want to make a few additions, a correction and some comments.

Start with the inception of the Portola Institute (Dick Raymond founded it; it was in Menlo Park and I was a board member from its inception)  was founded to profoundly change education (and failed like everything else in education reform). Kirk tells about me bringing together, for lunches at Glide Church, many diverse people who later played important roles in the hippy movement and the Whole Earth movement.

The sequence is wrong.  I became the business manager of Glide Church in 1971 and established the Point Foundation offices on the roof half a year later.  The lunches were part of my life long pattern of using my station and status to build an organization.  From 1966 to 1971 I was head of a department in marketing at the Bank of California (later becoming the youngest vice-president of a major American bank).  I had an expense account which I used for long Friday lunches at the Yamato Restaurant on California at Grant.  I invited 8-10 guests every Friday for three years at the Bank's expense.  Dick Raymond and others had the power of invitations.  These lunches are what helped form the cohort of people who later were the Whole Earth movement.

Kirk mentions that before Stewart got the Whole Earth started he was impressed with an education fair put on at S.F. State College for teachers showing all the current aids and tools in education (it was called Innovation in Education).  A true story.  Missing is the fact that I put on the fair.  As president (from 1966 to 1967) of the Service Committee in Public Education a blue ribbon citizen's group to improve the S.F. schools, I looked around for a way to communicate directly with teachers and particularly the teachers at the college-prep-school, Lowell High, who had a $200 budget each. My solution was to organize the education fair that Stewart saw and was duly impressed with.  My fair was duplicated by others all over the U.S.

AARP and CU

The two acronyms are fairly obvious: American Association of Retired People and Consumers Union. 

Two years ago I announced my intention to start an anti-AARP organization.  The AARP fails to understand the need to provide some form of Social Security for a young generation just entering the labor force.  AARP is blindly fighting all viable suggestions on the false believe that it will hurt the current SSI recipients.  AARP succeeds in creating a generation that might very well take funds away from current SSI recipients unless an alternative is built.

Consumers Union's problem is that they don't do anything.  The CU is a seventy year old organization founded by Marxist, union organizers and other cookie cutter Lefties of the mid-1930s.  Aside from publishing Consumer Reports, the organization fights a hundred trivial battles you never hear of.

I'm announcing the formation of the Real Consumers Union that will represent real consumers.  Real consumers want lower prices, higher quality, more retail innovation, a far greater variety of products and services and much more shopping.

Real consumers who know their own interests are rabidly in favor of NAFTA, the WTO, expanded global trade, more free trade agreements, reduced tariffs and significant expansion of outsourcing.  We certainly don't hear any advocacy groups tooting those horns.

Lying is unacceptable to me

Over the past two days, the leading and most likely candidate for president on the Democratic ticket, Barack Obama, was caught in a blatant self confirmed lie.

During the past two weeks in the Pennsylvania campaign Obama has been saying that he will re-negotiate NAFTA.  You don't have to read the title of this blog to know where I stand on NAFTA.  NAFTA is one of the most pro-commerce trade agreements ever written and signed by three nations and has generated untold trillions of prosperity for all three countries involved.  The treaty is still not fully implemented because unions have blocked the open trucking part of the agreement for 15 years.

The press discovered emails in which an Obama advisor told the Canadian consul in Chicago that Obama was just posturing on the campaign trail. Obama had no intention of ever renegotiation NAFTA.  Disgusting and certainly a lie but it was a second hand lie.

Then yesterday Obama owned the lie in his own words: "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities (a lot of small towns in the Midwest) are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

This is clearly a statement that "anti-trade sentiment" is not what Obama believes in. But he campaigns on his own "anti-trade sentiment"

To me this is a clear admission of a lie.

I have not and never will vote for a public person who openly lies.  I've stayed out of many elections.  This election I have a choice to avoid a liar but Obama supporters don't.

Alive

In the last blog I used the term 'alive'.  I use the term often in discussing human characteristics. Most people, the popular meaning, think of a person as being alive if they are attentive, fun at parties and have a sense of humor.

Not me.  I have an explicable and rigorous definition of alive: A person is alive if their behavior, opinion or response is not predictable by friends who know them well.

From my definition you can see why attentiveness and a sense of humor are part of the popular notion of alive.

To get to my definition simply examine the mental image of a Disney automaton of someone well known. Let's say Jack Kennedy. This automaton has been programmed with every known phrase and response Kennedy gave during his adult life. 

The question is: How would you know the alive Kennedy from the automaton?  The answer I give is that an alive Kennedy could give a response that is not predictable.

The same applies to you and me.  We are only alive if our behavior, opinions and responses are not predictable.  Many people I know are definitely not alive.