Pro Commerce

Self destruction

I have often explained to small local bookstores in lectures and articles what they do to make sure that chain bookstores and Amazon do well. It is usually self destruction.

A good example is Greenapple bookstore in San Francisco.  It has made a policy decision to not carry Doug Feith's  War and Decision. (I reviewed it on this blog). Just order it from Amazon, get it quicker and cheaper.

The Left has come to the preposterous conclusion that ignoring a book will somehow deal with the fact that the book is extremely important and extremely reliable.  The NYTimes, the WaPo and the rest of the nattering nabobs have decided to ignore this book.  Nothing is going to censor this book.  Censorship will benefit a book of this historic importance and accuracy and disgrace the Lefty press in still more intellectual venues.

The reason is simple.  Feith is (1) incapable of deception, even if his family were held hostage, and you can tell that in the first three pages and (2) Feith is accurate about the history he saw first hand, and he saw nearly all of the decision making before and during the Iraq and Afghani Wars.

The polls say it all

The polls that check gender tells us all we need to know about this presidential race.  The country is severely divided on the 19th amendment.

America is voting by gender more today than ever since women got the vote.  We are clearly divided 3-2 men for McCain and women for Obama.  This division has become evident in every election since 1980 and today stands at its greatest extent.

I call this the sandbox division and will come back to it often.  Its trucks vs dolls, beer vs chablis, strength vs appeasement. Of course there are the 2 out of 5 women for McCain and the 2 out of 5 men for Obama. There are plenty of wonderful women who enlist in the military.

McCain has his children and beautiful wife to trot out to appeal to women, Obama has nothing to appeal to men....nothing. He had better not put on a helmet and stand in a tank, it would make things worse, as it did for Dukakis. 

Black men who run away from their fatherhood could be the Willie Horton sub-text of this campaign.

How others see us

I spend a great deal of time in Japan.  The Japanese, like most others in the world get a large part of their image of America from a very distorted lens. The ones who can read English are disproportionately exposed to CNN, BBC, the New York Times and the Herald Tribune. They have no awareness of how biased their American news delivery service is.  Such observers of America were certain that Al Gore and John Kerry would be elected. They are equally certain that Obama has already won the presidency.

I usually start by pointing out that in the U.S., CNN is watched by far fewer people than FOX news. FOX is more popular because it has a very different slant, definitely not biased in favor of Obama. I also point out that a whole array of radio personalities with audiences double and triple any left wing radio types, hate Obama and rail against him daily.

It is unfortunate that the change in media available to Americans, that opened up our dialog is not available to the many English readers around the world.

If you can read this...

There is a whole class of bullshit floating around the web.  It relates to the following paragraph:

"fi yuo cna raed tihs, yuo hvae a sgtrane mnid too. Cna yuo raed tihs? Olny 55 plepoe out of 100 can.

"i cdnuolt blveiee taht I cluod aulaclty uesdnatnrd waht I was rdanieg. The phaonmneal pweor of the hmuanmnid, aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it dseno’t mtaetr in waht oerdr the ltteres in a wrod are, the olny iproamtnt tihng is taht the frsit and lsat ltteer be in the rghi t pclae."

 I challenge any reader to find an authentic academic site that deals with this issue.  There is a purported article by Graham Rawlinson that refers to a PhD thesis but there is no evidence that it is real.

One effort to see if the same effect is visible in other languages shows that it isn't possible in Hebrew where there are no vowels but it is possible in most languages that are the roots of English.

There is some reality to the observation about first and last letters and reading. But many sentences can be constructed that are unreadable.

  Back in the early 1990s I designed a typeface-typeset that was designed to be read more rapidly.  Using no real knowledge of typeface design, I concluded that focusing on designing the first and last letters differently, particularly at the beginning and end of sentences and designing common letter combinations (tt, lt, tl, etc) in a distinct style would make reading easier and could be done with a computer in a way that other typesetting couldn't.

I tested my type-face type-set and found I was right.  I never got anyone else interested.

What I came to understand is that this scrambled letter phenomenon was the by-product of spoken language becoming written language in the 15th Century.  Typesetters had a nearly infinite variety of spelling and letter shape choices (think of the early W V, and some of the weird early versions of S and F).  What typesetters settled on were spellings and typefaces that emphasized differences in the readability of the most common 115 words.

That transition from spoken to printed word, and the focus on the readability of the 115 most common words, is the phenomenon you are seeing in the poor spelling paragraph above.

Tuesday's election

Update of a Monday pre-election blog.

First Cindy Sheehan has chosen not to run against Nancy Pelosi in the Democratic primary, she has decided to run as a fully independent candidate in the general election.  That requires 10,000 signatures by August 8th.  She could have run in the Democratic primary or gotten on the Green party or the Peace and Freedom party ballots for a hand-full of signatures.  What is she doing?

Carole Migden, the State Senator who ran on a ticket opposing the Iraq War lost badly.  Incumbents only lose when everyone dislikes them. No one apparently liked her.

I thought I could estimate the number of rent-control dwellers who vote by looking at the anti-rent-control votes on State proposition 98.  Can't. The anti vote was very high everywhere, just 15 points higher in San Francisco.  That large anti vote obscures any measurement I could have gotten.

Don't read this if....

Don't read this if you have any positive views of the CIA.  The read I'm referring too is Doug Feith's  War and Decision.

This book is a masterpiece of history written close to the time history was being made by one of the key participants. We have never had anything like this before.  Every historian has a right to be overjoyed.

There will be plenty of reviews of this book that will tell you the main contents (so far the MSM has completely ignored the book, hoping the truth will go away.)

What I can tell you is that Feith is completely convincing in his honesty and candor.  This man is incapable of lying and incapable of distorting what he has seen, experienced and read.

One of the key things he experienced and something I have known for nearly two decades is that the CIA is incompetent.  What Feith adds to my understanding of the CIA is that it is dishonest, corrupt and is a political operator usually acting against the interests of the United States.  Like the time CIA employees told Castro we were about to invade Cuba.

Knowing this about the CIA and knowing it can't be fixed is good reason to lose sleep at night.

Second, the State Department does not work for the United States.  The State Department is an arm of the UN.  It has always been since the UN was created by the State Department and always will be.  Again, good reason to lose sleep. Every Secretary of State ends up parroting the internal State Department culture...which is 'We are an arm of the UN.  Even if the UN has some minor flaws we must first work with the UN we must support the UN.'

If you doubt the truth or accuracy of either of these statements, it is time to read the book.  On the other-hand, if you aren't capable of confronting the reality of our government as it really is, that is a reason not to read the book.

Lastly, in any discussion of the freedom of the press it is important, after reading this book, to understand that the NYTimes and the WPost are both instruments of dissent wielded (without concern for honesty) by internal government bureaucrats to defeat the implementation of policies and programs after the bureaucrat has lost the internal battle against the policy or program.

If there is something beneficial from this role of the press, it needs to be compared to the horrible consequence of officially sanctioned dishonesty actively spread around the world by enemies of America

Refrigeration case

I have argued here for some time that what you see in the grocery refrigeration case doesn't necessarily mean you should refrigerate the product in your own home.  Often you can leave it on the counter at room temperature.

Some products are put in the refrigeration case just to let you know that it is in the same category as the refrigerated items.

Case in point.  I arrived in Tokyo to find that there was no place to get my favorite product: I Can't Believe Its Not Butter. So I asked a friend to bring a jar.  He brought it but wondered if the 24 hours without refrigeration would do any harm.

So I put a few tablespoons out on the counter and left it uncovered in the open for a month.  At the end of a month it looked and tasted the same.  No microbes had found it worth eating.  Nevertheless, I like it.

That product certainly doesn't need refrigeration but being in the refrigerated section tells customers it is a butter-like product.

Education for community

I don't ever want to get into the public education debate and I don't think any reasonable national policy has a chance of passing. 

But I would put on the back burner of any conservative educational policy the option for public schools to allow testing and sorting for voluntary classes for college prep, arts and technical school work.  Meritocratic sorting by classes and by schools would make public schools more appealing to the many parents who have moved their kids out of public schools. 

Also as I have pointed out before, and now include in the rubric of community building, providing a national tool for city employees (police, teachers, etc) to transfer to other municipalities with full seniority and pension would open jobs to younger people in most regions and allow the bored, backsliders and working government zombies to move to a locale where they would be happier.

Tomorrows San Francisco election

Cindy Sheehan is not on the ballot.  This  brave and bold leader of the anti-Iraq war movement was very public about running against Congresswoman and House Chair, Nancy Pelosi in the Democratic primary.  I even promised to support her in a fit of malice.  The woman is so incompetent she couldn't even get on the ballot.  Hugo Chavez's buddy. Leader of the sandbox crowd of pacifists.

We also have a state senate candidate, Carole Migden, running on a platform that she is a leading opponent of the Iraq war.  A politico who doesn't even understand the political office she is running for.  The State Senate has nothing to do with foreign affairs.  Another leader of the sandbox crowd of pacifists.

Lastly on the ballot is a State proposition to get rid of rent control.  The vote in San Francisco will give me a good estimate of the proportion of 200,000 people who are covered by rent control who vote.  I suspect that rent controlled voters are a majority which accounts for the weirdness of San Francisco politics as I described in an earlier blog.  These people don't care what impact their vote has on raising taxes or creating an incompetent bureaucracy.  They don't feel they suffer the consequences.

Conservative ideas

A few weeks ago David Brooks pointed out that European conservatives are winning elections on a "community building community supporting" political policy package which American conservatives haven't caught on to yet.

So it is my turn to throw many of my policy ideas into the hopper, nearly all of which are based on community building; after all I built the first and largest community of small business people: the Briarpatch Network in the San Francisco Bay area. I built other communities as well.

Two phrases stand as the tent poles of my community-building-policy thinking: (1) The only real function of government is to promote socialization. Socialization is the term for bringing everyone into the circle of mutual social support. (2) Conviviality is the attribute most important to building communities.

San Francisco government is a great failure on both counts.  Two examples of bad policy and good alternatives. 

Bad San Francisco policy keeps chain stores out of neighborhoods and out of the City, especially Starbucks.  Consequence: low income, poorly educated people and recent arrivals are deprived of low cost and easy to understand businesses.  Home Depot, Lowes, Ikea, Target, Wal Mart and Costco are vital in everyone's lives particularly low income families and new arrivals. Starbucks is where middle-class and educated people meet each other, so bad policy hampers conviviality.

Good policy is to encourage chain stores especially chains that provide (1) low cost goods and (2) chains in which visitors (international visitors especially) feel comfortable such as Starbucks, McDonalds, Segafredo, Prada, Gucci and Pizza Hut.

Good policy would elevate coffee shops and similar convivial businesses to the same or higher zoning status as hospitals and churches.  The federal government can do this with model zoning laws and subsidies.

Katsu's drinking efforts

This story has only been told once. I had drinks and dinner with Katsu a few weeks ago, in Shinjuku, and was reminded of this story.

Back in 1992 I was visiting Tokyo as I do annually.  My good friend Murayama, Katsu took me out several nights in a row to the standard tiny five seat bars on the upper floors of seven story buildings.  This was my chance to see Katsu, my only chance that visit.  He spent several months going to these bars every night recruiting the owners. 

Katsu had formerly been a main staffer in the Japanese Socialist Party which was now called the Social Democrat Party.  What Katsu was doing was trying to talk the women bar owners into putting their names on the Tokyo ballot for the up-coming National Diet (Congress) election.  The way Japanese elections worked in that period, five or six candidates names appeared on every district ballot for each party and the voters choose up to five names, which could include a mixture of parties.  Katsu was trying to fill up all the local ballots with a list of the full five names.  He was desperate and was trying  to get any working person to run for legislative office. 

 Katsu failed to get more than 2-3 names in all the districts he was trying to fill.  If he had succeeded he would have changed history.  In July 1993 the following summer's election saw a wild swing in favor of the Social Democrats and other anti-LDP parties who would have filled up the Diet if they had enough candidates listed on the ballots, but as it was, all the candidates that they did have listed were elected. There just weren't anymore names on the ballots for the voters to select, so the Social Democrat Party and their allies in the political movement didn't completely win.

That July was the first year since 1955 that the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) was voted out of office, by a coalition of Katsu's Social Democrats and other anti-LDP parties. The big issue for Japan at the time was strong opposition to any military or peacekeeping efforts outside Japan, and the Recruit scandal.

The following year I got to hold a meeting with all the Social Democrat Party Congressional representatives in the Diet. They included all young women bar owners whom Katsu had talked into running for office.