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Smart models

I hung out with about 60 Elite models in Tokyo during several summers in the early 1980's.  They were all 16 to 17 year old Americans. The owner of the Elite agency in Tokyo was a friend of mine.

The most distinguishing characteristic of the models (about one out of six were male) was how naive and unintelligent most of them were. 

My friend, Paul, and I often talked about how the few bright, sophisticated ones could have anything in the world they wanted if they only had the appropriate skills.  The rest would just disappear into society, unknown, unacknowledged.

We pondered how a program to pass on the requisite skills could be developed: a program to find the few beautiful, bright and sophisticated young women and teach them the skills to shake the world.

We settled on creating a small (200 girls) college in Switzerland, designed much like a traditional finishing school, but without the historic hereditary upper class basis.  The college would be supported by a few Saudis who would get to meet the graduating class every year.

As you might guess, we never did it.

Too funny

The man I have started calling O'Gumby, because he is an empty vessel intended to receive white guilt is laughed at on extreme Lefty Comedy Central in a brilliant piece of mockery.  Trouble is, mockery isn't good for someone who shows no sense of humor...which O'Gumby doesn't.

Debutante's balls

My regular blog readers know I have been somewhat adamant about the disappearance of an elite upper class in America circa 1960. 

Now I have a great example of how you can be confused.  The photo on the right is from the San Francisco Nob Hill Gazette, the faux journal of the faux elite class.  The article the photo came from is about this year's debutant ball.

Reality:  I went to the last real debutant ball in 1960 where the total number of women from San Francisco and the Peninsula was over 75, today the number is 22 for the entire Bay Area, and virtually none would have been invited in 1960. At least they are all white, but, probably in error, there are four Jewish names in the list.

Since the actual debutant balls, put on by the private members-only-blacklisting society clubs ended in 1960, the sponsor, of 44 years, has been the womens auxiliary of a non-profit hospital which was bought decades ago by a profit making company.

Autos and housing

Now that the Pollyanna's have had close to a year to tell you how disastrous the housing meltdown is and how horrible are the economic consequences of the slow down in auto sales, it is my turn to remind you that the American economy is so huge, dynamic and extensive that neither of these issues constitute a serious problem.

Here are the numbers.  Our Gross Domestic Product is $14.3 trillion.  We have grown $.2 trillion so far this year. The entire residential new housing market is roughly the size of our GDP growth so far this year and the same is true of the entire domestic auto industry.

Even in employment the same numbers hold true.  We have over 100 million people in the labor force and only .5 million are in residential housing or auto manufacturing.

The reality is that the multiplier effects of housing market and auto market reductions are larger than the actual declines in employment and GDP data, but similarly, many of the residential housing workers went into the commercial building fields and many auto workers shifted to foreign auto companies operating in the U.S.

Now, I hope you can see why I say we are no longer susceptible to business cycles.   We grew because we are still incredibly productive and because the low dollar generated export business.

Obama-Palin

This blog is for the historians who are looking at the current period, who trust me, and want to get a sense of the feelings of today.

I listened to Barak Obama last night give his Party acceptance speech.  I have listened to hundreds of political speeches.  I would rank this speech for content in the bottom 30% of speeches and I would rank Obama's delivery at roughly 50%.  He can speak a little better than this, the stadium may have been a technical problem.

Obama has his reputation as a great orator largely because he is really O'Gumby, a malleable plastic toy into which guilt can be poured. One kind of guilt is felt by whites from the elite education world guilty for being white (much the same world of academic guilt that gets Smith, Vassar and Wellesley girls to run off to Puerto Rico or Senegal to have sex with a black man the week they graduate from college).  The second kind of guilt is from the majority of Lefties who have lived 7.5 years filled with hate and venom for President Bush.  This kind of guilt for being filled with hatred sees the O'Gumby as an empty vessel to fill with all their hope that is the opposite, the reverse side of their Bush hate.

Even today, the name George Bush, mentioned in San Francisco will evoke the most unsightly, disgraceful, effusion of bile imaginable to a human...from any Lefty wearing a suit or living in an alley for homeless. These eruptions are so emotionally uncontrolled they can happen at a wedding a funeral, on the beach, during sex or awaking from a dream.

(Footnote on this point. Based on question 9 in the Battleground poll, the majority of Americans have a positive "impression of George Bush as a person" contrary to the world as seen by the Left.)

The other element in the air for the past week, when I suggested earlier that McCain should pick a woman for Vice President, because of the disaffected Hillary Clinton female voters, is based on what I learned in the early 1970s during the lawsuits to integrate the police departments on the West Coast.

In the law suits by the Blacks against the cities, the white male police were joined (enthusiastically) by the white women police against the blacks. The women told me openly that they 'should come first' over blacks in promotions in the police department.  I'm sure that that women first before blacks is still a prevailing view among American women, Lefties included.

England was invaded and lost the war

Today's Wall Street Journal has a review of Lisa Jardine's soon to be published Going Dutch.  The reviewer is the distinguished Andrew Roberts author of one of my favorites A History of the English Speaking People since 1900.

I have a double interest in this review. 

First Jardine argues in her book that the Dutch under William of Orange conquered England in 1688 and he installed himself, his wife and his whole government in London.  The Dutch conquest of England is in fact the origin of modern England, the English Enlightenment and the subsequent American Revolution. I have argued this in many blogs over several years.  My views grew out of the extraordinary work of Jonathan Israel the greatest historian of Holland and the Dutch Republic.

I have talked to many wise and knowledgeable Englishmen and have never met one who knew and understood this key, vital part of their history.....none. They were invaded and lost their monarchy.  Jardine makes this historic fact obvious to her readers.

Roberts is a great historian and puts English speaking history in perspective, the same perspective that Churchill developed in his writings.  What is important in this regard is that the greatest president, because he fully understands the history that Roberts writes about, is George W. Bush. Both Bush and Roberts appreciate each other and have said so.

Roberts as a reviewer of Jardine's book gets the material wrong.  I didn't read Roberts' history after the period in the book since 1960 because no historian can see clearly that close in time.  That period in history  is relevant here. In the review Roberts argues that the invitation to William of Orange to invade England came from the elite Protestant class, which makes it an invasion by invitation rather than a conquest. Nonsense as we can see in the world today.

The elites of many countries, today, want America to invade their country and change the regime. Start with Tibet, Cuba, Iran, Russia, North Korea, Mexico, Venezuela and Pakistan.  That was irrelevant to William of Orange and hardly got him to build 500 ships (largest armada until 1944) and recruit 30,000 soldiers.  The British army knew their leader, James, was incompetent and as a consequence they ran away, just like Saddam Hussein's Army did twice.

Roberts is wrong, England was conquered by the freedom loving Dutch Republic. We Americans are the greatest beneficiaries of William and Mary's triumph and so are freedom lovers the world over.

American terrorism

We forget, for good reason, that America has its own long history of homegrown terrorism.  We can learn some lessons from our own long bout with terrorism.

You don't know what part of American history I am talking about (unless you look at the photo).  Well, that is specifically the problem.  The terrorists controlled the press, they targeted a specific class of civilians who were of no interest to the general population and they justified their acts of terror as motivated by cultural differences that had deep historic roots.

The fifty year rein of terrorism is called lynching.  It was targeted at a limited population, Southern 'colored people.' Lynching was actively practiced against the black population in America by the white population by the hundreds per year for most of fifty years.  It was always justified as an effective way to maintain law and order. That is why thousands of people turned out to watch the lynching spectacles.

What is the lesson? Terrorism will only die out when it is seen as morally offensive to the majority of the perpetrators...and that can last 50 years.

Marx and Dickens

I often rant about the people who are stuck worshiping the 19th Century Dutch recluse who lived in London. I tend to call them damnMarxists, one word. But the reality is that most Lefties are more accurately referred to as damnDickens-Marxists.

Why? Because they are trapped in the observations of two men living in Britain who were one year apart in age: Karl Marx and Charles Dickens. Karl Marx and Charles Dickens both observed a world that had only fifty years of rudimentary experience with industrial commerce.  They were observers in the earliest years of industrial commerce.

When both men came of age in the 1830's there were no elevators to make skyscrapers, canals were just being built for transport, horse and wagon were the main mode of transport, bicycles hadn't been invented.  Trains were virtually unknown as were any form of telegraph. England, particularly London, had no sewer system no bathing, no toilets and dentistry was done by barbers. Ships had sails, but only a few masts, since square riggers were yet to come, muskets were common as were swords and dueling. Department stores, fixed pricing, cash registers and the notion of doctors with clean hands were only to come in the last part of either man's life; after most of their writing had been done.

Dickens described the lot of most people, not just poor, but most people in the foul smelling, illness bound London.  It was miserable and Dickens saw the cause as industrial commerce. Karl Marx saw the same thing, with the additional cause in the rudiments of global trade. England and much of Europe were buying global supplies with the protection of armies and navies to maintain modest stability with local communities mostly in rebellion.

That is the world most lefties still see today.  They see Dicken's poverty all around them, they see Marx's elitist class analysis and labor theory of value based on mid-19th Century industrial commerce.  Marx's and Dicken's world had only the rudiments of technology, rudiments of international trade, no agricultural surpluses and no significant banking or capital markets...certainly no government regulation of contracts, labor law, health codes or anything else.

A Lefty view of the world is pretty much the way an angry 2 year old sees the world.

Disappointed

I'm disappointed.  The Democratic Party had a chance to destroy itself for ten years into the future, but a few party leaders figured out how to avert the destruction.

Because of good planning, Jimmy Boy Carter's speech was scripted to be about New Orleans and Katrina and put on tape so Jimmy Boy could not get in front of a live mike with a large American TV audience.

It is rumored that, nevertheless, Jimmy Boys speech had to be edited to take out his reference to the hurricane being caused by a Jewish weather conspiracy and his claim that dikes and levies were destroyed by the Mossad.

Short Mayor Alioto

I mentioned in an earlier blog the tallest perceived man wins, rule of politics.

The most humorous story in this vein was when I was helping Joe Alioto run for mayor in 1967.  Joe entered the race after a friend of mine, Gene McAteer, abruptly died in the summer. Joe entered at the last minute (which is a good strategy) running against Harold Dobbs.

I did some market research and focus group consulting for Joe's campaign. 

I immediately appreciated Joe after he saw (through a two-way mirror) a focus group with many people who said they didn't like Joe. He turned to me and said: 'How can that be...they don't even know me?'

I advised Joe about the problem he faced being short (maybe 5' 9") running against a very tall man. Dobbs was well over 6 feet.  Joe understood and realized he would have to stand on a pedestal at any public debates.

A few days after we talked, Joe called me to his campaign headquarters and showed me one of his main pieces of campaign literature. It was a photo of Joe bending over to shake hands with a Chinese utility workman in a manhole.  We both laughed.

PS: Photo upper right.  Joe is in the middle, but this is a misleading photo. Joe and I parted ways when he strongly opposed school integration.  Photo lower left,  a real 50 year old streaker at one of Joe's rallys.

Announcing: White-man's global warming

This is the official announcement of White-man's Global Warming.  It is about time to confront the environmental hysteria with their own worst nightmare:

The whole Global Warming issue is an imperialist concoction of the prosperous white elites of the world.  Think of Al Gore, his Mac-Mansion house and fleet of cars telling the poorest country people in the world that they have to join the Kyoto Accords and enjoy greater poverty to save the planet from CO2.

In California, with a law mandating that utility companies convert to alternative energy, the poorest utility users will have to subsidize solar and wind energy. Solar and wind energy cost 4-10 times what oil, hydro and natural gas cost. So the poor minorities of California will carry the heaviest burdens to alleviate CO2 emissions while the prosperous whites revel in their PC self righteousness.

Is it any wonder that no committees made up of poor minorities have been created in the U.S. to examine the burden of mitigating CO2 emission on poor people.  Is it any wonder that all the international scientific experts on Global Warming are from rich white countries.  No. 

Global Warming hysteria is an imperialist white-man's fantasy for the purpose of oppressing the poor and colored people of the world with phony data and sham science.

Bitten by Biden

The choice of Joe Biden for Democrat VP leaves John McCain with an opportunity to shift American politics a long way into the future. 

If McCain selects a female VP he would shift a small but important segment of women to the Republican party.  Right now, men have shifted to the Republicans far more than women.  The women only need a modest reason to shift parties because they are not really living in different worlds.

Now that we know the two victim-identity clusters in the Democratic Party can't get along (Blacks and women), we should make the separation permanent.

Joe Biden is cast in history as a villain by Clarence Thomas in his marvelous book My Grandfather's Son. Biden was the committee chair of what is now known as the Anita Hill hearings. Biden invited Thomas to chat and visit the Senate hearing room.  While walking around the room, Biden promised and assured Thomas that he, Biden, would be friendly, just pitching Thomas a few softball questions.

Biden's first question was about something so arcane and obscure in Thomas' law school writings that Thomas had no idea what he was talking about. Not friendly not a softball question.

Also, for the entertainment of us all, John Podhoretz and David Brooks point out that Biden has logorrhea, the inability to stop talking.

Yelp comments

If you want some reading fun, just take a look at my blog Yelp is a mess.  There is a long string of comments from knowledgeable angry people and a smattering of Yelpers trying to defend themselves.

Short summary: Yelp is a mess.

Up from under the bus

The most exciting event at the Democratic Convention will be the address from Jimmy Boy Carter. 

Why?  Because Barack Obama threw this fanatic past president under the bus.  In Paris, when Obama was asked by a reporter to comment on President Bush and on the American involvement in Iraq he said: it is a longstanding tradition in America not to comment on a standing president or American foreign policy when abroad. 

That was throwing Jimmy Boy Carter under the bus.  Jimmy Boy has made a career of attacking President G.W. Bush and American foreign policy with venomous hatred everywhere outside the U.S. that he can get a platform.  Jimmy Boy has been trying to run his own foreign policy for more than two decades after Americans vigorously threw the fanatic out of office specifically because of his odious foreign policy.

Can Jimmy Boy be trusted to give a patriotic, well thought-out, intelligent, cogent address? Hell no.  First, he knows he was thrown under the bus.  Second, this is a rabid, ideological Jew hater  who would be unlikely to miss a chance to spew his global Jewish conspiracy theories.

Overheard on the left bank

Overheard today in a San Francisco Castro district coffee shop. 

Obama supporter #1 "I'm beginning to think Obama can't win."
Obama supporter #2 "You've got to think positive."

Get an analog TV

The TV world is telling us analog TV viewers that we need a DTV adapter to received any signal after February 2009. 

I just wanted to let you know that, if you are like me, and currently get your TV from an antenna, now is the time to convert and get a DTV adapter.  Why, because you will double or triple the number of stations you get and the quality of the picture will be higher.  It won't be HDTV, but it will look much better.

I still get my TV from my antennas but with the DTV adapter I get 20 instead of 7 and they all are much clearer.

To get your coupon to reduce the adapter price from $60 to $20, go to this website.  Be incredibly patient.  This is a government program and what should take two days will take close to a month.

If you aren't interested in a flat screen HDTV, you can also go to the local Goodwill and buy the analog TV of your dreams for nothing.  People are getting rid of great non-DTV sets.

Convert to CNG?

 I spent a great deal of time thinking and investigating converting my car to natural gas (methane), the gas most of us use to warm our homes and cook. The great advantage is that natural gas (CNG) is nearly all produced domestically and I would be off oil from the Arab, Russian and Latin tyrants.

There are plenty of filling stations in the S.F. Bay area and prices are reasonable.

But I didn't convert and decided to wait a couple of years until I can go to rechargeable electric. The reason is simple: only a few cars can be converted to CNG at reasonable cost.  Mine, a used Nissan, would be too expensive to convert, almost more than I paid for the car.

Obama racism

Obama has revealed his core beliefs in his statement about the Supreme Court.  The one person he wouldn't have appointed is the only Supreme Court Justice to have ever been born a 'colored person' in the Jim Crow South.

"I would not have nominated Clarence Thomas"... he also "wouldn't have appointed Antonin Scalia, and perhaps not John Roberts, though .. at least they were smart enough for the job."

 Obama is obviously a man still trying to locate himself on the black-white spectrum because he has no idea who he is.  The anti-Thomas statement shows that he is completely unable to identify with a man who struggled against the reality of Jim Crow and succeeded without the hate whitey identity doctrine that is at the core of Barack Hussein Obama's world view.

Is Obama a racist?  Are his views any different than Woodrow Wilson's?  Wilson believed that 'colored people' were inherently inferior. Colored people could never have been "smart enough" in Wilson's eyes.

The Democratic candidate, the favored son of arrogant Harvard, is incapable of understanding human hardship and rise to greatness, without his racist blinders on.

First to start and win a war

George W. Bush is first president in U.S, history to start and win a war.  In the process he changed the very geopolitics of the most critical part of the world for the 21st Century....the oil rich Middle East.  George W. Bush has been an extraordinary force for global stability and the expansion of democracy.

The simple fact is that no previous president has been in office to start and win a war that had geopolitical consequences of the magnitude of the democratization of Iraq and to end up with a the solid military victory.  The closest historical comparison is Teddy Roosevelt in Cuba, but the Cuban part of the Spanish American War was only a tactical military move and was only part of a much longer campaign that stretched over several presidential terms in office.

As Americans come to appreciate the great exploits of President G.W. Bush they will also get a chance to go back and read his annual State of the Union addresses, which rank among America's greatest.  Like Lincoln and his oratorical genius, Bush's is similarly unappreciated at the time of his shinning brilliance.

For stunning, logical and convincing proof of what I cover in this blog, check Edward Luttwak at Prospect.

The tallest man wins

It was in 1965 that this pseudo rule of politics was invented by my wife, Helen Phillips. The correct rule is The tallest perceived man wins.

I had been president of the San Francisco Young Republicans, which meant that Helen and I saw many local elections and attended many California State Young Republican elections as well.

After Helen had personally seen more than half a dozen elections involving probably 100 candidates, she announced her observation.

The observation got transmitted to the world in two ways.  First, I had been a successful campaign manager and was invited to Chicago in 1965 to train other Republican campaign managers.   At that point, since we were no longer dealing with in-person elections, but media elections, I changed Helen's observation into the correct form that survives to this day: the tallest perceived man wins.

I pass the rule along to hundreds of relevant people at that Chicago Republican training session.

I also trained dozens of campaign managers and political operatives (Republican and Democrat) in an organization I formed in 1964 called Research in Politics, that was San Francisco based, and lasted until 1969.

Moral problem with the NYTimes

If you were an old person who had read the New York Times all your life you would have been the last to know that Stalin ran a terror state and killed millions in his 1930's show trials (last year the Times apologized for this oversight.) You would not have known till four years later what the Time's editors withheld from you: millions of Jews were being killed by the Nazis.

More recently you would not have known that the most prestigious French intellectual visited America to write a brilliant and insightful follow-up on Tocqueville's works (B-H Levy). That the most important planner of the Iraq War wrote an honest and comprehensive book on the decision making up to and including the war (D. Feith ). That John McCain wrote an editorial for the NYTimes which they wouldn't publish.  That the Time's ad staff gave heavily subsidized ad space to a libel against America's top Army general.  That the Israeli Army gave conclusive photo and  tape evidence to the NYTimes editors to prove that Israeli troops didn't wage a full scale attack on (Jenin), the day the blood libel was issued by the Arabs and published by the Times.

The list is long.  The Times has plenty of blood on its hands and always has had.

Political Science 1002- Congress

I have a slightly different take on Congress, this is less unique than my take on presidential politics.

 I think that Congress, both houses are only superficially related to the political parties.  They are really representative bodies, organized for convenience around party organizations. 

What passes both houses of Congress, in nearly all cases, is what the American people want and what fails is what the American people don't want.  It would be nearly impossible to make a list and use it as evidence.  The simple evidence is that when a matter of national importance, such as the Post 9/11 period occurred both parties joined together to support the war, modify the intelligence structure and give the intelligence community better surveillance tools.

Summary: Congress is only superficially organized by party.  Elected Democrats are often very conservative on fiscal and military issues and Republicans are often liberal on social and civil rights issues.

Political Science 1001-President

I have an unusual take on the history of American presidential politics.

I see the two parties very differently.  The Republican Party was formed in 1854 in opposition to slavery and the mounting evidence that the Confederacy wanted to dissolve the Union.  The Democratic Party was the party of slavery and new immigrants from the early 1830s. 

The Democratic Party remained the party of Slavery, becoming the party of Jim Crow until 1968.  In the 1890s the Democratic Party added labor union issues to its party base.  Nothing has changed on that score.

After 1968 the Democratic Party became the party of Urban Pacifism and added Victim voters to its fold, including disproportionately women and blacks.

With this view, the Republican Party has always been the palette of America, representing the broad basic American politics.  The Democratic Party has been the one or two colors of ideology that occasionally adorn the American political scene.

Looking at history in this light, the Republican Party won the Presidency every race from 1860 until the 1930 depression hit both labor union members the South (Jim Crow land) terribly hard at the same time.  The exception was W. Wilson who won only when the Republican Party was split in two.

Truman was also carried as a VP by the hot union and Jim Crow issues of his day.  The Kennedy and Clinton elections were genuine exceptions.  Kennedy didn't really win without the machine fraud of Illinois and Texas, both residual dying mechanisms of the old Jim Crow, union alliance. Clinton, like Wilson, was elected when the Republican Party split in two. 

Carter was the first president elected by the new Democratic ideology of Urban Pacifists in violent revolt against the Vietnam War and the newly cohesive black Victim voters.

Summary: the base party in presidential politics is the Republican Party, the Democrats win when the Republicans are split or when the ideology of the Democrats is triumphant for unique historical reasons.

Interesting real grass roots

One of my favorite bloggers, Bookworm Room, has joined six other bloggers to support John McCain with a daily blog that is well written, interesting and worth a look.

No bama

This is a bumper sticker observed on a car in the San Francisco Castro.  It may have been modified by a Hillary supporter.  Just so you'll know.

Happier

Please don't laugh at me.  In early August I wrote a blog suggesting that measures of happiness were irrelevant.

Now I have a slightly different perspective.

In May 2008, the Gallup Organization reported asking 1,200 American adults how many days in the past week they had felt "outraged." The average number of angry days was 1.17, and 54% of those surveyed said none. ...

"Indeed, we are less angry today than a decade ago. Let's look back to the glory days of the 1990s, ... In 1996, the General Social Survey (done by the Federal government) asked exactly the same "outrage" question of 1,500 adults. In 1996, only 38% had not been outraged at all in the past week. The average number of angry days was 1.5 per week, 29% higher than at present.

"Virtually every group in the population is less angry in 2008 than in 1996...."

Only one major group in the population has gotten angrier: people who call themselves "very liberal." While conservatives, moderates and non-extreme liberals all have seen their average levels of outrage fall over the past 12 years, the number of angry days among our leftist neighbors has risen 56% (to 2.28 from 1.46), and the percentage with no angry days in the past week has fallen to 31% from 37%. Today, very liberal people spend more than twice as much time feeling angry as do political moderates. One in seven is outraged seven days a week.

I have have one clear and obvious explanation for the very liberal increase in anger over twelve years: for the first time in their lives, and mine, there is an alternative opinion being expressed to and heard by Americans (not to Europeans of course). Americans now can hear Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and Shawn Hannity every day nearly everywhere in America.  Very liberal people actually don't believe there is another view than the ones they hold, all other views are "just bigotry and hatred".

I believe Americans are much less angry today than they were in the early 1990s.  My proof is that Ross Perot created a dissident national political movement in 1992 that lasted several years.  No such group is on the horizon today.  One reason I believe we were angry is that we had just lost a war in Iraq...by letting Saddam Hussein remain in power.  Today we have been victorious in Iraq and we are proud of that.  That is also a reason the very liberal's are angrier today.

Back to the first sentence.  Happiness, as a general feeling is not measurable in a general population but something as specific as number of outrage days in the past week is very measureable. Such measures are an excellent proxy for anger.

Good job Dell

This is good marketing.  First rate Internet marketing.

Dell had a terrible reputation for repair and maintenance three years ago. I had troubles myself and heard the same from many friends.  The bad news traveled to every corner of the world as bad product news is wont to do.

Now Dell responds to every mention, everywhere in the world, immediately, about Dell wherever it occurs on the Internet.  Dell responds immediately with honest answers, by named employees with factual references where relevant.

Dell also addresses public issues by discussing them on its own Dell blog.

Not only has this had a very positive impact on Dell's reputation, but Dell is now getting plenty of good publicity for its aggressive interest in customers and the market.

An Internet marketing lesson everyone should learn.

Hippies and architecture

My blog has become a major Googled site for material on the hippy era.  Rightly so, since I was directly in the middle of nearly everything.

One area I've never commented on is the hippy contribution to contemporary architecture.  Frankly, I never made the connection myself. The wonderful S.F Chronicle architectural critic, Zahid Sardar makes the point in an article that begins with a reference to Alastair Gordon's "Spaced Out: Crash Pads, Hippie Communes, Infinity Machines, and Other Radical Environments of the Psychedelic Sixties" ($65, Rizzoli), and goes on to suggest that some of the great works of architecture by Gehry, Koolhaus and Moss are derivative of the wild hippy housing experimentation.

I can testify to the wild experimentation in hippy housing.  Everything, every material imaginable and every shape imaginable was tried.  I saw hundreds and hundreds of experimental structures.  If just the imagination and material experimentation are the source of the connection to the great architectural wonders of today, I'll go for that thesis 100%. 

My co-author, Salli Rasberry lived in a teepee for many many years and the communal land she lived on was the site of endless experiments in structure building.

Marketing advice

I am still an active business consultant.  The following advice relates to Internet marketing a subject rather hard to keep up with.  Fortunately, the publisher of Marketing Without Advertising (Nolo Press) puts out a revised edition every two years.  This advice will go in the 2010 revision.

I have a client in Tokyo with whom I worked on marketing her new consulting company.
The advice would be appropriate in the U.S., just as it is in Tokyo.  Only it is more important and useful in Japan, where people are not very gregarious and make friends mostly with people they know from school or clubs.

My client is Ms. Noda.  Ms Noda's staff goes into client's offices and often spend many days on the client's premises.  I want Ms. Noda's staffers to have a good chance of meeting as many client employees as possible, for future business, as the employees in the client company rise in the company hierarchy.

My proposal was that Ms Noda's website have an extensive biography on each of the staffers who go out to work on client's premises.  The biography should offer as much personal information as possible to allow client employees to connect to Ms Noda's staffer.  Information such as high school, high school clubs and activities, college and college clubs and activities, favorite sports, hobbies, travel experiences and current neighborhood (that is a safe thing to do in Japan).

You probably won't believe it, but just as I posted this blog I got an email from Ms Noda, with the most recent financial spread sheet.  Since the company website was changed the quarterly revenues have increased dramatically.

Does an "it" campaign work?

In marketing there is a category known as an "it" campaign.  That is where you see billboards and hoardings for "the New Warmth is Coming" but the product remains secret for several months.

Its time to tell every marketing person in the world that secret "it" marketing campaigns don't work.

Back in 2001 the Segway was a secret project called 'Ginger".  The secret machine was the subject of a six months promotion of unlimited PR.  Steve Jobs of Apple and Jeff Bezos of Amazon joined many others in claiming, weekly that 'Ginger' was a totally new and revolutionary form of transportation.  They claimed everyone would want one.

The developer, engineer, Dean Kamen, was on every national TV network show to promote the secret 'Ginger' product, from late 2001 to early 2002.

The "it" campaign got plenty of attention.

But Ginger, now called the Segway, got few buyers.  Even today, seven years later, with a new oil crisis the Segway has sold less that a total of $75 million worth of machines.  A terrific flop.

Lesson learned?

3rd Street

Willie Brown, a former Black mayor of San Francisco, did everything he could to help the black community. He got a $billion spent building a light rail line to Hunter's Point, the black AK47 neighborhood. The light rail runs on and is called the 3rd Street T line.

I drove on 3rd Street recently, something my desire to live keeps me from doing very often.  I wanted to see what the much vaunted improvement in the neighborhood was about.

Nothing has happened.  I know from friends that many of the new apartments and condos sold in the area have gone to Filipinos who want low cost housing and are willing to die for it.  The black exodus that has been underway for forty years, continues. 

However, the young men standing around the street look as dangerous as ever, even to a black man.

There is absolutely no new business in the area despite the new rail line that goes to downtown.  Four  retailers had new buildings: Bank of America, Walgreens, McDonald's and Burger King.  These are chain businesses that have been blackmailed into opening in this hopeless location.  Blackmailed by a City's refusal to let them open stores in desirable areas unless they open in AK47 town first.

Hey, brain-dead lefties, did you notice that only chain stores will open in your blighted dream world?