Pro Commerce

Not a coward

I'm not a coward.  I have seen from September 11th 2001 that we are in a war against some major part of Islam. I'm not afraid to see war for what it is.  War... people die. People have to die to stop it.  I see a cowardice in the vast numbers of people who deny the reality of this war.

For those of you who are not cowards, it is time to look at the evolution of this war.  David Hazony does a great job of summarizing the evolution of the Islamic terror. 

Mumbai is a case where a tiny militia, fully armed and trained, invaded by boat.  This was a significant advance over previous terror tactics.  The kill ratio was better than 10 to 1 of victims to perpetrators. Like the two planes and the Twin Towers in NY.  Horrifying.

What David fails to mention is what happened in Iraq.  When a beachhead was established in Anbar province, tens of thousands of Jihadis poured into the country from the rest of Islam to support the insurgent terrorists.

That can and will happen again.  Next time the battle front will be a beachhead that is secured by commandos with a route of reinforcement.

Travesty of art

This sculpture was installed when the Bank of America opened its world headquarters in 1969.  The magnificent sculpture is by Masayuki Nagare. When the sculpture was installed it sat flat on the marble plaza surface.

The most extraordinary quality of this brilliant sculpture was the proportion it gave to the giant 52 story building next to it.  The building was like a man and the Nagare was like a pebble.

I started bending down to look are the pebbles on the ground after I first saw the sculpture. I suddenly began seeing small pebbles all around me on the ground. 

What I learned was that pebbles never sit flat on the ground.  Pebbles are always at a slight angle to the ground because they never have a flat bottom.  I learned about the world of pebbles around me from the Nagare sculpture. 

Now the people with no art sense, no intelligence, no taste have made the Nagare appear to be flat bottomed by putting it in a grass cemetery casing. (Photo on the right)

To me this miss treatment of a great piece of art is a travesty. The lack of a public outcry goes a long way to  explain why San Francisco is so lacking in a first class fine art scene.

40 Newsstands

Can you explain the city run newsstand program?  I need help from the open minded more-government-Lefties.

The San Francisco city newspaper stands were installed by the Board of Supervisors to clean up the clutter of dozens of esthetically varied private newpaper dispensing racks. 

Here is my problem with this City run program:  I walk to coffee in the morning, going more than a mile on main streets and I pass 40 of these City run newsstands.  I have to walk an additional twenty feet past my coffee shop to get the S.F. Examiner.

If that doesn't sound strange to you then here are a few relevant facts: 35 of the 40 racks I pass are empty. The S.F. Examiner should be in several of them.  The Examiner has a distribution level 7 times greater than the largest other newspaper in the remaining 5 racks. Seven times greater than the other papers in the 5 used slots of the 40 racks.

Explanations: (1) standard government incompetence and (2) deliberate censorship because the S.F. Examiner is owned by a conservative man who lives in Denver.

(Photo of the corner of Castro and Market with 24 racks most empty, no S.F. Examiner.)

Failed law firms

Two old (1890 and 1924) San Francisco law firms folded in the past few months: Heller Ehrman & Thelen. Both had payrolls with more than 600 lawyers, offices on both coasts and over $100 million in billing. Many more law firms are going to fold in the coming months.

Why? 

I read the best insider explanation (not a public document) by Richard Gary a former chairman of Thelen and consultant to 40 other law firms. 

Gary's explanation was symptomatic of the problem.  He was not a manager and doesn't truly understand management. Other law firms listen to him, further proof of the problem.

Most law firms are clusters of hard driving competitive lawyers, a modest proportion of whom are the sources of the legal work that the firms do ('rainmakers'), the rest are just people who passed the Bar exam. The main law firm structure is a partnership with a few stock owning 'participating in the spoils' partners and the rest as lesser members.  The common technical form of organization is an LLC, a bastard stock holding form of partnership.

Management of most law firms evolved from a horizontal model with all newbies in a lower status.  The model remains horizontal as the firm expands with teams that work on special client areas, with the creation of an elected CEO in some cases and an elected executive committee, with select sub-committees for personnel, administration and finance. Usually the committees are made up of active partnership lawyers.  Occasionally their are hired non-lawyer administrators.

Many consulting and accounting firms have this same structure.  And like Arthur Anderson, they fail for lack of management and impossible partnership bickering.

There is only one viable form of management for a large firm: a good manager at the top of a pyramid with power to hire and fire.  Good managers only come from working under another good manager never from schools, law firms, personal experimentation or any other source.

The pyramid is the core form of management with authority and responsibility in the hands of one person at the top.  There are countless variations on this structure from Office of the Chair to Boards of Directors that represent multiple divisions and multiple active outside interests.  But the pyramid is the core structure.

Most large law firms don't have the pyramidal structure with a real managerial boss at the top and they are consequently doomed.

Christian Science and hippies

The hippies had thoroughly Christian Science theories of health but they never became Christian Scientists. Why not?

Hippies almost universally believed that they could control their own health by following active health practices including food choices and eschewing scientific medicine.  Hippies brought every form of alternative medicine to America from China, India, Africa, the Philippines and the homeopathy of Europe. Yet they ignored Christian Science.

Most hippies believed that right thinking and intense love could cure almost any malady physical or otherwise.  This is identical to Mary Baker Eddie's Christian Science.  So why didn't the hippies swell the ranks of Christian Science from the hundreds of thousands of Church believers in 1960 to the tens of millions by 1980?

Answer: Christian Science had become too rich, too establish, too lavish and too clean for hippies.

Hippies saw the elegant Romanesque Christian Science  Churches with their marble stairs and fluted columns, they saw the clean, neat, sparse, white reading rooms; they saw the wealthy national Christian Science newspaper with its proper delicate typesetting and black & white photos and they knew they weren't welcome.

Too much money is one thing that will destroy a religion if it needs new members.

Victor

Victor Davis Hanson wrote a wonderful-fun article called Ten Random, Politically Incorrect Thoughts. You'll enjoy reading it. It summarizes the accumulation of social disasters in the past half century.

Hanson's article follows from Classical Conservative thought but not from a Pro Commerce perspective. That distinction is what makes the article particularly interesting to me.

Hanson finds social harm in the educational curriculum changes that have moved away from the traditional model over the past forty years, particularly in the imposition of special studies departments of minorities and women.  He also finds social damage from the environmental movement's imposition of EIRs, (environmental impact reports) that slow down everything and stop much.

The pro commerce position has little to say about the traditional curriculum issue that Hanson raises and bemoans. Hanson argues that minorities and women are harmed by the incompetence of the academic material and the ideological narrowness.  On the plus side, commerce benefits immensely from a diverse population in the workforce.  If that is aided by special minority and women's studies, all the better. If the traditional curriculum generated more entrepreneurs or more resourceful employees then the loss of the traditional curriculum would be a loss for a commercial society.  However, I have no evidence on either of these points...and remain neutral.

On the other-hand environmental impact reports have been very harmful to commerce and consequently to society.  I have personally watched three big and beneficial commercial projects destroyed, eviscerated or badly hobbled by EIRs.  I have also seen half a dozen projects that bribed their way around EIRs.  The level of secrecy involved in bribery is harmful to commerce.

I think EIRs cost hundreds of billions of dollars annually and trillions cumulatively in lost productivity but we have no studies to examine their impact.  I would guess that less than five swallows, four bats and three hummingbirds have been saved by EIRs.

A pro commerce position would first demand a national accounting of the harm and benefits of EIRs.  I suspect that the harm is astronomically high and the benefits meager or non-existent.

Pro commerce sympathises with Victor Davis Hanson on the plight of the modern curriculum but remains neutral on its effects.  Pro commerce joins Hanson in condemning EIRs and we jointly beg for relief from environmental impact fraud.

Quakers/Friends

The best religion around, as far as pure spirituality is the Society of Friends (Quakers). The Quakers have no religious organization and no creed.  Friends gather on Sundays and other times to be together quietly. Each rises to speak only when the inner spirit moves him.  The meetings also have 'announcements' at the end like other churches.

Generally, since other Quakers get up to report that the spirit wants them to live simply and peacefully that is what virtually everyone ends up finding their inner spirit saying.

The historic problem the Quakers have had is that a modern commercial society doesn't have many people who's inner voice is telling them to live simply...unless the voice of 'buy a new flat screen 54 inch TV' is understood as advocating simple living.

The other problem is that peaceful thing.  The Quakers made a valiant effort before the Civil War to talk to all their members in the Confederate South and urge the ones who owned slaves to be examples and free their slaves.  The Quakers made an intense effort to stop the Civil War.  They have tried to stop every other war too.  It gets discouraging when your religion has such a long history of failure.

Maybe the Quakers, who have been around for nearly 4 centuries and only have a few hundred thousand members, are so old and small because the real inner voice doesn't feel free to speak honestly among a group of pacifist Quakers.

My inner voice encourages simple living and many other virtues for practical not spiritual reasons.  But my inner voice has never recommended the pacifist response to aggression, meanness, cruelty or any other anti-human abomination.

The Quaker inner voice may just be a voice of pacifist social pressure.

The first victory for random selection

Proposition 11 in California has won.  This is the first American success for a model I was the first to propose in a published article back in the mid-1970s.

I have long advocated the use of random selection in political processes and I've waited a long time.  Proposition 11 creates three pools of Californians: Republicans, Democrats and Independents. Random selection is applied to these pools to come up with 14 citizens selected to design the State legislative districts in the 2011 apportionment. The vote was 5,758,709 for the proposition, 5,577,112 against.  A difference of 181,597 votes.  The margin of victory will be greater as time goes on.

San Francisco, true to its century long tradition of voting against any change voted against Prop 11.

Texting and phoning

I think texting (also called SMS) is a valuable new social technology.  Are you aware of its prevalence?

If you divide the number of Americans by the number of text messages or phone calls per month you get the following average figures: 357 text messages per person per month, compared with 204 phone calls.

Texting has one advantage over phoning: speed. 

You can deliver a similar message by text without the social necessities required for talking to that same person; that saves time.  You get the same asynchronous advantage of voice mail but it is almost always faster to read a message than listen to it.

Speed.  We obviously want it and we are obviously getting it.

Unhealthy San Francisco

The City of San Francisco created a health plan for city residents without health insurance called Healthy San Francisco.  It is a sham.  Fortunately commerce promptly found a way around it.

Why is it a sham? There are no new doctors, medical workers or clinics.  It is all the same as before except that people who formerly went to public health facilities and got billed some of the time, can now register, get a card and will never be billed for receiving the same services as before.

The city has additionally proposed a new tax that is falsely associated with Healthy San Francisco.  Businesses are required to pay $1.80 per hour per employee either for health coverage or pay as a tax to San Francisco.

This tax is now applied to all employees.  In this city, half of all wage earning employees don't live in San Francisco, so if their employer doesn't pay for real health coverage, half the employees in the city and their families wouldn't get any medical coverage under Healthy San Francisco.

Commerce also found away around the tax, bless our commercial minds.  Businesses actually set aside the $1.80 in a health trust account to provide standard medical coverage.  The businesses get back what the employees don't use.  In the cases I've looked at, the cost of health coverage is now less than it was before the tax was introduced.

Our City fathers are bad fathers, but we seem to live good lives despite them.

True biblical justice

I know many of my blogs get turned into mainstream articles a few days after I write them.  This is an example.

The party that has spent the past five years complaining about the terrible economic conditions that prevail in America, the global dislike of America, was able to put on a convention in August in which every single speaker, every single speaker, complained about the terrible economic conditions in America and the global anger that only the Democratic Party could fix.

 These complaints were made when the Dow Jones Industrial average was 13,000, jobless rates were in the low 5% range, the GDP was growing 1-3%, retail sales were growing on average 3-5% and tax revenues were surprising budget analysts who expected the 2009 budget to be close to a surplus. Internationally, America had just won a six year war in Iraq with the fewest soldiers killed of any war in American history and conservatives had been elected leaders in most allied nations.

Here comes biblical justice. We are now in a recession with the worst financial decline in 75 years, many retirement portfolios have fallen 50%, housing prices are half what they were a year ago in many parts of the country and the Detroit auto industry is entering bankruptcy.

What the Democrats described as their reality...although it was a completely false picture is now everyone's reality and it is all up to the Democrats to deal with. The Democrats cried wolf wolf wolf and now the wolf is here for them to deal with.

True biblical justice.

You ain't seen nothin yet

The New York Times and Kevin Kelly have just discovered the small video screens popping up all around them at gas stations, check-out stands and ATMs.

I advised the readers of my Marketing Without Advertising, sixth edition, to use video clips everywhere in their business.  I (with co-author Salli Rasberry) wrote that part of the sixth edition in March of 2007.

I foresee a ten fold increase in the number of videos in our lives, most commonly at point of sale locations where we are looking for specific information such as how to use a pumpkin pie mix, what a pulse driving drill can do and what it looks like when your coffee bean is picked and roasted.

The opportunities are endless and the educational value is vast.

On the other hand I have no idea when or how we will teach Americans about the fundamentals of our political system.  Turns out, based on a reliable Zogby study that college grads know more about PC politically correct than PA politically accurate. A vast number of people who voted didn't know the Democrats had controlled Congress since 2007 and erroneously ascribed many Obama gaffs to Palin and McCain.

Commerce and the messiah

The coming of the messiah is a very old focus of human attention in the parts the world that developed around the Mediterranean, including the Arab world.

The prevailing religions of our modern day are based on a messiah (Christianity), the return of a messiah (Mao and Stalin), the end of the world (Global Warming) or a messianic age when all people have the same belief (Islam). There is also a dominant ideology that the messianic age will dawn when all people are under one government (Leftism, Marxism, socialism-communism).

I am here to proclaim that the messianic age is being brought to us by commerce not by all the false messiahs.  A pro commerce ideology is one that appreciates that commerce has brought us all the great benefits that humans have wanted a messiah to provide.

Commerce has brought us modernity.  The commercial world has ended hunger and extended our lives by many decades as well as providing life for many who formerly died at birth, because of birth, in childhood or from disease before the modern era. Health for everyone, with good teeth, strong legs and feet, treatment for most pestilence and a state of physical well being never before imaginable...they are now ours, thanks to commerce.

And those are the least of the elements of the commercial messianic age.  Individuals are free to explore their own humanity, values and meaning. We are working in a world with an infinite myriad of occupations never conceived before. Hereditary classes have been eliminated in America, technological marvels are everywhere, the poorest Americans have cable TV, cell phones, most have cars, refrigerators and a bounty of food and pleasure drugs.

Nobody in Cuba even has the freedom to travel much less enjoy the rest of the bounties of the commercial world.  The Marxist/socialist/communist messiah never came and never will.

The messianic age is the commercial age. When you appreciate this you may become a pro commerce advocate.

My conflict with conflict

I'm coming to realize a conflict inherent in my pro commerce position.  Rural people can be brave, cosmopolitans are often cowards. Commerce creates cosmopolitans.

The inherent problem for commerce arises from the need for global political stability.  Industrial commerce needs stability among various needs. Industrial commerce thrives on stability because the more enduring the political stability the greater the potential to lower costs, expand markets and introduce cost saving mechanisms.

On the other hand global political stability requires, or has so far in the 200 year human history of industrial commerce,  a strong global hegemon. (From the Greek for leader.) First the hegemon was Britannia drawing its army and navy from a largely rural society; for the past 65 years the hegemon has been the United States drawing from a largely urban population.

The United States is badly divided on our role as global hegemon and peace keeper.  That is the basic red/blue divide.
* In the brief 3 years the U.S. military fought in WWII, the American public supported the military effort for only the last two years. Public support only came after the first victories on mainland Europe.

* In the 60 years since WWII the U.S. public showed its urban cowardice in several wars. In the Korean War the U.S. was forced to a draw after fighting for only 2 years. 

* In the Vietnam War, the U.S. faced cowardice again. The age group of males needed for the Army became defeatists, resisters and heavy drug users.  The rest of their cohort paraded their cowardice shamelessly. Finally after 8 years of battle and final victory,  the Congress elected in 1974 showed complete cowardice and withdrew from a war-ending-treaty to hand the enemy complete surrender.

* In a war declared by Iran on the U.S. in 1978 the U.S. only sent in an expeditionary force and failed completely in hours.

* In the Desert Storm War in Iraq, which was carried on for only a few months and produced a military victory, the U.S. settled for a draw.  The public promptly defeated the president in an election shortly thereafter.

 * Finally in a the first victorious war America has fought in a century, Enduring Freedom in Iraq, the stalwart president who led the nation was vilified, faced a cowardly Congress that tried to capitulate with every piece of new legislation and finally saw the soldier/Senator who developed the victorious Iraq strategy defeated in a Presidential race.

America is now cosmopolitan and cowardly, like the ultimate cosmopolitan exemplar Woody Allen. America is having trouble being the hegemonic peacekeeper...we are having real trouble.

Cosmopolitanism is entirely the creation of commerce. The awesome power of the U.S. is the by-product of 200 years of industrial commerce and a successful pro commerce political environment. What do we get? We get the cowardly cosmopolitanism that is in conflict with the need for global stability.

Don't sue the NY Times

The New York Times has released an unending series of what appear to be national security secrets for the past eight years. Most recently the Times released reports of a secret presidential authorization to attack terrorists in any country without diplomatic contact first. 

The first question most people ask is 'why doesn't our government sue the NYTimes and put the top management in prison for treason?'  That question reflects good moral thinking and patriotic values.

The problem is that national security secrets have a strange quality.  Most intelligence agencies are never short of information about other countries, friendly and hostile.  The inherent nature of intelligence agencies is that they simply can't distinguish good information from bad.

Intelligence agencies spend 90% of their time and resources trying to sort information into categories of: trivial, wrong, deliberately wrong, useful and very important.  By letting the NYTimes publish real secrets along with deliberately false secrets and ignoring the Times, our government is simply making the job of foreign and hostile intelligence agencies more difficult. Suing the Times would help categorize information into 'very important.'

On the other hand if the civilian readers of the NY Times believe what they read in the Times...who cares? I don't trust the Times for anything, even their page numbers. Doonesbury is just as accurate as the Times and the Doonesbury bias is always worn on his sleeve.

Why is it so hard?

A friend of mine, at dinner last night, asked the question: 'Why is it so hard to sell in a declining market?'

I don't have the answer.  My friend phoned a number of people in early September when the Dow Jones Industrials were at 11500 and asked whether they thought she should sell. The answer was don't sell this may be the bottom.  She sold anyway because she needed the cash.  (The market closed at 7500 today.)

She has been glad she sold every day since then. But her question is powerful.

Toxic turkey warning

One year I saved all the Thanksgiving turkey parts for a turkey soup.  I cooked up the mix and put it in a large plastic container in a freezer.

Months later I defrosted a cup to taste it and didn't like the taste.  So I threw the whole container in the trash.  The garbage men took it out of the trash and left a note saying that it was toxic waste.

Toxic waste goes to a special place at the San Francisco city dump.  Which is where I took it.

The toxic handlers told me to stay in the car and open the trunk.  They were wearing hazmat suits as they do all the time.  They looked at my plastic container then came to the driver's window and asked what was in the plastic container.  I told them.  They refused to take it because it was 'organic waste' of unknown composition.

So I drove home to think about it. Solution:  I dug a hole in my back yard far from healthy trees and bushes, deep enough to keep out animals, and poured it in my new toxic waste hole.

European integration

I met one of the editors of the Danish newspaper, Dagbladet Information, at coffee. We discussed the issue of Muslim integration in Europe. A sore and significant subject.

It appears to me that the slow assimilation of non-Europeans all over Europe in comparison to the more rapid assimilation in the U.S. is a matter of hereditary social class. 

Americans have never believed we had hereditary social classes and we actually haven't had them since 1960.  That means Americans have been generally more willing to be flexible in employment hiring and promoting than Europeans who believe they have hereditary social classes to consider and actually do have them.

America not only has a more vital and open commercial society focused on merit compared to Europe's elitist academic, government oriented society but America also has a 200 year history of 'move on' if things don't suit you in one place.  That experience inherently rewards merit and creates geographic clusters that are more convivial to assimilation.

Hard to ignore

It is hard to ignore the reality of global issues when you know how to use the Internet.

(1) I keep saying the financial world is well aware of the likelihood of a nuclear Iran and the inherent danger that follows for the whole commercial world (the real cause of the past year's market crash).  The best source on the details of Iranian weapons grade production of U235 is from the Wisconsin Project.

By the end of next month the deadly threshold will be passed. Iran will be turning 3.8% U235 into 90% U235 for their first atomic bomb. The deadly threshold is the presence of weapons grade material that will spread in the air, after an attack on Iran, to a large geographic area, including American troops all over the middle East, just like Chernobyl.

(2) Americans who appreciate the peacekeeper role of a global hegemon for the United States are definitely the minority.  Since no other country has the Navy, the wealth or the operational skill, we must think about the U.S. taking responsibility for safety on the high seas and combating piracy. The International Maritime Bureau is the source of data on the extent of piracy. Take a look at the map for 2008. Piracy is a very serious military and commercial problem.

Note the photo of Iranian hangings.  What do you think of modern hanging techniques?  Think about how it is done. The hangman now has to operate a crane.

Can't fool us these days

I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire.  I laughed at different parts than many others in the audience because some of the jokes were for people who have spent time in India. Such as the scene where the boys are in the kitchen gluing the tops back on sealed water bottles.

I highly recommend the movie.  It is among the very few international classics.  This is a classic that is funny, tragic, traumatic, exciting and is a love story at the same time.

My blog is about remembering the geography of the Taj Mahal. I have a very good visual memory.  When I was in college I could remember the page numbers of paragraphs I had read.  In the movie, the two brothers fall off a train and find themselves looking at the backside of the Taj, they are on the other side of the river.  I definitely don't remember a railroad there.

Drive home and check. Good old Google Earth confirmed my memory.

Leadership

I have a little surprising material to add to the vast body of knowledge and nonsense about leadership.

Why should I know anything about leadership?  That should be your first question.

It has been my misfortune to be chosen as the president or chairman of every group I have ever been a member of, with no effort on my part, since I was 15. While at the University of Chicago, in 1958 I organized the first student demonstration against merging the college senate into the University governing body. As a result I was elected president of three groups of which I was not a member: the Young Communists, Young Socialists and SDS all in my absence. From there on it never stopped.  I had been at S.F. State College for one week when I was chosen as campus president.

It appeared to me, early on, that whatever leadership is, I had plenty of it and other people could recognize it in me. I was even made the youngest Vice President in American banking in 1968 by the Bank of California management and subsequently offered the CEO job at two large banks.

 After twenty years of this incessant elevation to responsibility that I never chose, I put on all white clothes (taken as a sign of slight derangement by everyone) and I escaped promotion to leader from that day till this.

Now, my thoughts on leadership.  Leadership is a quality in a person that directs a group to focus on him as the convener of the group.  The good leader is a thoughtful unbiased listener who accepts the responsibility to consider the needs of the group, both the immediate needs for comity and longer term needs for survival. The leader having listened and weighed the group concerns, expresses them back to the group in a form that is acceptable and capable of creating the commonly desired movement.

Not much else, from my experience.

Fires in Southern California

Stunning photos of the fires:

Click to enlarge.

What I know for sure

Thirty years ago on Monday Nov. 20th the S.F. Chronicle reported that hundreds of followers of Jim Jones had died with him in Jonestown, Guyana.  A week later on Monday the 27th Dan White killed Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk. The current S.F. Chronicle has an excellent summary of the events.

I knew nearly all the participants; some well, some like Jim Jones, fairly well. I was dating the Supervisor Dan White searched out to murder. The one part of the story that the Chronicle writer, Susan Sward, is unable to write about is the direct connection between the two events, Jonestown and the City Hall murders.  I am a personal witness to that connection.

I was business manager of Glide Memorial Church at the time.  Glide was a center of many communities, including the mixed black/white community of which Jim Jones' community had been a part.

Every morning beginning Monday the 20th, with the news of a few hundred deaths, the number of deaths reported in the press grew daily, reaching the staggering number of 909 by Friday. The cumulative effect was electrifying. The psychological frenzy of the San Francisco population was palpable.

I was so disturbed, as were the rest of the staff at Glide, by the hysteria we saw around us, that I called a meeting on Friday the 24th with the key staff to put in place a protection plan for the upcoming two Sunday the 26th religious services.  We doubled the number of trained plainclothes staffers we had available to mix with the crowd, we searched the building twice before the services for bombs and weapons; most importantly we placed two security staffers on the roof of the building, with binoculars and walkie-talkies to carefully observe everything happening below.  We had never been this cautious before. We were truly scared of the precarious mood of the crowd we were dealing with.

That was the same Sunday that Dan White met with Mayor George Moscone to ask for his reinstatement to the Board of Supervisors and was rejected.

Dan White responded to a mood of hysteria that engulfed him, in addition to his personal motives.

There is much more to report. There are many aspects of this history that I experienced and have not  reported.  I will save that for another day another time and several more blogs.

Autism and TV

Poor me, poor us.  I prefer empirical evidence to religious belief, sentimentality and ideology and I assume most of my blog readers do too. 

So (a) I have friends who have family members with autism who hate the idea that parents could be a cause of autism and (b) I have read the definitive and brilliant paper by Waldman, Nicholson and Adlov that shows autism correlates with being indoors due to rain and being indoors correlates with TV watching by children.

Until a better explanation of these correlations comes along, I'm forced to say, keep your young children away from TV as much as possible until they have clearly passed the stage where autistic symptoms arise.

Really offensive

My wonderful friend Carol made a contribution to 'Yes on Proposition 8', the California initiative supporting the male/female combination as the requirement of marriage. 

Carol got a message on her phone machine from a 'No on 8' supporter politely excoriating her for her contribution.  Around here with people being fired for making contributions like Carol's and 'hate' signs all over the 'No on 8' marches, this could be a little frightening.

I contribute to many campaigns and now I will have to give special thought to the retribution that I might have to expect from the hate mongers out there in the political world.  I know how much hatred there has been for President Bush and recently towards Governor Palin...so I know where the bulk of the hatred comes from.

That isn't the issue.  I favor open reporting on campaign contributions.  I think the response to Carol and other contributors was 'really offensive'.

What we need are laws punishing anyone who uses public campaign information (and other similar information) to harass and threaten.  We also need an enforcement agency to pursue that specific transgression.

Of course we'll get such protective legislation when a few elected officials find their contributors being harassed.

P.S. If I had gotten a phone call such as Carol's I would have told the caller I was black and that the caller was a bigoted, KKK racist.

Is the end in sight?

The end I'm talking about is the vitality of the San Francisco gay community.

AIDs did horrific damage to the vitality of San Francisco's gays and to the world.  It killed a vast army of imaginative bold and creative young men.

The gay population has been slowly regaining its vitality with new entrants...it has been revitalizing, but not wholly.

Now a new and equally devastating scourge is on the doorsteps of the gay community: a battle for gay marriage.

Why might gay marriage be a destructive force in the vitality of the gay community?  Picture yourself as a 22 year old gay man, horny as hell and looking for other horny men.  You know the history of the Castro District is licentious, risque and wild.

Now you show up in the Castro and see men, like the photo on the right, proclaiming the value and stability of long term coupling. Everywhere you go in the gay community you hear the plea for having children and settling down in a gay marriage.

Do you, a horny young man, want to stay in this future home of middle-class suburban values?  Do you want to be a horny gay man with social pressure everywhere around you to settle down and be monogamous? Could you see yourself as a gay Puritan?

Doesn't such a scenario, which is already here, sound like the end of a vital gay community to you?

MSM

If you think MSM is only an acronym for Mainstream Media you are in for a big surprise.  Not only does it have another more important meaning but that meaning refers to a an issue that will probably shock you as much as it shocked me.

I was investigating the black vote for California Prop 8 where blacks voted overwhelmingly against gay marriage. One anecdote I heard from black women was that black women were against gay marriage for fear that it would encourage even fewer marriages of black men to black women.  They said that black men disproportionally prefer male sex partners to women.

So in talking to a friend who works on HIV/AIDs for the UN I learned about the terminology that UN World Health uses: MSM, males sex with males.  It has nothing to do with homosexuality or gender issues, it is simply a label used by epidemiologists while working on HIV/AIDs. 

MSMs constitute a large proportion of Arab males as I have mentioned here repeatedly.  MSM is a dominant behavior in Africa where AIDs has been spreading rapidly and it is common in the American Black population as well.

What do you know? We have a term for male sex with males when the parties involved don't call themselves homosexuals.  It sure messes up a lot of stereotypes and prejudices.

Straight about the Web

I have been listening to my friend Stewart Brand's nonsense that 'information wants to be free' and the phantasmagorical academic world of Larry Lessig who has several similar notions about property rights on the web that are completely off base.

The first good counter arguments are in the Claremont Review of Books by James V. DeLong (Fall 2008) who is appropriately at a legal think tank in D.C.

The Lessig group points to Wikipedia and Linux and yells for net neutrality, cooperative vs competitive, anti-corporate, wisdom of crowds and the power of altruism.

The web was founded with two initial advantages: (a) there was so much dark fiber, no one cared about scarce resources and(b) most of the previous 2500 years of human creativity was free to be digitized. Wikipedia is the Britannica kept up to date and expanded but it does not include creative new material that needs property protection to generate it.

Linux is Unix updated by serious paid programmers at IBM, HP, Sun and a few other corporations and is merely error checked by a mass of unpaid bug checkers.

Most creativity, good editing and news reporting in the world is done by paid professionals.  Only property rights can make that happen over a long period of time.

Fires on summer days

I usually have a fire going in the fireplace when we have guests or a party. (I know fireplaces are almost illegal in San Francisco.)  Sometimes in the warm weather people open a window. I had one friend who used to ask why I 'had a fire on a warm day?'

The answer comes from an experience I had in an elegant house just off Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills.  I was doing a focus group to find out why wealthy people weren't buying $100,000 CDs (the lowest type available at the time).

Every one of the strangers in the room, sitting in a circle, was quiet when I started the meeting; cold and uncommunicative.  Then a Spanish speaking maid came into the room and lit the pre-laid fire.  I tried to tell her it was not necessary but she couldn't understand me.

There we were with a beautiful blazing fire on a hot LA Summer day in an air-conditioned house.

That completely broke the ice.  With the glow of the fireplace the group became animated, warm to each other and very open.  The fire was pure social lubricant.

PS. I learned that rich people had no understanding of the CDs on the market at the time.  So, five months later, I introduced a $1,000 CD on January 1st at the Bank of California that paid the maximum interest rate by compounding interest hourly. We ran full page ads in every urban daily.  Before the end of the week my new consumer CD product brought in $60 million, a lot in those days. However we were promptly copied by every major California bank.

Now fires on a warm day are both comforting to the guests and a sentimental reminder for me of my marketing vice-president past.

Pro commerce banking system

We have all seen the financial system come close to collapse, worldwide, in the past month.  And we have seen how this phenomenon alone can create a truly undesirable effect on the economy.

So how does a pro commerce advocate handle this?

First the political problem to overcome is the deep seated anti-commerce/pro-farming bias embedded in American society by the founders, particularly the slave loving Thomas Jefferson: He made it clear:

'I believe that banking institutions are more dangerous to our liberties than standing armies. If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks and corporations that will grow up around the banks will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.'

Thanks to the views of this paranoid anti-commerce slave loving farmer we have had 200 years of riding a financial roller-coaster. Most of the humans on the planet have suffered from our American caused disasters in the past eighty years.

 The pro commerce solution is simple:

* We need two of the largest banks that provide direct banking service to the public to be controlled by the Treasury.  

* The banks need two mandates: all deposits are fully secure and liquid at all times (that includes multi-millions deposited by giant corporations); all loans and lines of credit remain permanently open and in force so long as the underlying security has not changed in value.

The two reasons for this simple policy on behalf of commerce are:

(1) two banks will provide some recourse to lenders if one bank isn't interested in lending. Furthermore the entire banking market, with greater inherent risk, will also be available for financing alternatives;

(2) there is no reason whatsoever that commerce should have to deal with an unstable currency or an unstable financial system....commerce is complex enough without added chaos.

Commerce thrives on financial stability and always has.

The Nummi moral outrage

President elect Obama has taken his first anti-commercial act.  The act is both morally and socially disgraceful.

I call this anti-commercial act the Nummi moral outrage.  Nummi is the plant in Fremont that I fly over nearly every time I go flying in the East Bay. Nummi is a plant jointly owned by General Motors and Toyota that produces cars and trucks for both companies.

President elect Obama is asking for a bailout for the Detroit big three that are puppet corporations run largely by the auto unions and which deserve to be in bankruptcy. Their cars aren't selling.  The strong healthy American automobile companies are mostly in the South and are owned by Toyota, Honda, Nissan, Mercedes-Daimler and VW.  The successful American auto companies are not going to be part of the Obama bailout.

Simple: bailouts are for auto industry failures in the same country where the government ignores the successful corporations in the same field.

Then there is Nummi, part failure part success.  Is Nummi going to get a bailout for the part of the factory that produces failed autos?