On the blog Weakness with a Twist you will find a brilliant summary of one of my favorite books, Albion's Seed. The summary concerns the issue of violence which I discussed in a blog earlier this week. Attidutes toward violence came to America with the first settlers and remain unchanged.
The blog goes further and discusses a separate issue about the depth of American missionary zeal. A very striking conclusion about Arab response to our secular form of missionary work. We are proud of what we do that generates suicide bombers.
On the plane into Des Moines I flew with a long
time farmer. He was distressed to see that so many towns in Iowa were
being depopulated as city life became more interesting and attractive.
His three children were all in the urban world working in the computer
IT profesions.
There are only two crops in Iowa. Corn and soybean. Corn is
planted in rows 30” apart and soy 15” apart. They are rotated. This
farmer, whom I met on the airplane, grows food grade soy. There is also
food grade corn, neither of which are the main crops.
The food grade
soybeans are shelled and put into 30 kilo bags (roughly a bushel), 640 bags into a 20’ foot
container, trucked to Minneapolis, taken by train to Seattle or
Vancouver and shipped to Tokyo or Taiwan. At $13 a bushel (today's
price), cash to the farmer that comes to $7,000 per container after
deducting the $1,500 container shipping costs. In Iowa, where there is
no irrigation, it takes 4.2 acres of soybeans to produce one full
container.
The farmer I was talking to sends 1,200 containers to Asia every year. You do the math.
One little tofu shop in the neighborhood where I stay in in Tokyo every year uses one 30 kilo bag a day.
My
farmer friend has to call on the buyers of his soy crop four times a
year. They are wholesalers in Tokyo and Taiwan. They have to know and
trust him for his food grade soy. They should. He is a solid American
farmer of Danish heritage.
All of Iowa I saw was Nordic clean (except Ft. Dodge) cleaner than Switzerland.
Imagine,
clean and worldly, with regular travel to markets in Asia. That sure
doesn’t sound like Washington D.C.,Boston, New York or the standard image of Iowa. But
why not? Unions don’t exist in most of Iowa and hard work and honesty are the
norm.
I visited North Central Iowa which is not Lake
Wobegon country.
In that part of Iowa the farming is too prosperous, but it is populated by the same
Nordic people as Lake Wobegon with many Orthodox Lutherans.
I see two major differences
from the radio version of Lake Wobegon.
* First, the most above
average attribute of the locals are lipids attached to their bodies.
* Second, the politics are
very pro-America, pro-military, anti-union , pro motorcycle and
anti-Democratic Party.
If Garrison Keillor really lived there, he and
his NPR values would be kicked out of every bar without mercy and
probably sent to the meat packing plant.
A few months back I read Sargent Rory Miller's extraordinary book Meditations on Violence. I loved it and still do.
Sgt.
Rory, as his followers call him, worked much of his life in Oregon
prisons, so he dealt with extremely violent men and had to use violence
to control and occasionally subdue them. Sgt. Rory knows violence and
he tells us honestly that we don't.
The Sgt. makes several
points. Violence produces a hormone cocktail that can totally paralyze
one, can make one nearly immune to pain, can lead to complete fantasy
and irrationality and can generate extraordinary strength.
If
you are the aggressor (police, military, prison officer) you must train
to work effectively with the hormone cocktail and not let it overwhelm
you. If you are the victim, virtually no training can help you. Your
best option if possible, is to escape or second best, be prepared in advance to kill
the attacker. I am now prepared.
My readers know I consider
pacifists to be completely blind to the world, often dangerous to
themselves and others (think Rachel Cory). Sgt. Rory, on his brilliant
blog, explains that both pacifists and people who imagine they are good
at fighting are both equally blind. You'll love it.
Occasionally
a powerful intellect stumbles into a field that has never seen the
bright light of intelligence. Violence is such a field and Sgt. Rory
is the intellect.
I remember the old
days. What I remember about the old days that never comes up in the
myriad sentimental 'Remember the old days' emails that I frequently get
is that we used to get coffee served with every meal any time of the
day FREE.
I don't know when that practice
ended nor do I know the geography of its demise (it may still prevail
in parts of Nebraska). I still notice it in hotels and highway diners
at breakfast where you can sometimes start with free coffee. But that
seems to be the limit of my current experience.
When did this change? Was it brought to us by fast food retailers? Did the change signify anything else such as the rise of espresso or more dinning out?
The other product that used to be free was water. Now water is sold in bottles.
Does that tell us anything about the future of 'free' on the Internet?
The future I've heard about for the past 20 years is the impending rise of China and India. That future arrived in July 2009.
On July 9th, after two days of meeting, China left the G8 summit in Italy and the meeting ended. Without China nothing can happen.
On July 19th
the U.S. Secretary of State visited New Delhi and received a cold
shoulder. She was told that with Congress considering a Cap and Trade
bill that would put an embargo on many Indian exports, there was nothing
to talk about. India is now telling us how to behave in a free trade
world where India is a key player.
This month is the 15th anniversary of the end of the environmental movement. The movement ended when Americans chose SUVs in defiance of global warming and environmental disaster. The environmental movement had no impact on car buyers...whatsoever.
To honor the 15th
anniversary of the end of the environmental movement, Pacific Gas &
Electric, the Northern California utility announced today that the
number of customers who signed up for carbon offset credit on their
monthly utility bill ($3) has reached 31,000 users after two years of
heavy advertising and promotion.
If you want to do the numbers that is: less than 1% of PG&E's 5.1 million users signed up to pay the carbon offset tax. 1% is almost zero.
And the U.S. Congress thinks Americans want to pay more for a cap and trade carbon tax.
I've written about the mountain bike history in another blog. The Briarpatch was hundreds of businesses that were part of a network I started in the S.F. Bay Area in 1974. The inventors and builders of mountain bikes in San Anselmo, Marin County, were members of the Briarpatch. I visited their first shop, with other Briarpatch consultants, several times and always encouraged them on the path of business they were pursing on their own.
I just want to point out that even today the mountain bike world still has all the remnants of the early founding values of the Briarpatch. The founders made only the highest quality bikes and sought to alway improve the technology not to get into mass production. Everything they did, they did as part of a community including newsletters, parties, outings, clubs and the inclusion of customers in the family of mountain bikers.
Craingslist is built on the model of the Briarpatch.
If you've got a great business, start it the Briarpatch way.
Should dogs be allowed in grocery stores, should I be able to eat horse meat?
We are here touching on one of the most difficult and critical issues of our time that appears to me to be wholly unaddressed. Only the Peter Singer, vegetarian, position is well known.
I'll give my opinion and then connect it to the disastrous behavior I see around me.
I believe it is self evident that moral systems exist to regulate human societies. Every society has its moral system and they have some overlap and many differences. We go to war regularly over our differing national moral systems, and come close to war even more often.
The fundamental purpose and support for a moral system is that it engenders cooperation among members of the society. By punishing some behaviors, making others taboo and stigmatizing yet others, the society leaves open all the areas in which cooperation is encouraged.
We can't steal valuable possessions of others lest we be punished; we can't marry our siblings lest we face taboos, nor can we have an affair with a friend's partner without stigma. Yet we can work with other peoples tools with permission, and spend much valuable time with siblings cooking, vacationing and living together. We (Americans) can work, travel and cook with our friends and their partners for everyone's benefit.
Our morals are designed to generate cooperation within our society.
What happens when we bring members of other societies into our society and when we bring in non-humans (pets, animals, food, etc)? Answer: we degrade our cooperative system.
Start with bringing in people from other moral systems. We don't allow Muslims to have multiple wives; it would destroy or degrade our serial marriage system. Similarly, we don't employ the Chinese criminal system in our courts nor the North Korean property rights system because both would make our own system dysfunctional.
Similarly, when we bring non-humans into our moral system we degrade our level of cooperation.
Bringing dogs into grocery stores because they are 'just like children' or 'family companions' generates hostility between dog owners, store managers, customers and other staff. Treating dogs as part of the American moral system (rather than the manner system, see earlier blog) creates hostility and degrades cooperation.
Animal testing pits sick, dying and at-risk people against animals.
The most visible open combat is in the realm of killing animals for fur. That is open warfare in America.
Americans troops are being kept out of urban areas in Saudia Arabia and Iraq partially because of animal issues. We eat pig, they don't; we love dogs and they don't.
Think about American children turned against Japanese over our differing views of whales.
Summary: moral systems are designed to generate cooperation in a society. Bringing non-humans into the moral system (giving animals moral rights) degrades the cooperation.
The photo is of several printing presses (probably Heidelbergs) being loaded on a truck for sale as junk metal.
Some of these fine high quality presses are being saved in small shops and others are making it into museums and a few are being saved by newly formed small press operators. But 99 out of 100 are being treated as hunks of junk steel.
The confusing emotions for me, who is a lover of technology, is that these pieces of equipment were masterpieces of technology that were so complex, delicate and precise that they required full time care, operation and maintenance.
On the other hand, they are being replaced by the new technology of silicone, fiber and software that I also love and appreciate.
Love technology and you will often be torn by this creative destruction.
When I was in Seattle the subject of this photo was the talk of the people I met and visited.
This photo is of a fish market section of the famous Pike Place Market. The marketing hook of this fish booth is that when someone buys one of the semi-frozen salmon lying on the ice near the customers, a big fuss is made, a bell is rung and the salmon is tossed up to the guys behind the counter for weighing, wrapping and payment by the customer.
PETA, the beloved lovers of many beings non-human, wrote a public column attacking the fish booth for tossing the dead fish and 'degrading' the nature of dead animals.
The photo shows how many in the public feel about PETA. The crowd at the fish booth is bigger than I've ever seen there.
The previous blog is about the Mission District being destroyed by BART. One of BART's two main stations in the Mission is at 16th and Mission.
If you want to see and enjoy San Francisco low life with high density of people at one place, this is the place for you...but only in the day time.
The weirdest piece of marketing I remember seeing is on this corner. For many people in this neighborhood their cash is in their boot, underpants or being held by an armed 'associate' nearby. Their drug inventory is in the crotch of a raunchy looking woman also standing nearby.
So here is this Pacific National Bank ad in a window with a high-paying 2% CD for people who have $100,000 or more to deposit.
What am I missing? Or does this bank know something I don't know.
When anyone talks high speed rail or rail based public transportation I want to pipe up and say: are you aware that BART destroyed the Mission District? The consequence of construction may be permanently harmful.
Through most of downtown San Francisco and Oakland BART was created with tunnels bored under the streets and very few major streets were closed for any length of time. This all happened in the 1960s.
That was not true for the Mission District. The street was opened up from the surface, like a heart by-pass, for six blocks and closed completely to traffic for more than five years.
The Mission had been a thriving multi-ethnic neighborhood with Greek, Italian, Jewish European and Central American businesses closely intertwined and doing a robust business. It was the center of life for cops, firemen and blue color San Francisco shopping and eating.
All that is gone now and forty years later the neighborhood is slowly recovering with mostly Latino businesses, MacDonalds and some hi-tech geek clubs, restaurants and hidden offices.
It always tickles me to see the acronym LGBT. I had something directly to do with the B (bisexual) part of the LGBT.
I had been the person who funded the San Francisco telephone sex information hotline (SFSI). I worked with the three wonderful founders to set up the office and get the training started. I was in the first class and worked the phones for a year. I also went to New York to try and get a similar hotline operating there (I failed).
One of the three founders of the sex information hotline, Maggie Rubenstein, and I were sitting in a hot tube at the newly created Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality that created PhDs in human sexuality along with sex education training materials (1976). I had been part of that operation for six years.
Maggie was complaining to me, as we sat in the tub, that bisexuals were being left out of the rapidly emerging sex field (she considered herself bi). I looked at Maggie and said, "Well you are now the first president of the Bisexual league and I am the first member." I gave her $5 when we put our clothes back on.
Maggie did found the movement starting with her first membership meeting in a hot tub. That is the source of the B in LGBT.
I've made it clear in an earlier blog that the top officials of the world know that there is no global warming. The big question is how and when the hysterical followers are going to get the message?
The hysterical followers never really got the message when the population explosion came to an end (observed clearly by me and reported in 1992). They just spent fifteen years without reinforcement of the idea by mainstream press so it withered away. Many people still believe in a population explosion problem.
I think the global warming hysteria will have a more abrupt ending. I think somebody will be able to successfully arrange a public debate by significant authorities on the subject. After the debate, the issue will melt away like the Arctic Ice.
On the subject of language, I have a strange phenomenon to report.
After finishing college I went to study Hebrew on a Kibbutz. The Kibbutz was Hagoshrim, a farm near the Syrian-Lebanon border.
I had been there a few weeks and certainly didn't know any Hebrew yet. (I never got very good at it.) I was working in the fields, moving aluminum watering pipes, when some thing I did set a swarm of bees or hornets after me. I ran as fast as I could, on pure adrenaline, assuming I could out run them...but not really thinking or assuming anything.
After a few minutes I passed a woman on a tractor who yelled at me to "stop and lie down." I did and the swarm went on its merry way. I got up and walked over to thank the woman. She was an Israeli and didn't speak a word of English.
I am a simple liver and in addition to my main book on the subject, I have written quite a bit over 35 years. But I don't proselytize.
I occasionally get questioned about my patriotism and loyalty to commerce as a simple liver. The logic behind the question is that commerce is driven by consumerism. Not really true.
Commerce did not originate with consumerism, it originated from the realm of necessity. Industrial commerce grew strong and vital based on providing for necessity.
Nevertheless, commerce in most of the world long ago out-supplied the realm of necessity and entered the realm of consumerism...satisfying whims and personal goals.
Commerce is currently driven by a large component of consumerism because satisfying customers is the driving force of commerce. Buying products to enhance personal goals is consumerism.
In my opinion, the nature of simple living is also the satisfaction of personal goals, it just requires much less in the way of physical objects. Simple living is more focused on livelihood, friendship and individual authenticity. Those elements can drive commerce just as well as physical objects.
The effect on GNP growth is not obvious. If a median income simple liver takes four friends to a wonderful restaurant and hires a string quartet after dinner around a fireplace and conversation, the GNP effect is the same as buying and installing a hot tub.
Simple living is just as relevant to driving commerce as consumerism. Probably more so in the future.
In a week or so I will be writing a blog about non-humans and morals. The Peter Singer issue. Right now I'm in Iowa and am learning as much about this region as fast as I can.
The issue of bringing dogs to dinner is slightly different from bringing dogs into grocery stores, which I have blogged about before. The grocery store and other public spaces must make their own rules and these rules have to do with public behavior in a public space. That is different from my subject herein.
Should you bring a dog where you are going? If the place you are going is someone else's personal responsibility, the answer is that you must get permission.
We often forget that dogs and other pets are in the domain of manners (not morals). A dog is theoretically under the control of its owner, just as a child is theoretically under the control of a parent or guardian. (The obvious distinction here is with cats and nearly all other household pets and human infants).
Therefore if you would always ask whether a child is invited to a dinner, a meal, a party, a bar-b-cue, to a stay over, a short trip together or anything similar, then the same applies to a dog. The host needs to know the degree of control you have... generally measured by the age of the child or in the case of a dog, the size of the pet and your judgment.
Dogs are in the domain of manners close to the category of children.
I love it when my readers get news-related material before the mainstream press (it happens about 5-6 times a year). In this case you are getting news that the press will never pick up in my lifetime.
Why is there a battle between the CIA, Executive and Congress?
The U.S. secret and intelligence agencies have a terrible record of maintaining secrecy. Both the FBI and the CIA had top level communist moles for forty years, so did the State Department. That means many operatives overseas died because of the failed secrecy of the secret and intelligence agencies. Remember, in 1996 I knew Valerie Plame was a CIA employee. Few overseas operatives are, to this day, willing to work for the U.S. Nobody competent could be dumb enough.
That is only half the problem.
The other half of the problem is that Congress is even worse with secret material. For the past forty years every person who had been a Marxist or communist in their younger years, headed straight for a position on the Congressional intelligence committees as soon as they got elected to Congress. Two shocking examples that I personally know of were Phil Burton an open Communist (along with his wife Sala) who was also Democratic Party whip in the House for 10 years. And Ron Dellums with the same background who was in Congress for nearly 30 years. Both actively hated the CIA and yet they sat on nearly every intelligence briefing. Did they keep any important secrets?
I don't know the other people who have been on the intelligence committees, I haven't paid attention, but what I know is enough to make it obvious that an intelligence briefing with Congress is a direct telegram to the people from whom the secret is being kept.
That is mostly why the CIA and the Executive hate to brief Congress about anything.
While we are at it... Democratic Congresses, more than any other group, caused the intelligence breakdown on 9-11. Congress passed legislation making it illegal for the FBI to cooperate with the CIA. That made 9-11 a certainty according to the 9-11 Commission.
I wrote about tipping more than 30 years ago in several magazines and newsletters. Nothing I said then has made a dent on any mind whatsoever (in case you want to point to several areas of my intellectual impotence).
The subject of tips and tipping often comes up and no one seems to be conscious of the fact that tips are not a way to reward or punish service workers; they are a remnant of a training tool for slaves and servants. And a way to reinforce the slave-servant-master hierarchy.
Every job that involves tips was formerly done by slaves and servants. Food service, taxi and livery service, baggage handling, hair cutting, etc. All the places where we don't tip service people are where the service was formerly provided by skilled workers: gasoline stations and auto repair workers, plumbers, electricians, carpenters, dentists, lawyers, retail clerks, firemen, policemen, ambulance workers, nurses, etc.
Today's headline is: "BELFAST, Northern Ireland – Masked and hooded Belfast Catholics hurled gasoline bombs, fireworks and other makeshift weapons at police Monday as the most bitterly divisive day on the Northern Ireland calendar reached an ugly end."
The current Roman Catholic Pope, Benedict the 16th, like all the other popes in the past 60 years, has offered several thousand words a year to admonish the Jews of Israel in correct behavior, never condemning the Arabs who promote the (careful, moderate) Israeli responses.
But will you ever hear a Roman Catholic pope admonish the Roman Catholic terrorists (hooded) in Belfast and Northern Ireland? Not until Hell and Purgatory both freeze.
It looks to nearly everyone that the world of academia, especially the colleges and universities, is infested and under the total control of the Fundamentalist Left.
It doesn't look that way to me.
Why? Because I reasoned long ago that the goal of education and educational institutions is to be the keel of society, to be the drogues (the sails thrown over the stern in a storm to stay aligned directly into the waves). Educational institutions are designed to be ultra conservative... conservative meaning unchanging or changing very slowly.
So what is going on now where Noam Chomsky is still the hero of academia?
Academia is holding on to the anti-American, anti-war values of the mid 1960s, when most faculty members were coming of age. Think Jane Fonda, Hanoi Rose.
Simple. There will be no change in academia until the current old yippy-yuppie crew dies off.
When the Honduran democratic government drove out an emerging tyrant we got to see an old story. An important and vital old story.
The entire family of nations (a very dysfunctional family) and the Kenyan President of the U.S. condemned the righteous ouster of the illegal President who was ousted with full support of the Honduran Supreme Court, the elected Legislature and the Army.
The old story is: if you are a weak country it doesn't matter whether you are a democracy or not... screw you. Why is it an old story? Because the same opprobrium is endlessly heaped on another democracy, Israel, every day by the same scoundrels. The only exception has been one American President, G.W. Bush.
What is my proof that this happens to democracies in particular?
Take the current anti-Israel horrors generated over West Bank settlements. Israel won the West Bank in the 1967 war. All the following countries who conquered land since 1945 have kept their conquered land and done what they pleased with it:
* USSR conquered the Sakhalin Islands from Japan and no one cares that democratic Japan wants them back.
* China conquered Tibet and nobody tells China what to do there.
* India conquered Kashmir and does what it wants in Kashmir.
* India conquered democratic Goa and no one said a peep.
* North Vietnam conquered democratic South Vietnam after abrogating a peace treaty with the South and does what it wants there.
Let me summarize. Being a democracy means absolutely squat in the world of international relations. It means nothing to the U.S. State Department, only Truman, Nixon, Ronald Reagan and G.W. Bush tried to override the Foggy Bottom UN lovers. Four men who will be remembered for their bravery and defense of democracy. They didn't change a thing.
Were you aware that many Jews, and one in particular, spent three entire years, from 1941 to 1944 trying to awaken the American press, Congress and the American people to the Holocaust?
The man was Hillel Kook and you can find part of the story in wikipedia. (Also here). What the story fails to impress is that Kook called on the New York Times on many occasions, brought prominent rabbis with him and never got the Times to publish a word about the ongoing Holocaust. Shame on the Sulzbergers forever.
My father was a rabbi in El Paso, Texas before the war. He was very aware of the treatment of Jews in Germany because he smuggled many into the U.S over the Mexican border. He was even given a Zeiss camera by one of them as a gift (which I used in my teenage years). My father joined the Navy the week after Pearl Harbor. While in the Navy, he was on a Presidential commission to decide whether Jewish conscientious objectors should escape service. He voted 'no' and his side prevailed. He knew about the Holocaust and went to visit Palestine and help shortly after he was discharged from the Navy.
The shocking part of this story that is never discussed is that: Orthodox Jews in America helped Kook as much as they could and the Reform Jewish establishment opposed him, sabotaged him and did everything they could to contradict the evidence of the Holocaust. The majority of Reform Jews were opposed to Israel for ten years after it was established. The Holocaust museum never makes this point.
To this day, 9 out of 10 American Reform Jews have no idea that their fellow Reform religionists and rabbis participated (by opposing the truth) in the killing of 6 million Jews. They also have no idea that they are today the main Jewish force in America that fails to support Israel when Arabs attack, kill and murder innocent Jews. America's Reform Jews have failed their fellow Jews for the past 80 years.
My friend Alex who first pointed out the global revolution due to new natural gas reserves, has pointed out the relatively new word trustafarians.
I will start using this word. Trustafarians are obviously trust fund kids who live as Lefty radicals. We have a super abundance of trustafarians in San Francisco. Together with government employees, academics and rebellious young anarchists they are a voting majority that keep electing a group of (1) anti-poor (2) nannies to run our local government.
(1) The trustafarians spend all their time hanging with their friends and have no idea that their hatred of commerce keeps poor people poorer and creates more auto pollution. By banning Target, Wal-Mart, Home Depot and dozens of other stores from San Francisco... they force poor people to drive to adjacent towns. Poor people also move to other towns for the low cost shopping.
(2) The nanny government punishes smokers, people who ride public transit, people who park their cars on the street and people who own old cars. Parking fines in San Francisco are astronomic. Who are these people being punished? Poor people.
Sometimes I think there is a perverted justice in the political system... because when poor people vote, they vote for the politicians who punish them.
I believe the Knesset should be openly discussing the moral issue of preemptive bombing of Iran's nuclear sites.
Two reasons the Knesset should debate this issue:
One, the Knesset is the modern body that establishes the Jewish moral code. The Jewish moral code is the basis for the moral codes of the entire billion-person Christian world, especially the United States. For the past 2,000 years the Talmud and related commentaries have kept the tradition alive. Christianity has followed slowly behind.
The Knesset in its rulings on 'pulling the plug' and 'multiple births from invitro fertilization' has shown that it is the modern Jewish moral ruling body.
Two, the preemptive bombing of Iran's nuclear sites presents three serious moral problems.
The first deals with the likelihood of spreading nuclear fallout to Iranians. While all of Iran is complicit in the destruction that necessarily brought this death upon them because they could have overthrown their government, is that sufficient moral reason for them to die?
Second, there may be many non-Iranians who will die from the nuclear fallout. Who must accept the direct moral responsibility for these deaths? Is it all the people and their nations who did nothing to stop the Iranian nuclear program (Russia, China, Germany, Britain, U.S., France...)?
Third and last, can preemption include destruction of Iran's retaliatory weapons such as Hezbollah and Hamas, when the certainty they will be used against Israel is not 100%?
Do you get a creepy feeling when you look for a document and find that it is totally missing, stripped from the historical record?
There are a few cases that give me that creepy feeling. In historic sequence, the first is the main speech that Senator Joe McCarthy gave in public and then gave again on the Senate floor. No copies exist of either speech, but because this is where McCarthy first cited the names of State Department employees who were Communists, and McCarthy was forever berated for not really naming names, the absence of this speech from historic records is 'creepy'.
The second instance is the Surgeon General's report on smoking in 1959. I used that report for two statistical tests in the statistics class where I was a teaching assistant in 1961. Of course the data contradicted the main theses of that report that smoking caused lung cancer. The charts never appeared again in any subsequent reports. I have paid researchers to find that original report and it is clearly missing from every major library that should have it.
The third was a missing 15 minutes from a tape of Richard Nixon, talking in his office.
Most recently we had Sandy Berger going to the National Security Archives and removing documents, taking them out of the building under his coat. Did they ever get back in the file?
Berger is the reason for the title of this blog. Berger got a slap on the wrist. Frankly I am always offended when confronted with a Bergerism. His name should be comparable to Guy Fawkes for historians.
The G-8, minus China after the premier left the meeting early, agreed to an actual empirical target number for global warming. For those of us who know the facts... we have a pure unadulterated victory. The number is 2 degrees C above the current global temperature.
There is no way that such a number could be reached in a century, even if global warming were a reality.
The average global temperature is now 21.5C and that is roughly .4C above the 20th Century average. In the past 150 years the temperature, starting before human generated CO2, rose only .8C. The chance that the global temperature could rise 2 degrees in the remaining 90 years of this century is close to nil.
Goodbye global warming hysteria. Killed by a target number and, to me, a very clear admission by global leaders that they don't believe in the hysteria.
Postscript:The Wall Street Journal reports that the 2 degrees C is based on pre-industry, not current, global temperatures. So that means a remaining increase of 1.2 degrees C will be allowed (as if these leaders who have never done anything together effectively could do something in the imaginary future). This is inside the possible global temperature range based on the rise in one period of increase in temperature from 1978 to 1998. Otherwise based on any other period it remains a probability close to nil.
I start with three premises that I believe are accurate reflections of financial reality.
(1) Nobody genuinely knows the origins, motive power or consequences of excessive executive compensation. If we knew these elements, it would would be easy to regulate executive compensation and it would have occurred before now. Some corporations with excessive compensation do well and some do poorly over time. No factual data can define or create a stable long term executive compensation system that is beneficial to society.
(2) American financial reforms have little positive effect when initially introduced and often have negative consequences. The limit on tax deductibility of executive compensation in 1993 at $1 million was the primary source the subsequent explosion of stock options, back-dating of stock options, ghost stock plans, monstrous retirement benefits and many more evasive tactics.
(3) Envy does not trump greed. Punitive controls on executive compensation cannot work. The envious person does not apply the determination, intelligence or skill that the greedy person applies to avoiding regulation. In time the envious person loses interest; the greedy person doesn't.
What will work in restraining excessive executive compensation is to establish a publicly agreed upon set of executive packages that any corporation can select for its executives. By selecting from a pre-established package of compensation, the ground rules can be made explicit and understood by all relevant parties including shareholders, government agencies, board members and fellow employees.
Here are three examples of what I mean by publicly agreed upon executive compensation packages:
Blue package. The chief executive and five other named executives shall receive supplementary taxable wages every year based on the percentage increase in net corporate profits of the previous year when compared to a moving average of the previous three years.
Orange package. The chief executive and select other named executives shall receive supplementary taxable wages (50%) and shares of corporate stock (50%) based on three times the percentage increase of the net corporate profits of the prior year compared to a moving average of the previous three years, plus the increase in percentage of the shareholder value of the prior year compared to a moving average of the previous three years. A decrease in his two-element number shall result in a decrease of 20% in the ordinary taxable wages of the executive.
Red package. The chief executive and select other named executives shall receive supplementary after-tax wages (10%), shares of corporate stock (50%) and stock options (40%), based on the percentage increase of the net corporate profits of the prior year compared to the average of six named similar corporations in the same industry. A comparative decrease in number shall result in a 50% decrease in the ordinary taxable wages of the executive.
Summary. The nature of the packages are open, understandable to everyone involved and designed with clearly beneficial public objectives
There are many regulatory agencies designed to supervise and audit financial funds to prevent fraud. In nearly all cases the enforcement arms of these agencies are weak, ineffective or non-existent. In most cases the fraud is detected after the fact and the relevent assets have evaporated.
There are two reasons for the inadequacy of our fraud enforcement regime. First, the technical skill and competence to understand and detect fraud are rare in the workforce and when they occur they are most likely to appear on the highly-rewarded fraud-creation side (the crooks are well rewarded). Second, enforcement agencies are highly fragmented. The SEC, FBI, Postal Service, Department Of Justice, IRS, state Attorneys General, local DAs and the financial regulatory agencies all have their own fraud enforcement forces. Cooperation is weak and sporadic.
The long-run solution to reducing financial fraud is to centralize both the audit/supervision functions of all agencies and to centralize the enforcement/prosecution functions of all agencies. While Americans will never be comfortable with an increase in the power and effectiveness of any law enforcement agency, all centralization, however limited, in this area will be beneficial.
Overall, the most effective approach to the financial fraud problem is to create a single national educational center, such as the military academies, that concentrates knowledge and technology related to accounting and fraud at one location. Such a single, focused professional educational center will not only attract desirable fellows to the field, but proximity will help the students form the kind of social networks that will make supervision and enforcement more effective.
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