Pro Commerce

Politics 101-2

Trust is vital in politics.  That is not what you'd ordinarily think about politics.

The most surprising thing I can say about politics is that trust is one of the vital elements.  For a politician, staffer or lobbyist to be effective he must be trusted;  his word must be good.

With all the prejudice against politics it may be hard to understand why this is true.

At all times in politics you are dealing with a vast number of people, not just fellow legislators, staffers and lobbyists but donors, supporters and important people of all sorts.  Politics is the art of creating coalitions.  Coalitions include friends, allies, opponents and enemies.  The only glue that can hold such a strange conglomerate together is a common purpose and mutual trust.

When a politician gives his word to another politician, lobbyist or staffer it must be good.  It doesn't matter whether the word is a threat, a promise, a commitment or a rejection... everyone else will be operating on the assumption that the statement is trustworthy.

So that leaves two obvious questions: what happens to people who aren't trust worthy and how does trust relate to campaign politics?

A person in politics who is not trustworthy becomes a pariah in the political world.  It may pain you to hear this, but Bill Clinton was always known as untrustworthy and to this day he is not trusted by anyone.  Clinton had lied to or deceived every member of Congress by the time his impeachment reached the House.  I was shocked that not one single Democrat stood up for him in the House and no one used the dozen procedural options available to derail the impeachment.

One of the most famous internal Senate letters in the past decade was from John McCain to junior Senator Obama when Obama had broken a promise to McCain on a vote.  McCain laid out the core principle of the Senate: trust.  I assume Obama listened.  I hope he did.

What about campaign statements?  Campaign statements are meaningless.  Some politicians try to be honest in their campaigns, many don't; many more try to make statements that are ambiguous and can be read by multiple parties in selective ways.

Within the political circles there is great tolerance for vague or outlandish campaign statements.  It doesn't impinge on the requirement for interpersonal trust.  Candidate Obama made many statements that threatened important American treaties.  Canada checked with his staff to see if Obama was 'just talking campaign talk' and got reassurances that he was.

That is how it works.

I was right but not a genius

Back in August I wrote a blog saying that the core data for human caused global warming was totally fraudulent.  Now the Times of London has confirmed my statement.

The basic global temperature measurements were thrown away because they don't support global warming. I knew that and wrote about it because I have been an expert witness on statistics and research data for over 25 years.The reality of fraud by the East Anglia University people was obvious.

The Copenhagen conference is a waste of everyone's time and money.  Call it off now, if you have an IQ that is three digits or even close to three digits.

Arab memory and the Holocaust

I had a Lebanese correspondent who asked me and others on his list whether the Holocaust occurred.

Why would anyone who can use a keyboard ask such a stupid question?

One simple reason.  The Arab world is mentally incapable of recognizing that Israel was settled in a sparsely populated land where Jews bought the land and turned it into a paradise.  Those few Jews who accomplished this miracle did so with 20th century Western skills and intelligence.

Because the Arabs, everywhere, live with no skills and no competence and in a paradise only a camel would appreciate, the Arab world must fabricate a reason for their desolate self-inflicted failure.

The fabrication is that the Jews made up the Holocaust as a way to move en mass, with European support to create Israel and drive out the large Arab population.

Piling fabrication on top of blindness is the Arab Way. Anything to save face.

Turkey resumes its role

The Ottoman Empire extended from Hungary to Ethiopia, from Morocco to Iran and lasted over seven hundred years.

Are the Turks about to revive the Ottoman Empire?

They are well on the way to trying.  Turkey has turned its back on NATO, the EU, Israel and America. 

It started when, under pressure from the EU with a promise of fast access to EU membership, Turkey banned American access to Iraq at the start of the Iraq war and destroyed a major war front for the U.S. She destroyed good relations with the U.S.  Since then the EU has turned its back on Turkey, double-crossed in the Turkish view, with no offer of EU membership.  Since then, Turkey has rebuffed the U.S. on several occasions and cut long time good relations with Israel.

Turkey is opening relations with the Kurds, Armenia and is opening active trade with Syria and Iran.

Turkey is moving to re-create the Ottoman Empire.

Will she succeed?

I have not been to Turkey.  I am told that Turkish soldiers are good fighters with terrible officers.  I am told that the Turks have few industrial skills and fewer modern technical aptitudes.

Turkey created and controlled the Ottoman Empire because the Arabs were so totally incompetent and lacked even rudimentary managerial and communication skills. That difference may exist today but it means little.  The Turks can fly fighters with Israeli help and the Saudis can fly fighters with American help, but neither can do it alone.

Since I see a long term failing of the Arab world due to the abundance of natural gas, I see little or no significance in the change in direction of Turkey and its potential rise to power.

With my projection of future oil at today's equivalent of $40 a barrel I expect to see the middle eastern tower cities as abandoned havens for Blade Runner movies.

Sirhan Sirhan

It is time to elevate Sirhan Sirhan, the murderer of Robert Kennedy, in 1968, to his rightful status: the founder and father of the Islamic Jihad War on the West.

Sirhan was a 24 year old Palestinian who moved to the U.S. with his parents when he was 12 years old.  He chose Robert Kennedy as his target because Kennedy promised to send 50 fighter jets to Israel.  The murder occurred one year after the Israeli victory over the Arab world in the 1967 War.

Sirhan cased the hotel where he killed Kennedy two days earlier and went to practice at a pistol range the day before the murder. Sirhan said his reason for his deliberate murder of Robert Kennedy was very clear. ' I did it for Palestine'.  He hated Israel and Jews and except for the intervention of the judge he would have gotten one of his court appointed Jewish lawyers, Emile Berman, removed.

We are now in a time where a U.S. president and attorney general think that there is no Islamic Jihad against the West, just an inchoate series of criminal acts.

I think it is time to declare June 5th 1968 the day the real Islamic Jihad War against the West began.  Sirhan Sirhan was not a man ahead of his time, he was the first soldier to be captured on American soil in a war that began 41 years ago.

We should have a special day of remembrance on June 5th much like December 7th.

Dangerous tea party terrorists

Recently, I went to a buffet dinner with a speaker.  The main attendees were San Francisco Bay Area Tea Party activists.

These are the people who Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid have assured Americans are neo-terrorists, dangerous pro-Hitler radicals and represent the extreme right in our country.

Frankly, I've lived in America more than 2/3rds of a century and I wonder about the sanity of Pelosi and Reid.  These tea party people look like every private club, golf membership group I've ever seen.  Radical only if you think a 70 year old woman is outrageous for bleaching her hair.

One member of the Code Pink crew that lives in tents in front of Pelosi's house looks more dangerous than twenty people from this group.

The dollar and deflation

 The dollar is falling and we have no inflation.  This has never happened before in the U.S., never..... did you know this?

The dollar is falling relative to all major currencies, by a lot.  It is falling relative to gold too.

We have no inflation.  There will be no automatic Social Security raise next year because there has been no inflation.

How can this happen?  In economic theory, when a country generates a significant fiscal deficit its currency falls relative to the world because other countries discount the value of its currency, justifiably because the deficit is inherently a case of a government printing money.

Simultaneously, the country experiences inflation because everything that is bought with dollars (all imports) become more expensive (in dollar terms).

This isn't happening now. We are printing money but not facing inflation  We aren't following the economists' script.  Why?

Three reasons: (1) Some major product categories from foreign suppliers are cutting prices to maintain market share, such as automobiles and oil producers. (2) We just came through a financial crisis that saw a collapse of housing prices... that produced a deflation in a major product category. (3) China, a major source of our household goods is keeping the Chinese currency from falling relative to the dollar.

I don't think the current conditions will continue. 

Pensions

I'm involved in an international effort to help a group of pensioners get their pensions.  As in many parts of the world, (I won't tell you where I'm working) borders have changed and the government that collected the money for pensions from workers is gone.  That happened all over East Europe in East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and places in the Middle East such as Iraq.  It is a big worry for South Korea in case Kim Jong Il's tyranny falls.

I find that most people assume there was a pension trust fund that is now gone. 

However, I was trained as an economist so I know that national pension funds are really transfer taxes from workers to retirees. There is not and never was a trust fund. Not in the U.S. not anywhere.

So, who should pay the retiree's pensions? In Iraq there is oil revenue, in East Germany there were the prosperous West Germans.  The rest of the former communist world is still suffering with trying to find the money to make the pension payments since the original communist governments occupied the same nation states that are now free.

How do you address this issue?

Kabul: knives and camel tack

I've been asked my opinion about military options in Afghanistan.  Why me?

No good reason.  I was in Kabul for a visit with my mother and father, in 1971, as they traveled over many years from London to Singapore where they bought an island in Malaysia on the South China Sea.

I learned three things that the press never covers. 

First we took a few days off to relax in the cool nearby mountains at an American Embassy lodge.  It was night time and we got lost.  It was only about five miles outside Kabul in the green hills.  We found a beautiful empty palace and set up a tent for the night.

When we got up in the morning an Afghan was standing over us with an Enfield rifle and a very threatening demand.

My father reached (slowly) for the nearby dictionaries.  The Afghani didn't speak Farsi, Pashto or Urdu.  That is when I learned how many mutually un-understandable languages there are in Afghanistan.  It is not one country.  It is a tribal region.

My mother moved extremely slowly and made some tea.  That is the universal language.  The Afghani finally put the rifle down and sat down for tea.  Again, in universal sign language we learned that he was the guard for the abandoned palace of King Zahir Shah, who had left the country but not yet been overthrown.

Second, you can look at Kabul in a Google map today.  As in 1971, it is a zone of flat mud houses, dirt streets, hardly even a town with a few two story buildings in the center.  This is the capital of nowhere and it makes Tijuana and Juarez look like Manhattan by comparison.

Third, I saw nothing resembling industry or productive output.  The markets were filled with old rifles, thousands of knives and machetes, rusty metal and every imaginable form of tack for camel transport.

What could a military protect?  We can probably form military rings around a few towns and run convoys between them and have a few of our own strategic bases but I can't imagine any other military goals.

Changing politics is much too hard

As an example of what I mean by changing your mind let me give an example: you see a small ad on a wall.

1) Many people believe that ads are posted by malicious corporations intent on getting consumers to buy products they don't want.  The advertising agencies hire highly paid psychologists to use the latest subtle technology and science to take advantage of poor people to make a profit for the corporations.

2) Another smaller group believe that an ad is put up by a fragile business that is trying hard to sell a few more products or services with no idea if the advertising investment is worthwhile.  The company, made up of a few hard working marketing people with only hope and determination, is desperate to find any pragmatic way to sell even a little more for the company.

To get from one view to the other you have to change your knowledge of history.

The people in (1) believe Thomas Jefferson was one of the great founding fathers who shaped this country in positive ways to stay fresh and vigorous and well governed. That is what is taught in our schools and most books of history.

The people in group (2) have to form their own opinion about history and Jefferson.  When they know history they find that Washington and Hamilton were the men who founded the business loving part of our country, the ones who created banking, finance, stability and vigorous enterprises. Both hated slavery and Washington freed his slaves.

Jefferson, on the other-hand, was a spend thrift, who hated business, favored high tariffs, was against foreign trade, a military and banking; Jefferson died in debt, strongly supported slavery and backed the French Revolution long after the guillotine had sickened other more rational people.

You have to go a long way in changing your mind about history just to have a different view of a small wall ad.  I haven't mentioned changing your view of every war including the Civil War and the Cold War.

No wonder I can speak of nearly everyone having a brain like an egg that became hard boiled at age 23 and never does a major change again. 

To change one needs to relearn nearly everything.

Who knows how to start businesses?

There may be several other people in the world beside myself.  I don't know how many.  The number is probably less than five.  I started the Briarpatch Network in San Francisco and worked with over 1,000 start up businesses. 

When I say worked with I mean I saw their books, I visited their work premises and in most cases I gave advice that was requested and got to see the consequences of my advice. 

A count by independent auditors found that 95% of the businesses I worked with survived more than five years.  That compares to the norm of 90% that fail in the first five years.  Of course the Briarpatch Network had smarter people than average (lots of hippies and college drop outs).

I worked with several hundred other businesses as clients all over the world, of every size, including a European airline, the largest trading company in the world and several world class artists.

I was invited by the Swedish government to design and initiate a program to start small businesses in Sweden.  I did.  It generated over 4,000 businesses in five years.

I read endless statements by experts on the importance of starting businesses for economic growth and employment. Yet, I don't get any phone calls asking me how to do it.

It would take a lot of research to find out that I am the expert on this subject.  To make things easier for everyone, I am writing this blog.

I have my phone with me these days... if you want to know what policies will generate new businesses give me a call and be prepared to pay for policies that have a proven track record.

Are Republicans smarter?

I had an epiphany in early 2007, when I figured out how to reliably measure the IQs of Republicans and Democrats (and Independents and non-voters).  Once I knew that the issue could be resolved by survey research I haven't hesitated to speculate on the answer.  There is a reliable answer, we just don't know it yet.

Most of the people who have responded to my blog have failed to understand that the IQ issue is currently a matter of opinion and mine is just as irrelevant as anyone else.  We can actually know the answer with survey research work, so opinions are just for fun.

However, I wish to continue the fun. The fun for me, of prodding the Democrats with their false elitism and their real IQ inferiority.

Two studies support the thesis that Republicans are smarter than Democrats. 

The first is a recent Pew study where 12 current news related questions were asked.  Of the 12 news questions, more Republicans got the right answer to 10 questions, while the Democrats were tied with the Republicans on one question (about the public option in health care) and beat the Republicans on correctly answering only one question (US versus European health spending). In many cases the Republicans were much more knowledgeable than the Democrats.  Many more Republicans knew what the Cap & Trade bill was about, who the newest Supreme Court Justice is and what the current unemployment rate is. Shame on the Democrats. Shame.

(You have to create your own cross tab on this one. Go to SDA then to the SDA Archive, then GSS Cum file 72-08, for Row use wordsum for column use partyid.)

The second, the GSS, General Social Survey by the National Opinion Research Center is a long term test, over 32 years, with 24,255 respondents, where respondents are given 10 words and asked to define them.  The Republicans out did the Democrats and the 'Strong Republicans far out did the Strong Democrats'.  72% of the 'Strong Republicans' knew 6 to 10 words while only 53% of the 'Strong Democrats' knew 6 to 10 words

Because I love honest data, I can't neglect to mention the strong showing of word knowledge among half the left-leaning Independents and the tiny 1% group that vote for 'other parties'.

There you have it. The best data we have shows Republicans are much smarter than Democrats.

Technology in baseball and football

I don't watch much sports.  I do swimming, running, skiing, sailing, scuba and many other sports.  I just don't watch.

I have seen Super Bowls and World Series so I know what happens.

I want to point out the difference between the way baseball and football have responded to technology.  The technology in point is TV and the ability to re-run a play in microscopic detail from several angles.

This is a matter of social thought: how institutions are structured around ideas, metaphors and images. 

In the recent World Series I saw game changing calls by the umpires that TV re-runs showed were wrong. Game changing.  I'm not even including the ability of TV to show the pitching rectangle and show where the pitch went inside or outside the strike zone.  Many, many pitches were called wrong. Doesn't matter. In baseball the TV perception of the game doesn't matter, only what the umpires see matters.  The game slowly goes on regardless of the accuracy of the umpire rulings.

Football is exactly the opposite.  If the TV re-run shows a different outcome than the referee's ruling, there is frequently a referee group consultation to look at the TV re-run before making a final ruling. The rules and rulings matter in football. 

Why the difference?

Because baseball is a game developed and popularized when much of America was agricultural and exploded when America became industrial with production line workers.  In agriculture rules don't matter, only the unforgivable, unpredictable weather... much like umpires.  In the industrial production line, again, rules don't really matter.  What the boss says is what counts.  Like it or lump it.  Just like the umpires.

Football became the national pastime with the rise of the AFL to play against the NFL in the early 1960s.  This beginning was in the white collar era in America.  White collar workers follow very exact rules, manuals and work in a meticulous environment.  Football is a very rule based game, most of the action is stopped by referee rulings.  As a consequence, getting the rulings right with TV back-up is important.

In football, the TV technology matters, in baseball it doesn't.

As an aside, I learned how ice hockey uses TV technology.  All professional games are viewed live in Toronto by the National Hockey League and when there is a dispute about how the puck got into the scoring net it is immediately ruled upon in Toronto and the game proceeds.  This is pure French culture.  In France, all communication for centuries has gone into and out of Paris, the central hub of the national spokes. For ice hockey it is Toronto.

Advice to Sarah

This is really for my friends who are stunned (again) by the venom and hatred that is directed at Sarah Palin.

"Sarah, I have no idea whether the hatred directed at you by the Harvard media elite bothers you or not.  My advice is to feign not being hurt by it."

Why?

Because the public hatred of an innocent public figure by the media elites and on-the-street-Lefties will get you elected president sooner rather than later.

There are three stunning examples.

* The most hated man in 20th Century American politics was Richard Nixon. He was elected president twice and the second time by an overwhelming majority.  (When Nixon was first elected my father left America as he had promised to do many times, he was a standard Lefty who hated Nixon. He stayed away for 12 years.)

* The second example is Ronald Reagan.  Defeated even by Republicans the first time he ran, he was elected president twice by increasingly large majorities.

* Hated with incredible passion by all the media elites, but elected by a large plurality with a large Republican Congress to boot, was George W. Bush and Dick Cheney for their second term, 2004.

Whether these men were bothered or not by the hatred, each of these men feigned indifference.  The people who elect American office holders are Independents and they are intolerant of public hatred.  Probably more intolerant of hatred directed at a woman.

That core American view of hostility to intolerance is why we have a 1,000 religions in America and no other country does.

Look carefully at both of these photos and tell me I am not right.

Don't take people out of the Church

On several occasions, when I was younger, I spent time talking to Roman Catholics about their religion and how it didn't fit into the contemporary world.  Most often they had already reached some personal accommodation that resolved the specific issues that least fit the modern world such as Ex Cathedra pronouncements and the ban on birth control.

I've been in touch with several of these friends over the years and I am slowly beginning to regret the time I took to disturb their earlier religious equilibrium.  Why?  Because they all substituted Lefty Fundamentalism for the Catholic Church.  The ideology of politics, hate big business, support income re-distribution and expand government became their new catechism.

They are very much like Jews who are in the Reform movement and the weak-Conservative synagogue goers, Lefty ideology becomes a substitute for religion.

Integrate gays into the military

I am sympathetic to the original military ruling 'don't ask don't tell.'  The military needed time to deal with the issue of red neck soldiers who would have been uncomfortable with the idea of gays in their barracks and showers.

That original concern is no longer relevant.  It is time, it is beyond time, to integrate open gays into the military. 

It is simple to do.  Announce the date of the change, six to ten months off, then designate the units where the first integration will occur.  This will give gays time to get into the appropriate units and let red neck and other anti-gay soldiers transfer to other units.

It is time to do it.  No excuses remain.

Sit down in front of a computer

Sitting down in front of a keyboard and a monitor is indeed a great accomplishment.

While it may be sissy and it may be bad for our health, the success in getting over 100 million Americans and many times more non-Americans to sit in front of a computer for more than 40 hours a week is an extraordinary achievement.

Less than sixty years ago, most workers worked standing up and they used their bodies to do much of their work (women in the home included). Slightly more than a century ago, a large proportion of the work force worked outdoors, many in farming and related food production.

In roughly a century, commerce has changed the way we physically work and increased our productivity to the point where one worker today produces what it took seven workers to produce 100 years ago. Seven times as much.  I'm glad the boring school system puts such a high priority on students sitting still in class with their mouths shut.

Still, the growth in productivity per capita would have been much greater if it had not been restrained by a terrible American banking system, unbelievable political ignorance, more than half a century with little foreign competition, Eurocentric immigration laws and an hereditary upper class with too much power.

Together we changed the SF skyline

A tale of beauty and the beast. 

In the early 1960s I was elected president of the San Francisco Young Republicans, a 4,000 member organization held together by the desire of young newly arrived single San Francisco women to meet men and vice versa.  Elected with me was a secretary, whom I didn't know, who turned out to be a beauty.  She was charming, sweet and truly innocent.  Something I had never encountered in a 22 year old beauty.  The reason turned out to be, that she had always previously been fat. After high school and the debutant ball of that era, she started seeing a shrink to lose weight.  It worked. 

She fell in love with the shrink and they had an affair.  When her parents found out they drove the shrink out of town and my secretary was left to mope in love-sick pain.  She lost a lot of weight and emerged as the swan.

We both ended up at the Bank of America.  Me starting the marketing research department, she as a secretary in the legal department.  At the time, the Bank was trying to buy property in the heart of San Francisco for a new headquarters.  I knew about it and knew about the completely unwilling owner of the main block the bank wanted.  The owner was an old miser named Luigi.  My gossip sources told me that he was also a lecher.  I went to an Executive VP in charge of the new building and suggested he send my Young Republican secretary to take notes at the meetings with Luigi.  The EVP later put me on the building committee in return for my brilliant suggestion.  The brand new interest in selling his land, on the part of Luigi, led to a final agreement (based not on a sale of land but a 99 year lease). 

The Bank of America building was and still is a major landmark in San Francisco.  My secretary married an English count within a year.

Consumer fraud: Lowes

I should have known that Lowes (the national hardware store who's stock is listed as LOW) had an odor of corruption.  Lowes is moving into San Francisco after buying the Home Depot site which took Home Depot ten years and millions of dollars in bribes to  acquire.  Lowes bought the site and rights to develop and has started construction in less than a year because they understand San Francisco bribery.

I'm glad they are coming to San Francisco but I will be extra careful when I shop there.  Here is what I found at their South San Francisco store.

The photo is an enlargement of a price sign on door hinges.  The sign is 2" by 1.2".  The lettering on the statement about buying 30 hinges to get the lower price is exactly 7 point type.

If you have 20/20 vision, as I do, 7 point type is readable from roughly one foot away. I thought this product was $2.19 each.  Of course it wasn't, as I learned at the check-out stand.

Hey, you folks at Lowes.  This is consumer fraud.  Lowes is a fraudulent company.  If you work for Lowes you work for a bunch of crooks.  I would guess their financial statement has plenty of fraud in it.

As an expert witness on business ethics I have testified on the subject of type size and fraud.  I once had to testify that Pacific Telephone was offering a fraudulent business answering service. The mailed promotion for the answering service said at the bottom of a letter to the new subscriber, in 9 point type, that all calls to pick up answered messages cost money. Survey data showed that virtually no business person (a notoriously careful group) ever read this 9 point fine print.  PacBell had scammed over $130 million from this 9 point fraud.

Gay men and kaffiyahs

This is the photo of a guy who was sitting in the Castro District outside a Subway sandwich shop.  He has on a Palestinian kaffiyah and some sort of Buddhist beads.  I got permission to take his photo.  I think he was stoned. Really stoned.

What is wrong with this picture? Buddhist beads are generally a sign of a pacifist.  A Palestinian kaffiyah is a sign of support for terrorism.  Combined peace and death and in the gay Castro District.

The gay Castro District adds an additional overtone.  The kaffiyah, as worn by all Arabs, is a sign of gay-hate.  All Arab populations stone gay men to death, if they are public.

Some day the gay population will figure this out and will start thinking about the tens of millions of gay men in Arab countries who can be stone to death if their gayness is discovered. Right now the issue is not on the gay-dar screen.  Many gay men are even extremists supporting the Palestinian cause in complete ignorance of what Palestinians do to gay men.

I didn't mention gay women because Arabs don't believe lesbians exist.

Alex Haley: fraud

When I read Haley's Roots book in 1976 I was impressed with the clear writing style but paid very little attention to the details.  I was not paying attention to political correctness at the time, I worked for a black church and enjoyed a leadership role in the hippy movement.

What now gives me some authority on the subject is that in 1963 while in graduate school of economics at U.C. Berkeley I was hired to do a comprehensive reading of all books and texts on sub-Saharan Africa written before 1850.  There were only 160 and I read 140 in English, French and German (using cognates in economics is not hard).  I was creating a map of all trade and commerce across Africa.  My research for a professor at U. Wisconsin became the seminal work on African economic history that everyone else uses.

(Aside: When I gave a talk on my findings in 1965 at the Commonwealth Club and said that West Africa was more technologically advanced in 1800 than all of Europe, I was laughed at.)

Now back to Haley and Roots. What I knew at the time when I read the book was that all slave trade in West Africa in the 1700's was conducted as part of existing black African slavery.  The Africans sold their fellow African slaves to the few Portuguese, Spanish and English shippers with trading posts on the coast.  Haley, never mentions this for two reasons:

He was being PC and trying to suggest that white traders were enslaving Africans.  And because he made up most of the book... it was an act of plagiarism from a book of fiction by Harold Courlander. Haley lost a plagerism trial and was forced to pay more than a-half million dollars.

Haley was a complete fraud.  It doesn't matter to me because he had no influence on me.  But anyone who thinks the pervasive and successful PBS series on Roots was non-fiction needs a head correction.

What's wrong with capitalism?

The problem is the word. Just as we rarely talk about pants, we usually talk about a pair of pants, capitalism is only one-third of a word.  It is a three legged chair that is missing two legs.

Capitalism exists only as part of a package of Socialism and Communism.  Three isms developed by people who hated the incipient industrial commerce that they saw in 1820.

All three isms have commerce functioning in their midst, but the focus of the isms (Capitalism, Socialism and Communism) is about the amount of commerce that is owned and controlled by government.

Who actually cares how much of commerce government owns? 

The only issue is the extent to which commerce is thwarted.  In all Communist nations commerce was and is so severely thwarted that nearly all the people are hungry and most of the people are starving.  Such nations have little to export and no money to buy the abundant food that commerce produces everywhere else. 

The same is true for Socialist countries.  Commerce is thwarted to a lesser extent than under Communism, often by labor unions, and government ownership of vital services. Eventually the Socialist governments and their people figure out that Socialism restricts the ability of a nation to be fully productive, for citizens to be fully human and the Socialism is reduced as rapidly as possible.  Think Sweden, China, Israel and East Europe.

The appropriate word when one is talking about the subject of capitalism is commerce.  Commerce is the driving force of humanity.  It is encouraged or thwarted by government policies.  The degree of growth or restraint is a matter of interest to those few who understand commerce. The rest can argue ideology.

Nuclear power debate is irrelevant

Two environmental authorities are in a debate.  Stewart Brand the genius of the Whole Earth Catalog and most of the environmental world (and a friend of mine) argues that nuclear power is vital to constraining global warming. It doesn't emit CO2 and is safe.  Amory Lovins a leading technical expert on automobiles, power and energy argues that nuclear power is inherently too expensive compared to other environmentally friendly modes including energy conservation.

I'm happy to say I disagree with them both.  Their arguments are irrelevant. We have now entered the era of abundant long term really cheap energy, natural gas.  There is no need to consider any other form of energy.

Not much more to say. Our life is changed in many ways by the natural gas findings.  I have friends who say the exploitation and integration of natural gas into our world is a long way off...5 to 10 years. One reason is that the oil companies own much of the natural gas world.

I say it is much more likely that natural gas will inundate us much like a tsunami.  The reason is simple: the driving goal of commerce, the sine qua non, is the reduction of costs.  Natural gas reduces costs radically so it will be incorporated everywhere regardless of the power of oil companies, Luddite environmentalists or the neanderthal political classes.

I hand counted

I've searched for several years for the answer to the question 'What percent of San Francisco property owners are taxed under Proposition 13?' I could never find it online or from talking to people in City Hall.

Proposition 13 was passed by Californians in 1978 and it kept any existing (at the time of its passage) property taxes from rising by more than 2% per year.   That now means two adjacent homes worth the same on the market can be taxed at $600 for one unsold since 1978 while the other, sold more recently, pays $8000 a year in property tax.

What is the answer?  I went down to City Hall with a piece of paper, a table of random numbers and counted a sample of tax bills. Answer 25%, one out of four, property owners are still paying taxes on their assessed valuations in 1978.

If you wanted the answer, you now have it and 'you are welcome'. 

Roughly 50,000 householders benefit from this tax break and 600,000 residents don't. ( I consider families and a few tenants in the 50,000).

Are the Palestinians worse than the Nazis?

Main differences between the Nazis and the Palestinians:

In March of 1933 the Nazi's only got 44% of the vote for the Reichstag but they never held another election. Unlike the Nazis, the West Bank Palestinians appear to be ready to hold an election in the next few months. The third in 15 years. Like the Nazis the Gaza Palestinians have declared their opposition to elections... ever.

The Nazi's never directed their radio programs at children, but they did recruit teenagers as Brown-shirt Jew haters.  The Palestinians use their TV programs directed at young children to promote Jew hatred. The Palestinians don't recruit teenagers to march in parades, they recruit teen-agers as suicide bombers.

The Nazis took many mentally retarded youth and killed them.  The Palestinians recruit them as suicide bombers.

The Nazis decried homosexuals and killed many of them.  The Palestinians decry homosexuality and kill anyone found to be homosexual.  However, most Palestinian men have sex with other men and prefer sex with other men. (My reference is from an Arab in an Arab city.).  When they wish to be open about their male-male sexuality they simply move to Israel where they are free and safe.

The Nazis never fired rockets at neighboring nations and never sent suicide bombers to attack neighboring civilian populations. The Palestinians do this all the time.  They even go into Israel and steal cars.

The Nazis never used women as warriors, certainly not as suicide bombers. The Palestinians do.  Though most of the Palestinian female suicide bombers have been sent as suicide bombers as an alternative to honor killings by their own family.

Nearly all the former Nazi allies in the Middle-East have supported the Palestinians and continue to do so.

Arsenio Hall was poisoned

This is what I wrote on Hall's Wikipedia page: "His role as host to anti-white racist Louis Farrakhan severely disturbed his audience and ended his TV career."  His career on TV was from 1989 to 1994.

Arsenio Hall is a black comedian who had a popular late night TV show.  There was no reason the show should have died except that Hall self administered some poison.  He invited Louis Farrakhan to appear on his show and treated him with warmth and humor.  I can understand Hall's behavior.  He is black and he has extensive roots in the black community.  The black community has long been tolerant of Farrakhan, believing him to be 'just a colorful charismatic preacher' of which there are many in the black church. Three years later Farrakhan was the leader of the Million Man March, which got over 400,000 black men to Washington D.C.

The problem for Hall was and still is that the vast white community of America thinks Louis Farrakhan hates whites, is a threat to white safety and is mentally deranged.  Hall's treating him as a rational fellow human being on his TV show created cognitive dissonance in Hall's audience.

The mental gymnastics of cognitive dissonance would act in the following way: (1) 'Farrakhan is a dangerous deranged lunatic (2) Hall is unable to see who Farrakhan is....therefore (3) Hall probably has many elements of a dangerous deranged lunatic himself.'

Goodbye Arsenio.  Did you ever learn your lesson?  It took Barack Obama awhile to learn the same lesson about his black preacher, but did he really learn?

Natural gas ... from where?

I have given much thought to the abundance of energy we shall enjoy in this whole coming century. The vast reserves of natural gas shall be the equivalent of free energy. Free energy creates free water for the parts of the world where this may have become a problem.  The same is true for CO2 (if it is important) because free energy can easily deal with sequestration and breaking or joining the CO2 molecule to other molecules.  It should be the end of the clean and green field. The dead end.

Free energy will put the Arab-Muslim world at a great disadvantage.  The Arab-Muslim world live in the centuries before the Enlightenment, before the harnessing of commerce and technology.  They are currently irrelevant to this real world, despite their oil riches; they contribute nothing novel, technological, interesting or vital. Think about Islamic investment: a farcical, juvenile, self-deceptive absurdity. The Arabs-Muslims probably will be insignificant in this century of free energy, where commerce and technology will become even more important.

There is something of comparable interest.  Natural gas may not just be abundant, it may be inexhaustible. That is a thesis of Thomas Gold and other abiogenic theorists. 

It should not be surprising that humans have considered the possibility that natural gas is an inexhaustible out-gassing from deep in the earth and has nothing to do with buried organics eaten by bacteria.  Jupiter our biggest planet is entirely frozen natural gas and so are all the planets beyond Jupiter.

Anyway, this is just to let you know.  Thomas  Gold got Swedish researchers to look into his hypothesis but then behaved in such an unscientific way (concealing data) that he spoiled the research field for the time being.

Is saving land good?

When is enough enough?

If you look at the entire United States you'll find that more than one-third of all land is owned by the State or Federal government. It does not include highways.  Most of that is park land and wilderness.  There are some states that are nearly all owned by the combined state and federal government like Alaska at 90%, Nevada 81% and Utah at 70%.  Most of Idaho, Wyoming and Arizona are public land.

Even California is 42% public land and that doesn't include private land set aside in land trusts.

Personally, I think that nearly all the beautiful and important biological land was public land a long time ago.  Adding more public land is the prerogative of rich self-serving people who are the prime users of public land, especially inaccessible public land.

I see no justification for more public land.  I see plenty of justification for reducing the amount of public land, and increasing the usage of public land for commercial purposes.

If hunters, hikers and the rest of the outdoors loving population (myself included) can't find enough places to go in the giant sprawling system we have already...they are too lazy.

Do we need more land for the lazy among us?

Meaning from Tuesday's vote

In many ways all elections that are local are local elections.  What I see in the three state voting of  NJ and VA does not contradict that truism.

What I see is the legacy of the 1980 Carter-Reagan presidential election, when a publicly conservative  Reagan overwhelmingly defeated a publicly Liberal incumbent.  That election moved a large proportion of Democrats, union members, blue collar workers and Catholics, into the Independent category where they have stayed ever since.  The Independent voters, who are about equal in number to either Republicans or Democrats, are generally less interested in elections than major party members....Independents are decidedly conservative in fiscal and moral matters.

The Independents have been voting predominantly Republican since 1980 with two exceptional occasions.  One was the 1992 Affair Perot, which allowed the minority Clinton party to win and the other was the 2008 where Independents responded to the July-October financial meltdown and voted against John McCain.

Independents voted against the incumbents in 2008 out of distress. A year later we may have returned to the norm of conservatism for Independents. Independents voted against Obama who actively made the NJ and VA gubernatorial campaigns about himself. Independents are doing what they did in 2008, voting against the status quo.

Sarah

The Wall Street Journal has pointed out that the Tea-Party explosion of grass roots anti-tax activism presents a problem for the Republican Party because it threatens to split elections three ways in the same mode as Ross Perot's movement did in 1992, giving minority Democrats a chance to win.

My point, in looking at the situation on a national level is to suggest that times are different today. Sarah Palin will have an influence on this group and could well become an acceptable leader for them.  Sarah Palin could unify this great traditional American grassroots outpouring of tax-government antagonism and lead it into mainstream politics.  She has the charisma, the cajones and the political intelligence to do it.

The thought that Lefty and mainstream hatred of Palin will be a barrier to her moving toward the center and appealing to independent voters fails to remember that the independent voters of America are uniquely galvanized by mistreatment from the mainstream media.  The more vituperous the mainstream media, the easier it will be for Palin to consolidate Tea-Party and independent polities.

To understand this dynamic, merely recall the 2004 election where George W. Bush was excoriated every day for two years by the mainstream media and carried the country and Congress by a significant majority.

Power of ideas

For nearly a decade I produced a public radio program called Social Thought.  Social Thought is about how institutions are built around ideas, concepts and metaphors.

It recently crossed my mind that there is an example of one particular simple and clear idea that radically changed the world in ways we have never conceived.

The idea is germ theory.  There is no clear point of origin of germ theory it is so simple it can not be ascribed to anyone at any one point. 

However germ theory could only become popular after the development and widespread use of the microscope and the Enlightenment value of experimentation.  The idea that invisible organisms were responsible for many illnesses slowly gained currency in educated circles before the middle of the 1800s.  From that point on scientists and medical practitioners increasingly found evidence to support germ theory.

The first point where I can find a drop in infant mortality is in the suburbs of Boston in the late 1840s.  It was clearly due to improved sanitation.  The overall death rate proceeded to drop rapidly as nearby towns improved their sanitation. 

The spread of these two linked conditions, improved sanitation and increased survival rates expanded until it covered the planet. (1850: 1.2 billion, today:6.8 billion)

The consequence of improved sanitation was the decline of infant mortality, the decline in death from child birth and the decline in all other forms of early death.  All of which combined to dramatically increase global population.  A simple idea, that was an accurate description of the world around us, created a population explosion, that is over now.

Germ theory create global population explosion.