Pro Commerce

The real party of war mongers

As a pro commerce advocate I am infuriated by yesterday's anti-Chinese steel tariff increase; the second act of war against China in three months by the Obama administration.

Only a Democratic administration backed by a Democratic Congress would start and continue a trade war against China.  George Bush and the Republican Party were not whores subservient to labor unions, but the Democratic Party is. We and our children and grandchildren will suffer from this tragedy of political corruption.

What did the Democrats and Obama do and why is it so absurd?

The Obama administration is placing the second round of tariffs on China.  The first was tires.  The second is on steel worth $2.7 billion.  Who gets hurt?  Every user of steel products and by-products related to steel will see prices increase... bridges, cars, refrigerators, stoves, etc.  When the Chinese respond as they have in the past, the workers in all the export industries that the Chinese target will be hurt and many will lose their jobs.  The response to the tire trade war was to punish the nylon industry.

Why is this absurd?  The charge against Chinese steel is dumping.  The idea of dumping is what is absurd.  Dumping is defined as selling a product below its cost. No economist has ever found an entire industry anywhere in the world that sold products below the cost of production. It can't be done, a few producers would break ranks.

Considering that China's top ten steel companies produce only 33% of Chinese steel it is inconceivable that dozens and dozens of other Chinese companies could collude to sell steel below cost.  America has much more of a monopoly potential.  Two American steel companies produce 50% of American steel. The American charge of Chinese dumping is absurd, malicious and preposterous.

China has no reason to dump steel.  China's steel sales in the U.S. have been growing at a very high rate from 4% of the American steel market seven years ago to 19% today. Without dumping. The steel sales have been growing because the steel is cheaper, better and comes in the right product mixes (wire, sheet, beams etc..).

This is madness, Democratic Party madness. We are presently governed by malicious, blind, union-ass-kissing, upside-down turtles.

Not as ignorant as the rest of western journalists

I've said before and I'll say it again: China has a long perspective on international relations.  China is now thinking 40 years into the future and the following blog makes clear, she can think back 170 years too.

I don't want my readers to be as ignorant as the entire American mass media and our so-called-professional journalists.  I assume nearly all my readers know the history of the Opium Wars. 

Twice in the early and mid-1800s Great Britain went to war with China for a total of about seven years to force China to allow British traders to sell opium in China.  Britain force China at gun point to allow Brits to sell opium in China.  China had a ban on opium then and now.

Now, when England is particularly incensed about Akmal Shaikh (who has an obvious British name like Thomas Bingham, Harry Hamilton and James Edington) being executed for drug selling in China, China responds with a rather furious threat to Britain based on its "bitter memory of history."

I'm proud of the Chinese in this case and ashamed of the Brits, the vast American mass media and the global Amnesty fruitcakes. China remembers and arrogant jew-hating Britain has never thought of asking for forgiveness.

Time to go from Yahoo to Google in filing

When Yahoo began it was a search engine based on classifications.  You went to a sub category: Business, marketing, plan and found a list of search returns under the last sub-category.

That is still the way most people maintain their computer files.  The main problem with the category storage approach is that you can forget your category structure pretty quickly and you usually end up with a gigantic "miscellaneous" category because category creation is time consuming and difficult.

The alternative, which I started using inadvertently is just collect the incoming material and find what I'm looking for with a desktop Google search. 

I still put photos in one file, because it is easier to look through Picasa at the image than to tag it.

The Iranian revolt just got underway

The Middle-East reporter I respect most, Michael Totten, has claimed that the Iranian revolt against theocratic rule has just passed a point of no return. 

The shooting of unarmed protesters during the holiday of Ashura is a blow that is unacceptable to conservative Shia.  Ashura marks the sacred date in 680 when the caliph Yazid killed the grandson of Mohammad in the Battle of Karbala that forever separated the Shia from the Sunni.

To quote a protester: “killing Muslims on Ashura is like crucifying Christians on Christmas.” Or maybe like Arabs starting a war on the holiest of holy days, Yom Kippur.

What is going on?

This is an unexpected turn of events.  Bibi (Netanyahu) went to Cairo and a photo was taken with Mubarak a week ago.

The same week Egypt banned more than a thousand foreign jew haters from traveling to Gaza.

The whole picture suggests a long term human caused warming between Egypt and Israel after a thirty year hockey stick of cold relations.

The real history of the Civil War

We didn't celebrate the end of the Civil War in 1964 and we probably won't celebrate the 150th anniversary in 2014 because the South won the politics of the post war Era.  The South still controls the Northern view of the Civil War history and will not let the North celebrate its well earned victory (from an earlier blog).

The following are artifacts of history that we have all been taught about the Civil War based entirely on Confederate ideology.

1. The war was not about freeing the slaves it was about states rights and the right to secede.

2. The North won because it was the richest region.

3.  The South had the bravest troops and the greatest generals.

4.  General Sherman's march to Atlanta was pure cruelty and intentional human slaughter.

5.  The carpetbaggers were sent south to permanently suppress the South.


The only reason any of this is taught is because the South has dominated our view of history.  The South has created a victory of historic ideas all of which are false.

1. Here is "the song John Brown that Julia Ward Howe heard in 1861 in Washington D.C. from marching soldiers."  The Northern soldiers were preparing to fight to free the slaves.  The original Congressional battle that led Lincoln to run for the Senate dealt with admission of California as a state free of slavery. Slavery was the only issue, everything else was secondary.

2. The South was much richer at the beginning of the War with vast agricultural exports to Europe.  The War created the industrial North, with the required extensive railroad building and the necessary expansion of manufacturing.

3. The Southern Generals were continually at each others throats, rarely cooperated and took high risk strategies that all too often failed.  Bravery and good strategy belonged to the Northern generals (except for McClellan's who was in many ways a turncoat).

4. General Sherman is excoriated by the south because he freed the slaves as he went south.  He burned crops to force the South to surrender; he moved ahead of the rail lines he was building which supplied his troops and defecting Southerners with food.

5. The North gave the South the most favorable possible surrender conditions, so favorable that the Northern General, Grant, was popular in the south when he was elected president. The North sent agents south with money and skill to build public schools and libraries for blacks and whites. The whites didn't like the school and library building program for former slaves and invented the derogatory term carpetbagger.

Jimmy Carter was talking to God

I realize now that when Jimmy Carter sent his al het (request for forgiveness) to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency (the Jewish version of the Associated Press) Jimmy was trying to speak to God. 

Jimmy could have tried to talk to a real Jewish or Israeli audience but he wanted to speak directly to God.

Jimmy most likely has been reading the first five books of the bible (Torah) and the prophets. 

Two things are clear, absolutely clear on every page, (1) the Christian God is the same as the Jewish God, Jesus was, after all Jewish... and (2) the Jewish God says it in hundreds of biblical statements that 'the enemy of Israel is the enemy of GOD'.

I think Jimmy just got scared about his future eternity in Christian Hell. I hope he mentions this next time he sees Bishop Tutu.

Only business creates jobs

Something that warms the heart of a pro commerce advocate is to hear or read the phrase "Only business creates jobs".  I hear and see that phrase regularly these days from members of both political parties, journalists, editorialists, bloggers and human beings.

Google that exact phrase and get 468 hits.

I never heard it before in my life.  It is a true statement. The pervasiveness of this truth in our public conscious is a great step forward in human understanding. 

What is a zoo?

I know the answer because of regular revolutions.  I went to the zoo in Bamako which is the capital of Mali in West Africa. 

In the 1980s there was a regular monthly coup d'etat in Mali because the military barracks were only three blocks from the capitol.  The top ranking officer only needed to walk his troops a few blocks to take over the country.

Everything in the country that was of value was stolen and everything the government ran was left in ruins.

Can you guess what animals were left in the zoo.  No cage gates were left closed.

Answer: a  few chimps, one camel and a lioness. 

Why?

All the other animals had escaped, been eaten by the local population or eaten by other zoo animals.

One man, a vendor was in the zoo selling bags of peanuts during the day.  Visitors bought the peanuts and fed them to the chimps who made faces and noises to entertain the kids. Kids also liked to feed the camel who could entertain with the most monstrous belch.  At night the chimps and camel found other food near the zoo.

The lioness found her cage to be a great safe haven to sleep in.  The rest of the time she roamed the neighborhood finding animals to eat.

What is a zoo? A zoos is an expensive European creation intended for educational purposes. That is obvious when the Europeans are gone and the government can barely pay for regular schools.

Is science dead?

I have a good friend who has been a bio-tech scientist all his life.  It was only courtesy that kept me from asking whether he was going to make-up some new data to get new grants.

The East Anglia-Hadley CRU debacle has appeared to throw a pall over science.

I see two realities: first the scientific community has never really made any effort to clean up all the messes that it creates.  Simple proof: I contribute to nearly all the research in America with my Federal income tax, my Federal taxes extracted from the companies and banks I do business with yet I can't read any scientific finding in any published journals without paying $25 for each article.  Each article that was generated with tax dollars costs me big bucks to read.  If that doesn't show that the entire scientific community is self-centered, hypocritical and morally incompetent then what is the evidence to the contrary.

Moreover, probably 90% of the research I pay Federal tax dollars to support are complete failures.  Much of it would be useful if it were reported but failures are never published in science. Most research is not published because it might embarrass the ego maniacal researchers.  I repeat: the entire scientific community is self-centered, hypocritical and morally incompetent.

Second reality: even when the entire scientific community claims to be unified in forecasting a global disaster for more than twenty years... the political world has totally ignored the consensus scientific community.  Copenhagen was a complete rejection of the dire warnings of the scientific community. 

Science is not dead, but it is so weak and pathetic it is barely surviving in a wheel chair with an oxygen tank.

(Science and technology are not the same check this earlier blog and this one too.)

Have a homeless person over for Christmas

To me a homeless person is a vestige of the time before industrial commerce.  The homeless person is a nearly perfect living manifestation of a member of the hereditary upper class in most of Europe 200 years ago before we were redeemed by commerce.  Why?

* A homeless person smells from their own urine and from wearing clothes for days or weeks without a shower. In 1809 Europe there were no baths.  Everyone smelled awful including Royalty.  You can read about the Japanese encounter with Europeans.  The Japanese, who bathed every day, would not let any European (Europeans smelled terribly) enter any building. All meetings were outside.  In the regions near Europe, only the Finns, Hungarians and Turks bathed regularly.

* A homeless person smells from continuously drinking sweet alcohol.  The 1809 European ritually drank five times a day, often rum or sweet port.  this kept the pain of tooth aches, deformed feet and legs, lice, tape worms, vestiges of childhood disease and countless infections from being too debilitating.

* A homeless person eats food regularly and doesn't work.  Only the hereditary upper class in 1809 Europe ate regularly and did little or no work, everyone else lived near starvation and in periodic famine conditions.

* The homeless person generally wears cotton underclothes and some cotton pants.  Only the hereditary Upper-class in 1809 Europe wore any cotton, which was very expensive.  Everyone else wore wool, felt and leather and it was pretty raggedy.

On this day, reflecting on the homeless person we should realize that commerce, not government, not the military, not religion and certainly not academia brought us bathing in hot water, sewers, fresh water, cheap cotton and dozens of other bright warm fabrics, an abundant supply of food, medical care and medical technology, wealth to use for leisure time and clean neat clothes. It was commerce.

Today, we should all give thanks for commerce and the world it has brought us and brought to the billions of other people who don't live the way Jesus and his family did.

Christmas spirit

Jimmy Carter who has been an open and active Jew hater for more than 30 years has, just last week, asked for forgiveness from the Jewish community.  I hope this offer is genuine and in the spirit of Christmas. 

Like many Jew haters before him, he has made a partial statement of apology.  The real statement will come when he says, without qualification, that 'Israel has a right to exist in peace as a Jewish homeland'.

Here is wishing Jimmy a merry and genuine Christmas.

Two policy suggestions

I occasionally try to think about policy solutions to social problems.  Two problems seem to cry out for new policy thinking.  My first principle of policy making is that people do not obey laws they don't understand.  Drivers go 45 mph on the Golden Gate bridge because they can see traffic going in opposite directions 3 feet apart. They can see that it is dangerous.  Drivers ignore similar speed limits on the Bay bridge with its one way traffic and no visible danger.

One policy idea concerns people talking on the phone while driving.  In California, making the act of holding a phone illegal has had no effect. Even the governor's wife ignores it.

The law doesn't relate to the same problem which occurs when people are talking on the phone with an earpiece or speaker phone. In both cases people are distracted by a phone conversation, earphones just leave the hands free, a minor improvement.

My policy suggestion is that motor vehicles need a special blue light on the roof that goes on (like a cab light) when the driver is on the phone.  Everyone around would be warned to be careful.

My second policy suggestion is that all service dogs that are brought into stores with food and perishables and into offices have on a bright red jacket with the word "service dog" printed on jacket and that the jacket display the reason for issuing a service dog permit: neurotic person, psychotic, bi-polar, depression, lonely person etc.  Then the public would understand the need for the dog and in some occasions be able to help.

Airport car rental fees

On a recent trip to Seattle I found that the airport car rental agency  had tacked on over $100 related to the cost of using a rental agency within a mile of the airport.  If you are in Seattle, take the new rail line and rent your car downtown to save $100.

If you are renting an airport car in San Francisco walk or get a ride to the car rental office on the airport grounds and make sure they know you didn't take the air-rail.  Save $18.

Salt Lake City was another place for saving $100 by using a downtown car rental office, but I had a family member drive me there.

Punish me, please

When I was an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I got a terrible headache on a Saturday night.  Aspirin wouldn't do any good so I went the the UC emergency ward to get something stronger. 

To my surprise at the time, I was treated as a lunatic, a 17 year old coming into an emergency ward asking for something stronger than aspirin.  The Southside of Chicago was plenty dangerous at the time in the late 1950s.  There were 'Negroes' at 2AM (Sunday by then) with knife and bullet wounds.

I was given nothing and told to come back on Tuesday morning and see a shrink.  I did.

That is how I met Carl Rogers, one of the great American psychologists -- developer of of non-directive therapy and one of the founders of humanistic psychology.  During our 50 minutes we had a wonderful discussion and became friends.  I saw him one other time socially and then in the early 1980s when he was on a visit to Stockholm and we were co-panelists. Wonderful man and several great conversations.

The UC Emergency ward probably thought they were punishing me by sending me to a shrink.  Do it again, anytime folks.

Human morals and animals

I have had trouble defending my abstract argument from an earlier blog that expanding non-human rights diminishes our human moral system. For most people to understand complex logic it is usually necessary to have some good examples.

* A mother walks into a doctors office with her young daughter.  There is already a woman in the office with a dog on her lap.  The new woman explains that her daughter is allergic to dogs.  The other woman says she was there first.  Stand-off.  We have given the possession of a dog greater rights than the health or well being of a child.  Neither the doctor nor a policeman would be certain about resolving this confrontation.  Our moral system has already been degraded.

* Three deciding members of the Utah State Legislature Budget committee face one fiscal 2010-budget line item of $2 million for herding and sheltering 50 wild horses on public land during the winter.  There is another $2 million line item for the continued operation of a maternity ward at a poverty clinic for Latino women in West Jordan, Utah.  Just having those two line items to choose from has degraded our moral system.

* A shopper at a Whole Foods grocery sees a dog quickly stand-up snatch a slice of cooked pork roast from the warming table and eat it.  The shopper complains to the security person who approaches the owner of the dog (neither the security person nor the dog owner saw the dog eat the slice of pork) and tries to suggest the dog owner take the dog outside.  The dog owner says 'no' she has papers to prove the dog is a 'service dog'.  How can this be resolved.  It is already a degradation of our moral and legal system since there are California laws on the books favoring both the complaining shopper and the owner of the service dog.

* At the present time, in most of America, a person bitten by a dog has to endure the pain of the bite, the distress of a dog attack, the pain of rabies shots, the cost of rabies shots... and the owner of the offending dog may pay no penalty or a small $35 penalty.

Allowing non-humans into our human moral system degrades our human moral system.

Japanese graphics

Most of my readers know two things: I go to Tokyo every year for several months.  The Japanese graphic mind has no equals in the world...  which is why Japan is likely to still be the second largest economy 50 years from now (after the U.S.).

The two are connected.  I am excited every year by what I see in Tokyo.

Here are three short videos, each about 3 minutes that show the power of the Japanese creative mind..

Fixing the finance system

Before we can understand that the finance system needs to be isolated from the commercial system, if we want economic stability, we need to understand finance.

What is finance?  Finance is the monetization of anything and everything. 

I promise, in writing, to pay you $100 in three months.  You can monetize that written promise.  You can sell it for anything, maybe $90 if there are people who know I am a trustworthy borrower.  You, the owner of my promissory note, can write three promises based on my promise and sell each for $31 if the buyer's assume you are more reliable than I am.  You can sell insurance to guarantee my note for another $1. Got it?  My promise, in writing, has been monetized.  It is now several pieces of financial product and can be sold to other people.

What can you monetize?  Draw a rectangle, put numbers on it, draw a pattern and make part black and part red.  Generate random numbers and sell the outcome of the number plus the design of the board.  Sound ridiculous?  It's called roulette. Roulette is the monetization of a specially designed rectangle and a random number generator (and some booze).

You can sell the belly of 1,000 pigs for delivery in Feb.  You can buy them in the real world on your computer from a market in Chicago. People have sold Florida swamp land, plots of land 50 feet under water in San Francisco Bay and even the chance to spend a few minutes looking at a Chinese Panda. You can buy or sell sequestered farts from cows (I have sold these myself), buy or sell billions of thermal units of methane for delivery on March 4th and you can even buy or sell 15 minutes of sex (the oldest known monetization).

Anything can be monetized, and that monetization can itself be monetized, insured and the insurance policy can be monetized and the chance that the insurance policy will be paid out can be monetized.  Land on the moon, Mars, a seat on a satellite ride.... all can be monetized.

Because finance is a world of promises, hopes, guesses, probabilities it will always be volatile.

The volatile finance system should be isolated from the commercial system.  The simplest way to do that is to have two large banks subject to government rules that make sure the banks can not call-in a loan, or refuse to extend a loan.  Simple.  Businesses that get loans will be able to keep the loan as long as the loan is secure (as long as the underlying asset doesn't decline).  With secure business loans in place financial volatility won't spread to the commercial world. 

Right now, when a bank makes a financial mistake in a Swaziland investment, a perfectly healthy businesses in Minneapolis has their solidly secured loan called-in. People are laid off and new products are not produced. The volatile finance system infects the stable commercial system.

From Japan

If you want to see the most imaginative window display you can ever imagine, try this site that shows two store windows in Tokyo at the Hermes store. A little over one minute.

Geometric change on Internet

I've watched several products 'go geometric' meaning consumers quickly accepted and bought them.  Geometric is unlike automobiles, telephones, radio and consumer bank accounts which took decades to penetrate the market.  Geometric is unlike TV which took more than a decade.

One of the first geometric products to reach broad acceptance, happened in the 1970s.  It was the global credit card (Visa and my own Mastercard).  Another was the Sony Walkman and still another was electronic games such as Pong and its successors.  Most of these took roughly five years to penetrate the market.

Today, with the Internet, geometric has reached a new level.  Amazon shopping, Google searching and Craigslist listing reached major penetration in under five years.

The world is not moving faster. Change is not inherently more rapid.  This rapid penetration has little or nothing to do with the Internet itself or better marketing, in my opinion: It has to do with more (1) sophisticated customers combined with (2) a well developed complex market.

Let me explain.  Craigslist had a great advantage because it was free for most uses, and 19th Century newspaper management refused to compete with Craigslist.  But the real marketing advantage that Craigslist had and has is the ability to sort ads by neighborhood, small neighborhoods in most cases... which matters to people who want property, apartment rentals or to pick-up merchandise quickly.  Craigslist can also be sorted by price and many elements more effectively than any print listing.  I call that the result of sophisticated customers and a well developed market (with payment systems already in place).

Amazon was and is the beneficiary of rapid and trusted home delivery services (FedEx, UPS etc) and a reliable payment system (credit cards, PayPal etc). Sophisticated customers had learned to order and trust retailers via catalog sales and were ready for Amazon. The developed market provided delivery and payments systems.

Google took off because the front page had no advertising.  A sophisticated market immediately invested Google with more trust than banner ad search engines.  Google also benefited from a developed market; Google arrived at the same time that a vast number of newspapers moved online to satisfy news searches, the same time as Wikipedia became trusted and covered vast subject areas and importantly Google joined the search world with reliable mapping and better word combination algorithms that had been weak (Boolean) before Google's arrival.

What happened to create the crime wave?

One of the truly most baffling issues for thinkers and researchers is what created the great American crime wave that began in the mid-1960s and exploded in the early 1970s.  It grew at astounding rates in the late 1970s and through the 1980s before starting its decline in 1991. We went from 2,000 crimes per 100,000 people in 1961 to 4,000 by 1971 and 5,900 by 1981 where it grew slowly until 1991.

So far I can think of several explanations.
 
1. The end of the top hereditary social class that was nearly complete by the early 1960's.  Could the presence and activity of our hereditary upper class have been a restraint on crime.  Could the classes' replacement by others have lead to some form of incompetence?

2. Did the vast migration of women into the work force and rise of divorce for the period from 1960 to 1980 have a direct or indirect cause of the crime explosion?

3. Did the loosening of the bonds of sexual restraint and the explosion of drug use by young people (baby boomers) contribute to the crime rate explosion?

4.  Was it the hippies and the era of social rejectionism that is the explanation?

5. Was it the vast movement of blacks from the South to urban areas that began in the mid-1950s?

6. Was it the school integration movement and the subsequent urban disruption that followed from white flight to the suburbs?

7. Was it simply the age range of the giant baby boom?

Your opinion is sought.  Write a comment.

Hopefully, future research will give us an answer to this vital question of social structure and social cohesion.

Rolodex vs phone

Like nearly everyone else in business up until the 21st Century, I had hundreds of names on a device called a Rolodex. 

Sometime after computers became common I generated lists of my most commonly called numbers and put them on folded paper to carry with me in my pocket.

What was unambiguously true for my Rolodex and my paper 'short' list was that all the names were arranged alphabetically by last name.

Big news: starting a few years back most names, especially on phones and email contact lists, have become arranged alphabetically by first name.

Good lord... who figured this out?  Its fine with me but it is truly a revolution in our behavior and I'd like to know how it happened.

The Way of science and technology

We have a wonderful example of how science really works thanks to the Cassini space craft. Cassini has photographed a region on Saturn's north pole that is a perfect hexagon...a moving hexagon formed in gas clouds.

(Be sure to look at the moving image...and thanks to David Boxenhorn.)

What this tells us is how science works.  Technology is usually the first step.  In this case it is Cassini bringing us a full image of a phenomenon never before seen in the universe. Just like Galileo's telescopic discovery of moons around Jupiter began the scientific era.

Next there will be an effusion of theories.  Most of the theories will be based on existing math about dynamic stability in multi-dimensional fluid spaces.  A few theories will fit most of the Cassini data.

Next will come more technology, another Cassini, to test some of the theories and some of the details of the theories.

Ultimately we will revel in a new scientific model of semi-rigid  dynamic gas structures and find a few more examples in the universe and on earth.

Lastly, the phenomenon will be measured so accurately that we will find a constant that applies in all similar hexagonal cases.  It may be called the Phillips constant 131.488.... (I'm joking about the name and details of the constant).

That is how science, real science, works.  Technology is really the mother of science.

Change in the liberal mantra over past 30 years.

The Liberal mantra used to be: 'Capitalism created too much change, inequality and poverty; that we need bigger government to redistribute wealth and control the 'means of production'.

I call it the Liberal Mantra and Lefty Fundamentalism others call it the Liberal Catechism and the Torah of Liberalism.  Whatever it is called its basic tenant is being replaced. The change has come over the past 30 years.

I owe my recognition of this change in Liberal Dogma to a letter in the Claremont Review from Donald T. Critchlow at St. Louis Univ.

New Liberalism is concerned with controlling our consumer behavior.  In San Francisco we call it Nanny government but it is a direct attack on the Declaration of Independence.  It is an attack on our right to the pursuit of happiness.

The New liberalism tells us what kind of light bulbs we have to use, when we have to use helmets, what weight and size our children must be before they can stop using 5-point auto harnesses, when and where we can smoke, what we can smoke, how we can talk on the phone in a car, what kinds of foods we can't eat at all (horse, whale, dolphin etc), what labels must tell us about the food that we buy and on and on.

In the San Francisco Bay Area, the pioneer region in New Liberalism, these days we are told when we can have a warm household fireplace going, how we must pre-sort our compost properly or be punished, we must bring our own bags to grocery stores or be restricted to paper bags, we can not smoke in apartment houses or inside a wide range of businesses (bars; even outside coffee houses) and no smoking in public parks or beaches.  Hundreds of stores are banned from selling cigarettes.  In my neighborhood one chain restaurant is prohibited from serving coffee (Fuzio).  We are not even allowed to build garages in our own private new homes for more than one car per house.  Much of our food consumption is in the process of being regulated from trans fats to movie popcorn.

The New Liberalism focuses on controlling our behavior.

The new world order

 It is going to happen very fast.  

Two of the groups who have created havoc in the past half century, the tribal Arabs and the theocratic Russians are about to lose their vital role in the energy world.  The tribal Arabs are being defeated by the discoveries of vast natural gas resources worldwide, and the theocratic Russians by the efforts of all their neighbors in finding ways to circumvent Russian territory in the delivery of energy.

Here is the story of China getting oil and gas directly from  Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

Why do I call the Russians theocratic?  I look at their 1,000 year old ubiquitous-character-defining Russian church, the Eastern Orthodox, that had three basic principles: hierarchy is everything, ignorance is bliss and secrecy is happiness.

The end of the Birkenstock era

The title Birkenstock Era should be perfectly descriptive of the era I'm talking about and easily understandable.  It started in 1964 with the early spread of rock music and a few drugs and the arrival of Salli Rasberry in San Francisco.  It ended last week with the triumvirate of events: the discovery of vast natural gas supplies for an abundant energy future (which happened over a year), Climategate which put an end to the latest Armageddon theory and the Oslo speech of the most radical Lefty president in history declaiming against pacifism and proclaiming the exceptionalist thesis of Americanism.

I've called the demise of several past eras correctly: the end of the population explosion, the end of environmentalism and the end of the women's movement. 

Now I can call the end of the Birkenstock Era.  Whatever the new era is it will be an era where we waste energy, don't give a damn about producing CO2 and start enjoying our astounding prosperity.  Lets eat to joy (eat meals with an average distance traveled for the food of over 600 miles) drink to joy (drink the widest assortment of imaginative beverages humans have ever tasted) and be merry (thanks to the bountiful world of diverse humans, goods, ideas, technologies and services brought to us by commerce).

New city is going to erupt

This photo is of a development in the middle of the San Francisco Bay Area.  It will be a large town, over 2,500 homes and 10,000 residents.  It is south of Orinda.  You can Google Castlegate to see it on a map. You can also Google news about Castlegate or any other new development in that area and not find it mentioned.

Here is a giant new development that will effect everything in the East Bay area and it doesn't seem to register. 

The project is in abeyance for the time being due to a funding shortage, but it will be back online in a year or less.

Do metropolitan areas just grow with giant internal spots of explosion without anyone paying attention?  I guess so.

(Photo by Eliot Khuner. Click to enlarge).

Is there a God?

I hope you never expect me to answer a question like this.  Most people who believe in a God or a 'higher power' ascribe powers to intervene in human lives, making prayer and moral behavior relevant to the individual's relationship to God.  Such a god is like Santa Claus.

I wish to suggest that there is such a phenomenon.  It is the market response to a commercial mind. The invisible hand of Adam Smith operating in our lives. If you have and use a commercial mind you will be rewarded generously, extravagantly, sometimes more than Croesus.

What is a commercial mind?  There is an academic mind, a military mind, a political mind, a technological mind, a healing mind, a religious and many other kinds of minds.  

A commercial mind has several qualities that distinguishes it from other kinds of minds. A commercial mind is pragmatic, always open to change, driven by customer desires and always willing to treat reliable financial data as important. When a person with a commercial mind confronts the world he sees many things others don't see.  He sees with a freshness that accepts novelty with enthusiasm, he sees others communicating with him via financial data, imploring him to act.  The person with a commercial mind sees what can be done that others doubt or do not see.

We live in a society where such a mind is rewarded in many ways.  It is rewarded with extra work, extra opportunities, extra wealth and abundance of all resources.  

Commerce rewards meritocratically. Pretty much like a god rewarding moral behavior.. except commercial behavior is rewarded and commercial behavior is amoral (non-moral).

Politics 101-4

On the surface it has always looked like newspapers are important to the political process.  Every political season, aspiring  candidates and elected officials troop to the newspaper offices and sometimes to the TV stations to be cross-examined by the editorial board, with hopes for an endorsement.

I'm here to tell you different.  I've been in and around politics for nearly half a century.  I've followed newspaper and TV endorsements of half a dozen papers and comparable number of TV stations over four hundred elections and several thousands of candidates, initiatives and propositions.

I've never seen an endorsement that had any influence whatsoever.  For every case where every press outlet endorsed a candidate and he won, there are an equal number where his opponent won.  The same is true for initiatives and propositions.  The only conclusion is that endorsements don't matter, that includes union endorsements and party endorsements. Sorry.  I've tested this several times with statistical tests.

So then, it must be reasonable to conclude that money spent on a campaign is what makes a difference.  Again, the answer is "generally no."

I've seen extreme conditions where a rich man spent a fortune running against a popular figure (Huffington for Senate) and lost. I've seen cigarette companies spend a fortune, millions of dollars, and lose to a group that spent $40,000.  The only thing that raising money does is tell you whether you as a candidate have a chance.  Money does not flow to candidates who are complete losers (recent campaign of S.F. mayor Newsom is an example... he couldn't raise money because everyone knew he is a loser.)

So what does matter in any campaign? 

*(1) Some realities about politics such as the normal turnout in a specific election, the party allegiance of the registered voters, incumbency etc.

*(2) In local city or regional elections there are 30+ trusted opinion leaders who's private communications determine the election outcome... all done via informal networks.

*(3) What the voters perceive to be the real nature of the candidate or the issue.

*(4) Fortuitous circumstances such as political waves, dominant issues and unexpected public events.

President Obama said this

 President Obama said this: "...the plain fact is this: the United States of America has helped underwrite global security for more than six decades with the blood of our citizens and the strength of our arms. The service and sacrifice of our men and women in uniform has promoted peace and prosperity from Germany to Korea, and enabled democracy to take hold in places like the Balkans. We have borne this burden not because we seek to impose our will. We have done so out of enlightened self-interest -- because we seek a better future for our children and grandchildren, and we believe that their lives will be better if other peoples' children and grandchildren can live in freedom and prosperity."

I'm proud of our president for making this speech.

Data, does anyone else care?

Two economists at Harvard looked at government fiscal policies in the OECD countries (30) for a 37 year period.  That is one hell of a data set.

What did they find? 

* Fiscal stimulus based on tax cuts were more likely to increase GDP growth than spending increases.  Keynes was wrong.

*  Spending cuts with no tax increase are more likely to reduce deficits and debt than tax increases.  Democratic policy makers are wrong.

* Reductions on the spending side are less likely to create recessions rather than increases on the tax side which are more likely to create recessions.

Like it or tell me you don't rely on data from 1,000 national historic data points.