Pro Commerce

Real spies

If you want a real spy story, here it is straight from official French sources via Israeli military. The story was apparently leaked by the French intelligence services who have the best contingent operating in Syria.

Disarming and love: the book

In the early 1990s I was asked to write a book that was called Disarming Anti-Japanese Prejudice.  It was a guide for Japanese doing business in the U.S. and was commissioned by a Japanese golf book publisher. At the time Japan bashing was an annual event. The book was published in English in 1996.

I wrote the book, which had a particularly prescient chapter on American sexual discrimination laws.  I warned the readers that Japanese corporations would be sued on this issued because of racial bias that viewed Japanese bosses to be especially aggressive towards female employees.  I said that any affair between a Japanese boss and a lower level non-Japanese employee should result in a one hour rush to take the boss to the airport and send him back to Japan, permanently.

The book needed promotion in Japan and one person solicited for a book cover endorsement was Shintaro Ishihara, who co-wrote the Japan that can Say No.  He read a few chapters and found the one concerning sexual harassment.

Ishihara, who was by then, Mayor of Tokyo, said: "I can't endorse this book.  It tells us to send the manager home to Japan and leave the other employee behind.  What if the two of them are really in love?"

Two years after the book was published in English (not in Japanese) Mitsubishi Corp in Normal Illinois was hit by one of the biggest EEOC sexual harassment law suits ever filed.  Mitsubishi settled for $34 million.

Ask me about Machu Picchu

I live in the Americas, so therefore I should be able to act like an Inca, read Inca engravings and answer questions about Inca society?  Yes or No?

Most people walk around believing that the answer is Yes.  How else does one explain the presumed connection between the people who now live in Greece and the Athens of Plato and Euripides day?  Or the Egyptians of today and the Pharonic Era when the pyramids and the library of Alexandria were built?

There is no connection in any of these cases nor is there any connection to most other present day populations.

The Incas have remained a fairly separate population from the many new arrivals to the Americas, and the little intermarriage has resulted in very little cultural transmission.

In the case of the Greeks, we usually think of Greek civilization in connection with Athens which was defeated by Sparta.  Greece was overrun by Macedonians then Romans and then Huns and a dozen other settling populations since then.

Pharonic Egypt was defeated, overrun and often settled by Hittites, Persians, Greeks, Romans and finally Arabs. It was the Greeks and the Persians in Egypt who created the library at Alexandria.

Don't look for democracy of the Athenian type in contemporary Greece or high civilization of any sort in contemporary Egypt.  Nor should you ask me to read a quippa (set of Inca ropes) or lay stones in the Inca tradition. There is no historic connection in any of these cases.

Remember: clubs are gone

Every time I am faced with some version of environmental conspiracy theorist's or religious Armageddon I have to remind myself why such nonsense is common today.

We are living in an era when few, if any, people have a genuine experience of human political association.  Most people have experiences of school (top down authoritarian hierarchy) or the corporate work world (another top down authoritarian hierarchy).  Very few people work in the PTA and similar self organizing groups...very few.

It hasn't always been this way.  In the pre-urban industrial world there were myriad local rural social clubs and many larger organizations such as the Masons and church assemblies. After the civil war there were robust self-organized clubs: the Elks, Eagles, Odd Fellows and Rotary.

To belong to any club meant learning how political association works.  Two simple rules: (1) it is hard to organize people to do anything...anything other than to come to a party with free drinks; (2) only nice cooperative people can get others to help them.

Understanding those two rules means that people who have political association skills know that conspiracies are nearly impossible to organize and that humans are inherently more like the Irish and French than anything else... they will only act in their own behalf most of the time.

Most Americans have never had the experience of political association, clubs are gone, we watch TV... so they don't really know how people in groups behave.  They have absurd world views like conspiracy theorists and enviro-Armageddonists.

I missed an important one

On one of my parallel blogs I explained what several dead and dying shopping streets in San Francisco need to be revitalized.  I listed the kind of magnet foot traffic stores.

 Now one of the worst disaster areas in San Francisco is being discussed.  Mid-Market from 5th to 8th.  A proposed development could turn six contiguous blocks from dangerous, very dangerous slums into a successful shopping and entertainment area.  The development needs parking.... surprise.

The City that knows how (how to drive out the poor, the whites with families and the optimists) is debating whether good parking would harm the City Campaign to replace cars with bicycles. 

Yes, a shopping area that would bring in more than a million additional tourists, $3 billion in sales per year, is being pitted against the interests of having a few hundred more bike riders. Believe it.

In my earlier blog I listed several stores that attract foot traffic but I missed the most important one for San Francisco: Fry's Electronics which is in the proposed package for Mid-Market St. 

San Francisco is the Internet capitol of the world and Fry's is to Internet geeks what Patagonia and REI are to mountain climbers. Fry's is the most powerful magnet store for San Francisco.

Please calm down

Many of my friends, many of my beloved readers and many of the blog sites I visit are upset about a mosque at ground zero in Manhattan.

I can't be upset.  My son suggested a similar idea about three months after 9/11 and I have marveled at its brilliance ever since then.  His idea was even better than just a mosque and an office building, he wanted the world's leading Islamic study center to be in lower Manhattan.

Please think like a New Yorker for a moment.  What is the best way to avoid another 9/11 attack on your city by Muslims?  Answer: make Manhattan important to Muslims with a world renown study center and an important mosque.

Since the idea was first broached, I have come to realize that the U.S. needs to become the center of Islamic studies for Muslims.  The reason is to support and empower the moderate Islamic world... which really exists.  Lower Manhattan is a good place to start.

The Marin County effect

Today's Wall Street Journal has an editorial piece that I have reproduced below.  It says a Harvard study reports that successful pork shoveling from Washington into the the district of a powerful Congressperson doesn't have a positive effect because private investment thenceforth avoids the pork hole.

I wish to name that the Marin County Effect.

I saw it in the mid-1980s when my friends at Public Advocates brought a case before the California Attorney General in attempting to amend the will that had created the Buck Trust.  The Buck trust specified all the money pouring into the trust go to Marin County. The trust, at the time, was part of the San Francisco Foundation but had grown to an enormous size.  The S.F Foundation was using the Buck Trust for broad Bay Area charity and Public Advocates supported that behavior.

The move to change the trust document backfired and all the money was court ordered to be given to a new Marin Community Foundation.

Consequence: over the next decade, because the Marin Community Foundation had so much money to give away in Marin, every other charity and non-profit stopped giving money or support to Marin County.  The big money drove out the small money.

Same thing, as the WSJ reports,  with big money Washington DC pork driving out small local private investment money. Another version of Gresham's Law.

Read on from the WSJ editorial:

"For Members of Congress, becoming a committee chairman means more power to spend and thus help for the home district, right? That's certainly the common wisdom. But according to new research from Harvard Business School, the increased federal spending causes local companies to lose sales and cut back on research, payroll and other expenses.

Conspiracy versus Armageddon

Is the idea that the Elders of Zion control the world really very different from the idea that human generation of CO2 will bring the world to disaster?

My answer is no. 

The same kind of mind is required for both.  Each is predicated on some alien force that is working against the interests of humanity.  Both have a paranoid worldview. 

In the conspiracy case there is the requirement that a group of other humans are coordinating the destruction in order to control the rest of us.  In the environmental Armageddon that is usually the case (big oil, Sarah Palin, etc) but there are some who merely attribute the impending disaster to the stupidity of the world that doesn't understand the brilliant insights of the environmental elites.

Summary: conspiracy theorists and Armageddon environmentalists drink from the same poisoned well.

(The image is Alfred Dreyfus.)

Celebrity vs politics vs business

We know what sells newspapers and what is of interest to the drive-by media (thanks for the great metaphor to R. Limbaugh): celebrities living on the extreme edge and perpetual political battles.  Neither of these are of much consequence, and the political battles only do a little occasional harm (the Obamacare debacle, and the Obama trade wars are an exception to the "little harm" issue).

Through all this smoke and furry of celebrities and politics, the world of commerce goes on, waking every day to face new battles, bringing new prosperity and innovation to a fragmented but enthusiastic shopping world.

In some ways I feel like Adam Smith who lived in a world where everyone around him, nearly all the time, was focused on the religious battles of his era.  Adam Smith knew that the way out of the world of religious malice was commerce.

Fortunately I know the same is true today.  Despite J-Lo's love life, Tiger's golfing problems, the hate directed at Sarah Palin, and the meanspiritedness of President Obama, the real world of commerce just keeps making life better for everyone.

Lessons from Russia and Israel

I hear much discussion about of the future of Europe, now that Greece has made it clear that a socialized state can bring a democracy to the brink of chaos.  Can Germany, Sweden and a few other countries get out from the aging socialized disaster ahead?

Unfortunately the catastrophe scenario is inappropriate. Greece is not a good example because no matter how the global economic system treats a nation, a new government will always come along after the debacle.  Argentina is the perpetual example of a country that always has a government despite the regular economic destruction wrought by the government.

Of course the real issue is whether a democratic nation can ever get out from under the nightmare of socialist Armageddon.

The two examples I look at are Russia and Israel.  I discount all of East Europe because that was a case of the boot of tyranny being lifted; the citizens responded with an enthusiastic rush to copy Ronald Reagan's America. 

Russians watched as USSR socialism crumbled and Russia spent ten years getting its bearings. Now it has an oligarchic semi-open market with a strange case of National Socialism. A failure really.

Israel on the other hand is the hopeful case.  Israel was a totally socialize country with nearly every bank and industrial organization run by unions (Histadrut and Mapam). 

After Israelis realized that they were stuck in warm socialized tar, but surrounded by murderous enemies, they saw that the way out was economic growth.  With some public support, Bibi Netanyahu, in the early 1990s, brought the failing Israel back into the pro commerce world and Israel has been thriving every year since then. A hopeful lesson.

Yes, its my job

I will happily analyze and explain the current financial reform bill after it is signed by the President.  If you need my opinion now, phone me.  The bill does not in anyway separate the volatile world of finance from the necessarily stable world of commerce.

Retail marketing architecture

I

 We think of architecture as a form of marketing.  It can tell the potential customer something about the company and about the likely buying experience.

I saw an example in the Ginza, in Tokyo, where the relationship between architecture, marketing and retailing were stronger than I had imagined possible.

This store is on the main Ginza street with high-end retailers next to each other endlessly in every direction.  The entrance area is open.  There are about five circular glass pods, with jewelery like displays of watches in each. 

When you walk into any glass pod and talk to the sales person standing there, you learn that the pod is an hydraulic lift that will take you up to the floor above with a complete assortment of the watches and jewelry on display from that manufacturer.

 It is your personal elevator to the showroom of the company that is on display in the pod.

Photos of ex-felons

So what do they do now?

I worked with ex-felons for eleven years and they all had one distinct characteristic: they would not let anyone take a picture of them.

I don't know the reason for that over-sensitivity to photo taking, most ended up back in prison anyway.  The reason, I presumed, was to not let probation officers know where or what they were doing; nor who they were hanging out with.  But that is a guess.

Now that people are taking photos with the phones, at all times, I am wondering how ex-felons are responding to the new environment.  

I no longer have any ex-felon associates (that I know of), but I hope some of my readers can bring me up to date on this issue.

The Kennedy plane crash

I often read some new analysis of the JFK Jr plane crash in 1999 with his wife and sister-in-law on the way to Martha's Vineyard. He was in complete overcast weather, a sunset, over the sound, and did a spiral dive into the ocean from 2,200 feet. Pilots and instructors used to talk about this for the first few years after it happened.

The thing is, the issue is pretty well settled.  What isn't settled is that people who have never had the same experience can never accept the explanation of what happened.

I had the experience after about 25 years of flying.  I am only licensed to fly when I can see five miles ahead of me and I can stay clear of clouds by 500 feet. I deliberately keep my pilots rating that way (Visual Flight Rules) to keep me out of more dangerous weather situations.

One day I broke the rules.  I was going about 90 miles from Oakland to a landing strip in Sonoma.  There was a low cloud cover over Oakland with occasional holes in the clouds.  I could see that the clouds were about 1,000 feet thick and it was clear blue sky above the clouds.  I knew I could find a hole to come back down near Oakland in an emergency.  It was clear in Sonoma.

 

I flew in a small circle gaining altitude and intentionally flying up through the low cloud cover.  It should have taken me less than two minutes to climb through the cloud cover at a climb rate of 1,000 ft per minute.  But, the first minute passed and no blue sky.  Several minutes passed and no blue sky.  

Here I was, on a bright sunny day, inside a cloud, with absolutely no visibility, and the plane was climbing. Minute after minute.

I knew that I had no seat-of-the-pants orientation ability in an airplane... nobody does.  I did what I was trained to do.  Fly by the instruments, believe the instruments. No one who hasn't been in that position can imagine the absence of orientation in a white-out or a black-out with no possible reference point other than a few stupid flight instruments in front of you. Damn it.  What else could I do, I sure couldn't go back down, there were 2,200 foot mountains adjacent to Oakland.

When the altimeter showed 6,000 feet, I finally broke out of the cloud into the warm blue sky.  The cloud cover was 4,000 feet below me stretching for miles in every direction.  I looked back.  I had been climbing inside a giant 5,000 foot high chimney cloud that stood all by itself.

JFK Jr. had never been in such a blind situation before; he couldn't believe that the only thing to do is trust what the instruments tell you.

Is it really dead?

I've been asked two questions about the death of the Left.

First, what will we be hearing from the dying Left in the future?  The answer: it will be more of the same indistinguishable whining.  The Left hates big business so every event, inconvenience and misstep will be seen in the Lefty world as a source of whining about big business. Rich people and big business are the villains so they will be bugaboos for a long time.  There is no way to disabuse anyone of those hoary themes. Real death is the only end to the whining.

Second, what will happen to the Left-Right dichotomy?  It never was a genuine dichotomy.  While the Left was a coherent ideological rant, (getting daily talking points from Doonesbury)the right is a meaningless conglomeration.  Simple proof: the main anti-gay voting cohort is Black and Latino, not Republicans.  Are they 'Right'.  No.  The strongest supporters of urban police are Asian-Americans, not Republicans.  Are they 'right'. No.  Are Republicans disproportionately religious?  No, Democratic Catholics and Mexican evangelicals are the most religious.

The dichotomy in America before Left-Right was slavery/anti-slavery. Before that it was religion/anti-religion.

I can already see that the post Left-Right alignment will be pro commerce/anti commerce.  The anti-commerce movement has a large Luddite component.

Mohammed image

In both Exodus and Deuteronomy the Mosaic commandment is: "You shall not make for yourself an idol, whether in the form of anything that is in heaven above, or that is on the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth."  Jews have always interpreted this to mean no worship of idols and no efforts to paint or create an image that could be used as an idol.

Of course, Christians completely ignore this commandment. Many parts of the Christian church worship a crucifix, often with an image of a man on it. Also images of Mary.  I see no need to comment on this.

The issue for Islam is similar to the Jewish model.  There can of course be no image of Mohammed because there were none made of him when he was alive. So this is not an image of Mohammed it is a cartoon.

The issue then, is whether the image I have created on this page could be considered useful as an idol.  It is not, it is nothing other than an attempt to show the Moslem world that efforts to stamp out cartoon images of Mohammed are a foolish and provocative effort... similar to the Islamic radical effort to eliminate Israel.

My personal interest in this matter is that Islamic extremists targeting cartoon creators is not a whit different from the broad Islamic Jew hate. Its time for everyone to recognize the parallels.  Defend the Jews, defend Israel and denounce the extremist interpretations of Islam.

The end of the Left

I wish to announce that the end of the Left has arrived.

My announcement is not without substance or importance.  I was among the first people in the early 1990's to publicly announce the end of the world population explosion. (I had a party to make the announcement, based on UN data.)  I announced the end of the women's movement when I saw their power wane in the mid-1990's, especially on abortion; I called the end of the environmental movement in the late 1990's when I saw their fund raising and influence on the wane.  I got the end of the anti-war movement right when I saw the age of the marchers in San Francisco and saw the numbers dwindle in mid-2005. Last year I called the end of the Birkenstock era after the Copenhagen debacle.

The end of the Left is at hand and it is time for everyone to celebrate. 

The coupe de grace was the trillion dollar bailout of the Mediterranean EU nations because their welfare expenditures had driven them to bankruptcy. 

The end of the USSR was a smack on the head to Leftism; the economic explosion of China after the death of Mao was a further smack with a baseball bat, but the Left lived on in a coma until now using a stable Europe as a viable socialist model.  That is now gone.

The Left has finally had the heart-lung machine plug pulled. 

We have to spend the rest of our lives watching the corpse twitch and spasm just as we do with all the other movements that died in the past two decades.  But we can rejoice on its terminal decline.

Commerce is THE SOURCE

This New York Times book review of a new book by Matt Ridley, The Rational Optimist, lets us know that someone else thinks the way I do. 

Ridley, according to the review, suggests that our ancestors advantage over Neanderthals was commerce. "..after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.” The evidence for this trick is in perforated seashells from more than 80,000 years ago that ended up far from the nearest coast, an indication that inlanders were bartering to get ornamental seashells from coastal dwellers."

Ridley then shows how all of history is an evolution growing out of commerce.  Right on, brother. 

I'll get the book and see if there is more I need to report.

Lesson of Salem

The lesson of the Salem witchcraft trials is with us today, for those who read a good description of the Salem story.

The best writings on the 1692-93 episode are in Boyer and Nissenbaum's Salem Possessed.

The point I want to make is that the witchcraft hysteria did not end until people of high rank in Massachusetts were accused of witchcraft. Among those accused were relatives of the deputy governor William Stoughton. That put a prompt end to the whole sordid mess.

The same thing happened last week in Spain. 

Judge Baltazar Garzon has been on a global rampage issuing warrants for the arrest of Augusto Pinochet, terrorists at Guantanamo and he had plans to issue such warrants for former Bush Justice Department officials and Israeli elected office holders.

None of this insanity mattered to the Leftist governments of Spain until Garzon started hearings on Spanish Civil War crimes which had an impact on the entire elite society of Spain.  That was enough to remove him from his judicial office.

Salem revisited.

Police tactic in Tokyo

 Up close and personal. The photo is of two policemen standing in the face of a suspect in a subway corridor.

I have a formerly homeless friend who now has a home, wife, job and a family.  But he still looks homeless and gets harassed periodically.  He knows his legal rights from years of harassment.

He told me that when he refuses to identify himself or explain anything or turn out his pockets, the police get up close and personal.  They are trying to provoke a fight response and the consequent justification for arrest. 

This is someone else in the photo.

I've never seen this tactic in the U.S., but I expect to see it cross the Pacific.

How much Federal debt?

Alexander Hamilton was 200 years ahead of his time.

Did you know that in the late 1990's the U.S. came very close to paying off the national debt? 

All the professionals in the financial world were aghast.  That would be a horrible thing to do.  The national debt provides the secure bottom layer of risk in the financial market and it has done this (in stable governments such as Holland and England) for 400 years.

Hamilton was the man who demanded that the new U.S. government assume the debts of the states and create a secure national financial market.  As today, only the fools, like Jefferson, wanted to ignore the states debts or to pay them off in full. 

We owe Hamilton an incredible debt for understanding what no one else understood.

There is no answer to my headline question about the optimal size of the Federal debt.  I would guess, for purposes of the international financial world, it might need to be something like the current $12 trillion level. (Sorry to say that in front of ideological conservatives.)

Syria preparing for war

This is no joke. 

We don't have a competent person as President of the United States. The U.S. has become a giant cowardly wimp and every tyrant knows it. 

One  consequence is that Syria is building a medieval fortress style wall in Lebanon to hide a full military build-up of Hezbollah.  Read it and weep. Especially Jews who voted for Obama.

Class discovered by the WSJ

The Friday Wall Street Journal had an article on the ranks of the new Conservative British government being filled by members of the Upper Class.  The Saturday Wall Street Journal had an article on the new American Supreme court that no longer has any Upper Class WASPs and Peggy Noonan wrote on the new 'meritocratic'  America. 

I can speculate on the reason for the new interest of the WSJ in social class but it is meaningless.  Possibly the owner of the WSJ, Rupert Murdock, continues to be offended at the miserable treatment he has always gotten at the hands of the British Upper Class. He may have told his staff to write about it.

The real story is that class, which means 'hereditary class', has been gone in the United States since 1960, but an hereditary class remains everywhere else in the world. This is the true exceptionalism of America.

I have done two things in this matter: I wrote a blog proving the elimination of America's hereditary Upper Class and showing the date, 1960, in this blog.

I wrote a blog explaining why this happened in America.  The Wall Street Journal reporter on this story finds several explanations for the end of America's Upper Class.  He includes changes in religion (end of mainstream Protestants which happened a decade later) and lack of upward mobility for minorities into the Upper Class. No other serious person has thought about this subject nor written about it, so the reporter was stuck with his own nonsense.

There was one reason for the end of the American Upper Class and I wrote about it here.  In the American army of WWII everyone of talent could become an officer.  Not true anywhere else.  After the war, these skilled managers, forming a large group, took over American corporations in a 15 year period.  They displaced the hereditary American Upper Class by pure numbers and talent.

Saved you from a movie

The Cove is the movie I saved you from for more than thirty years.

Back, about 1978, I got wind that a small village on the Sea of Japan, hunted and killed dolphins, about 600 a year. The village I went to was one of several that hunted dolphin for meat, sold in local markets. 

I had already defanged the rabid anti-Japanese anti-whaling movement, so I quickly acted to head off another anti-Japanese enviro-fanatics-disaster.

I met the local fishermen, talked to their leaders at the fishing cooperative and got invited to the local community banquet. I took photos, and wrote an article for the leading environmental newspaper of the day, the Friends of the Earth weekly.  I got a full page center spread and made the point that the fishermen were part of a small town traditional coop with a practice that went back centuries.  I had a photo of the ancient shrine where the fisherman made offerings on behalf of the dead dolphins. 

My article was sympathetic, played on all the warm and fuzzy feelings that enviro-activists had for traditional people and staved off the kind of hate-filled nonsense that was made into the current documentary, thirty years latter.

Book businesses next door to each other

 This photo is from a point near the Uehara station in Tokyo.  I took it because I keep hearing false voices in my head, the false voices of people who don't understand business, who say that a big business will drive a little business out of business.

I've already proved that this is nonsense in an earlier blog.  Starbucks came into San Francisco, dramatically increased the number of competing coffee shops in the whole city and raised the quality of the coffee business.

In the foreground of the photo is a small book store that specializes in science fiction, exotic foreign titles and children's books (Los Papelotes).  It is a very adaptive book store that is personable and warm. It is much loved by the neighborhood.  

The bookstore in the background, 50 yards away, (the tiny blue sign under the railway tracks) is a major national chain.  Both are surviving well despite Internet competition that impacts both.  Japanese are the most hardcore book readers in the world (maybe Israel is in the same league).  These book stores have been here for the 15 years I've been watching them. Proximity helps.

Start an arts organization

When I was in Tokyo I was taken to see a new arts center.  It was an old remodeled middle school, with many galleries, studios and offices not far from Akihabara. Visually very well done.  I met the paid organizer but it was not a business consulting visit.

Since I played a role in the design and business issues of a major center for the arts in 1978 on Federal property at Fort Mason, I am reminded of some of the lessons.

First, such a center needs an internal traffic flow for both the visitors and resident projects that includes many places for leisure, conversation and food.  (That is what led me to organize Greens restaurant).

Second there must be a strong and severe mechanism for throwing out arts groups, artists and other occupants when they become boring, static, stultifying and certainly when they are disruptive.  Any group of humans will rally around the one being kicked out.  But stasis will kill any arts or dynamic business entity.

The best approach is carried out by a very small group that makes the decisions and proceeds the same way a personnel firing is carried out.  At least three public warnings to shape up, in writing.  A final hearing and then a prompt move to get the departing party out the door.

Otherwise the whole venture goes down hill and the attractive parties leave before the whole place dies anyway.

Hot summer and comity

I had an experience that has parallels to the drafting of the U.S. Constitution.

I was one of six men, at the peak of the hippy revolution from 1971 to 1974 who tried to make sense of the revolution going on around us.  We were in the physical heart of revolution, in the San Francisco Bay Area, with our gatherings ranging from Palo Alto to Bolinas. We were the Board of Directors of the Point Foundation.  Point received the royalties (well over a million dollars) from the most hippy of all institutions, the Whole Earth Catalog.

 What is so stunning in retrospect is the comity.  We always had a seventh member, Elijah, an interesting invited guest, who, for the first year, was given the power to spend money (that power was revoked after it was abused).  There were many shades of political persuasion in the room: a professional environmentalist, a Marxist, Stewart Brand, me a Republican banker, a leader of the computer explosion and our version of George Washington, the moderator.

The six of us had a dozen day long discussion of our granting work and supported each other's projects enthusiastically.  The comity was only visible twenty years later when we had a 20th year reunion and we couldn't agree on anything. We no longer had our lives connected in any meaningful way.  At the reunion we were on opposites of every issue we discussed (yes multiple opposing sides).  We were also living our lives on opposite sides.

I think the early comity was the result of two things: we knew we were in the middle of a revolution to build a better world based on cooperation and good will (basic hippy principles). We also accepted full responsibility and serious commitment to our work and for our behavior.

That is what makes me think of the smoldering hot Summer of 1787 in Philadelphia, with the shades drawn and 39 men, the finest men in the 13 colonies, struggled, compromised and argued to create the U.S. Constitution, the most powerful document of modern times. They had the sense of their time being a key point in a revolution and they had a personal sense of responsibility.  There was comity there. 

 Fifteen years later virtually none of the founding fathers could speak to one another.

The slayer

  In no way do I pretend to be a coffee expert.  I just happen to love the machine in the photo.

My personal taste in coffee has been based on years of testing.  First, I went through dozens of national origin coffees, in double blind testing, and found that coffee from Yemen, sometimes called Mocha and Sanini was the one I preferred.  I have many Yemeni friends so I know that this coffee is picked by hand by the same men who climb up the mountains to carry it down.  Mountains range from the plain of Sana the capitol at 6,000 feet up to 12,000 feet.  All this is high for coffee.  About twice as high as all the other coffee regions in the world.  People in Yemen live on Qat, a chewable leaf. They walk up the mountain pick and dry the beans and carry them back down.  No donkeys or mules, just qat. Also no fertilizer or pesticide.  No vacuum sealing the beans in Yemen either.

There is much focus on roasting in the San Francisco coffee fanatic world I live in.  But, again, it is a matter of taste.  There are a number of different roasting machines and degrees of roasting.  That difference I can taste, but I'm happy as long as the beans aren't burned and are quickly vacuum sealed until I bring them home within a few days.  Again, open the bean bag and grind for use.  No storage and certainly not in the freezer.  

The last big difference in taste that I can detect is in brewing.  I don't like French press because of the grit that gets through. I do love the AreoPress. It looks like a bong.  The temperature of the water makes a noticeable difference. Coffee is important to taste in the AreoPress and from an espresso machine.

The machine photographed on this page is the Slayer.  Made in Seattle.  I went to the factory to see the details.  The main advantage is that the operator can set the exact temperature of the water and it remains at that temperature through heavy use.  The coffee grounds get a low pressure stream of water to wet them, then the steam is applied in a short burst.  The machine in the photos is used in the Intelligencia coffee shop in Venice California.  That is where I got to compare the traditional espresso machine with the Slayer.  Again, a noticeable difference, so taste matters at this point in the process.

In summary: I can taste national origin difference in coffee, roasting machine difference and brewing machine difference.  Each has an effect on the coffee.

No, I'm not the handsome Mike Phillips who won the 2010 barista championship.

Hard to believe

Those of us who follow Jew-hate closely are astounded by a book review in the New York Times.

The review is by Harold Bloom of a book by Anthony Julius on British Antisemitism.  Bloom summarizes the book and makes clear that Antisemitism has a long history in England and has been at a ferocious level in recent decades.

I am not surprised about the subject.  I have to point out to Lefty Jews that half the Jewish population of England has left in the past two decades.

The two surprises are that a book on this subject is published in England and that it gets a positive review in the New York Times.  The NYTimes is almost as vehement in its Jew hate as the majority of the English academe, the BBC and the English upper class.

Of course the NYTimes' excuse is that it suffers from Anglophilia.

Failing audience 101

 For years I read dismaying reports about the inability and unwillingness of young people to read books, to read at all.  I still hear the same thing about attendance at symphony, ballet, opera, jazz and theater.

All of these forebodings are unwarranted.  

My rule in the matter is: HP and MTT.  

Kids from age 7 to 14 started carrying 600 page books with them all the time, everywhere.  The books were written by J. K. Rowling, the hero was Harry Potter (HP). There were seven in the series and each was gobbled up like macaroni and cheese.

 When Michael Tilson Thomas came to the San Francisco Symphony in 1995 it suffered from the same doldrums every other symphony in America suffered from.  The Davies symphony hall immediately filled up and has been sold out for MTT's performances ever since.

Got the rule of HP and MTT.  Any and every medium can thrive if there is available first rate talent.  We live in a time when movies and video offer more interest and challenge than books, so books have to be really good.  We live in a time when recorded music and arts are first rate, so live performance must be of higher quality. It is that simple.

All of that is true for every medium I listed in the first line, with the exception of theater.  Theater has been a home to Left wing rant for fifty years.  Consequently, no intelligent person wants to risk paying for a live stage performance that will insult his values and intelligence.  Theater is probably gone for ever.

Very important article

We live in a world where we are at the whim of large systems.  These systems are almost always poorly designed, most often they weren't designed at all they evolved accidentally.  These large and vital systems are rarely tested to see how they can break down or catapult the world into a disaster because of simple error or malfunction.

If your savings were nearly wiped out the year before last, or last week; if you were paying $4.00 for gasoline and couldn't run your car to commute and make a mortgage payment at the same time, if your plane was in a near miss, if your taxes have been rising while the available jobs have been shrinking, if you are surrounded by people who believe the world is near Armageddon because of CO2 the gas that makes life possible.... you are the victim of systemic failures.

The most interesting analysis of the swine flu imaginary pandemic, a case of a large system gone berserk, you will love this article in Der Spiegel.