Pro Commerce

Unexpected and unkown

The New Yorker ran a long article by Jeffrey Toobin about Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. I hope my readers are aware of this article and the very public discussion that has grown out of it.

I was sympathetic to Clarence Thomas from thetime he was nominated for the Court. He was treated like a n-gg-r by the Democrats in the US Senate. I later learned that Joe Biden was the most malicious of the senators he dealt with. When he publicly said that the Democrats in the U.S. Senate were a 'high tech lynch mob' I recognized a man who was a genuine American black and who was clearly honest.

Later, when I read his biography I recognized that he was the first true American black to rise from the conditions of slavery to the highest office. A true black Horatio Alger story. I have always assumed he could never have gotten as far as he did without inherent extraordinary qualities. And I have since so many times.

The unexpected part of this blog is that the liberal a machine has decided that Thomas is so brilliant that he is shifting American legal opinion by himself and has become the greatest threat to the liberal machine.  That was truly unexpected.

The unknown part of this blog is the mass media’s inability to read, do research or even do their job adequately. Alan Krueger has been named head of the CEA by the President.  The president is in for a disturbing surprise. Krueger is an honest man, who makes decisions based on data. 

Krueger’s work on the minimum wage has been badly mischaracterized. In his data based research he compared chain store employment in two adjacent states where one state had a high minimum wage. What he found was that in the high minimum wage state the employers invested much more money in training employees in order to reduce turn over.  The reality of minimum wage eliminating jobs was not relevant to his study.  Minimum wage laws have created most of our current unemployment.

His immigration study is of great importance. He compared the effect of Mexican and Cuban immigrants on the employment of blacks. The immigrants did not in any way increase the unemployment among blacks.

If the media and the unions understood Krueger's work they would hate him.

Everyone who has been offended

I am in love with a current political phrase. When a political or public figure has said something disgusting, unfair, dishonest or false the response to any objections has become: ‘I apologize to everyone who has been offended.’

Don’t you agree that is the most wonderful, ingenious, mealymouthed way to apologize?

It’s simultaneously says ‘I do not want people who disagree with me to be offended, on the other hand I am right and refuse to back down’.

I frankly just love that phrase. It allows for public statements that are outside the realm of common agreement.

Container cargo

I am old enough to have seen cargo containers coming into existence and become the dominant form of global maritime transportation. At one point in the 1970s I even bought two cargo containers and used one of them, with modification, as a tea house.

When I was in the military in the early 1960s, the military had a well-developed cargo container system. I saw it in frequent use at the Oakland naval base.

By the late 60s, I was already seeing cargo containers of standard dimensions in commercial use. By the end of the 60s standardization was common and the format was 8’ x 8’ x 20’ or some multiple of the 20 feet. The hooks and connectors on the top had become standardized and were universal on the planet.

This entire process evolved slowly but by the end of the 1970s it had begun to have a significant and beneficial effect on commerce.

I do not give any individual or entity credit for this development. But we all owe a great debt of gratitude for the development and evolution of the containerized cargo. It has dramatically reduce the costs of everything in our lives.

Capacity for learning

I know that 95% of my readers do not believe in national or ethnic characteristics. I on the other hand, am a strong believer that culture dictates everything from the language you use to the worldview you hold. The variation within any culture is infinitesimal on major cultural issues.

I want to discuss national cultural learning capacity.  I do not think that willingness and ability to learn is a universal cultural characteristic.

In fact my view is important on this subject because I am highly concerned about the vast number of small independent populations on the planet who deliberately refuse to join the modern world. I am comfortable accepting their position and have tried to create organizations that protect cultures and peoples who do not want to be part of the modern society.

Aside from that issue there are populations that want to be part of the modern world but do not seem to have the capacity for learning.  I single out three populations in particular. First the Arabs, second are the Russians and third are the Latin American Spanish speakers.

My thesis is very simple. I have selected these three populations that have significant cultural cohesion because they all stand athwart the modern world, pretty much living with the skill and technology of 150 years ago.

There are some Russians and some Latin Americans, mostly immigrants, and virtually no Arabs who are competent in modern technology.  I take this to mean that they are part of the society that does not have the capacity for learning.

We should not expect any cultural change in these societies.  They may want to change but they are missing the key ingredient.

An opposite example would be the American Tea Party.  The Tea Party is Americans rising in defense of democracy. This autonomous self organized group of nearly ⅓ of the adult population has learned not to form a third party and not to throw up leaders, but to be a flat grass roots movement.  This group has learned what works in America and are doing it. Americans, at least a significant portion, have learned how to cope with politics, and therefore has a significant capacity for learning.

Tolerating business

This is an article that was recommended to me in a recent comment.  Here is Robert Fulford saying what I say, clearly.  

This is summary quote: "Capitalism creates most of our jobs and we would all be desperately poor without the entrepreneurs who keep the economy alive and the financiers who invest in our corporations. But that's no reason, as Canadians see it, to look upon business with anything but suspicion.

"Of course, only a few Canadians will declare themselves anti-business, and an even smaller minority will argue for replacing free enterprise with a command economy directed by bureaucrats and politicians. But we tolerate business rather than admiring it."

True for America, obviously. Which is why I am proposing a statue to honor the Heroes of Commerce in my hometown.

UPS and Fedex

This blog is a continuation of my historical commentary on contributions to commerce.

Both UPS and FedEx were operating companies in the 1970s.  UPS was much older. At the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s there were changes to both postal regulations and airline regulations that allowed both companies to explosively expand their services.

By the mid-1980s all fast delivery by businesses was in the hands of either of these two companies. The US Postal Service was completely left in the dust.

The consequence was the complete change in the way business was done in America and around the world. Legal and financial documents travelled overnight to their destination. This made location of offices significantly less important and business much more efficient.

The impact on production, manufacturing and related services was even greater as small efficient parts moved around the world at nearly sonic rates.

I, as well is everyone else in business, was aware of the geometric increase in the speed in which everything in the business world was happening. A small part of it was the fax machine the large part of it was the overnight air service of UPS and FedEx.

Kennedy immigration

This is a continuation of the historic appreciation of contributions to modern commerce.

The bill that made such a great contribution to commerce is called the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965. It was pushed by the entire Kennedy family and is usually referred to as the Kennedy immigration bill.

What the bill did was to eliminate the previous 1924 immigration system that limited immigration almost entirely to white  Europe.

The Kennedy bill opened immigration to every country.

Where would we be today without Indian and Chinese engineers who power our Internet world?

Nowhere.

Answering machine

I’m on a campaign to look at significant contributions to commerce by people and tools.

One tool that is historically under appreciated is the electronic answering machine.  

I watched this machine in the late 70s and early 80s make many one person and small businesses possible. The answering machine allowed workers to stay in touch with their clientele at a very low cost and a high level of reliability.

At the time, it was common to use answering services which were operated by humans. The significant shortcoming of answering services in comparison to the answering machine is that people were very willing to leave details and technical messages with the machine. This was in fact necessary for small business to function.

This machine led to a flood of small businesses.

In addition, one simple wire made this machine even more effective and valuable.  The wire connected the recording head and the speaker allowing the listener to screen incoming calls. As a result a message could be overheard as it was being recorded.

End of manufacturer's price control

I rank the end of manufacturer’s price control in the late 1950’s as a signal event in American commerce. I can’t find the actual cause or date of this change. I suspect it was something in the courts.

Up until the change, wholesalers controlled the pricing of most goods at retail.

The change was significant because it dramatically opened the market for new retail stores and generated effective competition in a range of products and services in the United States. It further permitted the introduction of imports into the United States which had not been restricted by quotas or taxes but were kept out by wholesalers.

For example, Kodak would not let any of its retailers sell Agfa or Fuji film or develop them.

The Democratic party recently reintroduced manufacturer price controls as a legal tactic. Aside from the evidence of anti-commerce deeply ingrained in the Democratic party, the cat has been out of the bag for 50 years (that manufacturer's price control is bad for the public) and cannot be squeezed back into it by new legislation.

The same Democratic party, under Nancy Pelosi, eliminated the laws that Republican congresses of the 1990s created to successfully reduce welfare. But again the cat is out of the bag and nobody in a practical position wants to return to the horrors that the Democratic Party lives for.

 

Japanese and maintenance

The most surprising fact about Japan is that it is a modern industrial society in which everything works perfectly.

Having spent many years in Japan I have always searched for the source of this industrial perfection. It not only results in a stunning cleanliness of every sort, but subways are able to run at high speed only a few minutes apart.

I have concluded that this commercial miracle originates in the Japanese skill at maintenance. Maintenance is very different from traditional ideas of repair. When a human artifact fails and the artifact is restored to its operating level, that is repair. When the human artifact is serviced at regular intervals to avoid failure, that is maintenance.

I believe the Japanese learned the importance and function of maintenance because the entire country has been in rice production for two millennia. Rice fields require maintenance on the field, the water supplies and seasonally, to function. I believe this rice field maintenance experience has been central to the rest of the Japanese industrial society.

The first evidence of maintenance that I see in our  Amero-European society was in airplanes and that appears to have come from France along with the word maintenance.

When Japanese automobiles entered the American market in the 1960s and 70 they created the need for maintenance on the part of the American automobile industry.  A new world that fortunately spread to many commercial fields.

Rockefeller and kerosene

John D Rockefeller was one of the greatest men in American commercial history.  

He was a strict Baptist, abstemious, a non-smoker and very careful with his money. He not only created the greatest enduring global oil company, from an early partnership, he also was the true visionary of American universities and university-based research. ( University of Chicago and Rockefeller University.)

This great American was vilified with bile, lies and ideological venom by the perpetually hate-filled-Lefty world of his time and since. American history is taught in our third-rate public schools in a way that elevates the hatemongers of Rockefeller’s era, the muckrakers, above the great man himself.

There are several things that Rockefeller did in commerce that are important.  He developed the catalytic cracking method that produced pure kerosene and gasoline. He developed long pipelines and mass storage tanks that made commercialization possible. He dramatically reduced the price of oil and kerosene in the market. Making whale oil irrelevant for lighting and automobiles possible on a mass scale.

With his technical advantages in oil and kerosene production he was able to buy other less efficient producers in the industry. Whenever these men were exceptionally good at business he put them on his board of directors and used their skills.  

The man was a master of modern commerce and deserves a monument in Washington DC. The muckrakers deserve a special room in hell.

Cash register

There were several technical inventions that I believe played an important role in the expansion of commerce. One was the invention of the cash register.

The cash register has many fathers. The history is quite murky. (Ignore what you find on Google.)  I look at the 1840s as the period when department stores became possible because of the invention of the cash register.  Department stores began appearing everywhere in the commercial world.

The cash register was nothing more than a cash drawer which was operated along with a manual posting of the total sale price and the ring of a bell.  This invention, in its many forms, allowed for the management of retail.  Managers could oversee many sales.

Retail required that all prices were fixed and not negotiated. Retail management required that managers know what was being sold at a distance from the actual sale.  Retail management is by definition the origins of department stores.

You can see the important role of cash registers in commerce.  When mechanical cash registers arrived by the 1880s, they were immediately successful.

Commerce and history

A friend of mine is trying to create a graphic history of the world. I have told him that all history is a creation from the present. I am not trying to make a Buddhist point. I am looking at the many histories I have encountered. They are all projections of current world views onto the past.

The present is always shaped by the histories we believe in.  The recent Norwegian bomber, Andrew Berwick, (his English name) spent most of his 1600 page declaration writing his view of the history of Europe and Islam.

When I look at history, I see the growth of commerce as the most significant human accomplishment.

In my view, the elements that make up the history of commerce, come from the Dutch Republic in the late 1590s and carry forward for the next century. That was the great primary source of modern commerce.

During that period, the bond and stock markets were invented, along with taxation systems run by civil servants.  I see the creation of modern technology based on the intellectual structures of the the Spinoza enlightenment and the explosion of publications from the Netherlands. (Source Jonathan Israel).

I also see the creation of most Democratic ideas in this era and I see it transmitted to the world from this tiny nation by its conquest of the seas and its conquest of England in 1688.

Ranked choice chaos

If you happen to run into the election model call rank choice or instant runoff you should know that it has a wonderful failing.

San Francisco introduced ranked choice as an alternative to having expensive runoff elections. Since we adopted this weirdo approach we have had two wonderful anomalies. Oakland also chose this weirdo approach and they immediately got an anomaly.  

In San Francisco two of the supervisorial districts had an outcome where the leading candidate was far ahead of the rest but short of 50% of the vote total. So another, not necessarily the second runner up, was selected to fill the office. In Oakland, the Mayor was chosen from several runners up after the most popular and best known candidate came in short of the 50% mark.

Personally I like to see the most important candidate lose because all election candidates are people who have outsized egos and are irrelevant to the issue of representation.

I have no problem laughing at this ranked choice chaos. The only intelligent form of democratic representation is random sampling of the population for service in legislative bodies.

Pro-commerce public monuments

I am forced to think about pro-commerce monuments because I live in one of the many cities that was built by heroes of commerce and is populated by haters of commerce.

The evidence is simple. There are no public monuments to the great commercial builders of my city. San Francisco. The same is true for the rest of the United States.

These men, who should be revered, will find their names evoke screams of hatred and scat when such a monument is proposed.

When I have some influence on this city  we will see monuments to the great pro-commerce builders who have worked and lived in San Francisco.  

Here is the beginning of such a list of names to go on this important monument. In no particular order: A. P. Giannini, Levi Straus, Mark Hopkins, Leland Stanford, Jane Lathrop, Milton Friedman, Charles Schwab, Anthony Zellerbach, Warren Bechtel, Mortimer Fleishhacker, Adolph Sutro, Collis Huntington, William R. Hearst, Charles Crocker and Joe P. Williams (creator of Visa).

What a great day to look forward to.

Obituary for Ruth Kadish

A lifelong firend of mine died last week  I wrote an obituary at her request.  It is relevant to this blog because Ruth Kadish at age 65 created an important global institution.

While serving on the San Francisco Airport Commision, Ruth conceived and implimented a long art and culture gallery in a United Airlines wing.  The gallery gets several million visitors a year.

After Ruth created this airport gallery, her idea was copied in airports all over t he world.  She created a market for art and cultural artifacts that had never existed before.  Good work Ruth.

 

Hate legacy

This blog is not for Lefties. If you are one you have no idea how easy it is for you to become like a rabid pit bull, filled with anger and venom.  Just the mention of Bush, Cheney, Limbaugh, Palin etc. is enough to let you know your automatic hate response. No political names can do that to me or other pro-commerce advocates.

The question for me is ‘Where does this hatred come from’?  

The answer is that it has a continuous legacy of nearly 2 centuries.  I trace the Lefty position to the beginning of the industrial revolution and the French Revolution.  I particularly identify it with the Jacobins.

The Jacobins put up the scaffolding and falling blades to use on the elites of France. Certainly a case of excess hatred, the beginning of the Lefty legacy. The Jacobins cohesive position was strong central government. Does that remind you of a president who believes in  punishing ‘millionaires and billionaires and owners of the executive jets’?

In between the Jacobins and the current Lefty president are thousands of hate mongers.  Look at Karl Marx, look at the American muckrakers and American communists and fellow travellers of every stripe. For the past 50 years, all one needed to say to provoke Lefty hatred was to suggest that Sen. McCarthy was right about Communists in government and the Rosenbergs and Sacco-Vanzetti were guilty.

The Left has a long legacy of hate and probably a long future in the same vein.  

Best blogs Aug. 1 to 14th

Is a person starting off at age 20 today better or worse off than the person starting in 1960?

Was a slave child in the South more likely to have two parents than a black child today?

When the number of urban fires declines by more than 60% the unions figure out how to replace fires with fall-down-drunks.

America is failing the world of commerce by our neglect of the high seas. Piracy suppression is our responsibility and we are neglecting it.

Do you know why Paul Krugman is a toothless dragon?  The man has contributed nothing but misery to the planet and learns nothing from his own mistakes.

What happened this summer to prolong the serious below-average growth of the American GDP? It was the second-stage evaporation of our money.

Is it fair to suggest that the Israeli demonstrations arise out of a suppressed, harmful, Jewish personality element?

An important reason that we have high unemployment among minorities is because government, at state and local levels, is making life harder for micro-business licensing.

Unemployment and licensing

The current unemployment rate among white college graduates is 4.4 percent. Among minorities the unemployment rate is roughly 12 percent.

This is a good point to mention that a modest attempt has been made to measure destructive interference by the government in the labor market.

The Wall Street Journal on July 28 had an article by Mellor and Carpenter who looked at occupational licensing requirements for the hundred occupations below median income. The article is long and the conclusions are shocking.

The licensing requirements for ooccupations from TV installers, to animal handlers, to florists, to tourist guides and manicurists are growing rapidly... are growing explosively.

Guess who suffers the most from occupational licensing expansion? People who don’t have college degrees.  Black and Latino minorities.

If there is any operating hypothesis among the conservative community it is that government has always created barriers to business.  Taxes and licensing.  

I know that governments are almost always anti-commerce especially Lefty urban governments.  This is a case where the people being punished are perversely the Lefty supporters.

Church and hippies

One of the most common utterances I heard from hippies over a 20 year period was: ‘we need community’.  They wanted it desperately and they tried everything, from communes to co-op’s.

That plea arose with vigor and fanatic desire because the hippies had given up their connection to the past in their pursuit of the hippie future.   

The hippy future did not have the prime source of community that prevailed before the hippies.

The prime source of community had been the church.  Churches provided classes for young people, care for people getting married, care for families in trouble, care for the elderly, food, job hunting services, condolences and support for the dying.  Churches provided housing for seniors, hospitals of every sort and counselling at every hour of the day.

The hippies didn’t know that.  They joined Buddhist temples, they pursued every form of new religion and clung to one another in massive crowds of protest and music.

What they didn’t know, what we didn’t know, was that a common religion or common ideology or common ethic was vital for people to get along with each other and and allow them to form community.

It should be no surprise that in the late hippie and post-hippie periods, that nondenominational mega-churches evolved to provide all of the community services. Many mega-churches went so far as to have motorcycle committees, camping committees and world travel committees.

Without the centuries old trappings of mainstream churches and with powerful community elements that mega churches offer, it is not surprising that they have grown so rapidly.

Kvetching

 

I have no direct observation of what is happening in Israel today. My observations are based on two recent trips to Israel and a simple theory.

Israelis seem to be leaving a perfectly normal life without much concern about their crazy incompetent Arab neighbors.  This seems to have been going on for the past three or four years. Normalcy.

After 2000 years of living in a persecuted environment, including the last 130 years in Israel,  I think we may be seeing many real Jews. A group of people who have a deep love of kvetching.

If I am right this type of kvetching will go on for the next hundred years.

The entire Israeli protest began over the high price of cottage cheese.  So you know it was kvetching.  The movement seems to have spread to college student’s, inherently kvetching Lefties. And then to the entire Left.

In Israel the Left is in a terrible position. They still believe in socialism that is destroying Europe and was rejected by Russia, China, India and many other starving people.  The left in Israel is in a particularly hopeless position because the Arabs they wanted to make peace with started killing them. In large numbers and in their universities.

Money evaporated

I love hearing people say about the stock market ‘don’t worry it will return to its former highs.’

What are they basing this on?

My reading of past financial declines indicates we just lost investment funds and that loss is transmitted to the commercial world. When a stock or home price declines that money has evaporated. It will only return when corporations and businesses have earned it back as retained earnings. That money is gone.

When the first financial collapse occurred in midyear 2008 we lost $40 trillion globally. I estimated it would take five years to return to the same level of abundant cash.  The current drop is roughly half the previous decline so we just lost an additional $20 trillion globally. That adds two-and-a-half years to the length of recovery. A total of 7 ½ years from 2008.

With the economy of the US growing at less than 1% for the first half of 2011, it is fair to say we are in a recession, right now.

Sorry for the bad news.  If we had a government that understood the need to separate the volatile financial world from the stable commercial world we would not be having this type of problem.

Krugman

I never get angry at what Paul Krugman writes.

The reason is simple. I have read the book he wrote that got him a Nobel prize in economics.

The book is Geography and Trade. Published by MIT press in 1992. It is about 150 pages short.

The book is largely an indictment of economic theory. In the 200 years that men have been developing economic theory no one has ever previously noticed that industries tend to grow up in limited geographic locations. Weaving and fabric processing were pure New England. Clothing manufacturer was in the Carolinas as was rug production. Computers and the Internet were Silicon Valley and San Francisco.  Automobiles and before them carriages were Detroit.

Those are the observations that Krugman’s book is based on. He was simply calling economists attention to the facts than any businessman has known for a century. Not a man of insight.  Just seeing the obvious one hundred years after the ordinary businessman.

He ain’t right about anything else, he ain’t knowledgeable about anything, he is merely a political ideologue who writes a uniquely dishonest column for the New York Times.

I saw the same dishonesty because he advised the Japanese government from the early 1990’s to the late 1990s in how to deal with the real estate bubble and ensuing economic turmoil. He was in favor of using Keynesian debt financing.  The Japanese followed his advice.  It never worked.  After hurting millions of people, he always said more debt financing was necessary. He never learned from his own experience because he is ‘uniquely dishonest’.

Pinocchio in office

I have trouble watching any presidential TV addresses these days.  President Obama seems to lie more than any president in my lifetime.

As I watch him on TV I see his ears growing just like Pinocchio’s nose. Our affirmative action president seems to lie perpetually.

The most recent instance was during the debt ceiling battle.  President Obama actually said that Social Security checks might not be sent to seniors after August 2.  That was a blatant intentional lie.  It was the act of a very mean man.  

Many of the tens of millions of people who live on Social Security are incapable of recognizing that the President’s statement was political manipulation. It was very cruel to tens of millions of vulnerable Americans.

In thinking about the long history of presidents, the only equivalent level of meanness I can imagine was that of Andrew Jackson who signed the law moving the Cherokee and other tribes from Alabama and the South to Oklahoma.  Tens of thousands of innocent, peaceful Native Americans died in the March of Tears.

The president’s disgrace and meanness is only matched by the AARP, the disgusting organization that pretends to represent seniors.  The AARP never called the president a liar. That is because the AARP is blinded by its management’s Lefty Democratic hate agenda.

Pirate disgrace

The Pirates in the Red Sea-Indian Ocean are a disgrace for America.

More than 50% of the international trade, by tonnage, is carried by ships. It has always been the responsibility of one competent nation to protect ships at sea from piracy.

That responsibility has changed often.  The British were particularly good at protecting the high seas from piracy.

America has been a failure at accepting this responsibility. The first instance of our significant failure was the piracy in the Straits of Malacca and the piracy that attacked Vietnamese refugees. The current disgrace is off of Somalia.

The only excuse for American negligence is our incompetence, our stupidity in failing to understand our role in the world, and most importantly the vigorous lefty hatred of commerce that is still extensive in America.  

Protecting ships at sea is America’s responsibility. We are the only pro-commerce country with military power in the world.  For the time being we are a disgrace.

I hope some future president apologizes to the world for our neglect of our responsibilities.

Union scams spread, not in education

The previous blog describes a common use of emergency personnel. In most American cities the firemen’s unions have figured out that the 60% decline in the number of fires in the past 50 years requires replacement of fire calls by emergency health calls, otherwise firemen and fire stations would have to be reduced.

So now we have very expensive ambulances and pumper trucks responding with sirens to heart attack calls and fall-down-drunks.

This national scan is spread by fireman’s unions.

Which raises the question in my mind, why don’t the educational unions spread the successful educational projects that are constantly emerging in American education?

Stupid me. Unions have only one purpose, to preserve themselves.... As they have been doing for the past 500 years.

Jurisdiction party

This is a photo of two overlapping jurisdictions.

One of the ambulance and emergency personnel teams comes from Santa Monica, the other from the city of Los Angeles. Their jurisdictions overlap at this point and both have arrived at the same time.  The personnel generally love these overlaps because they get to stand around and socialize.  Both teams get to list the call on their daily roster.

The subject of this emergency happens to be a standard fall-down-drunk.  The majority of emergency calls in every jurisdiction in America are fall-down-drunks.

Many efforts have been made to find less expensive more imaginative solutions to this large population of people who are trying commit suicide at taxpayers expense.

There have been special vehicles designed to take the drunks to rehab centers. Do-gooders usually destroy these programs. 

In the process they leave the fall-down-drunks to the care of emergency room medical personnel who find other forms of livelihood to avoid servicing this smelly, poopy, irresponsible population.

Do-gooders make sure no improvement in the situation ever happens.  Emergency personnel just bill the city at high rates.

 

Flowers with TV

I don’t often enough offer praise for small retail workers.  This satellite dish reminded me.

All across America, and the world, there are people standing behind counters for up to 60 hours a week, patiently waiting for customers.

This is a kind of endurance and patience that I do not have. I simply have an appreciation for the generous offering of our retail brethren.

The photo is a flower shop on a street corner in San Francisco that has a satellite TV dish on the roof. I love it because it gives the retail flower shop operator something to do during the endless hours of waiting and serving. It is especially valuable during world soccer periods.

Sebastapol

 

This blog is part of a series.  The photo is the main street in Sebastapol a small town in northern California, Sonoma County.

I have focused a few blogs on the issue of small town revival. The revival that is going on today is the result of the Internet allowing young people to work anywhere. Consequently some choose to live in or near small towns.

There are several classic models for small towns attempting to revive themselves. One is to create a hokey small-town historical image whether it is Gold Rush, Western, Rustic New England or Disneyland. They always fail.

My approach for reviving small towns is that revival comes from people not streets.  The town needs to offer a few amenities that appealed to young interesting people. When those people arrive they will create the appropriate small Main Street business, like Sebastapol.

The types of amenities that appeal to young people range from colorful bars and dancing to open and inviting coffee shops and a few fine restaurants.

 

Professor Bachmann

In an earlier blog I cited Governor Palin as a public professor who teaches us accurate history as opposed to the mainstream media that doesn’t seem to know American history.

Now I must elevate Congresswoman Bachmann to the status of a public professor who teaches Americans accurate history when the mainstream media doesn’t seem to know American history.

The issue arises from a pledge that the Congresswoman signed in the Iowa primary.  The pledge began with a sentence that: slaves had two parents they lived with in 80% of the American South, compared to 20% of black slave decendents today.

The mainstream media had a hysterical fit denying the accuracy of the sentence in the pledge. Once again the mainstream media doesn’t know American history and once again they don’t bother to check with reliable authorities.

Congresswoman Bachmann was correct and the pledge sentence is accurate. Here is the source.

 

Monk

I love the old TV show Monk.  The problem has been that the star, Tony Shaloub,  is personally a monster (as reported by retailing friends) and a prominent Jew hater.

It took a while for me to resolve the conflict between who he is and the great detective he plays on TV.

I slowly realized that a good actor creates a person different than themselves.  The actor himself may be a disgusting human being, but he has created an imaginary person who by the magic of theater allows me to enjoy the creation.

That is a pretty wonderful quality of the theatrical world. It is fortunate because the theatrical world is filled with disgusting, stupid and offensive actors.