Pro Commerce

'Stupid' survey researcher

“The first lesson you learn as a pollster is that people are stupid,” said Tom Jensen

This quote from a Democratic survey researcher is not surprising. It is simply a sign of a stupid person with no experience in the field.

I virtually never use the word 'stupid' in this blog, because it is a fantasy description of an unknown person very similar to the psychoanalytic descriptions I so often hear of Republican presidents by  Democrat psychologists who never met them. I think psycho-analytic descriptions of people you have not met is absurd and rarely used on anyone other than a Republican office holder. 'Stupid' is the same thing.

I call this survey researcher stupid in this case because I have done survey research for nearly 50 years. In my earliest days of doing survey research I conducted many hour-long interviews by myself of a randomly selected population. Since then I have often done personal interviews in order to carry out focus group work or to refine the wording of a questionnaire.

The single most striking quality of randomly selected citizens when interviewed, is the intelligence and coherence of their worldview in virtually every single case.  People are not 'stupid.' Of course you have to be honest to say this.

No person I have ever met who did this type of qualitative in-depth interviewing has ever come to a different conclusion about random citizens.

It is with that firm and convincing experience that I call the man referred to in the first paragraph 'stupid'.

What this man is himself mistaking for stupidity is the fact that all questions are probes into the respondents' mental world. The probe can be ridiculous, not understandable or can have many other confusing elements. That is why a good survey researcher pretests his/her questionnaires to make sure that the questions are not totally ambiguous nor will result in contradictory responses. Tom Jensen does bad survey research work.

Over several years, using the same questionnaire for tens of thousands of people, I went back to the raw data to see the range of interpretations of the questions' wording that were possible. In a large sample virtually every interpretation of every word in the questionaire turned out to be on record. Contradictions did occur even with a first-rate questionnaire when used over a large enough sample.

Japan today - new politics

I get many reports from my friends and also see a great deal online about changes that are occurring in the Japanese political world.

I have now talked to several friends in Japan who understand politics. One was a major party campaign manager for the largest left-wing political party.

What is happening is that the Japanese disdain for their national government that arises from a general sense of political malaise was increased significantly by the failure to deal well with the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown.

This is taking the form of a national interest in consolidation of political support for the mayor of Osaka: Toru Hashimoto.

There will probably be elections to the Diet before Midsummer.  Hashimoto is likely to run many supporters and win more than 100 seats if the press does not crucify him before-hand the way the press tends to do with Republicans in the United States.  With 100 seats for reform he will also find coalitions with sufficient other minority parties to give him national power.

The revolution in politics that Hashimoto is proposing is to distribute political and financial power away from the central government to local governments. He has a slight Milton Friedman agenda, with the intention of reducing the direct restraining power of government over commerce.

Hashimoto is young, persuasive and may well be the face of reform in Japan.

Dishes and the futurama restaurant

When Disney World was being designed in the mid-1970s the plan included a section called Futureland.  The public was invited to submit designs.

I submitted a styrofoam model with descriptions.  My model was a restaurant of the future. Its uniqueness consisted of four elements.

One was a glass wall overlooking a Japanese garden. This was not new in Japan, but nearly nonexistent outside of Japan.

The second was the presence of hand made and aesthetically beautiful dining tables and chairs. Again, this was influenced by the hippie design elements found in the 1973 book Handmade Houses.

The third element was hand made dishes, glasses and silverware.  Handmade dishware was something I've only recently seen in the sushiya described in the previous blog.

The fourth element was necessary to protect the third element. It was a sign on the wall in the entrance that established the restaurant rules.  In addition to requests for courtesy, no smoking and civil discourse was the expectation that there would be no theft. If anyone was suspected of theft they would never be permitted to return.

I admit, the Disney people didn't find my view of the future similar to their Buck Rogers view.  

Sushiya and provenance

I recently had my expensive sushi experience.

The sushi chef is not the one who has a movie made about him and operates a sushiya with 10 seats and three Michelin stars. That shop is near Ginza.  Meals there are $400 per person.

My sushi chef has a 12 seat restaurant and the meals are only $200 per person. This sushi of course is extraordinary. This shop is in Shimbashi. This chef was awarded last year’s top Japan sushi chef award.

The reason I bring this to your attention is because Mr.Nagayama, Katsu does something that I considered to be the act of a marketing genius.

Every evening there is a large piece of rice paper on the wall with the name of the seafood to be served in the top column, followed by a description of how the food was caught, in detail whether net or long line or hook, as well as the wholesale supplier and the locale of origin either a town or a segment of ocean. One piece of the tuna came from a fish caught off of Ireland.

I call this document the Provenance of the food.  there are many other types of business that could display such a document of provenance from fancy American restaurants to shoe stores. It is a brilliant way to connect customers to their products.

Chef Nagayama happens to write his providence document with an extremely beautiful calligraphic hand. I don’t expect that from anyone else.

Nuclear future?

After yesterdays blog on nuclear power in Japan I want to comment on nuclear power in California. My readers know that Germany is giving up nuclear power over the next eight years in response to the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown. The Germans know that the Japanese are great engineers and a meltdown in Japan is a horrible sign.

Since I visited Fukushima last year after the meltdown and took geiger counter measures of my own I returned to California to testify before the California Public Utilities Commission on the issue of nuclear power at the two operating power stations in California. Both are on the ocean and both are on earthquake fault lines.

My testimony was based on my experience in interviews in Fukushima Prefecture. I found that virtually everyone 45 years and younger and all families with young children were leaving. The Prefecture was being deserted by the hard-working productive future.

It has nothing to do with the actual level of radiation damage or danger. Most humans will not risk their lives or their children's lives in the face of an unknown.

The California Public Utilities Commission gave me the finger. They refused to admit my testimony on nuclear issues, even though I am a certified expert, on this subject. They behaved like an ostrich and could not see any relevance to the nuclear issue for the two utilities that operate the San Onofre (photo) nuclear power plant.

History has been on my side. The following article from the Wall Street Journal confirms my concern about nuclear plant leakage. It is a problem, the pipes leak at San Onofre.

If and when someone finds high radiation readings near and outside the San Onofri powerplant, the local young population will start moving away. California nuclear plants will kill the future of the towns nearby.

Satellite data on temperature

I stopped paying attention to global temperature when the data I was using was changing every time I compared it with earlier data from the same source.

Just for your own files, this is the satellite data that doesn't need to average thousands of thermometers around the world.  

I know data.  I don't see the rising wavy line created to fit the data.  I see two straight lines.  One from 1979 to1997 and one from 1999 to 2011 separated by .3 of a degree C over a total of 30 years.   

Japan today - nuclear

I have spoken to several of my most reliable friends in Japan to find out the current circumstances about nuclear issues in Japan.

I have commented previously on how much the Japanese distrust their government especially since the Fukushima Daiichi meltdown.

Slowly 52 of the 54 reactors in Japan were shut down over the past year. The remaining two will be shut down this week. Nuclear power comprises 10 to 20% of all Japanese power and more during the hot summers.

My question has been whether the Japanese citizenry will turn off nuclear power.

The answer is as follows. The federal government is set to approve the reopening of nearly all the nuclear power plants via the decisions of two agencies. Whether any plant reopens is finally determined by local governors and administrators.

My best friends' estimates range from zero plants ever being reopened to a maximum of 12 plants being reopened.

Japan is finished with nuclear power and plans to substitute the emerging abundance of natural gas from the US. Canada, and New Zealand in the form of LNG.  There may possibly be natural gas in or near Japan.

Isabella Bird - 2

I did the core research on Africa as a graduate student in 1963. For a professor in Wisconsin, Marvin Miracle, I read and reviewed every written document about sub Sahara Africa written before 1850. I collected all the economic references which were later used to create the core of our knowledge of African economics and trade.

I read several dozen explorers. So I have a good sense of how explorers attitudes and observations reflect the society they came from.

The most striking material that comes from reading Isabella Bird’s description of the backcountry of Japan is that like most explorers of her era, all other peoples were seen as inferior. The Japanese Buddhist and Shinto practices were seen as voodoo and prayers for greed as opposed to the inimitable virtues of Christianity. All morals on the part of the Japanese were inexplicable because they were not Christians.

All non-Europeans were inherently dishonest and scheming, incapable of aesthetic or technological accomplishment. When Isabella looked at the gardens behind her guest rooms the trees were horrible, distorted and disfigured. Europe had yet to discover the genius of Japanese bonsai or other Japanese abilities to cultivate and configure trees developed over centuries.

The Japanese never cheated Ms. Bird, but she saw skimming and bribery everywhere because that was the practice in Europe. She didn't speak Japanese. England was just beginning to understand sewer systems and sanitation and so Ms. Bird was rapturous whenever she saw sewers working well and sanitation carefully observed.

Lastly and most importantly historians describe the English, who came to America in the 1600's (think Thanksgiving) who could only eat what they ate previously in England in the 1600s.  The same was true for Ms. Bird in the 1870s. She only ate rice, often complaining about that, with eggs, tea, condensed milk and sugar. Several times, over months, she had a boiled chicken.

As a trained horticulturist she recognized all of the fruit and plants surrounding her from cabbage, radishes and mushrooms to carrots and eggplant. She recognized the fruits from apples to persimmons. She never tried any of this, fresh or pickled. The Japanese eat abundant fish and seaweed. She never tried any of it.

To this day the British have a very narrow range of tastes, even the royal family visiting San Francisco would have been happy eating at Denny's.

Isabella Bird - 1

There are two parts to this blog. First is what Isabella Bird saw in Japan in her travels in the 1870s from Yokohama through the mountains to Niigata on the Japan Sea and on to Hokkaido.  The second part is a reflection on what Ms. Bird tells us about the England of her time.

What Ms. Bird saw, she saw through the lenses of an English woman of her time. An upper middle class educated religious, unmarried woman in her 40s. What she saw was very clean and appealing in areas in well-established central urban areas. She commented on the cleanliness and the incredible proper manners displayed by everyone. She was very impressed everywhere with the extraordinary attention paid to children. Mothers and daughters never let a child out of their reach. Fathers played with the children immediately upon coming home. The children at all ages were behaving to Ms. Bird's highest English standards of kind gentle and well behaved.

Ms. Bird was always surprised by acts of kindness and honesty. The Japanese were very industrious, the hardest working people she had ever seen in her global travels. When she tried to pay for hot water or any other kindness, the Japanese refused the money. She always expected to be cheated. Since she didn't know the language nor anything about commerce she never learned how unbelievably honest the Japanese actually are.

She complained about their filthy habits of the farmworkers and rural people as well as their nakedness. She commented on how much better off they would be if they bathed at least once a week like English people. 

Since Ms. Bird retired to her bedroom accommodations, really just tatami floors and shoji walls, shortly after 6 PM, she had no idea that the Japanese bathed every evening. They got dirty during the day from working but they bathed every evening. Moreover, the women were naked above the waist on hot days working in their private kitchens.  The men always wore a loincloth tied around their waist and between their legs. To Ms. Bird they were naked, even in the hot summer, running with a rickshaw behind them.

Ms. Bird considered Japanese horses to be incompetent, poorly trained and feeble. They probably were since horses were never important, nor carriages, to the Japanese.

Ms. Bird, was an excellent reporter on flora and fauna. She saw many beautiful sites and spent many happy days in-between her weeks of rain, bugs and misery.

She went to Japan to study the Ainu who live in Hokkaido the Northern island.  She found them to be kind, gentle, lazy, drunken, European looking, hairy "savages". They were also naked, never bathed, ate and worshipped bears.

Saved the world from CFC’s

This is a blog about two subjects.

One is a continuation of my theme about science and modern hysteria about a field that is mostly farce.

Two, is about the inadequacy of journalists. Again, an ongoing theme with me.

The story comes from an article in the Los Angeles Times about the death of a scientist, Sherwood Rowland, who was given credit for having understood the connection between CFC's and holes in the ozone layer. I have no doubt that the factual matter in the story is accurate.

It is also important to know that this research resulted in the complete replacement of every air-conditioning and refrigeration unit on the planet with coolants that have been more expensive and less effective than the original CFCs as a result of Rowland's work. Plus environmental concensus.

It has recently come to light that there are new holes in the ozone layer. In the 1970s the holes were mostly in Antarctica.  Now there are fresh holes in the Arctic ozone.

I am sure there are many people who are trying to discover the cause of the new holes. Someday we may know. In the meantime this Arctic story will be suppressed because it inherently conflicts with the environmentalists’ claim that they saved the world by getting rid of CFCs.

The new problem also presents a more serious issue which is that we may have cured a nonexistent problem. Ozone holes may be a natural phenomenon that cure themselves. That rings too close to the truth about climate warming and the hysterical effort to make humans change their behavior in order to cure a natural phenomenon.

My two points are: we may be tempted by environmentalists to cure problems that are not problems on claims about brilliant science that are phony.  I suggest that science is itself mostly fiction.

Additionally, a journalist for the reputable LA Times, doesn't bother to hit the Google button and find out the current status of ozone holes. I claim that journalists are generally not very bright, which is the reason they are Lefties and they lack fundamental moral direction and competence.

This LA Times article is my evidence.

Is our president a global farce?

Just look at this video.

Can the President of the United States be viewed as anything but a farce?  Everyone in foreign affairs around the world knows that the Foreign Minister of Turkey is a fool and is ignored by his own coalition.

Now the facts are out.  The whole planet knows that the American president is a babbling fool who is not interestred in his job and not competent to do anything but put on snappy suits.

 

Groupon and Yelp

GRPN and YELP, two recently listed stocks that I consider to be worthless. Billions of dollars of bull.

Why?

Groupon sells discounts for group purchases. Businesses that offer these discounts make the assumption that this is an effective marketing tool to attract customers who will become repeat business in the future at the full non-discounted price.

That just happens to be absurd. A simple rule of marketing is that people will not pay more for the same object or experience than they paid the first time. Another rule of marketing is that people who seek out discounts are not desirable customers for the long term.

After Groupon has exhausted all the junkie ignorant businesses, it will fail.

Yelp has a different problem.  Yelp is presumably a business that offers customer criticism and complements about businesses they have used. If you Google Yelp on this blog on the left, you will see that I wrote a blog years ago that continues to get an endless stream of complaints from business people who found that Yelp offered to sell them advertising.  When the business refused to buy advertising they found that criticism of their business move from nonexistent to excessive in the first few lines of Yelp comments.

This type of crooked, dishonest behavior will put Yelp out of business either because of government action, lawsuits or public understanding that supports an honest competitor.

I won't sell short these two stocks because I don't know how long they will take to fail.  But they will fail.

Toy Story

I don't know how many of my readers have seen the movie Toy Story 3.

The relevance for this blog is that it was a brilliant film with complex multiple overlapping storylines that were still understandable to a 10-year-old.  It was made at Pixar Studios in Emeryville California and it ranks as one of the most successful international animated films in history.

Emeryville is a small town in the center of the San Francisco-San Jose urban area located between the Cuban village of Berkeley and the Nigerian village of Oakland. Emeryville is astoundingly successful because it is pure commerce with no anti-business elements in the government.

What is so stunning is that an animated movie is created on computers and entirely as a representation of the mind of some writers. It is a pure mental creation. The fact that it can generate hundreds of millions of dollars worldwide shows exactly where the world is today.

Good minds, creative minds are the source of modern wealth in a commercial world.

Tokyo drip

In an earlier blog I described the United States as a Third World country with a tech veneer.

A simple story will illustrate what I mean.

These two events happened at the same time.

I was in Tokyo at a house of my friend. The toilet required a screwdriver to turn on the water flow because the expensive automatic toilet seat had not been repaired.  My friend was too busy.  I turned on the screw and accepted a very small drip, roughly a quart a day.

Three days later a man from the city water department knocked on the door to say that we had a leak and needed to fix it.

The same year, when I returned home to San Francisco, we found a small river gushing out of a hole in the adjacent neighbors backyard. I filtered the water and tasted it. It was good and I assumed it was an artesian well, which was possible in our neighborhood. The water had been flowing for the two months I was gone.

I got all excited and thought about selling bottled water from our artesian well. But being cautious I phoned the water department about the flow of water. A week later the water department came and took a sample of the water. If it had chloramine in it it was city water. Chloramine is not taste-able.  After another week the water department came and dug up some pipes in the main street and found the leak in a water main.

So one country can detect a few quarts of water leaking in hours. In the United States, a Third World country, months pass as gallons pour out.

Perfect legislation- part 2

Continuation from the previous blog.

‘Start with the premise that nearly all government is intrusive on individuals and businesses and generally irrelevant or harmful.

That means perfect legislation would diminish the impact of government intrusion.’

My second piece of perfect legislation would take most rule and regulatory actions out of the legal system and out of agency enforcement.

A perfect piece of legislation would require that every rule and regulation that is listed on the 3' x 6' notice described in the previous blog would require a clear path for adjudication within the agency responsible for enforcement. Such adjudication procedure would not require lawyers and would emphasize arbitration by independent authorities. Such a path of adjudication would include internal appeals.  A similar process operates in the California Labor Dept.

No rules or regulations could be enforced or taken to court until the procedure within the relevant agency had been exhausted.

Those of you who have dealt with the EEOC or any similar agency, will know that such required internal process before going to court will make sure that less than one out of 1000 cases will ever make it to court. Few will ever be enforced.

I called this and the previous suggested legislation the Hallelujah Laws.  

It is my hope that such simple legislation would get nearly every government body off the backs of the citizenry and still allow a portion of criminal laws to be enforced.

Perfect legislation- part 1

Start with the premise that nearly all government is intrusive on individuals and businesses and generally irrelevant or harmful.

That means perfect legislation would diminish the impact of government intrusion. At the present time the California government and the federal government each passes or creates 200 new regulations every year. For all states that number, in a decade, is astronomic.

To me, perfect legislation would make sure that 99% of rules and regulations are un-administratable and 1% might be available for citizens and businesses to use when necessary.

Here is my first piece of legislation:

All businesses, buildings and moving transportation that is open to the public must display all laws, rules and regulations pertinent to that site on a 3' x 6' paper in 11 point type. For moving vehicles the paper must be available in fold-up form.  

If the relevant agencies that govern that site cannot fit their rules on the paper, then no prosecution can be brought against citizens or businesses on the invisible rules.

The logic of this legislation is obvious. In a democracy made up of decent citizens and a decent government all legal limitations on an individual or business must be clearly visible to the relevant party at the relevant time.  That is at the core of the Miranda Rights which have survived all court tests for 50 years.

This proposed new law clearly supports the Bill of Rights notion of no bill of attainder.  You can’t be punished for what you didn’t know.

Can't we have such decent and necessary legislation?

Wilkinson Steel blades

There are two lessons to be taught in this blog.

The story is about an experience that I had in the 1960s and 70.

Like nearly all men in those days I shaved every day. The blades I used, both Schick and Gillette, only lasted a few days since they were low quality steel. They were sold in grocery stores and drugstores.

In the early 1960s, around 1964, I learned about a stainless steel blade that was sold by the Wilkinson gardening tool company in gardening shops. I bought some and found that each blade lasted many weeks.... sometimes a month.  I told all my friends and before long the Wilkinson steel razor blades had penetrated to 8% of the American blade market. The blades were never available at grocery stores or drugstores. Schick and Gillette kept them out.

How does a company like Schick or Gillette keep a competitive product off the shelves?  Simple. They tell the stores and the distributors that no further razors or blades will be available if the Wilkinson blade is sold at that store or that chain.

Kodak did the same thing to Fujifilm in the United States for decades.

 Schick and Gillette also mounted large advertising campaigns and introduced their own stainless steel blades.

Lack of management at Wilkinson meant that Wilkinson pulled out of the United States and the company was sold in the 1980s to a subsidiary of Gillette.

There are two points: one is that the government is totally incapable of pursuing anti-monopoly policies when clear monopolistic practice is being carried out. Antitrust was and is the haven of idiots working for the government. Two, the way to enter a new market with a superior product is to distribute in an unconventional channel. In this case gardening stores for a product that should have been in grocery stores and drugstores.

Mission street - gov’t destroys business

I live in San Francisco.  A far Left city that hates cars and hates business even more.

Somehow, the people who start businesses are blind to the anti-business milieu that we live in. Fortunately.  Only when their companies are large enough to attract the Lefty hate do they do anything. They leave and take their companies with them.

Let me help you understand how this hatred works. One way it works is sheer blind inconsiderate ignorance.

For the next four months, Mission Street is being torn up over an eight block area that is the center of low income San Francisco commerce. All the buses are being rerouted and most street parking is unavailable.

This is a problem that my good friend Peter Sherrill (photo on right) and I discussed for many years, many years ago.

Back when BART was being built in the 1960s Peter was working for the the government transportation agency and was asked to estimate the amount of lost business when the same part of Mission Street was closed for five years. What Peter found was that the loss of business was so great that the future value of BART, our underground rail system, could never earn back an amount to offset that loss.

The 1965 Mission St. commerce never recovered after the hole had become a subway.

New digging is now going on in the center of San Francisco for a new subway line but I have not calculated the cost, knowing it can never be recovered in the social benefits of the new subway. The actual route of the new subway is a farce, in itself, going from nowhere to nowhere.

But the Mission Street damage is calculable.  I assume that most businesses pay rent equal to or less than 10% of their gross revenue and the average rent on Mission Street is $100 per street front foot.

That is roughly 7000 street front commercial footage.  That comes to gross revenues of $7 million a month for the area being torn up. Times five months of direct suppression of business of 60% and an assumed loss of business for a year of 30%.

The total loss of business is $30 million.

What kind of street improvements could be done to Mission Street that will ever give it a return of that amount of money?

Nothing. The government is incapable of understanding the blind ignorant damage it does.

I reiterate my basic position: government only metastasizes. We must somehow learn to stop it or understand how damaging it is.

Left loves nazism, racism and gay accusations

Ahmadinejad's buddy Hugo Chavez is in a close electoral race against a good candidate, Henrique Capriles.

Being a Lefty, it is natural for Chavez to support Nazi values and call his opponent a zionist and a gay jew-monster, just like his Persian brother.  Here is the video footage in Spanish (footage has since been taken down).  It is shocking.  Too close to the original 3rd Reich.  (Thanks to my friend Larry Whitted.)

Here is a commentary in English. Pretty disgusting.

If you are a Lefty, it wouldn't hurt to ask yourself why Lefty leaders are so prone to sound like Nazi's, racists and anti-gay thugs.  Hint: same basic view of the world.  Another hint: add Venuzuela to the list of failed Lefty governments in Cuba, North Korea and the USSR.

Oh, you need a reference to Lefty racism.  That reference is all from Lefty statements in the U.S.

 

 

The Real vs the old with the old dying

My regular readers know what the title of this blog is about.

When I talk about Real I am talking about the political world that we came to understand emperically in the 20th century.  Millions died trying to create an ideal man using the power of government. Government cannot create the ideal man and a powerful central government is also incapable of generating or supporting the core elements of commerce necessary to feed and clothe a nation. We further learned that when government becomes too large a percentage of the GNP that the commercial functions of the society are damaged and generally suppressed.

I have also pointed out that nearly all human beings are incapable of changing their mind, certainly incapable of changing their ideology after age 23.

Put these two things together and you can understand the title of my blog. There is a vast population of Lefties who learned to deny reality before they were 23 and a large population who are over that age and didn't learn the lessons of the 20th century.

I simply want to generate the type of optimism that is warranted because the Left is going to die off in the next 20 to 40 years.

Special derangement syndrome

My regular blog readers know that I have decided to accept as brothers the self-hating Jews on the Left who are so hostile to Israel. The reason is simple. We have learned in the past 2500 years that when Jews are divided they are easily conquered. That will never happen again. That is why I accept as brothers the Lefty self-hating Jews.

I have even gone further and decided that all Jew-hate can be understood in the same way.

Let us quickly examine what Jew hate is. The Jews, we Jews, are the oldest continuous population line known on the planet. We have maintained the same language and the same practices and the same literature for a period of time that is unimaginable for any other people. Yet, we consist of a tiny percent of the world. Less than 2% of Americans. Less than 0.2% of the population of the developed world.

And yet a Jew-hater will ascribe to us powers and skills that are not available to any people of any population size anywhere on the planet.  Not to the brilliant Japanese, not to the Jesuits and not to members of Mensa.

Reading that last paragraph will let you know the conclusion I have come to about Jew haters.

They are mentally deranged. Most Arabs, half the people in Europe and a good chunk of the Lefties in the world are mentally deranged.

There is no other way to explain why people would hold such an absurd paranoid idea.

America is not divided

I want to make this perfectly clear.  Most people I talk to are confused on this issue.

The Tea Party is about one thing and only one thing: the federal government and a few state governments where the Tea Party won elections are growing too large. That's it.

All federal governments in history, have continued to grow without boundary, they can only metastasize. That is world history.  

This is a horrible and horrifying fact. That is precisely what the U.S. Constitution and the Amendments, especially the 10th Amendment, were designed to avoid. The founders had already had too much government intrusion in their lives. That is why the Tea Party always refers to the U.S. Constitution as its core document.  'Stop the growth of government'.

In the year 2009, a large segment of the American public realized that our government had grown too large and was continuing to grow... to metastasize.  The passage of the Obama Health Care bill using a dishonest budget voting mechanism was the final act that awoke a sleeping dragon.

There are two significant reasons to disdain the growth of government: (1) as government grows it inevitably and invariably crowds out investment in the commercial sector and restrains economic growth. (2) As government grows it becomes more intrusive in the lives of individuals and businesses. Both forms of intrusion restrict commercial development and economic growth.

The harmful effects of the growth of government as a percentage of GNP is evident in every nation in the world. It is with this evidence and personal experience that the American people rose up against the massive extension of government in the Obama Health Care bill in the election of 2010.

The Tea Party has made this especially evident with the elected representatives’ refusal to focus on reducing the debt by increasing taxes. The only form of legislation that is acceptable is to reduce the size of government expenditures and the government itself. Raising taxes will only perpetuate the growth of government.  The focus is not the debt, the focus is the size of the debt caused by malignant government growth with or without taxes to pay for it.

Is that clear?

America is not divided.  It consists of those Americans who have now recognized the horror of uncontrolled government growth and the original purpose of the Constitution and those who haven’t yet recognized this historic global horror.  One segment is growing and the other, the ones with their eyes closed to the cancerous growth, are aging.

Natural world of commerce

Some of the intellectuals in the core tradition of commerce, including Thomas Hobbes, have cited the amoral nature of the biological world as an attribute of humans.

It is evident to most people that the natural world is made up of species eating other species and often eating their own. Most large mammals eat smaller mammals and nearly all eat non-mammals. We eat a wide range of other species including the entire world of plants.

It can be painful to watch as I often see neighborhood cats attack and eat mice and birds.

There is no question in my mind that commerce has this eat and be eaten quality, though mergers and acquisitions do not seem to have the blood and moral pain I associate with cats eating birds.

It is the vast cooperative realm of bees, birds, ants and butterflies fertilizing flowers that is a model of voluntary cooperation that is such a perfect comparison of nature and commerce. Commerce is, on an individual level, nearly 100% voluntary cooperation and shared benefits.

In the biological world there is also parasitism. That describes much government, taxes and welfare in the commercial world.

Evolution in the natural world, divergence and selection, certainly parallels similar phenomenon in the commercial world. The pace of evolution is far more rapid in the commercial world.

I have written earlier blogs that argue environmentalists should see that their worship of diversity would lead them away from big government.  Now I only point out that commerce and the natural world operate in the same way and environmentalists should be more respectful of those of us who are fans of commerce.

WSJ activist

For many years, I have been reading the Wall Street Journal …. nearly 50 years. I was always aware how ineffective the WSJ was in the world.

I remember in the 1960s an article on problems at Cessna Aircraft. The article had no effect on the price of the stock nor on the behavior of the company.

I speculated, for 40 years, that the toothless quality of the WSJ was due to the fact that the editors didn't write articles in a series to follow up on uncovered misdeeds nor did they complement articles with polemic editorials.

This has changed, probably thanks to Rupert Murdoch who bought the paper in order to have influence.  Possibly making him one of the most influencial people in the world.

The most stunning example of the new WSJ activism and success is that the WSJ found and brought up the issue of Nancy Pelosi's insider credit card trading. Less than two months later both the House and the Senate have passed a bill intended to significantly reduce insider congressional trading.

That is the power of the activist WSJ, the largest circulation newspaper in America.

Congress floor rule

I hear an endless parade of complaints about lobbyists and never ending tirades about influence in politics.

Yet I have never, never heard anyone understand a key element in how lobbying is conducted.

The best lobbyists work with former members of Congress, particularly members who were popular and influential.

This is because any member of Congress retains the ability to access the floor of Congress for the rest of their life.

When I was active in DC, we always hired former Congress members because they could walk on the floor of Congress and into hearing rooms and make our case for a budget increase.

This strikes me as a point at which people who are uncomfortable with lobbying and political processes could simply act to limit physical congressional access to current members.

Women in college

Most of my readers know that colleges have been graduating far more women than men. The admissions data for the male/female ratio seems to have stopped rising before reaching the high 50% range for women more than 15 years ago.

In talking to my friends in academia who are involved in enrollment and admissions, they say there has been a rule of thumb for some time: men will avoid any campus where they see the ratio exceeds 3 women to 2 men.  

The consequence is that admissions officers keep the admissions numbers below that level but have no control over the graduation ratio. Men drop out at a much higher rate than women.

Additionally, I’m told, to attract more men requires expansion of the technology, engineering and computer sciences departments.

Many people speculate on the causes for this phenomenon and the social consequences. I do not have a simple explanation. In a society where the service and health industries are a growing proportion of employment  I do not find this academic trend surprising.

Since I do not consider college or university to be important to business except in the fields where men are focusing, I see little long-term impact.

My protege’s 2

I will take credit for the most powerful driving force in the lives of both Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Both proclaimed openly, extensively their believe that a person must orient themselves around the passion of their life. Their business views followed directly from this Phillips business teaching.  It is the first law of my The Seven Laws of Money published in 1974. (co-author Salli Rasberry)

Both Steves said that every detail of their business life was driven by their passion. Both also emphasized the need for fun in business. Another point that I made many times publicly and devoted a chapter to in my Honest Business.(co-author Salli Rasberry)

What I do not take credit for is the persistent and pervasive dishonesty of Jobs. Nor do I have anything to do with his mean-spiritedness, sense of revenge, nor his litigious focus on proprietary and secret business elements.  He was an immature brat.

I proclaimed openness and honesty in business as desirable attributes. Wozniak understood this and argued consistently my position against Jobs.

Both Wozniak and Jobs owe a far greater technical debt to John Capt. Crunch Draper than either acknowledges. Both Jobs and Wozniak made money, later used for their business, by making and selling blue boxes. Blue boxes were used to illegally circumvent the telephone network. Both were able to build them but their claim to have designed them is fallacious. Capt. Crunch and his cohorts were the ones who understood the phone network and provided the technical skills. It was common for hippies to use illegally generated money to start businesses (usually the money was from pot.)

Isaacson makes a big deal in his book about Jobs' veganism, love of Japan and his Zen Buddhism. These were core experiences of the inner 250,000 people in the hippie circle. I am still surrounded by the post hippie attachment to these values. Today I am in Tokyo.

One element that is central to Isaacson's book is the debate between openness and proprietary. While I was a fanatic advocate of openness and made it a requirement for businesses to join the Briarpatch, I did not explain problems with proprietary behavior until I taught hippie classes in the early 1980s and included it in the 1984 book Marketing Without Advertising.

Footnote: The photo of John Draper looks like he was the day he demonstrated his blue box for me and we listened in on an FBI conversation.

My protege’s 1

This blog is about Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. I just finished the Isaacson book on Jobs after being encouraged to read it by several close friends who know my connection to the events.

Both of these men are my protégés in business. In the next blog I will take credit for the good things they did and deny responsibility for Jobs’ bad behavior.

Why are they my protégés?

The definition of protégé is: ‘One .. whose career is furthered by a person of experience, prominence, or influence.’

Both of these men were hippies and I had a direct influence on the business values of the core group of hippies.

I breakdown the hippie population into three groups. First there was the group of a quarter of 1 million (250,000) people who lived fully in the hippie milieu: sex, drugs, clothes, hair and values. Both Jobs and Wozniak were in this category. The second category was 2.5 million people who used drugs and moved in and out of the complete hippie domain on weekends and other times. The third category were about 25 million who were influenced by the hippie movement and accepted most of the hippie behavior and values.

I was a dominant influence in the business values of the hippie world from 1970 for the next 20 years. I was president of the Whole Earth Catalog foundation, wrote dozens of articles for the Whole Earth magazine on business, and founded the Briarpatch Network of businesses that included well over 1000 Bay Area businesses from 1974 into the1980’s. I organized the original Greens restaurant, Steve Jobs' favorite San Francisco restaurant. I called on and gave advice at the Homebrew Computer Club where both Steves were active members. I was a friend of many of the significant influences and mentors for both men.

I also wrote prolifically, one of the few, on simple living which had a big influence on both Steves. Their formative hippie years were from 1970 to 1982.

Tomorrow's blog will deal with more specific elements of my influence.

The movie part of the brain

This year's Oscar night made graphic improvements that I appreciate. Additionally, there was no effort to insult half of the viewing audience with Lefty hate comments. Surprisingly, the presence of the French film crew for The Artist resulted in the first historic Oscar record of someone saying 'I love America.'

That is not what I want to comment on. There were many graphic  interludes with comments on screen by celebrity actors discussing the privileged, brilliant and socially meaningful importance of film. I disagree.

I think that films and novels actually stimulate a part of the brain that is associated with pornography.

It is part of the brain that is an entertainment source, but has no connection to reality. That is why I compare it to pornography which is always fresh and new and stimulating and a person who observes a great deal of pornography will not be able to use the experience to seduce a real person.

I have one example of the detachment of film experience from reality. In the 1980s when I was protesting the Diablo Canyon nuclear reactor being so close to the ocean and on top of a seismic fault I personally saw many protesters taken behind the prison-bound bus and beaten on the head with batons by the California Highway Patrol.

This matched exactly the police treatment of protesters in the Salt March in the movie Gandhi. I handed out fliers outside of the Gandhi movie describing the identical situation to the offensive footage in the movie. Out of hundreds of people who talked to me, not one understood that reality in California was identical to the footage they found so offensive in the movie.

I would venture to guess the same would be true of people coming out of a current Holocaust film.  Not one would connect their film experience to the fanatic six year-long rantings of Ahmadinejad in the daily press.

Even thinking back to the hundreds of novels I read, I must confess that I doubt anyone of them has prepared me to deal with reality. That includes The Scarlet Letter, Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, The Brothers Karamazov etc.

I repeat.... The part of the brain that enjoys entertainment is not connected to the rest of the important brain functions.  Hollywood films are entertainment and nothing more.

What I know about Larry Ellison

This story (C.W. Nevius) in a San Francisco newspaper describes how the local Board of Supervisors disgusted Larry Ellison. Ellison had agreed to rebuild two decrepit wharves that will never be repaired otherwise. The Supervisors made the project contingent on future Supervisors decisions, before agreeing to let the project proceed.  Ellison walked away from his generous offer.

Ellison has faced this type of politics before.

Ellison agreed to build a very large and expensive and elegant headquarters in the town of San Carlos. He got advanced agreement to expand the adjacent airport runway. A runway that I use regularly. The runway is within walking distance of his headquarters. A longer runway was needed in order to land his small jets.  Next to his offices.

Ellison made the mistake of accepting the promise of the San Carlos political powers to extend the runway.

He built the expensive headquarters and then went back to have the runway extended.

The San Carlos political powers, saw that the headquarters was finished and Ellison's leverage over them was gone. They said 'fuck you.'  

The lesson was learned. Ellison no longer will trust political power groups to deliver on future promises unless the leverage remains in place.

Ellison got to say to the San Francisco supervisors... exactly what the San Carlos political powers said to him.

The pure case

I stopped collecting and analyzing global warming data when I realized that the data was being ideologically distorted. It has been a while since I began ignoring the data.  I have since been viewing the supporters of global warming as pathetic people controlled by hysteria. Despite the fact that these sad people are often my friends and family members.

I am now in a worse position because it is no longer a matter of defective data manipulated by Lefty perverts. It is now a case of pure blindness.

In all science, there is always the possibility of a pure case experiment. The pure case experiment is a situation where the data cannot be manipulated, where the data has only one explanation and where the data explains the entire phenomenon.

Such is the case with the data at the bottom of this blog. The cumulative snowfall in the Sierra Mountains for over 130 years is recorded for one number each year. The cumulative total for the period is recorded and the annual variance is shown on the chart in standard deviations.

The perfect climate character of this data comes from the fact that the atmosphere that drops the snow has moved for 10 days over the Pacific ocean collecting water and moved one-half day later to drop the water in the mountains.  When the temperature is close to freezing the cloud water becomes snow.  The cumulative snow pack is what is measured in this chart. Being cumulative eliminates daily and monthly variation. You don’t need an average. There is virtually no human development or urban heat sink involved over the eleven day movement of the air one third of the way around the earth.

In this pure case we find no change in the snowpack over 130 years. We find no bullshit 'climate change' in the variance over that period.

Global warming and climate change are simply fictional.  This is a pure case. People who cannot grasp this fact have either hysteria, ideological blindness or an inability to comprehend simple statistics.