Pro Commerce

Weight Watchers goes PC

I have had the good fortune to go to Weight Watchers twice over the past four years.

In both cases I was able to lose weight. In the intervening years I gained weight.

The relevance of the two distinct periods of membership is that I saw Weight Watchers grow and expand. I had stock in the company because I was impressed with their product the first time.

The new Weight Watchers is somewhat different and very PC. The new Weight Watchers is entirely focused on counting points. The old one had another system which is properly discarded, it was for people who couldn't count points and probably didn't lose weight. Losing weight requires paying attention to the details of intake. Numbers.

The new Weight Watchers has two interesting PC elements.

One is they give points for exercise which can be used to offset eating points. That goes along with trying to reward people for exercising.  I personally recognize this as PC because it is wrong.  Exercise always makes me hungrier for calories than the number of calories I burn up. But exercise is popular and considered healthy.

Two, they treat all fruits and vegetables as zero points except for avocado. This is simply because it is PC to eat fruits and vegetables,  some of which have plenty of calories.

There is also a PC distaste for packaged and canned foods and hostility toward sugar.  None of which may have nutritional logic.

From a business perspective there are other revenue generating additions. From 10 to 15 products for sale they have gone to 30 or 40 at every location. They also are using celebrity posters to support their marketing pitch along with books of celebrity success.

I am not a fan of PC but I do appreciate what Weight Watchers is doing as a business.

DNA Jewish

I had an extraordinary experience, recently, when I went to hear a talk by Christopher Buckley, the son of William Buckley, the author of several humorous books.

Mr. Buckley was speaking at the Jewish Community Center and began his talk with the startling announcement that he is Jewish. He just learned this because his niece (they have the same maternal grandmother) had submitted a National Geographic DNA swab and found that her mitochondrial DNA had three alleles that were Ashkenazi Jew. The grandmother considered herself a High Church Episcopalian. She would have been very offended.

This was striking to me because my former wife and the mother of my children also found her DNA was four alleles Ashkenazi Jew.

What is surprising in the case of my former wife is that her Irish Roman Catholic family had kicked her out of the house when they found she was having sex with me, a Jew. The whole story is well told in Philip Roth's first book Goodbye Columbus. Roth occupied the same apartment as I, just as I was leaving the University of Chicago. He got the story from our mutual roommates.

When my wife and I were married in Israel by the Orthodox rabbis who wouldn't speak Hebrew, it was a long and arduous ordeal.... over six months to get permission to get married. The rabbis always assumed my wife-to-be was Jewish and never believed that I was despite countless efforts by my father, a reform Rabbi to convince them by mail.

That is the wonderful irony of National Geographic DNA.

Clean cars

I consider myself to be a observer for future anthropologists. I look for social phenomenon that are unlikely to be seen by others and might be hard to measure for future anthropologists and archaeologists.

I counted automobiles a few days ago on a 20 mile trip through the Bay Area. I saw, up close, well over 1000 cars.

My unusual observation is that all but one were very clean and none had a perceptible dent or remnant of a collision.

I wish I had done such a study on a regular basis.

I had a Japanese friend in the 1980s who loved to ride with me in the same area and photograph the outrageous damage that American’s left visible on their cars. There were plenty of examples of dented fenders, crumpled bumpers and mayhem of all sorts in addition to dirty cars.

To my friend this was bizarre because automobiles in Japan are immaculately clean and never driven in public with a scratch, a dent or dirt.

It is possible that the San Francisco Bay Area is a bad example because this is a boom time economically. It is also possible that the falling automobile accident and collision rate is reducing the number of damaged cars.

It is also possible that good weather and being in an urban area is an additional influence. I will try and do this type of observation more often in the future.

Obama is creating anti-black racism

My source for believing that president Obama is creating anti-black racism comes from a few of my black friends who have been detecting an increase in anti-black racism over the past two years.

It is surprising to me, until I think about. If we had a president who was Jewish and had the qualities that Obama presents I can see that it would increase the level of anti-Jewish sentiment among those who were already anti-Jewish and those who were marginally so.

I believe the same would have been true and quite visible in the Jack Kennedy administration concerning anti-Catholic bias. However he was assassinated before any evidence was available.

I consider the evidence from my black friends as valuable because the black community has been very clear in rejecting outright offensive blacks such as Rev.Sharpton.  Rev. Sharpton ran for president and was severely defeated in black communities in South Carolina. He was perceived as a serious embarrassment to blacks.

President Obama has several presentation problems which I understand can possibly encourage anti-black racism. He has promoted racist division in both the Cambridge and Florida white on black arrest cases.

He has encouraged and promoted class warfare. Hatred toward: "millionaires, billionaire, bankers, Wall Street and hedge fund managers". Something Americans find very offensive. He generated the, offensive to blacks, all white Occupy Movement.

President Obama is a divisive president who attacks Republicans aggressively and lies with little hesitation. He has shown no propensity for compromise or conciliation.

He has shown a mean spirit which does not endear him to people who might not like him in the first place. A year ago, in August, he told America's seniors that Congressional delay on raising the debt ceiling "could mean no social security checks". A very mean-spirited lie.  

I know of no national surveys that measure anti-black racism, but if there is one I expect to see a significant climb in anti-black racism over the past two years.

This is a sad outcome. It would not have happened if Gen. Powell or Secretary Condi Rice had been our first black president. They are both conciliatory people.

Emergency re-boot for the economy

- Stable tax horizon
- H1B visas
- Immediate expansion of free trade areas to Asia
- Natural gas export
- Moratorium on EPA, OSHA and Labor laws for 5 years

The United States is on an incipient economic decline at the present time and will take the world into a depression at the current rate. The Democrats are 100% to blame for the complete absence of recovery. They are also to blame for an unwillingness to change the direction of the United States from a hydra headed government octopus to a modern pro-commerce democracy.

1. Bill Clinton is right. We must immediately pass the Bush tax cuts and provide a stable horizon for the economy with an end to Obama care and major Medicare revisions.

2. We must expand the H1B visas immediately into the multi-hundred thousand range. We desperately need educated immigrants in our society as we always have. Bell Labs and most modern Internet companies are the byproduct of new educated immigrants. The impact will be immediate.

3. We have very few free trade agreements with Asia. Asia is the fastest-growing part of the world and we must immediately negotiate and pass free-trade agreements to increase our level of trade.

4. We must immediately approve LNG facilities for the export of natural gas to the world. This is the most immediate source of potential tax revenue and job growth. It is the future of American industry and must proceed rapidly. All barriers from the environmental fanatics must be suspended.

5. We need an immediate moratorium on all EPA, OSHA and labor regulations. No new regulations can be passed for five years and every month we must include a reduction of existing regulations.

Banking

Banks these days are getting a large share of public condemnation.

That is appropriate.

The banking that I knew in the 1960s and 70, when I was a bank VP, consisted entirely of business loans. No small business loans and no loans that were unsecured. Banks only made loans that were 120% secured by solid liquid or near liquid assets.

There were many other entities available to make loans on the basis of less security.

Even under the circumstances, my knowledge of bankers assured me that they were operating at the maximum limit of their capability. Bankers could only make loans that were 120% secure. They did not have competence to cope with risk.

That is still true today. It is unfortunate that the same people make loans at unimaginable levels of risk to: sovereign nations, to unsecured borrowers and to people who secure their loans with magical mathematical paper and investment instruments of uncredible complexity.

The bankers I knew could not cope with any of that.

The Volcker rule, which you hear bandied about much these days, simply says that bankers should only make loans of the traditional secured form.

I support that fully and I await the day when that is all bankers are allowed to do.

Hippies and love of business

More than just an anti-statist ideology, being a hippie meant you wanted to start something on your own whether it was a commune, health-food store or another form of new business.

Hippies were fanatic friends of new business and saw the only way to change the world was through new businesses. Not a shred of Lefty love of government in them.

Again I know this personally because my book The Seven Laws of Money brought hundreds of new hippie businesses to me for advice. They also knew that I had founded MasterCard.

I created the Briarpatch network made up of more than 1000 hippie businesses at its peak in the mid-1970s. The Briarpatch network was known throughout the hippie world at the time.  It symbolized the hippy love of business.

I was invited to help start similar networks in other parts of the United States and overseas. I was invited to Western England, Amsterdam, all of Sweden and France. I also spent many years developing a Briarpatch network in Japan where organic farming was extensive. Everywhere I was invited there were small businesses ready to blossom. They simply needed to hear the idea that businesses could be open, honest and loved.

The most important part of the Briarpatch was the fact that hippies loved business. Hippies found business to be their only clear and honest vehicle for bringing about change in the world …. and they were enthusiastic.

The few hippie businesses that grew large included Nolo self help press, Greens vegetarian restaurant, Body Shop, Apple Computer, Patagonia and Whole Foods.  The hippies create the organic food movement, health practices from accupuncture to yoga, rock music, Eastern religions explosion, New Age shops of every kind... and countless businesses and classes that were never seen or imagined before 1970.

It was hippies anti-statist values combined with their pro-business values that together defeated the future of Leftism.

I was there, at the center of the storm, I saw it. Today I am one of the fortunate beneficiary.

Hippies brought down the Left

This will be the first time you have ever encountered this idea.

In an earlier blog I pointed out that the peak historic point for Lefty thinking and Lefty projects was 1959. I now want to explain why the Left has been in decline from that point on.

I  identify two minor reasons: the beatniks and the Civil rights movement.  And the single major reason: the vast hippy generation. Over 20 million young people.

The beatniks were the young generation of the 1950s. What is interesting about them is that they did not borrow the socialist pro-state theology of their predecessors and the dominant view of the world at the time. They created a world of nihilism. It was mostly black, dirty clothing, beards, poetry and perennial wandering.  I knew nearly all the prominent beatniks because they stopped at my dormitory in the mid-50s at the University of Chicago.

So here was a new generation that did not accept the previous Lefty ideology.

At the same time, the civil rights movement in the United States was beginning and spreading. It's greatest power came from black churches in the South and Jews in Northern law schools. It was a movement against local government that was unable to get support from any government. It was a non-statist local moral movement. Again it did not draw support from classic Lefty ideology. It had a few Lefty ideologues as hangers-ons. In fact one of its targets were the many Lefty racist labor unions. Nearly all labor unions were segregated, everywhere in the U.S.

The greatest shock to the global lefty success of 1959 was the emergence of the hippies in roughly 1965. Here was an entire new generation that numbered in the millions, tens of millions by the 1970s, who were in complete open rebellion against everything their parents stood for. The hippies were for drugs and sex and music. They, we, believed we could create an entirely new society based on honesty, cooperation, new personal visions and pleasure.

That sure as hell had nothing to do with Lefty statist ideology dominant in the world. From that point, 1963, on the Left was doomed.

The hippies were antithetical to the Left because they believed in creating their own new world of new foods, new health, new books, new houses, new schools, a new green lifestyle, new honesty and new personal visions with the help of drugs and music.  I was there as you can see from reading many of my hippie blogs. And the Whole Earth Catalog.

The hippies brought a global end to the Lefty vision that began with the French Revolution. The hippies traveled everywhere on the planet and carried an anti-state pro-individual ideology to the ends of the earth. They even had a guidebook: Lonely Planet.

The hippies killed the Left.

Advertising world is failing

Unless you are in the advertising business or were involved in the debates about the future of Facebook you may not know that the future of advertising on your smart phone is looking pretty grim right now.

Dish network is joining the world of TiVo in recognizing the need to skip over TV advertising. The reason is simple. As more people get their TV over the Internet there are fewer people who are willing to tolerate advertising.

Since I wrote a book (with Salli Rasberry) in 1984 called Marketing Without Advertising I am certainly the living expert on this issue. People almost invariably do not like advertising especially since broadcast advertising is irrelevant to their needs or interests.

There is a new problem for advertising. It is the very small screen on the smart phone. The smart phone has become a major source of Internet information for nearly everyone but especially people under 35. The richest advertising market.

The small screen is simply too small for advertising to be readable and not interfere with the rest of the relevant useful information on the screen.

Yes, it is obvious that advertising usage has been decreasing rapidly thanks to Google and Craigslist for the past decade. It will decrease even more rapidly in the coming decade.(Neither of these are advertising, they are 'listing' a place you go to look for information.)

So how do customers find businesses and vice versa? You will have to read Marketing Without Advertising which is already de facto the primary book in marketing in English.

The simple answer is: that good businesses are promoted by their customers.

Get the book and the ebook

I struggle these days when ordering a book.

I can get a paper copy or an e-book. The paper copy has the great advantage that I can give it away if I wish to use it as a gift.  Also give it away to someone who might like it if I don't.

The e-book version has the advantage that it is light for a book with many pages and I can travel with it. It is not a weight burden.

I struggle with that decision. Not with the decision about price. But I have almost never bought both the paper book and the e-book.

I think it would be a good marketing idea to price paper books and e-books together. If the paper book is $20 and the e-book is $13, the combination could be $26 and I would buy both and the publisher would end up with far more revenue and no greater cost.

How long before someone catches on to this beneficial marketing approach?

Genetically like apples and dogs

Humans are not breeding no matter what we think. Because you have children with someone whom you think is smart does not actually result in any biological attributes in the children. Perfect pitch and good looks, maybe. Higher intelligence no way.

Most people don't believe this. They think that if the parents are smart the children have a good chance of being smart too.  This may be true in terms of outcomes but it is not because of biology.

When your purebred poodle comes back from the park pregnant you know the offspring will be a dog. The name for generic dog is mutt.  Humans are the same. We are not really different in any meaningful way. We do not breed, certainly not over generations which breeding requires.

Fuji apples are created by grafting Fuji branches on to apple trunks. If you plant the Fuji Apple seeds and they grow you will get crabapples good for apple cider. Johnny Appleseed did not walk around creating good tasting apples for America. He planted seeds that could only have grown up as crabapples good for apple cider.

The prohibitionists, who came half-century later, would have been lucky if they had stopped Johnny Appleseed (John Chapman) before he got too far.

No, your children are born average. Mine too. Outcomes are related to multiple environmental factors when it comes to intelligence, skills, morals, values, competence.

Reimburse business for disruption

I have raised the issue before of how expensive city infrastructure projects can be for surrounding businesses.

At this point I would like to suggest that there is a political necessity for urban government to pay for the damage and lost business that occurs  in the wake of infrastructure disruption.

A restaurant I favor, owned by a friend, faced a week of dramatic decline in customers because of the overhaul to the nearby municipal railway. Many businesses nearby lost revenue because of the disruption.

I believe a few lawsuits and a Supreme Court case are required to make it clear that the government has no right to take revenue away from a business without compensation. Even if the government is behaving intelligently.

I hope we can look forward to a day when new government projects have very simple environmental impact statements and very serious business impact statements that require compensation for the lost business. The cost of lost business should be built into the infrastructure costs.  It should not be the burden of individual businesses.

European future disaster

The current European financial trouble is trivial and of no long-term significance.

That may be a nasty or shortsighted statement. I stand by it.

Europe has not had a future for a long time, because there is little vitality, horrific demographics and a socialist political overhang with no escape.

Still that is not enough to project the dire hopeless future of Europe that I see.

The hopelessness comes from the fact that the environmental perspective of the Europeans is based on their deep seated belief in an ecological Armageddon.  This global warming Armageddon leads the Europeans to build a fantasy world of green energy, carbon capping and a conscious choice to leave natural gas in the ground.

No society will be able to compete in the world market, even one decade from now, when it is saddled with high energy costs. Europe is putting on lead boots and deliberately destroying its business future.

Need I say anymore about the grim prospects I see.

We should also be thankful that our environmentalists in the US are such a weak and ineffective force. 

Lesbian issues

I don't see much candor or honesty about the issue of lesbianism.

I live in the middle of a gay male neighborhood and have a large number of gay friends and a good assortment of wonderful lesbian friends.

You probably recognize the letters LGBT.  On the face of it this seems to be a little unfair. The L part of the acronym is lesbian and the G part is gay. The two are not different, there is an overlap because lesbian is linguistically part of gay. The unfair part arises because gay males comprise four or five times the number of Americans as lesbians. This would usually be a reason for putting the G in front of the L.

Because the origin of the acronym dates to a time when efforts were being made to create a coalition and the G part was much stronger politically than the L part, the inversion of letters was a deliberate act of solicitation.

The new museum and historical society on the subject of sexual attractions is the GLBT Museum reflecting the more recent politics.

What I want to bring up is the current internal social situation. Gay men generally are promiscuous when they are young.  In the early stages of settling down as a couple they frequently remain sexually active outside the couple, by common agreement.

This does not appear to be the case with lesbian couples. While I know a few sexually active lesbians as well as some who solicit, successfully, straight women, the general pattern is monogamous lesbian pairing.

The common practice in the lesbian community is sequential pairing and nesting with relations that last 3 to 5 years on average. Older lesbians seem to have stable lifetime pairings.

These observations may be limited to what I see in the Bay Area and what I have seen over the past 40 years. They may be far more volatile than they appear to me.

Rare honesty

On rare occasions you find an honest article in the NYTimes, (a major source of disinformation, false data and leaked national secrets).  This one by David Brooks is exceptional, based on Yuval Levin's article last month in the genuinely honest Weekly Standard.

Remember, the Left has been in historic retrograde since 1959, the peak of statist power when 90% of the world was socialist or communist. Europe is our future on the current trajectory and Europe has no future.

Golden Gate Bridge

A friend asked me what San Francisco was like before the Golden Gate Bridge.

I generalize this to a question of the way cities grow.

Cities always grow if they have inherent vitality.  Some cities have no future because they are dependent on some limited resource whether it is energy water or mining. Other cities intentionally kill themselves with political values that are hostile to business. Such cities are usually controlled by unions.  Fort Dodge and Detroit are such cases.  Portland an environmentalist heaven is a future case.

If the barriers to growth are insignificant, just land and expansion, growth will occur and infill follows as the density expands. Not so interesting. Often the infrastructure keeps changing to accommodate greater density.

That was the case with the Golden Gate Bridge. It replaced increasingly heavy car and rail ferries to the land north of the city. What was formerly vacation homes became suburbs and they became villages and towns.

If you want to know the math, that is interesting. The value of property as it radiates from the central most dense location is always a geometric curve. Geometrically higher property values for square footage in the center and geometrically declining values as the circles of distance radiate.

That has always been the case for Manhattan as the center of New York city. It has not changed in more than 300 years.

Lefty sentimentalists

In the past I have used the term Lefty Fundamentalists. I am about to change my terminology to Lefty Sentimentalist.

The reason is straightforward. The peak of Lefty historic triumph and the point at which the Left's values were most widely accepted in the world was 1959. See my blog on the subject.

Thus Lefties are people looking back sentimentally to the day when 90% of the world was governed by communist or socialist central governments, all new postcolonial governments including the new revolutionary Cuba were socialist.  Unions in the United States were at their peak. Nearly all major corporations in Europe were owned by the state. 

Those were the glory days for Lefties.

Lefties are sentimental for those long gone days of their greatest achievements.

Wisconsin progressive upset

I am a little late in analyzing last week's Wisconsin recall election.

Now we all get the benefit of a little bit of thought which is entirely absent from the paid professional media mavens who are supposed to make intelligent comments.

All of those professionals saw some way to treat this election as exceptional and unexpected. Either the Left blaming the outcome on money, which seldom explains why elections go the way they do and the Right seeing public hostility to unions and grassroots success courtesy of the Tea Party.  Everyone considered this process unexpected because Wisconsin is a progressive state that created Robert La Follette Jr. and Sr. and the Progressive Party a century ago, exactly.

All wrong. Wisconsin was and still is a Progressive state. It is important to understand the origins of the Progressive movement. They are the same as the Tea Party. Americans wanted a Democratic government that was not corrupt. The Progressive movement was a series of political reforms intended to eliminate corruption. The most famous and most significant was the introduction of civil service.

A moment's thought will allow you to recognize that the corruption that was eliminated by civil service is exactly the same corruption we have today with government unions having compulsory collective bargaining and compulsory wage garnishment for union membership. Union money goes to bribe legislators to give union members higher wages. Pure corruption.


There we have it. Wisconsin was Progressive and remains Progressive. Fortunately for all of us. They are helping us all realize that the current Democratic Party-union-corruption must be ended and will be ended.

Justice Ginsberg

I think it is clear from an interview that justice Ginsburg gave in Cairo on February 1 of this year that she should be tried for impeachment by the Senate.

She made it clear that the US Constitution is an outmoded document that should not be used as the basis for any government being organized or operating today. Her statements were unambiguous.

First I believe this is grounds for impeachment.

But second I believe this ends every argument that anyone has ever made that the Left does not believe in the Constitution. The Left doesn't. What the Left believes in is a contemporary ideological model that is completely independent of the Constitution. The role of a Justice on this court is not to interpret the Constitution but to bring the Constitution up to date in respect to contemporary ideological values.

The statement by a sitting justice, Ginsberg, that confirms this Lefty view is sufficient to end every argument.

I personally believe that Justice Ginsburg is in the thrall of a gigantic bubble of ignorance that has made her completely incapable of understanding the past 60 years. Like most college graduates of the liberal schools and of the liberal persuasion that she had, she has never noticed that most democracies with her revised model of a Constitution are pathetically inferior in freedom and economic prosperity to the United States.

Ginsberg has constitutional views that have nothing to do with most human beings who live in the same country that she does.

I'm grateful for her honesty and I hope it will have the consequences of opening the discussion to both impeachment and public outrage at the Lefty liberal view of America that has been dominant for most of the 20th century.

From slavery to socialism

That blog title might make an interesting book title.

It describes the trajectory of the Democratic party over the past 170 years. Before the Civil War, the Democratic Party was the party of slavery. It remained the party of the South for the hundred years after the Civil War.

Today, having had a vetoproof and filibuster proof Congress and openly socialist president, the Democratic party passed a socialist medical plan resembling that of every socialist government on the planet and several environmental and financial bills designed to increase control of the economy.

If you are a Lefty you do not like my proposed trajectory for the Democratic party. You will deny that the legislation was socialist, you will deny that states under Democratic control promote union government workers programs and you will deny that legislation such as the stimulus are part of the socialist ideology. Since Keynes himself never denied his socialist position.... You are simply misleading yourself.

Now the part that Lefties will dislike most. My explanation of why the Democratic Party has moved from slavery to socialism.

The idea that humans are in a hierarchical natural world is fundamental to both positions. The Democrats defending slavery always argued that the natural position of blacks was subordinate to whites. The function of whites was to protect, in a paternal, way the interests of the blacks, the slaves.

That is precisely the current Democratic party view. Most people are too ignorant or too poor or too selfish to understand the need to buy health insurance. Most people cannot make political choices for themselves and so unions must help and protect them.  Most people are not able to make occupational or educational decisions for themselves, the government must subsidize behavior to induce the correct outcomes. The same is true for all financial behavior.  Most people cannot make reasonable decisions about mortgages, about credit cards, about interest rates, about investments and so they must be protected.

Current paternalism is easy to define as socialist and it is just as easy to define as the core principles of the Democratic Party today and 170 years ago.

Healthy probably isn’t

Forty years ago there was a Woody Allen movie, Sleeper, in which McDonald's burgers and Coke were health-foods.

Based on my experience, this may be time to take the movie message seriously.  At age 73, I had a heart attack. Other than some modest family evidence there is no reason to expect such an event for me. My doctor, who is famous, sees no prior evidence.

The reason I related to the issue of health is that, post heart attack, there is virtually nothing for me to change in my behavior. I have been a prolific exerciser, running five days a week for 30 years and swimming ever since. I have been eating a spa diet for 40 years and even eliminated eggs for most of that time when they were considered a source of human cholesterol (Not). Virtually everything else I have done meets the ultra-healthy requirements including low alcohol intake and plenty of sunshine.

There is no change of behavior available at this point, post-heart attack. I am relying on the generic versions of Lipitor and Plavix to deal with the plaque that was evident in my heart arteries when the doctors put a catheter in to look.

I'm afraid that if you think healthy behavior (including composting) will somehow result in
health benefits, I am here to tell you that that may not be reasonable.

From my vantage point the standard health benefits of exercise and spa diet can result in positive energy and a clear mind. For me, that has always been sufficient. It is probably all that is reasonable to expect.

This may not be the most cheerful upbeat blog but if you were to continue your life eating and exercising under the misapprehension that you would benefit from health and longevity...... you may end up regretting many years of wasted activity.

On the other hand, I personally have always felt the reward of exercise was sufficient in itself and the same is true for a reasonable body weight.

Charter school kids’ parents

This is really an issue of manners and morals.  I need your opinion.

When you encounter a mother or father who is very proud to send their child to a charter school and that parent is a Democrat, what should be your reaction?

Here is the conflict in case you may have missed it. That parent is sending their child to a school that is better, almost invariably, than the other public schools available. Their child is getting a better education than other children in the same district.

Since the Democratic Party is having permanent enthusiastic coitus with the teachers unions that are deliberately and consciously subjecting poor students to poor education, it is clear that to vote Democrat is to support poor education for poor people.

Democrats are voting for other children to have poor education while they are sending their own children to the better public school.

So how do you deal with an  encounter with such a parent. I think they are deeply immoral whether they know it or not.

Indians in TV programs

I want to call to your attention the emergence of Indians on major popular television programs. There is an Indian central character on Big Bang Theory, on Rules of Engagement and
The Good Wife. All top programs.

Indians have the great advantage that they are dark skinned assumed to speak the King’s English and there is a stereotype that Indians are smart.

This makes an Indian character a perfect person for a dramatic role. Anyone who is smart or accommodating in American stereotypes cannot have strength of character. An Indian can be an exception to this because they are essentially Americans in foreign guise.

I am fascinated to see the emergence of this character and look forward to understanding what it is that we want to add to our character array.

Story of Amalek

The very last sentence of Exodus has the following quote after Joshua defeated the Amalekites in battle: “write this as a memorial in the book.... the Lord will have war with Amalek from generation to generation.”

It really doesn't matter the level of authority you give to the words in the Torah. These words are very strong. They are the Lord telling Jews that they must remember the endless nature of an historic battle.

The endless nature of this phenomenon so closely resembles the perpetual nature of Jew hate that it is hard to ignore.

This quote has been debated by Jews for 2000 years. There is no satisfactory alternate conclusion. Jew hate is there perpetually.

I simply want to bring it to your attention. I consider it a physical tumor in the brain of the haters.

The idea that any people would have a permanent historic enemy is interesting in itself.  It suggests a mechanism for improving the survival ability of that people.

It is also worth considering that America has always had its enemies as well. This may be a source of American strength.

Serrano outcome: failure

You can Google this. No one before me has noticed a significant fact of history.

The California Supreme Court ruled in 1971 that the local funding mechanism of California, that relied on property taxes for education was unconstitutional because it resulted in great variation in the quality of schools based on the wealth of the geography.

The case, called Serrano v Priest,  was brought by a friend of mine, Sid Wolinsky. This was a monumental case. The outcome has been a complete Lefty failure.

Today, 40 years later, the entire funding for schools K-12 comes from State revenue, just the outcome Serrano prescribed.  Part of this was because of a tax revolt in 1978 that forced schools to rely on State funding when local property tax was severely cut back.

Are the schools in California more equitable or better than 1970?

No. No way.  The Serrano Lefty idea was that unequal distribution of money creates unequal educational outcomes.   Wrong.

Students' culture creates unequal outcomes in education.

Positive sum

I have one important suspicion. Most people are Lefties because they are not competent at mathematics.

The Lefty president of the United States, Obama, is terrible at math. He has no comprehension of numbers and has demonstrated this failure many times.

The core failure of Lefty ideology is its inability to understand that commerce is a positive sum process not a zero sum. Government is always a zero or negative sum process.

These three concepts  (positive, zero and negative sum) are derived from the mathematics of game theory. You can look at this document to see the underlying math.

In any relationship of exchange between two or more people, groups or nations one can look at the total outcome of the exchange and decide if there is more, the same or less total benefit.  That is the simple math that the Left is never able to grasp.

A zero sum process is where an apple pie is being divided. Everyone gets a slice of the pie and the total of the slices remains equal to a whole pie.  A negative some is what happens in a gambling casino where the house gets a percentage of every bet.  The players, in total, never end up with as much money as they brought in.

Positive sum is where the outcome results in a greater total. (The players total take from the casino is more than they brought in.)

Positive sum is what happens in commerce because there are diverse interests in the program. John has a belt to trade because he has too many belts he doesn't want. Bob has more doughnuts than he wants. When John trades his belt for Bob's doughnuts John is happier because he has more satisfaction than he had before the trade and so does Bob. That is a positive sum process.

Commerce is always a positive sum process because it is always voluntary and all participants end up with more after the trade than before.

I can see where lefties are confused by this. If John trades Bob his $10 for Bob's $10 there doesn't seem to be very much happening. Commerce is about John trading his $10 for Bob's €9 and both are better off if they are planning to visit a dollar or a euro country.

It is a little complicated.  A trade is always for dissimilar objects.  1-1=0  but A-B=X.   I can see that Lefties will not understand why commerce is so desirable and their government solutions are so inadequate.

The Left are historic losers

Sometime around the middle of the last century was the peak 'future' for Lefties.

Marxism has always argued that because it was rooted in Engels theory of history that Marxism comprised the entirety of the future.  As a consequence, Leftists have always believed  that the inevitable future was theirs.

I pick 1959 as the peak year for the Left. The Soviet Union had expanded deep into Europe, re-suppressed Hungary and included Mongolia. China was pure communist. India was an ally of the Soviet Union and marching to the socialist band. Nearly every liberated Third World country was socialist and Latin America was completely in the thrall of Liberation Theology.  Castro had conquered Cuba.  Nearly all major European businesses were state owned.  Canada, Australia, New Zealand were deeply socialist. Roughly 95% of the world was communist or socialist. In the United States labor unions were at their peak.

Need I say more?

From that year forward, the left has been going downhill for 50 years. Today the socialist countries of Europe are facing bankruptcy or have completely changed direction (Sweden, England). Only Cuba and North Korea are still in the thrall of the Left and both are miserable countries. Their citizens are prisoners.

The Left has no future. The future came and went because the idea that humans can be perfected by government action is absurd on the face of it.

Humans change very slowly and only by inducement.  Governments have seldom shown the slightest competence in most human organization except in mass murder and popular starvation.

Jerry and Las Vegas

This is true story.

My friend Jerry owns a manufacturing business in the San Francisco East Bay. He has 15 employees and his business is growing steadily. Jerry sees a grim future here in California with the California political outlook less favorable than Greece.

Already 400,000 Californians have left California in the past decade because of the unfavorable business climate and thousands of businesses have moved to more favorable business friendly states.

Aside from the facts, the Democratic politicians and their sycophants have denied this reality.

Jerry went to Las Vegas to look at factory space. He found buildings at prices where the mortgage would be a fraction of his current rent at a big increase in square footage. He found the labor market to be lower-priced and more reliable. The same is true of all utilities and shipping.

But the part of this story that is most astounding and alarming for the future of California is that the Las Vegas business community brought together 30 people to meet with Jerry. These were people in every relevant business field from taxation to transportation.

Jerry figures that in the first year of being in Las Vegas, he will earn a net hundred thousand dollars more than he does now.

That will justify many airplane trips back to visit his friends and family in California. His partner has agreed to run the business in alternate periods.

For me, this is a living example that Democrats in power can destroy a state and they are.

Unabomber and Breivik

A friend of mine died recently and left a long memo of his final thoughts. He was a wonderful friend. He always expected a big end-of-the-world to come because humans were such terrible environmentalists.

The relevance to my readers is that his long rant resembled in many ways the published works of the Unabomber and Anders Breivik.

I haven't written about the similarity of these two anonymous murderers. Both killed people they did not know. Both killed people whose presumed ideology they held in contempt. You may want to read each of their screeds ( Kaczynski the Unabomber, Breivik). I have.  In a few cases, Breivik copied parts of Kaczynski.

My friend and the two anonymous murderers had a common core view. The world is morally wrong. Human beings are destroying a desirable world with their bad behavior.

The moral strength of these beliefs was strong enough to lead to dangerous personal action (not my friend who was a Lefty coward).

As I read each of these screeds I was impressed with the logical coherence and the serious effort to make a successful academic presentation.

That should tell you that good education, the Unabomber went to Harvard, is not a criterion for civilized behavior. In fact, what it does is makes the anonymous murderer feel more compelled to justify his or her behavior to the academic world.

A good academic background convinces its offspring that it, the academic world, is the moral judge of human beings.

Both murderers felt compelled to create a manifesto, really an ideology.  The Unabomber was environmentally oriented, Breivik was both environmentally oriented and anti-muslim.

The impression I got from reading this material is that the modern environmental model is a glove of ideology that can effectively be used to justify murder especially mass murder.

The Sierra Club has often been hostile to immigrants, to new born children and recently to abundant cheap energy (natural gas).  Each of these positions carried to their logical extreme justifies mass murder of immigrants, children and everybody who wants to live a productive life.

Environmentalism could one day be a mass murder movement.  It is already getting a push in that direction.

Conservative becomes obvious

For many decades, lefty fundamentalism has been highly predictable to me. The core elements of leftism are anger at the world and a certainty that the experts on the Left can use the government to make appropriate corrections to eliminate the sources that generate anger.

Even before the rote meme of the Left became obvious to me, the predictable nature of New Age spirituality had become equally obvious. Here is a spiritual generic speech I wrote many decades ago.  I left that world behind.

I raise both of these issues (Leftism and New Ageism) at this time because I am beginning realize that the conservative intellectual position is slowly becoming predictable to me.

I am not yet ready to described it with the same crude simplicity that I used in the first paragraph to describe lefty fundamentalism.  

I expect to be able to come up with some summary statements about the conservative view point in the near future. I no longer read a large number of conservative blogs. I read one or two and occasionally read the geniuses in the field if they are mentioned by others.

Happening to me? I eat organic

I can imagine the plea from someone who is in a terminal health condition: 'how can this be happening to me?'  I eat organic food, I recycle my waste, I ride a bicycle and I exercise outdoors vigorously.

What this tells me is that the health-food organic bicycle world is a religion.

This phrase, ‘how can this be happening to me’, is traditionally asked of a religious deity. The implication is that I donate to my church, I give to charity and I am relatively free of sin.

In neither religion, the traditional form nor the modern environmental form...  do individuals believe that good people die.  

I just wanted to make this point. Life and death do not seem to be easily connected to human behavior or human beliefs.  Good people die, often early and without fairness.  While there are some minor connections to their behavior there are no enduring or powerful ones.

That is what the story of Job is about. The great sound that pervades the universe, doesn't judge individual moral behavior. The story of Job, of course, should be read without the final redemption bull sh-t, that was added much later from a different language and ruins the real story of Job.

P.S. I wrote this blog more than ten days ago, before I had my heart attack.