Pro Commerce

Social sorting

I recently read an interesting book called The Big Sort subtitled Clustering Like Minded by Bill Bishop.

Before I describe what the book is about let me point out that I developed the idea of social sorting in the mid-1980s and wrote about it several times in the early 1990s including in two books on commerce. There is a summary of my understanding in this blog on original ideas.

Social sorting is the structure of human choice in a free society. There are three elements. The flag that attracts us to the location or institution or product. The screen that determines whether we become part of it or use it. And the overflow that determines over time whether we fit in.

I went to the Library of Congress several times. First to find out if my Seven Laws of Money had been written before and the second time to see if social sorting was an original idea. In both cases I was the original creator.

What Bishop has found is that since 1995 there has been a very distinct geographic sorting of Americans into very small neighborhoods of like-minded people. Using precinct data he is able to show a very dramatic homogenization occurring over this period of time. We now have precincts that are homogeneous in voting habits. In a way that we never had before.

While Bishop makes his strongest case with political data he is careful to point out that the homogeneity has to do with many elements other than just politics. Radio stations, magazines, eating, clothing etc.

Why Bishop first detects this in 1995, I do not know. What has been happening for many decades is that after college people resettle themselves into neighborhoods other than the ones they grew up in. In most cases they do not move far. Maybe within a 40 mile radius. What has been going on since the early 80s is that a far higher proportion of people are going to college and that means a far higher proportion of people are resettling their lives after college. This may be what Bishop has detected after 1995.

Facebook and jobs

Teenagers and young people are constantly told to be careful in their use of the social media because future employers will be reading their Facebook page and see the embarrassing, job disqualifying, pictures and comments.

I want to add to this caution. Age doesn't matter.

I found out from a friend of mine that before she interviewed nearly a dozen scientists for a very important laboratory job she checked the Facebook pages.

She actually eliminated several people because they had political and social views that were contrary to hers.  Imagine that she is a very pro-abortion voter.  She saw anti-abortion comments and membership in anti-abortion organizations on the people she disqualified.

You and I when looking for a job must remember that people want to work with people who are like them. That is a fact of human life.

That is the reason I have always pushed aggressively for diversity in corporated boardrooms... because human beings always want to hang out with other humans like themselves. In the corporate boardroom this is incestuous and harmful to the interests of our society.

Review your Facebook page if you are looking for a job.  Get neutral.

Movies have no meaning

I have often argued in my blogs that movies are totally ineffective and meaningless in the real world.  That may explain why actors are so adamant about expressing their political opinions and filmmakers are so determined to make films that offend their audiences.

I have new proof of my simple hypothesis.

A friend of mine is the lead person in a documentary about the 2008 financial crash. The film explained how he anticipated the crash and the reasons for the crash and the warnings he gave to the chairman of the Federal Reserve.

You would expect that such a person in the years after the financial crash changed so many lives and had such dramatic impact on the world, would be widely sought after as a speaker and lecturer on the 2008 crash.

He is a friend of mine and I know what he does. You would be wrong. He has not been invited to give a single talk or classroom conversation as a result of this very widely seen and publicize documentary.

I reiterate my simple hypothesis: films have no impact on the world.

Sell SFO

In the previous blog I explained how fanatics have cost the society $136 million a year in wasted airline passenger time.

There is a straight forward solution. The San Francisco airport is owned and managed by the city of San Francisco.

It is time for San Francisco to lease the airport operations to a private company. This is what is done in most of the world for harbors and in several places for airports.

If SFO were operated by a private corporation the environmental fanatics problem could be solved.

Whenever the existing airport management points out the urgent need to expand the North Eastern runway into San Francisco Bay, the committee appointed to study the matter is always made up of politicos and environmentalists.  These people know better than to rile the environmental fanatics.

A private company as the operator would not face such political failure. Such a company would find ways to bribe the environmental fanatics. In earlier dealings, the environmentalists were offered a trade of 1,300 acres of airport shoreline for 5000 acres of salt ponds conversion to bay marsh for wildlife. They turned it down.

A deal would be possible if they knew that their political pressure would be ineffective.

It is time to lease SFO to a private operator and give us a decent fully functioning airport.

Cost of weather delays at SFO

My regular readers know that I am very bothered by a ,problem at San Francisco airport.

At regular intervals airplanes are delayed in arrivals and departures from SFO due to weather that requires landing on only one runway. That drops the number of landings from 60 per hour to 30. The second runway cannot be used in common weather conditions because the local environmental fanatics will not allow a runway to be built on the existing mud flats.

A friend of mine recently challenged me to calculate the cost of this environmental disaster. My calculations show that the society loses $136 million a year in passenger time wasted. Here are the calculations.

There are a number of considerations that went into these calculations. First, many people may be working while sitting in an airport, anywhere, waiting for a plane. That is the wonder of modern telecommunications and mobile computers. Second, some small part of the weather delays were atmospheric, unrelated to the runway problem. Lastly, many passengers may just be on vacation and the delay is of no consequence.

Nevertheless my calculations are based on the best available data. It still comes out to $136 million of wasted time because of environmental fanatics.

Abba Lerner and real interest rate

When you look up Abba Lerner in Wikipedia you will learn that he is the real person who invented Keynesian economics. I read Keynes general theory including the supplement which is more original than the socialist diatribe in the main part of the book but you will never find what is called the modern Keynesian fiscal model. Lerner invented it.

The Wikipedia entry does not mention one of Lerner's important contributions to economics. I was a graduate student in economics in the early 1960s at UC Berkeley.

I learned that Lerner offered a theory of interest rate that suggested that real interest rate, the prime rate on long-term bonds minus the cost of living, was the key driver of investment. This of course is inherently true because return on investment includes an interest-rate calculation.

Lerner contended that at low real interest rates investments would be over a very long term, infrastructure such as bridges, railroad stations and tall buildings.  In periods of high real interest rates investments will all be very short-term, quick profits and instant gratification.

I look at the current interest rate milieu, where real interest rate is probably negative and I wonder what Lerner would say. I suspect that in these negative real interest rate periods we are bouncing between low return infrastructure investments in capital and no investment whatsoever.

I don't think Lerner discussed a negative real interest rate. But we are there right now and have been for 3 1/2 years.

Apple and mobile payments

It appears that top management at Apple has made a wise decision. They have decided to go slow developing and introducing an Apple mobile payment system.

Having lost a great deal of money personally, developing an online micro-payment system, I can speak with some painful authority.

There are already several mobile payment systems being tested throughout the United States and around the world.

The problem is, not just the cost of introducing new equipment for the retailer, but the real problem is that there is no consumer dissatisfaction with the current general-purpose credit cards.

To create a new cliché:' if something works, let's keep using it'.  There will be a new mobile payment system if the current system has significant shortcomings. I do not see people seriously bothered by carrying a credit card.

I do see people bothered by retailers who charge less if local currency, non-credit card, is used. I do see people bothered by the outrageous international credit card fees.

But I don't see a mobile payment system replacing or dealing with these dissatisfactions.

Good for Apple. Intelligent management in this instance.

Commerce is living organism

I want to advance a somewhat outrageous thesis.

I want to suggest that commerce has anthropomorphic qualities. Think about the way James Lovelock advanced the thesis that the Earth's atmosphere was a living entity, call Gaia.  Gaia was not to be considered like a living being but it was to be considered an entity that could respond to changes autonomously much like a living being. It also served as a useful hypothesis.

Why do I think commerce can be thought of as a living being?

I am looking at the past three years in which a Democratic administration that hates business explicitly states its hatred of Wall Street, hedge funds, it's desire to create class warfare and it's desire to expand the state at the expense of increased taxes on business and capital investment.

In response I see three years of apathetic near nonexistent commercial growth.

Commerce seems to be responding to a hostile government by saying 'you don't like me I am not going to perform for you.'  And commerce hands the Democrats the worst labor market in half a century.

That is why I think of commerce as a living being. It is almost as though commerce in the United States was listening to the Democratic Congress and the rabid anti-business president.

I can understand that commerce is the byproduct of human evolution. If computer geeks have the audacity to think the computers will have human attributes, I don't feel totally outrageous by suggesting the same for commerce.

Fancy watches are packaging

I'm not complaining  because commerce is based on voluntary relationships.

I am, rather, marveling at the ability of wrist watch marketers to promote exorbitant prices for high end watches.

We see fancy watches in the $200-$500 range that have quartz timing mechanisms and watches in the $5000 range that don't mention their timing mechanism.

Here is the technical facts underlying this issue.  A single factory in Switzerland produces all the quartz timing mechanisms in the world and sells each unit for under five dollars. This factory has been going for 25 years.

All watches that have quartz timing use this under five dollar mechanism. When you pay more for a quartz watch you are paying for the marketing and packaging.

If you pay still more for a watch that is not quartz, you are paying for a watch that has a lower level of accuracy. The highest possible wrist watch level of accuracy is the quartz mechanism.

The Swiss have been selling watches with a common timing mechanism and fancy packaging for over 100 years before the quartz mechanism was developed.

It is fascinating to see a niche in society thrive for this long entirely on marketing skills.

Catholics in El Paso like Dems in San Francisco

When I was eight years old, I lived in El Paso Texas where my father was a prominent reform rabbi and my mother was active in Planned Parenthood. I went to a public school heavily populated with Mexicans and Mexican Americans. My Mexican classmates were nearly all Roman Catholics, in those days.

Whenever a traveling priest came to the local parish, usually a Dominican, he gave a fire and brimstone sermon excoriating Jews for having killed Christ.

It was on the following Monday that I was chased home after school by the inflamed Catholic students who often threw rocks at me.

You should not be surprised that I get exactly the same feeling being a pro-commerce advocate in a city like San Francisco. My fellow San Franciscans treat me the same way as my Mexican Catholic classmates following a visit from a proselytizing Dominican.

In some ways my early experience inured me to my current experience. I know that American society did not protect Jews and doesn't protect pro-commerce advocates.

Battles in Congress: reaction to war with Islam

During the 40 year battle with communism the United States underwent many changes of self understanding.

The first was a recognition, based on the term 'godless communism', that the United States was a religious nation. This led in 1953 to inserting the phrase 'under God' in the pledge of allegiance.

From that point on the country began to make many changes including full legal rights for Negroes, vast expansion of the immigration laws, and the radical understanding that America was a free market economy. The latter elevated the entire argument in favor of commerce and against government control. A battle that the free market has been slowly winning since the mid-1960s.

It seems that our enemy helps us define ourselves.

So how will our enemy, Islamism, help us define ourselves today?

Islam clearly has an inferior status for women. That was already changing in  the U.S. and will be even more aggressively changed in the coming years. Islam is only divided into two sects, and as a consequence neither sect has much internal argument about important issues such as science, economics, philosophy, or political life. The ideas of freedom are nonexistent in Islam.

I would suggest that all of these issue areas will come under scrutiny and result in change in the United States over the next few decades.

The first change I noticed is the increased willingness of Americans to debate many issues and an increasing willingness of individuals to carry on debates with their friends and peers. I think this is a reaction to the mono ideology of Islam.

The big mistake

The CEO of Peregrine Financial, a futures trading brokerage firm in Iowa, is accused of stealing over $200 million of the customers' money over a 20 year period.

This is one mistake that Russ Wasendorf made.

The bigger mistake was trying to commit suicide and leaving notes for his business partners and his wife. That leaves no question he was trying to commit suicide.

He made the mistake of hooking his tailpipe exhaust to a hose into his car as his suicide method.

Being a successful CEO he undoubtedly has a new car. In order to asphyxiate yourself with carbon monoxide you must use an automobile dating before 1992. Since then catalytic converters have been so successful that there is not sufficient carbon monoxide to commit suicide.

If you have to commit suicide, I have a blog that deals with that subject. Don't use a car of any age.

 

Taxis and SFO airplanes

Like most people in San Francisco I do not rely on taxis for anything important. If I am where I can hail a cab I will do so. I will not telephone for a cab.

I will also check very carefully any plane arrival or departure at San Francisco airport.

There is one simple reason. If the failure rate is too high in either case the potential user must find alternatives. In the case of taxis, I have been screwed at least twice because of a late arrival by a taxi and had to find an emergency alternative to get to my meeting or plane on time. Two screw ups were enough to permanently influence my attitude toward taxis.

There is no margin for error in the taxi business. All taxis are smeared by the incompetence of any in the business.

At SFO we have a problem that the regular overcast skies of San Francisco significantly impair the landing of planes. Our runways are too close together to allow parallel landings with overcast and the pernicious environmentalists will not allow the building of a new runway in the Bay.

Consequently, I waste a great deal of time checking airplane schedules for both arrivals and departures at SFO. The airport cannot be trusted.

Close to my analysis but wrong

In two earlier blogs, I came up with an analysis that I consider original.

I pointed out in the first blog that the peak of lefty progressivism in the world was 1959 when nearly 90% of the people on the planet were subjugated by a communist or socialist government. It was the peak of European government ownership of business and American unionization. I then explained that the American hippie movement, the core of a new generation of young people, destroyed the lefty progressive ideology.

The lefty ideology of solving problems with government and creating better humans through government was the exact opposite of what hippies stood for. An entire young generation of Americans believed that self-improvement, drugs and rock 'n roll plus love was the way to create new people and a new society.  That would have killed lefty ideology by itself.

In the second blog I pointed out that hippies loved business and saw business as the way to change society. They started every imaginable business from organic grocery stores and farms to yoga studios to acupuncture clinics. They also started the global Body Shop and Apple Computer. That was the coup de grace for leftism.

The article I am referring to in the title of this blog was in the New York Times. It was a preposterous answer to the question: ‘Why had the revolution dreamed up in the late 1960s mostly been won on the social and cultural fronts — women’s rights, gay rights, black president, ecology, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll — but lost in the economic realm?’

The answer is irrelevant. The author is a lefty buffoon.  It is the question that is so wrong. It is only right because it focuses on hippies as promoters of ecology, sex, drugs and rock 'n roll.

As I pointed out, hippies also were champions of business. Their pro-business attitudes totally destroyed the potential for lefty anti-commerce ideology.

What I want to challenge is the incorrect notion that hippies in any way promoted women's rights or the black president. They also did not start the ecology movement which was well underway many years earlier. The hippies did promote ecology into a national and international movement.

It is the women's rights movement that was started well before the hippies and not promoted by the hippies. While hippies were quite egalitarian in all their values, it was the political realm that pushed women's rights. The same is true for civil rights of blacks. The hippies while not discriminatory toward blacks, did not promote the vast expansion of civil rights for blacks. I was part of the civil rights movement.... that was a political movement.

I'm glad someone at the New York Times is paying attention to hippies but they’re missing the complete significance of the hippies because they will never recognize how hippies destroyed their own New York Times leftist ideology.

Poor seldom win

There was a recent court ruling overturning Obama that said the Dept.of Education could not punish for-profit colleges based on the success or failure of their student loan rate post-college collection.

The federal agency attacking the for-profit colleges was being manipulated by the incredibly wealthy private elite colleges in order to reduce competition from the emerging industry of for-profit colleges.

This was a Democratic administration doing what it often does, unwittingly punishing the poor. For-profit colleges are the primary source of technical education and subsequent jobs for the bottom social class in our country.

In calculating the failure rate of the student loan collections, the federal agencies involved, only compared gross numbers, they did not compare private college student loan rate failures for low income students to the comparable loan rates at for-profit schools.

Once again, despite a Democratic onslaught, the poor have survived.

Microsoft and Bing

Recently Microsoft took a $6.2 billion dollar charge-off because of failed Internet advertising it had sought over the past five years. Most of the charge-off is associated with the purchase of the company aQuantive in 2007.  Many analysts treated this as a one-time non-cash “accounting” event at a company with $58 billion in cash on hand, operating cash flow of $29 billion and a stock market value of $257 billion.

I don't treat this as a minor unforeseeable mistake.

Had anyone at Microsoft asked me about the issue of creating, Bing as a competitor to the Google search engine, to use for advertising revenue, I would have told them not to waste their time. As co-author of Marketing Without Advertising, one of the three most successful marketing books in English, I would have told them what to expect.

Google search has more than two thirds of the search market and related advertising revenue. The public is very satisfied with Google.

I call this a service monopoly. A service monopoly is a business that satisfies a large percentage of the available market niche and consequently is not amenable to competition.

Put simply, if people are satisfied and find that the information or services they need are nearly 100% available on the service they are using, they have no need to change. And they will not change.

That is the definition of Google as a service monopoly.

Change occurs when the service monopoly does not fully satisfy the market niche. The new entrant can then take advantage if they provide everything that the service monopoly provides plus the additional needed customer functions.

Microsoft with Bing never satisfied whatever shortcomings Google may have had, if it had any.

Mia’s plea

On my Google+ page a young woman, who works for one of my clients, and who is working on support for minority' issues, reports on how a black woman called her a racist.

The young woman was indignant because she works so hard as an antiracist activist.

I'm sorry my dear, that's the way the world is. More than 40 years ago I was the instrumental figure in the most significant anti-employment discrimination case in the history of America. It resulted in massive long-term employment gains for minorities and women in the entire financial services area. Was I ever thanked by anyone?

Actually I was. Thirty years after my legal victory, the lawyer in my case explained my role and the importance of the case to a black minister who is a mutual friend.  When I was on the dais at his church for a different reason, he described my role in the antidiscrimination history to the Sunday black congregation. I got a 5 minute  standing ovation. Wonderful.

Considering the dozens of other historic successes I have had in helping minorities, for which I have never been thanked, it would be foolish of me to expect thanks or to expect beneficiaries of my activism to even know my role.

I have always done what I do to satisfy an internal moral code. If additional appreciation were needed nothing I did would have been done.

Starbucks CEO

The CEO of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, recently ran an ad in the Wall Street Journal pleading for an end to the Congressional divisiveness and asking businesses to start hiring workers.

Schultz also has a program in place in his US retail outlets along the same lines focusing on getting businesses to hire workers. Of course he only hires workers he needs to meet demand.

Schultz is a hard line sentimental* Democrat, giving massive amounts of money to Obama and the party.

It is only hardline sentimental Democrats who think there is a worthless stalemate in the Congress.

The stalemate is of a very serious historic nature and is not a trivial matter that can be solved by doing what the Democrats want. The Democrats want to raise taxes, increase the debt and ignore long-term entitlement problems.  That is not sensible policy, that is disaster.

The big problem is that Schultz is a great business CEO and a third rate political hack.

The consequences are really stupid, so that we have a rich person who can put ignorant ads in the Wall Street Journal and promote meaningless job creation projects in his retail stores.

Schultz only learns from being hit on the head, unfortunately. He didn't stop running his stores as left wing New York Times, jazz oriented, academic havens until McDonald's started serving first rate espresso everywhere.

He didn't learn how to open overseas retail outlets until he was driven out of a few countries, like Israel and Italy where he didn't understand local issues at all and failed to find a knowledgeable partner.

On the domestic Democratic political scene.... he is unlikely to be hit over the head and ever learn about his ideological blindness.

* Sentimental: wishing for the old days in 1959 when 90% of the world was communist and socialist with unions powerful and big European companies owned by the state.

Black friends

A few blogs back I mentioned that some of my black friends had told me they've detected an increase in antiblack racism because of president Obama.

This led a friend of mine to ask me about my black friends.

I couldn't remember who told me. The problem is that I have absolutely no way to sort in my mind which friends have high melanin.  My brain simply will not sort on skin color. It never has, even when I was manager of a black church and had dozens of close friends who were black.

That is not my only friendship failing.  I cannot tell you how many of my friends are young. To me there is a wide range of friends who are between 20 and 60 and I rarely think of them by age.

My worst failing is an inability to detect good looks among my women friends. I consider most of my women friends to be attractive. They are wonderful friends.  I have looked at pictures of them on occasion and commented to myself that some are not very attractive.  It just doesn't play a role in my perception of them.

I assume that my failure is highly personal. I look for many other qualities in people than melanin, age or female beauty.  Surprisingly, I do notice which of my male friends are handsome... most are.

Poor people pay more taxes than I

I am in the most favorable of all tax categories, I am self employed. That means that I can deduct virtually all my expenses associated with conducting and generating business. The ordinary poor person is in a surprisingly unfavorable tax position for several reason.  

First, they tend to have jobs that file W-2s so that their income is fully reported even on part-time jobs. Second, I have an accountant who keeps me posted on tax changes. I know he is valuable and he prepares my taxes. Third, I keep meticulous accounting records.

The most significant reasons that poor people pay more taxes than I is because there are heavy sales taxes on liquor, cigarettes and the lottery is a tax itself.

I can't avoid the 10% sales tax that we all pay in San Francisco. But my light consumption of alcohol and abstinence from cigarettes and the lottery assure me that I will not be paying the exorbitant taxes on those items.

There are additional reason that I don't pay as much taxes as the ordinary poor person. One, I live in the central city and have very low gas mileage and a car with good gas mileage. That is not usually true for the ordinary poor person. Lastly, I am a simple liver so I have cars that are old. New cars and frequent automobile purchases on credit generate taxes I don't pay.

I repeat: the ordinary poor person pays more in taxes that I do.

From idea to living being

I have been a lover of business for most of my adult life. I have been a successful business consultant for 40 years and author of many books on the extraordinary nature of commerce.

At the end of May, of this year I made a transformation from being a person who loved business and promoted the idea that society needs to be pro-commerce to a person whose life is now the byproduct of my own worldview.

What do I mean? How do you go from having a worldview to being a living worldview person?

Are you interested? The answer is that I had a heart attack and was promptly diagnosed and treated at the closest hospital. The hospital had a catheter lab, a high-tech facility that rents for $25,000 an hour and I had 10 doctors attending me.

I now am alive because I take three medicines, Lipitor, a beta blocker and Plavix. I will continue to have a normal life as long as I take my appropriate medicines.

A brief review of Wikipedia on catheter labs and these three heart medicines will show you that it was the prolific and life-giving quality of American commerce that generated this miraculous medical accomplishment. They didn't come from Cuba, North Korea, Communist China or the USSR.

It is for this reason, because America is the first pro-commerce society on the planet and the generator of extraordinary medical miracles, that I have become transformed from an advocate of the pro commerce worldview to a living embodiment of that worldview.

Sur La Table and Starbucks

If you ever chance to visit the Pike Place Market in Seattle be sure to take a look at two stores that are a block apart. Both of these stores have grown to national importance and in the case of one, to global importance.

The founding stores for both Sur La Table and Starbucks are within 100 feet of each other. They did not start at the same time but they expanded at about the same time, the late 1980s for Starbucks and the mid-1990s for Sur La Table when it was sold to another Seattle company..

As a lover of commerce, this coincidence is of interest. I have no way of knowing whether there is a connection between these two stores that exploded in popularity.

Is it because Seattleites are the leading edge of American consumerism?

Is it something in the water?

Is it really just a coincidence?

On academic knowledge

When I went to the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s, during the Robert Hutchins era, students were tested at admission time to see how much knowledge they had about college subject courses.

If we did well enough in the examination we did not have to take the particular year long course in that subject area.

What was the criteria for having enough knowledge to skip taking a year-long course?

The criteria was that the entering student had same level of knowledge as a C student would have on the same subject three years after taking the course.

That strikes me as the most intelligent design for student teaching requirements. If you already know what a C student would know three years after taking the course, why in the world should you take the course?

Such intelligence never migrated to the rest of the academic world to my knowledge. Academics are such arrogant misanthropes. And politically biased to boot.

Seattle harbor changes

At the beginning of July two thirds to three quarters of the container shipping from Seattle began moving to the harbor in Tacoma. The Tacoma harbor is roughly 1/5 of the size of the Seattle harbor.

I never got the full facts on the reason Seattle is giving up billions of dollars of business.

There is one fact which is easy to see. New container technology allows the loading of railroad cars 1.25 miles long at one time. The Seattle railroad tracks are on the wrong side of a freeway.

I was given several reasons Seattle gave up billions of dollars of business. One was the environmentalists abhorrence of the future use of the harbor for loading coal. Another was the unions dislike of new technology that reduced the number of jobs.  Still another was the view that the land in the harbor was too valuable to continue using for industrial harbor purposes.

Regardless of the reason there seems to be a political failure. The two harbors should be controlled by one political entity not two.  In such a case, more rational decision-making would be possible. But I rarely have ever seen two separate commissions agree to become one.

If anyone has better information on this nightmare please let me know. I am interested in the way cities kill themselves.

Fuel authority

There are a few people who still believe in peak oil. The theory that we are approaching the end of abundant petroleum. Wrong.

There are still a few people who have no comprehension of the magnitude and importance of American natural gas. Domestic American natural gas will change the economic future of America.

There are even more people who are not aware of the way pro-commerce American society is the instrument that has created the modern petroleum extraction-cracking technology. America has thousands of small oil speculators and producers which is the source of our great petroleum potential.

This all ends with the reading of a complete petroleum analysis coming out of Harvard University. Here it is in PDF form.

Obama doesn’t believe in God

It is possible that president Obama does believe in some abstract God as in the AA version of a God or a Moslem version.

What he doesn't believe in is the Judeo Christian God of the Torah. I contrast president Obama to president Jimmy Carter.  Carter was a Christian who regularly read the Bible. When it finally sunk in with Jimmy Carter that the God of the Torah punished the enemies of the Jews, Carter wrote a public apology to all Jews for his past behavior in mistreating Israel.  I know this was an apology before God because Carter did it in a letter to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the AP of Jewish news.

President Obama has been one of the strongest enemies of the Jews since the presidency of Jimmy Carter. He gave his first middle East speech outlining a history that was completely false regarding Israel. He demanded that Israel stop building homes in Jerusalem, the city founded by the biblical King David. He demanded that Palestinian-Israeli negotiations be based on 1967 boundaries. That boundary did not include the main part of Jerusalem and was completely indefensible by an Israel that needed to survive against hostile Palestinians. Over a total misunderstanding of a trivial issue he excoriated one of the greatest leaders of Israel for 45 minutes. Most recently he claimed to be the best informed president on Jewish history ignoring the fact that Madison and Adams could both read Hebrew and nearly every other president read Torah daily.

This is a man who will be punished by the God of the Torah. It should be obvious to him if he paid any attention to what Jewish and Christian tradition teaches. But he doesn't because he doesn't believe in the God of Jews and Christians.

Weight watchers multi-vitamin

Weight watchers these days has become very politically correct.

Their handout material includes the recommendation that members take a multivitamin pill every day.

Our most reliable medical and epidemiological authority, the CDC, months ago announced that multi-vitamins were a waste of money and in some cases such as the use of calcium for osteoporosis were counter productive.

I will keep you posted on how many months for weight watchers to incorporate this authoritative notice.

I have never taken multi-vitamins. My simple reason was that, from the earliest days of vitamin stores, I noticed that the salespeople were pasty faced and wimpy.  I never noticed healthy athletic people attributing their health to vitamins.

I also noticed that a healthy balanced diet included far more of all the necessary daily vitamins than any one seemed to need.

So where does the need for more vitamins, outside the realm of food, come from? Paranoia, hysteria?

Gates Foundation museum: education

I recently went to the Gates Foundation sales promotion office at the front of their Seattle headquarters.

I first dealt with the billions that these goodhearted people are pouring on the third world in hopes of making them more like us, in the previous blog.

The five rooms of displays were lovely and heartwarming. The foundation spends roughly $75 million to convince the public that the $30 billion they are giving away is worthwhile. This commentary deals with the second category of Gates foundation charity: education in the US.

I spent roughly 20 years in the field of education, trying to improve public schools.

I was most successful in changing a few schools in San Francisco that my own children went to. I worked in dozens of training projects for teachers. I put on a major education fair in 1964 to demonstrate the vast array of educational innovations available in the United States. The fair was duplicated all over the country.

After watching every change I saw undertaken completely overwhelmed by the status quo of the educational system, I concluded that change was virtually impossible in public schools. I know nothing of the private world except that it is much safer for the kids. The outcomes are not measurably different.

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation of course is pouring billions into improving education. This money does not appear to do much harm. It could be doing so but I doubt it. I know money is irrelevant because one K-12 school in Hawaii with the most per student expenditures has the lowest high school graduation rate in the whole U.S.

As in the previous blog I propose a mental experiment. Let us take 100 5-year-old children, put them all in any one school system in the United states. I am confident that 90 of the students will graduate from high school and go on to college. My only condition is that the 100 students are Asian American.

Our public school system is not a problem.

The educational problem in America is the cultural background of our students.

Gates Foundation museum: foreign aid

I recently went to the Gates Foundation sales promotion office at the front of their Seattle headquarters.

I will first deal with the billions that these goodhearted people are pouring on the third world in hopes of making them more like us.

The displays were lovely and heartwarming. The foundation is spending roughly $75 million to convince the public that the $30 billion they are giving away is worth while. My commentary is made up of two blog's paralleling the two major categories of Gates Foundation charity. Third World aid and education in the US.

My background in Third World aid consists of having been on a major Third World development organization for seven years and spent many months visiting projects in Laos, India,  Nepal, Guatemala and West Africa. I saw dozens of projects. I saw dozens of miserable failures.

The aid field is a complete Lefty bubble of fantasy.  Nine out of ten projects are flat out harmful and the last one is ineffective. Projects fail for only two reasons. (1) People lack resources because they lack stable government and consequently (2) they lack adequate commercial development.

I could fill this blog for weeks with reports on Third World development project disasters. There is no shortage of stories.The Gates Foundation should be filling its display hall with those stories of failures for a real public education.

If you doubt me, do a simple mental experiment. I propose we bring 100 5-year-olds and their parents from every hellhole in the Third World to Los Angeles with appropriate visas. I am certain that 80 of the 100 children will be successful middle-class Americans by the time they are 35 years old.

They are not lacking in money in the Third World. They are lacking the opportunity to be healthy, fully developed and contributing human beings. Inadequate market, inadequate opportunity.

The idea that the Third World is not filled with competent people of goodwill is Bill and Melinda Gates' style arrogance. The Third World lacks what Los Angeles has: stable government and a vast commercial world of opportunity. 

Sex training for doctors

I recently spoke to a number of doctors of many ages and asked all of them whether they had had sex training as part of their medical education.  The universal response was 'no'.

I was involved in the sex training of doctors and administrators for a decade in the 1970s. I was also a founder, in the same period, of the San Francisco Sex Information hot line. Sex training for doctors was developed by the National Sex and Drug Forum a project of Glide Memorial Church where I was business manager. The project was led by Rev. Ted McIlvenna.  It began with the goal of protecting gay street hustlers.  It became immediately evident that there were no professionals who understood human sexuality.

Ted began preparing training materials to use for teaching ministers and doctors about human sexuality in their professional schools. Materials included many films and even more experts in the many subsets of the sex field.

Ted went on to create the Institute for the Advancd Study of Human Sexuality which was the first Institute to grant PhD's in the field.

I was involved in several of the films for the training material and was on the state committee to certify the PhD program.

Doctors and ministers never really had much of an idea about human sexuality, so this training was vital. The training was also superb allowing professionals to deal of sex issues comfortably. Comfortably was not something that existed before, nor seems to exist today. I recall being told by several doctors not to have sex with my pregnant wife for the month or two before delivery. Absurd: a medical caution with no justification. There are more than a dozen similar pieces of medical mythology

I should not have been surprised at the disappearance of human sexuality training for doctors. Our United States is a Puritan country in its deepest most fundamental recesses. It remains a tragedy that we no longer have professionals trained to deal with human sexuality.

And the general level of knowledge about human sexuality is not any higher today than it was in 1965. Not one iota higher.

Wrong data

I found the data for San Francisco visitors' dollar and number. The surprise for me is that I have been misreading this number for a long time. My definition of a visitor is significantly different from the San Francisco Visitors Bureau.

In my head there are roughly 16,000,000 visitors who spend roughly $9 billion. But it turns out that people coming from the rest of the Bay Area, for the Symphony or for a good dinner are also considered visitors.

If you sit next to one of these people on an airplane coming from a long distance, say Hong Kong, they will tell you they come from San Francisco. They in fact could come from any of the suburbs up to 70 miles away. They would never define themselves as tourists.

So the correct number is really 11 million visitors spending only $8 billion.

My longtime concern, the amount of business that is driven away from San Francisco because of the homeless and beggars in tourist areas should be modified because these people who are Bay Area residents have homeless people on their doorsteps too. They may want to visit San Francisco without seeing and being abused by the homeless but it is not going to affect their behavior.

My basic concern about the way homeless people in tourist areas are driving away business in large numbers remains. Tourists can always go to Disneyland and live without homeless and intrusive beggars.