Pro Commerce

Jobs and Schultz

Steve Jobs was fired from Apple and returned roughly a decade later. Howard Schultz left Starbucks and returned about five years later.

In both cases the companies did better when the founding CEO returned.

I would like to suggest what happened. In both cases the founding CEO had built the company with a clear personal vision. That vision was never successfully transmitted to the successors. Possibly because the vision could not be explicated or possibly because the vision that was explicated was incorrect or off base.

In both cases when the CEO returned they were able to re-establish and clearly elucidate the vision of the company. This allowed them to make the appropriate changes.

In Jobs case, he was able to understand that the final product had to reach his standards of taste perfection. Not simply to master the technology. The early Apple company created the Newton that was a hand held computer (clunky and ugly). The revived Apple created the iPod which was elegant and much more useful than the earlier Newton and when the iPhone came along, it met the demands that Jobs had imagined earlier.

The same is true for Starbucks. Starbucks originally saw its market as the Lefty-New York Times-jazz elite. By the time that McDonald's entered the market a new direction was required. That is where Schultz's return was necessary.

Schultz  moved the company toward a much larger but still elite basis. He added Wall Street Journal readers and became friendly to modern workers using their computers at coffee. Most recently he is planning to add high quality pastries.

Plane crash in Nigeria

If you are like me, you do not have much emotional tie to a story about an airplane crash in Nigeria. I would like to explain that.

The reason most commercial airplanes crash is because of inadequate maintenance. The Third World is particularly known for its nonexistent maintenance in all domains.  The image in my mind is a taxi we rode in India where the front wheel was attached with a wire or a shuttle in Cameroon where the door was latched with rubber bands.

Let me discuss the reasons why. The two countries with the best maintenance competence are Japan and Germany. This is evident in their engineering.  Their cars are designed to facilitate maintenance. They’re societies are very clean and well maintained.

Because airplanes have such great risk built into their operation they must give the highest priority to maintenance. As one of my own passengers commented upon take off where I was the pilot and she was anxious about turbulence, "You can't pull over and stop can you?"

Maintenance is built into all Japanese life because it was founded as a rice culture and rice, with its irrigation needs, is very maintenance oriented. I don’t know the reasons for Germany’s attention to maintenance.

Airplanes are usually serviced in the First World. But they operate invariably in the Third World which is where the failure of maintenance results in a high number of commercial crashes.

Airplane safety is extremely high and fatalities terribly low, but we automatically assume this does not apply in Third World circumstances. We just need to understand that the absence of a maintenance culture is the reason.

Peoples Party today

It is highly unlikely that you would know the Peoples Party.  Our conventional history doesn’t teach it.

I studied the issue when I wrote a book called Baby Boom II. I had noticed many obvious similarities between the period 30 years after the Civil War and similar period In the 1970s.

As I studied the issue I discovered that there was a baby-boom resulting from the Civil War.

What was of great interest to me was the rise of a movement very similar to the hippies in that earlier Baby-boom. No history of that era had been written at that time. So I wrote my own.

The parents of the Civil War boomers were mostly in the new territories where they had moved after surviving the War.  The political movement that they created was named the People's Party. The People's Party matured over several decades and became the Progressive movement. Here is a modest but good study of the People's party.

The Civil War baby boom had all of the same qualities of the WWII baby-boom including health-food nuts, sexual freedom, music (ragtime) clothing, new businesses and communes.

What I am now realizing, thanks to the Tea Party, is that both baby-boom movements  and the Tea Party are drawing on an indigenous American political attitude. All three, have a complete contempt for secretive and corrupt government practices.

How this unusual, nearly mystical, phenomenon keeps popping its head up at the time it is most needed, will remain beyond my understanding. But in all three cases (we still have two months to go to see if the Tea Party is going to have its impact) there was a vast improvement in the level of American democracy.

Apple lawsuit tradition

I am constantly being asked about Apple lawsuits.

Apple has a tradition from its inception of suing everybody. That is one of the tragic anti-commerce values passed on by Steve Jobs.

I have told the story in an earlier blog of how I ended the lawsuit Apple brought against Microsoft. Apple brought the suit from its earliest days as a company. The suit was absolutely groundless.

Today Apple is suing everyone, left and right, and the suits remain as groundless as the first one against Microsoft.

I am not going to intervene to save anyone's skin from the tens of millions of dollars in legal fees that they are all paying as well as the costly disruption of internal management.

The simple solution is for the major players Microsoft, Google, Samsung and HTC to get together and explain to the Apple management that this sort of childish behavior will have to stop or the competitors will take joint action to stop it.

The threat will work. It will work because each of these companies has leverage on the suppliers of all of Apples constituent product components. More lawsuits.. no more Apple products.

Israel abandoned

In the September issue of Commentary there is an article by Ronald Radosh about the attitudes toward Israel by the Left at the time of its creation, 1948.

Radosh makes it clear that the Left supported the establishment of Israel. The key support came from I F Stone (Izzie) and the Nation magazine.

My father had been to Palestine the year before and was a fanatic supporter of Israel. Based on his experience he warned me, when I went to Israel a decade later, that I should be aware that Arabs are very charming and Israelis are very rough-cut but that the Israelis were the honest competent ones.

My father read every issue of the I F Stone weekly and the Nation magazine all of his life. I read the weekly for about 10 years of my life.

The question is why the Left in the early postwar years was pro-the establishment of Israel. The answer is sadly simple.

The Left for the first half of the 20th century followed the dictates of Russia and the USSR. Immediately after World War II, Stalin was very anti-Hitler and he knew that the Palestinians, represented by the Arab Mufti had actively supported Hitler. Therefore Stalin supported the creation of Israel.

This changed promptly when Stalin saw the opportunity to use Arabs against American interests in the Cold War.

The Left slowly moved away from Stalin in the early 50s and moved toward Mao's China.

That is where the Left was stuck until Mao died.

I object

What I object to is the r value of Tyvek.

The r value is apparently 2. That is very low. An r value is a number based on the ratio of heat transmitted through any object. The r value compares the heat on one side to the heat on the other side. A high number is what architects want to keep heat inside the house in the winter and keep it outside in the summer.

The problem is that Tyvek does something extremely important for comfort that is not relevant to its r value.

I was involved in the earliest solar no-purchased-energy homes. In visiting one such home high in the mountains when it was surrounded by 7 feet of snow, I was amazed at how warm I was inside the house.

The reason I was warm and comfortable was the absence of drafts. The architect explained that people feel cold even in a warm room if there are drafts on their feet.

Tyvek is a metallic plastic wrap that completely covers the house. The consequence is that it blocks all air leaks and undesirable airflow.

As a consequence Tyvek does more to make a house comfortable. It truly increases the emotional r value far more than an r value of 15 or 20.

I hope people concerned about r values are sensitive to this reality.

African billionaire

In an earlier blog about billions of dollars wasted by the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation, I suggested that an alternative is to establish prizes.

I now have an example, from the Wall Street Journal, of a man who is doing precisely what I think is useful with foundation grants.

The man is Mohammed Ibrahim.  He made his billions by building the wireless telephone networks in Africa and selling his phone company to Kuwaitis.

Ibrahim created an Institute to evaluate and rank all African countries by level of democracy and corruption suppression.

Every year, or whenever possible, if an African leader of a democratic country completes his elected term and successfully passes on leadership to a newly elected leader he receives $5 million over 10 years and $200,000 a year for life. The leader must have improved his country’s Democratic financial and anti-corruption practices as measured by the Ibrahim Institute.

To me this is an example of imaginative and probably effective foundation giving.

Gay marriage

My gay friends are certain that the Democratic party has a platform plank that supports gay marriage. I'm not so sure.

Here is the plank from the platform for this year. There is no question that president Obama supports gay marriage.

   "Freedom to Marry. We support the right of all families to have equal respect, responsibilities, and protections under the law. We support marriage equality and support the movement to secure equal treatment under law for same-sex couples. We also support the freedom of churches and religious entities to decide how to administer marriage as a religious sacrament without government interference.
   "We oppose discriminatory federal and state constitutional amendments and other attempts to deny equal protection of the laws to committed same-sex couples who seek the same respect and responsibilities as other married couples. We support the full repeal of the so-called Defense of Marriage Act and the passage of the Respect for Marriage Act."

The language in this plank seems to oppose any legislation banning gay marriage but does not openly support anything other than civil union.

It really doesn't matter. People seem to vote the way their parents did.

Gay teachers

Most gays that I know are Lefties.  While the Left does not automatically support unions the Democratic Party is 100% the pawn of modern unions.

Union supporters have been running a periodic ad that is false. Unions claim an important role in child labor, safety and time off laws about labor.  

This is historically not true in the United States. It was the movement around women's suffrage and particularly Jane Addams and the immigrant related Settlement Movement that created the core labor rights at state and national levels.

Not only do the unions come to this issue late, but they were segregated for over 50 years. During the early battles labor rights for children, women and workers in general, unions were out fighting among themselves and with anarchists most of the time.

The relevance to gays is what I saw with my own eyes. In the mid-1960s, my close friend Ruth Kadish was appointed by Gov. Brown to the California State teachers personnel board.

At that time, it was policy to fire any teacher who was arrested (not convicted) for homosexuality (caught in a public bathroom). Ruth lobbied her board to reverse this policy for years.

What is relevant to you if you are gay and support any union is that two strong California teachers unions opposed Ruth at every step. The unions supported firing gay teachers.

Unions are not your friend, even if you are in one, unless you have seniority or are incompetent.

Attention San Francisco Residents

I only get 400 San Francisco residents as readers each month but you can help me change San Francisco. (1) I've analyized stop signs in San Francisco.  They increased at a rate of 4% per year for 40 years while the number of people is static and the number of cars increased only .5%.  Lets take out 2 stop signs for every new one. (2) Let's lease out San Francisco Airport to a private company.  We lose $138,000,000 per year in passenger wasted time because we don't have an all weather second runway... due to environmentalist obstinance.  A private operator could solve that problem. (3) The whole demeanor of San Francisco's anti-business climate could be changed with a monument to the great business founders who created San Francisco.  Let's build one.

Bus sign morality

The sign in the photo on the right caused a great deal of outrage in San Francisco and New York. The sign says “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel. Defeat jihad.”

The debate was about one side calling it hate speech and the other side defending it as a first amendment right. It appeared in pristine Lefty heaven, San Francisco, because the people behind it won a lawsuit in New York.

I do not believe this has anything to do with the first amendment. I think people who consider it a First Amendment issue are morally degenerate.

This is a clear-cut statement that you either agree with or you are not civilized. The Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza gleefully murder innocent civilians in Israel. That is savage. That is not acceptable to civilized people.

You do not need first amendment protection to recognize the immoral, disgusting, uncivilized behavior of the Palestinian people.

The only argument I can imagine, an extreme argument, is that not all Palestinians support this uncivilized savage behavior. Unfortunately for that argument there is not a single outspoken opponent in the entire Palestinian world that opposes their savage behavior. Not one.

Therefore this imaginary argument has no validity.

Back to the core issue. This bus sign does not raise any First Amendment issues. It only raises the issues of who is civilized. Most San Franciscans really aren't.

Viva commerce

There is an example in this article of the reason I love commerce.

The article explains that Canadian oil is being shipped from Calgary to New Orleans' refineries by rail in increasing volumes. Significant increasing volumes.

This is occurring because the president of the United States at the urging of the anti-commerce environmental extremists has been banning the shipment of oil and gas through pipelines in the central United States.

Commerce, as always, ignores the stupidity and bigotry (poor people are hurt most by the environmentalists, especially in this case where oil prices are forced up) of the anti-commerce world and finds a route to solve its problems.

Oil tankers are moving through the central United States and they are also going to both coasts of Canada. Oil transported via rail is more risky for the environment than the much less expensive shipment of oil via pipelines.

I first noticed this genius of commerce when Shell oil company provided oil to Israel in 1973 when all the Arab and Muslim countries were boycotting shipment of oil to Israel. Commerce always gets around political stupidity and viciousness.

It is also via commerce that prisoners in jail and illegal institutions are able to thrive and provide their members with necessary provisions.

Viva commerce.

(Thanks to Alex who is living in oil country these days.)

I’m the real Progressive

It is customary these days for Lefties to call themselves progressives. This is because the earlier term liberal was in disgrace.  Of course Lefties never had a right to call themselves liberals because liberalism relates to a pro-commerce set of values from the middle of the 19th century.

Lefties have no more right to call themselves progressive. The progressive movement that exploded at the beginning of the 20th century was a direct descendent of the People's Party in the late 1880s and 1890s.

Lefties do not hold any of the values of the progressive movement. I am a progressive, especially as a Californian who lived in the Progressive era and worked in the Legislature at the end of it.

In the 1950s California was the leading state in education, freeways and honest government as well as supporting a rapidly growing economy attracting new business and new technology.


The core ideas embedded in the California government by the Progressives were government employees selected and promoted by civil service exams, elected political offices without any party affiliation, open primaries, open public documents and policy available to the public in the form of initiatives and referendums.

Every single bit of the Progressive agenda was completely destroyed by the Democratic party in 1960. By 1962 the Democratic Party had wiped out nonpartisan elections and built a giant union based money machine for electing only Democrats at state and local levels. Transparency was eliminated.

Decent people no longer ran for office. California became the cesspool of education, union corruption in government and incompetence at every level of government. Non-progressive Democrats destroyed California.

For the modern Democrats to call themselves progressives is simultaneously a farce and an insult to the history of the real Progressives.

Lani Silver

Lani was a friend of mine for many years. She died at age 60 a few years ago. You can Google her name and get a sense of the many things she did. I often had coffee with Lani and discussed her projects. She was a feminist and a teacher, two things that mattered a great deal to her. We never argued because I always support sincere activists even when I disagree with them.

I bring up Lani now because a friend of mine has been working on a project for nearly 30 years. He has always been ahead of his time. Quite recently his field, the long view of history, has become an important field in its own right called Big History.

There was a recent conference on the subject and my friend knew many of the key people there from his years of work.

Thanks to Bill Gates there is now money flowing into this field. I suspect my friend will not be a beneficiary of the new influx of money.

This is why I am reminded of Lani.

Lani was the mother of the field of Holocaust survivor interviews in the United States. She trained many people and scoured northern California for every living survivor. She had thousands of interviews in her records. Lani was funded modestly in part by Bill Graham, the rock impresario. (That is the only good thing I ever heard about Bill.)

When the movie Schindler's List came along and was such a stunning success, the producer (Steven Spielberg) was moved by people he knew to spend time and money on Holocaust survivor interviews. He consulted with Lani and then proceeded to fund, lavishly, his own independent Holocaust survivor interview project.

Lani died young. I hate to think that it was because the big project passed her by.

The lesson for my friend in the Big History project is that if everyone of importance and relevance in your field knows who you are and what you are doing, it will be virtually impossible to pass you by. That means encouraging many people to support your project and having them feel that they are a part of the project. Part owners.

Claremont Review of Books

On a recent weeklong vacation I struggled to find interesting reading to take with me.

The disadvantage of a good non-fiction book is that I become deeply involved with it and need some quiet time to contemplate my reaction. That is hard to satisfy.

The solution, the perfect solution, turns out to be the Claremont Review of Books.

The Review is made up of dozens of short articles including essays and reviews. They are disproportionately pro-commerce and invariably intelligent.

The greatest benefit is that they are generally short. I can read it and think about it in small chunks of time such as an airplane flight or some time in the sun sitting on a porch between errands and parties.

I highly recommend the CRB.

 

I've been reading it for many years and have always been rewarded.

Cath labs on map

My blog readers may know that I had a heart attack in the Spring and had a stent put in my heart artery.

There are two points I want to make about this experience. First, the heart attack had virtually no effects on my body or mind.  The reason for this is that I didn't wait for an ambulance I had my partner drive me directly to the closest good emergency room that has a catheter lab. A 5 minute drive.

The harm from a heart attack is measured in public health circles in time from event-to-balloon. The balloon refers to a device that is inflated in the artery to block the blood flow and substitute an x-ray visible die.  For me that was a terribly short time.

What I take away from this is that everyone over 45 years of age needs to know where the closest catheter lab is. I think this should be an app on every smart phone. I think it should be subsidized by health insurance.

The second relevant lesson is based on my long-term view that medicine is pretty much still voodoo.  

All of my doctors were wonderful and competent and I take the prescribed medicines without ever checking the relevant literature.

But the catheter lab is the most extraordinary room you will likely see. It is a large room filled with technology that has one purpose: surgery on the heart. The catheter is a tool that is used to enter your artery and go to your heart and carry out microscopic surgery.

To me, the catheter lab and my successful heart attack treatment are primarily due to surgery and the associated pro-commerce generated technology.

Surgery is over 2000 years old. Indian surgeons were restoring ears and noses before Jesus was born. Medicine is roughly a century old. My grandfather went to dental school (at UC Berkeley) for three years. My grandmother went to medical school (same place) for two years. She was filled with witchcraft and other nostrums as best I can remember from my father.  Medicine really begins with sulfatiasol and penicillin, 70 years ago.

Find out where your nearest catheter lab is. It is also helpful to know where the nearest trauma center is too.  A trauma center is a standard emergency room with roughly 20 doctors on immediate call. That is where you go for a gunshot or automobile wound.

Envy compared to greed

It is fair to compare the two sins of greed and envy.

I am surrounded by Lefties and a few others who are filled with envy, wanting to tax rich people at much higher rates than everyone else, because the rich are presumably greedy.

I know many rich people, I know virtually no greedy people. Most of the rich people I know love their work and love business and they are rewarded for their efforts. I also know many rich social climbers. If personal recognition is a category of greed then the angry Lefties, particularly those in politics have the worst case of greed.  They are like the rich social climbers, greedy for attention and status.

To me, Adam Smith explained that self interest, which is a large category that includes the subcategory of greed, is the basis for our successful commercial society and the reason most of the world is eating and is prosperous.

I have never found a social justification for the widespread social phenomenon of envy. It appears to me that there is no benefit to society from having envious people. A large category of such people are criminals at the bottom of our society and others are committing white collar crime in the middle class.

On the personal level, I find that envy is a very destructive emotion. It eats away at self identity and generates hatred, loathing and constant anger for the individual.

To repeat my position. Greed has been shown to have positive social benefits. Envy doesn't appear to have social benefits and does appear to be highly destructive of the individual who is cursed with that emotion.

If you want to tax the rich disproportionately, we should all feel sorry for you.  You suffer one of the deadliest sins: envy.

This should be a footnote.  People filled with envy want a leveling of economic disparity.  Such an idea is most closely associated with the horrors of the French Revolution and the Left ever since then.  It is not a Judeo Christian idea. In the Torah it is clear that justice is defined by treating the rich and poor alike. The rich person's generosity is not considered greater than the poor person's mite.

Did modern work for better reason?

What we call modern has been evolving over most of the previous century.

It is most obvious in architecture where we replaced froufrou and luscious ornamentation with stark flat surfaces and visual austerity.  Think who is the great hero architect of the modern buildings... Mies van der Rohe.

Modernity is evident in every aspect of our lives from household appliances to automobiles and graphic design.

The main driving presumption behind modernity was that ornamentation and froufrou were the by-products of earlier sentimentality and visual clutter. Modernity was conceived as a response to rational thought.

Churches were highly ornamented to encourage religious feelings. Modernity was intended to support scientific clarity in thinking.

It is my personal view, based on the level of religious fantasy (Lefty politics) and widespread pseudo-science hysteria (human caused global warming) that modernity had no perceptible effect on popular world views.

I don't think modernity encouraged rational thought. I see so little around me, especially among scientists.

S.E. Asian battles; Obama failure

In one recent conversation among Lefty women, they talked about the good job that Hillary Clinton was doing as Secretary of State.

I don't really know if that is true because it his hard to separate the presidential foreign-policy from the State Department that carries it out.

Our foreign-policy is in fact a disaster.  I will not discuss the litany of failures and deliberate Obama programs designed to diminish American power and influence.

I simply wish to point out that our own allies are fighting among themselves in Southeast Asia over ocean territory that China is claiming.

Our long time historic allies of Taiwan, the Philippines, Japan, South Korea and a more recent ally Vietnam are all fighting each other over the rights to the South Pacific.

This is preposterous and only occurring because of America's deliberate weakness in the world.  The United States has allowed North Korea to fire rockets over Japan. We have defensive weapons in place and did not use them. We did nothing when North Korea sank a South Korean ship. We did nothing when North Korea fired on a civilian population on a South Korean Island.

We have stood by while China has bullied candidates for president in Taiwan elections.

We have not made our military presence significant in any of this area, such as building new bases. In fact we have been retreating from bases in South Korea, Japan and the Philippines.

It should be obvious that American weakness not only encourages our opponents to be more belligerent it weakens existing alliances significantly.

President Obama is successful in his campaign to diminish the United States. But he is incapable of understanding that his policy makes the world more dangerous.

Wool bathing suits

Sometimes I forget the little things in life that have gotten better.

As a boy in San Francisco I went to the famous Sutro Baths, a cluster of salt water swimming pools some of which were warm. It was near my house. A movie has been made about the Baths.

This was after WW II when I was regularly wearing dacron or nylon bathing suits.

Sutro Baths had a rule that required the customers to wear the Sutro Baths woolen bathing suits.

The logic was simple. Sutro could control the cleanliness of the bathing suits.

The bathing suits itched terribly and I remember this was a reason I avoided the Baths unless some of my friends insisted on going.

The Baths burned down a few years later at a point where few people were using them and revenue was certainly not sufficient to justify rebuilding.

Was that policy of woolen bathing suits part of the reason for the Sutro Baths failure?

 

(Incredible footage by Thomas A. Edison of the Baths in use.)

Prefabs necessary

There are three areas in which the United States has inflation. Otherwise we have been in a deflationary period for 20 years.

They are: housing, health care and education.

The most distinguishing aspect of these three inflation causing categories is that they are immune, at present, to foreign competition.

I have dealt with healthcare and education in other blogs.

In this I want to point out that housing requires federal legislation in order to break the stranglehold that local developers, unions and building departments have on the housing market.

I have been looking at pre-fab housing systems for over 50 years. I have seen many that were superb and very economical. I have watched some manufacturers export to Japan where there is a small market for such housing.  I have watched Swedish prefab house builders fail when they try to export to Europe.

Over that 50 years I have seen endless failures in the prefab housing business. The reason is simple. It is too costly to battle local building departments.

The only way around this problem would be federal legislation.

I don't expect that any time soon. Put it another way... We will get federal legislation for prefab housing one day after the mortgage income deduction is phased out.

American Jewish Committee

Reform Jews in America have long claimed that their indifference to Israel or their out-right left wing hostility to Israel is the result of a genuine interest and concern.

This is flat-out untrue.

If you are my age, you will remember the American Jewish Committee from the 1950's and 60's.

The American Jewish Committee was the national organization of Reform Jews organized primarily to deal with the emergence of Israel.

The AJC had a very straight forward Israel position. Israel had nothing to do with American Jews.  It was just as a new country independent of Jews in America. The AJC emphasized that Jews were a member of a religion.

The object of the AJC, since I knew the president and several high-ranking officers personally, was to expedite assimilation of American Jews in America. Being 'just a religion' made that possible.

With that as my history, it is clear to me that the modern Reform Jews and left wing Jews are direct heirs of the AJC position.  Their off-putting relationship to Israel is strictly to benefit their own desired assimilation in America. 

Footnote 2015: My 'high ranking friends' were part of the American Council for Judaism an even stronger opponent of Israel.

Understanding the State Dept.

I never hesitate to explain how government agencies in our country and other countries behave.

I’m sure that many of my readers consider my confidence to be arrogance. It must be hard for someone who has not spent as much time as I have dealing with businesses and government agencies to understand how an outsider can claim to know how an agency acts or views the world.

I have, for decades, bemoaned the absolute blindness of the State Department in the middle east. When Condi Rice took over the State Department I could see that she was a tool of the State Department in trying to get president Bush to force an Israel-Palestine settlement. I had no inside information.

I have known for decades that the State Department believes that the biggest problem in the middle east is the Palestinian issue. This is pure nonsense. Pure. All the evidence since the early 90's suggests that the Palestinians have never had an interest in settling the issue. Moreover, no Arab country, Persian country or friend of Osama has actually cared one iota for the Palestinians.  The Palestinians are widely hated. Their relation to Israel is nothing more than an excuse for all Arabs and Persians to justify their ignorance, incompetence, and tyrannical governments.

So now we have the proof that I am not making this subject up, I have been right all along. This comes in an interview with Elliott Abrams recently.  Here it is.

Senior housing in nuclear radius

When I came back from Fukushima last year after a visit in the Spring I wrote several strong arguments to the California Public Utilities Commission to encourage a review of the nuclear power plant at San Enofre.

What I found in Fukushima was that people with families and people under the age of 45 were leaving. That was turning Fukushima into a productivity desert.

Fate turned out to be on my side. The national Nuclear Regulatory agency shut down plant in March of this year because of leaky pipes. It is still closed.

I have since thought about the issue and concluded that any nuclear plant should be sited where there are no people within a 50 mile radius or people should be banned.

The alternative is to allow people to live in that 50 mile radius if they wish to. Either because they are old and radiation is irrelevant or because they are poor and the cost of housing is low.

Don't pour your out dated morals on me.  If poor people want to save money for a few years by living in a radiation risk area.... I congratulate them for their intelligence.

I personally am not enamored of nuclear power. Primarily because we have such an abundance of low-cost natural gas. But for existing plants I think it is reasonable, here and abroad, to repopulate neighborhoods of nuclear plants with the appropriate communities.

Occupy phony movement

This is another blog for future historians.

A year ago there was a movement among young people called 'Occupy Wall Street'. The term Occupy was then used in other locations in the United States and around the world

This movement has been grossly mischaracterized by journalists of my era.  I went and looked at several encampments on several dates in Seattle, San Francisco and Los Angeles. The number of people was very small in each instance, in the hundreds at the peak. The people were disheveled dirty and resembled everyday homeless people. The encampments were dirty, littered and squalid.  

The movement was elevated far beyond its physical reality by the fawning adoration of all the prominent Democratic politicians, academics and clergy in every city.

I can only speculate on the reasons for this fawning adoration that was repeated and exaggerated by the press.

I suggest that among the Left there was wishful thinking in hoping that the Occupy movement in some way was a rebuttal or response to the Tea Party.  It may have been but it was infinitesimal, ineffective, chaotic and irrelevant. The Tea Party was probably the most significant democratic movement in the history of the world.

The Occupy movement was astro-turf ginned up by an angry anti-American president.

History patterns

I saw the Dinesh D'Souza movie last night: 2016. It is a wonderful and effective movie. See it, for sure. He makes the same point in the movie that he made in his book, that Barack Obama's vision of the world is anti-American based on his upbringing in a communist anti-imperialist intellectual swamp. Obama spent 30 years in that swamp, much of the time stoned.

How much do I think this has influenced his presidency?

That goes to my view of history. From my own personal experience, history is a mixture of trend and fortuitousness. There are times when my contribution to history has been unique to my own vision. There are other times when I simply atepped in front of the parade.

I explained in the blog two days ago that Obama has all of the shortcomings of a male American black. He was raised as such a person and he had direct experience with many other black people in shaping his attitudes.

I would have to agree with D'Souza that he has a worldview that is strongly anti-American and he blames America for imperialism.  His goal is to diminish America.

However because of his black upbringing he lacks the skills to execute his vision. He is, to put it simply, incompetent. He has no administrative or leadership background. He can't do anything but argue and that seldom has an influence on government agencies.

Obama was elected because the stock market crash wiped out 40%of many American's net worth and pensions.  And he appealed to American anti-racist guilt because he was non-threatening and spoke good English.

Obama stereotype of blacks

I was originally going to write this blog for future historians in order to let them know how I perceived president Obama before his second reelection campaign was over.

However, as I thought about the words and concepts that I would use to describe Obama, I realized that the president fulfilled all of the common stereotypes of a black American male of his age.

I have worked extensively in the black community and I know these stereotypes are widely applicable.

According to stereotype, black men are inadequate in handling math. They are even more inadequate in handling money and are often tempted to steal when put in positions of authority over money. Furthermore there is a widely acceptable image in the black community of blacks as victims of white males and occasionally white Jewish machinations.

Additionally blacks do not frequently consider themselves to be entrepreneurial or leaders.

Having stated these stereotypes I hope my readers will understand that I know many individuals who are not characterized by any or all of these stereotypes.

On the otherhand president Obama meets every single one of the stereotypes. He is incompetent at math, he hasn't the faintest understanding of finances or budgets, he considers himself a victim and blames everyone else for every problem he has, most importantly he is hostile to entrepreneurs and arrogant beyond reason. He has exactly zero leadership qualities.

There is one attribute president Obama has that does not derive from this black male stereotype..... he is a mean person. He claimed in 2011 that the budget negotiations would deny seniors their Social Security check. That was a lie and it was unbelievably cruel to American seniors who often trust their president. The man is mean.

While American black males commit crimes at 4-5 times the rate of similar whites, Obama does not appear to have any of these criminal propensities.

President Obama also appears to have a high level of verbal skills. This attribute is also found among black preachers. It is often mistaken for high intelligence.

Small business can’t get home loans

There are many reasons to avoid starting your own small business.

I have jokingly suggested that any intelligent person considering their life choices should give greater priority to becoming a government bureaucrat and looking forward to a prosperous life and an even more prosperous retirement.

I have also made it clear that starting a small business is extremely difficult, extremely frustrating and highly likely to fail.

If that is not sufficient to avoid starting a business consider the fact that the small business person will find it almost impossible to get a mortgage loan. Small business people file taxes based on a schedule C which is real income but it does not seem that way to lenders. Small business people get very large tax breaks but the barrier to mortgage loans is serious. A schedule C makes it look like there is no real income left after expenses to the ordinary lender.

I do think that a separate form of insurance for loans to small business people for mortgages may be warranted. If their business works they are highly reliable.

During the boom in real estate small business people were able to get mortgages because the aggressive mortgage loan brokers stopped looking at the income of the borrowers and only looked at the rising home prices.

Until we reach that stage again, we will need some mechanism for insuring loans for small business people.

Kill criminals?

The title is intended to be provocative.

I know that the definition of crime is always in flux at the margins. I know that killing people for minor crimes only makes sense to those people who are the victims. It would be nice to live in a society without crime or with very little.

That is the subject of this blog. Japan is a society with virtually no crime. While Japan is less than half the size of the United States there are more murders per year in Oakland, a single American town, than in the entire country of Japan.

When I'm in Japan I never have any sense of crime or the potential for crime.

How did that happen? The answer must be that criminals or criminal behavior has been bred out of the society.  I don't think that criminal behavior is genetic. Therefore it is bred out by making sure that the individuals who pass on criminal behaviors are unable to reproduce and raise children.

In the United States we have an incredibly dramatic drop in crime after 1991 and it was shown by Donohue and Levitt that this was the result of legalized abortions widely available 20 years earlier.(Please don't argue against this, the data is overwhelming and the research is top-flight.)  This is again not evidence of criminal behavior being genetic, it is evidence that potential criminals didn't have parents or a parent to raise them. The criminal strain in the culture was terminated when the potential criminal wasn't born.

To me this suggests some very harsh considerations. I do think that some juvenile criminals and young people in prison should be paid to be sterilized. Considering the cost of incarceration, they could be paid large sums of money in the range of $100,000 each.

While I see the moral problems, I also see the benefits of a low crime society.

Sustainability self defeating definition

I get a feeling of déjà vu quite often.

The hippies went through the entire environmental circle once including everything from solar power and wind mills to toilets and organic.

They also examined the concept of sustainability and evaluation of corporations for social responsibility.

Sustainability got very short shrift because the definition is much too vague. It is not clear and never will be that a paper bag is more sustainable than a plastic bag nor that the plastic diaper is less sustainable than a cotton one. On a more grandiose scale in comparing coal, shale oil, and other forms of power the differences are even more difficult to evaluate. Those of us who examined the idea in the 1980s decided that sustainability was nonsense.

The problem with evaluating corporations was of a slightly different nature. We started off looking at just a few elements such as women and minorities on the board of directors and in employment and expanded to animals in testing and wages in Third World countries and on and on. The list kept growing and it became impossible to evaluate any corporation by any criteria that had wide public support.

That idea fell by the wayside as a consequence.

It is déjà vu for me to watch the environmental movement and its subsidiary concepts of sustainability and corporate governance fall apart.

All institutions ossify

In talking to a friend recently, who was a key organizer of the main co-op grocery in San Francisco, he mentioned that he had watched the co-op grocery in Berkeley fail.

I also watched the mature co-op grocery in Berkeley fail, many years ago.

To me this is an interesting phenomenon because there is no business simpler than a grocery store.  The revenue is fairly constant, the inventory is straightforward and jobs are easily defined.

The grocery business does change at a steady pace. We have gone from organics, expanded frozen sections to take out to premade meals.

All businesses and institutions ossify. They almost invariably become so rigid and unable to adapt to changes of consumer tastes and technology that they fail.

What I noticed in this instance is that co-ops, that have very flat managerial forms, almost no management or inadequate management are more vulnerable to ossification.

Which is to say that one of the functions of management and particularly the authoritarian nature of management is to keep the institution alive longer while undergoing the changes necessary to accommodate the market.

We may have to look at the authoritarian nature of management a little more favorably when we understand it may be necessary for forcing accommodations to change on institutions that don't want to change.

The Catholic Church is highly authoritarian and has survived a very long time.