Pro Commerce

Tax the least among us

Taxing the least among us would seem to be cruel.

And yet we do it every day. Without thinking about it.

The highest taxes in the world of consumption are on liquor and cigarettes. Liquor is disproportionately a high part of most low income person's lives.

Cigarettes are disproportionately consumed by low income people.

Most jurisdictions have penalties for smog and inspections for older cars. Older cars are disproportionately used by low income people.

All of this would be minor except for the nearly complete absence of legal jobs for low income people caused by high minimum wages. No living economist doubts that raising minimum wages excludes low income people from the labor market.

Americans just elected a president and political party that had presided over the most negative four year economic climate in 70 years. The median income actually declined for the first time in my life. The people most harmed by the election are low income people.

I repeat. We seem to be taxing the least among us.

Home alarm

During the high crime rate period from the mid-1970s until the early 1990s I was concerned about burglars entering my San Francisco home.

I had no confidence whatsoever in any known alarm system nor in notifications to the police. I had dealt with the police on occasion and found them to be unreliable at stopping burglary.

My solution was to alarm the accessible points in my house and connect these points to my high wattage quadraphonic sound system.

When I left the house I flipped a switch that connected the alarm system to the sound system, turned up very high, with a cassette disk that immediately began playing. The high volume surround sound system played the William Tell overture.

At that time, most people over 15 years of age still had memories of the Lone Ranger whose theme song came from the William Tell overture finale.

I assumed that any burglar entering the house and hearing a deafening version of the William Tell overture would run for his life.

I never got a chance to find out. No one ever burglarized or accidentally entered my house.

Linear effect

A great deal of our lives are related to linear effects.

A linear effect means simply that two phenomena are related by a sloping line.  Think of the relationship between gasoline consumption in an engine and distance travelled. That is a linear relationship and the line describing it shows a linear effect. More fuel more miles travelled.

Two issues bring the linear effect to my mind.

The first is the relationship between exposure to harmful radiation and detrimental medical consequences. There is not a linear effect. At low levels of radiation there does not appear to be any harmful medical consequences. People who live in Denver or fly professionally on commercial airlines see no medical consequences. Those people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki had longer than average lifespans.

On the other hand, people who smoke only a few cigarettes regularly and people who are exposed to moderate secondhand smoke do not have the consequences of lung cancer that are evidenced at higher exposures to cigarette smoke.

Neither of these are expected linear effects. We generally assume that something that is harmful in a large dose is less harmful in a smaller dose. That is a linear effects assumption.

It is often not true.

Gave up flying

I gave up being a pilot earlier this year after I had a stent put in my heart. There was no technical requirement that I do so. I did it because the risk of my having another heart attack is far greater than I am willing to tolerate in risking the lives of my passengers or people on the ground.

This was a very difficult decision for me because I have been flying for 50 years and I love it more every time I go up.

I have been a partner in a 30 foot sailboat and raced it many times. I have been a scuba diver and have dived in many parts of the world. Neither of these are of the order of magnitude of skill required to fly an airplane.

You will note, that I am keeping the photograph of me as a pilot at the top of this blog.

I want to explain that being a pilot is very difficult and the difficulty is not understood by most people.

There is a bi-annual pilot's examination, written, oral and flying, that I took it 25 times. It requires several maneuvers in the air to demonstrate complex and precise skills. It requires an emergency landing with no warning. Flying is a very demanding skill that involves a large body of knowledge, experience with a dozen complex systems and a level of focus that is intense.

Because of the complexity of being a pilot, when I took command of a plane, I became a different person. That person was intense, focused and able to concentrate on dozens of technical requirements simultaneously.  Everything matters to your own life and death: weather, the engine, the fuel, radio, radar and gps systems...physics, electrical and hydraulic systems... other planes in the area too.

Unlike a car, you can't just 'pull over' and stop.

I am very proud to have been a pilot. There are only a few hundred thousand of us licensed in the United States. I give up my license with great regret.

Disability spreads

If you want to read a very strange blog, this is it.

I was a very good friend of the founder of the world wide disability movement, Ed Roberts. (Ed was actually one of two founders.)

Over the more than two decades that I knew Ed he had several attendants.  He needed several because he could not breathe without a machine or an iron lung at night. He had very limited movement. It was the result of teenage polio.

The subject related to Ed came up recently when a friend told me about a year he spent being a caregiver to a woman with severe disability. At the end of the year my friend discovered his own case of disability. He has since been able to treat it and recover.

That is when I recalled that three of the caregivers for Ed had become recipients of disability funds themselves. They had become disabled after working full-time with a disabled person.

It is possible that people saw the mechanism for getting government grants in the disability field and wanted some for themselves. I don't think this was the case. I saw no one faking their uncomfortable new condition.

I think we have a real mystery about a very unusual issue.

Drink the Kool-Aid

The phrase 'drink the Kool-Aid' refers to the historic shock related to the People's Temple and the Rev. Jim Jones. More than 900 of his parishioners drank Kool-Aid laced with cyanide at his direction. All died.

There are two connections to the Kool-Aid event.

I remain baffled by the election of Barack Obama. I have seen many explanations and a few of them explain a small portion of the data. What is not explained relates to my own inability to understand those events and the data which also doesn't make sense.

For a man, who is probably the least competent, most arrogant, dishonest and mean-spirited president in a century, his victory during a period of severe economic distress doesn't make sense to me.

The inexplicable part of the data in the 2012 election seems to be related to charisma that the president has. I am incapable of recognizing his charisma.

Which gets to the second point, Kool-Aid and Jim Jones.

I knew Jim Jones.  I spent plenty of time with him and heard him preach. He was never able to appeal to me. I know how charismatic he was, he got his followers to travel to a God forsaken jungle and to follow him into oblivion.

Jim Jones was very much like Barack Obama. He was half black and he promoted a pure Marxist class envy combined with socialist programs and victim mentality. The two men sound nearly identical.

Is it because the left wing ideology of both protect me from their charisma?

I don't know. And in neither case can I see their appeal. It is my shortcoming.

Progressive taxes

I am beginning to rethink my position on progressive taxes.

I had generally considered progressive income taxes to be detrimental to economic growth particularly because multinational data suggests that that is the case.

There is a recent study by the Congressional Research Service that suggests that progressive taxation does not correlate positively or negatively with subsequent economic growth. I know that progressive taxes are not effective at raising tax revenue but the absence of a connection to economic growth comes as a surprise.

I do not accept this material as final or authoritative.

What I have begun thinking is that most rich people, 80 to 90% do not make a contribution to national growth.

The people who make the economic contribution are the ones who start small businesses, since small business of under 20 employees is the main source of employment growth, and those businesses are also the source of innovation.

I have worked with hundreds of these small businesses, and dozens of the most innovative contributors to world commerce.

I can say, for certain, that these people started their businesses for three reasons: they loved their work, they wanted to be their own boss and their innovation was only possible in a new business.

You will note that I never mention the word: rich. Nobody I ever knew started an innovative business in order to get rich.

Therefore when examining the reasons why progressive taxation may be harmful, I will not accept the argument that it will dampen the drive of innovators to start new businesses.

The presence of many rich people may attract immigrants who want to start new businesses but that remains data not available.

Since the mansions of rich people seem irrelevant to economic prosperity and the same is true for fancy cars, I question the tax deductibility of such investments and think progressive taxes on houses on auto fees might not be economically harmful.

Gas station jobs

Many of my readers will not remember that there used to be people who worked in service stations, sometimes called gas stations, who cleaned windows, pumped gas, checked oil, repaired tires and did auto repair work.

This was low skill manual labor. When I was in the Army in the early 1960s there were several men in my Army unit who worked in service stations. They weren't very bright and had limited skills.

It is my opinion, that steady increases in the minimum wage, pushed by labor unions and the Democratic party have created a large pool of unemployed people who are unemployable at current minimum wage levels.  Unemployable all their lives. I knew those guys.

The Japanese government has a policy that subsidizes small businesses. The Japanese reason is that small businesses employ the low end of the Bell curve of employment skills.

I think the evidence supports that position and minimum wage laws create general unemployment, particularly higher unemployment among blacks and young people.

Concert tickets

You don't always get what you want when you go to a concert.

I was in Israel in 1958 when a young ,hardly known, pianist was scheduled to perform. He came on the stage sat down at the piano and announced that it was too cold to take off his gloves and that he wouldn't perform. That night he announced strong opposition to public concerts.  I'm sure those concert goers were very unhappy.

As time went on they learned that the pianist, Glenn Gould, was to be considered one of the greatest of all pianists and that that night was the last of his public performances for a long time.  A memory and a concert to talk about for decades. He relented for awhile.  His final final performance was in 1964.

Another concert.


I put on an evening hippie event where the speaker was Abbie Hoffman (I put on many events, concerts and theater productions). I started the event with a local popular rock band.

As the band was playing, I went out to the van where Abbie was sitting and told him it was time to come in. He said ‘no!’. He was leaving and not giving his talk because he was paranoid in the extreme, probably due to drugs.

I had to go back into the auditorium and announced that Abbie Hoffman wasn't coming and refunds were available at the entrance. I manned the entrance expecting to lose all my money spent on hiring the band and renting the hall.

That is a concert I won't forget because half the people stayed to dance and I didn't lose money.

Cars coming downhill

In most of the United States there is an automobile regulation that requires automobiles approaching each other on a hill to have the automobile or vehicle going down the hill give way to the vehicle coming up the hill.

This doesn't make sense for automobiles. The automobile going up the hill has the advantage of gravity to help it stop. The automobile coming down the hill requires far more energy and better equipment to stop.

This regulation would appear to be left over from the era of the horse and buggy. For horse and its load to stop on the way up the hill and then restart would've been much more difficult than for the horse and vehicle coming down the hill.

Which is the subject of this blog. Many of our modern day behaviors are byproducts of earlier technology.

I am told that the railroad gauge for track in the United States came from England which in turn came from the Roman era that established the width of vehicle tracks based on vehicles pulled by two horses side-by-side.

This ancient technological reality is evident at the Russian-Chinese border where the train cars have to be put on new wheels to go from one country to the other. Really from one ancient Roman civilization to another ancient Chinese civilization.

The persistence of technological tradition is of great interest. We certainly know it every time we use a computer because the keyboard is tied to the earliest problem that typewriters had of conflicting letters converging on the type roll.

Small business hires from the bottom

Japan has had a very low unemployment rate for the past 60 years.

We're talking in the 2% range.

The reason for this was explained to me by my business partners after they heard me complain bitterly about all of the national level restrictions on large businesses and priorities given to small businesses.

There are many such disproportionate legal issues in Japan and it is very evident in a small town or a small neighborhood where the local stores sell national products at the top of their price range.

The reason for this long enduring high priority government support for small business, was an early recognition that small businesses hire the least qualified employees.

If there is a bell curve of employment suitability, it is small businesses that hire the workers on the bottom end of the curve.

In that case unreasonable support for small business is a rational employment policy.

If you doubt it, think of the hurdles required to get a job at a big corporation. Ordinary people just can't hack it.

Europe needs American leadership

I find in discussions of international relations some people understand that for the business interests of the United States there must be an international suzerain to maintain order.

Even these people fail to understand the role of such a leader in places like Europe ... among highly developed nations.

I would like to let you know what happened in the Yugoslavian war. Initially, while Bill Clinton was US president, the American policy was to leave the issue of an aggressive Serbia in the hands of the Europeans. Particularly the European nations in NATO.

The results was no action whatsoever. Then Russia was brought into the decision-making bodies intent on restraining Serbia, there remained no action.

One of my friends, was involved in these decision-making bodies.

What he saw was that the Europeans and the Russians were completely unable to agree on anything. Anything.

Finally with the arrival of Americans in the neutral role of leadership it was possible to bring these decision-making bodies to conclusions and actions.

The American role was nothing more than the presence of a powerful nation. This suzerain action is what is constantly needed among dissonant international bodies.

Government pay for time lost

I foresee the day when governments will have to pay the cost of intrusion in the life of ordinary citizens and compensate them for lost time due to government activity.  A microscopic version of eminent domain and resulting compensation.

Examples of such lost time are street repairs that result in long traffic delays (that has been getting my goat for the last few weeks) and disruptions in retail business revenues.

This concept is already embedded in our Bill of Rights. It is the fifth amendment:  'nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.'

It will take a while before people stop saying 'the government has to do this for everyone's benefit'  and start realizing that individuals are being disproportionately taxed in each event. In some cases the disruption is trivial and others it is significant.

Why don't we have this now?

At this point we are not very analytic about the role of government nor the cost of government. We just have a general attitude and have no expectation of improved quality or accountability.

This may continue for a long time, but it is not inevitable.

Anti-Asian prejudice

Many Asians identify the early 1960s as the time when anti-Asian prejudice in the United States began to subside.

I don’t believe there is a single identifiable reason. I would like to suggest several of the reasons.

First is that the civil rights movement made discrimination against blacks a very visible unacceptable behavior. The same is true for discrimination against women and Jews.

I don’t think it is accidental that all of these changes in American behavior occurred at the same time for no reason.

I would suggest the confluence of two historic forces. The first is the fall of our hereditary upper class that occurred about 1960. The second is the emergence of the vast number of hippies.

The fall of the hereditary upper class I believe was a simultaneous wiping out of all class distinctions including the unique classes of blacks, Asians, women and Jews.  It is my contention that hereditary upper classes around the world maintain anti-minority prejudices in order to suppress societies' efforts to support and reward merit.

The hippies were the first young group in world history to totally reject Left wing ideology. They rebelled against the entire hypocrisy of their parents and predecessors. One of the most rebelled against attributes of their predecessors was a highly sorted society. The hippies were fanatics about egalitarianism, love and communal sharing. That never fit Left wing pro-proletariat fantasy nor the Left wing love of powerful government.

I suggest that it was the convergence of these two major trends that dissipated the earlier prejudices.

Shikakeology

I met a very interesting visiting scholar to Stanford University: Naohiro Matsumura. Dr. Matsumura is the father of shikakeology.

There is no particular reason to explain the origins of the Japanese word or how it connects to Dr.
Matsumura’s work.  His work concerns the way objects get us to behave in pre-disposed ways.

One of his examples is this ad from a Volksvagen collection. You will notice that when people drop garbage into the garbage can they get a sound of an object falling and finally hitting the bottom loudly. It is fun and encourages passersby to pick up garbage and throw it into the garbage can.

There are many other such objects and Dr. Matsumura will have a website to display them in the next few months.

My interest in the subject is that marketing people already use this intellectual domain of shikakeology.  Virtually everything about marketing is intended to induce the desired behavior. That includes long aisles, garish displays, a whole range of lighting and sound issues as well as the use of smells and design.

I wish Dr. Matsumura well in his continued explorations of the subject.

USA and GMO

In the recent California initiative to label all genetically engineered foods the campaign in favor of the labeling argued that 61 countries had genetically engineering labels already. (The initiative lost.)

This ad was playing on the Americans’ fallacious assumption that other parts of the world are more advanced than the US.

In this domain, the United States is half a century ahead of the rest of the world.

We had the hippies. The hippies invented organic agriculture. The hippies were fanatic health food nuts.

When GMO (genetically modified organisms) foods came along, I had no problem organizing hundreds of thousands of hippies to get the Department of Agriculture to define organic as excluding GMO.  As a consequence, the entire domain of organic has been legally free of GMO for 20 years.  

Since the rest of the world was not blessed with a gigantic population of hippies they did not get the benefits of organics and they had no political solution to distinguish organic from GMO as we Americans did.

In this regard, America was and is far ahead of the rest of the world. Of course nearly everything else the hippies gave us was copied worldwide from music to bluejeans.

Raising a prodigy

I recently read a standard article about raising a prodigy. It was crap so I feel obligated to write this blog.

I have known a few prodigies in my life in a range of fields from math to violin. I am almost in that category myself since I went to college at age 15 and could have done it earlier if I had known how.

The first time the issue of raising a prodigy confronted me was when I was dating a very beautiful and sweet suburban woman who had a brilliant four-year-old son. I spent as much time as I could with the boy but his mother was not sufficient reason for driving to the suburbs.

The house had no books, the mother hired babysitters who were no brighter than she.

The boy was starved for stimulus and information. We spent hours discussing everything he was curious about.

I thought a great deal about it and realized he was lacking in real world stimulus and probably would be so for the important coming formative years.

I never expected him to develop his extraordinary talent and intelligence. Years later I met his mother again and learned that he was living in the mountains with several strange collections ( Japanese swords) and married to a woman who shared his eccentricities.

Our society has no solution for such prodigies. I’m sure, mathematically, that many prodigies have ordinary and below ordinary parents. My life was filled with stimulus but I was not happy until I met a few brilliant fellow students at the University of Chicago.

The Internet may be helpful in this regard. I hope so. I started a program for math prodigies to contact and work with a math professor at Stanford in the early 1980s. That sort of mentorship may be easier to facilitate these days.

Nouveau riche

Some of my friends wonder why many high tech company executives, such as the Google top ranks, were supporting Democrats.

Because Hollywood actors have been doing this for so long the question is never asked about them. The same is true for wealthy sports stars.

I have published several articles and advised on other articles about this issue.

Before the hereditary elite of America disappeared in 1960, there was a widely used and widely understood term: 'nouveau riche'.

That is the demeaning French for the newly rich. The newly rich have no idea how to spend the astronomic sums of money they earn.  The first things they buy are fancy cars. The second thing is expensive and large houses. That is what they have done since cars were invented. Established rich always drove Buicks while the nouveau riche drove flashy Cadillacs in the 1950s.

By being flashy the newly rich in America exposed themselves and their families to kidnapping and social class hostility. The nouveau riche today don't have the same problem because they hire bodyguards and live in gated communities.

The most important thing that the nouveau riche did was vote Democrat in line with their family upbringing. They became Republicans, just as the hereditary upper class did, because the Republican party has always been a group of people responsible for stable and competent government.  

In the days of the hereditary upper class, the upper class accepted the responsibility for maintaining good government, well run cities and states and accepted the idea that they were responsible for maintaining social equanimity. They had clubs and tight knit organizations solely for that purpose. They also supported very traditional organizations such as: opera, symphony, ballet, hospitals and academia.

Unfortunately, my beloved commerce, has been generating so much wealth, so fast, that we have a gigantic class of nouveau riche that has no sense of responsibility for maintaining good, stable and responsible government. They give money to the Democrat party.

It will take time, for this class to understand more about how the world works and their responsibility as wealthy people.

Wounded bird syndrome

I was a business advisor to the World Institute on Disability for many years.

I noticed that the founders (and my good friends) Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann were both dealing with sexual advances on occasion. Both were in electric wheelchairs and Ed could only live with his breather.

One day I asked a close friend in the disability community why people who were disabled were considered suitable objects of sexual flirtation?

The answer was, the title of this blog. There is a wounded bird syndrome among the general population. It applies to people in the disability community.

A person who is disabled is sometimes considered a wounded bird who needs care and attention. Sometimes this need for care and attention is treated as a sexual matter.

Of course disabled people are sexual beings.  However, attention because they are in a state of nonconformity, seldom makes them feel comfortable being treated as wounded birds.

I only mention this because it strikes me as an unusual issue seldom noticed by others. If you find someone with a disability to be sexually attractive to you, re-examine your mental state.

Internet Archives

I recently attended a celebratory event for the Internet Archives. They had reached their incredible public storage point of 10 petabytes. The petabyte is the next step above terabyte which is the next step above gigabyte.

The Internet archives have been storing copies of everything on the World Wide Web since roughly 1996. They have added millions of books, symphonies, TV news programs, and the entire culture of Bali.  This is all open to the public.  An historic accomplishment that makes the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian look less than adequate.

The genius behind this, a man to whom we all should be grateful, is Brewster Kahle.

Thank you Brewster.

Russell Means

Russell Means died a few weeks ago. He was an American Indian leader. I knew him in the early 1970s. I did not know him well enough to make any personal comments.

While the Indians were staging an occupy-Alcatraz media event, I rented them and Means an office in the Glide church building that I managed.  I also used my sailboat to occasionally take canned foods to the residents of the island.

I never really got to know any of the Indians personally. I talked to them many times but no friendship was ever generated.

Which is the entire point of this blog. The Indians were given plenty of charitable funds but they were so incompetent at handling finance that they could never pay their rent.

Worse was the fact that they could never agree on anything. I went to several meetings and no agreement was ever possible. Even the hippies in their food co-ops were more able to reach agreement than the Indians.

As far as I could tell, the Indian community is only able to reach agreement within existing tribal structures. These adhoc activist coalitions of Indians, where each person was outside their own tribal structure, faced a complete absence of cooperation.

This always makes me think about how rare it is that Americans and some other people's are able to cooperate. Chinese, Japanese and a few other Asians as well as Israelis and speakers who’s languages derived from the same Scandinavian-Germanic origins seem to be able to cooperate.

Why is that the case?

More on racism

The before the recent election the scurrilous Associated Press released a survey indicating a high level of anti-black racism in America.

You can see the survey here. What the survey shows is that the survey designers and analysts are themselves disgusting racists. The American people are not.

The key finding that the survey creators use to indict Americans as racist are two question responses.

The first is the question whether black are more susceptible to violence. The second is whether blacks are not as hard-working as others.

Had the question been framed more accurately, even the racists who did the survey would have a different conclusion. The question on violence should have been:' Are black males between the ages of 13 and 30 more likely to commit a violent crime than others?'  The correct answer is yes. That is not a racist statement. It is accurate.

Had the other question been phrased as: 'are blacks more likely to be unemployed, receiving welfare, public housing and benefiting from foods stamps than others?'  The correct answer, not racist, is yes.

I hope this allows you to see that AP report was a racist act created by racists.  It was part of an ongoing Obama, Democrat attack on America. 

I suspect that the Democratic Party is more the home of race-guilt than anything else.

Status of forces

The election is over. I can now discuss an issue that I think makes president Obama one of the worst presidents in American history. He failed to get a status of forces agreement in Iraq. I learned about the role of the vice president in the negotiations from listening to a debate. The vice president is irrelevant, it is the president who is responsible.

During the second Iraq War, we lost over 3500 American military lives. We also lost the lives of contractors. These lives were sacrificed on behalf of American national security and Iraqi freedom. The failure to use our sacrifice on behalf of future American security in the Middle East is tantamount to a crime committed by the American president.

A status of forces agreement allows American forces in the country to be tried under the laws of the United States. That includes many other elements but it is essentially a safety precaution for continued American presence in the country. Americans will be in Iraq for many decades and need to be there for our security.

We also need a base for air support in Iraq to protect Kurds and American allied countries nearby.

We need intelligence resources to protect us from Iran.

All of this is endangered by the absence of a status of forces agreement. President Obama committed an act of international crime by failing on this key issue.

Farming is not business

For the record, I've never seen anyone mention that running a farm is not a business.

Over the past forty years I have been a consultant to well over 1,000 businesses, probably over 1,500. Giant corporations, one person operations, and many in between.

Twice I have been begged to consult with farmers. I did. I also spent a week in Iowa visiting farmers and their farming communities. That is where I realized that farming was not a business.

Why? Business is about minimizing risk. Please, ignore the political nonsense that entrepreneurs are bold gamblers on new visions. Every competent businessperson who ever lived did everything possible to reduce the risk of failure to as close to zero as possible. That is just reality. I have no interest in some counter-example. I just told you, I've consulted over a thousand businesses; I know what business is about from the deepest empirical place.

Farmers total lives are based on unbearable, unfathomable risk. The weather can destroy a crop, several crops and crops for several years in a row. So can insects and disease. That is the kind of risk that no business mind can live with.

Farming is not business. It is mystical, religious or voodoo. You pick.

(This blog is from ten years ago.)

 

 

Homeless innumeracy

We've got an innumeracy problem in San Francisco. I want to call to your attention a number that homeless advocates regularly use. The words are: "169 homeless died in San Francisco last year"-- presumably from being homeless in a city that treats them cruelly.

I have been disturbed, since I was a member of the S.F. Emergency Services Council, to find that homeless, crap-in-the-pants-filthy drunks consume nearly half the resources of our San Francisco emergency services. They get far more resources and do far more damage to the goodwill of our emergency personnel than I think is warranted.

I wondered how many homeless would have died if they were living safe happy satisfied lives in Kansas City. The answer is in the mortality tables on the web.

Homeless advocates say there are 10,000 homeless in San Francisco. More than 169 of them would have died last year living safely and happily in Kansas City if the average age were 55 and they were mostly male smokers.

Someone should tell the homeless advocates that living on the streets of San Francisco, drunk and filthy, is good for longevity.

(This is a repeat of a blog ten years ago.)

Global traditional peoples

A regular reader of my blogs may get the impression that I have done 50 or more major projects without any problem. That is true. However I have had one failure.

I have one major project that I have completely failed to organize.

During the many years in which I travelled in Third World countries and talked to important organizers and leaders in these countries I found one conclusive, dominant theme that seems to have never reached the ears of anyone else in First World countries.

I was told time and time again that most people in traditional tribal environments want little or nothing to do with the massive overlay of First World projects. Not only was I told this many times but I saw countless cases where First World aid projects were encouraged to fail or deliberately sabotaged.

The message I got was simple: ‘We are happy to have products that we can buy in the market but we do not want industrial world jobs and the associated lifestyle. We do not want to go to work at eight o'clock five days a week for eight hours. We do not want any of the First World imposed on our traditional way of life. There are some diseases we can do without but the eradication must minimize the disruption of our lives.

I tried to create an organization that would communicate this message to all of the do-gooders and aid providers in the world. An organization to respect the wishes of tribal peoples.

In 20 years of trying, I only found three people who understood the issue and concurred with me on the need for an organization. That is not enough for me to create an organization.

The Internet should be a place to organize such a movement but I don't know how to do Internet organizing.  It is not simply putting up a high quality web page.  I have tried that.

Russ George and Stan Ovshinsky

Two men bring into question the general scientific endeavor.

The first is Russ George who dumped a ship load of iron filings off the coast of Vancouver Island this summer. George had to do this surreptitiously because the entire scientific community in the field of oceanography and climate were totally against his experiment.

More than 20 years ago it was determined that high plankton growth occurred at the outlets of rivers that had high iron content. It was surmised that there was a connection. The interest in the subject was driven by the fact that plankton consumed CO2 and when they die they sequester the CO2 at the bottom of the ocean.

A few halfhearted experiments were carried out on this subject. But nothing significant was done in the past 20 years. The environmentalists world was afraid some damage might be done to the oceans. These people have no idea of the size of the oceans and they are absurdly precious.

Russ George could never get permission from anyone to carry out this experiment on a sufficient scale to test the idea of dropping iron filings into the ocean and seeing how much plankton grew in that location. He finally got permission from a fishing tribe that wanted to increase the salmon population. A great PC solution. Indian tribes are at the top of the PC goodie-goodie heirarchy.

To me, this is a lesson in the ideology of science: don't do anything that is not politically correct.

The second man who provides an important lesson about science is Stanford Ovshinsky. What is so stunning about Ovshinsky is that he is the man responsible for modern flatscreen TVs, tablet computers and anything else requiring amorphous thin surface electronics.

Ovshinsky, never went to college and never got a scientific degree. He was a pure technologist and made a greater contribution than nearly everyone else in the field of science. We are not talking 18th-century. We are talking late 20th century when science claimed complete dominance in the world.

Abraham

I have long argued that most people do not ever change their mind about their basic worldview after they are 23.

I can make an exception for extreme trauma's.

My friend, Abraham, is a professor at Hebrew University. Head of the Middle Eastern studies department.

He was, because of his Iraqi birth and fluency in Arabic, an important intelligence officer. After leaving the intelligence service he became a major organizer of a left wing peace organization. He was a strong Lefty.

When I met him, he was no longer a Lefty. He no longer supported the naïve left wing peace ideas.

What had change?  

He explained why his politics and worldview had changed.

He happened to be standing in the Hebrew University dining hall in 2002 when an explosion from the backpack of a Palestinian went off. Nine  students died and 100 were injured. There was a pillar directly between Abraham and the Palestinian bomber.

The quote from Abraham about the reason his Left wing worldview had changed was:" when parts of the brains of my students landed on my shoulder I was forced to change my worldview."

That sort of trauma strikes me as a potential source for adults over 23 to change their world view.

Why Romney won

I do not trust political explanations made by people after the election. I only trust explanations made before the outcome is known.

From my 50 years in political campaigns including the many surveys I conducted, I have some clear views of the voting system.

The final election looks like waves on the ocean at the beach. The waves consist of an underlying tide, there is a visible surface that is caused by the land formation underneath, by very long waves traveling hundreds of miles, by surface waves caused by wind and by countervailing waves related to the underlying surface and wind.

This election is being determined by the following factors. An incumbent in any office has a significant advantage. Probably 3 to 1.

Therefore president Obama has lost the election by his own actions.

The strongest undercurrent in an election is the tide.  The president was elected because much of the electorate had lost 40% of their assets in the financial and housing crash. There was a national 2008 political movement to: ‘throw the rascals out’.

This undercurrent was totally reversed when the newly elected Democrat super-majority showed themselves to be worse rascals.  They passed an earth shattering increase in government spending (ObamaCare) without a single Republican vote using an inappropriate fiscal voting procedure.

The emerging tide is the Tea Party. The Tea Party resulted in the most extensive political realignment in American history in the 2010 election. The Tea Party is still energized and is the backbone of the Republican party .... the source of its renewed energy.  It is a tide.

Next mistakes: President Obama lost significant public support over a two-year period by perpetually lying and expecting the media to blindly support him and his lies. This is a reason for his electoral standing that has never exceeded 45%. 45% is a certain loss for an incumbent. (The biggest lie was from Senate majority leader Reid who claimed on the Senate floor that candidate Romney hadn’t paid income tax for 10 years.  The press swallowed the obvious lie.)

Next mistake: trying to start a class war. Most Americans have no interest in class war and consider it disgusting behavior on the part of any leader.  For me this was a major issue. For most Americans is just one of many signs of an inadequate president.

Next mistake: Obama and his minions have been accusing his opponents of racism nearly every week. This plays well with his hardcore white-guilt-Democrat supporters but antagonizes the rest of America.

The biggest campaign mistake: Attacking the opposition continually.  Attacking has been Obama and the Democrats greatest failure.  It is entirely reasonable to attack your opponent early in the campaign. It is best for the attack to be from a source other than the candidate. Sometime after July, no candidate and certainly no incumbent should attack the opposition.  Opposition to policy is understood by Americans.  Personal attacks are abhorred.

Obama never stopped attacking and the attacks have never been credible.  That is an overriding reason for the loss in this campaign.

You will not see these positions from any other political analysts.  The paid pundits believe in economic forces which I consider generally irrelevant in politics. They believe in anti-black racism which is simply non-existent based on many surveys I have done.

Lastly, other analysts have no understanding that non-voters comprise nearly 50% of the electorate.  They have a singular view: ‘politics is corrupt, but it doesn't intrude in my life’... ‘so I usually don’t vote.’ . It is these people who came out to vote for Romney. They were seriously offended by many things Obama did and said in office.

The Romney economy

In an earlier blog I have advanced the thesis that the American domestic economy has been growing slowly because the business community interprets President Obama’s political environment as hostile to business.

I have never seen such a phenomenon before. President Obama is hostile to business. The only historic parallel is FDR in 1938 running for his second term. At that time FDR was openly hostile to business.

The current business environment is radically different than at any period in our history.  In 1938 there were roughly 25 major corporations, strong unions and very little international trade. Today there are over 1000 major American corporations, few unions and extraordinary international trade.

It is in this extensive and diffuse business community that I presume to find a coherent anxiety about the business hostile attitude of the political administration.

It is because I have advanced this thesis connecting economic growth and business investment to the political climate, that I must test my theory.

Tomorrow I will change my portfolio. Significantly increasing the equity portion and investing heavily in funds that reflect the American stock market and the American economy. I expect Romney to win the election on Tuesday. He will be the most pro-business and one of the most competent administrators to hold the presidency.

The economic outlook does not look immediately positive. We are currently in a global recesession which includes this quarter and the next two quarters. I expect the US economy will rebound by next summer. The natural gas supply will mean a decade of economic boom.

I do not believe that the previous very weak growth rate was accurately reported. Growth rate is adjusted by inflation. We actually had deflation for the past 20 years that was obscured by increases in the domestic prices of academia, healthcare and for most of that period, housing. Since we actually had deflation, our growth was higher.

Our unemployment no longer looks grim to me either.  It is beginning to look structural because there are so many open jobs and so few appropriate people to fill them. Most of the economy needs skills that the unemployed don’t have and won’t try to learn.

I am putting my money where my mouth is.