Pro Commerce

Is Islamism causing our divide?

When the world became a battleground for the communist USSR versus America we slowly watched America take on a definition. America became a religious sanctuary 'under God' with a free market economic system. This all occurred within a decade of the global confrontation.

I keep wondering how the confrontation with Islamism is shaping America.

I believe it is the source of our current national divide. I have discussed this divide often. America is divided between those who consider government expansion and increased debt a threat to economic growth and commercial success.  And those who don’t.

This is a divide and it is firmly entrenched in our governments local, state and national.

How is it related to Islamism?

Islamism wants to create an ideal society in the image of the Koran.  That includes a government and religious entity combined in one called the Ummah.  The Ummah is a vast administrative system that enforces the morals of Islam. The system can be seen in Afghanistan under the Taliban and for half-century in Saudi Arabia.

How has America become divided in its reaction to Islamism and the implementation of an Ummah?

Half of our society considers this to not be a threat just as the same group of people (Lefties) denied that the USSR was a threat. Their group opposed the Vietnam War and strongly resisted a military build up against the USSR. Today the same group including president Obama has refused to use the words "War on Terror" to describe the current confrontation with Islamism.  The group considers the Islamic goal of improving people using the government to be the same as the Left’s own goals under the rubric of environmentalism and stopping global warming.

This Lefty half of our society sees no problem with the expansion of government, increase in debt that is associated with it and is not alarmed by increased regulations of daily life and business. It favors such expansion as morally necessary.

The other half of our society considers Islamism to be a threat to the core American values at home and in the many countries for which the United States has been serving as an example of freedom and religious coexistence. That half of our society (which includes me) considers the expansion of government a threat to both individuals and businesses and that the growing debt is onerous to commerce. That half of our society does not believe that global warming warrants extreme restrictions on individuals and businesses.

This appears to me to be the domestic outcome of a foreign threat.

To understand that I am not exaggerating consider a book that is pro-Ummah and pro-Sharia law by Sadakat Kadri that received rave reviews in the Lefty British Spectator and the Independent.

What is your reaction?

Urgent personnel matter

It was a girlfriend I lost who made this an issue for me.

A manager can be sitting with a pile of projects and items on his or her 'to do' list and a personal problem arrives.

Most managers know that items on the project and 'to do' lists on his desk will disappear or become insignificant if they are allowed to sit and wait.

That is not true of personnel matters. Most, if not all, personnel matters get worse over time. Over time can mean minutes or hours.

I learned from some very good managers that any personnel issue should be dealt with immediately. Not quickly, not promptly but immediately.  Robert comes into my office and says that the sales manager wants him to do something I have told him not to do.

I stop what I'm doing and immediately take Robert with me to the sales manager to discuss the issue. Both the sales manager and Robert have the potential for making the problem worse if I leave it to fester.

The reason I lost a girlfriend, a rather beautiful redhead, was that I got entangled in a personnel problem where I was working that had to be resolved immediately. I had promised to help her move some of her belongings at the same time. I phoned to explain my necessary delay but she had no idea why a personnel problem could be more important than she. She left me that day.

She became an example of a personnel problem that could not be postponed.

Apps vs large systems

There is a problem that I think is slowly being made amenable to improvement.

Most government agencies have had a disastrous history of adopting information technology. Computers.

From the earliest efforts to use computers in the IRS and the military, the results have been high cost overruns, static systems that are too rigid to be broadly useful and complete failed projects. Governments face this inherent problem. They are governed themselves by compromises within existing power forces. Power is never static or stable. Therefore the demands for computer systems are constantly in flux and difficult to impliment.

The same is true, to a slightly lesser extent, in all bureaucracies.

The term app has recently migrated from meaning a specific but distinct function of a large computer system to referring to specific functions on a mobile computer.

It is this distinct creation of mobile apps with their own language that run on a separate operating system and obtain data from an Internet database that seems to me will offer greater access to computerization from government agencies and other bureaucracies.

Because writing specific variations on a large computer system is very costly and maintaining those variations is even more costly it strikes me that having these apps as standalone separate functions will make larger computer systems more functional.

I have only dealt with this issue with a few of my clients and while looking at a seventh revision for Marketing Without Advertising.

Please feel free to enlighten me.

One man makes a mess for everybody

Every time I mail a book or take off my shoes at the airport I am reminded of a shocking modern reality. One perverse man can effect the behavior of hundreds of millions of other people for decades.

Since Ted Kaczynski used the mail system to send bombs to innocent people whom he targeted because of their contributions to modernity, the post office has a limit of 13 ounces for the weight of packages put in mailboxes. I must take books, being mailed, to a human being at my local post office.

Kaczynski in his malice toward the modern world has had a genuine impact on the lives of hundreds of millions. A trivial influence. A negative influence. But the man had a perverse effect. Curse you Ted Kaczynski. Curse those postal officials who think that a 13 ounce limit is a meaningful deterrent to mail bombs.

We all take off our shoes in the United States when we are flying. (A recent exemption has been made for children and old people.) The hundreds of millions of people who take off their shoes, boots, high heels and Birkenstocks every day owe this ritual to Richard Reid who tried to blow up an American Airlines flight with chemicals in his heel.

Reid failed but our lives have been impacted. It is a trivial impact. It is a negative impact. But one man had a perverse effect nevertheless.

Curse you Richard Reid. Curse all those people in the airline security business who think taking off our shoes reduces the chances of a bomb on an airplane.

The Japanese airplane security system does not require anyone to take off their shoes.

Texas accent

I used to take American dignitaries to meet important institutional leaders in Japan. Among the dignitaries were occasional members of Congress. Among the leaders in Japan, whom they met, were often department heads including the national banks and treasury.

This is not the point at which to explain that the Japanese bureaucracies are famous for keeping the number of employees to a minimum. The same is true in Sweden. The Japanese agency that manages all of the national parks has five men running it.

At one point, the agency that most American dignitaries wanted to visit was MITI the successful agency that directed the investment into massive computers and computer components.  Later as this agency was perceived to have made mistakes, the name was changed.

At the time, I brought dignitaries to meet the head of MITI.  He was the most impressive of any Japanese they ever met. There are three reasons. He had the most gorgeous secretary anyone can imagine. She brought everyone tea and was dressed elegantly. He would occasionally open his drawer and pull out a very fancy bottle of scotch with small shot glasses for his guests.  All of this impressed the visiting dignitaries but nothing compared with the fact that he spoke English with a Texas accent.

I later found other foreigners who send their children to learn English in Texas.

It is my observation that Americans view a Texas accent as the most American of all accents.

It is my guess that this particular accent has gained prominence from decades of airplane pilots who spoke with the Texas accent.

Current moral system

I have my own moral system. In the previous blog I discussed morality and commerce. The morality I have in mind is clearly my own. I would argue that each person has her own moral system. I would further argue that these separate moral systems are common to our general American moral system.

Within the American moral system there are many explicit separate moral systems. I do not think the divergence is very great, or we could not sit on juries together as readily as we do.

I do not think that our moral system is directly connected to our religious heritage. It is distinctly American.

Let me suggest what this moral system is.

We Americans have morals built around a simple proposition: a child is born with the right to fully develop his or her best qualities, skills and talents. Society must have a parallel moral system that supports this simple proposition.

This is why we so fervently support meritocracy. We are outraged that anyone should benefit from their family birth. Hereditary advantages are viewed as offensive. We fervently support learning opportunity equally for everyone. We fervently believe in scholarships and subsidies for the talented.

We abhor and punish insider trading that keeps legitimate people out of the loop. We abhor people, products and services that mislead individuals. Those individuals have a right to the best knowledge and skills to develop their own lives.

I do not need to go further. I think most of my readers will agree that these are fundamental American moral precepts. They are much more important and universal than issues of monogamy, church attendance or charitable giving.

As far as I can tell there is no particular book or article that summarizes the American moral system that I have just outlined. The closest I know is Charles Taylor's The Ethics of Authenticity.

It is also evident that American morals, because they support everything that enhances the individual's opportunities to develop their full capacity, includes environments that promote diversity as a moral value, meritocracy and openness. The values that help commerce to thrive.

Amoral or moral?

I did two earlier blogs on the moral values of commerce. Here and here.

My son and a few friends immediately reminded me that I have been a champion of the amoral quality of commerce for decades. So why am I now talking about the moral values of commerce?

It is a good and legitimate question.

Commerce is absolutely amoral as a system. I will sell you my goods and services whether you are the Archangel Michael or Mephistopheles, a hospice nurse or a teenage drug dealer.

On the other hand the values that promote commerce are indeed moral.  Diversity, meritocracy and openness are what promote commerce and they are moral values.

Commerce itself operates as an amoral system and its output is amoral.  But the values that are promoted by commerce are moral.

This unusual combination is more understandable in the realm of technology. When a bridge is built it is just as helpful to a wheelchair-bound invalid as it is to an enemy tank. Amoral. On the other hand technology encourages reliable recordkeeping, innovation, mathematics, openness, meritocracy and pragmatism. All are moral values.

Since I use the term moral in an unfamiliar way, I also raised many hackles. I am clearly not talking about morals as traditional church attendance, family stability, sexual abstinence nor am I talking about monogamy in marriage.

I also made the mistake in one of the earlier blogs of suggesting that 'openness' is a biblical value. It is not. The relevant commandment is “thou shall not bear false witness against thy neighbor.”  That is a good translation of the Hebrew. It is only relevant in a judicial system. It says nothing about lying within a family or dishonesty in a commercial transaction. It dealt only with a judicial system not interpersonal relations.

The next blog discusses what I believe to be the current system of morality.

Industrial medicine

For more than 50 years I have been following the evolution of medicine and wondered how it would be industrialized.

Industrialization means technological focus, marketing focus and dramatic cost reduction.

In medicine it has long been assumed that gigantic employers of doctors such as Group Health and Kaiser were the model. This kind of mechanism does not seem to have reduced costs and increasingly I see Kaiser outsourcing many of its functions.

This outsourcing is a clue to the emergence of the industrialization of medicine.

Industrialization seems to be taking hold in the form of focusing on organs and bodily systems.

The most successful business seems to be standalone dialysis entities. These are now national. The same is true for endoscopy and pathology. Most testing including large MRI and CAT scans are becoming standalone operations. In dentistry, surgical procedures and orthodontia are often standalone businesses.

Increasingly this is true for a wide range of complex treatments including various forms of cancer, heart disease and childhood disabilities.

I would expect this industrialization process to continue despite the imposition of socialized medicine on the United States.

It is hard for most people to understand that innovation in medicine is driven by commerce at both the pharmaceutical, medical appliance and day-to-day operations of medicine levels. Commerce is the source of this innovation. I think it will survive the stupidity of national socialized medicine.

Democrats, enchanted by their ideological fantasies fail to see that commerce is the source of medical innovation. It would be cruel for me to say it but I often think that every Democrat should be forced to live with the medicine and dentistry of 1820.

The real San Francisco

I recently read a book, the Season of the Witch by David Talbot. I don't recommend it.  The book purports to cover San Francisco from 1960 to 1990. It covers the hippie period, the assassination of the Mayor and a supervisor and Jim Joneses Temple.

The timeline is somewhat accurate, the details somewhat less and the insight is insignificant. Just what you expect from journalism.

I was sufficiently offended to write my own piece about San Francisco. I put it in my blog only because you might be interested. It is long. I have separated the bulk of the piece below the line.

San Francisco can be described as a personal crucible and the eccentric wild West. Most people come to San Francisco in their early 20s to find their identity. Most people who grow up and go school in the city, leave.

How did San Francisco become this way?  What have been the consequences?

All institutions are heavily shaped by their founders and their founding circumstances.  San Francisco was a sandy, marshy peninsula with regular sandstorms, no permanent native tribes and one grizzly bear who patrolled the entire area. The first settlers were Spanish explorer-monks, who opened a church in the center of the sandy peninsula near fresh water,  and a Spanish military contingent that built a fort on the north shore to protect the entrance to the bay.

The few pre-gold rush settlers on the north-east bay harbor side established a few small businesses and lodgings. The first restaurant was a French bistro on what is now Kearny Street, near Sacramento Street.  The restaurant had a Chinese chef. Chinatown has grown from that one location.

The vast explosion of the city came in the 1850s in the gold rush. The primary cities of settlement were in other parts of the Bay, particularly Petaluma. San Francisco became a belated destination for business people who arrived to provide resources and entertainment for the prosperous returning gold seekers registering their claims. Most of the early business people came from New Orleans.

Decentralized local government

We don't seem to have any idea of what our government is like. We have no idea how different it is from every other government on the planet. It is not taught in schools or universities.

I became highly aware of this when I first started showing Japanese and European dignitaries around the Bay Area.

Whenever we saw some unusual event such as a boat accidentally discharging sewage into the Bay my visitors would ask why the authorities didn't stop that behavior.

I had to explain that the authorities consisted of six different unrelated but overlapping agencies. There were local police closest to the boat. There were the local prosecutors in a separate agency.  There were several police agencies at the maritime level and at the regional level. There were specific agencies that covered only the Bay.  There were other agencies at various levels local, regional and state concerned with pollution.

To put it simply 'no one is in charge'.

This is because America was settled by frontiersman who created government on an ad hoc basis. We did not have a King who was expanding his empire and expanding his control. These were independent and autonomous people. When they needed water they formed a water district.  When they needed fire protection they formed a fire protection district. The same was true for judicial entities and schools. Over time some of these were consolidated but only a few.

America, uniquely in the world is a multilayered highly centralized system of governance.

In my opinion, this is one of the reasons we have so much commerce and innovation. No one is watching to stop the outlaws who create innovation in society.

Smell of 1820

Are you sensitive to smell? Do you avoid sitting near a bathroom in a restaurant because it would disturb your dining? Can you smell a person who smokes when they walk past you?

If the answer to these questions is 'yes', you should be very grateful to be living in the modern era. You should be grateful to commerce that has created the modern era.

As recently as the 1980s in the United States and still today in much of the world a cigar smoker can enjoy a good cigar in a restaurant, hotel room or in a taxi. Buses had their diesel exhausts at tire level.

That is trivial compared to the smell left on the street by horses as recently as the 1930s. In urban areas there were still horse drawn vehicles and police patrols on horseback.

From the 1920s, on back in time, the majority of the population did not bathe regularly (certainly not the English or French) and drank so much alcohol to cover up medical pain problems that it was very easily detected.

I picked the title of this blog as 1820 because that is the earliest time at which commerce became industrial and began to improve the lives of ordinary people. In most urban areas of the United States and Europe that time predates the separation of sewers from street side and from fresh water intake.

Until late in the 1800s, horses and other animals lived in homes including urban homes.

If you want to know what everyday life, all day every day, smelled like for an ordinary person you need to stand next to a modern homeless person. Homeless people have a combined smell of their individual excrement's. To get the smell of 1820 precisely you need to occasionally add the smell of perfume that was used to cover up bodily and horse manure smell.

If smell bothers you you should seriously give thought to any of your long-held Luddite or anti-commercial political values. You could well be living in an 1820 environment that the Left so romantically aspires to.

I should definitely note that some societies were very clean in 1820 and have been for millennia. Primarily those derived from the original cluster of tribes around Lake Baikal.  The Japanese, Turks, Hungarians and Finns.

Common sense about Christopher Dorner

I make no claim to have a broad perspective on the news media. I read the Wall Street Journal and an occasional online local paper and a few blogs including some news collections. I get many articles by email from friends. I don't see mainstream media or Fox News. I fall asleep with the news on TV, on occasion, but the first 15 min. are always murder, fires and mayhem.

It is possible that the news somewhere made some very obvious common sense comments about Christopher Dorner. I didn't see it.

What is most obvious from reading his manifesto is that a modicum of human understanding can explain his behavior.

Christopher Dorner was a person who liked rules and regulations and wanted the world to be strictly governed on a good versus evil basis. Rules are to be obeyed and good people follow the rules. Dorner was very comfortable in a military environment where rules and authority are the universal norm.

It is this very kind of rule based person who most commonly becomes a policeman. You can tell by his fervid devotion to military and police acronyms in his manifesto that he was very comfortable in that rule-based world.

In simple language, Chris Dorner was a goody-goody who wanted to know the rules and wanted to follow them.

In the LAPD, Chris found corruption left and right. As the kind of person who always pointed out what was right and proper, he clearly became a thorn in the side of LAPD management. They set him up in a phony kangaroo trial and kicked him out.

So where does a goody-goody former policeman and former military person turn for solace. Some turn to alcohol and drugs.  Not this straight laced cheerful fellow.  He turned to all of the trusted figures in his media milieu.  He listed the people he trusted: Chris Anderson, Anderson Cooper, Jon Stewart, Piers Morgan, the leaders of the Democratic Party including Pres. Obama and the whole cohort of Lefty movie celebrities.

Are these people, that populate the Leftist world, in agreement on any subject?

Yes they are. For more than 30 years, the lead story every six months has been about how white police forces have been killing innocent black men out of pure racism. 30 years of this unending stream of mainstream media lead stories. Never once was the story found to be true and the outcome publicized in the media with an apology. The current U.S. President, Obama, even jumped into a parallel headline about a white volunteer guard killing an innocent young black Treyvon Martin.

Chris Dorner's mind was filled with this racist media crap. The anger of a disillusioned goody-goody was easily channel into this racist line of thought. He started killing the people the media had found guilty for him.

Of course there is no discussion of this common sense trajectory from goody-goody to disappointment, to racist revenge.

The media is so culpable and so dishonest that it cannot discuss the obvious.

Commercial hate grows

To my great surprise I have seen greater hostility to commerce in the past decade than I saw in earlier decades.

The hippies loved business and started more new businesses than had ever been seen in America before. They had no hostility to large companies unless the companies produced war matériel.

Somehow over the past 20 years there has been growing hostility to commerce. Often in the guise of hatred toward large corporations. Walmart hatred has been growing steadily. It grew largely because rural people need Walmart and understood it as a successor to Sears and Roebuck. On the otherhand urban areas have promoted hatred of Walmart encouraged by unions. Increasingly the same has been true for hatred of Target, chain restaurants and Starbucks.  In the 1980s the hostility was limited to Barnes & Noble and Borders.

Now we have a president who regularly excoriates big business, the financial world and Wall Street. He is vehemently intent on imposing regulations on business and making government investment the prime source of capital formation. Every effort has been made to forestall trade expansion. The man is hostile to commerce and his hostility has found a receptive audience in the American academe, media and urban youth.

Despite this period of growing anti-commercial hostility, now represented by Democratic-union control of every city in America, many quiet commercial entities have been growing like weeds. Craigslist has become an important source of interpersonal trade as have other similar online sites. Most large cities have dynamic and growing secondhand clothing businesses. The secondary market for all sorts of products from phones to flea markets has been seeing a steady rise.

Somehow the hostility toward commerce ignores these jubilant person to person weeds.

Commerce and governance

In the previous two blogs I have discussed the moral attributes of commerce that allow it to thrive. I have not discussed governance.

The reason I have not discussed governance in the context of commerce as a moral system is that I have not seen a clear connection.

I know that many of my readers believe that it is the Democratic quality of our country, the USA, and our constitutional structure that makes us such a successful commercial society.

My problem is that I see so many counter examples on the planet. I see thriving commerce in Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, Denmark, Israel, the English-speaking countries and Holland.

Singapore has a democracy in only a limited form. It is run by a small family that hides behind the screen of democracy. But most laws and contracts are enforceable in court's.

Japan is a society in which laws and contracts do not take precedence over common sense, tradition or social values. The democracy exists inside a very traditional hierarchical structure.

Denmark and Holland are very egalitarian societies with a King or Queen and a long tradition without constitutions.

The English speaking countries, other than USA, have stronger centralized governments without the protection of the Bill of Rights or built-in structural checks and balances.

It is not clear to me that any particular form of governance is inherently best for commerce. China is thriving despite awesome central controls, a highly structured family priority and little openness. India is showing significant commercial growth despite an absence of honesty or functional day to day diversity cross class lines.

Commerce thrives on the moral attributes of diversity, meritocracy and openness but it is not clear what form of governance supports these best.

Commerce is moral

In the previous blog I outlined the three elements that make commerce a moral system. These three elements when present will make commerce thrive, when absent will suppress commerce.

Why is diversity a moral attribute?

In the moral system that my readers and I inhabit the ultimate moral criteria is whether individuals are able to develop their unique capabilities in the most effective and complete manner.

In a system that values diversity we have to have mechanisms that protect a very wide range of values attitudes and behaviors. Here in San Francisco we can have an extreme range of behaviors that are tolerated in a way that would be impossible in Isfahan.

A black man in drag can walk on the street with two Asian women one of whom is wearing a bathing suit with tattoos. That is actually mild for San Francisco. It is also only a reference to external attributes. Genius and weirdness are also tolerated in a diverse society.

Meritocracy is also a moral attribute in our system of values.  It is only in a society where individual uniqueness can be recognized and appreciated, a meritocratic society, that the uniqueness of individuals has a chance to be triumphant.

Openness is a traditional moral value. It is biblical. It is important because secrecy and dishonesty that can be covered by secrecy are the source of a great deal of social malice and bad moral behavior.

Commerce, because the attributes that make it thrive are moral, is a moral system.

Why no understanding of pro commerce

I have been trying to promote the idea of pro-commerce for roughly 15  years.  I see very little evidence of success. Few of my readers and still fewer of my friends and family know what I am talking about.

The reason is quite simple. I have been exposed to business experiences for 50 years that are not accessible to most people. Maybe not to anyone else. I was a banker, a corporate treasurer, an entrepreneur many times over, a consultant to well over 1000 businesses where I saw the most intimate functions of the business and I have consulted businesses in very backward Third World countries and at the top of the corporate pyramid.

That is the source of my observations but each observation can be confirmed by looking around our own environment once we are looking with the correct hypothesis.

First, there are three types of commerce: trade (a local flower store), where the goal is to make a sufficient margin on each sale to continue the business, industrial where the goal is to reduce costs by technology, marketing or other forms of efficiency and finally clientry (a trust lawyer) where the goal is to generate and maintain a lifetime relationship.

By distinguishing these three, the activity of business can be better understood.

Commerce is a moral enterprise. It rewards three moral attributes. The first is diversity. A society that is diverse in every way, the way, Bell Labs was, the way, Google is, is a society that will help commerce thrive. The opposite is a homogeneous society as one finds in the Arab world.

Second is meritocracy. This is a deep moral attribute. It means hiring, using and working with the most skilled and appropriate person available. It is the opposite of nepotism or family favoritism or old boy cronyism.  

Finally, openness which includes honesty as a moral attribute. Any society that is highly secretive or deceptive on an interpersonal basis will have a terrible time promoting commerce.

Just looking at the world around you and looking at various nations will support my pro-commerce observations.   

Romeo and Juliet

My granddaughter was writing a high school essay on Romeo and Juliet. I offered my observation.

The story of Romeo and Juliet is stuck in the pre-industrial commercial era. It was very common prior to the industrial countries emergence 150 years ago for family feuds to be the dominant element on the social landscapes.

We have escaped the world of family feuds. Most of the planet is still in that tragic era.

Commerce requires of us that we are convivial in dealing with retail employees and most importantly that we are convivial in our dealings with fellow employees in our work environment. Commerce makes us much more decent people.

Because commerce rewards meritocracy it simultaneously must suppress family feuds of the Romeo and Juliet model.

While the modern version of Romeo and Juliet is West Side Story, where ethnicity keeps the couple apart, America has very little of that inter ethnic, inter racial antagonism thanks to commerce.

I read manifestos

There is a left-wing theory that an occasional act by an individual will fall on a fertile field of popular distress and grow into a revolution. This theory has propelled hundreds and maybe thousands of revolutionary acts. This theory can be found elucidated in many writings.

As a consequence I always read manifestos. The manifesto is the act of a revolutionary who believes that his writings and often his actions will lead to the desired popular uprising and revolution.

The first manifesto that I'm aware of was by Karl Marx published in 1848. It was a global call to the proletariat to shake off their chains and rebel against capitalism.

That manifesto has wrung like a bell through 150 years.  It is connected to many revolutions and revolutionaries. I read it.

In the past few decades, a well educated bomber from Idaho wrote a manifesto that fell on deaf ears in an era of social upheaval.  Ted Kaczynski was a Leftist railing against technology and modernity. His ideas came out of the hippy-Black Panther firmament. The press never summarized his manifesto. I read it and put it online.

Two years ago, Anders Breivik, a well educated Norwegian released a manifesto as he bombed a government building and slaughtered an island of innocent left-wing teenagers. He was convinced that his rant against modernity especially against the Islamic movement into Europe would find fertile ground for rebellion. Again, the press never summarized his manifesto and it fell on deaf ears. I read it.

Once again an educated revolutionary has written a manifesto. This is Chris Dorner's manifesto. I read it. I recommend you read it. This version is uncensored of the names (censorship is common on most published versions.)

While the mainstream media has portrayed Dorner as a disillusioned crackpot with good military and police training, that is way off the mark.

Dorner is a dyed in the wool strong Lefty. He is in love with the Lefty media gurus. He praises every Lefty leader and openly supports every Lefty cause and grievance.

Much of what he writes rings true especially his disillusionment with the racism in the Los Angeles police department. He makes a very strong case that racism remains a powerful force against blacks. He also cites Bill Cosby who suggests that blacks should not be self-destructive.  Dorner is out to kill his enemies. He knows how.

He knows he will be killed on sight by the LAPD. Therefore his manifesto, while overly long, should be taken very seriously as a death bed confession.

I believe, as I have suggested in two earlier blogs (the second one refers to the first one), that we are in a period in America that is susceptible to a civil war because we are deeply divided.

I had expected the suburban gun owners who are the targets of the Democratic Party, the President  and the mainstream media to be the first to fire their weapons.

I am wrong. If indeed this is the beginning of the second civil war it is the mainstream media and the Left that has fired the first shot. It is Christopher Dorner.

So far, no one has agreed with me on the likelihood that we are on fertile ground for a civil war. I certainly hope I am very wrong.

I know that the longer Christopher Dorner is out killing successfully he will be garnering stronger support and becoming the hero of a Lefty radical movement.

Open books

A newspaper I was recently reading described the value of open books and several Internet and software companies that use it. Open books refers to posting of all employee wages and all internal financial data for employees... occasionally for the public.

From its earliest date, I have been a strong advocate of open books. It is part of transparency and I have advocated jt in my published business books. I posted the internal financial data for the non-profit I managed near the front door.

In order to have open books it is necessary to start the business that way. I have found great resistance to letting everyone in a company know employee wages after the business is running. The same is true for financial statements at the point where management has become accustomed to keeping the knowledge to themselves.

There are many reasons why open books make a more efficient and productive business.

First, there is always a potential in most businesses for interpersonal jealousy, antagonism and time wasted in discussions about wages. This disappears when all wage material is open to everyone in the company.

Second, as various departments come to understand the functions of other departments and see the core data, they are much more able to cooperate and be supportive. When manufacturing knows the details of sales everyone benefits.

Third, the managerial milieu becomes significantly more cooperative and friendly in an open books environment. Employee turnover is reduced, management skills are elevated and output is measurably improved.

When starting a business a commitment to open books is a positive element improving the chances of success.

Alternative to witness protection

Homicide is rapidly increasing in many areas. In Oakland homicide is back to levels more than 20 years ago when it was the highest in its history. That is also true in other black cities and neighborhoods, DC, Detroit, Chicago, and New Orleans.

There is one simple reason. There is one solution that I can suggest.

The reason is simple.  Black gang memebers are killing other black gang members and accidental bystanders. No black citizens are willing to identify the killers because they themselves will be killed.

No witnesses, no success in taking killers off the street.

My solution is to allow video testimony in court if the witness is killed before the trial.

The TV testimony would have to include cross examination in order to meet the requirements of the fifth amendment to our Constitution.

The Constitution did not consider the problem of gangs killing witnesses.  Juries should also be informed before the video that the witness was killed before the trial.

This proposal will not initially be welcomed by witnesses.  But over time as its effectiveness becomes obvious and well known it should result in a dramatic increase in the number of witnesses and the decline in black homicide.  

It may work where witness protection programs don't.  Witness protection is generally nonsense because few ordinary people want to start a new anonymous life.

Auto fatalities

Of course we know that automobiles are made safer with seatbelts, airbags and improved structure.

Is it possible we are wrong?

What we see in any dramatic test with a dummy in the car is that these safety improvements protect the dummy. Is that a valid test of the real world.

I have one piece of data that suggests the real world is not like the one we see with crash test dummies.

Japan has had a relatively stable automobile fatality rate for the past few decades. In roughly 1993 Japan went from a country where seatbelts were only required on highways as of December 1992 to a country where seatbelts were required at all times in all front seats in January 1993. The Japanese did as they were told. 100%.

There is no positive evidence to draw in auto fatalities as a result of seatbelts.

This is what leads me to make another suggestion. Here is another chart that shows auto fatality by age. It is clear that people under 35 have a much higher auto fatality rate while driving. Under 20, the situation is even worse.

Hypothesis: while safety devices definitely work, the reality is that making driving more difficult  for young drivers is far more important in reducing auto fatalities.

In Japan, a drivers license requires many hours of training and at least three hours of driving in the drivers test.

The greatest drop in U.S. automobile fatalities occurred in the past three years. A drop of nearly 25%. This is due entirely to severe state restrictions on teenage drivers.

It may be that drivers' habits are more related to safety issues than auto technology.

Their life is screwed up

More than half a century ago I learned a bitter lesson.

If you can see a serious impending problem in someone else's life, shut up.

If your friend is about to marry a con artist,  your good friend’s wife is cheating on him or a teenager you know is having unprotected sex, keep your mouth shut.

The first story is one that I learned about.  A good friend of mine, with whom I commuted daily to graduate school, became engaged to a handsome young man. When I met the man I found that he claimed to be working at a job in a field that I knew very well. I doubted his veracity.

Since I knew his boss as a friend, I phoned to see if this young man was indeed working at the job in that field. The answer was ‘No’. He had been telling my female friend that he was saving his money for their wedding while they lived on her money.

In good faith, I told my female friend about the reality, that her fiancé did not have the job he claimed to have. She never spoke to me again. And she never spoke to one of our close mutual friends again.

I keep my mouth shut these days and have for the previous 50 years, when someone else's life is about to be screwed up by something I know about.

I doubt that Ann Landers or Dear Abby would give the same advice. I learned a harsh lesson which I will not forget.

Mexico and China

A few years ago I wrote a blog about Chinese manufacturers in Mexico putting the made in China label on products in Spanish.  These were Chinese products partially made in Mexico.

A decade before that I had a client in the Imperial Valley that bordered on Mexico and I encouraged my client to become a shipping and assembly center for the products made in Mexicali (just the other side of the border) for distribution in the United States. It was a very big business at the time. My client followed my advice.

Today that Mexican border business has become gigantic.

There are two reasons. First the level of technological competence of the workers in Mexico on the American border has become first rate. Mexican graduate schools are turning out top-flight engineers and business managers. In large numbers.

Second, the prices of Mexican labor are equal to or less than the current Chinese labor market.

The consequence is that more Chinese companies are moving their production to the Mexican border.

Just so you know. We can now outsource to a country on our border. We are doing it in increasing volume.

Business and politics-unhealthy

I have many simple business rules. This is a blog about one such rule:

Business is about business... it should avoid any politics.

This does not mean businesses should not lobby or try to influence legislation or fight political battles in the courts. This does not mean that owners or leaders of business should avoid politics and political issues. That is an ad hoc matter.

What it means is illustrated in the following story.

Four years ago, in San Francisco, the local Board of Supervisors introduced a tax on all local businesses that required them to either pay into a city health care fund or provide roughly $2 per employee per hour payment for health insurance. The Restaurant Association set up a trust fund for medical insurance. The two dollars was paid into the fund and employees could submit bills for payment. Rarely do the employee medical expenses equal the amount of money in the fund, they are always much less.

Nearly all the large restaurants in the city during the first year of the new health requirement added a few percentage points to the customer bill. These ranged from 2% to 5% and in some cases it was a dollar amount like two dollars. Always mentioned on the menu.

On the face of it, this restaurant behavior was absurd.  When taxes on business are raised it is rare to see a gas station or a supermarket or department store add the new taxes as a supplemental charge. But the Restaurant Association was angry and felt they could educate the public by listing this new charge on every restaurant bill.

Over the four-year period the politicians forced a few changes on the restaurants. They prohibited the wording “health charge”. Restaurants responded with “mandated charges”.

Last month, the City Attorney, running for higher office, announced that all restaurants could only apply a surcharge if all the money went to employee health care. He also announced penalties that will put any restaurant out of business.

What happened is businesses tried to get into the world of politics to educate the public. The public, San Franciscans, don't give a shit about the restaurants plight and never responded. The politicians who are anti-business, mean-spirited and vengeful are getting even with the restaurant businesses.

Back to my original observation: businesses should stay out of politics. Just raise your prices to accommodate or move.

Blind flying

Single engine plane pilots can sit around and exchange stories with the same alacrity as fishermen. It is something both groups excel at.

Often when such pilots sit around and exchange stories the subject of the 1999 crash of
John F Kennedy Jr's plane comes up.  

Most pilots concur with the NTSB findings that Kennedy was flying a plane more powerful than he was used to into a cloud bank at night over water and became disoriented. We discuss whether there is any appropriate pilot training that could have avoided such tragic mishaps.

I am aware of how I learned to avoid this problem. It came decades after I had my pilots license.

I was taking off in a single engine plane from Oakland Airport with a cloud cover at roughly 1800 feet. The mountains to the north east of Oakland rise to about 2200 feet. The weather data indicated that clouds were less than 2000 feet thick. The top of the cloud cover should have been about 3,800 feet, well above the small mountain range.

I did something quite illegal as a pilot with only a license to fly in fully visual environments. I decided to circle and climb through the clouds. This was not a problem until I had climbed more than 3500 feet and was still in a cloud.

I realized at that point that my sense of direction including up and down was completely useless. I could only rely on the instruments in front of me.

I kept climbing and by the time I was at 5500 feet above the ground I was seriously doubting my brain, my butt and my instrument's. I tried not to show my distress to my passenger.

Fortunately for me, I came out of the clouds at 6000 feet. The cloud was a single giant funnel that was more than 2000 feet above the surrounding completely flat cloud layer.

I was very happy to see the blue sky.  I learned a horrendous lesson about how important it is to trust your instruments more than your physical perceptions.

A sad lesson that John Kennedy Jr. had not been fortunate enough to experience in survivable conditions.

Autism and population changes

Since the beginning of the 1990’s there has been a steep rise in childhood autism, ADD and ADHD.

This has also been associated with a series of erroneous explanations and improper correlations. Many explanations have been advanced for this rise in childhood anomalies including childhood inoculations, a widely accepted piece of nonsense. TV has been blamed as has obesity and corn syrup.

When a population anomaly of this sort begins to appear a logical mind is forced to examine something other than direct correlations.

The problem must be systemic. And because it is specifically a problem in America the systemic issues to be examined should be American and should be connected to practices in widespread use in America. They should be connected to childhood but not necessarily.

I can think of more than half a dozen changes in our society in the 1980s that could have a very strong impact on children in the 1990s and later.

Let us start with the five point infant harness that is required for all infants leaving hospitals after birth. The infants are actually kept in harnesses in vehicles and in the backseat until nearly 10 years old.  (The fifth strap, in the crotch, is used by all small children I have observed, for masturbation.)

Then, more importantly, in the 1980s it became criminal to punish a child by spanking. That was a major change in child rearing.

Children were increasingly part of a female head of household family without a father present.

Pregnant mothers were heavily admonished against drinking alcohol of any sort during pregnancy.

The list goes on and on and it includes a wide range of new games, new technologies and new eating patterns for the 1980s and 1990s.

Any attempt to explain the rise of autism, ADD and ADHD without reference to these many changes and many more.......... is poor logic and foolish.

Sidwell Friends

Slight problem. Maybe it is cognitive dissonance. Seeing one set of values connected to a contradictory set of values creates dissonance.

President Obama's two daughters (and president Clinton's one daughter ) are students at Sidwell Friends school. The word Friends should alert you to the problem of this attendance with heavily armed Secret Service personnel at the school daily.

Here is a school called a Friends school, where the headmaster is a Quaker and half the board of directors are Quakers.  Quaker values are fully committed to pacifism.

How does the school reconcile its deep commitment to Quakerism and pacifism and allow bureaucrats walking around the campus loaded to the gills with lethal weapons?

I see some dissonance, I see some incongruity and most of all I see some Quaker hypocrisy of the first-order.

So presidents want their children to have a good education and it turns out that a good education means a pacifist environment in DC.

I don't think the solution should be to impose on Quakers with heavy armaments every day. I'm rather surprised the Quakers who advocate aggressive pacifism are so hypocritical on this issue.

Ashes to Israel, business?

I started wondering the other day about having my ashes scattered in Israel. It isn't that I am old, it is that I am taking heart medications to stay alive.

In truth, I intend to be cremated by the Neptune Society, but my ashes should go to Japan and Israel. Specifically to the most crowded part of Shinjuku in Tokyo and the beaches of Tel Aviv.

When I looked up the issue of burial or ashes in Israel I found that there is a significant industry in that field. Many Jews want to be buried where their ancestors lived and were buried. Maintaining a 3000 year old tradition.

I will be cremated so all the costs of shipping a body are irrelevant. I actually have friends and clients in Israel so making business arrangements is equally irrelevant.

However, there must be a vast number of Christians for whom scattering ashes in the holy land would be appealing. I see no business oriented in that direction.

It shouldn't be difficult to set up such business. It would consist mostly of listings in relevant Christian pro-Israel media.

I have a long history of having started businesses, nearly all of which have failed. This idea is free to anyone.