Pro Commerce

Richard Florida hypothesis

If you aren't part of the current American discussion, it is important that you know of the continuing debate that has been going on between Richard Florida and Joel Kotkin over the past 15 years.

This article will give you a good summary of the debate as well as the data that show why Richard Florida's thesis about the 'creative class' has not been accurate.

Cities and towns throughout America have adopted the Florida model based on a 'creative class' of people who should be attracted to a declining town. Richard Florida has argued that such a class of people can restore vitality and growth.

It turns out that this is not the case. A city government appeal to the 'creative class' can bring people who will raise rents and drive out the middle class.

Kotkin has pointed out the importance of having a business friendly environment and how that is sufficient to attract new business and vitality.

My own perspective on this is different.

I have looked at towns and cities that are declining and at the very few towns that have seen a revival. Nearly all declining towns (except those dependent on farming) have forced businesses to leave because of strong unions. Unions have often come to control the political process. That means death for business that means death for that urban area.

Neither Kotkin nor Florida have made the point that all of America is about to face a renewal of traditional businesses because we have abundant natural gas. Both should recognize this. All of us should recognize this.

When it comes to what creates new businesses I am the living authority. I have had more to do with the creation of small businesses than any other living being. Read the history of the Briarpatch.

I would identify three elements in the creation of new business:

*Businesses grow and thrive in poor run down neighborhoods. In environments where the rigidity of the social structure is at a minimum. But safe. Places where the police and government inspectors are ineffective.

*They thrive particularly in societies that accept very weird people.

*Lastly new businesses thrive in areas where people are cooperative. That often means young but it can mean cooperative in other meanings of the word. That is my addition to the Florida-Kotkin debate.

 

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Real roots

I love the photograph at the right.

In some sense it is metaphoric. It shows the magnitude of a significant root structure and how powerful that can be. It is relevant to holding up the tree in earthquakes and wind storms. It is powerful in busting through concrete.

Of course the metaphor of a large tree with strong roots has always been part of our perception of the world. I do not plan to add to that metaphoric perception.

I simply wish to call to my readers attention that all important individual thinking must have roots in the life of an adventurous and curious thinker. Ideas are the tree. Roots are the experiences and curiosity of the young person. Original thinking comes particularly from the soil of personal integrity and self correction at a young age.

I have often suggested in these blogs that a person's view of the world becomes as rigid as a hard-boiled egg by the time they are 23 years old. I don't find many people who violate my observation.

I do find that people who have had a root structure based on a curious and honest life experience before age 23 are exceptions. Such people are more likely to be interesting and colorful people later in life.

The purpose of this particular blog posting is to recognize the benefits of a variety of experiences, not necessarily pleasant, in youth. Various novel environments can be positive influences on young people.

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Longevity and cleanliness

I have long been curious about the unusually long lifespan of the Japanese. Of course there are tiny tribes that have longer lifespans but it is irrelevant compared to a population of 122 million people.

I've also been forced to disregard the issue of diet causing longevity because I know how my American diet prejudices resemble the views of our German cousins ('how vas your bowel movement dis morgen?) Diet issues are just an Anglo-German ethnic prejudice. Anthropological data suggests that diet can be extremely varied without having any influence on lifespan.

Then what accounts for the long Japanese lifespan?

I have a simple hypothesis. The Japanese live so long because they are uniquely clean.

I know that the North Koreans consider themselves the cleanest race but I've never met a North Korean nor visited North Korea. Therefore I cannot compare them to the cleanliness of the Japanese.

I have been to most of the rest of the world and can assure you that nobody is nearly as clean as the Japanese. Some of the similarly clean people are Swiss, Turks and Finns.

But none of these people seem to me to have the level of cleanliness of the Japanese whom I know very well.

What is unsurprising about the cleanliness hypothesis is that it is in fact the history of longevity in the previous 150 years. As global populations improved their sewage and their cleanliness their life spans were extended. Explicitly creating our population explosion.

Cleanliness and sanitation were in fact what the rest of the world learned that allowed us to gain the kind of lifespan that comes close to approaching that of the Japanese.

Cleanliness may still have a role to play in increasing our lifespan.

If I look carefully at San Francisco, look carefully at the homelessness that is pervasive and look carefully at the level of filth that Americans tolerate, I can see that an increase in cleanliness would directly effect our own lifespan.

To put it in an other perspective: it is our dirty country that is keeping Social Security from getting more out of hand.

 

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Aida is the greatest

I am not talking about the opera by Verdi. I am talking about a Japanese artist by the name of Aida, Makoto. He is the greatest living artist.

Before I discuss Aida I need a brief digression into my own art history.

When I was 13, I took a class in painting at the Henry Gallery in Seattle. I did a number of watercolors. One day when I returned for my class I saw a selection of my paintings on one wall. It took up the entire entry hall of the Gallery. This was my first and only one man show.

That was the same year I saw a large Matisse show at a major gallery. I was stunned by the quality of Matisse's work. I immediately gave myself the middle name of Henri in his honor. I did not and still do not have a middle name, but at that time I got my Social Security card and used the middle name Henri.

60 years later, my Social Security annual tax statement still shows my middle name as Henri.

A few years later at age 16, when I was at the university of Chicago I took an art class. I had to stop the professor in the middle of a slideshow to point out that one of the slides, ostensibly by the painter David, could not have been done by David. The style was too different. The professor, of course, told me what a fool I was.

At the next break I went to New York to the Metropolitan to the room filled with David paintings.

There in the middle of the room on the most prominent wall was the very painting that I said was not by David. I knew for certain that it wasn't by David when I saw the original. On the way out of the Metropolitan I bought some of the postcards of that painting and I sent one to the curator pointing out this could not have been painted by David.

Six months later I returned to the Metropolitan and the postcards were gone. There was a blank space on the wall where the painting had previously been. A year later I returned and now the wall was filled entirely with David paintings and a separate room across the hall had the original painting that had moved me to protest. It had been done by a female student of David's, Benoist, and was now recognized as an important painting.

This is by way of introduction to the artist Aida, Makoto a Japanese. I considered Aida to be the greatest living artist for three reasons.

*Number one is the variety of his media. His styles are astounding. He does everything from massive scrolls to video to sculpture to manga to public art organizing.

*Two, his technical proficiency and his superb visual power have an enormous impact on my view of the world. I see the world differently because of the images he has presented me.

*Third, and most importantly, he engages with the world with a uniqueness that is so stunning that one cannot leave his gallery without understanding something new that you had not ever seen or understood before.

I need to alert my readers that Aida will be a shock to Americans because feminists, feminist thinking and politically correct thinking will go insane over his work. Aida sometimes uses images of young girls in violent and pornographic modes that will drive Puritans nuts ..... for at least half a century.

Remember the name, Aida Makoto,the greatest living artist.

 

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Real estate sales window

This is a marketing idea that truly takes advantage of video technology. I saw it in the window of a Boulder Colorado real estate office.

This is the type of marketing that I have foreseen for a long time.

The window is a facsimile of an ATM machine. In the window is a video screen that shows a continuing flow of available homes for sale. When you touch the text on the screen for one of the homes, you are shown the details of the house both in a video presentation of the rooms, spaces and views but also the relevant financing and technical data.

At one spot you can get an entire grasp of the potential home purchase including financing availability, taxation as well as the details of square footage and slope.

I am very impressed

I'm simultaneously curious as to why this technology is not widespread throughout the real estate industry.

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Fifth column terrorists in the U.S

Terrorists and guerrillas have had very little military chance of succeeding over the past 2,000 years.

Over the past 70 or more years they have succeeded not by military means but by winning the relevant population to their political or religious ideology (Cuba, Vietnam, Mao and Kosovo) . They have convinced their opponents, in the larger population and in friendly governments, to give up a military defense that would have been technically successful.

To put this in other words: 'terrorists and guerrillas have learned to use propaganda to win their military battles.'

Once we face this reality we begin to realize that The New York Times is a fifth column pro-terrorist pro-guerrilla tool in the United States. The New York Times helps the United States and its allies lose our wars against terrorists and guerrillas.

What could be more obvious?

The New York Times, for 50 years has trumpeted the propaganda, interests and values of the terrorist Palestinians versus the Israelis. Similarly The NY Times has trumpeted the futility of our anti-Taliban campaigns and our anti-Al Qaeda efforts and our anti-Iraq Ba'athist military actions.

It is the Left in the United States that perpetually supports the fifth column defeatism that all terrorists and all guerrilla anti-Americans are appealing to.

We must come to terms with this tragic reality that the fifth column in our own country, the Left, is the only way the terrorists and guerrillas in the world, the anti-American forces, have a chance of defeating us.

 

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Fertility increase

You already know that most of the world faces declines in fertility and population growth. You also know that many parts the world from Sweden to Japan have tried virtually every policy and technique to increase their reproductive rates.

The only country that has a positive reproductive rate outside of North India and parts of Africa is Israel. The two reasons that Israel seems to have a positive rate seems to be: (1) an existential threat by most of the world encouraging the Israeli woman's personal annihilation. (2) The existence of a universal draft that includes women and gives men and women a chance to work closely together at an appropriate age.

There are many suggestions for increasing reproductive fertility but absolutely none of them have been effective. No incentives, no amount of money have increased reproductive ratios.

I have a suggestion that I believe will work.

The suggestion is that IVF (invitro fertilization) be changed from its current painful and risky procedure to a non-painful non-risky procedure that is inexpensive and is subsidized.

I believe that there are many women who are not fertile or are living in pairs that are not fertile and that there are many women who are single with no intention of getting married and having children.

All of these groups will be interested in a new functional and simple IVF procedure.

I believe that this number of women is sufficient to help populations, such as United States that is near a 2.1 reproductive rate, to increase its fertility.

What do you think?

I would also make sure that such an offer of subsidized fertility is not available to women under 27 years of age. The reason is straightforward. I want to exclude overly careless poor-parenting populations of teenagers, from producing more unwanted children.

 

 

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Compact trailers

There have been only two periods in my life when I took an interest in trailers or recreational vehicles. One was when I first saw an Airstream for the first time and was fascinated by the beauty of it.

The second time was when I realized that hippies we're going to be great users of RVs in their retirement years. I bought stock in several RV manufacturers.

I have not followed the issue in detail since.

The photograph on the right is one that I had to bring to your attention.

This is a compact trailer-RV in which three sides have a panel that expands and provides for a queen size bed.  One more couch inside.

That means this camper can sleep three couples plus one kid comfortably. Inside, when the beds are extended out, there is a standard compact shower, refrigerator, stove and toilet.

I am quite astounded by the brilliant engineering involved.

You already knew this? Congratulations.

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Blacks run amok

You may know it. We faced a 20 year decline in crime from 1991 until a few years ago. Since then there has been a very rapid rise in murders. In the black community.

Cities like Oakland, Detroit, DC, and New Orleans are facing an incredible increase in the number of homicides. Sometimes doubling each year for the past three years.

Other crimes are rising rapidly as well.

So what is the explanation.

In my opinion it has to do with social thought. Social Thought is the body of knowledge that shows that people are organized around central concepts, ideas and images.

In this case, the black community has finally decided that it is the victim of police brutality and white injustice.

This should not be surprising. Since the early 80's the mainstream Lefty press has been running a basic story that the police and white people are deliberately harassing and killing the black community.

Start by remembering the Tawana Brawley case of a black woman who falsely accused white men, including police, of brutally raping her. It was the case that made Al Sharpton into a black superstar; ultimately, getting him his own TV program.

It turned out of course the charges were false. There has been a 30 year series of such false cases. A 30 year period in which such false accusations have been made against police and white people. The stories have been followed carefully in the press and when the verdict showed that the police or the white person was completely innocent or acted in the line of duty, then the press completely buried the story.

The black community, supported by the current president of United States, has totally supported the false narrative that the police and white people, in general, are trying to kill blacks, particularly in crime related situations. It is therefore not a bit surprising that the black community has gone renegade. Blacks no longer respect the authority of the police and we have an out-of-control black population.

There was already a propensity in this direction. Blacks living in the South already had a much higher crime rate than their neighboring whites. The entire South had a much higher crime rate, for more than a century, than the north.

We should also keep in mind that the entire Lefty false thesis that blacks are unduly incarcerated has added to this idea of victimhood.

Summary: in the past few years we have witnessed an explosion of murder and other violent crimes in black neighborhoods in the United States. It spills over into neighboring white neighborhoods.

I suggest that this is the consequence of nearly 30 years of telling blacks that the police and white people are their enemies in the judicial system.

Blacks are told that they are unfairly incarcerated at five times the rate of whites. The reality is in the data. Blacks commit at least five times the number of crimes as whites. The 'five times' number is an under estimate of the black to white crime ratio.

 

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Winter organics in midwest

You have heard me rail against locavores and organic nut jobs.

Part of this is because I worked with many grocery stores throughout the United States before organic delivery systems were in place in the late 1970s.

I had to work with organic grocery stores that look just like the one in this photo. This is a small town organic grocery store with a semi-locavore ideology. You can see from the photo that they can't be too pure.

Those bananas are not locally grown in this small town in Colorado. Bananas have been a staple of American food for over 120 years thanks to international trans-ocean shipping and ethylene storage.

The persimmons are not a Colorado winter plant either. Neither are the beautiful tomatoes. At best, if they are locally grown it would mean a hot house. The rest are standard root vegetables that would be the real organic food before vast transportation systems entered commerce along with our superb modern food storage technology.

Look at this complete, nearly ideologically pure, organic winter vegetable table. Locavore is a farce.

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Jerry and anti-whaling

In an earlier blog I said some positive things about Gov. Jerry Brown. If you wish to deny that Democrats can ever do anything reasonable, read no further.

In the early 70s when I was a board member of the Point Foundation, I participated in what was then a very hot environmental issue: the anti-whaling movement.

We gave money to Joan McIntyre who harnessed kindergarden kids to send nasty letters to the Emperor of Japan and many other obscene environmental actions.

As I followed the anti-whaling movement I became alarmed at the moral indignities that were the tools of the activists. There was clearly more to the issue than saving the whales.

Because of my own culpability, I looked more deeply into the subject. I promptly found that all venom was being directed at Japan, while Russia and several Scandinavian countries harvested more whales than Japan. Further, Japan was the driving force in organizing the effort to control worldwide whaling because the United States, up until 1962 in Sausalito, was genuinely depleting world whale resources with millions of whale killings and discarding the meat.

Looking at data I found that only a few species of whale were close to a dangerous depletion rate at that time. Several main species numbered over a half million population with less than 2000 males being caught for food.

To my eyes, the anti-whaling movement was wildly exaggerated on the issue of whale survival and was predominantly anti-Japanese.

I wrote a strong article with all the facts for the Co-Evolution Quarterly.

The next time I saw Jerry Brown, who was governor by then, I gave him the article and explained the issue.

Jerry invited all of the anti-whaling leaders into his governor's office and presented them with my article. He demanded they explain their behavior.

They couldn't and at that point the anti-whaling movement became a smaller and less effective movement in America.

Thanks Jerry.

 

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Ted McIlvenna

It is time for me to write about one of the most extraordinary and under appreciated people I have known.

Dr. Ted McIlvenna has done more to shape modern America and the world than many others I have known. And I have known several world shakers.

Ted changed my opinions about human sexuality and the opinions of millions of others.

He began as a Methodist minister. I met him when I was business manager of the Glide Memorial United Methodist church. He had already begun a program called The National Sex and Drug Forum. The forum was used to teach ministers and doctors about human sexuality.

The method Ted settled on was to overwhelm the students with many hours of sexually explicit film that included every imaginable form of sexuality. After the overwhelming exposure, the students were readily able to discuss sexuality and learn about the incredible variety of human interactions.

You may not think that professional understanding of human sexuality is extremely important.

You would see that differently through the eyes of a gay person in the world that denied his existence and his desires. You would see the world differently through the eyes of the disabled person who wanted to live a full sexual life. And you would be happy to have a better understanding of what a medical doctor faces when people present him with complex sexual questions. For example, is there a date when a pregnant women should stop having coitus? (No.) Is it possible for a male and female to get stuck together (like dogs) during coitus? (No.)

Ted made it possible for all of these issues and questions to be opened up at the professional level in American society. He later founded the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality. The Institute grants advanced degrees and PhD's in human sexuality. I was on the Accreditation Board for the Institute. It is a masterpiece of advanced academia.

I would be remiss if I didn't mention one of Ted's earliest associates.

Phyllis Lyon worked with Ted on all of his projects. She is an astounding person. Like Ted she is kind, gentle, honest and incredibly competent. Phyllis was married to Del Martin. Together they started the first lesbian publication in the early 1950's.

Working with Ted, Phyllis was able to let the world understand the needs and desires of women in the lesbian community. She lives with grace and authenticity. Anyone who meets her has immediate sympathy for the interests of Phyllis and her friends.

To be born into the Puritan world I was born into, where condoms were never discussed and could only be bought by males over 21 from behind a drugstore counter, I was greatly relieved to meet and work with Ted McIlvenna.

 

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Pilots and drones

Some of my friends and I were recently discussing drones. Some drones in Afghanistan are being flown by pilots in Arizona.

I pointed out a credible authority for computer pilot experience. Mine.

A nephew of mine was showing me his online computer pilot simulator. I had no interest but said that I would be happy to fly a single-engine plane into my regular 'real airport' at San Carlos California.

My nephew handed me the controls and I proceeded to look out the computer screen at a simulation of the landscape I know as a real pilot.

I flew the computer simulation to the landing strip and landed it just as I would my own plane. On the simulator I made a smooth landing, exactly as I would do in real life.

The plane in the computer landed perfectly and gently at the right speed just as a real landing would happen.

I was amazed, frankly. I now appreciate how much a drone can be made to fly from a simulator far removed.

 

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Small town vitality

My father was very alarmed by the depopulation of small rural towns after the WWII.

As I explored the issue I came to understand that agriculture was coming to an end and that jobs were expanding in urban areas. Small towns had no chance.

20 years ago I began to see that a reverse process was possible. The arrival of the computer and the Internet was creating millions of jobs that could be performed in small towns in rural areas.

The question for me became one of: what would work to make a small town appealing?

The answer most small towns and redevelopment experts had was wrong. I have seen town after town remade into a miniature Disneyland and fail completely. In the worst-case the four-lane highway still runs through the downtown but sidewalks are wider and coffee shops and boutiques line the main street.

Almost universally these small town promoters are also opposed to chain stores.

The hostility is inherently nonsense. Travelers and tourists always feel comfortable when they see a chain store they recognize. It is a source of comfort. Some chain stores are the only source of reliable quality: Starbucks, McDonald's, UPS and Gap.

What makes the small town appealing to visitors and settlers is the same thing. A 19th century business that can survive in the 21st century. The people who go to small towns are sentimental.

This photograph shows a perfect example in a small town of Lyons Colorado. 15 miles from Boulder. The store houses a man who manufacturers bamboo fly rods. He has beautiful displays. He also has back orders for five years.

Similar stores that could create a real Main Street would have bicycle repairs, bicycle supplies, old-fashioned antiques, traditional beer making, a quaint ice cream store, a kayak store and antique car restoration.

You get the point. Sentimental but still commercially viable.

That is what brings visitors and settlers to small town America.

 

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Left never got the coverage it wanted

A few days ago I was particularly alarmed because an important event was not covered in the mainstream media. This event, was not on the front pages of any major newspaper except the Wall Street Journal.

A few minutes of grumbling and I began to think. I had to remind myself. I've heard this complaint before.

It is therefore worthwhile remembering that I spent my entire life listening to the Lefties complain that they were never exposed to the public. I'm talking Marxists, Trotskyites, Communists and myriad of Lefties who published dozens of small circulation magazines, pamphlets, newsletters and newspapers.

I realize their complaints were missplaced. People who were interested in reading their material had every opportunity because a person seeking that information could always find a magazine rack that had the Lefty material. The real complaint was that ordinary people were not exposed to this ideological material against their will.

The same applies to me. Material I consider reliable and accurate is widely available on the Internet and talk radio and magazines and newsletters. It is futile and silly to complain that it is not shoved down the throats of ordinary people who are not interested in it.

Complaints from pro-commerce people that the media has a terrible left-wing bias is irrelevant. The messages can always get through if they are interesting and appealing enough to the mainstream audience.

 

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The girl with the pearl earring

There is a current art exhibit in San Francisco. The show is very impressive and includes many masterpieces from 17th century Holland. Particularly from the Mauritshuis in Amsterdam. The advertising for the show focuses on Vermeer's painting of a young girl with a pearl earring. Most of the show is about Rembrandt.

Amsterdam was at the time the center of global commerce, global intellectual life, publishing in every field of printed matter, the center of the new rational thought of the era, of scientific exploration including development of microscopes and telescopes, the locus of modern medical developments and the global center for art.

To those of you who fully appreciate this blog it is not a surprise that all of these development are concurrent with Amsterdam being the center of global commerce. Amsterdam had the largest fleet of trading ships on the planet and it covered every ocean on the globe from South East India, to Goa to New Amsterdam.

Commerce is always the stimulus for intellectual, technological and artistic proliferation.

What is shocking to me and a permanent disappointment is that the people who choose to make their life in the arts are most frequently the very people who deplore commerce.

These are people who cannot see that commerce is what makes the arts possible.

In some of my darker moods I wish that there were a God of Justice who would move all of the artists who complain about their lives in the commercial world to Mongolia, Siberia, Burma, North Korea or Yemen.

 

This girl faces a short life

I recently saw a TV news bit that had a black woman and her 11-year-old daughter on the screen.

The mother gave a standard anti-police interview that you always get from a black ghetto person when a child or neighbor has been shot.

What was unusual was to hear this 11-year-old parroting the same anti-police trope.  How badly the police (usually a mixed race police force) treat blacks.

With that attitude I do not think the 11-year-old girl will live to be 16.

This blog is not about the short life that girl faces because of her anti-police attitudes. It is about the violence that is currently running amok in the black neighborhoods throughout America from Oakland to Detroit to DC to New Orleans.

It is about the fact that police are human beings.

I sympathize with the police. When you are hired to protect citizens who hold you in contempt and you are risking your life, you have no reason to answer the phone calls, to leave the police station or to drive your police car to their neighborhood.

You are human being who wants to lead a full life. Why should you risk your life for people who do not appreciate you?  Why should you risk your life when they permit killers with high-power weapons to walk freely around the neighborhood and never be reported?

If you are a police person you don't risk your life for these people. The black community has brought this disaster upon themselves.

The people I have sympathy for are the neighbors in non-ghetto areas who are not getting police protection because the police won't leave their station houses.

Protecting magnet businesses

Over my many years in business I have seen a regular phenomenon.

A small pioneering innovative business starts in a dull neighborhood.  Before long it is thriving and attracting significant foot traffic. Other businesses quickly rush to the neighborhood. I have seen such magnet businesses in the clothing field, as restaurants and as interesting repair shops.

Invariably as the neighborhood expands and thrives, the original business that created the locus of success, the magnet business, finds its rent  rise and become excruciating. The original magnet business is forced to leave.

I have never found a solution to this problem. How does a neighborhood protect the founding magnet business?

This is a problem that needs to be solved and there is no simple solution. When the magnet store disappears the neighborhood enters a downward slow death spiral.  The coherence is gone.

Historic shift

Last week saw a world historic shift.

A nuclear power of modest means directly threatened the United States.

Kim Jung Un, ruler of North Korea stated that pursuit of an extended embargo of North Korea would result in a nuclear attack on the United States.  The embargo was enacted.

This day has long been discussed by military strategists.  This day has arrived.  

I have no idea of the ability of Kim Jung Un’s military to deliver a nuclear weapon to the San Francisco Bay. Nor do I have knowledge of America’s ballistic defense capabilities.

I do know that the actions of one tyrannical leader and his coterie of insiders has put the entire population of North Korea in the nuclear retaliatory cross-hairs of the American military with North Korea at risk of disappearing from this earth in a one day event.

I also know that, because of prevailing winds that the Japanese people are now at risk of exposure to wind born radiation. I will soon be in Tokyo for a month.

This is no longer an hypothetical event.  It happened.  One of the immediate follow-up events of a North Korean launched missile directed at the United States will be the simultaneous eradication of the ancient Persian people.  

The Iranian leaders have been making threats against Israel for decades.  The language has never been clearly: ‘we will destroy Israel in XXX circumstances.’  I know Israel will not wait for the right wording once a rogue nuclear state has used nuclear arms in an attack.

The time has arrived when our world has changed. 

Immigrants

The photo on the right shows a long pier just beyond the entrance to the San Francisco Bay. It is only used for fishing.

One morning before September 11th 2001, I saw a large ship pull up to the pier at about 6 AM.

The ship disgorged several hundred Chinese illegals with their baggage on their backs and suitcases in their hands. They had obviously been told to make a run to the South up a wooded hill.

They were being sent to Clement St. It is a Chinese neighborhood about a mile away. They would have had to have gotten through the woods and around a lake. But I assume most of them made it to Clement St.

They would have fit in perfectly in that Chinese neighborhood. A bus could have been waiting to take them anywhere.

I tell this story because it shows how readily immigrants have always gotten into the United States. If there is an existing population, they can easily be assimilated.

World underground railway

Would the people you and I know have helped run the underground railway in 1860 to smuggle slaves out of the South?  I'm sure many of the people I know would claim that they would have been part of it. The truth is they wouldn't have.

Today there is a global need for underground railroads. People are still escaping from Cuba and risking their lives. Where are the private boats half way between Miami and Cuba to help them escape?

There are tens of thousands of people escaping North Korea into China. If they are caught by the Chinese they are sent back to be enslaved, tortured or murdered. There are a few church groups helping run a North Korean underground railway in China.

There are tens of thousands of innocent civilians escaping from Eritrea, Somalia and Syria who need the help of an underground railroad. We did not have such an institution for the South Vietnamese who died trying to escape the invasion of their country. How about Cambodia? We didn't have much for people under communist domination during the Cold War. We need such an institution.

We need a global operation of underground railways. It could take half a century before such a system can be put in place and become workable.

Now is the time to start.

Statisticians

The Wall Street Journal recently had an article about the geometric increase in the number of people who are entering college with advanced placement classes in high school statistics. It has tripled in five years. Similarly jobs in corporations for statisticians have been increasingly abundant and prestige is now associated with the title 'statistician'.

I am a statistician. I am an expert witness in statistics and I have worked for decades using statistical tools. I am very comfortable looking at any set of numbers or charts based on numbers.  Glad to hear there is growing prestige for my field.

Most of data I see around me that uses statistics from medical journals to scientific papers continue to show incompetence with statistical process.

I look forward to the day when more people understand and use statistics.

The reason is straightforward: we live in an empiric world that his governed by statistical processes. We can only understand the world we live in by using the statistical tools available that have only been developed in the past 100 years..

The simplest way to see this is to understand that traffic around us, that transportation systems we use and that even weather forecasts and crop pricing require an understanding of statistics to comprehend their operating mechanisms.

My statistics allowed me to be one of the first to realize why the population bomb disappeared in the late 1980's and the reason... still not understood by many people.  I also figured out what shabby data supports the human caused global warming hysteria which more and more people are figuring out slowly.

We live in a world of statistical processes and it is as vital to understand as elementary physics, chemistry, biology and technology.

Weight loss and intestinal flora/fauna

I have been in Weight Watchers several times over the past decade.

Weight Watchers makes it a point to suggest that eating habits be changed on a regular basis. They argue that a steady diet of any particular food will stop weight loss because the body accommodates to the regular food.

I don't take suggestions like this to heart until I figured out the evidence or logic behind it.

Finally I figured that one out. It has one element of caution to note.

About half of what we eat is digested by our saliva and our stomach gastric juices. Our stomach muscle takes more than an hour before releasing the partially digested food into the intestines.

The intestines have several hundred different species of (light-free) micro organisms made up of several dozen families. These microorganisms process the food sufficiently to be absorbed through the walls of the intestine into the bloodstream.

When we eat the same food on a regular continual basis we increase the number and proportion of microorganisms that specifically digest that food. Consequently, more of that regular food is absorbed by the body. By changing food regularly and constantly the highly specialized microorganisms do not get a chance to overpopulate. The amount of digestion and blood absorption  is decreased. The amount of waste is increased.

The one caveat for this observation is that highly complex proteins that are found in meat are largely broken down in the stomach and to a lesser extent by the gut Flora/fauna.  Changing meats doesn’t help much with weight loss.

So when you're changing food to increase your weight loss, feel free to eat weird. Eat foods your digestive tract has never seen before.

Sibling rivalry

My regular readers know I hold no sympathy for wusses. My sentiment extends to schools that generate wusses such as Waldorf and Montessori.

I argue that I am looking at the empiric world and the nature of human beings when I conclude that wusses are unnatural and probably semi-human.

When two children are born to the same mother within a 2 1/2 year period, the default relationship between those two children is sibling rivalry.

Why? This is true even in societies that heavily suppress conflict, such as the Japanese and the Balinese.

Why is sibling rivalry the default behavior of children close in age from birth until the pair is age 18? Siblings are always fighting, tormenting each other and ‘carrying on’.

I assume it is to give both of them a better chance of surviving in a Darwinian real world.

The super rich

There is a new reason to be comfortable with great inequality in income caused by commerce.

The reason I usually give is that our income inequality is a byproduct of natural processes. Nature offers far greater inequality than we can imagine. For every Sequoia, there are 1000 bushes and 1 million blades of grass. For every elephant or whale there are 1000 dog size animals and millions of insects. ‘Nature does it’  has always been an argument to justify human phenomena.

My new argument has to do with the need for the commercial world to deal effectively with the world of politics.

In the past year Google has successfully influenced the Department of Justice and the subsidiary antitrust department. Google has received several favorable rulings necessary for the search giant to thrive. On the other hand AT&T a telecom giant  has received unfavorable rulings that cancelled  a major merger with T-Mobile.

The reason is straightforward. The founders of Google have billions of personal dollars which they can easily spend on political campaigns. They get their money back handily because they are large shareholders in their own company.

The opposite is true for the CEO of AT&T. He only gets a CEO salary and bonuses and can only give a very small amount of personal money to the political world. Even if he gave a large amount of his own money he doesn't own enough shares of his company to pay him back his investment.

For me this is a very powerful argument in favor of supporting the super rich.

They can appropriately influence political donations to benefit their corporations. Anyone who doesn't understand politics will not understand the need for corporations to protect their interests and the interests of their employees.

Founding population and IQ

Every time I confront the fact that there are ethnic differences in IQ test results I am forced to think about how such an outcome is possible. Since these outcomes have survived dozens of different testing mechanisms, including twin studies, I am forced to ignore the test bias hypothesis.

The other hypothesis that is equally untenable is the ‘founding populations connected to some IQ gene’.  Any founding population that has survived to become an ethnic group would have to have been very large to begin with. Probably in the range of 1,000 people with a continual infusion from the parent population. Such a large group of people could not have a higher IQ gene than the original population. Statistically speaking.

That leaves two hypothesis: population evolution and cultural development.

Populations do evolve over long periods of time. We know that from physical differences in populations. Japanese women have smaller breasts than their Korean neighbors. Both groups have soft earwax and teeth that are larger than their jaws can handle. Many groups in the Asian geographic area have red spots on their lower spine as infants as do many American tribal natives who migrated from Asia. These suggest evolutionary practices over long periods.They do not suggest any way that higher IQ groups would be reproductively favored over lower IQ groups.

That leaves us primarily with cultural development as the best source for explaining ethnic differences in IQ testing.

I cannot take the thinking any further and remain rigorous.

I know that the two cultures I have followed intimately, Japanese and Jews, have cultural attributes that seem to explain their resulting higher IQ testing.  In Japanese culture intelligence, particularly logic and math skills are rewarded by selective adoption by higher status families. That adoption favors and rewards IQ attributes. Such family behavior in Japan is highly meritocratic and can resemble corporate behavior over centuries.

Jews have a high reward and prestige system in place for logical argument skills, linguistic talent and entrepreneurial facility.

That is what leads me to suggest cultural development as the source of ethnic differences in IQ tests.

Proud of a Black President

I have no doubt that Barack Obama was elected president in 2008 because a significant part of the population wanted to be proud to have an American president who was black (or at least half black). At countless times in my life I have seen blackness trump the female gender issues as was the case in the 2008 Democratic primary.

What I don't understand is how that same group of pro-black-pride-people elected the president in 2012. The only explanation I can find in my mind is that their ignorance of the Obama first four years as president was far greater than their pride in pro-black race relations.

I don't personally know anyone who has expressed such pride in having an American black president. Most of the people I know take it for granted that a black person can do anything a nonblack can do and that prejudice against blacks is not a political barrier. We have had an abundance of black elected officials in many urban areas for decades.

The real problem of having a black president, particularly Barack Obama, is that he is such a poor example of a human being. It will be difficult to look back historically on his eight years in office with pride. He has been arrogant, mean spirited, dishonest and most of all he has shown little political skill and a great deal of 19th century ideological ardor.

His 19th century ideas have been wholly inappropriate for the 21st century. I see no way we can look back on this administration with pride other than the fact that he was elected in the first place.

Nitrogen

If there were a single gas to which we owe a great deal of homage, these days, it would be nitrogen.

Those of us in California are somewhat in debt to nitrogen for all of the vegetables that come packaged in nitrogen during the year, out of season and from long distances. Those of you in other states are particularly in-debt to nitrogen for all of the fresh greens, lettuces, artichokes, beans, peas and arugula. Those are all brought to us because of the inert nature of nitrogen gas that is used to replace the rapid decaying effects of oxygen in our atmosphere.

I am able to get fresh corn, much fresh fish and many other global products thanks to nitrogen in our packaging.

You may not be aware that most of this nitrogen packaging of fresh leaves and vegetables began successfully in the 1980s. I met the man who was responsible for bringing us the myriad packages of fresh greens on our shelves. He was working with the farms in Monterey County California.

Everyone understood the need to replace air with nitrogen in fresh storage systems. The problem was to find an inexpensive and effective plastic wrap.

Because nitrogen is a molecule that comes in pairs and is lighter than most of the oxygen in our environment it was escaping from most plastic containers. This gentleman, whose name I cannot recall nor Google, found plastic wrap, empirically, that would contain nitrogen gas for long periods of time.

We owe him and nitrogen a great debt of gratitude.

Base 60

The way I learned math, history and the history of numbers, it always gave great credit to the Greeks and the Arabs for our current mathematical and arithmetic systems.

I was taught that the Greeks gave us geometry and the Arabs gave us our system of integers.

Wrong. Wrong.

The Sumerians, 1000 years before the Greeks and 2000 years before the Arabs gave us the base 60 numeric system. Base 60 is the method that is used to calculate all angles. A 90° angle a 45° angle are based on 180° triangle and a 360° circle.

The Sumerians gave the Egyptians sufficient geometry to build the pyramids and pass this on to the Greeks.

The base 60 is also the source of everyone's time system: seconds, minutes and hours are based on the Sumerians contributions. They were passed along without recognition of their primary role in the world of math. They were passed along with a full understanding of the zero decimal integer and a modern system of numbers.

The Arabs did not create either our numeric system or our algebraic system. That came from a combination of Indians and Persians using the earlier Sumerian systems.

As a pilot, I land an airplane on runway 24right. 240 is Southwest on the 360 compass.

All praise to the Sumerians and our base 60 world.

 

Getting rid of hereditary classes

Have you thought about the problem of getting rid of hereditary classes?

I was forced to think about it having read Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai. It is an horrific tale of a brilliant and powerful woman who was imprisoned and tortured because she was a member  of the upper class in China during the Cultural Revolution.

Millions of people were killed and tens of millions had their lives distorted and mutilated in Mao's effort to turn the Chinese people against the hereditary elite. It was only the remaining elite that had not left the country for Hong Kong or Taiwan in 1948.

I realized that nearly as many people have been brutally killed by class warfare in France, Russia, China, North Korea, Cambodia and many other places in the name of replacing the hereditary upper class. I think more people have been killed in this cause than for any other reason except warfare and epidemic.

The great tragedy is that it has not worked. Hereditary elites have always seemed to survive everywhere in the world except in the United States.

Therefore, for all people who care about human life, it is incumbent upon us to understand how the United States replaced its hereditary elite with meritocracy. We did not have to kill or mutilate anyone.

There were two forces that combined to eliminate our hereditary class. First was the military in WWII that promoted on the basis of merit. Initially college graduates were made officers. As the war went on, competence and bravery resulted in battlefield promotions to officer class. Additionally very open enrollment in public land grant universities created a meritocratic class of officers as well.

After the war, corporation's, which constituted a major force in America, began promoting former military officers into high management positions. By 1960, so many of the meritocratic Americans who had moved from the military officer class to corporate management were in charge of American corporations, that the previous corporate managers in the hereditary elite had been effectively replaced.

No other society, except Israel, seems to operate on this meritocratic military basis.

It is because of commerce, corporations, that are so deeply committed to meritocracy that I do not believe a new hereditary elite will emerge in America.

Nor do I believe that most other nations have any chance of replacing their hereditary elite effectively without the combination of the open military and the power of corporations.

Jerry Brown education funding

In the first chapter of my The Seven Laws of Money I mentioned a friend, Sid Wolinsky. Sid brought one of the most famous California education cases: Serrano vs Priest.

The case dealt with the need for equality of education funding throughout the state of California. When the case was begun in 1968 the wealthiest districts raised far more money than poorer urban districts because of property taxes.  

While the legislature made modest efforts to follow the California Supreme Court decision it was not wholehearted. In the intervening 40 years the inequality among districts as become as great as it was in 1968.

Gov. Jerry Brown is now proposing that state allocations to school districts take into consideration the need to equalize funding for poorer districts and even suppliment the funding in poor districts.

Legislators, because there are many, know that no one is going to be sanctioned by a court. Legislators therefore tend to ignore judicial rulings.

It is very brave of the governor to take this educational action. While I do not believe funding for schools has even a 5% outcome differential in educational consequences I still support the idea of greater efforts in poorer districts.

I made some phone calls that will help Gov. Brown's efforts.