Pro Commerce

Two distinct moral systems

For most of human history starvation and early death were the norm and only a tiny fraction of the population lived outside the realm of hunger, pain and fear.

That began to change in Holland in the 1600's and England in the early 1800's. Today we are more different from our ancestors before 1800 than ever imaginable.  And we live radically different lives than those outside the industrial commercial world.  The reason is that a new moral system came into being with the development and expansion of industrial commerce.

The previous universal operating moral system for millennia was a political-moral system.

We now operate in both an industrial-commercial and a political-moral system.

The political-moral system is a zero sum approach based on balancing power and maintaining the status quo.

The industrial-commercial moral system is a positive sum approach to human problems based on reducing all costs and using innovation.

The moral system that goes with each of these systems in their purest form is straightforward. Machiavelli in the Prince and James Madison in Federalist 10 explain that the goal of the political-moral system is to balance competing power groups in order to maintain the status quo of the society.

In the political-moral system everything that supports the status quo is desirable. It is desirable even if it requires aggressive action such as destroying neighbors or enemies. In itself it is not static but it's goal is to retain the status quo. Unions are the epitome of a political-moral value system. Unions maintain that every person must be equally productive or nonproductive, seniority is the only reward. No rewards should be used to change incentives or increase differences in production. In fact, rules should never be changed. Mediation should always be the norm.

The political-moral system favors packages of laws, like the Ten Commandment's. The father tells the child everything that he cannot do. Secrecy is viewed as necessary. Cunning is a recognized positive attribute.  All changes due to technology or innovation are suspect and invite suppression. Ideas that change, new values that appear are political-moral negatives. Europe under the popes from 400 to 1500 was the ideal world.

The industrial-commercial moral system favors managerial values. It believes in rewards for good behavior and education to remedy bad behavior. It strongly rewards differential production and output and skill. It is always encouraging growth, diversity, openness, honesty, technology and is welcoming to change.

We are living in an era where both moral systems are operating and are in constant conflict.

Each of us has a mixture of these moral system.

In time, we will come to see these moral systems as separate. We will understand the need to keep them separate. Political people will be allowed to operate within their values in their government institutions but they will be restricted and limited because they have no relevance in the moral world of industrial commerce.

When we complain that chain businesses put small local stores out of business and create zoning laws to protect the locals we are using a political-moral system. When we consider a highly paid city union bureacrat unfair to charge an eldery pernsioner a high penalty for a trivial mistake we are using industrial-commercial morals.

I have not named these two moral systems. That will come later.

I can define evil

Like you, I have long been perplexed by the concept of evil. It may be a perpetual question for all human beings.

Since I am a secular person whose moral system is based primarily on the values of commerce, the definition of evil has been a hard won insight.

My definition is straightforward: evil is any circumstance where a more powerful party takes advantage of or harms a significantly weaker party.

This is the case where an adult abuses a child. This is the case where a strong person abuses a weak elderly person. Where a person with a gun threatens a person without one.

Evil is where a strong government persecutes an individual member of the society without providing any protections. Evil is where a person or party is defenseless in the face of an aggressor.

I have not been able to think of every circumstance where evil is evident in a secular world. If there are circumstances that do not fit my definition please let me know.

I do not consider evil to exist in Manichaean terms as the opposite of good. It exists in circumstances where the relative strength of both parties is evident and the malice of intent is clearly on the side of the stronger party.

Evil is not tragedy as in the case where a child dies before it's parent.

Evil is not something one brings upon one's self.

I think that evil is a concept  arising out of human biology. Humans are expected to defend and protect their offspring. Therefore the violation of this biological standard becomes a moral issue.

Clearly when one animal eats another, or even eats plants, there are differences in power but evil remains only a factor in human culture.

Evil is any circumstance where a more powerful party takes advantage of or harms a significantly weaker party.

The end of hereditary class was not obvious

In an earlier blog I mentioned that I was still fighting against private clubs, the key mechanism of the hereditary elite class, well into the 1970s. This despite the fact that the hereditary elite class in America was already disappearing by the early 1960s as we can see from the disappearance of the blue books of that era.

Which is to point out that the end of the hereditary class in America was a slow moving glacier. It was not obvious to me at the time. It became obvious by the end of the 1970s when the private clubs in San Francisco were desperately seeking new members from anywhere. The debutantes ball as an elite function had been long dead.

I have consistently attributed the end of the hereditary elite class in America to the promotions into the officer class during the WWII and the extraordinary development of native talents by the military. All of which prepared an entire generation with the skills needed in business in the postwar era. The hoi polloi then rose to the top ranks of business and displaced the hereditary elite.

I may not have given sufficient credit to the practice, beginning in the 1950s, of admitting ordinary human beings to the elite colleges and doing it deliberately. By the time I attended the University of Chicago in 1955 most elite schools were recruiting from the West Coast and from middle-class neighborhoods. I was also recruited by Harvard but had no interest in going in that ‘snooty’ direction which was very visible to me at the time.

The slow moving glacier, eliminating America's hereditary class is itself an interesting phenomenon.

As late as 1969, the son of a bank president, himself a member of the elite club world asked me how my fellow bankers would react to his marrying a beautiful young Chinese American. I explained to him that the emerging hippie society would slowly change the larger society and that his actions might become acceptable but that I didn't think it would be acceptable to his parents yet.

I didn't sense the rapid change that was occurring in attitudes toward children of the hereditary elite. His parents might not have minded, considering the social collapse they saw happening around them.

The hereditary elite was in full power in America in 1955 and was completely gone by 1975.  A very short period to transition for everyone in that class.  They went from having access to each other to no one even knowing who the others were.

Gay and gone

I don't often comment on current political affairs unless I have something personal or unique to a offer. 

In the case of yesterday's Supreme Court decision on a national law against gay marriage I have given some thought to the effect this will have on my part of San Franciso. The gay Castro district.

The Castro district is roughly 100,000 gay men and about 80 retail businesses. With tourists the street traffic is very heavy.  It can support a sizable retail population.

The city of San Francisco, its Board of Stupivsors, joined with an extreme Lefty gay community to ban all large stores and chains. The store that would have brought the most positive business to the Catro District was Trader Joe's and this was maliciously banned precisely because it would bring so much business to the area. 

The gay community is very hostile to large successful businesses and chains like most Lefties but they claim to like small business. There is nothing logical about this.  I call it 'commercial pedophilia'. Good businesses always start as a small businesses.  If they are very good they are under great pressure from the commercial world to expand and include a much larger geographic area if they are retail.

There has been a very slow movement out of the Castro district over the past 25 years as it has become more comfortable for gays to live in other communities. Acceptance of gays has been extraordinarily rapid compared to any other minority population. Probably because they are predominantly white, educated, socialized to American norms and generally attractive.

With the Supreme Court DOMA decision, the reasons for being a repressed minority will be attenuated even more. This I think will result in more geographic spread and continued assimilation.

Unlike the black community, the gay community is not likely to find another issue to help them maintain their minority status. The black community, long after legal and operational restrictions were outlawed and disappeared, created a whole new range of imaginary slights to justify minority oppression status. In the 80s, it was the CIA selling crack. For the past 20 years it has been local police trying to shoot young black men. Even when such black men point guns at the police, it is still 'anti-black police oppression'.

I could be wrong about the effects of DOMA. My observation is based on the intense gay attachment to marriage despite the equal legal entity of 'civil union' that was created specifically for the gay community.

Living in San Francisco I have no sense of the level of opposition to the Court ruling in the United States. It may be like Roe vs Wade in which the whole country slowly moved to the conservative position in opposition to the Court's ruling.

Executive compensation

I have been an expert witness for more than a decade against high levels of executive compensation for the top ranks of public utility corporations.

I have generally relied on two arguments. First, the high levels of executive compensation are translated into high wages for employees. All of which costs the ratepayers in the form of higher utility rates.

The second argument I have used is that public utility corporations are de facto public bureaucracies and should not receive pay any higher than comparable government compensation. So that an executive at Pacific Gas & Electric should not receive more than $350,000, a wage paid to governors and US presidents. But the CEO of Pacific Gas & Electric is paid closer to $10 million.

I personally have never argued that high executive compensation has any inherent flaw in it. Fortunately, because the evidence in support of high executive compensation as a reasonable incentive is strong and testable.

Here is an example where economic research has been carried out. The findings were that in former public corporations that have been taken over by investment companies, the CEOs were often given higher compensation than before the takeover. Suggesting that when high stockholder gains are the goal that high CEO compensation can be justified .

Greg Mankiw reports that “the argument (is often made that)... boards are too cozy with the CEOs and pay them more than they are worth to their organizations. Yet this argument fails to explain the behavior of closely-held corporations. A private equity group with a controlling interest in a firm does not face the alleged principal-agent problem between shareholders and boards, and yet these closely-held firms also pay their CEOs handsomely. Indeed, Kaplan (2012) reports that over the past three decades, executive pay in closely-held firms has outpaced that in public companies. Conqvist and Fahlenbrach (2012) find that when public companies go private, the CEOs tend to get paid more rather than less in both base salaries and bonuses. In light of these facts, the most natural explanation of high CEO pay is that the value of a good CEO is extraordinarily high (a conclusion that, incidentally, is consistent with the model of CEO pay proposed by Gabaix and Landier, 2008).”

That is very strong evidence in my opinion that high executive compensation is an effective reward for productivity.

Random governance

I have done several blogs on the issue of randomly selected legislators and my role as the originator of this idea.

The idea was incorporated in a California redistricting plan that was approved twice by California voters on initiatives.

We now have the results of a careful independent study of the outcome of the redistricting that was done by randomly selected citizens.

The study shows a great success. An even greater success when it is compared to redistricting by incumbent politicians.

I expect my idea to be copied in many other states as the idea is better understood and this evaluation is promulgated.

2nd hand smoke evidence

I know this blog will be read with great hostility by smokers and anti-smokers. Nearly every American believes second hand smoke has harmful health effects.

I can live with this outcast status and always have.

Nearly all anti-smoking regulations are founded on the argument that secondhand smoke does a great deal of harm to people who are exposed to it.

Smoking is banned in work environments where people deliberately have gone to smoke, such as bars. The ostensible reason is of the employees who don't smoke will be hurt by secondhand smoke.

Smoking is banned on public streets in many areas, in common areas of buildings universally, on beaches in Santa Monica, and in parks in many other areas. This is all ostensibly because of the harm from secondhand smoke.

Restaurants and coffee shops are not allowed to have separate sections for smokers because the smoke seems to convey illness and death through the air.

I cite one example here that explains that no reliable study has ever shown a connection between secondhand smoke and any physical harm.

I personally read many studies in the late 1980s and early 1990s from Japan where very reliable studies have been done on married couples living in small confined Japanese homes. One person smoked for a lifetime and the other didn't. The one who didn't smoke had no shorter lifespan or higher morbidity than comparable homes where neither person smoked.

All such studies were removed from the good libraries that I visited in San Francisco, from the Library of Congress, and in Japan.

The anti-smoking group is much more ferocious, more tyrannical and nastier than the crew who support the human-caused-global-warming scam.  Both groups believe that any distortion of the data or suppression of results is justified because they are 'right'.

Minorities bad enviros good

We are currently witnessing an investigation of the IRS for its discriminatory mistreatment of pro-Israel and pro-patriotic nonprofit organizations. (I expect this issue to continue for a long time, until IRS executives go to prison.)

I can state, without qualification, that this type of behavior originated at the top of the organization and was carried out by the zombie-like bureaucrats who work at the functional level.

The same thing has happened to me over many years. I testify as an expert witness on a regular basis before the California Public Utility Commission. Sometimes I testify as an environmental expert. Most of the time I testify on business, survey and ethical issues on behalf of minorities.

I occasionally have to do research on the documents in the Commission’s operations center.

Whenever I come into the operations center asking for documents and I am identified as working on environmental issues I get first-class treatment. Even to the extent of having documents delivered to me and pre-sorted.

Whenever I come in asking for documents on behalf of my minority clients I am treated like shit. Even minority employees behave this way.

These opinions about environment and minority issues are not very strongly held by the operational people I deal with.

At the Commission level environmentalists are welcomed with open arms with high legal fee compensation and the minority issues are treated with polite disdain and low legal fee payments.

The employees are simply reflecting the attitude of the top level of the bureaucracy.

I'm sure this is the same in the IRS.

Mental illness solution

There is much discussion in the United States about gun control.

The Left is fanatic about the need to control guns as a way to keep criminals and dangerous lunatics from killing everybody.

The Right points out that the problem is that laws don’t affect criminals and that mental illness is usually the cause of mass killings not guns.

The problem with government control of the mental illness problem is that we can neither trust the government to make such judgments nor can we trust the term ‘mental illness’ to be a reliable term.

An experiment at Stanford got 19 psychology students committed to mental institutions after they studied a variety of mental illnesses that they simulated. They were unable to get themselves out of the mental illness institutions. Even the faculty and the Dean of Stanford had trouble getting them out because there is no definition of ‘not mentally ill’.

I have also pointed out in earlier blogs that dangerous people are easily identified at the kindergarten and first grade stage but we would never want somebody labeled all their life based on observations at that age.

I have a solution.

At this point we have drugs that can control some of the worst forms of mental illness. In a few instances, where I have personally observed it, these drugs are terribly effective. The person is stable and reliable on the drugs and crazed when off the drug.

My solution is to create a special court that has the power to supervise people on mental illness controlling drugs who are potentially dangerous when they are off the drugs. People will be able to appeal to this court to get off the drugs when they can demonstrate stability and lack of danger. But the court will have the power to enforce the continued use of the drug when the drug use shows clear ability to restrain dangerous behavior.

The court is not a psychologist. The court looks only at behavioral evidence. The court does not prescribe mental illness drugs nor apply them in the first case. It only deals with people who are on drugs and stable while on the drugs.

What is your response to this idea?

Fire from Kyoto to Norway.

The first time I saw photos of the gigantic bonfire in Norway I wondered how far back the tradition goes. Since the giant fire was built out of shipping pallets, there is some reason to think the tradition is recent.  Summer fires are obviously an old tradition, but not giant fires.

Without knowing and without any evidence whatsoever I suggest that this Norwegian giant bonfire comes from Japan via me.

In 1977, Carol Rae and I  witnessed a spectacular summer bonfire just Northeast of Kyoto in a clearing where a 40 foot high structure with a flower arrangement of wood was on the top and was lighted after dark. It was a spectacular sight. Sparks falling everywhere.

When we got back to San Francisco Carol suggested, around New Year's,  that we have a similar bonfire on the beach. I organized it with 40 dead Christmas trees and 200 friends. I did it regularly for three years.

Our New Year’s bonfire is now, half a century, later celebrated on the entire San Francisco beach.

The founder of Burning Man, John Law, (the man who designed and built the neon Burning Man) in one of his books attributes the first Burning Man event at China Beach to John's duplication of my bonfire's.

If the Norwegian bonfire came after the first Burning Man publicity in the late 1980s, there is a clear case of transmission from Japan to Norway.

Transmission of anything cultural is very difficult to establish. Long ago, I noticed that the word in English and Japanese for ‘hobo’ is the same and first appears in English after the American Adm. Perry returned from Japan.  Hobo in Japan is a homeless Ronin.

I know that the same is true for the word ‘bonfire’. English dictionaries attributed the word to ‘bone’ fires which makes no sense since bone fires would not be large.

On the other hand the ‘bon’ celebration in Japan involves gigantic fires every year dating back millennia. ‘Bon’ is a Japanese word and ‘bonfire’ makes perfect sense if the word came from Japanese.

Talk among yourselves.

Japanese cleanliness and health

You may know that the Japanese population is the longest living large population on the planet.

Most Anglos and Germans attribute this to the Japanese diet. That makes no sense to me because diets throughout the world are varied, with Inuit eating only whale meat and blubber much of the year, with no correlation to lifespan or morbidity.

I on the other hand, or anyone who spends a great deal of time in Japan, will notice that the Japanese are easily the cleanest human population on the planet.

Just before New Year's, every year, every retail store including restaurants and bars do a thorough cleaning. In restaurants that means cleaning the stoves and chimneys with steam cleaners. Everywhere you go in a commercial district you will see furniture and flooring on the street being steam cleaned along with the interior.

You will also notice that the underside of nearly all automobiles are just as clean as the outside. The Japanese are the cleanest population on the planet and longest lived. I see a connection.

When I say this to Americans, they invariably tell me about some study that found that children exposed to dirt are less susceptible to asthma and other similar problems. This is Puritanism. Whenever Americans rebel they get dirty. Look at the hippies, look at the Hells Angels. I do not trust studies that come up with pure Puritan results.

On the other hand I notice that hospitals and a few other public places have now become concerned about antiseptic cleaning of hands. This is based on reliable studies that indicate cleanliness in hospital environments results in lower illness rates.

It is hard for Americans to understand what a filthy Third World country we live in. But a trip to Japan with eyes wide open will help explain that America's homeless pooping in doorways and alleys is a low standard of cleanliness.

I’m worth $1 billion at Peets

Peets coffee is where I can be found most days of the week and on the weekends in the morning. I like Peets espresso.

I say that I am worth $1 billion to Peets.

Peets was recently sold to a German company for $1 billion.

What the German company was buying was the loyalty of millions of people like myself who are customers of Peets. Some of us are being sold at $1,000 apiece....  effectively.

While I am not personally worth $1 billion to Peets shareholders, I am a metonymic example of what the German company was buying.

Next time a company that is your loyal source is bought you can think of that purchase as a purchase of you. Your loyalty to a business is worth a great deal of money.

Such sales are relevant to marketing. Developing customer loyalty is what genuinely creates economic value for a company.

I recently learned that my book (with Salli Rasberry as coauthor) Marketing without Advertising, is one of the top three books on marketing in English in the history of publishing. My book makes it clear how loyalty can be created.

Chinatown store helps understand inflation/deflation

I don't know if there is a Chinatown near you.

If there is, you will find many stores with products that are available at incredibly low prices.

If there is a $.99 store in your area, you will find many but not all of these very same Chinese made inexpensive products on the shelves.

This is by way of explaining how inexpensive the products are that have flooded American markets and are readily available at high markups with still low retail prices at Walmart, Target and a few other stores.

A pair of pliers in Chinatown can sell for a dollar and in an Ace hardware store for eight dollars. Still cheap for a well made piece of steel.

It is because of this vast importation of Chinese goods that the United States has had a real twenty-year deflation.

We don't see the deflation because domestic products such as home building, education, and healthcare have been rising at astounding rates. Combining the Chinese imports of very low cost goods and the domestic explosion of housing, education and healthcare prices we still end up with a low inflation rate.

Going to a Chinatown is the way to understand what is creating America’s modest inflation.

We have deflation that effects most ordinary Americans who shop at Walmart and inflation that effects social climbers who buy new houses and expensive higher education.

Jews lucky to be surrounded by enemies

Jews are not unique in history in having serious internal dissension.

Such dissension is what led to the destruction of the first Temple and the dispersal of Jews throughout the Middle East. It is also what led to the writing of the Torah and several of the additional stories to explain to the Jews of the future how dissension had resulted in defeat and dispersal.  There would be no Jews today if Cyrus had not allowed them to return to Israel.

The same dissension later led to the battles of the Maccabees and the celebration of Hanukkah. And the destruction of the second Temple.

Jews did not learn the lesson over the intervening two millennia. There were many instances where Jews battled each other theologically, politically and in competing organizations. Even when they were building the State of Israel.

The survival of Jews in Israel required cooperation. The new state of Israel began with extensive dissension among the settlers. It was the hostility, now a century old, of the surrounding Arabs that has forced Jews to learn internal tolerance.

Israel survives because it is a cohesive nation, more cohesive than any other. It is cohesive because it is surrounded by obvious dangers and belligerent enemies.

Because one third of American Jews do not understand the situation in Israel, I can look forward to a long-term separation of a large part of American Jewry from the future of Israel.  Many American Jewish communities will begin to resemble overseas Chinese and Japanese communities... arcane and completely detached from the homeland.

Really boost the economy

We have been in the longest slowest economic recovery in American history (five years since the beginning of 2008).

There have been many speculative suggestions for the reasons. So far I have favored the hypothesis that the federal stimulus money diverted capital investment needed for the recovery and that the Obama administration has shown such great hostility toward commerce that it suppressed investment as well.

What I want to discuss here are the actual policies that could have stimulated the economy and still could.

The number one most important source of government led economic stimulus would be an expansion of free trade agreements and reduction of domestic tariffs and tariff barriers. Our economy would skyrocket. One such agreement is on the horizon: the Trans Pacific Partnership.

The number two source of Federal economic stimulus would be a fiat percentage reduction in EPA, OSHA and the Dept. of the Interior regulations that are hostile to business.

Number three would be a national model law for environmental evaluations of new projects, EIRs, that would limit the evaluation to two printed pages and one month for preparation.  A national law on this subject would trump local laws.

Similarly the fourth source of stimulus would be a national model building code that focused almost exclusively on fire, flood and earthquake safety. There should be national incentives to get local jurisdictions to accept the model code.  Buildings could be mass-produced as well as imported.

Those four efforts to stimulate the economy should probably result in dramatic investment success.

St. Francis Yacht club

The St. Francis Yacht Club has recently been in the local news because of a book that describes how Larry Ellison (CEO of Oracle) tried to get the club to sponsor his Americas Cup boat and to bring the America's Cup race to San Francisco.

Ellison failed in that effort and moved his efforts 100 yards to the Golden Gate Yacht club, a dinky ramshackle blue-collar drinking club. There he succeeded. The Golden Gate Yacht club, in return for some building upgrading, sponsors Ellison's yacht and the America's Cup race this summer in San Francisco.

Ellison (a Jew) would not have been a member of the St. Francis yacht club, in the first place, if it had not been for my efforts in the 1970s.

The St. Francis is on public property with a long-term lease supervised by the Park and Recreation Department.

The St. Francis was one of the very last vestiges of the hereditary upper class.  It was frequently listed in the San Francisco Blue Book.

The laws had changed by the 1970s and clubs with more than 200 members could not legally discriminate.

When the St. Francis lease was due to come up, I mounted a campaign to make their lease renewal conditional on affirmative action in membership. Their employees were already 90% minority.

It took only a few phone calls and I had the necessary political backing.

By the time of the lease renewal hearing before the Park and Recreation Commission, the St. Francis Club had capitulated and put a nondiscriminatory clause in their charter and invited a few prominent blacks to join the club.

The club remains a stuffy old farts hangout but they legally had to let Ellison become a member.

Dream currency

In roughly 1976 or '77 by the time the Briarpatch had grown to a large number of businesses, 600+, the strange thought occurred to me that we could have our own currency.  Most briars would have been happy to use a currency that promoted interaction among their fellow businesses that had common values (openness, honesty and cooperation.)

I actually commissioned a graphic arts studio to design a currency. I decided to call the currency ‘Briarpatch Dreams’. I picked this name on the assumption that any federal agency that decided to persecute us would be embarrassed to be persecuting ‘dreams’.

I also went so far as to figure out how to avoid forgery. As was consistent with the values of that era, I settled on handmade exotic paper.

I went to a remote village between Kyoto and the North Sea to have specially designed mulberry paper made. I ordered 500 sheets with gold thread through it at regular intervals. On the right is a photo of the roll of 500 sheets that I still have (the gold threads are sticking out).

My plan was to have a location where anyone could buy the Dreams in denominations from one to 50. The location would also redeem the Dreams in dollars. We would also provide a list of the Briar businesses.

I have no doubt the system would have worked and been very pleasing to the Briarpatch members.

I also have no doubt that the idea would have attracted a great deal of attention.

As I thought about actually beginning the operation, I realized I would have to be the banker and manage the banking function. The profit of the operation would come from all the currency that is never redeemed.  It could have been a large sum.

I realized, I had already been a banker and had no interest in doing it again.

Born equal: democracy and genetics

I recently made an observation that I wish to present to my beloved blog readers. This may be an original idea.

Democracy may be a biologically advantageous political system. When I'm referring to democracy I am referring specifically to the American model which is a limited government, multistate, Republic.

The biological fact of human beings, Homo sapiens, is that we are like apples.  Every child born is a reversion to the standard human being.  Plant a fancy Fuji apple seed and you get the standard crab apple. We constantly return to the norm of the population. With excessive inbreeding, our lineage dies.

If that is the biological fact, then any idea of a biologically bred upper-class, or lower-class, is bound to fail because there is no biological way to maintain the inbreeding superiority or inferiority in humans. Certainly, in the past, such inherited class categories have been created by culture. When families tried to inbreed they died out.

In the most extreme cultural case, Japan, the hierarchical social structure is maintained by selection of outstanding genetic individuals and marrying them higher in the hierarchy for their talent. This is still a cultural mechanism since the genetic material (their children) always revert to the population norm.

Over long periods of time, the question becomes what political system is most capable of accommodating a society that always reverts to the genetic norm?

I would suggest that American-style democracy creates the most favorable environment for the favorable-sporadic-random gene to become highly productive for the society. That productivity may be in any domain: culture, science, politics or most importantly commerce.  Such wonderful outliers have the greatest chance of making a social contribution in an American world.

Doesn't this strike you as an interesting thesis? That American-style democracy has a biologically favorable role.

A friend commented that American style uses a high level of chaos to produce innovation.  Yes, and that is also how biology works in the genetic world. Random variation with selection for favorable attributes.

How are in-laws like party guests?

You may have noticed that when you invite close personal friends of yours to a party they may be convivial and they may get along well, but rarely do friendships develop between your friends.

It was always my hope that my friends would become friends with each other but that rarely happened.

I gave a great deal of thought to my failure in this endeavor and came up with an explanation. It may be an explanation that makes sense to you too.

I am a somewhat complex person, like most people. My friends are attracted to me because of a variety of my personal attributes. They do not find that same attribute that attracts them to me in any of my other friends, necessarily.

That makes sense, doesn't it. I am like a starfish with each pod independent and different. My friends are attracted to different parts. They are not necessarily attracted to each other. Picture the starfish with a bunch of mussels or clams attached to each pod.  Those mussels or clams might not be interested in mussels or clams on other pods.

Now, I realize that in-laws have the same complex quality.

My children, like me, are complex and the spouse they find is attracted to some attributes of my child that I may not have appreciated myself. The spouses may have significantly different attributes from the attributes in my children that I most appreciate.

The same can be true of lovers. The magnetic attributes between me and a lover may not be in any way related to the attributes that attract friends of my lover. So my lover's friends may be of little or minor interest to me.

All of which is to say that families are inherently diverse and can be difficult. Because of their long-term nature, it is incumbent upon sensible people to accept the diversity and maintain family equanimity.

Willie’s voting scam

Willie Brown is the most brilliant political operative in the history of California. Maybe the U.S.

To his regret, he returned to San Francisco to be mayor. A job he disliked vehemently because he had to deal with a garrulous Board of Supervisors, mostly idiots. In a town of Lefty ideological voters.

Willie had a long history of running campaigns in California from his central position as Democratic Party banker.

Willie tried an experiment in his second campaign for mayor. He wanted to see if the traditional Chicago, New York political machines would work in San Francisco.

He set up several large church fried chicken dinners in black neighborhoods. He then offered, via his political friendship network, to take any black voter to the polling station by limousine and afterwards to the free chicken dinner.

Willie was prepared to transport several thousand black voters.

He only got several hundred.

Political machines with the traditional bribery form don't work in San Francisco.

The ones that work are union based. The union has sufficient power over its members to get them to act. The unions have 26,000 city employees, the highest salaries and benefits in the country,  thousands of SEIU maintenance workers and thousands of hospital workers.  Unions have a large voting influence. No bribery, just suasion.

We created the EU, Japanese pacifism

If you are noticing international problems that are arising because Japan has become a pacifist nation (Chinese and North Korean aggression) or because the Europeans are hostile to Israel and unwilling to share any burdens of global policing (Libya, Syria, Egypt, Iran...), you may have to look at the United States as the reason for this problem.

The United States has been willingly acting as a global policeman since World War II. This willingness has allowed Europeans and the Japanese to assume the position of helpless nations unwilling to fund a reasonable standing military.

That is part of the reason. The real problem comes from the fact that the United States, at the end of WWII, designed Europe and Japan to be pacifists.

The Japanese Constitution actually defines Japan as a country without a military. Over the intervening sixty years several generations have grown up with a pure pacifist mentality. I see no way that that can be changed.

The United States did everything possible to create a European Union with the intention of ending the millennia long internecine warfare in Europe.  The U.S. created a unified NATO that could confront Soviet communism. It diffused European nationalism. The net effect has been to create a pacifist Europe over two generations.  Europeans now abhor nation-states that need to defend themselves, like Israel.

We have succeeded in making sure that we have no allies to support us in global policing responsibilities and can never look forward to such allies again.

Someone might stop me and ask about the European staffed peace forces on the Lebanon border, the Golan Heights and Sinai borders and I can only respond by pointing out how quickly these peace forces evaporate in times of trouble. Pacifists pretending to be soldiers.

China and a few other countries are not part of this pacifist landscape that we have created.

We have no choice about how to deal with this as our own creation bites us in the foot.  We must remain the global policeman. Fortunately, Canada, has understood what has happened and keeps encouraging us to act responsibly.

Maintenance failure... precipitous decline

It has begun to be common to read about freeways, highways, bridges, railroads and even cruise ship disasters.  In virtually all these cases the problem is a lack of maintenance.

The Golden Gate Bridge is a shining example of good maintenance. The bridge is now 75 years old. Every year since it was built it has been scraped and painted and repainted. Nearly the entire six dollars per car that is collected goes toward maintenance of the bridge.

The same cannot be said about any other piece of public steel in America. While the Golden Gate Bridge has to deal with an ocean environment, it is not significantly more vulnerable than all the other man made steel objects in America.

Throughout my life, until the 1980s, when German and Japanese cars began to impact automobile design in the United States, American cars were notoriously unreliable.

Both the Japanese and the German engineers understand the nature of maintenance. Their cars introduced the requirement that new cars be serviced regularly at factory authorized facilities. Regular service is a synonym for maintenance.

Maintenance begins in design. If the object is not designed for easy maintenance it will not occur.

From my own personal experience I have learned what maintenance is about. I had an Aston Martin Lagonda, which was a sedan designed for high power. The only access to the spark plugs required the removal of the engine. British. I also had an MGA sports car. The electrical harness looked like spaghetti and when it began to be a problem, no one could figure out which wire went where.

I worked on a French Fuga fighter plane that had a stick of dynamite under the pilot's seat for ejection purposes. The dynamite had to be replaced every 100 hours. A major job that was an example of French maintenance and design incompetence. I had a French motorscooter with oversized rubber shock absorbers that wore out in less than five years.

The New York subway system had come to a virtual standstill by the early 1990’s when a transportation expert from Canada was brought in to fix the system. The first thing he did was install a reliable maintenance system. That made the subway system functional.

When you compare airplane safety to automobile safety in the 1950s and 60s you can understand the high level of safety of airplanes because they have a high level of scheduled maintenance that is enforced by government agencies.

In the contemporary world, where America remains pretty much a Third World country, part of our problem has to do with lack of understanding of maintenance. Without maintenance most man-made objects are destined to fail at a precipitous rate.

First Victorian paint jobs

San Francisco is noted for its Victorian houses painted in ornate styles and colors.

There are roughly 40,000 Victorian houses in the city most were built before the earthquake of 1906. They were originally painted in bright pastel colors.

Beginning at the turn of the 20th century conformity was the prevailing national style. Unusual behavior was limited to membership in the largest voluntary organization, the Odd Fellows.  So the Victorian color fest ended.

For more than a half-century all San Franciso Victorians were painted white or gray.

In the late 1960's one person, on psychedelic drugs, painted his house on the outside to resemble the psychedelic interior decor, common to hippy 'pads'. The tenant in this house was Jefferson F. Poland, well-known as a founder of the Sexual Freedom League. The photo on the right is the first house painted with modern Victorian polychrome style. The first modern Victorian paint job was done on the house on the left, 906 Steiner St.  It has since been returned to a rather boring standard look since Jeff left.  The next door neighbor has the more vibrant current Victorian style.

Don't bother looking this up in Wikipedia, they have it wrong. I knew Jeff Poland and I worked with many of the first people who got into the Victorian polychrome house painting business in the Briarpatch. They became very skilled and very much in demand.

This is just an historical note to set the record straight.

Lottery vs earnings-2

I am always puzzled by discussions about people who have too much money. My life is wonderful, I have no reason to complain about others.

The people complaining are clearly expressing envy and relying on an ancient tribal desire to have equality among all the tribal members.

The playing field of complaints about people having too much money is not a level playing field. That  makes the issue of understanding it more difficult.

While there is an endless array of complaints about senior executives being paid in the tens of millions and more extreme complaints about financial figures earning in the hundreds of millions, there is no comparable complaining about celebrities or sports figures earning comparable amounts of money.  A good basketball player can earn the same as a chief executive who runs a $10 billion company with 15,000 employees.

I begin the blog with the mention of winners of the lottery. There is a visible absence of complaints about their level of earnings.

So what is going on? I cannot understand it.

Executives frequently have managerial responsibility for thousands of employees and the level of responsibility is very heavy. The celebrity status is pretty much luck much like the lottery.  Both of which resemble inherited money.

Inherited money does generate some envy but nothing comparable to executive pay or financial figure  payments.

The president of the US and the rest of the envy crowd seem to put financial people with large earnings at the top of their hate list. In most cases these people are dealing with billions of dollars and making reasonable or lucky decisions about their investment. They are taking a tiny percentage of their success in payment.

The playing field for envy does not make sense to me at this point.

Lottery vs earnings-1

I simply want to ask the question: ' why a person who wins tens of millions of dollars in a lottery is not subject to the same kind of hostile greed-envy talk that a person being paid that same amount of money as a manager of a corporation experiences?'

I don't have the answer. It clearly has to do with the lottery winner benefiting from luck not because the person is ‘better’. Anyone can win the lottery.  Executives have to have more than just luck.

It is certainly hard, if not impossible, for the public to understand why corporate executives or successful businesspeople are able to generate a great deal of income because their behavior is good.

First we have people who are actors portraying corporate executives (like Peter Coyote) who have no understanding of the role. (Many such Hollywood actors playing corporate executives in fact come from a Marxist background.).

We also live in a society in which absolutely no arts, theater, movies or novels convey the type of work effort and competence that it takes to earn high income.  Except for sports and movie stars.

This could be a partial explanation. The next blog expands my bewilderment.

Jerry Brown

There are many articles about California Gov. Jerry Brown, these days, because he governs a large Democrat state and is acting very differently than the similar over-extended debtor states of New York and Illinois.

Jerry Brown is different. He has raised taxes and is cutting the budget, for real, in order to have some surplus revenue. This is not the way 999 out of 1000 Democrats behave.

I constantly disagree with Jerry but there are three things that permanently endear him to me.

In his first term in office, he appointed Ed Roberts to head the disability agency replacing the former deaf and blind agency. He did this on the suggestion of my friend Robert Gnaizda. Ed Roberts is the man who single-handedly created the modern global disability movement.  More important than Gandhi or M.L. King Jr.

He also did me a personal favor, we were friends at the time, by acting on an article that I wrote about the racism of the anti-whaling movement . He effectively killed the American anti-whaling movement.

In his current term as governor he has done something no Democrat to my knowledge in American history has done, he abolished an entire agency. He abolished the California Redevelopment Agency which had 412 offices and thousands of employees.

Jerry Brown is very unusual. At age 75 he does daily exercise in a room off of his office. He controls a completely Democratic legislature and yet he's not letting them become the spend and spend insane Democrats that one usually expects in elective office.

He is quiet, curious and honest.  Three characteristics that are as rare as you can imagine in politics.

Two biggest events in American history

Two of the three biggest popular uprisings in American history, since the nation was founded, have occurred in the past three years.

I am in debt to one of my favorite blogger, Bookwormroom, for pointing out that the current IRS scandal is the biggest scandal in American history. It is.

The Left has been inundated with the absurd meme that this scandal is not very important. These same media pundits are the ones who completely ignored the largest uprising in American history, the Tea Party of 2009.  These blind Democratic Party ideologues had no idea that the Congress of 2011, and for a long time into the future, will be controlled by the popular uprising of the Tea Party. The election for Congress and for the governor's offices in 2010 was the greatest political sweep in American history.

Since I know American history, and since we have already had one political upheaval of enormous magnitude, I do not hesitate to say that the reaction to the IRS scandal will be even greater than the reaction to the Democratic Party forcing an unpopular healthcare mandate on Americans with unacceptable parliamentary fraud.

The IRS scandal is far worse than the cause of the Tea Party uprising in 2009. A trusted an important government agency used its awful police powers to punish Jews and patriots.

The coming uprising against the IRS will be far greater than just the revolution by the previous Tea Party.

This is the second time in our history that the Democratic Party has caused a deep fissure in American society. The first time was the Civil War.

It is worth asking the question: What is it about the Democratic Party that is so un-American?

To create an earthquake in American society requires that a political party be (1) blindly ideological and (2) arrogant in its self-righteousness. Those are the two qualities that brought about the American Civil War and they are the same two qualities that are creating the current popular uprising. The Democratic Party ideological position of the 1850s was the importance of the 'peculiar Southern institution' of slavery and the right of Southerners to take that institution into the new Western states.

The current blind ideology is a belief in the importance of government control of the commercial world and individual behavior in the interest of the common good. A century of failure by communist and socialist countries has had no impact on the Democratic Party. Just as the abolition of slavery in most of the world before 1850 had no impact on the Democratic Party.

I personally do not often comment on current political issues. This one has made me feel so strongly that I am announcing the following:

I will not file my 2013 income tax form unless many IRS top managers are sent to prison.

This is an important issue at an important juncture in American history.

Swimming, sugar, salt and egg yolk

I could make this a quiz. 'What do swimming, sugar, salt and egg yolks have in common?' But that would be too difficult.

These are all related to false wives tales.

* Until 1960, when the Army published its own findings, it was widely believed (and strictly enforced by my mother) that we could not swim for an hour after eating lunch. The Army found it easy to test this thesis.  When I was in the Army we were marching immediately after lunch everyday.  There was no connection between eating and getting a cramp from prompt exercise.

* Throughout the entire 60s and 70s, and it is still widely believed,  that sugar is the reason for children misbehaving after eating ice cream.

Since this was easily measured by sugar levels in the blood, it should have been rejected early on. Sugar, in any form, including ice cream does not create blood sugar any quicker than cheese or avocado.

* Salt has always been identified as a source of potential harm to the heart. It is correct to say that salt, sodium chloride, does cause humans to retain water and slightly increase blood pressure. But careful studies have shown that salt in reduced concentrations in the diet has no direct benefit for heart attacks, stroke or heart disease. Just another old wives tale.

* I personally avoided egg yolks for 25 years because the nutritionist unions supported the old wives tale that egg yolks raise your cholesterol level. While egg yolks themselves are very high in cholesterol, they do not turn into cholesterol inside a human being. We create our own cholesterol independent of how much egg yolk we eat.

I notice that McDonald's is selling an egg white breakfast sandwich.  How long before they get the word that customers aren’t asking for it? How long before customers get 'the word'?

Street lanes in Japan

When I first began going to Japan, in 1971 and then returning every year thenceforth, one of the most striking features of street life was that there were no lines in the streets to divide the lanes of traffic. There was a line in the middle to divide traffic flowing opposite directions but there was no concept of lanes.  This was changed in the early 1980’s because Japan wanted to be seen as a ‘Western’ nation.

To  put it another way, automobile, bus, truck and bicycle traffic was treated just the way pedestrian traffic is. No lines to tell you to walk in a straight line.

In fact, like most pedestrian traffic, the street traffic flowed smoothly without the lines. Like people on a dance floor.

I mention this so that you can think about the perplexing question of why we Americans create traffic lines.

Is it for Puritan reasons? That we don't want automobiles to act like dancers prancing down the highway.  Is it because we are so legalistic that everyone has to have legal boundaries to our behavior. Or is it because we want a very orderly society and we think lines will help?