Pro Commerce

Slavery

Don't worry I am not going to remind my beloved blog readers that American blacks have created their own modern form of slavery by aggressively filling up our jails, prisons and homeless shelters. I am not going to remind my beloved readers that we have created a permanent black underclass of illiterate and innumerate people who have the same level of skills and competence as their slave ancestors. (American slaves in the South were not allowed to learn to read.  Ironic, now they don’t want to learn.)

I want to point out something that most people have not figured out by themselves.

I did the research on the economic history of Africa when I was in graduate school and my research became the core data for the many subsequent academic books on the subject. I know whereof I speak or write.

The slaves who were brought to North America, the Caribbean and Latin America were bought. They were bought in the open markets along the coasts of west Africa from Senegal to the Congo. Most were bought between Senegal and Ghana.

Who was selling them and why were they for sale? Slavery had been a mode of commerce in black Africa as far back as I was able to trace. Trafficking in slavery was part of African trade for more than 1000 years before European slave trade began.

So what brought about the slave trade?

Slavery was one of the most brilliant and humane inventions of mankind. It turned out that by keeping people alive after defeat in warfare those people and sometimes other members of the defeated tribes could be used productively as slaves.

The trade-off was you either died when you were defeated in warfare or you spent the balance of your life working for someone else. A very humane and ingenious trade-off.

What made this inhumane was the subsequent fact that people with dark skins were brought to societies of people with light skin who never emotionally identified with the blacks. This made it possible to create multi-generational slavery. Such multi-generational slavery is morally offensive and does not make the saving of a life nearly so reasonable a bargain for the slave.

The very few black freemen in America operated in most of the colonies as Independent men by dressing very well so no one would doubt their freeman status.  Also they carried letters of proof that they were not slaves.

Today, with the emergence of the permanent black uneducated underclass, I am beginning to see non-ghetto blacks spending money on elegant dress in order to distinguish themselves from the underclass who wear hoodies with pants around their knees.

Homeless scourge

I have a combination of problems. The first is that I am getting old and often look for a bathroom or bench to sit on. The second is that I live in a filthy Lefty inconsiderate city that thinks the highest priority for citizen comfort should be given to the homeless.

The consequence is that the homeless make nearly every bathroom in a restaurant or coffee shop inaccessible, and the public toilets that are operated by a wonderful French company are frequently dirty and out of service because of the homeless abuse.

Moreover the city goes out of its way to make sure there are no places for ordinary people to sit peacefully (or use a water fountain) because the homeless are likely to cluster and sleep in the comfortable spaces.

I am not heartless. I built a park for the homeless and my solution was infinitely superior to the type of solutions that the city of San Francisco and similar Lefty havens are creating.

I am not a frequent user of the emergency services or ambulances of the city. Such users are the ones who suffer the most from the high tolerance of this Lefty city. Good doctors and nurses will do anything to avoid prolonged service with this foul-smelling population to the detriment of everyone else who need these services.

None of this is necessary. It is just the consequence of Lefty fundamentalist thinking that gives a priority to the so-called under privileged homeless. At the expense of seniors who have been pathetic dupes all their lives and contributed actively to the society.

Hyper problems

Elon Musk, entrepreneur and founder of the Tesla motor company and SpaceX recently proposed a transportation system he calls the hyperloop. He proposes a tube to stretch from San Francisco to Los Angeles. The pods inside are to travel at 700 miles an hour and make the trip in a half an hour.

I have read about a number of problems that appear to be physical, financial and political.

The problem I see is different. The physical problems appear to be related to the levels of acceleration and deceleration in the tube. The propulsion system is a linear magnet in a near vacuum. Apparently humans get sick very easily at G forces much about 1.5. This would present a number of problems including very large turning radii for the many turns on the route. The financial problems relate to the cost of constructing the system and making it efficient by taking it into the downtown of both the cities on each end. Musk has said his system could use the right-of-way above existing freeways. How much that would reduce the cost is not clear to me or anyone else.

The political problem is also serious because California is building a high-speed railway that is costing an outrageous number of $ billions and will not work very well. It is consuming all transportation funds for this SF-LA corridor.

The hyperloop strikes me as having a much more serious problem. The pods are designed to carry a couple of dozen people and to travel at very close intervals.

In Japan the high-speed rails travel at rates of 5 minutes apart and subways safely travel at 1 minute separations.  In America the high-speed rail underground systems travel at best at 5 minute intervals.  On the surface they are 10 minutes apart at top speed.

Which is to say that Americans are only able to run a high-speed rail system at a multiple of the safe distance of the Japanese. Therefore I conclude that the hyperloop pods could not travel any closer together than five-minute intervals. That would allow for transportation at the rate of several hundred passengers per hour.

An operational waste. Several hundred passengers per hour is something that one airplane is capable of achieving.  An airplane does it at a tiny fraction of the cost since the system is already in place. Dozens of airplanes make the trip every hour from multiple Bay Area airports to multiple LA airports.

The hyperloop is flawed.

Taxi issues

The title of this blog should really be about honesty and trust. But I write about those so often that it is worthwhile going directly to the example.

I had a chance to try out the Daimler system in Seattle called car2go. Once you are registered you are given a card that you tap on the front window of a Smart car and the doors open. The Smart cars in Seattle are usually within a block or two of wherever you are. They are shown on a map on your smartphone. You drive the car, at a rate of $.40 a minute, and you leave it where you finished, as long as it is within the Seattle boundaries. Tap the front window with your card to end the trip and lock the car.

I checked my smartphone many times in Seattle to see where the nearest car2go was and there was always one within easy walking distance.

The system was magnificent and is in use in dozens of cities around the world and many in the United States. (Check this site upper right window for cities where the system is operating.)

The big question is why are taxi services in many of these cities so miserable?

For me the answer is simple. I had ordered the Yellow Cab company service many times up until the one time when the cab did not arrive and I was late for a very important appointment. Since then I have never called a cab in San Francisco and never will.

I have pointed out in earlier blogs that if a person is cheated at two stores in a shopping mall they will never return to that shopping mall. Having been cheated once with a taxi I will not use a taxi service again.

There are now three taxi-similar services in San Francisco all of which are based on smartphone functions. They were necessary to compensate for the incompetence of the traditional taxi services.

I understand the taxi drivers position. They show up at houses that have made reservations and there is no one there. That just happens to be the nature of the taxi business. For the taxi driver to make a policy to not show up will destroy and has destroyed the entire taxi system.

Need I say that commerce requires honesty (openness), integrity and reliability. Since honesty is in short supply in most societies it is small wonder that commerce does not thrive in those societies.  To a limited extent smartphones provide some of the honesty (openness) that commerce requires.

Equality problem with tribal minds

I am still struggling with the expanding view of income equality that has captured the core of the new Lefty ideology.

The basic premise of modern Leftism is that we have a tribal need for income equality and the government is the only tool available to acheive this ideological goal.

There must be some simple metaphor to eradicate or challenge this dangerous and harmful but deeply emotional proposition.

Many times before I have tried to use the metaphor of nature. For every giant pine there are 1 million blades of grass. That doesn't seem to influence people who have the tribal desire for the equality of all.

They also don't care about tribal equality extending to other tribes.  No middleclass American wants to be taxed to the income level of the average Nigerian.

The biological metaphor is partly unacceptable because you can't grow a vegetable garden in a pine forest. The pine trees are so efficient at consuming the nutrients in the ground and the air and absorbing the sunlight that vegetables don't have a chance.

To a limited extent, in the commercial world, only a few people could produce the Microsoft miracle or the Google miracle or the Amazon miracle. To the extent that these people were in the right place with the right skills at the right time does preclude others from matching their success in those specific instances.  Compared to nature, almost any pinecone could grow in a pine forest. Skill and good ideas don't matter in a pine forest.

In the commercial world, the Apple people were producing a similar product at the same time that the Microsoft product was introduced. The Apple people never came close to the success of the Microsoft people. The Microsoft people did not squeeze the Apple people out of the market. The Apple Lisa was a dramatically inferior product but mostly the problem was that Apple did not understand open systems.

The same was true for Polaroid. Polaroid was a seriously better product than anything coming from Kodak but Kodak was part of an open system photography world and Polaroid, like Apple, was tied to the completely incorrect marketing idea of a closed system.

This actually takes me to the real case that needs a metaphor. Most people do not have the mental or arithmetic skills to know the difference between a zero sum game and a positive sum world. I actually don't know of any positive sum game that can be used to illustrate this difference.  All games, except the games we play with ourselves are zero sum games.

Within the world of games, checkers is obviously less of a challenge than chess but both are zero sum games with a finite number of moves. We can respect the mind of the chess player because that finite number is greater than the finite checkers number.  That does not make chess any less of a zero sum game.

To some extent Scrabble is a positive sum game, although like chess there is actually a finite number of moves. In the case of chess and Scrabble there are people who are hundreds of times better than ordinary players but no one demands a lobotomy for these masters. A lobotomy is my synonym for income equality taxation.

I am clearly looking for the appropriate metaphors that will penetrate the Lefty brain and help them understand that not only can rich people be justified in a 'positive sum' commercial society but they can move if they don't like the progressive taxation system.

Loneliness and suicide

I recently saw a TV drama focused on a suicide note, left behind, that blamed loneliness. I found this an unfortunate and careless use of the term loneliness. There are a number of forms of loneliness, and in my opinion, only a few warrant association with suicide.

There is the loneliness of extraordinary intelligence or of extraordinary creativity that takes one into worlds no one else inhabits. This is a kind of loneliness that comes with the territory so to speak. Highly intelligent and highly creative people may need to explain to each other what it feels like to inhabit such a stark landscape. Maybe we need more people talking about this.

There is existential loneliness about which much has been written. We die alone, but we all do it alone; it is part of being human. There is also an existential loneliness that arises from the fact that no one can truly know another person. That is also part of being human. Most of us accept these forms of loneliness as sources of wisdom.

There is romantic loneliness, that presumes souls and matching pairs. Therapy doesn't seem able treat this, nor does sex or marriage. People with this form of loneliness are on an endless search. It is just sad. The search is also romantic.

There are two kinds of loneliness that I personally find would warrant suicide.

The first is the loneliness of being physically alone. When I'm physically alone I am usually happy ... the longer I'm alone the happier I can be. If this were not the case ... if I had no joyful inner identity, I could readily understand suicide as an option.

The second is a similar loneliness that comes from being in a world that doesn't acknowledge your existence. This can happen to celebrities, rich heirs and beautiful women. When all the people around you see a YOU that has no connection to your own identity, and your genuine identity begins to fade, that is horrifying.

I call it the Marilyn Monroe loneliness and I find it genuinely tragic. There are ways out of this kind of loneliness but, this is the tragedy, people rarely give up celebrity, money and beauty deliberately.

There are many kinds of loneliness. I've only mentioned a few. It strikes me that a wider discussion of the subject of loneliness would be helpful to people who say they are lonely.

Bush hatred

President Obama still gets away with blaming G.W. Bush for every current economic problem despite Obama’s 4.6 years in office.  He is appealing to the vast audience of Lefties that will hate G.W. Bush until they die.

I think I found the cause of Bush hatred.

First, the definition of a reliable source of causality: replication. If the same factors can be found to result in the same outcomes in two or more independent environments, they can be called causal.

The Lefty Israeli media hates Benyamin Netanyahu, "Bibi." The Israeli Lefty media hates Bibi with same passion that the American Lefty media hated President Bush.

The Israeli Bibi hating started four years earlier than the American Bush hating and  continued, unabated, regardless of Bibi's defeat in and multiple re-elections.

We get the same outcome (rabid hatred of a political figure) in two different environments, Israel and America.

This brings us to the cause. The qualities that both Bibi and Bush have in common. Bibi and Bush are generally considered good looking. Both men are very comfortable with who they are, no pretense whatsoever. Most importantly, both men represent the radical new school of Pro-Commerce. Bibi and Bush want less government, more commerce and both love the driving power of commerce to create a better world. 

Put that package together and you have something the Left can hate with a passion. If both men were ugly, pretentious and conservative they wouldn't bother anyone.

Bad news. Our friends who hate Bibi and Bush are going to be just like the rightwingers who hated FDR until their own death. Both men could live a long time and be important spokespersons for many decades to come.

Two arguments for a god

This is just a fun and intentionally provocative blog for me.

 

I do know theology quite well, both in the Eastern tradition and among the great Christian theologians from Augustine to Peter Abelard up to and including Paul Tillich.

 

What I find missing is an issue that would be of importance to contemporary atheists.

 

The question is 'What is to be done about the injustice of evil people?' For example, Saddam Hussein bought wood chipping machines after he saw the movie Fargo so he could put his political enemies into the machines. (Head or feet first?) His son Uday was considered to be even more cruel than Saddam.

 

Do we live in a world where people like this just die and the horrible pain and suffering they personally created is irrelevant. I didn't pick Stalin or Mao as my examples. I picked Saddam Hussein who personally inflicted the torture on others.

 

Dante, for literary purposes, created the description of multiple hells, much like the images from Bruegel a few centuries later. These were popular images of an afterlife for horrible people.

 

Modern religion has an all loving God who couldn't possibly operate and maintain such conceptual nightmares.

 

So how does one's sense of injustice yet resolved in an atheist theology?

 

The second provocative question is simply to ask how a god could make a covenant with the Jews 3,000 years ago and then we see the Jews, uniquely among all people in the world, having survived every effort to destroy them. The Jews (we) have survived longer than any other coherent nation. Survived an inconceivable level of enduring hatred. Is the answer that there must be a God or that there is a unique God who looks after the Jews?

 

I don't expect my readers to spend any time thinking about these provocations, I just felt compelled to present them.

Woman didn’t fight back

In the previous blog I referred to the case that I brought in 1971 against the Bank of California on behalf of minorities and women. We won that case and it became the most important anti-discrimination judgment before or since.

It was my job to find the woman and black plaintiffs for the case.

The job proved to be difficult. It took me four months

When I  hear women complain about the bad old days and how poorly women were treated I have to keep my mouth shut. The reason is simple.  Not only did women not complain, but when encouraged to complain and rebel they absolutely refused. In the early 60s I remember trying to get a group of women to take public action on women's rights and got absolutely nowhere.

When I set out to find a woman plaintiff in the Bank of California case I invited nearly a dozen bank managers and staff to individual lunches with me. In each case I showed the woman a printout of the wages for each individual in the bank as well as the personnel data. I showed each woman that she was paid less than comparable men who had less experience and less educational background. In each and every case, the woman told me that she ‘was not worried’ that her boss ‘would soon recognize her and increase her compensation’.

So much for the latent womens’ rebellious spirit of the times.

I did not experience this lack of willingness to act with the black bank employees  I took to lunch.   In those cases, I was told that the individual would be fired for becoming a plaintiff in a racial discrimination case. When I replied that the judge would protect the plaintiff's job, I was told that I was a fool and didn't understand the white justice system. (The black bank employees were right, except that we drew a good judge in that case.)

In the end I found a former employee to be the woman plaintiff and a black banker who was turned down for a job at the Bank of California on the same day he was hired at another bank.

The fact of the matter is that women did not revolt and sympathize with any of the prominent women’s movement leaders of the era.

White plea against racism

A recent story in the news attracted my attention. The headline was about a white manager who couldn't sue for racism on behalf of her fellow employees.

The case was before a US District Judge in Georgia.

It has relevance to me because I brought a lawsuit against the Bank of California in 1971 for racial discrimination against minorities and women. The lawyer on the case was Robert Gnaizda, who has remained a close friend of mine ever since. Bob put the case together with my help in finding a black and a white woman plaintiff.

Bob won the case, the most aggressive affirmative action class action before or since in America. He proceeded to get every major bank and financial institution including insurance companies to sign onto the judgment which required racial and women’s integration in top management. To this day, the financial industry is the best integrated of any industry outside of retail.

Bob wisely made the initial judgment to remove me from the case because whites were not really part of the anti-discrimination laws. That was a good decision, not validated until this recent Georgia case.

On the same subject, the lawsuit in Georgia was against Paula Deen and her brother. She recently made news because of this case in which she had admitted to using the six letter word for black beginning with N.

She becomes the second prominent media person to lose her job for this reason. The first was Dr. Laura an interesting radio personality.

Both of these women have my deepest sympathy. I worked for 11 years in a predominantly black church as business manager. Blacks referred to each other 10 times a day by the six letter word beginning with N. It had two meanings.  It implied that the other person had authenticity. And it was used as a comic lighthearted appellation meaning the other person had overstepped racial boundaries. (‘you act’n like a n…..'a man.’)

Blog doldrums

My readers are not concentrated in any place in particular. The bulk of them are in the United States.

I live in San Francisco but only a small percentage of my readers live within 100 miles of me.

I regularly forget how the rest of the United States lives. Particularly the East Coast where everyone leaves town in August and is truly on vacation from the middle of August until Labor Day. San Francisco is in the low 60 degrees fahrenheit during this time.

I am reminded of this because my readership of this blog drops in half after the middle of August and doesn't resume its normal level until after Labor Day.

The volume of New York stock exchanges seem to follow a similar pattern.

For two decades I was spending the months of July and August in Tokyo where I fully felt the wrath of August heat. My sympathies go to everyone who needs a vacation during this time of year.

I could do two more blogs on this subject but neither would be important.

One would be about the word ‘doldrums’ and its reference to the equatorial region where there is usually no wind.  Sailors had to row their ships or tow them with rowboats.

The other would be about wind chimes which were invented in China to enhance the very slight breezes that come in the summer.  Most Americans seem to think wind chimes are some religious icon and testament to wind energy.

Kennedy death central to civil rights

I lived through the assassination of Pres. Kennedy. Because I was a Republican political operative at the time I have a different perspective on Pres. Kennedy and the subsequent history.

First of all, Pres. Kennedy was not a divine creature in my mind. He was a fanatic fan of unions, a hater of big business and he was strongly disliked by most Americans. He was disliked only a little less than Richard Nixon. He won the 1960 election by fraud in Illinois and Texas. I also knew during his presidency of his profligate use of women. I even knew one woman who had had sex with him and his brother (separately).

All of which is to say that I did not come under the preposterous veil of ignorance and fantasy known as Camelot after Kennedy was assassinated.

The most significant post-Kennedy effect of the assassination was the passage of two civil rights bills by his successor Lyndon Johnson. Jack Kennedy could not have passed the civil rights bills. The Democratic Party had already destroyed the civil rights bills introduced by president Eisenhower. Johnson used the tragic assassination of Kennedy to manipulate a few Democratic party legislators. Only a few Democrats were needed when combined with a majority of the Republican legislators to pass the civil rights bills.

Up until Johnson's two civil rights bills, the Kennedy brothers had ignored and deflected all of the civil rights movements. There was nothing they could do because they were elected by the Southern Democrat's. The Southern Democrat's were a backbone of the Democratic Party. Johnson was willing to restructure the Democratic Party.

Among the most consequential effects of the Johnson civil rights legislation was that the Dixiecrat's left the Democratic party. This gave the presidency to Richard Nixon and the Republicans. It created a realignment in the Democratic Party. The Democrats had to run a Southerner (Jimmy boy Carter) for their only presidential win in the succeeding 24 years.

It is because of this that I credit Lee Harvey Oswald with the inadvertent creation of the civil rights legislation and the ending of the decent part of the civil rights movement.

There is no way to write alternative histories without Lee Harvey Oswald but if there were an alternative history of the civil rights movement it would have taken much longer and remained in the Republican Party.

The clock and business

I have begun to do more thinking about the origins of modern industrial commerce.

First of all I am stuck with the term ‘industrial’ until we find a better one. Industrial is wrong because as was discussed in an earlier blog industry has been transported whole to many non-industrial societies and the output was pathetic. Therefore I am forced to think about what the true elements of the industrial revolution were.

One is the clock. The entire commercial issue of the clock has been described in the brilliant work Revolution in Time by David Landes.

Landes makes the point that there have been clocks throughout history. The first modern clocks with escapement mechanisms were wooden in central clock towers. In Europe. These were designed to help monasteries arrange their complex daily prayer schedule. They were later used in Europe to get workers to their jobs on time.

The real revolution in time occurred in the 18th century with the manufacture and widespread distribution of clocks for homes and offices. This came with the evolution of a middle-class. The middle-class is first seen in the early 17th century in Holland. Middle-class businessmen found themselves in an equal relationship to other businessmen. That meant that when they had meetings they needed some mechanism to make sure both arrived at the same time. This was the new role of the clock.

Before the middle-class businessmen needed to meet each other at the same time the custom was for the lower ranked person to arrive early and the higher-ranked person to arrive whenever he damn pleased.

We now have a key element in the modern industrial commercial world. The clock and the need for timekeeping on the part of individuals.

I will keep working on the other elements.

New understanding of Lefties

My beloved readers know that I frequently try to explain what Lefty is about.  It should have disappeared with all the Lefty revolutions of the USSR, China, North Korea, Pol Pot, Cuba and India.

I owe it to Tod Lindberg in an article he wrote in the final issue of his Hoover Institution publication, Policy Review, for new insights.

He calls the article Left 3.0. Because he sees the current Left as different from its ancestry. Left 1.0 was the battles until 1966 between the socialists, anarchists and communists. These were battles over unionization and government services from the cradle to the grave. Left 2.0 dealt with antiwar policies, welfare, abortion and the creation of group rights as part of multiculturalism.

Left 3.0 has cleaned out most of those arcane issues. It is ideologically strong and pure based on one simple passion: Equality. In order to have equality (of outcome of course) one must have a powerful government. That is the passion of the Left today. This equality is hard to argue against because it is a core human tribal hormone. We all want our tribe to survive and we all want our tribe to be a family with equal status for every member.

Out of that equality passion rose the need for the creation of tribes. The tribes that the Left created are our gays, women, blacks, greedy white males, Latinos, etc.

For me Lindberg explains the great enigma. Rich people give big dollars to this Lefty 3.0 vision. The reason is that they feel guilty. They want the government to provide for the ‘poor’. They aren’t big on charity themselves and plan to buy whatever they want with their own money including medical care.

I genuinely want to thank Lindberg for his brilliant explication.  If you actually read the article you will see that I have condensed some of his descriptions and perspectives... derived from his brilliant insights.

Schedule C prejudice

I want to make two points in this blog. They are closely related.

The title of my blog is pro-commerce. Many think that this is a rather obvious position. I find the opposite. Virtually nobody defends the importance and centrality of commerce in our lives and in our survival. Virtually nobody.

The best example is the fact that almost no small business can get a business loan from a bank. The same is true for small business people  trying to get a mortgage. It cannot be done.

The code name for this problem is Schedule C prejudice. Schedule C is the page on an income tax return that lists revenue and expenses from a small business or sole proprietorship.

A small business cannot borrow money to cover operating expenses, startup expenses or expansion expenses. A small business can only borrow money based on assets. Small business can borrow money for a truck, a refrigerator or a kitchen stove. Each of these has to be re-salable and the loan will only be for a modest proportion of the market value.

The reason is that lenders, in no case a banker, cannot read and understand the Schedule C.

This is really not bias, this is just the way our world works. Home lenders only look at salaries. Banks only look at assets that can be sold.

The point I want to make here in addition to the prejudice against Schedule C income is that banks existed long before the industrial revolution. Banks existed in the 14th century in Venice. They did not changed with the advent of the Industrial Revolution.  Banks are  vestiges of a pre-industrial era.  So are unions.

We need to think differently about banks. There are dozens of intermediaries that provide money to business, but seldom banks. Their centrality to our society is an arcane hangover and a mistake.

Democracy in Russia

We seem to be in a very strange period.  Because George W. Bush, the neoconservatives and Natan Sharansky made the promotion of democracy a major issue, we have come to expect that democracy should flourish in Russia after the fall of communism.

We are inclined in this direction because of our positive postwar experience with Germany, Italy, Japan, Israel and a few East European countries.  That experience suggested that democracy is more feasible than reality since then evinces.

Each of these examples was a unique and telling story. Germany, Italy, Israel, Poland and the Czech Republic were brand-new, countries with less than 75 years of existence as a cohesive nation. Japan was the exception.  Being a recently formed country seems to help.

Japan was fertile ground for democracy because the Japanese had been creating it themselves since the Meiji Restoration in the 1870s. Moreover they have adapted democracy to their own political model. Japan has a hereditary hierarchy that survives by the use of adult adoption. My close friend in the Japanese Upper House was adopted by the Senator he replaced. My friend had the new adoptive family name. That was the family name that his constituency joyfully voted for generation after generation

This pattern is not unlike the American habitat of voting for the wife of somebody who dies in office.  Only in Japan the standard practice is adoption not marriage to the dead incumbent.

Now it's time to talk about Russia. Russia has been a coherent country, excluding the parts that were accreted by the USSR, for 1000 years. Russia has a well-established millennum old political system and it is not democracy. In fact, efforts to democratize Russian society have historically resulted in rebellion, coups or revolution.

We should not be misled by the democracy champions of this world into thinking democracy has some automatic implementation features.

My history with film

I probably have not seen a documentary film in two decades. The documentary is a form that I find offensive. Not only are 99% of all documentaries Left wing ideology but they are so blatant as to be insulting to the viewer. It is like being lectured when one goes to the ballet. A ballet is for dance, film is for motion and stories.

This is by way of saying that I have a long history with film. As an undergraduate at the University of Chicago, I was in charge of the classic film series (Old Doc). I learned how to do that.

A few years later, when I spent a year at San Francisco State College, I created a new classic film series. That film series, which I organized in 1961, grew into the film department.

Again, a few years later, I wanted to see more classic films than were being shown in San Francisco's commercial movie theaters, so I started a new classic film series at midnight in a Chinese movie theater in North Beach called the Pagoda.

A few years later when I drove by the Pagoda theater late at night I noticed that the marquee was showing the same film for several weeks in a row (Betty Boop).  I didn't think that film would be shown for so long a period.  I stopped the car and went inside.

To my astounded eyes the entire audience of hippies were dancing and on the stage was a chorus line of men dressed as women. One black man was singing, beautifully. I asked around and found that his name was  Sylvester.

That is my long experience in film.

Obamacare is like the Great Society

I generally avoid talking about contemporary politics. It isn't that I don't have opinions.  Its simply that my pro-commerce perspective would have to be explained each time.  Moreover I have no desire to antagonize my sympathetic readers. I knowingly antagonize ‘Lefties” but I only have few who are pro-commerce to begin with.

I am no better at making comments on the contemporary political issues than anyone else. I only do so when I have some uniquely relevant experience or information. In this case I do.

This is all by way of pointing out to you that in the current Obamacare debate, where some legislators want to defund Obamacare, this raises a point about the Great Society legislation that has been forgotten.

First and most importantly, Pres. Johnson passed both the two key Civil Rights laws as well as a vast array of government expansion known as the Great Society.

Johnson is not esteemed very highly as a president. He passed far more legislation that was far more appealing to Lefties than Pres. Obama and Nancy Pelosi.

That should be a warning to anyone who thinks that Obamacare will help give the Obama presidency any stature in the future.

Secondly, the Great Society is almost totally forgotten. It is forgotten because so many parts of it failed completely.  

It did generate the specific individuals who later created neoconservatism. They had worked on Great Society programs.

Most of the Great Society programs have technically survived but are non-functioning today, including all of the preschool education programs and the work subsidy programs. Most of the Great Society was dismantled slowly. It was finished when President Clinton signed the Republican legislation to force welfare recipients to work.

It is well to remind my blog readers why Obamacare has a unique cluster of dysfunctional regulations that will help send it into oblivion.

It was passed by only Democrats in the Senate in Dec. 2009 immediately after the voters of Mass. voted to end the Democrat super majority. It never went to conference committee where errors and contradictions are always removed. The current implementation problem is what happens when you circumvent government due process. Also the public kicked out Pelosi and her legislature in the 2010 Congressional election, making it impossible to go back and correct the many errors..

When I did research on the health care issue a few decades ago I found that 80% of all people were very happy with their own medical services. Most loved their doctors. To the extent that this is disrupted under Obamacare, hostility to the legislation will grow.

Futurists are usually wrong

If you have been reading this blog for a long time you will note that I have covered several issues about futurism and its failures. There has been a decline in the number of people who call themselves futurists because they are inadvertently wrong too much of the time. The Association of Professional Futurists shows a picture at their last meeting, last month, with only 45 attendees.

I find two serious problems with futurist projections. The first one deals with all of the missing dots, the second one deals with all of the missing reality.

In the early 70's I was confronted with a book sized object at Xerox Research Park.  It was called the Dynabook and I was told that this object exemplified a future portable encyclopedia which would be a development that would grow out of computers.

In order for this object to come into existence there turned out to be several important developments that could not be foreseen. Missing dots. One was the advent of Wi-Fi and the other was the development of HTML.

When Wi-Fi and HTML finally came along, decades apart,  the analogy to an encyclopedia turned out to be trivial. Wikipedia became far more comprehensive and useful than any printed encyclopedia had ever previously been. But the most stunning difference was the development of Google which became the primary source of information on this portable electronic book that no one foresaw.

The second problem in futurism is best illustrated by the post-World War II expectation for a personal jet pack. 70 years later the personal jet pack remains a fantasy.

The reason is simple and straightforward. To this day most people are unaware of what every butterfly knows: The air around us is is made up of many layers of air moving in different directions at different speeds. A jet pack would lift a person off the ground and the air flow layers, at some point, would flip him over.

The futurists simply were missing this fact of reality.

I don't make predictions. I don't pay much attention to predictions.

Nutation

This blog is about the global warming hysteria.

Nutation is the wobble of the Earth's tilt in its orbit around the sun. The Earth is tilted so that at our perigee (Jan 2-5) we are closest to the sun and at our apogee we are furthest from the sun. Because of the tilt the closest point Is where the Southern hemisphere is oriented toward the Sun.

Our elliptical orbit averages 93,000,000 miles from the sun.  It varies by roughly 3%. This warmer 3% is focused mostly on the oceans in the South. We are not very clear on how the temperature differential of the oceans North and South are related to their surface and subsurface movements.

The tilt of the Earth's is not perfectly on our axis of North-South.  Our planet has a slight erratic wobble that occurs over an 18.6 year period.

I mention this only because I am able to see in the slight warming pattern of the last 80 years a roughly 20 year pattern of warming, stability and warming. None of this warming is significant and could very well be associated with this tiny nutation.

I want to call this to your attention because this very small element in the Earth's orbit could have an effect on global temperature especially if it in any way synchronizes with patterns of solar radiance that itself has an 11 year cycle.

The entire history of global temperature changes over 750,000 years (that have been measured) coincide exactly with the earth’s orbital changes.

(I love this photo.  It is a roadside in Mexico where the peak of the sun's Northern most noon location has been measured over the past 7 years. Nutation as seen on the ground.)

Whether a tiny amount of anything has an effect on the earth would never be my hypothesis but global warming sports fans seem to put a great deal of emphasis on CO2 which remains only a few 10 thousandths part of the Earth's atmosphere.

Pascal Bruckner

For my few readers who may not be following the French intellectual debates of our time I want to call your attention to this book review of Pascal Bruckner’s book The Fanaticism of the Apocalypse.

Bruckner does a wonderful job of showing how modern ecology is a re-living of traditional Marxism. Here are several paragraphs from the book review which in turn quotes Bruckner himself:

“In the wrong hands, the best of causes can degenerate into an abomination”—which is exactly what Bruckner thinks has happened to environmentalism.

Ecologism has become a global ideology that covers all of existence, modes of production as much as ways of life. In it are found all the faults of Marxism applied to the environment: the omnipresent scientism, the appalling visions of reality, the admonishment of those who are guilty of not understanding those who wish us well. All the foolishness of Bolshevism, Maoism, and Trotskyism are somehow reformulated exponentially in the name of saving the planet.

He notes that “Marxism designated capitalism as responsible for human misery. .  .  . With ecologism, we move up a notch: the guilty party is humanity itself.” The result is a domain of thought and action today that rewards vehemence over sensibility. This is not a new theme; the “watermelon” label—green on the outside, red on the inside—has been applied to environmentalists for a while. Likewise, Bruckner joins in seeing environmentalism as a secular religion. But Bruckner captures more of the depth and texture of these two aspects of environmentalism than do other critics.

Along the way, he sheds fresh light on why even reasonable and rational environmental concern enables the nonsensical and extreme versions to flourish and dominate. The rational environmentalist wishes to warn us of the damage industrial civilization brings with it, while the nonsensical environmentalist wishes only to use this fact as a stick to beat human beings and condemn modern industrial civilization.

Bruckner offers a particular twist on the environmentalism-as-religion theme. More than just a form of faith, environmentalism revives a monastic mentality that wraps human guilt together with a call for humility, repentance, and a discipline of abasement. This “gaseous equivalent of Original Sin”—an eco version of the fall of man—explains why environmentalists are congenitally resistant to facts, science, and progress itself. Environmentalism isn’t out primarily to save nature, but to purify humanity: “Adding ‘eco’ .  .  . and ‘bio’ to any word is enough to sanctify it”—although it is no longer acceptable to the high priests to carry your holy eco-water in plastic bottles.........

He adds brilliantly how foolish the environmentalists look. “A cosmic calamity is not going to be averted by eating vegetables and sorting our rubbish.” The very triviality of the paltry practical exhortations undoubtedly deepens the furious gloom and misanthropy of environmentalists—making them all the more dangerous to their fellow humans. And Bruckner understands that, as with Marxism and other redemptive schemes of the radical left, today’s environmentalism unbound would necessarily involve the “lethal impulses” of retributive tyranny. “[W]e can almost hear the heavy door of a dungeon closing behind us,” says Bruckner of the environmentalists he vividly describes as “our Robespierres of the candle.”

Zingale notes

I found a book review of Luigi Zingale's book on Capitalism to be fascinating. Here is the paragraph that describes what Zingale reports:

“He tells, for example, of a tiny section of the 2005 Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act that destroyed Lehman Brothers. Under the law, when Lehman went bankrupt, it couldn’t simply, as it could have before the 2005 law, pay holders of derivatives as much as possible with its assets. Instead, it had to give a derivative holder a contract identical to the one it had signed with Lehman, but with a different counterparty. Lehman would have to pay the transaction cost of the new contract. A typical such cost is about 0.15 percent of the contract’s total value. That doesn’t sound like much until you realize that when it went bankrupt, the face value of Lehman’s derivative contracts was $35 trillion! So the transactions costs alone were $52.5 billion. That’s why Lehman’s bonds paid only 8.625 cents on the dollar.”

Did you know that? I certainly didn't.

To me it is very important. I look at the unique 2008 financial collapse as a systemic problem. Most other economic fluctuations are more gradual and they include much broader segments of the economy. The 2008 downturn was uniquely abrupt, focused entirely on a narrow sector and spread in an unusual way for an economic phenomenon.  Via banks, globally.

That is why I see it as a systemic issue rather than a regular pattern of growth and adjustment.

It is been thirty-five years since I have heard people talk about systems management and systems issues. It was very common among my friends around Stewart Brand in the early 1970’s.

The nature of systems is that they have many feedback loops. A feedback loop is what you're stomach tells your brain about being full and your brain tells your mouth to stop eating. Some feedback loops are very short and the system eats a little, stops and starts again. Other feedback loops are  long and the person gorges to the point of collapse and goes awhile before the next gorge.

Any system is made up of many feedback loops. When any single feedback loop gets out of control and is not controlled by a higher level feedback, that first feedback loop can bring the entire system to collapse or near collapse. This happens quite often with vehicle accidents on highways and streets and it happens on electric grids resulting in  blackouts.

I have therefore been looking for the feedback loops in our economy that could have brought about the catastrophe of 2008. Up until now the most significant feedback loop that went awry was the requirement to change all bank and financial records to reflect "mark to market" accounting rules. That new accounting rule required any asset on the books to be priced at current market value. Since a wide array of financial instruments had been on the books at their purchase price and had no measurable market price, many financial institutions were forced to show a stunning decline in assets.

Thanks to Zingale, I now know of another change in a feedback loop that could have brought the economy of the United States and the world to its knees.

Stand-up around computers

In the many years since I was in corporate management there has been a significant shift in daily work practices.

I observe my friends, working today, and they spend most of their working life at home or in the office in front of the computer. There are several computer screens that they use but most days are 90% in front of some computer screen or other.

One friend complains that he is unable to read on a paper surface, a book, in the evening. Most of my friends do not complain. They take it for granted that this is the working environment and they have no choice.

To cope with this reality, some people have radically increased the level of their exercise regime. A few others work with stand-up desks. And still others find ways to constantly interrupt themselves. None of these strike me as effective.

The issue of working with computers for so many hours strikes me as an opportunity for radical change.

If I were in this environment, my first act would be to add projection on a wall. This would allow me to move more regularly and in a natural form while working with the projected screen. My second act would be to use Google glasses or some version of the projection on a nearby lens which would also allow me more physical movement.

In my day, I seldom sat down. I was talking to others at their office or work area. I was in meetings. And I was doing a great deal of face-to-face management. I was at my office desk only to deal with the phone. Today that would not even be a reason to sit down.

I expect to see changes in this contemporary  work pattern soon. The modern office and managerial style is extremely efficient and certainly has increased productivity many times. But it's physical consequences may not be acceptable.

French Canadians vs American Blacks

It is an interesting question whether the French Canadians' efforts to create a separate country, in the late 1970's, did more harm to the French Canadians and Canada than the second emancipation of American blacks in the 1960’s did to the black community and America.

The French Canadians made a strong effort to form a separate French country in Canada. Primarily focused on Montréal. The consequence was that most national corporations pulled out of Québec and many smaller businesses did the same. Since the early 1980's Québec has been the recipient of massive welfare support from the rest of Canada to make up for the lost businesses. The French Canadians have become parasites on the larger society. There is no end in sight.  

Black Americans in the late 1960s and well into the 1980s were burning their own neighborhoods in large cities. With vast national welfare resources available, the black community led the rest of the nation in creating children with only a mother.

The consequence, over one generation, was the rapid increase in crime in the black community to the point where blacks commit five times the number of crimes of other Americans and commit roughly half of all crimes in America.

Moreover the black community, despite massive federal and state aid for education, has created the first large modern illiterate and innumerate population.  

The combination of crime and unemployment in the black community has created a serious and dangerous underclass that shows no prospect of improvement in the future.  

I am not a dispassionate outside observer, but because of the high education and modest crime of the French Canadians, I think black America has done far more damage to America than have the French Canadians to Canada.

Torah and work

Consider this Torah verse:  from Rabbi Daniel Lapin

"If a man steals an ox or a sheep and then kills it, or sells it, he must pay the value of five oxen for an ox and the value of four sheep for a sheep.(Exodus 21:37)

Why does God want the miscreant who deprives his victim of an ox to pay a higher restitution than one who deprives him of a sheep?  What's the difference between on ox and a sheep?

Ancient Jewish wisdom helps us understand that a sheep in Scripture means an asset. When you own a sheep, it throws off income in the form of wool.  However, an ox means a tool for earning your living.  When you own an ox, you have the means to plow your field or pull your wagon to market.

Stealing a man's asset is bad enough...but stealing a tool with which he earns a living!  God views that as considerably worse and requires restitution to be appropriately higher.  Earning a living is a holy activity and the tools that make it possible acquire some holiness too."

I concur with the Hebrew God on this.  Too bad it means nothing in the political-moral system that has dominated mankind for the past 50 millenia.  When the commercial moral system comes to have more importance we will punish Luddites who destroy property and especially IRS corrupt officials who act like 'hackers' to destroy or harm large productive systems.

(Thanks Susan G.)

Beautiful numbers

Commerce is a world of beauty, excitement and genius.

It is built entirely on numbers. Beautiful numbers, often in the form of a financial statement.

I want my readers to know about this website.

It presents dozens and dozens of graphic images that can be used for presenting numbers in graphic form. They are useful in charts and tables.

Take a look and apparently feel free to use them.

Commerce is the world of subtlety and beauty. It is just not the traditional world of beauty.  It is a new world of beauty that is accessible to an elite few.

Charlie’s Place

This is a good story. Sad.

Charlie's Place was a motorcycle shop in San Francisco in an industrial neighborhood. Charlie's Place is where I took my 1981 Honda 450. Charlie only repaired classic Honda's older than mine.

From all appearances, Charlie had a very successful motorcycle repair business. He had two master mechanics and required a two week appointment schedule.

Charlie is now operating in Los Angeles near Koreatown. He closed his San Francisco shop.

I asked some of my mechanic friends in the neighborhood "What happened?"

The answer was that the harassment by local government officials was unending and unmerciful.Charlie is a gentle hard working top flight non-political mechanic.

Local government officials were regularly visiting Charlie's shop to tell him he could not have so many motorcycles parked on the street in front of his shop. No one else was using the space. It is a barren industrial block. The visiting government dignitaries usually came in groups with a host of interns along with them... all wearing fancy clothes. The officials are all earning in the hundred-thousand-dollar-plus income category with pensions and health care benefits proportional to their executive earnings.

These arcane zombies from City Hall were incapable of understanding how important Charlie's business is to San Francisco and to San Franciscans who love old motorcycles. They are incapable of understanding how difficult it is to start and run a successful business.

What I am asking my readers to do is find a word that expresses the incomparable blindness of these perpetually harassing government drones. They are not stupid they are not naïve and they are not ideological idiots. What are they?

(Here is Charlie’s Facebook page with the top photo of the Honda model that he was constantly building from scratch with every part perfect.  Every screw and bold. He built many over many years.)

2 bad for the Jews

This blog title alludes to two old Jewish jokes.

In one joke the Jews are talking to each other about a political event. The question always arises "Is this good for the Jews?"

In the other joke, Jews are talking about some tragedy like a small airplane crash and the question always arises "So how many Jews were killed?"

I have combined the two jokes and am referring to the scandals of Eliot Spitzer and Anthony Weiner.

Yes this is bad for the Jews. It is bad in more ways than just having to identify two Jewish names who are dishonest, immoral and running for public office. Additionally, New York, where they are running for office, is disproportionately populated and controlled by Jews.

The idea that Jews would vote for these two disgusting human beings is the third element that indicates it is bad for the Jews.

Both of these men are only Jews in name. Neither has a genuine connection to the Jewish world. Weiner is married to an Arab, whose family is part of the Islamic-Jew-hate-Brotherhood.

There is a long tradition of justifiable stereotyping that Jews are dishonest. These two men are a constant reminder to everyone of this unfortunate Jewish stereotype.

Very consciously, many decades ago, I started a business called The Honest Jewish Boys Club with two friends. I sought the distribution rights for Japanese heating pads that are operated by chemical action when they are shaken.  They are used in Japan to warm the lower back. They are now widely used in the United States to warm hands and to wear while skiing.

My two partners were also involved in businesses of their own which became too successful and they could not devote time to our joint Honest Jewish Boys Club venture.

The worst part of this Spitzer-Weiner debacle is that they are running for office in New York. It is a distinct sign that the Jews of New York are tolerant of dishonesty, hypocrisy and immorality.

Singapore is like Emeryville

I have spent time in Singapore, decades ago. Singapore does not change. It lives on commerce, people are its only resource.

Emeryville is a small independent city in the East Bay of San Francisco nested between Berkeley and Oakland.

There are no size similarities between the two. Singapore is a city state of 5 million people on a 15 by 15 mile island barely connected by mud flats to Malaysia.

Emeryville is a tiny city that's only about a mile by mile with 10,000 people.

They are both pure commercial entities. Both are covered with businesses and business is the sole reason for their existence.

What is so interesting is that they are thriving places. They are alive, dynamic and prosperous.

Right next to each of these is a moribund world. Next to Singapore is Malaysia an Islamic country that is mired in poverty and corruption. Singapore is honest and non-corrupt almost to a fault.

Emeryville is surrounded by Berkeley, a modest version of Cuba, where the rich people live on the hills and the poor people live on the flats and businesses are hated. Oakland is the other major neighbor. Oakland most closely resembles Nigeria with out of control crime, corruption and a strong hatred for commerce.

Can anyone think of a pure government town that is ‘alive, dynamic and prosperous?  Brazilia, Juneau, Springfield, Augusta, Salem?

I only point out the similarity between Emeryville and Singapore for those people who are too dense to understand that commerce is the only source of prosperity on the planet. Government that is not in love with commerce means corruption, crime and poverty.

Forced to deal with political morals

In an earlier blog I made the point that people do not go into business for the purpose of dealing with politics and refining their political skills.

The Left has the preposterous notion that it is business that corrupts politics. The exact opposite is true. Politics has so much control over businesses that businesses have no alternative but to learn the ways of politicians.

I am beginning to think now about how very different the commercial moral system is from the political moral system.

This is my first rough sketch.

I know the values of commerce are: meritocracy, openness (which implicitly includes honesty),  love of the market place and a love of technology. Most importantly business, because of its meritocratic fundamental attribute, also respects diversity in every dimension including opinion, ethnicity and temperament. Commerce knows that it is a force for change and disruption in a society. For most of commerce, the industrial component, the main goal is to reduce costs and attract customers. Life is a grandiose opportunity.

I struggle to make a comparable paragraph about the values of the political moral system. I will try.

Political moral values in somewhat the same order of the commercial values in the paragraph above: Loyalty to family members. Giving a priority to finding compromise for conflicting power sources. Honesty among peers is important but not for politicians in dealing with the public. Hyperbole is accepted. Secrecy is necessary for most political negotiation. Maintaining the status quo is paramount. Today's friends can be tomorrow's enemies and vice versa. The world is about manipulation of everyone and everything. Everyone owns a part of you (blackmail) and you must own part of everyone else of interest to your future. Life is a game of calculation and cunning.

I have only begun this project and welcome everyone's contributions to explore the differences between commercial morals and political morals.

Sexual explosion for relief

In an earlier blog about the hippies I suggested that the sexual freedom that women offered in the hippy era had to do with age demographics. I noted that women tend to choose men who are two years older than they are. But with all the leading cohorts usually of smaller size, younger women from larger cohorts were forced to offer sex to attract the older males in the smaller cohorts.

In the interval of many years since the hippy era, I have had a chance to observe the wonderful fall of the evil USSR and the magnificent emancipation of the Chinese from the tyranny of Mao.

It appears that when a society is freed from repression there is a sexual explosion.

I saw it in Japan with the fall of the USSR. Women seemed to flock to Tokyo and aggressively sought out every man available. They were horny. I know a number of couples made up of a Japanese male and an East European female from that era.

During that same period many of my male friends visited East Europe and reported the easy availability of horny young women.

The same thing happened in China. To this day men are targets of horny young Chinese women coming in from the countryside.

So I now wish to add an important additional reason to the sexual freedom of the hippies. They were reacting to the repressive social conservatism of the 1950’s decade.