Pro Commerce

The disgrace of the Left

The Left has done everything within its power to destroy America (think Detroit). We have had a media for 50 years that only propagates Lefty values. We have an academic universe and a university system that teaches contempt for America in every possible form. If you doubt me look at the success of the boycott Jews movement at the university level.

We now have a national disgrace that is so horrific that every American should crouch down with their head between their knees and cry.

The National Archives have opened an exhibition called ‘Records of Rights’.

The permanent exhibition is reviewed by the most intelligent person who ever worked at the New York Times, Edward Rothstein. In this review Rothstein explains how an agency of the American government has been turned into a Leftist-Jacobin hate- America vehicle.

The exhibition does not talk about the power and influence of the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights on shaping the  freedom demands of people throughout the world. No, this government generated disgrace talks about how these great institutions that we have created and which made America unique have failed time and time again.

The entire exhibition is dedicated to showing how the American challenge to the world on behalf of basic human rights has been mitigated, subverted and destroyed throughout American history.

If this sounds okay to you don't get down on the floor and cry with your head between your legs.  Instead you should jump up and down and shout about the triumph of the Lefty backwardness of Stalin, Mao and Kim Jung Un that are is now promoted by the American government.

Platonic teaching

Have you ever sat in a class where the teacher was writing on the board; putting up sentences and equations and speaking while he was writing?

I remember many math related classes, especially statistics where the instructor wrote equations on the board and new equations just kept appearing and appearing.

The same things seem to be true in many social science and history classes.

I am now beginning to see that a great deal of my early learning, before the University of Chicago, was Platonic teaching. The teacher assumed, as Plato did, that the knowledge existed in the world and we only needed to be reminded of it.

The lecture format was designed to remind us of what it was we already knew.

I don't think education using the Platonic method worked on me. I read books and the books talked to me in a sequential manner that was usually explaining how ideas and events were connected. They also explained how to understand the subject. When I finally got to the University of Chicago my education began. All classes were discussions and we learned from each other by comparing and contrasting our perceptions of the material under study.

I would like to say, in the simplest possible terms: all evidence suggests that we are not born understanding a pure and perfectly formed world . We are not born with much if any knowledge about  the world around us.  Even more importantly, the world around us is not structured on the basis of an a priori truth.

Maybe this is why I never became a teacher and even more importantly why I can't give the same lecture over and over again. I prefer to interact with my audiences on a continual basis and that is NOT what a great speaker does. Great speakers refine a single speech until it is perfect and then give it over and over again.

I have been left to my blog and my books as the media to convey  my experiences and understanding.

Global warming soon?

I read an article about  Nathan Myhrvold in which he had gone back and looked at original documents in the field of dinosaur evolution. He was able to find serious mathematical errors in published documents and announced his findings. The erroneous articles had to be retracted.

I wondered what someone with his research staff and mathematical competence would say after looking at the global warming data.

I realized that this is a field filled with bigotry and hatred for anyone who disagrees with the ‘consensus’.  If Myhrvold looked at the data he would have to be very careful or else be labeled a lunatic.

He solved the problem brilliantly. This article examines all of the computer models that have been used to create the global warming fantasy.

He finds a specific equation parameter that is most powerful in determining the connection between CO2 and global temperature. He then looks at the 20 established equations that are used to make the published ‘disaster on the horizon’ results. He examines how each equation treats this powerful parameter.

The parameter has one dimension that shows how strong the connection is between CO2 and global warming and another dimension that determines how long a time lag there is between a rise in CO2 and a rise in the global temperature.

You can see what he found by looking at almost any one of his charts in this published paper.

The 20 equations are plotted and scattered evenly all over the charts. That means they all use a different powerful parameter and they all have different outcomes.

The simplest thing to understand is that the scientists who created these 20 equations don't know what they're doing. They have no idea how long the interval is between a rise in CO2 and its impact on global temperature. One year or one century. No idea and no evidence.

So Myhrvold has found a brilliant way to show the global warming hysteria is nonsense and he did it in a  scientific paper that only someone who is bold, brave, open-minded and persistent would be willing to read.

(Here is similar data to the kind Myhrvold examined. No connection to reality over 40 years.)

Scientists vs the rest of us

I would like to point out that scientists are considered brilliant successful and important in ways that are not comparable for thinkers outside the realm of science.

No one doubts that Einstein, Richard Feynman, Dirac or Albert Sabin were brilliant men who made important contributions to society. I can make a list of dozens of scientists who fit that category.

It would be impossible to create a list of even 5 thnkers outside of the sciences who made comparable contributions to knowledge. We all know of Freud and many people know of Max Weber. The list gets very difficult after that point.

Part of the fact is that we have Nobel prizes in the sciences. But that is not the reason we know the names of the great scientists going back centuries while the non-science categories tend to be empty.

I think the reason maybe that science has been built on a public image that science is testable and based on predictions. The public doesn't know the term 'falsifiable'. While this view of science is a myth (think global warming) it is widespread and suggests levels of concreteness to scientific theory that are not warranted.  Science may also get the benefit of our genuinely successful technology.

The more important point is that there is often a recognition of scientific contributions even though the contributions are not understood as in the case of Feynman or Dirac.

This is of note to me because I have made contributions to the future society that can be seen in my 15 original ideas but there is no earthly way I can be recognized now for the unique contribution of these ideas.

Even the creation of the world's first global currency will not warrant appreciation because few people conceive of how such an invention can even work... but it does.

There may be other reasons why science is more able to throw up prominent figures. Certainly the fact that many of the people in science are required to know math, which is held in awe by many people, may also contribute to the respect that scientists get.

Sports vs Business

When the America's Cup sailing races were in San Francisco it was common to hear the Lefty fundamentalists complain that it was just elite trash who could afford $100 million dollars worth of yacht for a race. Only rich people cared about it.  

Of course those weren't the people I saw watching the races.

I always wondered how these Lefty zombies could reconcile the fact that sports teams cost much more than any America's Cup yachts. Yet they pay attention to baseball and basketball.

I also hear from the entire Lefty population how terrible it is that corporate executives are paid in the millions of dollars while proletariat workers are paid only in the thousands.

Corporate executive who are highly paid are usually paid only for performance. There are a few exceptions where corporate revenue or profit is not the prime determinant.

I work in the field of executive compensation. I rarely see executives rewarded based on measures that are unrelated to the success for a company. Success means employees have jobs. Workers get paid only when the company survives.  Lefties don’t see the connection or don’t understand the relevance of top management.

My only way of justifying executive compensation is to point out that in the sports world there are roughly 100 teams on which 50 athletes earn over $18 million.

On the other hand, among the top 500 corporations only 73 executives are paid $18 million or more.  That may be unfair to the executives.

Who are the ones that should be rewarded by our society? The ones who are athletic or the ones who make daily decisions that keep hundreds or thousands employed, safely?

I say nothing about people who are paid for their singing, acting, painting, dancing, twerking or reading the news. Lefties never mention them because Lefties are stuck in 1872 when they thought the proletariat were going to overthrow the hereditary royalty.  Television, at the time, hadn't created the thousands of other very rich people.

Merry Christmas and seasons greetings

I have always been happy to celebrate Christmas or visit a church.  In the first case it is no more than a seasonal holiday about winter, in the second it is architecture of a special kind.

'Put Christ back in Christmas' may lead you to do the numbers.  For every creche there are one thousand North Sea Santas, ten thousand Scandanavian in-door pine trees and a million North European winter lights that would have been irrelevant in Israel 2,000 years ago.

Enjoy the music too.  For every 'Silent Night' there are four times as many songs written by Jews in the early 20th Century and by secular celebrities. As for Christmas stories, Ruldoph the Red Nosed Raindeer and the song sung by Frank Sinatra were written by Jews, schoolmates of my mother.

What happened to the WTO?

The WTO recently came to an agreement on the standardization of international trade documents for clearing customs. It took 15 years for this piece of minor improvement in trade activity to be adopted.

The WTO is a brilliant solution to solve the previous malaise of trade agreements. Before the WTO every country was subject to the pressure of its own most powerful export lobbyists. Countries were often in open hostility caused by pressure from their export lobbyists. At the State Department level there was great acrimony and a general sense that trade, while desirable, resulted in horrible country to country relations.

The WTO solved that problem. Any nation that wished to complain about protective barriers around another nation could use the WTO. If the other nation lost two cases on the matter before WTO judges, the complaining nation facing import barriers was allowed to create temporary barriers up to an amount equal to the money lost before the WTO judgement. In other words the WTO allows trade revenge after a court finding that the original trade barriers had inflicted costs that warranted the trade revenge.

The system worked perfectly for a decade until two kinds of countries were allowed into the WTO.  It still works for most large trading nations.

The wrong kind of nations were allowed into the WTO despite the fact the WTO requires unanimity in all decisions. The countries being allowed in were not effectively subject to WTO sanctions.

The first cluster of countries allowed into the WTO, mistakenly, were the export-invulnerable countries.  That included countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia that only exported oil and could not be subject to retaliation for import barriers. If one country retaliated by not buying oil from Saudi Arabia it wouldn't matter. Other countries would buy the oil.

Consequently there was no way this kind of export-invulnerable country could be punished by the WTO process.

The second cluster of mistakenly admitted countries are known as ALBA (Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia and Nicaragua).  These are communist nations or nearly communist nations that have no real reason to be in the WTO because they are not significant traders.  They don't even comprehend the reason the WTO exists. They just wanted to join because they consider their exclusion as a priori proof that the world is unjust.

I have no idea why any of the countries in either the first or second cluster were allowed to join the WTO. I'm sure they used political influence on other nations to include them.

Certainly Saudi Arabia could manipulate many smaller countries to force its inclusion in the WTO membership. Once countries like Mexico and Guatemala became members of the WTO they could be manipulated to include Cuba and Venezuela.

We should not expect any improvements in the future world trade agreements because of the WTO.  Nevertheless its current function among major trading, countries remains important.

Fortunately other major trade agreements are underway.

Tyler Cowen

There is discussion among the current economic chattering classes about a book by Tyler Cowen.

Cowen advances the thesis that the last five years of dismal economic growth or no real economic growth is the byproduct of a new era. This is an era of long-term slow growth.

Friends have asked me my opinion about the Cowen hypothesis.

Part of Cowen’s hypothesis goes back to the 1930s and associates 2008 with the financial crash 80 years earlier. Part of his thesis is that a financial crash does serious damage to the economy. More serious than the run-of-the-mill business cycles. He also argues that we have reached the end of a period of high productivity and low international competition.

I go back over two hundred years to the two revolutions that created the current environment. One was in America. A revolution to release the energies and genius of individuals. The other was in France to murder members of the existing royal hierarchy and replace it with Leftist tyranny.

These two revolutions have been battling each other for two centuries. The French model reached its apex in 1952 when it was adopted by all of Europe, China, India, Africa, Latin America and had been operating for decades in the Soviet Union.

The American model has been slowly combating its domestic French version (the Democrat-Union Party) since its inception. And still is.

It is my belief that the American model based on individual motivation has been slowly gathering steam. While still in the shackles of the French model it has never-the-less produced the incredible productive output we saw from 1980 to  2008.

Globally the same thing has happened. The American model began to outperform the French tyrannical model in the 1960’s .There has been a synthesis of the global and domestic American model for several decades resulting in dramatic increases in productivity, output and well being.

I do not believe we have begun to see the genuine productive benefits of the American pro-commerce individual model. For the past five years it has been suppressed by the French revolutionary model which Tyler Cowen sees as permanent in the form of suppressed growth.

I see this coming to an end soon. We will then throw off the hydraulic brakes of French tyranny and enter an era of domestic and global innovation and economic expansion.

Big data

So what is the outsized hooha about ‘big data’? The media presents it as a boogeyman.

The media seem to use the phrase ‘big data’ to indicate that the corporate world has some new magical tool that understands human motivation and intrudes on individual decision-making. The same way Lefties used to talk about 'advertising'.

As my readers know, I've taught statistics and I ran marketing research departments in the early 1960s. I used statistics on data within the Bank of America and other institutions to understand business. Bank of America had over 50 million accounts which I could examine freely. I did.  And I had computers (very slow, limited memory but I could process hundreds of thousands of data points overnight.) That is more than 40 years ago and that was god damn big data. So what did I use it for?

I did mail surveys to find out how to improve customer service at branches. Individual branches had thousands of accounts. I used that data to improve the quality of services offered in banking, in individual branches and I used it in branch design.

The only other person in the bank who understood statistics was an economist. Jointly we analyzed the bad credit at Bankamericard. We looked at applications from good users and compared those to users who ended up not paying the card balances. Bad users.

We used correlation equations on large bodies of data. The two of us found significant differences in the applications of the future good users and future bad creditors for Bankamericard. Out of this we developed the credit scoring system that is still used in consumer lending worldwide. We eliminated millions of man-hours of ineffective credit screening by humans.

We were much more accurate in detecting good and bad potential customers than humans examining the same data.  We tested our data too.

You are welcome. It was so good it lasted forty years.  Based on big data.

So what is the math of the data analysis?

It is always a reduction in variance. The computer manipulation of all data then and today is based on comparing numbers squared and totaled to totals squared. That approach is used for everything in finding correlation and in selecting important information branches on a decision tree.

The math is simple:  2+3+4=9, 9 squared is 81. The same numbers totaled after squaring are 4+9+16 equals 29. If we did this for numbers with no variance 3+3+3 we would get a total of nine squared for 81 again with the squared 3’s totaling 27.  That difference between 29/81 and 27/81 becomes the measure of variance and is the core of all ‘big data’ analysis. All data analysis using correlations and branching are based on this simple comparison.

The special algorithms used by Netflix to pick your favorite films and by Google to guess what you are searching for are based on that simple difference in squared numbers.

Is that worth being scared about?

A life of accomplishment (looking back at retirement)

In the 1960s I developed several major new banking services in my role as a marketing researcher. The most famous was the modern multi-bank credit card ( it became the first global currency ), the modern corporate cash management system, consumer certificates of deposit and simplified checking.

I was constantly examining new markets for new banking services.

One of the markets I looked at was senior citizens. I did focus groups in the early 1960s in senior citizen housing developments.

I also, as was consistent with my research methodology, selected random subjects for extensive personal interviews by me in person in their homes.

One of the most stunning, and to me surprising, findings of my interviews with older people was they invariably looked back on their life with pride. They believed they had accomplished something worthwhile before they retired.

This attitude was virtually universal among retirees male and female. It didn't matter whether they had sold life insurance or worked on a production line or raised one child. Their life has been meaningful and they had accomplished a great deal.

Now I admit that I was only talking to middle-class retirees. I cannot say the same would be true for people who were living in public housing and retired.

My experience was quite a surprise. On the other hand using cognitive dissonance theory I should have expected that outcome. People adjust their minds and their worldview to satisfy their prior decisions. Whatever decisions they made earlier in life they now were validating.

ASA compared to mainstream Christians

I was immediately outraged to see another academic institution express its Jew hate when the American Studies Association made their Nazi position public earlier this week. Jew hate has been spreading in academia and the Left for decades now. (Intelligent American Jews should be buying guns.)

This is no surprise to anyone who has realized that the academic world was captured by Leftism many decades ago.

As my outrage subsided I realized there is a silver lining to this growing Leftie nazism.

Beginning in the early 1960s the entire mainstream of American religion, Episcopalians, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and Methodists joined all of the Quakers and other ‘God is good’ fantasy religions in taking public Lefty positions. They were anti-Vietnam War, anti-anti communist, pro school busing and pro Castro’s Cuba.

By 1970 not a single mainstream American religion had gained membership and most had lost a third of their members. The evangelicals in those few short years had gained all of these members plus a few more because they were not Left wing and instead focused on traditional religious community needs. By the 1980s mainstream religions had sold most of their churches ( I helped sell five empty Methodist Churches in San Francisco) and were half the size of 1960.

Religious people realized their mainstream churches did not serve them and they went to churches that did. American religion took a major change in direction and with it we got president Reagan and religious support for traditional American values.

The same is happening to the Leftie world of academia.

That means that by the year 2020 American academia will be seeing dramatic declines in attendance and support from alumni and a new non-Lefty world of academic institutions will have emerged to replace them.

That is what the Left deserves and that is what is going to happen to these Jew hating Lefty bigot professors.

Oh you poor victim

I try to avoid looking at local TV news but it is often unavoidable. I’m pooped and turn on the TV to relax.  The regular programming is more offensive and even more idiotic than the news. So I leave the news on.

There is one consistent and persistent story that fascinates the local and national TV news and is subsequently picked up by the print media.

Oh you poor victim.

The story is simple.

Some idiot does something criminally wrong like stealing a car, a cell phone or mugging an old person; sometimes it goes so far as to include shooting a child or simply pointing a machine gun at a police officer. Sometimes it is a woman accussing white men of raping her under improbable circumstances.

The idiot is usually black or Latino and television fixates on the parent or uncle of the idiot criminal and talks about what a poor victim of police brutality he was. Now he's dead and we see pictures of him as a star athlete at some unknown school and we see pictures of him cuddled in the warmth of his large family and friends.  We are always told what a good person he was and what a great future he had.

I don't know how far back this ‘poor victim’ story goes.  It certainly extends back into the early 1980s.

This is the major story in the United States.

Oh you poor victim.

Every single day, without fail, for four years the half black president of the United States has blamed every problem he had on the previous president or Rush Limbaugh or Fox news.

In his current second term he still blames every single problem that he has on Rush Limbaugh,  Fox news and the Republican Party.  Oh, our president is a poor black victim.

This president’s victimhood carries weight with the media instead of the appropriate ridicule for a man of such pathetic incompetence and moral lassitude.  It carries weight because that is the primary story of the media in our lives.

Oh you poor victim.

Shape of the civil war

I have raised the issue in this blog many times: we are on the verge of a civil war.

Most of my readers understand this feeling. We never see the subject discussed publicly because part of the reason for this sense of impending civil war is that the national media speak 100% the Lefty language. This will be a war against the Lefty overlords. Even Fox News and the Wall Street Journal avoid the subject of how different their news coverage is from the rest of the news media.

It is this complete isolation of half the American public that generates this ominous sense that we are on the verge of civil war. At present the only  tools available for half of America to speak are blogs and election tools. This mechanism did not work in the last general election. We don't know why but the reelection of an incompetent anti-American, simply inflamed the civil war mentality. The year 2013 will be remembered as the year Americans bought more firearms than ever before.

On a recent trip by car I came to realize that I have a the second image of how the civil war will begin. My first image is of suburban and rural people coming into the center of urban areas, particularly the gay Castro district in San Francisco and the blackest parts of Oakland and firing hundreds of rounds from moving cars at everyone. Much like John Brown started the U.S. Civil War.

My second newer image is of suburban and rural towns where people will be shooting at automobiles traveling through town that they think are urban Union-Democrats.  Shooting at convertible Mercedes and BMWs and Teslas. 

Since this type of civil war is new there are no scenarios of how it starts. I am struggling in the dark to imagine how it will play out.

The first targets will be ostentatious rich people who are perceived to be major funders of the  Democrat-Union Party.

Men only

I am looking at a United Airlines timetable dated December 1, 1958. I was regularly flying around the United States in the postwar era and that year I flew to Europe too. Airlines were a comfortable form of transportation for me.

At the time, (1950s) less than 20% of Americans had ever flown on any airplane. Airplanes included stewardesses who were attractive and well dressed and flights almost always included a hot meal. Seats were wide enough for comfort.

The most interesting note on this United Airlines flight schedule is the existence of special flights between Chicago and Washington and New York that were for men only.

I have no idea what happened to this men only part of the schedule.

What I do know is that this would not have been an unusual or illegal activity. The first legal case against men only business related clubs with over 200 members was in 1971.

Smoking was permitted on airplanes in that era. Up until the mid-1970's. The male only flights probably included cigar smoking and drinking (booze).

Frankly, I still find time to smoke cigars and drink good whiskey with men and I appreciate it. Many of the men are young and appreciate the conviviality.

Such a flight would have been convivial for me and others.

The world has changed. In Tokyo most subways coming in from the suburbs have an entire car that is for women only. It is not intended to increase or promote conviviality among women but to reassure women that no men will touch their butts.

Lobby 1946

I have in my hand a newsletter from July 1, 1946 published by the National Association of Real Estate Boards.

It tells how to lobby Congress.  It makes very clear that the enemies of the Real Estate Association are political action committees (PACs) run by half a dozen unions including the CIO.

We're looking at an era where unions were becoming the dominant force in controlling Congress especially after having had an enormous power in the executive office during wartime.

The issues of the era were price controls, rent-controls, legislation to control home construction and government support to extend the power of unions.

Fortunately the real estate activists were more effective in the United States than the citizens in Europe or we would have suffered the same 50 years of slow growth or no growth that Europeans became accustomed to. Medical improvements would have been stifled as would most modern technology.

I give thanks to all the small business people and ordinary Americans who stopped the union and government expansion of the post war era in America. They deserve our Christmas blessings.

 

Quakers

The Quakers should have given up 150 years ago. That was the date of their first major effort in pacifism. More than 200 Northern Quakers went to the South to encourage their brethren, their ‘Friends’ to give up slavery and avoid the coming Civil War. They failed but they continued as a religious order, just like every other religious group that history proved wrong..

From 1960s onward Muslims began moving into Kosovo from neighboring Albania. By the 1990s they controlled two thirds of the country including the capital Pristina. It was clear that the Serbs who had controlled the country previously intended to retake it.

A Quaker, David Hartough, set out to train the Kosovan Moslems in nonviolent resistance. After five years of training, the Serbs invaded the country and drove all of the Moslems out. It was American bombing of Serbia that allowed the Moslems back into the country not their pacifist training.

Quakers failed again on a big scale.

Today the Quakers have decided that Palestinians are the latest version of the Northern abolishionists and Muslim invaders and that the Israelis are the enemies of peace. Another step in the long Quaker history of pacifists getting things wrong and backwards.

The Quakers have no organizational structure. They have meetings and they all think pretty much alike so they don't need much structure. They just go with the flow and the flow is usually pathetic.

Unlike the Presbyterians who have organization and a global campaign of Jew hate the Quakers just have a local individual direct contact with God who tells them to hate Jews.

 

(I wrote about the anti-Semitism of a close Quaker friend here many years ago.  She died in 2010)

I change my mind

I change my mind on a regular basis. I change my mind based on either my experience that contradicts my opinions or after giving my opinions due thought and finding they are in conflict with each other.

I don't know if this makes me more trustworthy or less. It is not something I find in 99 out of 100 other people I know. Most people form their views of the world before they are age 23 and they never change.

I have come up with, so far, 15 original ideas in my life. I think part of that is because I am willing to change my mind. I think it is a prerequisite for original thought that one is willing to recognize one's own intellectual failures.

As an example, in the past year I have changed my mind on a minor subject. For one year after I had a heart attack I said that exercise, meditation and good eating habits have to be pursued only for their own sake because they didn't prevent me from having a heart attack at age 74. After saying that and thinking about it for a year I came to a different conclusion. I now recommend good behavior for long-term health. But I modify it by saying you need to live near a very good hospital in your old age.

You can look at my resume and you will find two major actions in my life that I have come to regret. First, I was an organizer of school busing in San Francisco from the earliest date. I had been an aggressive activist in the civil rights movement and this seemed a logical extension.

I was completely wrong. Bringing incompetent students with a background of violence into fairly nonviolent schools resulted in white exodus from urban schools and public schools. Bused integration destroyed the public school system.

I was an early founder of the corporate social responsibility movement which is evident on my resume. Over time I was able to see that corporate social responsibility is nonsense. Every year, every month, corporate social responsibility activists added a new source of complaint about corporate behavior.

I quickly came to see It as a pathetic, ideological and trivial movement that is counterproductive to anything in human well-being.

I would say I have change my mind on roughly 50 major subjects. I am proud of that.

Against Phillips

To deal with a recent family issue, I googled the phrase ‘the seven laws of money’. This refers to a book I wrote, with Salli Rasberry as the editor, in 1973. The book sold in the hundreds of thousands of copies (it is still selling) and was considered the Bible in the hippie world.

About the fourth entry on Google was an article called ‘Against Phillips’. This means that many people who read about the seven laws also check to see what the rebuttal position is.

The rebuttal position is a long exposition of my principles in the seven laws and in other books juxtaposed against standard capitalist popular notions.

The article, Against Phillips, has a nom de plume, John Collar. I must confess, since this article appears on my own website, that I wrote it.  Phillips against Phillips.

The fact that it is apparently well read and there is the desire see alternative positions to mine suggests that I should write such a paper attacking my pro-commerce blog position.

You can look forward to that…  one of these days in the near future.

Clean people

In an earlier blog I referred to Vikings and hippies as dirty. A knowledgeable reader pointed out that the Vikings do not qualify as dirty.

What people in the world are clean and which ones are dirty?

I have two criteria. The first is that the cleanest people in the world are Japanese. They take a long hot bath in clean water every day and they wear clean clothes everyday. They have done this throughout recorded history at every level of society.

Secondly, I look at what various people from various stations in life describe as the cleanliness claims of other people.

The Japanese were totally offended by the smell and filth of all Europeans they encountered for four hundred years from 1550 to 1930.

The people who follow the Japanese pattern of cleanliness are the Turks, the Hungarians and the Finns, all of whom have extensive public bathing facilities.

Two travelers, among many,  give me an idea about England. An 18-year-old navy, Mungo Park, traveled throughout West Africa in the 1790s. He went from Senegal through Mali to Nigeria. Everywhere he went he commented on how clean the cities were, with well-designed sewage systems. He came from London, which at the time mixed fresh water and sewage in the same system. London was filthy, towns on the Niger River weren’t.

In the late 1800s an upper class English woman, Isabella Bird, traveled through the backcountry of Japan and never noticed how clean the people were. She never bathed. She never noticed the cleanliness of other people in her many European and American travels.

It appears to me that Europe, particularly England, has been a cesspool of dirty people for a long time. In our era people still joke about the French using heavy perfume in lieu of bathing. I noticed it myself when I visited as a teenager in the 1950s.

Other travellers from Germany, France and Italy to West Africa never noticed the cleanliness.

I have seen with my own eyes that children poop in the street in China.  

If anyone else has measures or evidence on this subject please let me know.

Reading the glossy WSJ magazine

There is a glossy magazine that comes with my Wall Street Journal subscription about one Saturday a month.

It has a format designed for carrying glossy high priced advertising for watches, diamonds, cars, handbags and the world of luxury items.

The content is about the crowd that regularly goes to Ibiza to show each other how important they are in the world of fashion, style and irrelevance.

I cannot resist these articles. One regular article shows the favorite objects of some rich dilettante. Their favorite watch, their favorite painting, and their favorite restaurant and hotel.

I read these articles with great pleasure. I have focused my life on simple living.

There are two reasons for simple living in my worldview. First it allowed me to devote my life to doing the things that I thought were important and rewarding. Second it allowed me to think in ways that have been unique and allowed me to explore entire worlds that were unknown to myself or anyone else. I got to be an explorer in a new world.

In some sense, reading this Wall Street Journal gloss, I am reassuring myself that I made the right decision in my life…. to avoid this world of gloss.

This theory of reassurance comes from the greatest of all sociological and marketing understanding: Cognitive Dissonance. CG theory suggests that once we have made a decision we must restructure our worldview to incorporate that decision. (This is sometimes simplified as ‘buyers remorse’). It is the observation that after a purchase, the buyer continues to look at prices and objects to assure himself he made the right decision.

Secondly, to remind myself that in my ventures around the world I have actually come to know many people who inhabit the world of Ibiza. I have met them under a variety of circumstances both leisure, romance and work. I've enjoyed their company but have never entered their of realm of gloss, frivolity and melodrama.

We got a Schekman

I can't help it. Similarity in the two names is impossible for me to ignore.

A recent Nobel Prize winner in physiology and medicine has taken a justifiable and important stand on science magazines. His name is Randy Schekman.

I instantly remembered a character from Two and a Half Men, a TV show with Charlie Sheen. Dr. Shenkman was the mythical figure who did all of the plastic surgery on Charlie’s forever young and horney mother. Including some touch up work on her rectum. The subject I know about mostly from my friendly gay neighbors.

Enough with that silly joke.

Prof. Schekman has used his Nobel Prize bully pulpit to complain that the leading magazines in science are run by journalists and not by people who know science. As a consequence these prestigious journals lean toward journalistic excitement instead of scientific hard work and rigor.

I complained for many years while regularly reading Science magazine that the editors didn't understand science, never looked at the political controversies surrounding ideological science and worst of all never corrected mistakes made by dishonest scientists. Science Magazine never investigated nor reported on the issues of dishonesty and fraud in science.

That is on top of the basic problem with all science journals: their high price makes certain that science is a secretive, sequestered field filled with poppycock and irrelevance.

No one has ever suggested that good science thrives behind a high pay wall. It keeps out young scientists and interested researchers in parallel fields.

Thank you Dr. Schekman. You will have no influence but you will be remembered as one of the very few honest, decent people in science.

(This NYTimes article confirms everything Dr. Schekman and I say about science publications.)

Fast track

I am reminded that even a stopped clock is accurate twice a day.

Which is relevant to the president of the United States asking for fast-track voting on the upcoming trade bills. We need it.

President Obama is a man of deep dishonesty, mean-spiritedness, complete incompetence and has a brain that has been unwilling to learn anything since childhood. Including how to deal with numbers. Maybe being innumerate is a sign of his dysfunctional brain.

Fast-track voting has been in use since NAFTA was first introduced in the Senate. It is a pre-agreed voting proposition that demands an up or down vote on a treaty with no amendments to the treaty. It is necessary because a trade treaty is only presented to the U.S. Senate after it has been agreed upon, word for word, by other nations. Any changes would require a new treaty. Both the treaties (TPP and EU) soon to be up for a vote took 5-10 years to negotiate.

The most powerful forces that want to change free-trade treaties are the environmentalists and unions.  Not friends of thoughtful human beings.

So despite who he is, the president’s request for fast-track voting on the upcoming free-trade agreements is in the interests of commerce, humanity and our common future.

National Geographic intelligence

I have written about how dishonest the National Geographic Magazine is. They use photos of museum historic houses and call them examples of current living. They ignore the writers and photographers descriptions of their own photos and put in their own explanations that are unscientific.

The graph on the right raises questions about whether the people who are in the editorial room are actually stupid. The evidence suggests that they are.

Look at the graph on the right. Tell me what year the oceans began to rise. If you say 1800 you are smarter than anybody in the editorial office at the National Geographic. This is a photo of their own chart.

The article on this subject, which is undated on their website for idiots, explains the rise in global oceans as having the same cause as the rise in global surface temperature.

I only have two points to make. Since 1800 the global oceans have risen at the rate of 8 inches per century. We have two centuries of experience and reliable data, but we have not one single solitary theory to explain this phenomenon.

This doesn't stop the National Geographic editors from projecting astounding increases in the rise of the oceans. Nor does it keep them from blaming this rise on industrialization. Since oil was not in significant use until the 1910s and coal for steel was barely in use in 1900, one has to wonder how oil and coal had such a great impact 100 years before they were in regular use by humans. Moreover humans comprised one sixth of the global number of people we have today between 1800 and 1850.

Once again I asked the question about the editorial staff at National Geographic: are they stupid? Could even ideological blindness help them overlook their own graph?

'Net' is neat

I am very happy about this discovery.

While trying to offer a definition for ‘net’ as in net revenue or ‘net’ as in net profit for one of my grandchildren, I looked up the etymology of the word ‘net’. It clearly comes from the Latin 'nitere' meaning to shine, look bright, glitter. It is the same root as the word 'neat'.

Horray!  Net is a beautiful word.  All intelligent people should worship it.  All our modern world is built upon its elegance.

This latin word parallels one of my favorite words in Japanese: ‘kiriei’ which means both good-looking, beautiful and clean.

In both cases the parallel word contains much of the same meaning.

In commerce, 'net' is a word that refers to expenses being removed from revenue to give one an important number that shows the elegant, glittering, surplus available for replacement, growth and expansion.

In real beauty, unlike the world of vikings* and hippies, clean is beautiful and dirty is smelly, unappealing and evidence of sloth.

To me it is wonderful that one of the most important words in commerce is associated with neatness, brightness and that conception has delivered to us the entire world of hope, health and vitality that are at the core of commerce.

*(Be sure to look at Brian's comment below about Viking cleanliness and my blog on 12-13.)

Conjugal visits limitation

We have a large and growing hereditary underclass of blacks. I don't know the size but it's in the low millions. This class is identifiable because it is illiterate, innumerate and illegitimate.

Honest people must ask themselves what can be done to reduce the size of this hereditary underclass.

In previous blogs I have made several suggestions, which I know are not politically viable.

My current suggestion is to limit conjugal visits for serious felons.  Limit the visits to spouses with whom they have been married before their prison sentence and for whom they can show some reasonable work experience and a modicum of education.

I know that many outsiders will believe that this will lead to greater unrest in our prisons. I would have to leave that judgment to the Prison Guards Union which is among the strongest of all unions. I suspect they know that sex inside the prison walls in sufficient that many conjugal visits are unneeded.

It may surprise you to know that a very high percentage of black man are comfortable having sex with men. Still, they don't consider themselves 'gay'.

Once this basic problem of an hereditary underclass is identified in some serious worlds I hope some honest efforts will be made deal with its solution.

Getting back into prison

I am one of those few people honest enough to talk about our hereditary underclass of blacks.

Part of the reason I am so honest about this issue is that I spent more than a decade working in a black church and some of that time working with the world of black felons and ex-felons.

That was the time before the hereditary underclass had formed. It is now three generations later with plenty of time for children to have raised their own children to be illiterate, innumerate and illegitimate.

Getting out of prison for someone who has spent the bulk of their formative years in jail or prison presents a unique problem. Such people have no idea of how they can structure their day. In prison, every minute and every hour is predetermined by the institution.

Many of the men who have been released from prison are unable to create structure in their daily life and want to go back to the preordained prison structure. Roughly two out of three of them.

In the 1980s I proposed the suggestion that we have voluntary prisons for people who prefer life in prison to the unstructured life outside.  No one seemed to understand that idea.

In some ways I was motivated by my friend Moses. Moses was a handsome, short. fairly dark ex-prisoner who was also quite gentle. He wanted to go back to prison but didn't want to hurt anyone. He committed a technically serious crime involving theft and hiding along with escape from pursuing cops. He didn't have to hurt anyone.

When he went to trial he explained to his public defender that he wanted the longest possible prison sentence. In the middle of his trial his public defender had to leave and Moses was given to the public defender’s assistant. The assistant didn't have time to read the file and began pleading for a reduced sentence. Poor Moses.

A gentle man who wanted a long prisons term was given a short one because his public defender lacked an understanding of the world.

TVears can’t hear

There is an interesting gadget on the market called TVears. It plugs into your TV set and a power source and allows a person with the specific headset included to silently listen to the program while the program plays out loud for the other people in the room. This allows a hard of hearing person hear at higher volume.

I don't recommend it. The company is in the pre-Internet era. Trouble, nothing but trouble.

I ordered this through Amazon. I promptly received a product from a supplier that was not the manufacturer. I found that the product would not work on my new television set based on a phone call to the manufacturer.  I was told to buy a more expensive model. Which I did.

First mistake. If your models don't fit all television sets on the market you should have a serious warning on all promotional material that directs the potential buyer to a URL that shows the correct product match for each TV set. Join the Internet century.

The return of the first product was easy because it followed Amazon rules.

The second product arrived. The headset would not hold a charge for more than 3 min. Small, simple crap.

Entire new retail industries are built on the high quality of Japanese products that set the retail standards for the world in the 1980's. That is why Costco and Walmart and Best Buy can stack boxes of products on shelves and be confident that 99.99% will be flawless. Customers expect this. It was the Six Sigma revolution.

The TVears headphones had not passed any quality control tests. Definitely, TVears is living in the 1970’s.

After trying to get a new headset with several phone calls I was sent a replacement headset.  They didn’t arrive after a week. They were sent to the wrong address. A second set was mailed a week after my second request.  It is still not here.

Again, this company is not in the Internet age. After the first recorded defect problem I should have received an e-mail summarizing the shipping data and a tracking code. I would have caught the erroneous address. I would have known the tracking was failing. A company that never thought of using email shows terrible incompetence.

Not making a record of my second phone call and not shipping an immediate new headset with one day delivery is simply outside of the range of Internet responsibility.

Of course this incompetent business would never think of making amends.  Every restaurant from Denny’s on up will comp a customer for a mistake that the restaurant made.

Nordstrom, founded in Seattle, set the standard for returns. Anything gets returned and people trust retail stores with a Nordstrom level return policy. REI too, which also started in Seattle.

Amazon, founded in Seattle, set the standard for Internet returns. Everything gets returned and handled promptly and reliably. Amazon has created the milieu necessary for Internet business to exist.

Do not do business with TVears unless you are happy with the kind of retail transactions that pervaded the 1970s and earlier.

Honor in commerce

The subject that generated the issue of honor has been my ongoing discussion about our black hereditary underclass that is illiterate and innumerate. It has been suggested that this underclass is held together by an honor system that requires illiteracy, innumeracy and illegitimate children. Honor for the black hereditary underclass also requires violence and killing members of other tribes and a lifetime of servitude in prison.

Which leads me to the question of the role of honor in commerce.

I see three areas in which honor plays an important role in commerce.

The first is that business founders and leaders are very proud that they have created an income and livelihood for their employees and their employees families. This is a reason American corporations have so heavily invested in employee healthcare over the past half century. This is always a point of honor when business is expanding and a point of great sorrow when the number of employees must be reduced.

The second point of honor for people in business is direct support for those around them. Employees and management take great pride in the role they play in their community in generating work for suppliers and direct contributions to community activities.

The third role of honor is associated with producing a valuable product or service at the highest quality for the best price. This is usually a point of honor found throughout the world of commerce.

To those of us who see the extraordinary contributions of commerce to the health, vitality and prosperity around us,  we can also see that honor pervades the commercial world.

The central role of honor in commerce is usually forgotten by people in the political and anti-commerce world. 

It is important to add that the honorable people in commerce are always ashamed that they have to stoop to the lowly and secretive world of bribery that the realm of politics around us demands.

 

ADD/ADHD

I have no expertise to add to the subject of ADHD. I was married to a woman whose oldest son was told in school that he had ADHD. His mother was told that she had to give him the drug Ritalin if he were to be allowed to stay in public school.

This woman had no intention of giving her son a drug to keep him from being hyperactive. She was and is a very wise woman.

She moved to the mountains of Arizona and put her son in a public school in a small mountain town. Every morning he had to run several miles to school. Every afternoon he had to run several miles home around a large and boulder strewn mountain. He was a hyper-active boy.

He grew up to be two things. One, a perfectly competent student who went on to create and manage a successful Mercedes-Benz business.

Two, he was a champion college swimmer and was scheduled to be on the Olympic water polo team. He just happened to be on the team that qualified in an off year for the Olympics. He is definitely an extraordinary athlete of the highest Olympic quality.

Which is what I want to say about ADHD and giving your child Ritalin. With this public attitude toward active males we will be losing out on many generations of Olympic level athletes. The politically correct attitude toward young healthy males may be a bad mistake.  Many may just need to run.

Males are diagnosed as hyperactive at three times the number of girls. Does this raise any questions in your mind?

Maggies drawers

There is a recent sub text to this blog that some very careful readers may have noticed. I became interested in the NRA after reading the requirements to buy guns in the United States.

This arose out of my interest in the potential civil war that the political environment and the media have created. Which in turn has led me to consider buying a weapon. Before buying any weapon I decided to learn how to handle a variety of pistols at a local firing range. A close friend and colleague allowed me to fire half a dozen of his pistols.

I am not required to have a safety license in order to buy or transfer a pistol because I was honorably discharged from the service. From the Army.

In looking at my documents from the Army I learned that I was not discharged. Because I was on reserve duty on my last assignment I was merely transferred to inactive status and received a letter that I could be reactivated by Congress. I also noted in my records that I had achieved expert marksmanship status.  I didn’t know that.

In describing my recollection of the firing range that we visited annually in the reserves I happen to mention ‘Maggie's drawers’ in a large group of people. No one recognized the term.

When we went to the firing range in the Army for our standard issue weapon, the M1 carbine, we fired at targets 100 yards away. Half the company was on the firing line and half was behind a bunker behind the targets. After the firing ceased, those of us behind the targets would come out and use flags to indicate where the bullets had penetrated the target. One flag was red and indicated the soldier had missed the target altogether. That flag was called ‘Maggie's drawers’.

It is not hard to guess why waving a red flag was called Maggie's drawers. It dates from the period before Kotex and Tampax when women used rags for menstruation. These rags obviously had to be cleaned and hung outside to dry.  ‘Maggies drawers’.

This is not rude. It would not have bothered any of us because the Army was all-male at the time.

Sit down dad

Roughly 20 years ago when my son was in his mid-20s and young men all over the country were coming out about being gay, my son came to me and said "Sit down Dad, I have something to tell you"

I obediently sat down and wondered if my son was going to tell me that he was gay. I actually had never noticed the issue one way or the other. I certainly had not bothered to learn that he was or wasn’t gay. I had been in the human sexuality field for more than a decade before that point and would not have cared about gay or not gay.

What he told me was a shock. There were many groups for parents who learned that their children were gay but there were no parents groups for people in my situation.

My son told me that he was ‘a romantic’.

My readers must know that I particularly abhor the romantic idea. It is anti-commerce, anti-rational.

To me the romantic era is defined as the period of time from the founding of America through the era of Goethe until the American Civil War.

 It is represented by the imagery of objects emerging from a foggy background. The metaphor of this romantic subtlety can only be fully understood by women who are living on a pedestal and who are very sensitive to this precious emergence. That is ‘romantic’ to me.

That is abhorrent  to me. I do not believe that the world around us consists of a platonic real world behind it. There is a real world that is incomprehensible and imperceptible to us who have limited comprehension and perceptive mechanisms. But one is not a reflection of the other, it is a sub-section of the other.   Certainly, I do not believe artists or faint women have any greater access to the real world. Commerce does.

I was shocked to hear what my son said, but because he is my son and I love him, I accepted this tragic news.