Pro Commerce

Jew hate and zero sum societies

In yesterday's blog I discussed the future of religion.

That let me think about the periods in which various religions have promoted Jew hate.   I have argued that Jew hate requires an elite hereditary hierarchy which uses Jew hate in order to protect itself.   Hereditary hierarchies use the Jews as a scapegoat. 

That  explanation of hereditary hieracrhy is not sufficient because we have the example of Islam that was not seriously anti-Jew for a long time.  Islam became strongly anti-Jew when the Ottoman-Turk Empire faced collapse and Islam began losing wars to the new Jewish state.

Neither India, China or Japan have experienced any national Jew hate even though they have hereditary hierarchies.  That suggests that hereditary hierarchy alone is not sufficient to create Jew hate.  What is also required is a religion that is not expanding.    A zero sum religious environment.

Christianity has been on the wain in Europe for several centuries but not in the U.S. which also got rid of its hereditary hierarchy. Which explains the re-appearnce of Jew hate in Europe and its near total absence in the U.S.

Neither China nor Japan have a religion so that is not an issue in combining with an hereditary hierarchy to create Jew hate.   India has several religions but the national religion is Hinduism.  Hinduism is not a religion by the conventional definition.  It is a national story.   The Hindu national story doesn't confront expansion or retreat and is therefore not a fertile ground to combine with the hereditary elite to form an anti-Jew sentiment.

In Africa the story is similar to China and Japan, with no religion in most parts of the country.   

In brief, we get Jew hate where Jews can be the scape goat for a hereditary hierarchy (usually hereditary hierarchies are unpopular) and a contracting national religion.

Which religions will survive?

At this point in my life I have seen many religions go from being important in the United States to virtually non-existent.

That leads me to ask the question:  ‘Which religions are likely to survive in the next hundred years?’

By watching the patterns of religion in the United States, where they are abundant, and watching the non existence of religion in Europe where they are state sanctioned, we can draw one conclusion.   I can plainly state that sanctioned religions in the Judeo-Christian tradition have no future.  These religions have nothing to do with the functioning of a state.   They have to do with the individual and the social institutions in which individuals usually operate.   The state and its function as a religious supporter is dysfunctional.  

Islam, with a focus on the state for tribal societies, doesn't face this problem.

American religions face the serious problem of permanent schismogenesis.   They are always splitting into smaller and smaller units and losing their theological cohesion.

All of which leads me to suggest that the religions that will survive are the ones that operate in an open ended environment.   Christianity grew as the Eruopean powers expanded their empires and stopped when they stopped.  The American expansion helped many religions such as Mormonism.  That may be at an end now.

When a religion is faced with a closed system, such as the European nations, they lack vitality.   When they are in an expansionist mode as Islam was for many centuries and Protestantism was for a few centuries, they had vitality and experienced growth.  

In a world where the competition is not other religions but societies without religion...  China, India, Japan and much of Africa,  I think we will see a decrease in religion. All religions, including Islam.

Religion also has a problem with commerce.  Commerce in the workplace demands tolerance of religious diversity.  This tends to make religion a much more superficial status matter and less of an organizational church matter.  It becomes an association with ‘a higher power’ as the diverse AA has evolved.

In summary if a religion can confront an expansion of religious opportunity it can remain vital. Religion benefits from converts.  When we are in a tribal environment, pre-modern industrial commerce,  religion can remain an important structure for maintaining the family and moral behavior.  Right now I see no significant religious expansion. I see even less in the rest of this century.

However, as we become more commercial and diversity in the commercial environment becomes more important, religion declines and becomes a superficial phenomenon.  

(None of this applies to Jews,  for which there is no human survival explanation.) 

Noren Institute

I recently read an interview with a prominent Silicon Valley CEO adviser, Ben Horowitz,  who made it clear the most CEOs have nowhere to turn to understand decision making of the type they must provide everyday.

There are countless business schools in America that claim to teach management and claim to prepare people to be CEOs.   

I have been a consultant to many CEOs and never found a way to give them a body of knowledge or experience that would be useful.   In most cases they have to learn from experience or from watching an able CEO who was above them for sufficient time to gain observational experience.

As a result of trying to find business schools or short term training programs for the CEO’s I advised,  I created my own management class in my own small business school.

The school was called the Noren Institute for Small Business.  We had classes in a variety of business subjects and took students to visit operating business.   The school was aimed at Briarpatch type of businesses that were open, environmentally friendly, cooperative and innovative.   

I had a great deal of trouble trying to teach management.   I included in the course the fundamentals of personnel which can be taught and consists of many specific practices.  One such is firing people.  Firing must be done on a face to face basis with the person who made the decision to do the firing.   

The issue of being a CEO was far too difficult to communicate and I failed.

The only advice I could give to those who were faced with the CEO circumstance, which includes daily presentation of at least 10 insoluble problems,  is to always remember ‘you can quit and be an employee.  Then you won’t confront 10 daily insoluble problems’.  

I call these problems ‘insoluble’ because there is no best solution, there is no correct answer.   Most CEO decisions involve postponing a decision and waiting to see if new consequences change the alternatives you have to choose from.

I wish there were a way to teach management for a CEO.   The best advice is to take each problem as it comes up and realize there is nobody who can give you better advice or a final decision.  Your peers as CEOs are among the few people you can turn to and they will only be emotionally supportive.  They can not answer functional questions.

Connecticut revolt

I don't know how many of my readers are aware of what is happening in Connecticut .

It is hard to believe, but we have a case of outright public revolt going on in Connecticut right now.   Has our media kept you informed about this outright American rebellion?

Last year the Connecticut legislature passed a bill outlawing assault rifles including the common AR 15 that is widely used by hunters and gun lovers.  It is the weapon of choice for the US Army and has been in use now for 50 years.

The legislature banned these common rifles as well as magazines that hold more than 10 rounds.  Most common pistols are 9 millimeters and they typically hold 14 rounds. This makes the magazines on most pistols illegal.  The Connecticut legislature required that all weapons be registered by last December 31st and that all  magazines that hold more than 10 rounds be dismantled.  This becomes an issue when we estimate the number of people in Connecticut who own AR-15 rifles or similar guns.  There are 3.5 million people in Connecticut.  I have seen estimates ranging from 50,000 to 90,000 people who own these guns.   Less than 40,000 people registered on time.  A few thousand tried to register but were late.  These too-late-filers were told to move the weapons out of state or turn them in. They were told that they faced felony charges for non-compliance.

So we have somewhere between ten thousand and fifty thousand people who are in open rebellion against the state of Connecticut and subject to felony charges.

Is this the beginning of the modern civil war, clearly underway?

I seriously doubt that there are any sheriffs who are willing to go to someone's house and arrest them for not having registered their rifles.  If that does happen we will see the beginnings of a shooting war.

I don't think any Sheriff's or police officers are willing to risk their lives in that  circumstance.  

West Bank governance

There is significant discussion in Israel, as there has been for the past decade,  about the fact that a two state solution will not work.  The Palestinians could not run a government.  The new discussion concerns the One State solution in which there is no need to have an unwilling or imaginary Palestinian partner.

My thinking along these lines has been how to deal with the question of administering a separate Palestinian population.

The problem arises because operating a separate province is currently costly in financial as well as human terms.  Israelis are not really willing to invest much time or personnel in administering an unruly people;  Israelis and Jews have a 2000 history of being the oppressed rather than the the administrator.

I wish to tell my Israeli friends that there is a very low cost and efficient mechanism for administering subsidiary provinces.

This method was used effectively in Japan and Turkey.  Japan for roughly 400 years of effective central administration and Turkey in the Ottoman-Turkish Empire for more than 700 years.

The mechanism is straightforward.  It consists in taking the leaders of all major families and continually moving them from their domain of control to the location of the centralized government, and simultaneously moving their families in the opposite direction.

For example,  I don't know how many major families there are among Palestinians,  I would guess something like 20 families.  The leaders of  half of each of these families would be taken to live in the headquarters in Ramallah where they would be housed alone on a regular basis. Their families would be housed in excellent housing in Bethlehem.  They would be allowed to talk by phone but  not allowed to visit.  Every year there would be a visiting period.  Annually the 10 leaders whose families were in Bethlehem would be switched with the other 10 families in Ramallah; they would then move to Bethlehem and their leaders would be in Ramallah.

This is the way the Japanese maintained central control of Japan and the Ottoman-Turks maintained control of a gigantic Empire.  In Japan the headquarters became Tokyo, in the Ottoman Empire it was Istanbul.

It is about time that we learn how to administer a subsidiary population.  We don't have a choice.

Analog computers

Are you aware that analog computers are a rapidly expanding part of the computer world?

I began realizing this recently when looking at investment in the computerization of automobiles.  

It is important to understand that analog computers have been around much longer than digital computers.  What is important to us is that analog computers have been increasingly put on a chip very much like digital computers.   The consequence is that they are being increasingly used in more functions particularly more functions related to automobiles.

An analog computer operates from the direct input of electricity,  hydraulic forces or even mechanical pressures.   Analog computers respond directly to these forces and their output can be in multiple forms, including digital.  In an automobile there are many operating systems that transmit information using physical media.  Our brakes are hydraulically operated.  Our steering wheel is also.  Both can communicate directly to an analog computer to provide information which can then be transmitted directly to a motor and back to the braking or steering systems.

I read some of the literature related to analog computers.  There is a whole new world of funding being provided by DARPA for the expansion of analog computers.  The reason is straightforward.  Analog computers use much less power if any at all.  They do not require as much cooling as digital computers.  Digital computer temperature growth is becoming increasingly a problem as the digital computers and chips become more powerful.

Syrian missile technology

Longtime followers of this blog will know two things.  First I am a welder.  I learned welding in the army nearly half a century ago and I love it.  Secondly, I have a very low regard for the level of Arab technology.   I frequently say that no Arab nation can even build an export quality bicycle.

What does it have to do with the photograph on the right?  The photograph on the right shows a missile that was captured by the Israelis on its way to Gaza.  This doesn't seem to bother most governments.  I saw very little coverage of the capture of arms meant for terrorists in Gaza... I saw no outrage in the news.  It is consistent with the idea that Arabs can kill Jews with impunity.  This impunity is taken for granted in the EU, in the Lefty media in the United States.   It has certainly not generated any outrage in the anti-Jew Administration that is in office today.

That's not relevant to what I'm actually going to comment on.  Just a rant.

I can see from the photograph that this missile is made of steel and that the fins for stabilization have been welded on not with a machine welder but by hand.  It was apparently made in Syria. The welding is a perfectly good job but done by hand. Also the fins show no control surfaces.     All of which tells me these are not really missiles. They are big mortars.  They are likely launched from a stand a few feet tall. There is no control other than whatever elevation and direction you gave it when fired.  The absence of controlling surfaces on the fins suggests a low level of technology, and the fact that this so called 'rocket' is made of steel, very heavy,  suggesting a low level of technology in the Arab world.

 Fortunately for the Arabs, the mortar is an easier technology to master than bicycle manufacturing.

San Francisco is where it really is

The really happening place for innovation, at the Internet level, is in San Francisco.

This became visible to me in reading about the merger of Cisco and Meraki.  Cisco is an old line company that manufactures computer-communication equipment in the network-router and cloud category.  It certainly has been a major factor in that world for a long time.  Meraki is a 6-7 year old company with more than 300 employees started in Boston by three MIT fellows.  Meraki is now in San Francisco acting as the innovative frontline for Cisco.  Frontline innovators for important companies are in San Francisco.

This city is booming in every way.  I have good inside information into what's happening in restaurants.  Right now they are full. These are boomtown conditions.  Meraki is an example of the innovative pioneers with technological skill who are coming to San Francisco.

This is not to demean Austin, Atlanta, Venice by the Beach or Des Moines.  Each of these has its own realm of innovative geeks.  What San Francisco has is a complete menu of both the technical, imaginative, the graphic and the geeky all in one place and all doing very well.

The interesting part of San Francisco that is most appealing is the milieu of innovation.  It is possible to go to any party,  go to a coffee shop or any bar and find people who are of the appropriate age and who are in the innovations-startup field.  And they are highly qualified.

Revised global warming

The issue of global warming was revitalized for me when I made a statement that the current global temperature is 58 degrees Fahrenheit and this has only risen by half a degree in the past century. This stimulated a wonderful friend of mine to challenge me to provide the data . The two of us together discussed and investigated the data.

What I concluded is that the thermometer data which goes back at least a hundred fifty years is not very reliable because it probably covered less than 15 percent of the globe and was derived from a changing sample of thermometers.  

It didn't include oceans, the poles and most of the uninhabited world of Russia, China and Africa as well as mountain ranges. Furthermore there is strong evidence of changing and backdating  numbers for different stations. This was evident in the disclosures about the Hadley Center at East Anglia University and my own records of the data.   (It was a Russian computer college that publicly disclosed the email evidence of the fraud.)

Fortunately, at the very same time that a rise in global temperature was occurring according to thermometer data, it was the first year the United States put a satellite in orbit to measure global temperatures.

Since that time we have gathered 34 years of satellite data from at least five different satellites. There are two extraordinary advantages of the new data.

The first is that we do not have to deal with selecting thermometer stations to be added or subtracted from the data . The satellites circle the globe roughly every 90 minutes and they cover the entire planet so that the number they come up with after each circumnavigation is a reliable number.  We have data now from 12,400 days.

The second thing that we have is observations of the most rapid increase in temperature for the globe, that occurred between the beginning of 1996 and late Spring of 1998.  We know that that rapid rise occurred and was accurately measured.   

Now that we have the data you can manipulate it by going to our Google Documents page here,  and take the data to use for your own purposes.

This is important because the conclusions you come to are your own.  They probably won’t match many other people’s observations of the same data.

My personal conclusion on the basis of this 34 years of reliable data is that if you take the full 34 years we will see a roughly 1.2 degree centigrade increase in global temperature for a century if it continues exactly as it did for the 34 years.  That is considerably lower than the IPCC’s lowest estimate.  

However I see two different global temperature patterns in the satellite data.  One period was stable from 1979 to 1996.  Then there was a global disruption between 1996 and 1998 that set the new global temperature level .3 degrees centigrade higher.  It has been stable again for the period 1998 to 2014.  If we project the pattern from the past 16 years forward we see virtually no increase in global temperature for the rest of the century.

I need not make any strong statements about global warming. If you want to take the full 34 years of reliable satellite data you will get a 1.2 degrees centigrade warming over the next century.  If you want to take the most recent  (roughly) half that amount of data, you will find virtually no global warming trend.

Its up to you. You have the data.

The IRS scandal

I'm not sure all my blog readers understand that what President Obama has done with the IRS is the most serious criminal act ever launched against the American public using our government.  The IRS has the most powers of any agency to exempt itself from the Bill of Rights.

The following paragraphs are taken from a House committee summary of what is known, to date, about the IRS’s  flagrant violation of our laws.  I'm giving you the actual wording from this document.  The person responsible for creating this document is Congressman Darrell Issa.  I know from two personal friends of his that this man is very honest and is pursuing the matter in the most cautious and careful legal framework.

• (Lois) Lerner and her colleagues, after being under public pressure from President Obama and other Democrats, engaged in an email exchange about how they could showcase their scrutiny of a Tea Party applicant for public disclosure, despite rules protecting the secrecy of unapproved applications.

• Lerner personally directed that Tea Party cases go through a "multi-tier review." An IRS employee testified that Lerner "sent [him an] email saying that when these cases need to go through multi-tier review and they will eventually have to go to [Judy Kindell, Lerner's senior technical advisor] and the Chief Counsel's office."  A D.C. IRS employee said this level of scrutiny had no precedent.

• Head of the IRS Cincinnati office's testimony refutes Lois Lerner and President Obama's O'Reilly interview assertion that this was all about a "local office": "[Y]es, there were mistakes made by folks in Cincinnati as well [as] D.C., but the D.C. office is the one who delayed the processing of the cases."

It is clear to me that this entire criminal behavior at the IRS was directed by the President of the United States.  There were more than one-hundred thirty meetings of the head of the IRS at the White House.  More meetings than the President had with any other department.

Had this president not had a black father he would be impeached for this blatant criminal behavior.  Obama’s Kenyan father saved him from impeachment because of America's racial guilt .

(You can donate to 'Find the smoking gun fund' here.)

My life at the right time

I was born in the United States in 1938.  I was born in the place and the time that is the most propitious in all of human history.

Let's begin with the fact that medicine has developed 90% during my lifetime.    Before that year there were only two or three effective medical treatments.  Among the treatments of real significance I would only list nitrous oxide as an anesthetic,  x-rays and the development of cleanliness in medical practice and public sanitation.

Since 1938 we have penicillin, vaccines of every sort. Vaccines that have virtually wiped out nearly every contagious human disease in the United States,  including polio.  By the 1960's emergency medicine had been perfected and brought to the United States from our war experience. Trauma is now well treated.  By the 1980s we had pharmaceutical treatments for breast cancer and the beginnings of catheter labs for heart surgery to provide a rapidly extending lifespan .

Simultaneously to the medical explosion, beginning in the mid 30's we developed most of the current effective pesticides as well as significant hybridization of major crops. The output of farmers has increased at least four fold in the interim and reduced the cost of every form of food.

I have also lived at the time when America got rid of its hereditary elite class.   In roughly 1959.  America, to this day, became the first and only society without a hereditary upper class. This allowed me to rapidly move to the top of my field in banking.  From new employee in 1964, to offers of several bank CEO jobs, in six years.  (I left banking at that point.)

Paralleling that development,  was the end of anti-Jewism in the United States.

This end to a prejudice that effected me, was partly due to the Catholic Church’s Vatican II deciding its core teachings about Jews killing Christ was wrong.  It also coincided with the emergence of the hippies belief in universal love.

At the same time, in roughly 1960, commerce began to explode. There were legal changes in the late 50's that eliminated restrictions on retail pricing and allowed an extraordinary explosion of imported goods.  The net result was a new global economy with significant innovations in technology.

I am grateful I was born at the right time and in the right country.

Vietnam revisionism

The revisionism that I am talking about is my own.  I was a supporter of the American action to protect South Vietnam from North Vietnam.  I kept my opinions totally to myself because the hippie generation around me at the time were anti-war.  They had no sense of what communism was,  nor the expansionist behavior of the USSR or China.  They believed in ‘universal love and peace.’

My current position is to look at the modern state of Vietnam and realize that it has joined the world of commerce.  Many people died on both sides to keep South Vietnam from being a communist satrapy of the Soviet Union or China.  Now both China and the Soviet Union, as aggressive communist states, have disappeared.  The new Vietnam is also not a direct threat to any of its neighbors .

The reality is that the Democratic Congress elected in 1972 refused to uphold the American commitments in the peace negotiations that promised support for South Vietnam if they were again attacked.  As a result of that Democratic Congressional refusal, North Vietnam simply overran the country and drove a few hundred thousand people out.

Now we can look at the consequences.  Hundreds of thousands and possibly over a million people on both sides died and we ended up getting very close to what the U.S. wanted.  Now Vietnam does not have a democracy but we have a commercial society that will someday be more free and open for citizens.  We also got several hundred thousand extremely productive and wonderful Vietnamese immigrants to America.  As well as thousands of good Vietnamese restaurants.  Many that make vegetarians happier than they would be otherwise.

Considering the loss of  American lives I am now beginning to think the effort was not 100% justifiable.  I know I am ignoring the deterrent factor that kept other nations from being aggressive in the years after 1962.

Exit interview for churches

I am not a great fan of exit interviews. The big problem with exit interviews is that people often don't know why they are leaving.

In my basic model of human behavior people leave institutions when they no longer feel comfortable in that particular institution.  However people often do not understand their own reasons for feeling uncomfortable...they may not be able to explicate it.

When I was doing survey research in the early 1970s I was asked by several churches, who were losing members rapidly, to do survey research for them. Research to find out the reasons people were leaving.

There was very little I could do to help because, as I explained to the church people, a church member may feel that there are other things to do more interesting than going to church. To measure what other things are more appealing is difficult.  The church can do nothing about competing with sports or sailing or whatever it is that the former parishioner is now doing.

With the perspective of history to look back we can now see what was happening that I could not see at the time.  People were leaving the liberal churches in America for one reason: the churches had become politically active in liberal causes.  That was simply not the reason ordinary Americans were going to church.   Parishioners certainly did not support the very liberal positions that their churches were taking.  (That is still true of the Presbyterian churches anti-Jew publc stands.)   

We know from looking at the data, after the fact, that these very same people who had been going to a Methodist Church were now going to Evangelical or charismatic churches that were non-political and focused on family life.

Exit interviews would not have helped the churches who came to me.  Exit interviews do not tell you what people are going to do or why.

I do not apply this same logic to exit interviews after people leave the voting booth.  Those exit interviews usually suffer from a different problem.  They suffer from bad sampling procedure and unwillingness of voters to tell anyone who they voted for.

 

Money as language and Bitcoin

One would expect me to comment on Bitcoin because this is a blog about commerce and Bitcoin is highly relevant to the subject.

I came to understand money many decades ago as a consequence of writing The Seven Laws of Money and having to explain it to people.  I ended up saying that money is language.  Not A language but language itself.  Bees have a dance that is language.  Different hives may have different languages but the dance itself is language.

How does that apply to Bitcoin?

Bitcoin is intended to fill three niches.

* One is to provide an international money transfer system.  

* Two is to have a monetary system that is not subject to national control.

* Three is to create a global market for the currency itself that is independent of all other currencies.

Let's exam each one of these goals.  

We don't need an international money transfer system per se because it is easy to move money between banks or within corporations. For small amounts, credit cards are international money. Bitcoin isn’t needed for goal number one.

The problem with existing monetary transfer systems is that they are subject to the control of any nation or national coalitions.  Goal number two is to avoid that control.

That is not only difficult it is impossible.  Nations will not permit money to be transmitted without their consent, their knowledge and their ability to apply taxes.

It is that simple and it is the reason Bitcoin could not survive had it gotten any further.

The third goal was to create a global market of the currency itself.  Because currencies are truly domestic and connected to the behavior of each nation, to have a currency that is supranational would mean it would resemble the language we call pigeon.  Pigeons are crosses between all languages such as Tagalog-English pigeon, French-English pigeon,  etc  Pigeon is language just as money is  language.

Pigeon does not seem to have much grammar therefore it is used in only the most rudimentary situations.  Bitcoin would inherently have to be cobbled together in clusters that would be too simple to use and too complex to create. For example: creating the Mexican peso value of Bitcoin would require one authorized Mexican exchange which would in turn be forced to compete with several Mexican exchanges which in turn would form alliances with several U.S. Dollar exchanges.  Each would have a different valuation of the Peso to the Dollar.  Both too simple to use and too complex to operate.  Like pigeon.

A Bitcoin-like supranational new currency is unlikely to be created.

 

The State department wants some countries unified

Why does the State Department seem to often want to force a country to be unified as opposed to segmented.

We see this nearly everywhere.

There was terrible reluctance to allow Iraq to split into three countries.  There is reluctance to let Afghanistan split into 5 countries.  Currently  we are opposed to seeing the Ukraine split into three countries or Syria into 6 countries.

Where does this reluctance come from?

We have a long history.  Almost our entire 200+ years of existence, of forcing political subunits into forming a single country.  We have strongly opposed most fragmentation. Whether it is French, Spanish or Canadian.  The eighteenth century foreign policy was heavily focused on the unification of countries such as Germany and Italy.

On the otherhand we opposed the expansion of Russia into the USSR and we opposed the expansion of Japan into its Greater East Asian Sphere of Influence,  

So what are we doing, what is our policy?

Our policy is to put together small units that would not be homogeneous into a larger nation. Homogeneity usually means 'tyrannical' to us.  Large nation states that are diverse are inherently less able to be aggressive.

More complex, diverse, nations present less threat to their neighbors than homogeneous nations largely because they have to appease the multiple political forces within their geographic domain.  Think Lebanon over the past few centuries.

In summary we encourage and support political subunits and ethnic groups to form larger nations or to remain as larger nations because we believe that larger diverse nations are simultaneously more stable, in international terms, because they are domestically much more complex and because complex nations are less likely to attack their neighbors.

We did not feel this way about the USSR for the Russians or the East Asians Sphere for the Japanese because they seem to be on an expansionist tear to rule the world rather than to create a complex domestic political entity.  We tolerated the breakup of Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia to provide a buffer against Russian expansion.

Big history

A friend of mine has been working on this subject for many decades. He has recently found other people interested in his subject.

My friend, Stuart Silverstone, originally was working on a graphic representation of history and saw the project as largely graphics. Now he sees it as a way of perceiving history from a neutral perspective as other people in the field have joined him.  There has been plenty of money poured into other people’s projects at this point.

It is about time Stuart gets some support. I have given a reference to his page here.

I have my own reservations about big history and this is the place to express it.

I find that the way a person views history is entirely reflective of his views of the present. You get a Marxian or Hegelian view of the past from Marx or Hegel .

You get a commercial view of history if you listen to me.  You get a biological view of history if you listen to someone like Jared Diamond.

History is a projection of our current perspective onto the past and I don't believe it can be otherwise.

This is a much debated subject in the academic world of historians.   But when you look at the incredible novelty that someone like David Hackett Fischer brings to American history you begin to realize that history is always a backward looking projection of the current perspective .

 

Good blacks

There is a noticeable difference in the background of good-pro-commerce blacks such as Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas and Thomas Sowell and bad-anti-American blacks such as Michelle Obama, Barack Obama, Al Sharpton, Valerie Jarrett and Jeremiah Wright.  

These people are different from each other based on their backgrounds.  The people I call ‘good’ are all prominent and have expressed a love of America and American values,  The people I call ‘bad’ have not; they have generally said negative things about America.

The good people have all come from families with parents who were sharecroppers in the south or lived in a sharecropper environment.  They made their way from the bottom of society to the top by hard work and competence.

The bad people all come from urban areas where they were taught black victimhood.  They have become outspoken anti-Americans. They grew up in a poisoned milieu.

I know my sample is small but the differences are very clear and they make sense.  

If you grew up and your parents told you this country was the land of opportunity and you went from the bottom rung to the top you know it is true.  If your parents or guardians or your friends and your teachers all told you you were the victim of white oppression then your move from middle class to prominence is seen as luck.  You are not able to see your own good fortune as the result of being born in the United States.

Putting bad kids back in school

There is a recent move a foot in San Francisco by the School Board to make it difficult to expel students for bad behavior. There is an effort to create mechanisms to keep the badly behaving students in school.  The consequences of this are terrible.

This is precisely why the public school systems in the past 50 years have declined to the level of near incompetence. When blacks were bused to predominantly white public schools, they brought an increased level of danger to the white students.  While danger had existed in public schools before, especially for boys, the danger increased inordinately.  This increase in danger to their children is what led whites to flee the urban areas and led to the destruction of urban public schools.

Now the very same people who were blind to the problem in the first place, the do-good people who thought they were helping blacks are instead now making sure that the black schools will be evacuated by the few people who are willing to stay with dangerous kids in the school. This is the last straw.

Most black schools are now populated by very specific minorities: Filipino, Latino and ‘other Asian’.  These people will leave just as rapidly as the white population did decades ago. Even if they can not afford to leave they will.  The lives of their children's depend on it.

Right not to serve

I might appear to be late in entering this discussion because there were cases in Colorado and in Arizona where a business refused to serve a client for political or religious reasons.  I am not late because this is a core issue of commerce. The issue will not disappear as long as commerce exists.

The critical issue here dates back to Roman times when it was important to use  commercial ferry boats to cross rivers. The Romans came to the conclusion that anyone who was in the business of operating a ferry had no right to refuse service to anyone for any reason.  That legal reasoning became known as the ‘public access’ right in transportation.

The core reality of commerce is that it is non discriminatory.  Commerce barely functions in a discriminatory society.  Commerce does not work inside tribal groups where most exchange is gifting or socially mandated.  

It is the non discriminatory nature of business that allows people to work together inside a business environment and produce far more than you could ever be produced by people who were from the same tribe or a homogeneous group.  The very nature of meritocracy demands the absence of discrimination.

It turns out exactly the same proposition functions in retail operations.  If you go into business you can not discriminate among customers.  There is a simple reason for this.  

Unless the law specifically protects a business that chooses to discriminate (as in the Jim Crow South) you can expect the people who are discriminated against to damage or destroy the business. That is precisely what would have happened to the businesses in Colorado and Arizona that chose to discriminate. The people discriminated against would have organized to destroy the businesses.

The problem inherent in the functioning of a business is its neutrality in service to the public.  Commerce would not have survived over the previous few thousand years and certainly not resulted in the explosion of the Industrial Revolution unless it operated on this non discriminatory customer basis.

To summarize: the core nature of commerce is anti-discrimination. Commerce, not only survives, but thrives because it does does not discriminate among customers.

Tracy Sims

On the right is a picture of Tracy Sims. This picture is from the early 1960s when I was actively participating in the demonstrations for civil rights in San Francisco

I do not regret my activity in these demonstrations.  It was a time when blacks were severely restricted from getting jobs and entering society as full members.  These demonstrations were effective in creating jobs for competent blacks.  I have thought about Tracy for over 50 years and thanks to Google I found that there was a picture of her and a story about her

Tracy was the dynamic force in San Francisco Civil Rights. She was smart she was competent and she was dynamic.  

One day she disappeared and there were no new effective civil rights rallies after that.  All of this time I have wondered what happened to her.  She wrote a book that explains how she moved away from San Francisco and started a new life.  I do not have the book but I will get it.

I seriously doubt that she explains the reason she left and changed her name.  It is my guess that her life was threatened. Whether it was by other envious civil rights blacks or by some more sinister political force, I do not know.  

This blog is to comment on the importance of one single supercompent black person in organizing civil rights at a critical point  and a critical geographic location.  San Francisco, whether anyone knows it or not, became the ground zero point for civil rights cases in education, police and fire departments as well as (my own case) in finance.

Tracy Sims deserves recognition and I give what little I can to her here .

The Fed increased income inequality

I found this article by Charles Wolfe of the Rand Corporation and the Hoover Institution to be quite insightful.  He argues that the Fed has been keeping interest rates at virtually zero and the consequence has been to increase inequality in American society since 2008 when the zero rate began.  I agree with Mr Wolf.  The reason is pretty straightforward.

When the interest rate is zero (or near zero) banks have an incentive to keep their money with the Federal Reserve where they get a small but safe return.  'Safe' is a greater return than most riskier returns they would get in the open market.

Additionally as capital accumulates inside corporations they look outside and find that with a horizon of zero interest there are not too many investments where innovation will yield more money to the corporation than its own operation.

Most importantly when interest rates are zero, individual savings decline and individual's find it less appealing to make investments and more appealing to spend and consume.

All of these consequences lead to the rich benefiting the most. Those of us who have seen periods of low interest rate know that this is a bad time for bonds because bonds can only lose face value.  It is a good time for stock market increases.

It is the wealthy who benefit from stock market increases disproportionately while small shareholders and people in the middle and lower economic categories are enjoying the consumption that zero interest rate makes possible.

Thank you Mr Wolf for making such an obviously true statement explicit.

 

Power: part 2

I am quite surprised to see how much I have to say about power. This is a continuation of yesterday's blog.

In a dynamic power environment, where one is building a new institution or moving an existing institution in a radical direction, there is one key piece of advice:  ‘do not take credit for yourself’.  People are willing to work for you and help you if they can expect credit. Therefore it follows that if you are the person who usually takes credit, other people will not be helpful to you. We see the opposite quite frequently where a person who is building an institution or organization appears to take credit. I find this to be false information. It is often worthwhile putting a figurehead in public view, where the person with real power can manipulate the figurehead who takes the credit.  In real power situations the powerful person is not visible and is not taking the credit. Think of Dick Cheney in the GW Bush administration. His power came from his deep understanding of how government agencies work and the histories of the people who ran them.

In a dynamic environment the power must be in the form of having a vision that unites people and is original. When creating something new it is not a zero sum game. One is always bringing in new supporters to the coalition and finding new people in institutions who support the vision.  The vision may not necessarily be explicit and other people may not understand it very clearly but they have a sense of a new direction and a sense of the vitality that all people seem to want to imbibe. Vitality is the lifeblood of the dynamic organization. People choose friends and allies and partners when there will be added vitality in their own life.

I have not found money to be a source of power in itself.  To the contrary, power is able to harness money to its purposes in both static and dynamic environments. That sounds ridiculous to people who have not spent their life dealing with power or dealing with wealthy people.

Power attracts money not vice versa. We can see this most clearly in the famous statement of Jesse Unruh talking about a good politician. He said ‘you must be able to take their money, drink their booze and screw their women and still vote against them’.

As I mentioned earlier, honesty counts. You do not tell the money people they have your vote because of the money, boos or women you just tell them you will take their interests into consideration. In a dynamic environment you do not get into a situation where you have conflicting power battles. In a political zero sum world the powers know they have only bought your consideration.

With that I have exhausted the few trivial matters that I can explain about power.

More like a real network

In today’s comment section you will see a change in this blog. The beginning of what I hope will be a geometric change in all serious blogging.

My good friend David Boxenhorn has created a simple format for bloggers to make comments and move back and forth between their blogs. It allows people commenting on blogs to chat with each other, to see their friends' comments in their news feeds (even comments on other blogs) plus other features of social networks. David calls it Sovevos.

To see how it works, create a username and password in the comments section below. Then you will see the actual format and be able to friend people who have left comments. Please leave a comment and introduce yourself if you want people to friend you. (If you don't have any friends, you won't be able to experience the network.)

If you are already have a Sovevos user on a diffent blog, just choose the blog from the drop-down menu, and sign in.

Nearly all of my blog readers are very intelligent and most are wise; we can use this new format productively.

You can go here for a more detailed explanantion.

This program is brand new today. If you find any bugs or have suggestions, please tell David directly about it on this post .

Power: part 1

I want to comment on the issue of power because a friend of mine recommended a book called The 48 Laws of Power.

I am not going to reference the book because I looked at the summary online. A few of the laws are legitimate comments about power. The rest is pretty much irrelevant crap derived from books on spirituality.

I have spent many decades thinking about the issue of power and never came to any useful conclusions.

There are two fundamentally different categories of power.

There are significant differences in dealing with a static power environment vs dynamic power .  With static power I am referring to existing institutions such as an operating corporation or an army or a city council in which one has an appropriate amount of power prescribed within the institution .

The static case is a very different kind of power, and the rules for coping with it, are significantly different from power in the dynamic environment. When creating a new organization or moving an existing organization in a radically new direction one uses a different type of power.

There is nothing about power that is obvious which is the reason I haven't written on the subject . Nothing about power is visible . Nothing about power is communicable by  standard means. You can’t learn about it from reading any more than you can become an artist or poet or musician from reading.

In general power is in the individual. When a person with significant power walks into a room most of the people in the room become aware of that person whether that person is significant to the people in the room or not.

I have noticed this about myself many times. When I enter a room I am usually noticed. I have noticed this about other people as well . It accounts for a problem I had in much of my early life . Until I knew what was happening from about age 15 until age 30 I was made president of every organization that I came near. Walking into a club I was often asked to be president. I’m not kidding. This happen to me the first week I arrive at San Francisco State College (to get some units for graduate school) I was asked to be President of the Student Council. It happened dozens of times. That led me to understand that power can be communicated between people. But it is invisible.  

Such power can be weak in people in a static organization. Such people can rise in the organization by ‘learning the ropes’.  

On the other hand, personal power must be built into the organizer of a dynamic organization. Such people always need strong personal power.

I was directly involved in politics for at least a decade. During that time I ran political campaigns, served in many elective party political bodies and worked in the California state legislature.  In these instances power was already written into the code of a particular position in these static organizations. That power can be exercised by using skill.

Since the power in most static institutions is a zero sum game it is necessary to gain power by blocking other people. This is done by having adequate information which gives one leverage over people by knowing their fears and desires. One then blocks other people using information they do not want revealed (ala J. Edgar Hoover) or forming an alliance that is threatening to them. As I say about an incoming president of the United States or any organization, he has the most power early in office because he (she) can make appointments and because people have not figured out how to block him from exercising power. After a short time in office everyone finds that (to use a metaphor) ‘many people have you by the balls and you can’t turn much in any direction without pain’. The great geniuses in exercising this type of power are people who understand the process deeply. It is skill in using good information.

Honesty is an important element in being a good broker in forming coalitions and being an effective user of power.

You won't hear that very often outside of power circles.  Power is also based on trust.  Your word is good, or you have no power. Bill Clinton never had power in power circles because he never kept his word. His power was always outside power circles among the naive and inexperienced. (continued in the next blog)

WSJ mansions section is a comment on basic values

There is a section of the Wall Street Journal every Friday that shows and discusses elegant mansions. The section includes large color photos of exteriors, grounds and luxurious interiors.

I often think about what the Wall Street Journal puts in its newly modified format. It originally added sports when Rupert Murdoch bought the Wall Street Journal. This was an obvious effort to get readers. The next thing he did was to add a monthly magazine and expand some of the coverage of film and cultural events. These were clearly designed to get advertising revenue. But what was the reason for adding an entire section on mansions?

While it does generate revenue with two or three pages of advertising for expensive properties around the world, that would not be sufficient to incorporate a whole new section when the section is really just a real estate promotion section.

I think the reason has to do with the fact that one of the most important goals among people who have gained wealth is the desire to have immense amounts of personal space as a sign of power. Sometimes this shows itself in the form of many houses such as Michael Bloomberg's more than a dozen houses. Sometimes it is pure ostentation but that is rarer because luxurious homes are often not visible to the public.

Ultimately I think the main reason is that we have a value connection between wealth and the amount of personal space.

I often see advertising for some expensive product and the person in the ad is alone in the ad; possibly in a swimming pool by themself or possibly in a luxury golf environment by themself. I think there is a connection between having vast amounts of space and believing that one is rich.

This reality of space and wealth is visible in retailing. Low price stores have racks very close together. High price stores are the opposite with vast spaces between objects on sale. We associate being rich with space. I think the addition of the mansions section to the Wall Street Journal is primarily to emphasize the upscale nature of the newspaper’s readership.

Muslims have reasons to limit Christianity

I now regularly read about the changes in urban life when the Taliban or other Islamic fundamentalists gain control. This has happened in Afghanistan on a widespread bases, in Pakistan, in Syria and Mali.  

There seems to be a strong backlash in American Christian communities because the Muslim controls put severe restrictions on Christian practices.  The first thing to go are Christian symbols such as crosses worn publicly, crosses on top of churches, church bells and loud prayer and Christian music that spill onto the street. There are other such restrictions on visible Christianity and visible Christian practices.

This suppression of non-Islamic religions is an ancient practice called dhimmi.  This process is  familiar to us Jews who have lived under these restrictions for 1,000 years.  My problem is with the outrage that Christians are now expressing about the suppression of their religion.

This is pure hypocrisy.

The Muslim community, in nearly every European country, has been suppressed. An example would be the obvious banning of head scarves and related dressing in France and several Mediterranean Christian countries.  A more significant and more impactful form of repression has been the outlawing of halal meat preparation in most of the countries bordering the North Sea. (Demark, Sweden, Norway and Poland)

Christians always give excuses for their bad behavior such as the need for public identification or animal cruelty.  These are excuses for repression of Islam. It is repression nevertheless.

I see no problem with Muslims reacting to contemporary Christian bad behavior especially since that bad Christian behavior has always been done to Jews in Christian societies without any hesitation. (The ban on halal meat is also a ban on kosher meat.)

Delta products: good

I occasionally complain about companies that have bad business behavior. I also commend good businesses and good business behavior.

In this blog I want to commend the Delta Corporation that manufactures faucets and related plumbing equipment.

One of my Delta single handle faucets began leaking. My wonderful partner stores all documents related to guarantees or warrantees. She had the warranty and repair document for this Delta faucet.

I happened, in my leisure, to read it carefully and found the faucet came with a lifetime warranty.  So, six years after I bought the faucet, I phoned the 800-number and was told by a charming woman that that warranty was indeed for a lifetime. She promptly mailed me the replacement item and the repair kit.

I must commend Delta and tell you that this is first rate marketing. Recourse is always a key part of marketing.

While investigating who Delta is I found that its single handle faucet is the founding product that turned an older company, Masco, into a home repair giant.

I also commend my blog readers to the history of Masco. It was founded by a Turkish immigrant who opened a machine shop and bought a patent for the single handle faucet. His son turned that successful faucet company into the giant corporation it is today. It is listed on the New York stock exchange as MAS with a market cap of $8  billion.

Commerce is darwinian

I have included a rather romantic video that is widely circulated on the Internet. It was a film made by a Canadian team to explain how the reintroduction of wolves in Yellowstone Park has dramatically changed the flora, fauna and geography of the park in a very short period of time. I don't know whether the film segment is accurate. It is possible that the introduction of wolves has had some other dramatic but harmful effects that the film overlooks.

In any case the film does depict the interaction of many multiple biological forces that result in unexpected outcomes.

This is because of Darwinian forces that allow species to become dominant based on local niche environments for which they have survival superiority. It is the same mechanism that allows new species to develop and evolve in the standard Darwinian model.

What I want to point out is that commerce is Darwinian. There is a constant random fluctuation as new people introduce new services and goods into a local niche market. There is a constant repression and selection that goes on in which consumers and buyers select the most desirable or suitable goods and services for each niche.

The consequence is that commerce produces incredible novelty and unexpected and often unimaginable outcomes.

NCIS and Martha Bayles

I know that I read an article by Martha Bayles about American TV broadcasts and the world. I cannot find the article but the subject falls into the area she usually covers.

The subject is that the entire world sees American popular television which portrays an image of American life that is very unappealing to the six billion tribal people of this planet.

The most popular program on global television is NCIS which is watched in 157 countries. NCIS is about seven and sometimes nine people who work together in a semi-military environment and are biologically unrelated to each other. NCIS is known as a police procedural story... meaning the people involved work for a police like organization that uses science to solve crime. As opposed to a detective story.

Most other TV shows that are popular around the world, like Big Bang Theory, also consists of a small group of people who are unrelated, of approximately the same age and who are treated as a modern American version of a family.

Sex and romance have a role in all of these stories very much like the earlier global success story of Baywatch.

This global presentation of America is accurate. We live most of our lives in networks of friends that include casual sex partners. That is certainly the cultural milieu in which we operate and in which we work. Of course many of us do have families and families play a role on the American scene.

The question in my mind is how do we translate the appealing elements of our TV portrayal of America into something that is understandable and appealing to tribal peoples.

In tribal societies loyalty and family harmony are paramount issues. They are not issues in American society where personal authenticity is our singular invention and objective.

I do not know how this bridge can be crossed and whether it can be crossed in a viable television format.

Nine states so far

I intended to write about the Article V campaign to create a constitutional convention originating from the states. The convention would be designed to make the types of changes that seem desperately needed at this time. Changes Congress can’t make.  The type of changes that have to do with setting a limit on federal expenditures, prohibiting Congress from self dealing and from allocating federal funds to campaign favorites .

The most recent man associated with this campaign is the radio host Mark Levin . I was hoping to reference a URL listing the nine states that have passed or are currently passing Article V requests for a constitutional amendment convention .

The problem is that the exact definition of what a state must do seems to be in limbo . This means it is not feasible to accurately tell the number of states that have passed an Article V request. Such an Article V request may need to be specific or it may need to be general.

At this point nine states have passed or are passing a written request for a Constitutional Convention. Three have already been submitted to Congress. It is not clear what the cutoff date would be for requests nor is it clear how specific the constitutional requests must be to fall in the same request category. As the issue becomes clarified I will keep my readers up to date.

I do believe it is going to be necessary for a Constitutional Convention to rein in the excessive powers of the federal government especially Congress.

Ordinary people at Applebee’s

A new Applebee’s restaurant opened in San Francisco last summer. I just discovered it. San Francisco hates national chains so Applebee’s had to be very quiet to open here.  It opened along with several other successful national chains, almost secretly. It is on the third floor of a nice large building at Fisherman's Wharf with a great view of the entire Bay.

I found the food to be excellent. Definitely in the top range of American food along with the Cheese Factory. This is a category that is different from gourmet food, entirely.

I had a wonderful time at Applebee's because the patrons are real people. I distinguish real people from San Franciscans who are ideological rabbits. San Franciscans all have the same daily conversations and vote for the same socialist-20th century-loser-agenda. San Franciscans are anti-commerce. Real people aren't.

So how can these wonderful American real people be living in the same city?

Because they comprise the silent majority. The majority of Americans, the real Americans, do not vote and most of them do not even register to vote. Half of all Americans are not registered to vote and more than half don't vote at all.

These are the real people I live with. I have studied non-voters and found them to be disinterested in the political process. They focus on their lives, their families, their friends and their daily activities. These real Americans see no connection to the political world that swarms around them in the major media. To partially understand how these real people see the world look at local television. It is about police, fire, weather issues and unusual personal problems that make good drama.  Local TV news is not about the political world that is discussed by the population that votes.

I love spending time around real Americans. They are pleasant, they are lighthearted, they are optimistic and most of all they are a diverse population. In San Francisco, they are Asians,  Latinos, blacks and everything else.