Pro Commerce

Evil in a pro commerce world

In yesterday's blog I used the term ‘evil’.

This blog is an attempt to explain what I mean by evil.

I know the literature on evil and I know the religious concepts that underlie most popular views of evil. I do not derive my view directly from these sources.

I have abstracted from the Ten Commandments and the general milieu of our social mores a single underlying ethical point. To me, evil is the torturing of an innocent person or being that is unable to defend itself. My most extreme image is Saddam Hussein feeding living political enemies into tree chopping machines, feet first.

This is a corollary to my basic premise that the first human right is self-defense.

Therefore all acts against an innocent person or being that they cannot defend against, is a form of evil.

In the specific environment of pro-commerce, evil takes on a broader meaning. Commerce thrives on meritocracy, diversity, openness and love of technology.

When one is anti-commerce, one is opposed to these four qualities.

* To be opposed to rewarding merit is to oppose the development of each individual's unique human characteristic; that is bad but it is not evil.

* To be opposed to an individual because of who they are in a society that lacks diversity (think of a disabled person); is bad but it is not evil.

* Openness is a fundamental quality of honor and opposition to commerce is to deprive people of their core honesty; that is bad but it is not evil.

* Lastly, to oppose technology, (there are many arguments about the harmful side effects of technology); may be bad but it is not evil.

To oppose all four of these attributes of commerce is evil.

Commerce is what brings us modern health, abundant food and meaningful work. Commerce raised us out of poverty. To oppose these powers of modernity is to oppress individuals.

 Commerce raised us from the life of misery we all lived for nearly 20,000 years, misery that still exists in much of the world. Parts of the world still live without modern commerce… they have not benefited in health or food supply or fulfilling work.

Opposition to commerce is, in my mind, evil because it condemns all of the poor people in the world, to live lives from of pain and suffering from which they are unable to defend themselves. Opposition to commerce condemned those who lived in India during the 1950s and were starving, as well as most of the world in 1800 who had nothing but bodily suffering and regular famine in their lives. To put people in that environment or to keep them in that non-commercial environment is evil (think N. Korea and Cuba).

To support politics that leads to a future that stifles personally fulfilling work and suppresses the medical advances that commerce generates, is equally evil. That is the goal of modern Leftism.

Hep C and evil

Hep C is the colloquial name for hepatitis C. Hep C is a viral liver disease that is spread by blood and is very debilitating. It robs you of your energy. It often requires a liver transplant. For people who are weak or old or have other serious problems, the main treatment, Interferon, is much too strong and not sufficiently effective.

A miracle has arrived.

A drug called Sovaldi has been produced and tested by Gilead a giant pharmaceutical company and has passed the FDA saftey requirements. It is effective in 9 out of10 cases; even for difficult patients and may be hundred percent effective.

A  close personal friend of mine, and co-author, has been a patient with Hep C for 30 years. She could not survive any of the earlier, less effective, treatments. She is now totally cured thanks to Solvaldi.

Gilead, by the way, is a company founded in the U.S. and based entirely on American medical research. Donald Rumsfeld was on its early board of directors.

Sovaldi costs $1000 a pill and requires 12 weeks of treatment. The total cost, including pre-and post testing is roughly $100,000. This is considerably less expensive than a $.5 million liver transplant or other treatments with Interferon that last for only a few years. Sovaldi works.

Now we come to the issue of evil.

If the US government had its way in setting prices for private companies Sovaldi would be forced to sell for a significantly lower amount of money. I base this on the current ferocious demand in the U.S. by Health agencies to force the price down.

This sends a message to every company that is developing a vital cure for a major illness: ‘it is time to stop investing in research for cures and risk spending much more to defend the products' market price against the government’. Private business are creating cures for human illness because they expect to make a profit that covers the unknown and unknowable costs of their research plus years of testing for FDA approval. That is a lot of money. More money than the U.S. government spends on any single major illness in research grants.

My close friend would be dead if the US government, that now controls most healthcare, were in charge of pricing for this Hep C cure.

I consider that effect of Obamacare to be evil. You kill my friends because of your regulatory inanity and I call that ‘evil’.

I have said over and over that the problem with national healthcare with Obamacare is that it stifles innovation in healthcare. Innovation in healthcare is what keeps people who have been attacked by vicious microbes able to survive or live vibrant lives.

These same people who are victims of their battle against microbes are also victims of a government agency that restricts the necessary investment in research and development to help humans win their battles. Obamacare is evil.

Mosaddeq

Do you get frustrated when you realize that most of your life you have been carrying around a lie that was given to you by your society and you found that lie constantly reinforced by text books and repetition?

I first faced this perennial lie problem with the Rosenbergs. They were an accused pair of husband-and-wife spies. In the early 1950's they were executed. For most of my life the entire media, based on a Leftist pro-USSR analysis argued that the Rosenbergs had been innocent of treason and falsely executed. By the end of the 1990s the basic Russian documents and the original Venona codes had become public. The Rosenbergs were totally guilty of espionage for the USSR.

There is a comparable lie that comes from all sides, the government and the Leftist world. That lie is that the democratically elected president and government of Iran, known as president Mosaddeq, was overthrown by the CIA and replaced by the Shah.

That is a 98% lie. The 2% that is not a lie is that the CIA did try and foment the overthrow of Mosaddeq at the same time that the British MI6, supported by a British embargo on Iran, tried to do the same thing. But they failed.

At the time, despite an embargo, Mosaddeq was popular. It took another six months before Mosaddeq was overthrown by a popular uprising based on the merchants who were tired of the embargo and realized it was only in existence because of Mosaddeq's vanity as well as support from the clerics who were hostile to Mosaddeq 's socialist programs. The Shah was not a replacement, he was already in place and merely stepped up to accept a responsibility that was handed to him by popular demand.

Not only have I been living with this CIA lie most of my life but the clerics in Iran have been promoting this lie for their own benefit in order to generate hostility to the United States. Even worse, president Obama, who had access to the truth repeated this lie with an apology from the United States. He apologized for something we didn't do.

It is my hope, that I don't have too many other official lies rolling around in my head.

Bureaucracy is inherently status quo.

For nearly a decade I worked with the largest bureaucracy in America. While I worked with only a tiny sucker on one of many giant tentacles, every beneficial change I wrought was like a sandcastle on the beach as the tide swept in.

The bureaucracy I was working with was the San Francisco public schools. What I was doing was trying to identify superb teachers and bring a sufficient concentration of them to each of the schools in a sequential hierarchy from K-12. I also helped get the teachers good administrators to back them up. Including a school superintendent.

I also made an effort to make sure that these teachers had access to any learning facilities and learning equipment that they wanted and could bring into the classroom any innovative or helpful technology of that era.

I was able to get my own children through this hole in the bureaucracy that I helped create. As soon as my youngest child was in the eighth grade, the sandcastle was wiped away.

I had helped find new school board members and worked on numerous changes of the law to improve education. All of this was wiped away by the bureaucracy in very little time. Nothing even resembling a residual mark of a tentacle was left.

It is with this background as well as having worked in Washington DC in foreign aid development with the USAID that I can assure my readers, who may have doubts that bureaucracy, especially government bureaucracy, is dedicated to the status quo, that it is. Government bureaucracy is by far the most effective agency of the status quo outside of the Catholic Church.

This is not to say bureaucracy is a priori harmful. There are many institutions in our society that we do not want changed. Many institutions for which change would be harmful including such organizations as the Red Cross and life insurance companies.

My whole point in this blog is to comment on that steady elevation of the use of government that, in my mind, is always oppressive because government is inherently bureaucratic and status quo.

I recognize that all large organizations have inherent bureaucratic tendencies whether public or private. But from my experience in the private domain, institutions fail and consequently they change via failure and replacement which I do not see happening in government.

Pro Commerce is only partly conservative

Many people who know me believe I am either conservative or Republican or Tea Party or some combination.

I am not any one of those. Pro-commerce is a position that stands alone and it is only a partial component of any one of the above categories.

The reason pro-commerce is an uncomfortable position for both conservatives and the Republican Party is that commerce is the fundamental source of modernity and change in our society. It is the reason we have a constant flux of new technology and the world of volatile modernity.

Commerce is the tentpole on which technology grows and thrives. Most importantly commerce is the tentpole that brings technological change, including medical and new health products, to the final consumer.

No matter how we look at the world around us in terms of our health, our daily lives and every detail of our daily lives, the changes that occur annually and decade by decade are the byproduct of commerce continually innovating, destroying the old and helping us welcome the new.

Commerce is the basis for modernity and innovation. The conservative plea to preserve old houses, traditional family and social norms as well as most traditional social values is actually at war with the innovative edge of commerce.

In a recent era we have seen the Internet change every commercial business. It would be very hard to argue that the old ways of brick-and-mortar and local businesses can somehow operate without the Internet and the massive upheaval it has wrought. The old ways, no matter how we look at it, have been disrupted by commerce.

As a lover of commerce I cannot be considered a conservative nor can I align myself with the conservative elements of the Republican Party. I certainly can't associate myself with the extraordinary anti-commerce of the Democrat-Union anti-trade pro-government-expansion Party.  As for the Tea Party, to the extent that it grew out of hostility to the vicious manipulation of the Senate and the House by the Democratic Party to create a vast government run health bureaucracy, I am a fan. To the extent that it remains grass-roots, I am a fan. Beyond that I see no greater affiliation on my part.

Pro-commerce is a perspective that stands on its own. It is a champion of social diversity, meritocracy, technology and openness. When some political party encompasses even a small segment of these values I will be affiliated with that political movement.

The rational world and the future

I have discussed in an earlier blog the battle between modernity and tribalism.

In my own society, the U.S., where modernity is ascendent,  I must still ask the question of modernity’s future.

‘What is the future of rationality?’ is a fundamental question.  Rationality is in fact, at the core of modernity and modernity’s doppelgänger: commerce.

To be able to survive in the world of commerce with its inherent meritocratic environment, with its inherent diversity of people, with its enduring need for technology and openness, we need a rational basis for human interaction.

It is definitely legitimate to question the future of rationality. The magnitude of Jew hate around the world is a measure of the level of anti-rationality. Jew and Israeli are synonyms for rationality.  Jew hate is epidemic in Europe, Islam and the Latin world. That comprises nearly half of the global population. It is also endemic in American and Anglophone academia.

While academia pretends to support the values of rationality that is not a defensible pretense. Academia universally promotes Jew hate and environmental Armageddon. Two positions invulnerable to rational examination.

At its core, academia is anti-modernity.  It is hostile to the corporate world, to the modern military, to commerce in general, and most of all it is hostile to open debate. Anyone who has  seen the commencement speaker brouhaha in the past year, knows that academia rejected speakers for their opinions. That should leave no doubt about the hostility of American academia to rationality.

My view on the future of rationality is based on the very slow creep of commerce into a significant position in the world. More countries now have open commerce in their society than at any point in history. That open commerce is not necessarily protected by the rule of law or popular opinion in every instance. Nevertheless commerce does have some footing in much of the world.

I live in a city very hostile to commerce, San Francisco. I constantly see that this position cannot survive in the long run as people refuse to confront ‘the 20th century problem’.

The 20th century problem was hostility to commerce, a dominant governmental position in the USSR, China, India and a dozen other places. This anti-commerce position failed because these societies were faced with the inability to feed their populations. Additionally, the appeal that the cultural messages of commerce conveyed globally, life opportunities for individuals, also hastened the failure of anti-commerce statism.

I know I am a lone voice in this matter but I see people learning the hard way from the lessons of the 20th century. In the United States we have urban bankruptcies and Detroit. The collapse of thriving local economies will teach some of us that statism is a dead end. Those who need to learn, will learn slowly but the lessons are being learned by younger people.

I am not overly optimistic. I don't see progress as being rapid or as a straight line.

Does commerce need democracy?

In our era there is an ongoing debate about the relationship between democracy and commerce. We have three locations that raise the question. Singapore is a socialist country with thriving commerce. Hong Kong was a free market, now a pseudo-democracy with thriving commerce and then there is China, a country with thriving commerce and not a shred of democracy.

I am a champion of commerce. What is my opinion about the role of democracy?

From my position it appears that Mancur Olson has answered this question with his metaphor of a saucer. Olson argues that industrial commerce, thrives on the flat part of a saucer. The low part of the saucer is anarchy in which industrial commerce has no ability to build a market and maintain enduring management. The high outside tip of the saucer is the tyrannical environment where the tyrant will confiscate a business that succeeds and give it to his brother (or his campaign donors).

I think it is necessary to re-examine Olson's saucer. What we have in the low inside part of the saucer that is identical to the high outside part of the saucer is the absence of a reliable legal system. The rule of law is the sine qua non of industrial commerce. One needs to have private property protected by the rule of law in order to avoid the problems of both anarchy and tyranny.

China does not have an established 'rule of law' that applies to everyone in the society. It might prove to be a failure over time.  We can therefore require a longer period of time than the current 30 years of Chinese success to examine the question of commerce and democracy. At this point I would say that democracy is not necessary but the reliable rule of law is.

The only question is whether we can have the rule of law in a society that is not democratic. We do not have sufficient answers to this question at this point in history.

I do not want to suggest that the rule of law is the end all of commerce. Commerce thrives at the trade level in anarchy. People still buy and sell food, cigarettes and sex in an anarchistic environment. They also sell and buy weapons and ammunition. (Trade is different from industrial commerce.)

The rule of law also has its upper limits. In the United States where we claim great priority for the rule of law, we still have property confiscated for self-interested plutocratic reasons under the eminent domain rule. We constantly have businesses punished by regulatory authorities and taxed out of existence. But, we have some fairly extensive rule of law that applies to the vast market of businesses.

Free speech, hate speech and taboos

The issue of free speech has come up for me because of the current political environment: Israeli cities are being targeted by an Arab Islamic tribe.  I read on my social media comments from Jew haters and friends of Zyklon B who don't even know what Zyklon B is because they don't know history (it was the gas used to kill Jews by the Nazis). We Jews have faced this kind of hatred for 2000 years.

This brings me to the issue of free speech and taboos.

One of my close friends, Catherine, believes that free speech is the most important element in a democracy. She argued that only with free speech could major issues be settled in a rational open debate.

I am also reminded that Justice O. W. Holmes Jr. who argued that the First Amendment was limited by ‘falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic’.

Those two positions are the traditional American boundaries for arguments about free speech.

Let me take Catherine's position first. Open debate will supposedly resolve issues in favor of the rational position. We have a 2000 year example of free speech. Jew hate with vehement and dominant support on one side versus a slight response on the other side. That is billions of person days of free speech on the issue of Jew hate.  We have had free speech with both sides represented for over 100 years in the United States. None of this free-speech has ever led to a remission of Jew hate or the spread of anti-Jew liable. Jews have always been the supporters of law and rationality. They never win and they still aren't winning in a global free-speech debate.

The same has been true for Rom people, gays and other sexual minorities.

On the Holmes Jr. side of the debate issue, it is important to note that Holmes Jr. used his anti-First Amendment argument in order to send Seattle prostitutes to internment camps in WWI as a ‘clear and present danger’. Pornography has always been exempted from the First Amendment. So the First Amendment has always had a notion of free speech with serious limitations.

Now to taboos. There are effective ways to suppress hate speech. It has nothing to do with the legality of the 1st Amendment or official government suppression. Absolutely no one but a black person will use the term Nig--r in public. The use of this taboo for a form of hate speech has been very effective for the past 60 years.  (Aside from the fact that a black president is destroying the taboo; it continues to be effective today).

All of which can be summarized by nuanced understanding of free speech. The argument that free-speech is necessary for rational arguments to triumph is false. Free-speech is limited by the boundaries of the current social milieu. Truly effective suppression of hate speech is only successful when it becomes a taboo.

What makes anything taboo is a separate subject. It comes from the traditional religious notion of ‘shunning’. When someone uses taboo speech they are shunned. The First Amendment can only be meaningful if it parallels the use of taboos and shunning.

Fundamental battle of our time

In the 20th century the battle was between the slowly emerging world of commerce and the well-established ideological world of human perfectibility. The German government was based on a human perfectibility derived from ‘Aryan blood and soil’ in contrast  to the evil ‘Jewish rationality’. The Communists had a perfectibility of humans based on rational control by social experts in the government. Commerce does not believe in the perfectibility of humans but advances each individual according his own unique contributions, existing as they are.

The 21st century is about commerce and the modern world that commerce has created versus the tribal world. The tribal world is still dominant among most Arabs, Africans, Latins and Southeast Asians.

What is the appeal of the traditional tribal world?  How can so much of the world be hostile to modernity and commerce?

I have relatives who visit and live in the Arab tribal world. I personally have visited friends in the tribal worlds: in the Latin world, in Africa, among Arabs and in India.

The tribal world has the same two universal attributes worldwide.

* First is a pace of life that is considerably slower than anything found in the commercial modern world. This pace is much appreciated by most people who get to try both worlds. People sit talking among friends all day.  When they come to visit it can be for weeks or months.

* Second, the tribal world is built around the family. There are many different types of families ranging from patriarchal in the Latin world, to cousins in the Arab world, to brothers and sisters in the African world and community members in the Indian world.

In all tribal situations the individual only exists as part of a family. The family provides everything, all the time, from entertainment, to sex, to education, to raising offspring, to healthcare: everything. The tribal member exists in a solid durable comforting framework.

None of these things are true in the commercial-modern world. Our pace is increasingly fast and the most successful among us are the ones moving the fastest.  Some of the very fast can often be the most productive.

The family has been rapidly disappearing in the modern-commercial world. My estimate is that half of Americans have no functioning family in any traditional meaning of the word family.

These two worlds, modern-commercial and tribal are in conflict. Neither seems to want the other.

Neither will be able to convert the other. Most moderns are bored and feel straight jacketed in the tribal world and most tribal people hate the unstructured, uncaring, isolated, over sexed modern commercial world.

How a peaceful reconciliation will ever come about, or the defeat of either side, remains a mystery to me.

Business censorship

If you can't guess my position on business censorship I would be surprised. I am pro-commerce. I love the moral and social benefits of commerce. So what would be my position on business self-censorship?

There are no circumstances in which a sensible business should actively censor anything unless it is forced to by a government or some other power wielding authority.

The object of every type of business, and the object of commerce, is to supply the needs, desires and wishes of consumers. The function of commerce is not to judge or censor those needs, desires and wishes.

There are two recent stories about censorship by businesses that should know better.

* One is by Costco that was accused by Dinesh d’Souza of pulling his books from their many stores at the request of the Democratic Party. D’Souza’s movie from the book ‘America’ offended the Democrats and Obama. Costco denied their motivation was censorship and the book was returned to the sales tables. The book promptly sold out.

* Google on the other hand has two bad behavioral censorship actions. In the first case they acceded to the EU censors demand that Google remove search references that demean or harm a person or business. Google is instructed to remove references to the maligning documents. The original documents continue to exist…. unreferenced by EU Google.

Google had no choice in this case. But I think Google management should have made some public statement that this censorship by the EU is no different than comparable censorship by the Soviet Union, China, Turkey, Iran and other tyrannical governments.

Much worse is Google's own determination to censor its ad placement service, Adwords, from a whole range of products that the Puritan members of Google management have put together. This includes ads on gun sites, recreational drug sites and tobacco related sites. Removing the ad placements from these sites will do nothing to harm the sites because there are other better services than Google. Nevertheless it is an act of censorship that can only harm Google and benefit no one.

There is no earthly reason why any business should be in the role of censor  unless they are forced to. Even then they should make it clear to the public that they object to
playing the role of censor.

(Thanks to Hans and Ann for alerting me to the Google evil.)

The vape era and early airplanes

I recently bought my second vape device.

The first was a pseudo-pack of cigarettes manufactured in China and sold in Japan. It had one cigarette with a battery in the main body, a dozen fluid filled tips and a rechargeable battery in the cigarette pack.  I bought it in Tokyo about six years ago.

The vape machine in the photo is my most recent purchase.   The main body is a rechargeable battery that has two USB hubs, it has a separate unit for the fluid and heating element and can be set to any range of voltage and amperage for the heating elements. The battery can be used to charge my smartphone too.

When I bought this vape machine I found another customer buying many feet of heating element wire.  He is building a whole array of homemade vape machines.

Let me pause and say that I'm not a smoker. I will join a friend on the porch to smoke one cigarette for conviviality reasons. I will smoke a good cigar for the same reason.

What fascinates me is the steady evolution of the vape technology. The machines are becoming more interesting and more complex. The variations in the delivery of nicotine are becoming greater as people explore this technology.

It appears to me to be like the early days of the airplane when experimental people and competent engineers found a new field in which to apply their genius.

I am enjoying watching this and trying to understand it.

Right now, two major cigarette companies are merging, Reynolds and Lorillard. They are both focusing on the future of the vape devices.

There are over 100 different solutions and flavors for which dissolved nicotine is available. The nicotine solutions are available in multiple levels of concentration.

In the social realm, people who use the vape machines know that there is no negative research on nicotine and they are 100% certain that the second hand vapor is not even smelled by people around them.

That means we have the same thing we had with early marijuana hippie users. The users know that the non-users are basing their hysterical reaction on ignorance and blind ideology. These are the social ingredients that will make vape users into rebels.

This may be the future for tobacco use.

Presbyter John

Imagine the wonderful surprise. One of my granddaughters had made a piece of pottery that was to be the Castle of Presbyter John. I could not believe that my granddaughter was so well educated. She knew who Presbyter John was. She credits her knowledge to a high school advanced placement class on world history.

So how do I know who Presbyter John was?

In the early 60’s, when I was a graduate student in economics, I was hired one summer to spend months in the University of California library reading every single book and looking at every map of Africa as reported by any European or Arab prior to 1850. There were over 186 such books and maps of which I was able to study more than 140 in five languages. These were usually books written by explorers. My research was the core data for all future economic books on the economic history of Africa. The client was Professor Marvin Miracle.

Among several explorers who were in East Africa, the subject of Presbyter John was mentioned regularly. From the earliest Portuguese in 1600 to Germans in the late 1700s there was a constant search for Presbyter John. Presbyter John was a mythical character from the 1100’s in medieval Europe. He remained important because it was believed that he had a magical Christian empire in Eastern Africa.

In fact, Ethiopia had been Christian since the fourth century.

We still see the remnants of this issue in the Muslim killing of Egyptian Copts.

Bofors lecture

In the early 1980s I was a hot topic in Sweden.

My friend Sven Atterhed had been paying attention to the Briarpatch and my business following in the hippie world. He realized that my approach had generated hundreds of new startup businesses. He promoted me in the Swedish business world where he was a respected consultant.

It was Sven’s promotion that led the Swedish government to hire me to generate new small businesses.

One of the big Swedish companies, Bofors, which was an arms manufacturing company that once had Alfred Nobel as its president and was founded in the 1600s asked me to speak to its management and engineering team. It was Bofors’ hope that I might give them some new direction in the business world that could lead them out of the military complex.

I did. The following is what happened.

I was flown from Stockholm to a rural traditional hunting lodge somewhere in the backwoods. It was an elegant medieval castle of the sort you see in movies. The classroom was in a separate fairly new building. I spoke to a group of engineers and management. There were about 40 men there to listen to me.

My basic theme was that all business that were currently succeeding in the global marketplace were open. I cited many examples of closed businesses like RCA whose brilliant inventions never became significant in contrast to the open practices of Philips which led to industry domination with new products and engineering.

What I had to say to this group of men who were living in the military world of ultra secrecy must've sounded like the most heretical statement imaginable. There were consequences.

I was hoping for a private luxurious elk dinner and an overnight stay in some elegant prince’s bedroom with sparkling fireplace. That was the setting and the way most guests are treated.

I was not served dinner. I was rushed (I’m serious) to a waiting plane and returned alone to Stockholm as quickly as possible.

So much for the new business insights that Bofors wanted to hear about.

Barack Obama and Woodrow Wilson

I try to avoid politics in these blogs but I notice a significant omission in the political discussions in my country that I believe should be highlighted.

The current Obama presidency resembles, in its last 2 1/2 years, the final one and half years of the Woodrow Wilson presidency. This parallel should not be ignored.

President Obama throughout his administration has been evidently innumerate (making management impossible), arrogant beyond any level of reasonableness, mean-spirited and vicious in his treatment of his opponents and anyone whose policies he disagrees with; and he has evidently done everything possible to avoid accepting the responsibilities of his office such as refusing intelligence briefings and blaming all the problems of 5½ years on his predecessor. He has appointed close friends and political hacks to important inner circle positions including intelligence reporting. Some of this may have caused his current condition.

Everything points to the fact that president Obama has had a mental breakdown within the last few months. He does not appear competent to carry out his office. One recent book reports that his main advisors are Valerie Jarrett and his wife who talk to him after daily decisions have been made and get him to change those policy decisions the following day.

It should be noted that president Woodrow Wilson had a stroke 17 months before his term was up and his wife took over the job of president. She and her close aides kept this secret.

We now have the 25th amendment which allows for a combination of the vice president and members of the cabinet and congressional leaders to agree upon a situation in which the president is incompetent and to place him on leave.

That time has come. Exercise Section 4 of the 25th amendment.

Greedophobia

My son looked at the word homophobia and concluded that it refers to the passing of an era. The Christian Biblical Era seems to have ended a few decades ago and its passing is signified by the word ‘homophobia’. Dislike of homosexual activity for religious reasons is dismissed by the very word homophobia. It simultaneously dismisses the entire logic of biblical authority.

My son pointed out that we can look forward to the end of a similar Roman Catholic era in which greed is treated as a biblical sin. The Pope, every Pope, seems to find that it is his job to attack greed.

I look forward to hearing the term greedophobia.

Of course greed is only harmful in a zero-sum world. In a positive-sum world it can become a desirable social attribute.  Adam Smith explained how markets use personal self interest to enhance everyone’s well being.  A baker gets up at 2am to bake our bread and if she does it for greed or any other personal selfish reason we are all the beneficiaries.

That is not true of three of the other seven sins: wrath, sloth and gluttony.  Three of the seven can be considered self motivation on occasion: pride, avarice and envy.

I look forward to the emergence of greedophobia as a measure of pro-commerce sophistication in our society.

Soccer and girls

There is a perpetual discussion in the United States about the role of soccer as an American sport. I have voiced my opinion on this issue in the past. (here and here)

There is a new factor to consider. It has now entered the popular domain that girls face three times the concussion risks of boys when playing soccer.

From looking at my own family it appears that girls are no longer being encouraged to play soccer. That will certainly doom soccer in America.

Since Title IX of the US code requires equal school funding for male and female athletics that raises the question of what sport girls will pursue now.

I suspect that means swimming and tennis will be the beneficiaries of the soccer concussion problem for girls.

(The photo is the winning German team. Notice the arms, and necks lack skin disease [tatoos] and all have simple hair styles [not hair diseases]). 

 

Bogus nutrition world

The field of nutrition is notoriously outside the realm of science. For most of my life, nutritionists have argued that eating ice cream and other high sugar foods will make children excited. That eating eggs will raise blood cholesterol. Among the many nutritional pieces of nonsense I cite only these two because each one of them was testable since 1950 with simple blood samples. Such research was not done.

To me the greatest and most flagrant failure of nutrition is the willingness to connect the caloric value of food to human fat. There is no known intermediate bodily process.

Yes, I know calories in food are really kilo calories.

We can accurately measure the number of calories consumed by the body in physical activity. We do this by measuring the caloric heat discharged by the body. To my knowledge this is accurate. An ordinary person burns 1800 cal a day. A physically active person might be 2400 cal a day and a professional athlete 3500 cal a day.

The question is: is 1800 cal of whiskey the same inside the body as 1800 cal of bananas? I seriously doubt it.

I believe that every food has a different impact on the human body than its common caloric count would indicate. Some large differences.

To measure this I propose a modest multimillion dollar experiment for the NIH. Take groups of people all from the same cohort, and divide them into groups of 10 placed in a controlled environment where their caloric output can be measured. Then give each group of 10 a specific food to eat for three consecutive days exclusively. Say one group of 10 eats only 1800 cal of carrots a day. Another group eats 1800 cal of french fries a day for three days. Determine whether the groups change their weight positively or negatively based on that particular category of food.

This test is ethical. This test is the only empirical model I can imagine for understanding the actual caloric value of food in the human body.

The NIH is an old institution. It is time for them to do some decent research of importance to the American public.

Time to change the Jewish world

In a recent Facebook comment I found myself responding to anti-Israel hatred by a person who claimed to be a Jew with my statement that this person, a stranger to me, “is not a Jew”. I said “Swedes do not attack Sweden, Danes do not attack Denmark. Real Jews do not attack Israel”.

This is a new insight for me. I realize that the founding of the state of Israel has changed the relationship of Jews to one another.

It is time for us to declare that Israel is the homeland of Jews and if you don't like Israel you are not a Jew.

This has absolutely nothing to do with discussions about internal policies of the Israeli government. Israel is a democracy (unlike any of its neighbors).  Israeli Jews love their country and they aggressively debate the policies of their government.

This does not in any way justify Jews outside of Israel, who are not participating in the Israeli electorate to spend any part of their life attacking Israel.

They are not Jews. It is time for us to declare that a Jew is a person who does not attack Israel. Jews living outside of Israel are not Jews if they attack Israel. It is the same for Swedes and Danes or Japanese. And it is obvious.

(Photo of my favorite beach in Tel Aviv.)

Tipping solution

In four earlier blogs (this is the 4th blog) I discussed the problem of raising the minimum wage by 40% in San Francisco. This is going to happen over a 3 to 4 year period. I discussed the enormous damage this will do to the city. We will become a sad declining city; we will be using Detroit style self immolation.

In the restaurant businesses, that I know, a 40% increase in the wages for the service staff will require at least a 20% increase in the retail price of meals and beverages. I expect most high-end restaurants with employees, who aren't family members, to close as the restaurant business moves to Oakland, a nearby city with very good restaurants.

Recently, I did see a possible solution for San Francisco restaurants.

The wait staff is paid primarily in tips. The average tip being somewhere around 18% of the bill before sales-tax. The wait staff earns two thirds of its revenue from tips.

If there were a way to get customers to pay 20 or 25% more for their food and not leave any tip, the net to the customer would be approximately the same as it is before the rise in the minimum wage. The wait staff could be given a small percentage of the increase.   (But they would still have jobs… their wages might suffer a net decline.)

Customers, in the dozens of cases that I have observed, will always leave a tip regardless of what instructions they are given. This is not a problem with Europeans who are happy to avoid a tip. They seem to understand that tipping is a residual practice left over from the days of servants and slaves. Tips were meant to encourage servants and slaves to do a more enthusiastic job.

Ordinary Americans will leave a tip no matter how much effort is made to discourage them.

The geniuses at Uber, the online taxi service, have figured out a way to keep Americans from giving their drivers tips. The entire bill is charged to the credit card and with the invoice on the  smartphone comes a questionnaire to rate the driver and car from 1 to 5. That rating function seems to replace the need to tip the driver.

I can see in a restaurant where the tip line, on the bill, would be eliminated but a rating system for the customer to rate the service would be on every bill.

This might be the way to raise prices more than 20% without increasing the cost to the customer.

Commerce is always a source of ingenuity.

Circumcision

A few days ago I saw an article that described a significant and reliable research project that had been carried out in Kenya. Over a three-year period, men had been divided into two groups of three thousand each: one group was circumcised as adults, the other was the control group. The intention was to test the medical success of circumcision on mature males in repelling HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases.  We all know the outcome. Circumcision is effective at repelling STDs.

What was interesting about this research is that it asked the men who had been circumcised whether they had detected an increase or a decrease or no change in the sexual sensitivity of their penis. It also asked about any changes in sexual activity.

This is the first study I have ever heard about that is scientific in its use of adult males to measure the issue of sensitivity post-circumcision. The results were overwhelming: that men found circumcision increased their sexual sensitivity as well as increased their level of sexual activity.

I frankly don't care what the anti-circumcision people say or believe they are flat out anti-semites (Jew and Muslim haters). It is nice to know that finally some scientific research has been done to find out the facts.

I have only one reference that I can find on Google or Bing and it only mentions a similar study in the middle of the article without an actual reference. If anybody can find an actual reference to the Kenyan study please let me know.

Presbyterianism and its discontents

The Presbyterian Church (PCUSA see comment below) has returned to the Christian ways of the past 2000 years: it has become a fount of Jew hate.

Jew hate has never had anything to do with Jews. Jews are merely the bogeyman, the scapegoats, in the internal Christian ideological battles.

I would guess there are no more than four Jews on the planet who care one iota about Presbyterian theology.

So it is not that Jews are picking on the innocent Presbyterians. The Presbyterian Jew hate position is totally self-motivated by the American Presbyterians.

The Presbyterian Church of America, in the past half-century, has seen its membership fall by half. This is because the Church is left-wing and activist and most of its members are not. In the past half-century the Presbyterian Church has been split by so called ‘confessions’ into groups that take the Bible literally and inerrant and those that don't.

In the past decade this has brought to a head the Presbyterian battle over the role of women in the clergy and gays in the clergy. The Church is eating itself to pieces over these issues.

The rise of Presbyterian Jew hate is entirely the byproduct of the internal dissension over women and gays. The Church is trying to focus its battle on the outside, against Jews. as a distraction from the internal battle that is destroying the Church.

Core Leftist beliefs

There is a long term significant change in our society.  The Lefty ideology is on the wane.

The design of our Constitution and its underlying concepts were explicated in the Federalist Papers. Both Madison and Hamilton, the main authors, were explicit in stating their view that human beings are not perfectible by the actions of government. Human beings are born with many sins and shortcomings and the best government cannot change this.  Government is most effective when it resists the entreaties and foibles of human miscarriage.

The Constitution and the Federalists were intent on keeping the errors and sinful ways of humans from harming each other via a centralized powerful government.

This very conception of the imperfect human is a core American idea. It has been challenged many times over the past two centuries. Hundreds of American utopian societies have been created to experiment with human perfectibility. The entire French Revolution and Marxism in Russia and China have been designed to improve humankind. They have all failed.

It is has been commerce that fits the American model of a human being. Commerce accepts humans the way they are and allows them to become whatever they are best suited to.

The Left has believed in changing people. Interestingly that is why it is supported by three main American voting constituencies.

* Single women are disproportionately supporters of the Left. They, unlike married women, believe in the perfectibility of man on a very personal basis.   Single woman commonly think they can find a man and mold him into a model they want.  

* Mainstream religions (Methodist, Anglican, Presbyterian.) believe in the perfectibility of man and that is why they have taken such extreme Lefty positions as: anti-war activism and poverty amelioration by government money. These ideas don't work and the mainstream religions have lost half their American members since the 1960s. These former members have joined evangelical churches. Evangelicals accept people the way they are and do not try to change them.

* Lastly, the Left is supported by unions. Unions of course have been in decline for half a century too. A basic union premise is that individual humans have no important contribution to make. Only seniority and union group efforts can improve man's station in life.

Of course Americans don't agree with the union model of humans.  Americans have left unions behind to the dustbin of history and the fantasy world of government employment.

Summary: the Left believes in a failed model of human beings; the model assumes that humans can be perfected by ideology and state compulsion. It can't, based on 200 years of evidence.  Only commerce allows people to perfect themselves.

 

6th Street Park aka Wino Park

I built a park for street people in San Francisco in 1978.  The lot was on 6th Street and Minna Alley.  I bought it as an asset for Glide Memorial UM Church where I was business manager and treasurer.  

The park was of great historic importance.  It lasted 3 years and was much loved by the neighbors and the park habitues.  The park was intended to provide peace, safety and a convivial space for people who were normally living on the street. Nothing else like it had been done before or since to my knowledge.

These are some of the blogs I’ve written on it.  The park has shaped my thinking on many subjects from Puritanism to poverty.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2003/10/puritanism.html A description of 6th Street Park, built as a safe refuge for street people. Nearly all street people just want a peaceful life.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/09/homeless_stabil.html  A description of research on street people who always seem to remain steet people. Decade after decade. Also, street people got the missnomer ‘homeless’ after 1981 based on New Yorker's blind 'do-gooder' ignorance.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2007/01/6th_street.html   My comments on recent efforts of renovate 6th Street.  We can’t  fix a street where street people have lived a long time.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2007/03/surprised.html Street people remain street people regardless of Lefty municpal efforts and regardless of the amount of money spent on them.  Talk to them an understand why.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/03/poverty.html  A real understanding of poverty comes from working with and being involved in lives of the 6th Street Park people. 'Poverty' is a word without substance.

http://phillips.blogs.com/goc/2006/03/poverty.html  Getting a better understanding of the lives of street people from 6th Street Park; particually people who are content being outcasts.

http://www.well.com/~mp/a25.html A complete summary of 6th Street Park, written two years after it closed.

(Photo includes some Park habitues and some staff.)

Origin of TRAX

I visited my family in Salt Lake City and when we drove passed their light rail system called TRAX I said that I deserve some credit for the origin of that wonderful system.

My family, as usual, discounted my claim. I make many claims to my role in the origin of many parts of our current society and they are probably right to dismiss me.

Part of my claim to influence is because I strongly believe in the power of ideas to shape society. And I have not only had many original ideas, I have published them and I have been an activist in promoting them. Discount me to your hearts content.

My connection to TRAX is Peter Calthorpe. Peter is the architect and city planner who shaped the designs of Salt Lake City. Peter has told me that he was heavily influenced in his attitudes toward urban construction and urban design by an article I wrote in the CoEvolution Quarterly. I wrote the first article that anyone had ever seen demonstrating that urban areas are environmentally more efficient and more resource preserving than suburban or rural areas. I gave an example in terms of metal and wood usage in home units as well as fuel and transportation costs for a wide range of urban daily functions.

My data was overwhelmingly accurate and convincing. That is what Peter Calthorpe is referring to when he gives me credit for his understanding of the environmental importance of urban areas. As a fanatic environmentalist, this drove Peter in the type of work he does.

That is the connection. My original and important article and Peter as a designer of the urban landscape of Salt Lake City that included theTRAX light rail system.

Japanese crowdfunding

Crowdfunding is becoming popular and successful in Japan. (WSJ) This is going to lead me, over the next few years, to invest in the economic future of Japan. Something I have not seen so far.

First let's discuss crowdfunding.

Crowdfunding is an Internet-based institution where business startups describe their business, their background and their business prospects to interested Internet readers. The readers are then permitted to invest in the crowdfunded business. There are many interesting twists on this including the promise from the start-up fundraiser to provide early products or services to the investors.

I haven't seen any data on the success or failure of crowd funding. There are several prominent crowdfunding sites in operation.

Based on my extensive experience with small and startup businesses, American crowdfunding will result in no greater success rate than any traditional family funded small business start up function. That is a very small percentage. Certainly less than 10% of the people who fund these projects will get anything back, ever. Probably more like 5%.

The same is not true in Japan. Japan has a far more entrepreneurial small business culture than the United States. It ranks even higher than France in small business entrepreneurship probably the highest such ratio in the world. Moreover the Japanese are honest beyond any level known anywhere else in the world.

While young Japanese who got credit cards in the 1980’s ran up their bills to the maximum and didn't pay, because they had no experience with consumer credit, I don't believe that is true for the more mature Japanese who would borrow money with crowdfunding.

With a combination of Japanese imagination, which is extraordinary, their incredible honesty and their entrepreneurial skills, I expect this unique form of crowdfunding to create great growth in Japan in the next decade or two.

Detroit revival

I regularly hear discussions about the revival of Detroit. I see Democrat politicians everywhere urging more money from the state of Michigan and from the federal coffers to revitalize Detroit. Even in the foundation world there is pressure to make grants to Detroit.

Is there any chance that Detroit could be revived?

I see two problems with the revival of Detroit. The first one concerns who is left in Detroit to promote the revival and attract new business.

The answer is: nobody. Everyone with talent left years ago when the obvious failure of the city was on the horizon. That left only two groups.

* Union members who were so unable to ever get a high paying job or even another job that they became welfare rats.

* The second group are blacks who have a great resistance to leaving their homes, regardless of the economic conditions. Also welfare rats.  

Out of work union members and desolatory blacks cannot attract businesses that are looking for workers. And they certainly cannot create new businesses that provide the bulk of all new employment.

There is an additional problem. Detroit (metropolitan area) has more than a quarter of its population that is now Islamic Arabs. As this population grows steadily, because immigrants always go to cities that are already populated by their families, Detroit will become even less appealing to anyone else.

Detroit has no future except for Arabs. Only Lefties can be so blind about commerce that they would think otherwise.

I read it

I had to read the Supreme Court decision on Hobby Lobby because I knew it would drive the Lefty Fundamentalists insane. The media went nuts.

It was designed to do the exact opposite.

When you read it, you can see immediately that it was not written by Thomas or Scalia. It is poorly written and both of those justices are excellent and enjoyable writers.  The staff wrote it with directions.

I can see clearly what happened. The four conservatives went to Roberts and offered him a deal: if we can deliver a decision that does not cite the First Amendment and does not deal with businesses via Citizens United, will you sign on? Roberts said ‘yes’ because he is making every effort to be conciliatory and be seen in the future as a moderate.

So the four conservatives got a bottle of scotch and some cigars and they figured out how to write the entire decision on the basis of Democratic Party actions. Here is how they did it:

The entire ruling is based on a 1993 law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by Billy Clinton called the The Religious Freedom Recovery Act. This act requires that ‘sincerely held religious beliefs  (can not be overridden) except in those rare cases where the challenged state action is the least restrictive means of accomplishing a compelling state interest.’

The final ruling was carved out to only exclude abortion which does not have ‘a compelling state interest’ involved. It does not exclude contraception for which there would be a compelling state interest. The same applies to issues such as transfusions and vaccinations which are specifically excluded by the boys with their scotch and cigars.

Now how did the boys deal with the problem that Hobby Lobby and the two other plaintiffs are small companies?

They just found that a for profit business is a ‘person’ covered by the Religious Recovery Act. It can be excluded from ACA if it is closely held so that the five or fewer owners could be religious and control 51% of the company.

The word ‘person’ in this instance is not derived from Citizen United it is derived from the dictionary at the beginning of all congressional codes. The particular 1993 dictionary definition of ‘person’ includes any conglomeration of human beings from partnerships to clubs to unions etc. The definition was established in 1951 by a Democratic Congress and signed by Harry Truman.

Poor Justice Roberts. The Lefty Fundamentalists have gone hysterical, lied mercilessly and exaggerated about everything included in this decision. Even Hillary is not bright enough nor competent enough to read the actual ruling. She is lazy and forced to lie and exaggerate.

Anti-religious attacks

When I was in Salt Lake City last week I was taken to a musical cabaret that celebrated, in song and dance, it's antagonism toward the Mormon Church. This singing vilification has been going on for 43 years. The songs are pleasant the dancing is okay and the words can be easily ignored.

A year or so ago I saw the broadway play The Book of Mormon by the South Park boys. It was flat out terrible. The word ‘flat’ goes with flatulence in this case because the entire musical was aimed at 12-year-old boys and their scatalogical world view.

To my knowledge this venom being sprayed at the Mormon Church has been ignored by the Church. I see only two reasons for this nonresponse:

* One is that the Mormon church learned from its 50 years of bitter attacks by the US government and the US Army that there is no effective response to malicious anti-religious aggression. They probably learned to just stay out of the limelight and not fight back. That is good advice since I have given that advice to half a dozen religious groups and the two or three that followed my advice still exist.

* Second, it is possible that the leaders of the Mormon Church have looked at the perpetual endurance of Judaism. It is certainly one lesson that proves having enemies attacking you helps to create a solid core of members that ensures your survival. The Mormon Church may be imitating Jews for the past 3000 years who have maintained their tradition, in its nearly original form, while under oppressive conditions that included murder, pogroms and genocide on a regular basis.

I thought about this while I listen to the anti-Mormon cabaret song and dance.

Creating new business

The following paragraph came from an article in the Wall Street Journal by E. Prescott and L. Ohanian.  It is shocking:

“…. productivity since 2005 has declined by more than 8% relative to its long-run trend. This means that business output is nearly $1 trillion less today than what it would be had productivity continued to grow at its average rate of about 2.5% per year.

Lagging productivity growth is an enormous problem because virtually all of the increase in Americans' standard of living is made possible by rising worker productivity. In our view, an important factor contributing to declining productivity growth is the large decline in the creation of new businesses. The creation rate of new businesses, as well as new plants built by existing firms, was about 30% lower in 2011 (the most recent year of data) compared with the annual average rate for the 1980s. (The data is the Census Bureau's Business Dynamic Statistics.) The decline affected nearly all business sectors.”

The authors rightly attribute this decline in productivity to a parallel decline in the number of startup businesses.

Startup business is a field in which I am one of the rare experts. To my knowledge I have been involved, on a hands-on basis, with the start up of many thousands of small businesses;  no one else on the planet can make such a claim.

In the 1970’s I founded a network of startups called the Briarpatch. We had a simple formula for all of the hippies who wanted to start a new business or who had already started one and needed help.  They joined the Briarpatch Network and had access to the support of every other business both in knowledge and services. That meant they got accurate and reliable information from people who had similar problems to theirs and they could find suppliers, including insurance and legal aid as well as banking, that they knew to be honest and reliable.

At any one point the Briarpatch had more than 600 businesses as members in the San Francisco Bay Area. Over a decade there were several thousand. The Briarpatch created, through its milieu, magazines, word-of-mouth and books, tens of thousands of start up businesses in America.

This is not an exaggeration.

I was invited, with my Briarpatch team in the late 1970’s, to Sweden where I helped set up a similar network to the Briarpatch to encourage and develop small startup businesses. Sweden went from a nation with only dozens of new startups, a year, to a country with 4000 new startups in the three years after I set up the methodology.

I suspect that the economic vitality that America experienced in the 80’s and 90’s was partially the result of the start up businesses that I encouraged and promoted.

Could the same thing be done again? Could we have the kind of vitality in business that the hippies generated?

(Note: the founders of Apple were hippies and connected to the Briarpatch and the founders of Google modeled their company and its anti-advertising graphics on the principles from my Marketing Without Advertising.

The current national milieu of business hatred that the Left has created does not leave me optimistic about commercial vitality. When the Republican Party envigorated with the Tea Party enthusiasm and the Reagan perspective finally arrives in America we may have the milieu for a new start up environment.

Right now the country is in a depressed Leftie mood; they believe that everything belongs to the government (“You didn’t start that business”) and success is considered a measure of 'evil greed'. That is not the environment for startups.

 

Excommunication

I was in Salt Lake City last week. That should be good for several blogs.

The chatter among the non-Mormons was about the excommunication of several Mormons; one in particular because she was leading a political battle to force the Mormon Church to ordain women.

The chattering class, which is almost entirely environmentalists, had no sense of irony or their own hypocrisy. They were positively hostile to the Mormon Church for having an excommunication procedure and for using it. They claimed that the Church suppresses opposing opinions to the dominant white male leadership.

This came within two weeks of the environmental movement excommunicating two important members of its own environmental church.

First came, Dr. Lennart Bengtsson a leading climatologist who was a writer on several of the UN climate reports.  Dr. Bengtsson was put under extreme hostile pressure by the environmental community for being an advisor to the group GWPF that believes more research is necessary on global warming. Dr. Bengtsson was forced to resign his position after only a few weeks; the bile poured on him was malicious and intense.  (By the way, the global warming community is almost entirely white male.)

In the same two weeks. Prof. Caleb Rossiter was fired from American University (Washington D.C.) for publishing an article that questioned the statistical validity of some of the high-end global warming computer projections. I have particular sympathy for Dr. Rossiter because he, like I, is a statistician. I know statistics don't support global warming at all.

So the environmental hypocrites have a field day patting themselves on the back about the excommunication and backwardness of the Mormon Church at the same time their own religion, environmentalism, does its excommunication with vindictive mean-spirited procedures.  At the same time.

Brain synthesis

I recently had a transient mental flash. One part, lasting 15 seconds was a large empty spot in the center of my vision. Like seeing the blog in front of you with the center of the screen a completely white blank circle. About 15 seconds, later while trying to read an article, I found that I could see everything clearly and the words were distinct;  but the words made absolutely no sense. It is just like the words ‘made...absolutely....no’ from the previous sentence, were each separate and had no connection.

I was promptly examined by several neurologists and went through a screening on high-tech equipment. It was determined to be a transient phenomenon that was not serious and may not ever recur.

What struck me was the intense focus the neurologists placed on the vision problem almost to the exclusion of the word problem. I can understand that the portion of the brain that assembles visual images and processes them is very important and has developed evolutionarily over a long period of time. It clearly plays an important survival role.

But I am a human being and the ability to connect words and give meaning to those words strikes me as the most complex phenomenon the brain can encounter. I call this phenomenon, and you do to, synthesis.

This is the human component of our brain, it allows us to connect words to the outside world in which we live. Our entire human experience allows us to synthesize the previous uses of those words and their multiple connections to the world we live in. All of these experiences together comprise our modern human understanding of the world.

There are certainly societies of humans that cannot read and do not need to use this particular brain facility.

It is my contention that this facility to synthesize everything about the world I see into words and to put those words into a meaningful context must require the entire part of our brain that makes us modern humans.  It is that synthesis function that makes thinking possible.

I am particularly focused on the thinking function of modern humans.  I think it stops working in most humans after age 23. So I want to know more about the synthesis area of the brain.

My experience with neurologists, who focused on the optics part of the brain that must indeed be the most measurable and identifiable, is surprising. They are ignoring the part of the human brain that makes us modern humans. Which in turn must be the most interesting part of the brain.