Pro Commerce

The European mind

I would like to make an observation that I haven’t seen made anywhere else. The European mind is dramatically different than the American mind.

Both can be looked at as a horizontal line. That is where the similarity ends.

That is why American and European intellectuals are unable to carry on meaningful.dialogue.

Europeans have a Left to Right line that centers on the structure of their societies and the oppression of the bottom part of society.  The Left sees the the bottom parts of their societies so lacking in opportunities for change that they demand society be totally restructured by government or by revolution. Revolution precedes the creation of a more just and equal society brought about by a new government.

The Right, on the other hand, represents the existing European hierarchy. It is particularly concerned with defense of the hereditary institutions. This is the position of Edmund Burke.  Mistakenly associated with American conservative politics.  The Right in Europe is strongly opposed to radical changes in society or changes in the hierarchic status quo.

In America the horizontal line from Left to Right has none of these characteristics. The Left wants to change human beings by expanding the government and using taxation to bring about income equality. There is virtually no consideration of a revolution but there is a perennial desire to reinstate the pre-commercial, pre-modern communal values. There is no focus on hereditary hierarchy because it is absent in America.

The Right in America is not concerned about hierarchy either. They are concerned with preserving the status quo which includes many religious and traditional business values.

The European mind with this different Left-Right distinctions cannot communicate with the American Left-Right mind.

Pro commerce...finally

From the late 1990s on, I have been writing this blog. Sometime soon after 2001, when Typepad first started, I signed up for this blog (that is why the URL has my name in it) and began using the phrase Pro Commerce. From the first the title had the same subhead it has today. This material about commerce was derived from my earlier 1997 book Gods of Commerce and expanded in my 2004 book Commerce.

At the time I started using ‘Pro Commerce’ I notified Google that I wanted to be alerted to all uses of the term ‘pro commerce’ which I recognized as a new human concept, not hitherto in use. In the early 2000’s I got several Google alert messages but they were always for a French use of ‘pro-commerce’ which has a different meaning than the meaning in English. Those notifications stopped coming to me. Then surprise,  a few weeks ago I got one.

A gentleman named J.G. Collins used the term in an article he wrote in the American Thinker. We're talking roughly 14 years since I first used the term. Collins uses ' pro commerce' in contradistinction to 'pro business' as it is currently used by the Republican party. He argues that ‘pro business’ as a political theme is too plutocratic while ‘pro commerce’ is inclusive of the middle-class and  blue-collar workers.

Collins is the first person who genuinely introduce my idea into our society and I'm grateful.

I had no idea how long it would take for this concept to make its way into the American mind.

Of course this is only the beginning. Pro commerce, when fully developed, is a state of mind. As I explain in future blogs it is situated at the highest level of the mind the level of: comprehensive thought.

I have been patient in the past with my ideas. I first enunciated the idea of random legislature in a car trip to San Francisco from a weekend spa,  late  in 1974. By 1977 it was an article and by 1984 it was a book. By 1996 it was taught in a course in political science at several universities and by today it is taught as a major theory in nearly every course in political  science around the world. The idea of a random legislature was used in the early 90’s as a model for focus groups on politics and for convening a new charter for the government in British Columbia. Today it is the standard model used for selecting the designers of legislative districts; this use was first started in California in 2010.

I am patient. I know I will not live to see Pro commerce as an idea used in a widespread realm and certainly not with the other elements that you see as part of it in my blog.

Hiring hookers

There is no need to comment on the preposterous Lefty meme that has been making the rounds in the past few weeks. People certainly do not become terrorists because they are a marginalized part of the population.

What I want to comment on is my own experiments in the field of employment.

I was manager of a major church, foundation and building operation in the 1970s.

I was also one of the cofounders of a prostitutes organization, Coyote.

There was one job that I thought particularly suited to street hooker's. First note that there are many forms of prostitution. The lowest price is a street hooker. There are whore houses, there are call girls and finally there are, the American versions of geisha, intelligent, talented and usually very attractive women for hire for sex and company. 

Nearly everyone in prostitution, on the selling side, enjoys sex and their work.

The job I had available was the receptionist at the entrance to our office building. The job included operating a telephone switchboard, which in the 1970s used lines with plugs and plug holes.

There were several shifts on this reception job. I put street hookers in these jobs because I knew they had a very short attention span and that they could be perfect for reception and switchboard. 

What I want to report in this blog is that it didn't work out. Yes the a level of attention for the receptionist switchboard jobs was comparable to the streetwalker's regular work. What was missing was the excitement and danger built into the job of a street worker. A hooker has to be constantly aware of dangerous clients, the police and predators on the street.

I couldn't offer that.

For the Lefties and their nonsense about terrorists needing jobs, there are no jobs with a fraction of the excitement of the front line military.

Marxist past

Karl Marx and modern Lefties are dealing with a problem that disappeared, in many parts of the world, without their even noticing it.

They are responding to a condition of life and political conditions that precede the founding of the United States.

Marx and the modern Left were concerned that the emerging industrial commercial world would allocate all of its resources and profitability to the existing hereditary upper class and leave the rest of the society pretty much the way it was.

The modern Left continues to believe in these very same concepts. The president of the United States, who is an extreme Leftist, constantly harps on the upper 1% of the society having disproportionate wealth and power.

There are two things that have completely destroyed the Marxist idea and basic Leftist principles... and those people have no idea what it is.

First and foremost, modern commerce has been so extraordinarily productive as to completely change society. It has given us modernity that can be contrasted with what life is like in Damascus today. Modern commerce gives us very long lives, good health, widespread prosperity, extraordinary travel opportunities and incredible ability to develop our individual uniqueness in art and other talents. It gives us vast areas of the world that are peaceful and safe.

Second, America with its enormous open territories provided new life for the oppressed serfs of Europe. It provided an escape from the hereditary elites.  Revolution wasn't necessary.

American both in its development of an egalitarian democracy and its development of a unique nationhood idea offers an alternative to Marxism and Leftism. Democracy in a commercial society has  totally demolished the validity of the ideas of Marx and the Left.

The Left is trying to create a better person, a revolutionary person, on a vast scale using a central government.  Think China and Mao.  They are wrong.  The Left is completely blind to the fact that commerce is now creating the most unique extraordinary individuals with their talents developed and expanded in a way that no one has ever conceived in the history of mankind.

Both Marxists and the Left are looking backwards to a world that doesn't exist in the modern commercial America.

Article 1 section 2 of the Constitution

The following is the first part of Article 1 section 2: “The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.

"No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State in which he shall be chosen..”

The actual wording of this section was pointed out to me by a gentleman from New York, Sandy Anderson, who was aware of my Citizen Legislature book. In the book I, and my co-author, propose a random selection of legislators. We do not make any effort to describe how such a solution will take place over time in the United States.  To change Congress.

The gentleman calling me from New York suggested that each state actually has the power to determine how Congress members are selected.  He is right.

Therefore it would be possible for the legislature or the citizens of California and any other state to choose their members using a random lottery approach. In California and a few other states this could be done by initiative without bothering the state legislature.

California has 53 members of its congressional delegation and Texas has 38.  A significant number.  A total of 91 members of Congress.

Both states could send randomly selected populations as their members of Congress.  The members only need to be 25 year old and a citizen for seven years.

Is it a good idea?

These people would be distinct from the political hacks that occupy Congress today.  Unlike the current members who orient their entire life towards their political party and spend 2 to 3 days every week raising money for their reelection, this group of randomly selected citizens would be unique.  And focused on their jobs as representatives.

It is my opinion, that this new Congressional selection would be an appropriate mechanism to begin changing the Congress to a random membership. The new members from states such as California would be sufficient in size and sufficient in unique talents to make California significantly more powerful in the Congress than it has ever been.

I think it's a good idea.

Apples and tomatoes

There was a recent announcement by a Canadian food lab that they are producing genetically engineered apples.  These new apples do not turn brown on the interior surface when they are cut open.  

This is done by turning off the genes that allow the fruit to ripen and decay. There usually must be such genes in fruits because fruits are vehicles for seeds. The pulp we like so much is food and nourishment for the seeds to grow in.

Turning off the rotting process is probably not harmful for humans.

I have seen this form of genetic engineering before.

The same approach was used on tomatoes about 27 years ago. (Remember, I created an organization at the time to label genetically modified foods.) The tomatoes were called Flavr Savrs. I bought a box and put them in the window to see how long they would remain in perfect condition. After two months there was no deterioration. It  was so unnerving to me, so weird that I threw them away.

The Flavr Savr tomatoes never found a market. I have no idea whether this will be the case with the new genetically engineered apples. It doesn't strike me as much of a contribution to the world of fruit or engineered food.

Coca Cola and milk

I want to  call my readers attention to the fact that Coca Cola has introduced a new premium drink called ‘milk’. This new product is specially designed for the one third of the people in the world who cannot digest the lactose in ordinary milk.

I am fascinated by this piece of marketing imagination.

Here is a company that is more than 100 years old built on selling flavored, carbonated, sugar water. It has expanded to many other bottled liquids ranging from fruit drinks to pure water and everything in between. They are now looking at a cow-produced high quality drink that is the definition of 'mammalian'.

I personally have no idea whether this product will succeed or fail. Coca-Cola has made a few mistakes in the past. I do see a significant market for any premium product in the food world. Foodies.

In any case I intend to put some Coca-Cola stock in my portfolio. Coke (KO) has been steadily rising for many years.

Commercial success

In just the past few decades we have seen Wal-Mart (Sam Walton), Microsoft (Bill Gates), Google (Brin and Page), Facebook (Zuckerberg), Ikea (Kamprad), Apple(Jobs) and Starbucks (Howard Schultz) become global companies.  

GE (Jack Welch) invented the cumulative conglomerate, Warren Buffett created the perennial high return stock portfolio, Fidelity (Ed Johnson III) grew mutual funds to gigantic size, John Bogle created the first Exchange Traded Fund,  IBM (Lou Gerstner) re-invented itself, Jeff Bezos (Amazon) created a new type of business,  Hank Greenberg with AIG invented a new world of insurance and Citicorp (Sandy Weill) invented the diversified global bank.

This is obviously a tiny segment of a much larger and more impressive list. I’m just suggesting that we live in the time of the greatest commercial minds in history. Only J.D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, J.C. Penny and Theodore Vail seem to match our current crop.

Rationality in the world

A beloved friend of mine is currently reading a book that she recommended to me about the era at the beginning of the last millenium: 100 CE. The characters, in her book, deal with arguments between traditional Jewish learning and Greek rationality. The Stoics and Skeptics are also in the argument.

We are still struggling with this issue today. There is a small percentage of the world that deals with anything resembling Greek rationality. We find this form of rationality almost exclusively in technology and engineering where tables of data get translated into the physical world pretty much in terms of a syllogism.  That is the rare form of Greek rationality.

The rest of the world has little to do with rationality. The person piloting the plane has training in rational decision-making, but the remaining hundreds onboard the plane have little to do with the rational world. The world of politics is one of calculation and arbitration but nothing to do rationality. Daily life occasionally has us encounter technology that requires a rational response, unless we throw our phone against the wall or kick the side of our car.  Otherwise the daily requirements for rationality are limited.

My regular readers know my view of global warming and the dozen other environmental versions of the apocalypse. Rationality and reference to reliable data plays virtually no role in the way 98% of the world sees the world.

Over two millennia, since the subject of my friend’s book that deals with tradition and rationality,  I see a modest increase in the proportion of the global population that relies on rationality.

The wonderfulness of our modern world arises because commerce does not depend on rationality or intelligence. Commerce is an empirical world. When people think of a political solution or bureaucratic solution they hope that there will be some intelligent people involved in the outcome. There never are.

With commerce we don't have to worry. People are seeking very simple, objective, measurable goals: to reduce costs, to increase sales and to reliably detect changes in the business that increase profitability. That commercial behavior is independent of IQ or charm.

Israel

I have been going to Israel pretty regularly in the past 15 years.

I don't have any plans to go in the  immediate future. I’m waiting  until the nest of evil Gazan cretans with their rockets are cleaned out of their nest. I have very little interest in seeing the inside of a dozen bomb shelters.

The most startling thing about Israel is its normalcy. In every way Tel Aviv compares favorably to a normal American city with: high quality maintenance, reliable electricity, cleanliness, first class transportation, fun activities and superb stores. Israelis are much more fun, wonderful, energetic and interesting than I would find in most American cities.

Israel also has another quality. Because it is such an amalgam of immigrants from a much larger part of the planet than any other population, Israeli’s are uniquely interesting. I recommend this set of photos to give you an idea of how unique and different Israel is.

The other interesting, if not just purely fascinating, aspect of Israel is the visitors instant comfort with the the way military life is integrated with daily living. Israel has no choice.

Lefties hate guns, lefties hate the military, lefties are filled with hate for everything because their lives are so miserable and depressed.  The military mix in daily living is no place for a Lefty.

Israel is extraordinary on the planet.  Israel is the unique case where the military has been totally integrated into society in visible ways that does not in any way resemble the tyranny that military means in Egypt, China or any other country where the military represents the authoritarian government.

On this page are two of my favorite photographs from the collection referred to above. I can't tell you how shocked, stunned and filled with pure pleasure I was the first time I saw three young women with their M16s slung over their shoulders shopping for women's dresses.

Nor can I tell you how comforting it is to see people on buses, in stores, in taxis, in shuttles and waiting in line with an automatic rifle over their shoulder. It gives a great sense of security it also lets you know that militarized presence in a truly modern society can be comforting.

It is sad that the Left is so powerful in America that we don't get to see ordinary citizens wandering around with guns to protect us.

Three parents

This blog concerns two subjects. First is the issue of three parents and the second is the issue of fraudulent science.

In the early 1990s when I organized a group calling for the labeling of genetically altered food, I became an activists in the general issue of genetic engineering. That included genetic engineering of humans.

I became aware of two projects that seemed to be on the frontiers of human genetic experimental engineering. One was by Jamie Grifo in Manhattan and the other was a similar project in Australia.

What these medical technologists were doing was to work with women who had given birth to or came from families where there was a known mitochondrial DNA abnormality. The goal was to replace the mitochondrial DNA in the germ cell before fertilization.  They were using mitochondrial DNA that was not known to be abnormal.

Mitochondrial DNA is in every cell in many small globules in the cytoplasm outside of the nucleus. It has its own DNA, from the maternal line.

For a woman who was having invitro fertilization, her extracted eggs could have the non-nuclear cytoplasm replaced with that of a woman who’s mitochondria were considered normal. This was before fertilization.

That is the way to produce an offspring with three parents. The father, the nuclear mother and the mitochondrial mother.

By the time I found out about the Grifo project and the Australian project, Grifo had successfully produced six offspring and the Australian team had done a dozen. I reported this to the appropriate person in the FDA and discussed the subject with him. I argued that he should be supervising the experiments.  I didn't follow up.

I see the issue is now in public discussion and research is being proposed on this subject. We don't need research. We have at least 18 offspring who are now in their mid-20s to be examined on this issue.  If Grifo and the Australians did not keep track of their research offspring they should be put in jail for the rest of their lives.

The fact that I have seen no articles about the presence of many children who are the byproduct of three parents is evidence that science today is a fraud.

We already know from the global warming hysteria that science today is filled with fraud and deception.

The fact that there are adults walking around this planet with three parents and no research is published suggests that science is more corrupt than I ever thought possible.

End of Jewry

Is American non-Orthodox Jewry coming to an end?

Since the publication, a few years ago, of a highly reliable Pew study of Jews in America, there has been minimal discussion of the problem facing non-Orthodox American Jewry as defined by the Pew study.

The Pew research shows that close to half of all Conservative and Reform Jews married a non-Jew and had children that were not raised with any Jewish schooling.  An apparent demographic collapse is on the horizon for these groups.

This would suggest that Jewry in America is going to become only Orthodox. The number of Jews in America has not been growing in the past 40-50 years except for growth in the Orthodox communities. The Conservative movement has seen an actual decline in numbers while the Reform movement maintains its status only by accepting intermarriage.

I would like to add my own personal observations.

I do not consider a large portion of the Conservative and Reform Jews in America to be Jews. Regardless of whether the mother or any parent was a Jew a disproportionate number of this group are hard-core Democrats and support Obama and other Jew haters.  These Democrat Jews are perpetually indifferent to Israel. To me, they can not be considered Jews.  If you are willing to see Jews die, because your Lefty ideology trumps all else, you aren't a Jew.

By simply defining a Jew as:

• anyone who declares himself a Jew,
• is willing to suffer the consequences of being a Jew,
• who learns about Jewish history
• knows some core Hebrew prayers and
• is primarily a supporter of Israel

is a Jew.

With my definition we will start out with 4 to 5,000,000 American Jews instead of 7 to 8,000,000. In my opinion these will be genuine Jews.

It would be my hope that these people observe the Sabbath, light candles on Friday night, and observe the major holidays. To me this would make the American newly defined Jew comparable to the bulk of the Jews in Israel.

It will make for a consistent and homogeneous definition of who is a Jew.

Glide Church and Cecil Williams

Among the four ministers that were brought  to revitalize San Francisco’s Glide Memorial Methodist Church, the last one was Cecil Williams, a black minister.  Cecil was selected for his skin color. This was in the early days when civil rights laws were being passed.  Cecil was brought in to handle the need for the church to have a functioning congregation. Cecil was very successful in attracting a young, hip congregation with live contemporary music and socialist sermons.

To me the relevant impact of Cecil Williams was his impact on the Methodist Church.

Until the early 1970's ministers in the Methodist Church served in a local church for roughly 3 years and then were assigned to a new church by their Annual Conference bishop.

This was a well-established tradition in the Methodist church from its founding.  The idea of ministers able to move at three year intervals was based on the idea of simple living ministers.  They could move and not become too attached to a local congregation and not too wealthy as a result of their fundraising skills.

Cecil created a large, several thousand member, congregation with a national reputation.  As a consequence it became impossible for the bishop of the Northern California Annual Conference to send Cecil off to some local congregation outside of San Francisco.  (Bishops Tippett and Cliff Crummy)

Because Cecil was black it was difficult to apply this rotating minister rule to him without coping with racist claims.

While Wikipedia mentions nothing about this, the Methodist Church was forced to drop one of its core important religious principles.  The Methodist appreciation of simple living was demonstrated by the rotation of the ministers on a continual basis. This disappeared. Methodism was a mainstream church with increasingly Leftist political values.  

This fear of being considered 'racist' for anyone dealing with blacks even in a normal way, was first evident  to me in the late 60s. It continues to this day. We have twice elected a black president who had little qualifying experience for the job and was a prolific liar in his first four years in office. But American Lefties don't want to be considered 'racist'.

No more drought hysteria

Northern California is currently experiencing a drought. I could go into the details about how poorly our water planning is done, how dependant our water supply is on snowmelt and dam control but that is irrelevant.

The main areas hit by a drought are the counties that depend on rainfall directly into their reservoirs.

Farmers are also restricted from drawing water from the Northern California rivers as they get lower during the drought.

All of this is nonsense. Israel, a desert country,  gets more than 50% of its freshwater from desalination. There is even a desalination plant being installed in San Diego California due to be running in 2016.

There is a  reason we don't have desalination in Northern California, where it would be very easy because salt water is diluted by the inflow of the Sacramento River.

The problem is the existing fragmented water commissions are unable to cooperate and lack leaders to organize joint projects with sufficient bond revenue.

This can be solved. We need an initiative in three counties: San Francisco, Alameda and Contra Costa. The desalination plants would be in Contra Costa. San Francisco doesn't really have a water shortage but it sells so much water to neighboring counties that it needs to have more water available in reserve.

Solving the problem of droughts with desalination plants:

First we need the legal wording of an initiative that will cover the three relevant counties to make sure that they build the desalination plants competently as well as raise sufficient bond money. That should be about $150,000 in legal fees.

We also need to underwrite three local initiatives. That's $300,000.

So for $450,000 we can solve the issues of regular recurring Northern California droughts.

Fix the San Francisco airport

My regular readers know that I frequently complain about the low quality of government at the local level. I not only complain about the political absurdity of a socialist San Francisco city government that tries to run our individual lives as a parent rather than as a competent government.  I complain that the government is incompetent at doing things that are needed.

I woke up one morning and realized my approach is wrong. I know how to make government work.  I took my two main government tasks and asked myself how to use existing structures to solve the problems. We lack individuals who care and know how to make changes.

The first task that needs being solved is the San Francisco airport. (The second one is in the next blog). We have two landing runways and two take off runways at a 90° angle. On days when the cloud cover is too low, which is common in San Francisco, the two landing runways are too close together for the regular 60 landings per hour. With low clouds landings are reduced to 30 per hour. That consequently reduces the number of flights leaving the airport too.

The two landing runways could be expanded easily by expanding into the adjacent bay.

The environmental organizations that control the bay prohibited this. The current airport political organizations have looked into the issue and always deferred to the power of the environmental political groups.

If the airport were run on a lease to a private company, the private company could easily resolve the expansion of the runway problem. The private companies could offer hundreds of acres of currently used salt flats to replace the dozens of acres needed for the airport runway expansion. How do we get private management of the airport?

The same way BART was created. By local initiative.  It took two elections for the BART initiative to pass.

San Francisco owns the airport and manages it even though it is in San Mateo County. We only need a local initiative in San Francisco directing the San Francisco Airport Commission to lease the airport to a private company.  There are several that run airports around the world.

The initiative must be very carefully written to make sure that it does not get commandeered by  politicians looking for a cushy job. That will cost about $100,000 in legal fees.

An initiative in an off year election will cost another $100,000.

That's how we can do it. For $200,000 we can have a world-class functioning airport that does not shut down every time the fog rolls in.

Computer virus pitch

I recently had a two week screaming fit. My computer was infected by a virus that put advertising on nearly every page I regularly viewed. I tried half a dozen Google Chrome ad blockers and pop-up blockers, none of which worked.

There is no way to describe the level of my frustration with ads and pop-ups on nearly everything I was doing.

There is one reason for this disaster: Microsoft announced that it was no longer going to maintain support for one of its earlier programs: XP.   XP is the most powerful and popular of all Microsoft programs in the last two decades and I had no desire to give it up nor did most of the people who were using it. But Microsoft, in its shortsighted view, stopped providing updates. This left my computer vulnerable to these goddamn awful viruses.

Let me say that Microsoft is violating one of my first rules of good business. People who buy software to use in their daily lives and in their business expect the relationship with the producer of that software to continue indefinitely. This is called a ‘clientric’ relationship. Microsoft failed.

There are many inducements that Microsoft could have offered to get those of us who love XP to update to a new system.  One would be to guarantee that everything running on XP programs would be upgradable with no effort.  Apple has done this in a few cases. Microsoft never made such guarantees and consequently new software was mainly bought by businesses, not by decent human beings as individuals. Businesses needed the upgrade and had the staff to make the conversions of old files feasible.

This is a good place for me to mention my final solution which worked.  I chose the Dutch AVG 8.5 program which is offered free as a sample for 30 days.

The sample immediately cleaned out 25 viruses, which my other virus suppression programs never touched.  It got rid of the ads and pop-ups. I immediately bought the two-year virus protection program from AVG for $85.

There are two elements of good business offered by AVG in contrast to the bad business practices of Microsoft. AVG allowed a 30 day trial and I could see immediately that it worked for me.

Secondly, AVG offers multi-year discounts as well as a discount for having tried it for 30 days. I never gave it a second thought; I was so happy to be rid of my virus problem.

The title of my big selling book Marketing Without Advertising,  lets you know what I think about ads. Pop-up ads on the computer screen interfere with what you are working on. It is absolutely no different than advertising in general that appears on television and newspapers everywhere. Advertising is not the same as listing. Listing is information when you want it when you are looking for it.  “Advertising is dog poo on the sidewalk” as my co-author Rasberry says.

Obscene sculpture

This blog is in memory of Carl Djerassi  who died recently. Djerassi is generally given credit for the invention of the oral contraceptive pill. This is a man who has changed the experiences of every person in the modern world.

The contraceptive pill for women allowed aggressive entry into the workplace for women without a national war footing. It also meant that women could enjoy sex without fear of unintentional pregnancy.  Women had gained new freedom when better sanitation drastically reduced death rates from childbirth. Ending the fear of unplanned pregnancy was frosting on the cake allowing sex to be genuinely enjoyable. We men are grateful too. Thanks Carl.

I met Carl at the Vorpal Gallery, owned by Muldoon Elder, in the early 1960’s. Muldoon was a good friend and I spent quite a bit of time visiting Muldoon. Carl also frequented the Vorpal where we got to know each other.  Carl came to my house once. We spent time chat chatting about art and his collections..

The way Muldoon became a friend of mine is an interesting story and an example of my early organizing skills.

I had bought three sculptures by Ron Boise from Muldoon. The Boise show was shut down by the San Francisco police (heavily Roman Catholic)  for obscenity a few months after I bought my small pieces. One pieces on this page is approximately 12 inches high. I sold all three many years ago.

When the police shut down Muldoon's gallery my first act was to convince him not to hire a political lawyer who I knew was an incompetent Lefty ideolog and was later murdered by one of her Lefty criminal clients. I convinced Muldoon to use the ACLU because they were free and their lawyer, Ephraim Margolin, was infinitely more competent.  Ephraim turned out to be superb in court and became a longtime friend of mine.

When the Gallery was shut down by the police I began an organizing project.  I gathered hundreds of people to be supporters of the Vorpal Gallery and opposed to an obscenity trial. We got plenty of pro-art publicity and I met many of the wealthy art owners. I already knew that publicity would influence the future jurors.

The newspaper on the right describes the trial and my role as a conservative banker as a witness. It was enjoyable.

I attended much of the trial. The jury deliberated a couple of days; they were debating with one jury member who was the most Puritan, a former hooker from Texas.  The jury came back with a not guilty verdict.

One byproduct of the trial, which had the prosecutors call the curator of the major San Francisco museums, was that a beautiful sculpture by Rodin was removed from the front of the Legion of Honor because it depicted a couple engrossed in an intimate embrace.

Bureaucratic appeal

My readers know that I have contempt for bureaucracy and bureaucrats. Bureaucracy is an institution that rewards seniority and punishes merit and ambition. Bureaucracies cannot be inventive or customer responsive. But they can maintain a status quo.

The question that many people ask me is: ‘why does someone become a bureaucrat?’

The answer is they lack ambition, they have no particular merit, and they don't know who they are in an authentic way that would allow them to develop their unique authenticity.

Bureaucracies offer stability in a world in which their lives have no particular meaning.  The promise of an early retirement with significant benefits to allow the non-striving, unambitious person to have a fantasy of a fun and an interesting life in old age.... is sufficient motivation.

The fact that old age for a bureaucrat has many shortcomings in terms of health and vitality is usually not understood by a person who is young and embarking on the bureaucratic life.

Beheading is a traditional tactic

I was thinking recently about the way that warfare has propelled the development of commerce in many ways.

Warfare developed the production line with interchangeable parts for rifles and other weapons. It developed airplanes and railroads and gasoline engines. It developed innumerable technologies as well as medical advances that were adopted by the commercial society and became modernity. Most importantly the military introduced into society meritocracy and maintenance.

I look at South Korea that became an industrial society after the Korean War where Americans trained Koreans in meritocracy and maintenance. The same was true for Taiwan after the Japanese introduced similar institutions.

So I was wondering whether the Arab world will get modernity out of their perpetual state of warfare.

This led me to think about the current popular Arab tactic of beheadings and stonings that they so proudly show on the Internet.

The traditional strategy of Arabs and many other traditional warriors, including Genghis Kahn, has been the use of attack, terrorize and runaway.

Sufficient use of this particular tactic of ‘terror’ has historically led cities and towns to capitulate to the invading armies and lay down their arms in fear.

This strategy in general doesn't work against modern armies that do not withdraw, do not retreat or runaway. But the terror tactics still remain in use among Arabs in the hopes of forcing capitulation among other Arab belligerents.   

Based on seeing the total ineffectiveness of the Iraqi troops after having been trained by Americans, I am dubious that modern warfare training will bring modernity to the Arab world.

I'm also reminded that highly skilled Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian pilots were shot down or destroyed on the ground by Israelis at a 100 to one ratio. No modernity there.

The reference in the comment below provides 90% of the relevant information to the 10% in this blog.

Ground Hog Day is about Commerce

It is beginning to look like the preeminent American film is a proto-comedy and a proto-philosophical work. It is Groundhog Day with Bill Murray and Andie MacDowell. The actual story everyone knows. Interestingly the story is resolved in a somewhat romantic form. Murray is propelled by a desire to attract the interest of MacDowell by improving himself. He becomes so enamored of the improvements for their own sake that he loses his own arrogance and in romantic fashion, ‘gets the girl’.

The focus on re-living each day until he gets it right is what most people focus on as the lessons of the film.

Not me. The idea that a meaningful life comes from finding your own internal qualities and nourishing those qualities is the message of the film. Happiness comes from fulfilling one's own internal competences and inclinations.

That is why I call this a film about commerce. Commerce has created tens of thousands of niches in our society for individuals to become authentic. To become fully developed beings. No other system, certainly not government, military, religion or bureaucracy has the potential to unleash the tens of thousands of individual authentic personalities and livelihoods that exist.

Groundhog Day is an encomium to commerce.

Jonathan Sacks

The Wall Street Journal has a section on Saturdays that is intended to be intellectually provocative. I appreciate that. They are picking intelligent people with interesting ideas as opposed to the New York Times that is simply publishing ideologues of the Time’s own cant regardless of their intelligence.

I wrote a blog on the erroneous ideas of Peter Thiel written in the WSJ and now I must comment on a recent article by Jonathan Sacks, the chief Rabbi of England, who is currently teaching in some prestigious New York Universities.

Sacks argues that Jew hate of the most dangerous kind arises when a nation or peoples have been humiliated. His model is Germany after WWI and the modern Arab world after the Ottoman Empire was disemboweled at the same time. Humiliation, in both cases led to dangerous Jew hate.

I see two reasons for Jew hate and several examples that contradict Sacks.

To me the dangerous kind of Jew hate that leads to genocide occurs only in societies where humiliation is concurrent with a hereditary upper class that promotes an external reason for the social problems. Jew's.

The second reason must invariably be that the humiliation and antagonism comes from commercial humiliation. It is not sufficient to just have humiliation in itself.

We have two recent cases of national humiliation where dangerous terminal Jew hate has not occurred. The Soviet Union was defeated, and feels horrible humiliation at the end of communism. We hear this stated explicitly by Vladimir Putin. And yet Jew hate has not risen to genocidal levels in the current Russia.

The reason is the absence of an hereditary upper class that is widely recognized.

The same is true for China that was bitterly humiliated by Britain and then conquered by Japan. We got a revolution but we didn't get Jew hate and we did not get a focus on some other minority.  In both cases we get a hatred of America.

To me the proof that Sacks model is wrong is that my model applies not just to Jews, but the same people who hate Jews hate America. To me that is proof that this hatred of Jews and America arises from humiliation caused by inadequate commercial competence which is true for Europe today and the Arab world as well as most Latin societies. They hate America as well as Jews.

I think I have given enough examples. Humiliation alone does not lead to genocide and that Jew hate is generated by commercial humiliation which is contemporaneous with hatred of America.

The real problem can be understood in terms of hatred of modernity which is synonymous with commerce, America and Jews.

 

Don’t let little minds shape you

I have had a policy throughout my entire adult life to never see a movie or read a book about a prominent person whom I've known. (Like Jim Jones or Harvey Milk). The same is true for movies or books about people whom I know to be very bright or extraordinary in some way that I understand.(Like Alan Turing).

My reasoning was simple. Such books and movies, especially documentaries are made by people who have significantly less intelligence and understanding than I do.

That means I am looking at parts of my life experience and my worldview with tinted glasses on.  There is no reason to do that, and I don't. It is similar to my refusal to read comic books that are summary versions of great books such as Shakespearean plays or Tolstoy’s fiction.

It turns out that I am not alone in this behavior. George Lucas felt the same way. Which is what led him to make his own films outside the studio system. Here is the quote from Lucas:

“Studio executives generally are not the most sophisticated people in the world…you do not want to be oppressed by people who are not as smart as you are and I’m dumb,” said Lucas.

CO2 and us

It has long baffled me that a microscopic part of our atmosphere should be condemned as the greatest human evil of our time. Carbon dioxide the source of life on this planet, has been stigmatized while only occupying .04% of our atmosphere. In English: four one hundredths of one percent.

I am further baffled by the question of how human beings and similar animals know when they are short of oxygen.

I know that oxygen is not measured by any animal sensory system, instead we detect an insufficiency oxygen by measuring the high proportion of CO2. When we start to feel we are out of oxygen it is because we detect too much CO2.

The contemporary way to commit suicide is to put a bag over your head and shoulders, and fill it with helium. As long as the CO2 is escaping and the helium is replacing oxygen you go to sleep and die because your brain is not getting oxygen and the CO2 mechanism to warn you doesn't have enough exhaled CO2 to be alarmed.

So how much CO2 can we detect? The answer is: we can't detect CO2 until it is 100 times greater than its concentration in the atmosphere. Here is the study that shows that we can't detect what we exhale at the level of 4%. That is possibly the point at which we know we should exhale. There is probably some point above that where we are forced to breathe. I'm sure people who do free-diving, know what that level of CO2 must be.

In any case, we are not very sensitive to CO2 is in our environment and can’t personally detect when it is at a dangerous level. That answers my question.

On demand workers

There are several smartphone apps that have created work for people called ‘on demand workers’ which means people who work when they want to or when jobs are available that they want to do.

Uber and similar ridesharing companies work that way. You become a taxi when you feel like it or when the price of being a driver and the time of day suits your tastes.

There is a Taskrabbit app that I love. You see a list of workers willing to do specific jobs around the house, for a party or for your business.  You post the job and people who want to take that job bid on it. If the job is interesting and suitable for them, they do it.

Of course, since we live in a society heavily populated by anti-commerce people, Lefties, environmentalists, and organized groups such as unions, these people find the idea of ‘on demand workers’ to be odious. These anti-commerce people universally assume that people only work for money and economic stability. The existence of ‘on demand workers’ imply that many people work at something they enjoy and do it in ways that can supplement their life.

Everywhere in the world, unions and local governments, are trying to argue that ‘on demand workers’ are really employees and should not have the freedom and independence that defines ‘on demand’..

The real problem here is that ‘on demand workers’ are more decent, competent and intelligent people than the anti-commerce population. The ones that want all workers to be considered employees and subject to employee laws and disciplines.

Hasn't this always been a problem in society? The happy go lucky, carefree person who is productive, has friends and does what they enjoy have always been envied. And criticized.

That's what we have. And, sadly, there are enough of the miserable, unhappy salaried workers and union members to do their part to politically quash this infusion of joy in the form of ‘on-demand workers’.

Obama and the Democrats finished him off

It took a long time for this man's ghost to be killed with a wooden spike. I'm talking about John Maynard Keynes.

Keynes has become the leading model for gross economic planning. He has reigned supreme for more than 70 years. I read his General Theory when I was in college economics and was unable to find anything other than socialist clap-trap. There was a hint in the appendix of a different model.  But in fact it was Keynes’ direct personal advice to England that became the theology of Keynesian economics.  Keynesianism claims that in order to increase consumer demand in periods of negative GDP, the government must increase its deficit.

This has been American policy as well as that of almost every other advanced nation in the world since WWII.

Thanks to the Democratic party we had an experiment that clearly contradicts Keynesian doctrine. Japan, of course, clearly proved Keynesian doctrine wrong earlier when the Japanese increased their deficit, for two decades, to the point where it was twice as great as their GDP. Japan never had respectable economic growth during that 20 year period.

The Democratic Congress in 2009, in response to a financially generated recession passed nearly $1 trillion in government spending and the associated deficit. We now have a careful study of what happened after the Republican Congress of 2011 applied serious restraints to the government deficit.

Once the restraints on the deficit were in place the economy of the United States began to grow at a rate far faster than it did during the Keynesian preceding three years. A great test and proof that Keynesianism doesn’t work.

Putting the stake in the heart of the Keynesian ghost was again the act of a Republican Congress that refused to extend unemployment compensation beyond the three years it had already been extended. The consequence was that we had many different states with different lengths of time for unemployment compensation.

In many cases we had counties on different sides of a state line as perfect control tests of the effect of having unemployed workers without unemployment payments. The marvelous study of that data shows that when you reduce or stop unemployment payments employment goes up. People get off their asses and seek work.

At least among economists, young ones will now have overwhelming evidence that Keynes’ theories don't work.

Obituaries 2

This is a continuation of yesterday's blog about obituaries.

The two people for whom these obituaries were written were public figures and I was prompted to write about them for different reasons than the omission of parts of their life from their obituaries by spouse or friend. I wrote these because it was important to convey significant political lessons.

The first was about Ed Roberts, the founder of the human disability rights movement.

Ed's wife and friends wrote a good obituary, an accurate one.

But they missed the important element that made Ed the powerful and successful person he was.

Ed never tried to influence people through the Leftist appeal to their support for underdogs or sympathy for the downtrodden. Ed always appealed to people on the basis that other disabled were like him. They were great potential contributors to society who were not being appreciated. People so loved Ed that they wanted him to be a full and productive member of their life. And the same became true for other disabled.

I had to tell the world how Ed used this love of him to make changes for the benefit of millions.

In exactly the opposite realm, a very productive longtime friend of mine, Frances Peavey had a strong antagonism toward Jews. This antagonism was so strong that she, in her global peacemaking work, was able to accompany the Israeli army when it invaded Lebanon. The Israeli army, as is its character, would always notify civilians by pamphlet and loudspeaker, that it was approaching a town or village and that innocent people should leave.

No other army in history has ever behaved with such extraordinary moral clarity. Fran, because of her antagonism toward Jews, still complained about the ruthlessness and aggressiveness of the Israeli army, never mentioning its incredible moral actions.

Since her antagonism toward Jews permeated her decision-making, the articles she wrote, in ways that was never explicit, I had to make sure that it was in her obituary.

I wrote the obituary nine years before she died and made sure she knew about it. At one point she asked for mediation. We had the mediation and being the bleeding heart wimp that I am I toned down the obituary but she never changed anything because her Jew hate was not subject to rational review.

I simply wanted the world to understand that she was not a saint and that some of her actions were not unmitigatingly good.

Obituaries 1

I have felt forced to write four obituaries so far. Two are covered in tomorrows blog. These obituaries, in today's blog, were for close friends for whom I felt the published obituaries were inadequate.

One was for my close friend and co-author Ernest Callenbach. Chick as he was known had his obituary written by his beloved wife and a few friends. His wife influenced what was written about the parts of Chicks life that were important to her. That included his love of Buffalos, a particular book he wrote about a whale that swam up the Sacramento River and was a big seller.

His wife and friends, in the official obituary,  played down four things of great importance.

• Chick wrote a very successful novel that was a hippie favorite which emphasized the environmental world and made Chick a leader in that world. Ecotopia.

• Chick wrote a book on simple living, which was excellent, but was inappropriate for his wife and was not mentioned in the obituary.

• Chick was a founder of Film Quarterly and his role was downplayed.

• Most importantly to me, Chick was my co-author on the first book about random selection of legislators. Historically this is an important book with global ramifications and it has had great history since its publication.

Fortunately wikipedia has a good summary of Chick’s working life.

A very close friend and lover, Annie Styron, married for a second time late in her life to a prominent author, George Leonard.

In her public obituaries her life begins with her marriage to George. That was the Annie who George knew and his friends knew. They were the people who wrote her obituary.

Annie had started organizations in the environmental movement and played an important role in the hippie world, all of which was ignored in the published obituaries by her friends from her late in life marriage. Here is the obituary I added about Annie.

 

Contrary person

Among American Indians, I have heard that there was always a tribal role for a contrary person (see Phil Ossiferz Stone's comment below for more details).

 

This contrary Indian was enabled to do opposite things to tradition and to standard daily behavior. If everyone else wore shirt's with feathers on the front, the contrary person could wear the feathers on the back and the feathers could be on left side not on the right. The contrary person could sleep during the day and go out through the wrong door. Live with a man instead of a woman.

 

We know very little more about the contrary person and his or her role in the tribe.

 

I knew an actual contrary person. She was a wonderful beloved girlfriend, Ranny Riley. Actually, Frances O'Brien Riley. She was a contrary person in every way, every day. If you asked for something, like a glass of water or to ‘pass the sugar’ she would say “no”. If you wanted to go to a movie, she wanted to watch television.

 

I quickly learned how to deal with this. On one trip to Japan, Ranny and I were at a flea market. She saw an old spinning wheel that she considered to be beautiful. It was. Ranny came from a rich family and could buy anything she wanted. I realized, that I being the person who understood Japan, if she bought the spinning wheel, I would have to find a way to package it and ship it home. A nightmare.

 

I told Ranny how much I loved the spinning wheel, how beautiful and wonderful it was.  She should buy it. I also said that I saw an antique watch a few aisles over that I thought she might like but that she should definitely not buy.  It was not beautiful enough, and much too expensive.

 

Ranny went right over and bought the watch instead.

 

Ranny was a member of the ‘upper-social class’ in San Francisco. She always lived in the appropriate neighborhood and often took me to society parties. I promptly found that most society people were eloquent and very conversationally gifted for the first 10 minutes of any encounter. After that, not much happened because they were fairly shallow people whose main interests were fashion and lifestyle.

 

I once gave Ranny my credit card to buy clothes for me at a fancy mens store where we both were shopping.  After buying a few shirts and ties we went to another department to look at pants. I said to Ranny that we had already spent $400 in the shirt department. Ranny explained to me: ‘Michael, if you total up the amounts in each department, you'll never learn how to shop’.

 

Ranny was a wonderful person, excellent in business, self-propelled and self-motivated. A sexual giant. She died a few years ago and I still miss her.