Pro Commerce

Jehovah's Witnesses

The woman I live with, thinks it is strange that I invite the Jehovah’s Witnesses that come to the front door to come in and visit.

First, one of the Witnesses was a beautiful second generation Ethiopian woman.  That is my first motivation.  Second, they are good listeners and polite.  Third, this is a chance to try out my rhetoric about pro commerce on ordinary people.

Last week the issue came up about whether the world was heading toward Armageddon since 1914.  I pointed out what commerce had brought us, since 1820, astounding improvements  in health, life span, reduction in birth defects, and pain in general. Much of the improvement has been since 1914.  That our levels of comfort with clothes, foods and housing had been dramatically improved;  as well as giving us immense amounts of free time and general freedom.  They asked if those improvements were due to technology.  I said yes, but technology is a by-product of commerce; look at North Korea and Cuba, places without commerce and limited benefits from technology.

Lastly we discussed heaven and biblical promises of paradise.  I said that I was living in paradise already.  I had almost never suffered pain in my life, had pleasure, joy and excitement nearly every day and most importantly, I had spent my life exploring the world, exploring my self and doing everything that my curiosity drew me to.  I have a wonderful loving family and myriad fascinating friends.  I have never done work for a day that I didn’t love.  I am enjoying the paradise of biblical prophecy. Thanks to commerce.

My visitors left, pretty much nodding in agreement with me.

Travel may not be broadening

I have traveled most of the world.  I started in my early teens.  On my own.  I would say that no travel had any impact on me until I was past 30.

My readers know that I don’t believe that humans are capable of important new thought after age 23.  Only about one out of 200 people are different from my observation. We are primates and learning occurs before adulthood.

Travel had no impact on me before an event at age 33. I remember my views.  I saw most other people as diminished versions of Americans.  Diminished in a variety of ways.  The French were an arrogant version of Americans who loved dogs and prefer oral sex to genital sex. The Brits were a backward race who loved to argue, never listen and eat awful food.  Everyone else was a variation on this line of thought.

I technically knew about culture from reading all the great cultural thinkers.  It didn't sink in.

It was on a trip around the world at age 33 and a discussion with zen Abbott Baker roshi that opened my eyes.  Baker roshi told me what he had been able to see in three years of living in Kyoto.

I arrived in Kyoto and my eyes began to open. Japanese sexuallity was different.  I saw a three year old Japanese girl on a bus near me masturbating through her dress.   When her mother saw me looking she desperately tried to get the girl to look out the bus window and stop what she was doing. Japanese don't say 'no' to children, they use distraction.

I was staying at a Japanese version of a Bed and Breakfast (Minshuku) that was run by a 50 year old woman.  I noticed that every afternoon a teenage boy ( several different ones) would come to a small room in the house with her and ostensibly give her a massage.  But it was much more than a massage as I could tell from the sounds and shadows. Older women comfortably have sex with younger men.

I wandered into a building one morning in a temple area, paid the door fee and joined about 15 men watching a sex show of some sort.  Women wearing school clothes, or house wives costumes would come down the runway.  Take off all their clothes and put them carefully in a basket;  kneel down and masturbate for a few minutes, sometimes with a vibrator.  They then spread their legs and passed out a few flashlights so the men in front could look in their vaginas.  Then they would leave with their basket of clothes and a new woman would come out on the runway.  Yes, strip, no tease.

From that point on, I began to see culture in a different light.  Now I can see culture, the way I was taught to see it by Franz Boaz, Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Whorf-Sapir and many others.

Can people see another culture just by getting off a boat in Barcelona for a few hours?  Can they see another culture even in a few weeks staying in a small village? No.  It is not possible.  Travel is not broadening for 199 people out of 200 and that one out of 200 may miss it too.  

I think it takes education combined with cognitive dissonance and a unique open mind to see another culture. Not travel itself.

Try this

My wonderful blog readers know I have been frustrated by a website I created that is getting no attention.

I am trying a new approach.  A free sample.  The most powerful marketing approach I find used in Japan.  Whenever you buy something at a department store, you are given a small gift of something related to the object you bought.

My website has over 300 MP3 interviews with people I recorded for my national public radio show Social Thought.

I have now put audio samples of six interesting guests.  You can hear them free.

Please try them here.  See if it propels you to spend the $.75 to buy an interview; go ahead, I will see the purchase.

The audio samples I’ve chosen are Mancur Olson the genius who figured out the relationship between politics and commerce; Steven J. Gould the man who made evolutionary selection a key mode of thinking; Joyce Appleby, the woman who understands how America came to appreciate commerce in the first place; Todd Gitlin an historian who saw the power of Copernicus to create global exploration; and lastly Chick Callenbach who co-authored Citizen Legislature with me in introducing random selection in politics to the world.

Funeral urns

You can laugh at me for this one.

My father wanted to have his ashes scattered over the San Francisco Bay.

A pretty simple request of me, a private pilot.

The day came to carry the box of his ashes up in a small two seat Cessna.  The windows open easily and it is safe to do it at 70 knots, which is also a safe flying speed.

I had a close relative, who shall remain nameless, for reasons you will quickly recognize.

I asked her if she knew how ‘to empty something’ into a moving air stream, as you would do when pouring coffee out of a moving car window.  She said ‘yes’, and I told her how to open the window.

Well, she didn’t know how to do it. Properly you put the open side directly into the wind.  She just put the box out the window open side facing away from the plane.

We were over Alcatraz, roughly the middle of the Bay.

All the ashes blew back into the plane.

When we landed at Oakland airport, I had to find a vacuum cleaner and vacuum the inside of the plane.  That is where my father ended up.

Interestingly at an art exhibit, a few months later, I saw some imaginative funeral urns.  One was exactly like the one my father ended up in.

Banking

Few things are as irrational as the American banking system. This chart shows consolidation over the past half century.

Our banking system has been a political football from our founding days.  Alexander Hamilton, the true genius of the American Republic and the author of nearly all the Federalist papers was also the creator of our pro commerce financial system.  Nearly every detail of it.

However, the city hating, commerce hating, ordinary people hating, slave owning founder of the Democrat Party, Thomas Jefferson, did everything in his power, including running for the office of President, to thwart the success of finance, commerce and the modern world.  

As the anti-Hamilton, Jefferson set in motion the battle between a rational banking system that would have been stable and conducive to strong economic growth and sheer chaos that brought financial panics every five years and monetary lunacy nationwide.

At its wildest, as described by Mark Twain on a Mississippi riverboat, a gambler could ride from St. Louis to New Orleans and make money playing cards by memorizing the books of currency values. Each local bank issued currency.  He would only play for pots that had valuable currency and would use the least valuable currency for his own plays in the pot. The values were published in books that evaluated how much gold the bank had in reserve.  One bank’s dollar could be worth four or five times the value of another bank’s.  The gambler memorized the different values.

At the same time gold discoveries in the California Sierra and silver discoveries in the Rockies were dropping the value of gold by 40% to 90%.

After the Civil War the U.S. government issued the single currency we now use.  Backing it with gold and silver became a political issue.  In either case the value fluctuated with new ore discoveries.  Banks came and went.  

The Federal Reserve was set up to create stability.  Established in 1913, It wasn’t allowed to work for 35 years as the U.S. treasury limited its function.  

The government insurance program created in 1933 (FDIC) to insure deposits put an end to the regular runs on banks and incredible bank volatility that had been the norm for 140 years.

When I was in banking in the 1960’s, my big bank was continually buying smaller banks.  Economies of scale.  The deposit side of banking was being handled by computers.  That continued unabated until the S&L failures of the 1980’s when S&Ls were made into banks, and then sold to bigger banks in the 1990’s.

Banking is very simply.  Consumer checking accounts bring in the money that the banks lend to corporations.  Loans are all 100% secured and have a loss rate of 0.5%.  The only issue about bank size was  the number of customers; state banks were limited in size, they became national after 1997 when Sandy Weill at Citicorp got Congress to permit it.  Another wave of consolidations, usually encouraged by the Fed. and the Treasury.

The current financial system is still unstable, because it is still designed by Democrats.  The world suffers as a result.  Most financing is outside of banking but that hasn’t dawned on the political world.

Postscript. The two banks shown are Bank of California 1970 where I was a Vice President and Bank of America where I started the marketing research dept and arranged for the land this dark building was build on.

Crime is rising

Crime has been falling steadily since the peak in 1991, a 21 year steady decline.

Now it is rising.  Rising rapidly.  In San Francisco, it started with car break-ins in 2011. Car break-ins have risen from 10k to 26k, a 260% increase in four years.

Car thefts in that time have risen 65%.  Except for murder all other crime rates are up in the City. They are rising in every city.  Some with big black populations are rising much faster.

Murder in San Francisco has not risen because the city population of blacks has been falling steadily for 50 years.  There are very few left and most of them are old.

Unlike San Francisco, murder and violent crime has been rising rapidly in most big cities in the U.S.

I see three different forces at work here.  

First, in the violent crime category.  The Democrat Party war on police is having a real effect.  It has been particularly noticeable since April of 2015 due to Ferguson Mo. and Baltimore.  It became obvious to every police officer that the Democrat Party would blame them for any shooting of a black in self defense.  The way to deal with that is to stay out of black neighborhoods and let them kill each other.

The second is a rise in all other non-violent crime.  Two reasons: first a general relaxation of punishment by DA’s and juries because crime is relatively low.  But most importantly, the smartphone makes non-violent crimes easier to commit.

Smartphones?  Yes, with one person as lookout with a phone the second person can commit crimes freely.  Before smartphones and texting, the job of lookout was almost as risky as committing the crime.  Not so with texting available.

Lastly, four things my readers need to know about policing, if they don’t know already.  

• A police officer would rather sit in a safe coffee shop or the police car than go anywhere near a dangerous neighborhood.  They don’t want to get hurt or killed.
• Nearly all criminals who are caught were caught because someone called the police to report them.  My guess is 90% of arrests are based on reports about the criminal.  Which is why black crime solving is low.  Blacks are afraid for their lives if they report a crime.
• Often when a shooting occurs the criminal is killed.  A wounded criminal will sue.  A dead  one is less likely to.  
• In the same vein, if multiple police are around, there will be multiple shots.  Each officer fires to protect all of them from getting the singular blame.

Crime is rising because a steady number of black criminals are reaching teen age, their technology is getting better and police are not changing anything.

Hooverville

We have always had the poor, the indigent and hobos.  Cities in the U.S. have always tried to provide housing and simple shelter. There was an explosion of street people at the end of the 1970's as the hippies made living on the streets socially acceptable.

The number of people living on the streets also began rising in the late 1920’s before the stock market crash of ‘29.  The numbers grew well into the 1930’s.  The villages that were created by these people were called Hoovervilles. The Democrat Party, as usual, blamed the severe fall in GNP on the financial crash and the president at the time, Herbert Hoover.

History doesn’t support that analysis.  And history doesn’t support the analysis that the Democrat’s aggressive expansion of government had any beneficial effects on employment.

The relevance to this blog is that we have Obamaville’s all over America.  The census of people living on the streets does not reflect a recent significant increase in that population.  But it is visually growing.  Believe your eyes.  The street population is growing.

It is even more visual because ordinary citizens in towns that have big recreational enthusiast populations are giving the street dwellers their camping equipment, especially expensive tents.

The reality of the current economy is that middle income people are watching their incomes stagnate while more people leave the labor market.  Crime is rising, food lines are getting longer and misery is on the increase.

The Democrat Party hostility to commerce doesn't improve the situation.  It does everything to make life harder on poor people.  Raising the minimum wage eliminates mundane jobs, banning large chain stores raises core food costs and high priced city union jobs eliminates funds for simple cleanup jobs. Most of all environmental costs make autos and driving more costly.  Rent control doesn't help nor do all the restrictions on new construction.

Baruch

I have regular Friday evening Sabbath candle lightings and invite a few friends.  We often eat afterwards.

Why would this be of interest to any of my readers?  Jews have been doing it for several thousand years, weekly.

Primarily because my friends, Jew and non-Jew have come to enjoy the Sabbath ceremony. I use it as a way to have each guest talk about their week.   We need that kind of summary and review of our lives, those of us who don’t go to therapists.

Guests also seem to love the ritual where we pour the wine into glasses overflowing.  Smaller than normal wine glasses.  This is a symbol of abundance.  An extraordinary symbol that I've regularly seen in Japan for pouring sake.

Lastly, this may be of interest to my readers who like ritual but are not ‘God Centered’ as my Reform rabbi father used to say.  

In translating the Hebrew, I explain that a late friend who was a Buddhist priest turned Conservative rabbi, Alan Lew, had a different translation.  He translated the Sabbath prayer's first six words (from the right) as ‘Praise to you, oh great sound that pervades the universe..’

This turns Jehovah into a Buddhist entity.

I have one personal reason for loving this interpretation of Hebrew. My son knows the daughter of the man who jointly found the 2 degree background microwave radiation of the universe, Arnold Penzias. She, Penzias' daughter, is a rabbi. I’ve met her.  

The universe really has this ancient ringing sound everywhere.

So, Rabbi Lew is right in a unique way.  There is a sound that pervades the universe, a sound left over from creation.

Rouault

It is time to look back on the last century and the state of the visual arts.

I have argued about art that there are two points of significance.  The first is the ability to change the vocabulary of everyone, visual as well as other vocabularies.  Edvard Munch did that with his ‘The Scream’ and Marcel Duchamp did it with his bicycle wheel and urinal.  

The second is the ability to influence the living aesthetic of homes, offices and public spaces.  Just about every prominent 20th Century artist did this.  Picasso, Matisse, Pollock, Pizarro, Rauschenberg, Frank L. Wright and Rothko.  We live with their work embedded  in fabrics, wallpaper, furniture and the visual world everywhere including television, fashion, the movies and advertising.

While I have many favorites there is one artist’s work that haunts me.  He forms a new third category: He changed how a few other great artists work.  

It is Georges Rouault.  His painting of ‘The Old King’, has haunted me for over 50 years.  What Rouault did was to paint and paint and never stop working on a single painting.  He never felt any of his paintings were finished.  It is this depth of mental and emotional interaction with his own art that is visible to me.  His paintings are layered in a way that human lives and personality are layered.

I think his influence was immense in ways that have yet to be understood.

How to explain to Lefties?

There have been a steady stream of solid retail businesses closing in San Francisco and Oakland.  Oakland has a minimum wage of $12.25 in force now.  That is where San Francisco’s is now too, on its way to $15.00.

In Oakland, Walmart has closed.  In San Francisco, two McDonald’s have closed. Because of the minimum wage.

There are two problems.  The first is that no business is willing to say publicly that the minimum wage is the reason they are closing or have closed.  They know they won’t be believed and that angry voters will see their explanation as partisan politics.  That will create deep hostility among their employees, friends, associates and other customers.

The consequence is that the Lefty public will not know how much damage they have done with minimum wage laws.

The second problem is that I am surrounded by people, all Lefties, who believe that a high minimum wage can’t hurt business and is good for workers.  They believe this with the same certainty that they believe the sun rises every day in the East.

Can you sense my frustration?

I realize how difficult this concept is.  Most people have no idea that businesses survive on a revenue stream they have found and cultivated, that is always precarious.  The prices of all the goods and services involved are all sensitive to comparable prices in surrounding areas.  A restaurant changes prices on the menu regularly to find out what is too high and drives customers to eat something else on the menu and often too high that they will not come back.

Then there is the issue of costs. Since the revenue stream is relatively fixed, price changes have to be dealt with by substituting one cost for another, reducing inputs, finding greater productivity or some other cost saving.  Minimum wages have an effect on the largest variable cost of any business. Going from a $10 per hour to $12.25 (where it was) is a 22% increase in all labor costs.  Including overhead of medical coverage, vacation, workers compensation, social security and sick time.  Most importantly, every one who’s wages are above the minimum gets a raise too to keep the authority and management structure in the same place.

Simple therefore: if wages are 20% of all costs then costs go up to 24%.  If labor is 40%, as it is in many businesses, then labor costs go up to 50%.  Just with the raise to $12.25.  It is going up to $15.00 in many cities. Intolerable.  But to understand this one needs competent arithmetic and some understanding of inflexible revenue for most businesses.

How was I born and raised in a country where such incredible ignorance reigns supreme?  I’m serious; I have never met a person who believes this climbing minimum wage nonsense who will change their mind for any reason. Nobody.

All I can say, that is positive, is this is another chance to study mass hysteria.  The problem is that thousands of good businesses will be destroyed, jobs lost, new entry level positions obliterated, low income people punished and the message still won’t get through to the large world of Lefties.

Hotels need to learn from airbnb

I find people everywhere preferring an airbnb lodging to a hotel.  Money is seldom the issue because it is often cheaper to go to the hotel.

When I talk to these airbnb users I get many reasons and I see a few more.  The most common reason given is the desire to be in a real neighborhood.  Followed by the desire to entertain friends, cook for themselves and have a sense of personal space.

The other reasons that aren’t expressed are the impersonality of hotels, the lack of personalized comfort spaces in hotels and the long hall ways that are too much like prisons and other cold institutions.

I think hotels are going to have to do much more to meet these challenges.   I stayed in a hotel like apartment in Tokyo that had a wonderful kitchen with everything I needed.  I stayed a month and it was great.  Tiny but only a few footsteps from the elevator and with shopping and every service within a few hundred feet.   

Being in residential areas will be a challenge considering the business hatred so deeply ingrained in most Democrat controlled cities.  But the necessary battles have to be fought.

Problems with retail stores

Every day we get more evidence of the contraction of retail businesses.  The biggest and most surprising to me is Walmart.  But Walmart explains their behavior as a switch to online selling.

Walmart is reducing its number of stores most in urban areas where wages are going up and Target is making inroads.

Unions in big cities create hostility toward Walmart.  That can’t make management feel good about serving the customers in areas where they are abused.  Also that hostility almost certainly crosses many expansion plans off the list.  It affects Target too.  Unions are bad for low income people and minorities. The Walmart in Oakland closed because of the local minimum wage laws.

The real problems of traditional retail stores are the long tail, delivery and parking.  

The long tail is important.  I looked at my most recent ten orders from Amazon.  Every one was for an ordinary item that I couldn’t find in a local retail store.  ‘Long tail’ refers to the distribution of goods and services when laid out on a horizontal grid with shopping volume.  There are all the goods commonly stocked in retail because they are frequently bought.  They warrant shelf space.

The ‘long tail’ refers to the many products that move off the shelves slowly and are not carried in retail stores of finite footage.  Such as dense urban areas. 'Long tail' comes from the graph of the sales volume curve where it is low and very low.

The next iteration of retail will have screens everywhere with all the long tail items that can be delivered in hours, with complete descriptions on the screen.  Retail must deal with this significant force in their business.  People now prefer not to waste a trip to shop.

In urban areas that gets to the next issue.  Parking.  Every retail business knows how much parking is needed for the business to function.  I’ve watched Trader Joes, Home Depot and Fry’s, the leading computer supply store, turn down great locations because the local political idiots wouldn’t wouldn’t give them enough adjacent parking.

Retailers will have to band together to educate urban politicians about the consequent loss of business.

Lastly, online businesses have a great advantage in delivery.  Delivery to the home is hard to beat. The only answer to this is to make a retail visit a theatrical event that makes the trip to the store worthwhile.  McDonald's did a little of this with children’s play structures, but that is trivial compared to what is needed.

Retail has a long downhill future.  With minimum wage laws proliferating because of union support and the business ignorance of Lefties, the downhill slope is steeper than ever.

Religions

My perspective on religion is heavily shaped by the fact that I am a Jew and consider myself a part of the Jewish peoples.  That means Israel is now and always has been part of my life.

I look at the religions of the world with that lens.  

I feel comfortable with Buddhism in its many forms, Daoism and Shintoism, whatever those three may actually be (probably not religion in the same meaning as Christianity or Islam).

On a personal basis, as a young boy living for a few years in El Paso I was tormented, chased and beaten as a Jew by Mexican Catholic Dominicans from my public school.

As an adult I was the business manager of a United Methodist Church and knew many Methodist ministers and a few bishops.  I had great admiration for many of them.

I watched American mainstream Protestant religions go from important, large, vital organizations in 1965 to trivial today.  From 35 million regular church goers in an America of 200 million people to 15 million attendees in a nation of 320 million people.  An effective fall of 75%, three quarters.

What these churches did to self destruct is clear.  They joined the Democrat Party.  That was an abandonment of religion.  Or a redefinition of religion as partisan politics.  

Now these remnants of important religions are on the path to total self destruction.  The three largest denominations the United Methodists, Anglicans and the Presbyterians have each declared themselves Jew hate organizations.

I won’t argue the specifics of their Jew hatred.  Only a fool would think that anti-Israel policies that only apply to Israel are not based on Jew hate.

The issue for me is that these three Christian organizations have eaten the bitter fruit of self hate.  When you hate Jews you are hating the founder of your religion.   Jesus was born in Israel of Israeli parents; he walked the paths of Israel and his friends were Israeli’s.  

For people today to hate Jesus’ people for any reason is self hate.  When they pray to ‘Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ’ they must have some part of their brain that says ‘that Jew would have nothing to do with me today’.

Christians who are now part of a Jew hate cabal are people who have to live with a cognitive dissonance of the first order.  

Inheritance

In my (and Rasberry’s) book the Seven Laws of Money the 6th Law is that you can’t really receive money as a gift.  The law is describing a reality of life.  All money that purports to be a gift really has expectation behind it.  If those expectations are ignored there are negative consequences that emerge from the milieu around us or from our own pre-conscious self.

One of the most troubling areas where I see this law of money come into play is around inheritance.

The problem of inheritance relates to an old Arab curse that I love and nearly worship: ‘May you be involved in a lawsuit where you believe with certainty that you are right.’   

Inheritance creates a specific problem.  The heirs didn’t earn the money and as with all lives that are not authentic, when the money comes it creates its own unfulfillable expectations.

If the donor wants the heirs to be in the family business, that has to begin early.  If the donor wants the heirs to be comfortable, that can only happen if the heirs have the skills and talents to cope with the world.  Also that requires early training.

What do I mean?  When you win a lottery or a MacArthur grant, the money will destroy you  UNLESS you are already a fully developed person who goes on with your life and just adds the money to what you are doing already.

People who are living with the expectation of an inheritance seldom become fully developed people.  They don’t find their authentic self.  They are still waiting for a part of themselves, their inheritance.

Money is only language.  It is not character, direction or meaning.  It can be used just as new words can be used, but it is really only new words.

Inheritances, no matter how well designed are usually devastating.  The family falls to fighting and the lawyers get good work.  The destruction of the family is tragic and harmful to all involved.

The only benefit of inheritance is to reinforce good behavior and good values that already exist.  That is also true for all philanthropy.

College admissions

Four recent cases of college admissions for me to consider.

I got a scholarship to the University of Chicago when I was fifteen and was very happy to get out of high school which I considered a comic book version of education.  I don’t remember applying  to Chicago but I had taken the College Entrance exam.  I also got accepted at Harvard.

Two grand daughters applied to college under an interesting entrance program.  They applied to only one school and the condition is that the one school has six weeks to accept or reject them.  They are stars in academics and hold state swimming records.  So they were accepted.  Now they are free to enjoy life and not think about college.  

A friend who has a brilliant and lovely daughter, has lived with her all her K-12 life in the heart of Africa, Madagascar and now in Barcelona.  She has always gone to rigorous French schools. ( Did you know that in every French school the curriculum is the same worldwide and the classroom materials are specific and sold in specific French stores, even in the heart of Africa.)  Her father is a respected graduate of Stanford.  She applied to many universities and only got in to her last choice (and it would be my last choice too.)

Another friend has a daughter, Gini, who went to high school with a close friend.  The two girls got the same high grades. Both applied to a dozen colleges.  Gini’s friend was editor of the school paper, is a heavy doper and got accepted at all of them.  Gini is a world traveler, a major organizer of a local choir and a good musician. She only got accepted at her bottom choice.

What is going on?  Who are these admissions deans?

I loved the University of Chicago because there were many brilliant students to be my friends.  I met blacks who got me into the civil rights movement in 1957.  I met students from around the world.  Many friends were offspring of famous writers, philosophers and artists. It was a challenging, expanding and exciting environment for me.

How could schools take someone who was a stoner in journalism over a talented serious girl?  How could any school reject a brilliant student from rigorous French schools with living experience in the real world?

Most of this doesn’t look good for commerce or the future.  Some really interesting people seem to be slighted.

Masonic Order

Joyce Appleby told me about a book that argued for a central role for the Masonic Order in the Industrial Revolution.  I never found the book, but the idea makes a great deal of sense to me.

I have added a unique perspective to the history of the Industrial Revolution and modernity.  Because a foundational element of both is meritocracy, one needs to explain how meritocratic people got out from under the oppressive rule of the hereditary elites.

I have supported the ‘great empire theory’ which helps explain how the meritocratic second and third siblings were able to leave their home country and be creative overseas; like Winston Churchill and many of America’s entrepreneurial geniuses.

My important contribution is to understand that the vast West of America played the same role for meritocratic dissidents to leave homes where the power restraining them was too oppressive.

One of the missing ingredients in my thinking is ‘how did these meritocrats’ find each other and get help in starting businesses?”.

The answer is found in the stories of John Paul Jones and Wallace Stegner’s grandfather.

Jones was a Scots outsider, but a good ship’s captain.  It was when Ben Franklin brought him into the Masonic Order that he flourished and got good ships.

Stegner’s grandfather was a civil engineer in the unsettled wild west.  Although a politically unskilled man without money he was still able to build bridges and dams because he was a Mason and his fellow Masons helped him everywhere he wandered.

The Masonic Order provided the social and network infrastructure that the meritocratic Americans needed to build the modern world.

How to create a Detroit or Baltimore

There are many cities that are in bad shape and a few worse than Detroit and Baltimore. Many more will face the same disaster in the near future.

The problem isn’t that the black underclass population is large.  That is one of the results of poor city government because the non-black workers and their families have left.

The problem dates back to the 1960’s when the hereditary elite in America disappeared for reasons explained in this blog.   When the hereditary elite lost power, the formerly stable urban governments moved from politically balanced to pure Democrat. The urban powers that remained were the unions; the Democrat Party. Almost identical twins.

The Democrat Party and the unions, without the previous restraints, embarked on two paths.  Deliberate expansion of city employment which meant expansion of the government unions.  And the increase in government employee pay and pensions.  Today urban government workers earn nearly 150% of what comparable market rate jobs offer.

Over time the only way to pay for these expanded government budgets is to raise taxes.  That drives out businesses and workers who follow the businesses.

The only cities that can survive the Democrat-union vicious circle are ones that have growing new businesses.  That is very few.  With each down turn the situation gets worse. The 2008 financial downturn saw the Federal government give half a trillion dollars to city governments to bail them out.

The next time a bail out may not be available.

Academia as a calling

My regular readers know that I have a website called Social Thought Radio.  I have put up over 300 public radio interviews I did with important thinkers and academics on the subject of Social Thought. Social Thought is concerned with how institutions work.  

Most of the interviews are brilliant.  All are interesting and important.  So now that the website is up and running and I have done what I can do to market the site, what can I say?

Each of these interviews is 30 minutes long.  A perfect podcast length. So?

There has been no response whatsoever.  Very few users.  A handful.

In trying to promote the site I went to the logical medium, the Chronicle of Higher Education.  They said ‘tough luck’, we only do news.  I can’t figure out a way to make news except when one of the interviewees dies.

The real problem is that people who are interested in broad knowledge across many disciplines are few and far between and are not organized in the United States into any coherent group or media focus.

The problem is both.  

Aside from my readers, there are probably only a few people who have a broad intellectual curiosity and the ability to search for that knowledge.    Maybe thousands or a few tens of thousands.  A tiny community.

Am I wrong?  Am I drawing the wrong conclusion from my experience?

Is there really a large group of people who are intellectually curious, intelligent enough to pursue academic level information and looking for an accessible source?  If so, can they be reached by any marketing approach, new or old?

Overwhelming dissent

This blog is about two bureaucracies.  In some ways its a political blog because it deals indirectly with the ‘monkey fight’ realm of politics. The partisan battles we fight.

I have had experience with bureaucracies inside of the two banks I worked in, in Sacramento in both legislative work and in advising in the executive branch and with many years in Washington DC with foreign aid agencies.

We are confronting two giant bureaucracies that are under severe pressure.  A level of pressure I have never seen applied to these two agencies.  In the IRS case there was deliberate pressure from the White House to ignore the law and bring political corruption to the mandate of the Agency.  The Exempt Status department was told to block the application of all applicants that had Republican leanings and the same for pro-Israel applicants.  In a number of cases these blocks lasted for three years and effectively cut off campaign funds to Republicans.  This is corruption at a level that is inconceivable to anyone who knows the Exempt Status operation.  I certainly know it because I managed an exempt church and foundation for eleven years.  

The FBI case is still pending at the time I write this blog.  Hillary Clinton, while Secretary of State, had a private server at home which she used for email for herself and her friends.  Over five years or more she sent and received classified mail on her server.  An illegal act if it happened once.  It happened over a thousand times.  In a few cases she had her staff delete the words ‘classified’ an even worse offense.

Both the IRS and the FBI are large bureaucracies.  Roughly 100k employees in the former and 35k in the latter.

Nearly every employee of the IRS knows that his/her organization has been criminally politicized, and no executives have been punished.  The whole organization received two budget cuts of 3% in 2014 and 2015 from a Republican Congress which every employee knows.

The IRS employees, all of them, know that with a Republican president and a Republican Congress, the agency will be torn apart and reorganized.  What does this mean?

It means that nearly all low level employees who are competent and have a profit making market value have already left. After the results of 2016 election results are known, the remaining competent employees will leave.  The IRS will be an angry grave yard.

Mid-level employees who have a good reputation in other government agencies have already moved out of the IRS and the rest will leave with a Republican win.

Even a Democrat president with a Republican Congress will be anxious to fire the entire top echelon to avoid future similar problems and to keep the Congress from further attacks on the agency.

In any case, morale is so low at every level that we will see bad behavior for a decade as people go to work discouraged.  They will waste staff money on lavish parties.  They will regularly commit fraud.  And worst of all, it will be open season on enemies within the agencies.  This will mean employment lawsuits will rise as will whistle blowing to the press about real and imagined ills. No intelligent person will accept the top position.

The FBI is on the edge of a precipice right now.  If the organization acts as its charter and employees will demand,  it will force the Justice Department to indict Hillary Clinton.  If the Justice Department under pressure from the White House doesn’t indict, there will be public protests from large numbers of FBI members.  The internal FBI turmoil in that case will be public.  All the rest of the consequences will be the same as the IRS.  Employees will leave and internal conflicts will become large and public.

The FBI is a more vulnerable bureaucracy than the IRS because it has promoted itself as a morally upright organization.  It is seriously vulnerable to charges of hypocrisy.  Employees will act in their own self interest which will often mean internal brawls that become public and dirty laundry will be spilled everywhere.  This will begin in a few months if Ms Clinton is not indicted.

I feel I know bureaucracies fairly well.  If you think there is a different likely scenario, please add your comments.

Week retreat

In the traditionally quiet week between Xmas and New Year’s I took a retreat.  It was a no media retreat.

Over my life I have taken many retreats, with sitting zazen and doing virtually nothing except long walks. For me, I reach a happy blissful state is about three days with a clear and empty mind.  It has been about five years since my last retreat.  Before that it was quite regular.

For one ten year period beginning in the 1970’s I didn’t read or listen to the news or see a movie.  A very productive period for me.

This time I found that the absence of email, the news and Facebook was a pleasant source of calm.  In my house the phone makes a noise for all of these.  The phone was off too.

It turns out my retreat was a little unnecessary.  I reached the usual state of bliss in two days and it wasn’t important.  These days I am nearly always in that state.   Satisfied and calm with no driving goals other than visiting and spending time with friends and family.  I didn’t need the retreat.

I decided that the time I spend reading the news is a waste so I have reduced that time significantly, including eliminating most of the material on Facebook except those very original people who use Facebook like a blog.  I also spent more time focusing on my few musical resources including a harmonica, small flute and a keyboard.

End of report.

Did Jehovah or the Church change their minds?

The headlines a short while ago announced that the Vatican doesn’t any longer seek to convert Jews.

I read further and found Yoram Hazony’s article on the subject.  If you are interested in either of these subjects, Jewish conversion or the Catholic Church,  I recommend Hazony’s thoughts.

The issue is whether the creation of Christianity has replaced Jehovah’s covenant with the Jews.  The Catholic Church, from its earliest teachings, has claimed that  god (other than Jehovah?) sent a living Jew  to be killed by the Romans in order to expiate ‘original sin’.    It is ironic that the Catholic Church should use the Roman language and the Roman territory as its own language and its own capital.

Hazony has argued effectively that the media headlines are wishful thinking. The Catholic Church could never change its position on such a tentpole of Christian theology.  He finds that in the most recent Vatican Commission on the subject there is a desire to make this change but also an acknowledgement that the Vatican can’t change this core theology.

My own personal comment and observation is that Jehovah seems to still have a special covenant with the (we) Jews.  Most recently he recreated a homeland, resurrected the Hebrew language and created a nation that has all of its earlier military and moral prowess.

Moreover, since Jews were driven out of Spain and settled in Holland, they have played a central role in creating the modern commercial world, where the tiny population of Jews has gained inordinate benefits and influence.

While the Shoah is a horrific reality, and the ubiquitous nature of Jew hate has not changed, Thomas Sowell has pointed out that all landless peoples are hated.  That includes overseas Chinese, overseas Japanese, the Rom people, gays and others including Jews.  The Shoah was a unique coalescing of this hatred of landless people and modern German bureaucratic excess.

I don’t expect the Catholic Church to change its core theology but, I personally don’t see evidence that the original covenant between Jehovah and the Jews has been replaced by Christianity.

The Great Path

I’m sitting here looking at a globe.

Why can’t we have a walking path around the globe?  Why not several walking paths?

In my imaginary global walking path there would be stations every eight to 12 miles with food, water and lodging.  There would have to be a ferry across the Atlantic and probably some ferries in the Aleutian chain.  I envision a few tunnels for people walking and a few bridges.  With improved materials the bridges could be 8 to 12 miles long.

This global walking path could be walked by an ordinary person in roughly 5 years.  (By various routes, a small number of people have walked similar routes.)

This could be a vision to replace the United Nations. The UN was built on the vision of a global democracy.  

The creators of the UN (American Lefties) had a fallacious idea of what democracy was, where it came from and how it worked.  Sadly.

The UN has become a great liability for the world.  It is deeply corrupt.  It has transmuted several humane ideas, such as the idea of ‘human rights’ into its  evil opposite.   It has created a chorus of hate with the voices of much of the world chanting “we hate Jews” to replace the Third Reich.

The global foot path could be built and supported by each territory along the route.  A level of cooperation that in itself would indicate the potential for a global community.  The people who successfully ’walked the earth’ could hopefully become masters of solemnity and humility in every part of the world.

I have great faith in ordinary people as individuals.  That is my global walking path conception.  It could be terribly wrong, as individuals don’t exist on much of the planet today.  It could also become meaningful.

I have had similar grandiose ideas in the past.  One was called the International Committee for a New Planet.  I conceived it on my first round-the-world airplane flight in 1971.  I enlisted members from more than a dozen countries and had several gatherings of members.  The whole point was to help each of us see that global visions of goodness would be greatly varied.

Within three years the American vision of a New Planet was underway with my help in promoting Gerard O’Neill’s earth orbiting  planet.   My time frame was way off.

Time to start on the great global walking path.  Many elements of it are already in place in parts of the U.S., the walking paths of Japan and Scotland.

Record making men

If any of my readers doubt that I am a male and a man, this blog will disabuse you.

I look forward to the day when sex is an acceptable subject of discussion.  There was a brief ten years during the hippie era when it was.  Mostly because women were aggressively seeking men.

The leading edge of the baby boom had each generation larger than the previous one.  So there were more young women in 1969 than in 1968 and consequently more women than men a year older.  Add to this the age preference of men and women. The 1968 cohort of men were choosing from the much great number of women available in the 1969 and 1970 age cohorts.

If there is ever a Guinness book of male heroes, I want to nominate two men.   First would be a man I met when I worked on his presidential campaign,  Nelson Rockefeller.  (Aside, should he be referred to as Gov. not as Vice President?  Title is only for elective office and the VP is really chosen by the presidential candidates not elected in his own right.)

Nelson died at age 71 having sex with an 18 year old blonde staffer. (The upper photo is of her, Megan Marshack.)

Sumner Redstone is still alive at the time of this blog posting.  He is 92 years old and had two younger women living with him.  One kicked the other out last summer.  The other one moved out and complained to the press. She was Manuela Herzer 50 years old.  The other was ostensibly told to leave, Sydney Holland 43, because she had another boyfriend.  Manuela complained to the press that Sumner want sex too often, every day. 

Manuela is being mistreated.  She had medical power of attorney until the PR, lawyers and other hangers on took it away from her.  She was right.  She objected to putting Sumner on a feeding tube which is certain death with slow pain.

Nelson had a great life and was an important public servant in every way.

Sumner was a great business genius and a self-made success of astounding accomplishments.

Why are people so small?

We are really small.

I’m not comparing humans to the vegetarian members of the clade Dinosauria, some of whom were more than 10 time larger than we.  They were larger because vegetation was more abundant in an era of greater CO2, which we know from watching pot farmers use CO2 rich atmospheres to grow their marijuana bushes.

I’m looking at the size of the earth, 25,000 miles around, 8,000 miles in diameter.  We are tiny specks on the surface.  Our biosphere is infinitesimal.  Our comfortably  breathable atmosphere is less than three miles up, and our ocean’s average depth is a little over 2 miles.  On a planet where the center is 4,000 miles down.  We are on a skin that is orders of magnitude thinner than the shell of an egg.

So why are we so small in these circumstances?  Because the physics of our biological systems combined with our food supply limit our bone to body mass.  Elephants and others are larger than we are, but they were not adapted to eating other animals, as we are. Carnivores have to move a little faster to eat. The same is true for many ocean species.  But again, gravity doesn’t limit ocean creature's size as much as it does ours because they have an offsetting buoyancy.

These physical limits don’t bear on the structures we build.  Several other forces do.

The combination of gravity from our planet and wind speed in hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis do.

We live in/on this very thin biosphere where temperature differences create wind storms along with water in the atmosphere that have always limited the size of protective structures we could build for shelter.

The most significant factor, until the last century, has been the earth’s mantle which includes in it a molten rock that regularly excretes and exudes through our 5 mile thick crust in the form of volcanoes and earthquakes.

The combination of high wind speed and earthquakes have limited the height of the buildings we construct and keep them in proportion to our own human size.  As we get better at using materials our structures are getting bigger, taller and heavier.

We are still tiny, relative to the planet we live on.  Other than modern commerce and communications, which are not visible, nothing human can be considered large.

Family

I want to write about this years Thanksgiving.  You’ll forgive me, because my reason for doing so is to comment on commerce.

My family is a wonder to me.  Large and harmonious.  I think (guess) that represents less than a third of all families in the U.S.  The total members of my family who came this year was 41.  Three people were friends of family members. My three brothers and their families 10, my kids and their spouses and grandkids and their mother 12, my partner and her offspring 7, my first cousins and their spouse and offspring 9.  The total was 41 (stock photo).

The missing are important.  One committed suicide years ago, two are incompetent and are under appropriate care and one husband, not native born, doesn’t consider himself a real member of this family.

Part of the reason a family this size is functional is because all the parent child relations that I know about were free of trauma   Many of the adults seem to live in a state of happiness, evident in many forms of solitary sports such as running, swimming, hiking and biking.

I know each family member well.  If I were anywhere in the world outside of the U.S. I would be socially compelled to consider a family member as an employee in my various businesses.  Certainly in all of the Americas south of the U.S., Africa, the Middle East, India, South Asia and China; nearly everywhere I would be compelled to give preference to hiring family members.  On a personal level I know that wouldn't work.

As explained in this blog, that whole idea doesn’t work very well in modern commerce.  In modern commerce we operate on meritocracy which overrides family preferences. Meritocracy is an important reason that commerce is so productive and family based business nations aren’t.

In talking about family, there are always some people who can't make it and the family can't or won't care for them.  This is also a good place to mention the consequence of those former family members: ‘homeless’ in many names, ‘street people’, ‘hobos’, ‘street urchins, ‘beggars’ and outcasts.

We have always had them in our societies and always will.  They are part of any population of human offspring.

Urban transport

In closing the last blog I was wondering what impact the smartphone and Internet  will have on urban transport.

My first reaction was that fewer cars will be needed in downtown areas with Uber and automated autos.  But that is a trivial issue.  Dense cities are dense so people can work and connect with each other.  Smartphones and the Internet reduce that need to some extent.

If human density is what increases the productivity of cities, it is elevators that make such density greater.

I live part time in the most efficient city on the planet, from a density point of view; Tokyo. The railroad system and the subways are connected.  Subways are so fast and efficient, running a minute apart at times.  They are the equivalent of a tube full of people constantly moving to their individual destinations. A million people go through Shinjuku junction twice a day,  Cars and bicycles make-up street life and Tokyoites are great walkers.  

Tokyo is the future of cities if human density is the important element.

Other than that, I don’t see how transportation will significantly impact urban life.

Which came first?

I started wondering about the relationship between communications and transportation.  They are related but the relationship is not simple or causal.

The first great need for long distance communication was with the advent of railroads in America.  Commercially useful railroads  emerged in the 1850’s.  With their evident importance for the North in the Civil War, railroad coverage of the U.S. exploded.  The first transcontinental railroad was 1869. It connected existing commercial networks widely developed in the East and Midwest with San Francisco. The first transcontinental commercial telegraph was 1861.

Strong parallels.

There were commercial railroads before there were commercial telegraph networks, but the two grew together and often occupied the same pathways and stations.

The explosion of engine driven commercial ocean cargo preceded the introduction of radio transmitted telegraphy.  Commercial cargo was being carried on the Mississippi and Great Lakes before it was important in open oceans.  After the Suez Canal was opened in 1869 there was a rapid increase in steamships because the new route allowed for each ship to carry enough coal and cargo to make a long ocean voyage economic.

Communications with ocean going vessels with radio telegraphy didn’t come until WW1.   Fast ocean going engine driven vessels came well before the necessary communications.

The telephone and the automobile also developed in America in parallel.   They both arrived in functioning form about the same time.  By 1900 there were 3 million phones in the United States, most residential. At the same time industrial production of automobiles was underway.  By 1920 automobiles and telephones were common in all urban areas of the United States.

While airplanes developed long before radar, radar came into regular use at airports in the United States in the 1950’s just as commercial aviation was becoming significant.  I personally flew a commercial plane from El Paso to San Francisco in 1947.  It was a few years before San Francisco airport needed radar to deal with the increased volume of aircraft.

The extraordinary explosion of traffic associated with container ships, 18 wheeler trucks and the FEDEX and UPS networks in the 1970’s-80’s is only associated with the use of facsimile machines.  Both emerged commercially at the same time.

I see no transport developments associated with the cell phone and the smart phone.  Uber is connected to the latter but it will be a long time before we see the important transport impacts of Uber and similar transport systems.  

(The word Uber, has joined Kleenex, Google and iPad as a proper noun and verb)

Pounds per mile per dollar

I owe a debt to Michael Adams who responded to an earlier blog about the central role America has played in the explosion of modern global commerce.  Mr. Adams sent me to a book by Jane Jacobs called Systems of Survival.  I have always loved Jacobs' writings, she is still an influential mind.

In her Survival book, Jacobs does an excellent job of distinguishing the ethics of commerce from that of government.  Everything she writes is clear and explicit.  However it applies to the period before 1800, maybe because she worked in Canada which is not part of the modern industrial explosion (Canada is nearly all extractive).  When we get to the modern commercial world we need to add the other element of my blog headline: meritocracy.  The replacement of tribes and families and hereditary hierarchy are central to our modern prosperity and technology.

In my mind my addition of meritocracy to Jacob’s list of commercial elements was still not sufficient to explain our global prosperity.  I finally had to add another element to my list to distinguish the world of 1800 from the world of 1900.  Speed and cost in moving heavy loads. 

This video of downtown San Francisco in 1905 is what stimulated my thinking.  Nearly everything is at the speed of a fast walking person.  When I was a child, cable cars only stopped at a few locations, otherwise men jumped on and off the moving car at about 9 miles per hour. That was the speed of everything downtown.  Today it is still about the same speed except for the underground rail line.

When did the world outside of downtown change?  It came with the steam driven railroads dating from 1850.  Speed picked-up with autos, ships and trucks in about 1910. Then again with airplanes in the 1950s at the same time freeways came into regular use.  The final uptick in speed and weight came with 18 wheel trucks, cargo containers and the complete FedEx and UPS systems in the 1980s.  

I see this increase in speed as a function of weight and cost.   A man can carry 60 pounds for 4 miles in an hour at $12 current dollars. That is 1.25 pounds per mile per $1 per hour.

A horse pulling a wagon is 1,000 pounds for 6 miles in an hour at the price of one man at $12 and one horse at $1.40 per hour.  That is 167 pounds per mile at $13.40 per hour, or 12.5 pounds per mile per $1 per hour.  The horse and wagon are about 10 times more efficient.

Rail freight costs about 80 pounds per mile at $1 per hour. A rail car goes about 30 miles in an hour. The rail is faster and costs one 6th the amount of a cart and horse.

It is this considerable decrease in transport cost from 12.5 pounds per mile per $1 per hour for a cart and horse to 80 pounds per mile at $1 per hour.

In 150 years we have reduced the costs of cargo by a factor of 6.4.  It now costs less than 16% of what it did then.  That steady reduction in the cost of goods dramatically increased the size of markets, reducing the costs of production too.  Transport costs declined and increased market size and that in turn reduced the costs of production.  Our modern commercial bounty owes much to this specific transport technology.

Air freight express is 3 pounds per mile at $1 per hour.   Air freight goes about 350 miles in an hour.  While air freight is only a little more efficient per mile per $1 than a man walking with a back pack, we wouldn't be eating strawberries from Chile if we waited 15 months for men to carry them to us.

I must now add transport efficiency to the panoply of factors giving us the modern world.

Also a note.  Our dense urban areas have not benefited much from the transport efficiency factor.  I can run across San Francisco in about twice the time it takes to go by car.  

Old San Francisco dinner

It must have been in the early 1960’s when I was a campaign manager (technically I was his legislative analyst) for Assemblyman Milton Marks.  Milton gave me a ticket and sent me to a dinner at the Fairmont Hotel.  The Fairmont was the most distinguished site for memorials at the time.  Owned by powerhouse Ben Swig. I don’t remember who the memorial was for.

I was seated at a table for four.  Someone with an outrageous sense of macabre must have made the seating assignments.  The four of us were: Harry Bridges, the Australian communist head of the Longshoremen’s Union, Benny Bufano a Maoist artist known for his pro communist marble statues, one of the Crocker matrons (an old rich and powerful San Francisco family) and me.

Harry had a face like an eagle, narrow with a large nose.  He was quiet as one would expect for an activist who shaped the San Francisco waterfront for the next century.  Benny was small and skinny.  He focused on the Crocker matron; she wasn’t sexy but she was a potential patron.  He talked to her about his studio and how he worked. She listened attentively.

The subject of the day at our table was Vincent Hallinan’s lawsuit against the Catholic Church for fraud for misleading a man into believing in heaven so he would leave his inheritance to the Church.  Nobody at the table believed the case had legal merit but Harry and Benny believed the intention of the suit was honorable and just.

I was the only person at the table who knew what the suit was all about.  So I explained.

The man who died and left his estate to the Church, was a judge who had ruled against Vincent in a case Vincent brought against the powerful Market St. Railway Line on behalf of a man who lost his legs in a streetcar accident.  The Railway was owned by the most powerful railroad interests in town. Vincent's father had worked for the streetcar company. Vincent was a prominent Lefty radical.

A grandfather of the Crocker matron was one of the 'big four' who founded the railroad industry.

The lawsuit was Vincent’s postmortem revenge for the judges decision.  He knew it would not win in court but he was determined to use up all the estate money in legal fees. Revenge served cold.

I wish I could describe the fascinating conversation.  But nobody said anything after my little presentation, and they were all  happy when the speaker commenced.

This would be a great start for a good fiction writer.  I wish I could add more.

(The sculpture was one of Benny's with the background at the SFO airport. It was later moved to some obscure location when his work fell out of favor.) 

Positive sum II

In a blog I posted the day before Christmas I wrote about the importance of elevating the term ‘positive sum’ to its rightful place as one of the most important terms in the human conceptual spectrum.  It is the reason that commerce has delivered the modern world to us.  Commerce is one of the few positive sum human activities.  The only other such activity I know of is technology which can only thrive in a commercial market environment.

I also asked in that blog whether there could be a symbol for positive sum.

I received several suggestions from friends and readers.  Nothing has struck me as obvious and overwhelming.  I am still hoping to find the right new term.

In the meantime I played with some imagery.  I want your opinion on this mathematics based visual.

There is no clear reason for using mathematics in this matter but it is a self evident language.

Authenticity: more

I met a lovely therapist at dinner a few nights ago and one of the subjects was authenticity.  She brought it up.  I wanted to know what it means in the current world of psychotherapy.  As best I can tell from her description, it dealt with the identity that is most durable in the therapy client’s everyday presentation of his/her self.

I wrote a blog  on authenticity more than two years ago.  It was an explanation of my views on it at the time and why actual authenticity is only accessible in a commercial world.  I’ll stick with that description and recommend you read it.

What I missed in that blog was to mention one of my sources, Charles Taylor, a philosophy professor at McGill who taught my friend Alex.

I need to add to my earlier blog that authenticity becomes evident in a commercial environment as one encounters the great variety of challenges in everyday life.  The myriad complexities, paradoxes and ambiguities bring out this emergent quality that we call 'authenticity'. Most of all it emerges as one accepts and rejects the infinite array of opportunities that are offered.

What I want to add is that each person is offered an infinite array of opportunities that often are presented to us by others who know us.  It is the array of offers from friends and acquaintances that are uniquely important.  We surround ourselves with people who reflect our values and important qualities.  It is these people who then offer us opportunities that are especially important in bringing out our authentic self.

As an example, one of the turning points in my life was when I went from being a rising star in banking to being in the center of the hurricane of hippy life. That happened when I became manager of the Glide Church and Foundation.  That job was offered to me by Don Kuhn who had known me for seven years in our joint work trying to fix the San Francisco public education system. (Photo below.)

The actual moment I made this vital and fateful decision was when two pairs of people walked up the beach on a warm summer evening when my girlfriend (Sharon) and I were building a fire to roast some potatoes.  The first couple had a folding table and offered an elegant dinner with champagne.  He was the fellow who offered me the job as national director of banking for the biggest consulting firm. A stepping stone to being the president of a major bank.  I politely declined.

The next couple was Don Kuhn and his wife Emogene who offered to join us and share their hamburger fixings.  They joined us.  A few weeks later I went to work at Glide.

It is people around us who see the qualities in us that need to be nourished and help us emerge.