Pro Commerce

Music impresario

I was a music impresario along with two friends, in the early 1970’s. It was at a time when the San Francisco scene was dominated by the Grateful Dead and the Airplane. We felt that hippies were ready for some country western.

The first group we brought was the Carter Family. Now known for June Carter who married Johnny Cash.

We filled a venue on the top floor of Ghirardelli Square. It was a 200 seat theatre and was filled to the ceiling.

Our first lesson was to control the doors. The Carters had given out so many passes to their friends that we didn’t make money.

My first lesson was, don’t bring a girl friend with me to these events. June Carter was flirting with me and I had to pass it up.

The second concert was at the Oakland Coliseum with room for 9,000. Nearly full. The singer was Charlie Pride and we sold out. After the concert, the gate revenue was distributed in a small room by the facilities manager, we had made plenty of money.

The third concert was Merle Haggard at the Oakland Coliseum. From the time we booked him until the concert, he came out with his record hit: Okie From Muskogee. The first line is “We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee, we don’t take our trips on LSD….”

It looked desperate trying to get hippies to come to a Merle Haggard concert. We promptly turned our promotion to Contra Costa County nearby. It is home to cops and firemen, who did come to the concert. We got about 5,000 people and didn’t lose money.

Merle was truly himself. At the end of the concert he invited the women in the audience to join him and his band at the Hilton near the airport.

We didn’t do any more concerts.

My partners were Ellliott Buchdrucker and Ed Statum.

Yosemite lawyers

You undoubtedly know that the name Yosemite National Park and all the names of the famous hotels and campsites in the park are now owned by Delaware North, a private company.

I think that three changes in American life are warranted by this startling fact.

First, somehow the term “Yosemite lawyers’, should enter our language as a phrase meaning ‘the-smartest-and-the-dumbest-lawyers’. On the government side, with a dozen levels of bureaucracy that reviewed the contract between the National Park Service and Delaware North, we should all realize that competence is not built into the American government. The people who go to work for the government, may be competent when they start their job, but if they stay they become part of a very slow lizard brain. Most, are of course, Democrats.

The Park service signed several ten year contracts with a facilities operator that didn’t make clear that the company, Delaware North, had no rights to ownership of anything involved in the contract, including the names of the facilities.

Chalk one up for Donald Trump. Under his administration a dozen lawyers would be fired. Right away.

Second, the lesson of government managerial incompetence needs to be learned and taught widely to every Democrat and future Democrat. What government always does is sign one management contract for facilities management and product creation (think military weapons) because the government is a monopoly and only understands how to manage monopolies. The Yosemite legal disaster would not have happened if their were two or three competing facility management companies operating in the park. They would have noticed and reported the problem promptly.

Third and last, every law school should be teaching a Yosemite Law class to make it clear to future lawyers that when you match government legal bureaucrats against a private market driven lawyer, the public loses.

My Go experience

It was world headlines when IBM’s Big Blue won the first computer-man chess match. Not quite the same when Google’s AlphaGo defeated a grandmaster of Go, Lee Sedol.

More people play Go on the planet than Chess, but the global media, following WWII remains in English and solidly American.

The accomplishment in computer terms is an order of magnitude greater for Google. In chess there are a near finite number of moves and working one’s way up the branching system allows for a mathematical analysis of the value of pursuing any line of branching. Each branch starts with about a dozen options.

In Go, each branch starts with nearly 100 options, and from there on the exponent is roughly 100. It takes many rungs on the branch to evaluate the value of the branch. Put it this way: in chess you are working with x to the 15th power, for Go you are working with x to the 100th power.

Go is a game of geography. Your object is to surround your opponent's pieces and block further moves. That is what you do in tic-tac-toe. Just 100 times more options. Go is the model of Japanese and Chinese warfare. The biggest army in the most strategic location is declared the winner. Fighting is not necessary.

Chess is European warfare. Think of the 100 year war or WWI. A battle of attrition. Last man standing is the winner after everyone else dies.

I went to Osaka, from Kyoto where I was spending the summer, for an appointment with a Japanese Go teacher for my first lesson. At his lovely home, we sat down in front of an elegant Go board and he explained the rules by demonstrating. I didn’t speak any Japanese at the time.

We then proceeded to play. We played until we ran out of stones. Black and white ones. He quickly counted the enclosed stones and fell silent.

I had won. He probably felt I was a shil. I was politely marched to the front door and out.

Where we stand today

Read the previous two ‘Not imperialism’ blogs first.

Tribal consolidation went on to a modest extent after WWII in French Indo-China and the post-Japanese Koreas.

The reign of new technologies has allowed the tribal groups of the world, that have resisted accommodation to the modern industrial world, to carry on warfare all over the world. To fly airplanes into tall buildings in New York. And explode devices in Paris and elsewhere.

The American response has been to build nations where possible, in Iraq and Afganistan. These have failed.

Modern trade and resource extraction are no longer of much importance in dealing with the myriad tribal groups that occupy land.

The next iteration may be to form small stable tribal clusters. Such seems to be working with the Kurds and the many tribes in the ‘stans’ (Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan etc.)

Watching Gaza take a stable form will be an interesting example of a new model.

Not imperialism 2

I leave it to historians to fill in the details of global trade expansion and ‘nation building’ in support of trade, based on yesterday’s blog.

The interesting thing to me has been the function of trade expansion in my lifetime. My homeland, the United States, was mostly empty (possibly due to epidemics) and tribal groups were not amenable to consolidation in most areas outside of New England. The tribes were generally defeated in warfare and consolidated in grim reservations.

As modern industrial commerce expanded, the existing nation states around the world, became the primary trading partners with each other. They had only a modest need for the tribal world in the trading milieu, except for some natural resources. They fought over these resources in two massive global wars.

The United States won WWII and under its military suzerainty, applied the American model of government to the defeated nations. Such a model was and is conducive to modern industrial trade. The rest of the world came under contention between the U.S. and Russia. Both did their best to create stable sympathetic nation states allied with their trading circle.

The United States was able, with its overwhelming physical dominance and the explosion of new technologies, airlines, telecom, pharmacology, electronics and transportation to impose its technical standards and language on the world.

That is where we stand today.

Not imperialism 1

I heard the term ‘imperialism’ applied to a period in Arabia after WWI. On brief reflection I realized that ‘imperialism’ is a hollow meaningless term, much like ‘capitalism’ and ‘socialism’, terms that come from the same Karl Marx and the failed Lefty ideology.

So what really happened in the world from 1500 to today? Hint: today we call it ‘nation building’.

Tribes have always been at war with their neighbors. Sometimes just to get new DNA in their blood lines and sometimes to expand their territory when their population grew.

What changed in 1500 was that the long historic patterns of trade, widely known from the Hanseatic ports and the Phoenicians, was expanded. Small successful tribal clusters that already called themselves ‘states’ saw the advantages of trade. The model used was to create unique trading ports as many trading nations observed in the North Sea and Baltic.

The first ‘state’ seeking trade on a large oceanic basis was Portugal. Portugal created fortified trading stations: West Africa (Goree in Senegal), India (Goa), China (Macau) and even on a Western Island of Japan (Dejima).

Trade was done to export goods and services from the home state in order to create local employment. The trading states would accept anything in trade that could be used in their home market.

In West Africa (in East Africa sales were to Arabs) the trade goods the Africans offered the Portuguese were other African slaves.

In order to find tribes to sell to and buy from, the early trading states came upon the idea of promoting religion (Roman Catholic) as the mechanism to unify tribes into larger units. The Spaniards and Portuguese used this approach in Central and South America, to modest success.

The Dutch used the old trading model in New Amsterdam and a dozen locations including Java.

The Brits pioneered a newer nation building model. With effective ground troops they conquered entire swaths of land and put the local tribes under the British mandate. India, Pakistan and most of tribal Arabia (after the fall of Turkey in WWI) came under their sway. In Australia the local tribes were weak and Britain took the whole continent. In New Zealand the local tribes, Maori, were strong and had to be accommodated. The Chinese were much too strong a cluster of tribes and yielded only Hong Kong to the Brits. Japan was never conquered nor was China.

This model of trade expansion, really many different models, has been going on for 6 centuries. It has been put under one ideological rubric, ‘imperialism’ which is a hollow meaningless term.

Sushi sourcing

According to the Wall Street Journal there is an increasing practice among retail suppliers in the food business to indicate some of the elements in the food chain. I see it in my local Safeway. Where possible, they list the farm that was the source of the product and the location of the farm.

Apparently the practice is spreading. There is nothing pro or anti-commerce in this labelling. There is no way to know how consumers respond. I have been shopping for produce and have heard shoppers say ‘I never buy organic, it is just a marketing gimmick to charge more’.

In any case, it may benefit some particularly good marketing wholesalers and producers.

The best example of educating final users about sourcing is a sushi shop I enjoyed twice in the Ginza in Tokyo. It is rated the number one sushi business in Japan by the sushi retailers association. The chef designs and produces all his own ceramic plateware and service utensils.

On the wall is the menu shown here. The top is the type of sushi. Next is the name of the wholesaler, below that is the fishing coop or local prep company or the fisherman. Finally at the bottom of each column is the locale and body of water the fish came from.

The largest caligraphy on the right is a high quality tuna that came from a particular seashore in Ireland.

Crying rape

The news recently reported a case of false accusation of rape against a taxi driver. The driver said the false accusation arose from the woman’s demand to be taken to the airport without charge. The ordeal lasted two years for the man.

I noticed this potential problem more than 15 years ago. A close woman friend of mine, while in a bad mood, accused me of being hostile to women. While I trusted her in general, I decided the milieu we live in made it too dangerous to associate with her. In a fit of anger, she, or any woman, could call rape or sexual harassment, and I would spend a great deal of time in the legal system.

I noticed it again a few years later when a female friend was remodelling her home and the basement tenant wanted $20,000 to move out for a few months during the remodel. (This is San Francisco after all.) She asked me if she should ‘cry sexual harassment’ to avoid the cost and force the bastard out. I recommended against it. Not because it wouldn’t work, but because the woman was no good at lying and would spend too much valuable time in the legal system.

In a related situation. When my youngest daughter was six years old, many years ago, I would not buy her an ice cream cone because I believed the nutritional nonsense of the era about raised sugar levels and bad behavior. My six year old, yelled ‘child abuse’ in a fairly busy area. She immediately got the ice cream and my appreciation for how smart she was.

All of which is to say that the blatant and flagrant ‘cry of rape’ on college campus’s and the trivial amount of evidence that is needed to get men charged with a serious crime, has changed my mind about the whole issue. The worst case was the Duke Lacrosse team a decade ago.

At this point I would not believe any woman’s charge of rape or sexual harassment, unless the evidence was physical and overwhelming and it involved male witnesses. Sorry women, you and the feminist movement have created this atmosphere.

The few straight men I’ve talked to agree with my sentiments on this issue.

Philanthropy and commerce

I was in Japan when the government decided to copy the American model of tax deductable charitable contributions and tax exempt charitable organizations. I knew the law well having been on both sides of the issue, as a foundation president and a foundation treasurer receiving donations.

I notice that China is copying the same model right now.

Is it good policy?

Whether it is good policy as Japan and China copy it is different from asking the same question in America. We have the 50% deduction for charity because America has a long and deep history of voluntary personal charity. It is the modern version of barn raising. It fit in with the newly implemented income tax a century ago.

Today it still works because it creates a gigantic loophole in the progressive tax rate that allows rich people to do what they would ordinarily do, give to the opera and ballet, while deducting it all from their taxes. It also offers an alternate route for supporting hard luck cases, indigents and malefactors, that would otherwise be the inefficient burden on the government tax roles.

In Japan it is a very pure case. The Japanese always helped their village and their family, but nothing larger. They also are very homogeneous and are uncomfortable with great disparities in income. From what I see in Japan the policy works well.

It gives rich people a tax reduction vehicle and it has created jobs and a virtual industry of non-profit-non governmental entities.

Does it do good? Certainly not. Like cell phones. “Good” is always the incremental benefits that arise by Darwinian commercial processes in any society. They are rarely perceived as beneficial and certainly are never the recipients of charitable tax exempt donations.

Hanseatic League

In a recent conversation with a new friend, I mentioned that I find the origins of modern commerce in Holland in 1600. In the next 50 years Holland became the global master of commerce, inventing bond markets, partnership insurance and salaried tax collectors. It was also the center of science, technology and the intellectual world. Holland was already the home of democracy and social equality. Under the future King William, the Dutch invaded England in 1688 and transferred the commercial knowledge to a new and larger Democratic society.

My new friend said he traced the beginnings of modern commerce to the Hanseatic League and had travelled to many Hanseatic ports to track the flow of salt, iron, coal, timber and cheese.

I didn’t argue with him. I am happy to have new friends who care about these issues at all. But he is wrong.

Trade is not the root of modern commerce. Trade is as old as humankind. Even the volume of trade that was seen in the Hanseatic League, trade between a dozen major ports on the North Sea, the Baltic and sometimes south to the Mediterranean, did not create modern commerce. It did create rich, powerful and fortified cities.

The proof is visible in the parts of the world that had extensive, high volume and long distance trade and are still not in the core of commerce. The Phoenicians traded throughout the Mediterranean. The Vikings traded everywhere from Ireland to St. Petersburg to the Bosporus, and the Hausa and Fulani tribes crossed all of Africa East to West and North to South. Even Arabs traded from Spain to China and back. None of these are modern commercial societies EVEN TODAY. Yet Holland and England remain at the core of modern commerce. Especially their main offspring, the United States.

That is my proof. Holland, not the Hanseatic League.

Oscars and commerce

Last month we went through several weeks of national hysteria in which a few blacks created a sensation by claiming that the Oscars were anti-black. Hollywood wrung its collective hands and begged to do better in the future and apologized profusely as only the Left can do, by insulting everyone who watched the Oscars and everyone who attended. Plus, every Lefty trope was presented as inherited fact during any of a dozen speeches. Rape was bemoaned, the coming weather apocalypse was berated and whites were excoriated for their privileged racism. (Not me. I don’t pay attention to that idiocy.)

There is one commercial problem that no one in any circumstances in the world had the nerve to mention.

More than 66% of the revenue that these elitist Lefties in Hollywood earn comes from outside the U.S.A. Moreover, in many major markets American blacks are not credible as important or central characters. That is true in China, much of South Asia and the Middle East. So putting more blacks in major global films is self defeating. You will lose money.

As an example, NCIS is the biggest TV show in the world, viewed in 150 nations every week for more than a dozen years. The only black character appears for about 10 minutes every 3 hours. That is what the world market can tolerate for a black character.

Frankly, if Hollywood had more American blacks in major global films, global revenue would go down. Much as I hold these Lefty film people in contempt, that kind of decline would not be good for American export business.

Sure put more blacks in domestic Loser Films and give them awards. That will keep the rabble down and keep the evil Lefties from foisting more political racism on the rest of us.

Not a travel blog

Right now I’m in Tokyo for month.  Cherry blossom season. I’m telling you because I don’t think it will hurt my readership numbers.

Ten years ago when I was an early blogger.  I had been blogging since 2001.  My readership was up to 60,000 readers.  Rather astounding to me.

I noticed one year when I put Tokyo or Japan on the top of my byline that I would lose thousands of readers.  I didn’t know whether it was anti-Japanese sentiment or people assuming that I was a travel blogger.  In any case I dropped the location of the blog byline.

Now my readership is in the 2-4,000 range,  Still worth my making the effort.  I really need to be appreciated and that is plenty of appreciation.

Tokyo stimulates me on many dimensions, but the stimulus may not be evident in the subject matter I write about.  

Since I doubt I can lose more readers, or at least hope I don’t, I will mention the occasional connection between my blog and the daily stimulus I get in Tokyo.

The Castro and sand box

For four decades the Castro District has been one of the safest in the city of San Francisco.  Gay men are not good predators.  Many single women have moved to the neighborhood because of its reputation for safety.

That has changes in the past few years.  Seriously changed.  I know personally.  For forty years I have left my doors, home and auto, unlocked and never had a problem of any sort.  Now they have to be locked because break-ins have become a common experience for me.

After 9 pm the entire neighborhood has become dangerous with muggings, broken retail store windows, car break-ins, car theft and constant serious unpleasantness.

What has happened?  I ascribe the problem to a multiple set of circumstances.  

• First and foremost a general Democrat Party milieu of reduced appreciation for jail and prison as effective tools to reduce crime.  
• Second a Democrat Party War on police lead by the Democrat President.  This War blames police who are protecting their own lives with using excessive violence against black males who are threatening them. Police don't do their jobs with any serious effort any more.
• Then there are California specifics.  The Democrat legislature refuses to build more prisons (they believe prisons are 'racist') so the State courts have ordered the release of existing incarcerated prisoners.  33,000 burglars and dope dealers, statewide, were released in 2011 and 2012.  
• Also California passed proposition 47 to raise the dollar amount of grand theft to $950.  This had the effect of police refusing to pursue auto break-ins which increased 5 times in number.
• Then locally, San Francisco is spending over half a billion dollars on vagrants (called ‘homeless’) in every category of the city budget.  This is increasing the number of vagrants in the city.
• Lastly, more locally, in the gay Castro District, we are dealing with an adult population that has the moral values of a sandbox wimp.  Gay men are more reluctant to testify against a criminal or to even report an assault than other whites and non-gays. So criminals migrate to the gay sandbox.

We got a rise in crime as a result of these multiple factors.

Beauties and marriage

With a good understanding of genetics you will not be as surprised as I was.

I was hanging out with young American models in Tokyo one summer.  They were in town for the summer working for the the Ford modelling agency.  A big demand for young Americans at the time.

As a group they were incredibly beautiful.  We had a wonderful time at luxury houses and elegant restaurants.

And the number of dumb ones was the big surprise to me.

I now know that genetics would create a group of beauties with an average intelligence half above and half below the mean.

A few friends of mine discussed the idea of starting a prep-school in Switzerland for the intelligent beauties that would be funded by really rich men.

We never did it.  We ended up talking with the man who ran the modelling agency.  He pointed out the strange fact that many of these young girls, the dumb ones, ended up marrying the owners of gas stations and mafia tough guys. They went for the guys who were most aggressive and whom they thought were going to be successful.

Consanguinity

If future college students are as assinine as the current group and don’t understand the nature of history, I’m in big trouble.  While I have a lifetime record as one of the most successful, least known civil rights activist from an early age to my death, I am regularly called a 'racist' because I use candor in describing the dysfunctions of the current black community.  I never hesitate to say that blacks commit murder at a rate 5-6 times greater than any other group in America and they are under represented in the prison population.

That, I guess leaves me free to talk about the Middle Eastern Arab population in ways that will be unpopular among Arabs and do-gooders in the future.  They already call me a 'racist.'

Thus my title consanguinity.  The subject is intra family marriage and reproduction.  The three main types of intra-family marriage and reproduction are (1) among first cousins  (2) between siblings and half siblings and (3) with an uncle or an aunt.

Being accurate when talking about consanguinity is not possible. I certainly don’t know the harm or the various levels of harm resulting from the various forms of consanguinity.  From my research, no one else does either.

I often start by asking experts ‘what is the smallest human population that can survive in isolation?’  That question deals with consanguinity and particularly with sterility.  So far I have never gotten a decent answer, even from evolutionary biologist Steven Gould.  Everyone seems to agree that 40 people with no new blood will not survive.   

The reason for broaching this subject is the Middle East.  What strikes me first is the number of young suicide bombers in the Arab world.  It appears to me that raising a mentally defective child is expensive for any society.  Therefore using the mentally ill and retarded as suicide bombers might be a rational strategy for a society with high levels of consanguinity that produces surplus defective offspring.

This is a good place for me to point out (no current reference) that I have seen numbers as high as 60% as the frequency of rural Arab marriages as consanguineous.  Most of Arabia is rural.

I also find it impossible to understand how Arabs can believe, on a vast scale, that Israelis are not indigenous people.  The evidence is overwhelming including their own Mohammed who made Jesus and Abraham prophets and they were Jews in historic Israel.

It is just my rationale for understanding the irrationality of Arabs in the Middle East.  Excessive consanguinity in the population.  Feel free to borrow my model if you can live with being called a 'racist'.

Sutro baths

I just recently had a hamburger at the little snack shop near the Cliff House in San Francisco that overlooks the abandoned Sutro Baths. Photo on the right.

Sutro baths was a gigantic enclosed glass palace with seven separate pools.  Six were salt water, with all but one slightly heated.  The cold one was deep for high diving. There was also a freshwater pool.

I went to swim at Sutro’s in my early teens in the 1950’s.

Adjacent to the pools was an ice rink.  From the entrance at the street there were descending stairs with countless stuffed animals, mostly exotic ones.  Built in 1896 it burned down in 1966 as it was being demolished.

I rarely went swimming there because Sutro’s required the customers to wear the provided wool bathing suits.  Sensible hygiene.  But I hated the wool suits.

Did they ever change that wool suit policy?  Did they ever spiff up the place which always smelled musty to me?

Is that why it failed before it became a chic reliquary?

Rent to blacks

On one subject I listen to the black rabble rousers and race baiters.  It is housing rental.

In the late 1960’s it became obvious to me that my black friends could not get apartments to rent in the neighborhoods they wanted.

So I found a woman friend, as a witness, to go with me to the Marina District in San Francisco and try to rent apartments.  We went to a dozen over several weekends.  We were followed by a black couple friend of mine, who had excellent work and financial resume’s.

In every case we were phoned back and offered the apartment and our black friends were told the apartment was no longer available.

I went to the Fair Housing Agency of that era.  They just gave me bureaucratic paper to shuffle and made it clear they weren’t going to do anything.

Since then I have become a landlord.  I now realize the many considerations that go into tenant choices and the fact that it could never be satisfactorily proven that anti-black discrimination is involved.

Me and AIDS

The AIDs epidemic was close to me in San Francisco.  I didn’t have any of my closest friends die of AIDs but many of my friends either died of AIDS or a partner or child did.  At the early stages no one knew what it was.  It was called HIV then HIV-AIDS and then AIDS.  Many public health authorities made predictions that a cure was only 10 years away.  That was in 1982, just 6 months after the first AIDs cases began showing up.

My friend, Dean Echenbach an epidemiologist, advisor to Merv Silverman had the gay bathhouses shut down.  I initially supported this because sex with strangers was what the bathhouses were about.  On later reflection, I realized the best thing to do was to use the bathhouses to distribute condoms and information.

In the early days of AIDS the virus was very lethal.  Many people died with a brief symptom period of a few months.  One woman, a beautiful acquaintance of mine, spent a week in Haiti and was dead two months after she returned.

The significant memory for me, from that time, was personal.  In early 1982, when we were figuring out what the AIDs issues were, two of my friends (lawyers) sat me down for drinks.  It was an intervention of sorts.  They told me I had too many ‘girl friends’ and that I needed to use condoms.  I still appreciate that intervention by Bob and Sid.

Unfathomable

I need help.  I came across a chart that I immediately recognized.  It is the top of the chart on the right.  My good friend Josh Gnaizda and I had been working on the two satellite streams of data that were first created in 1979.  They are shown in the top chart.

What the satellite data showed to me was that we had two periods of zero change in the temperature of the earth’s surface.  One was from 1979 to 1996 and the other, a few tenths of a degree Fahrenheit higher, was from 1998 to the present.  What happened from 1996 to 1998 was a significant El Nino.

When I saw the bottom chart with data for the same period from radiosonde devices lifted on balloons that measured air temp at multiple altitudes I was stunned.  The data corroborated the  satellite data that Josh and I had worked on.  In other words, both sets of data, independently generated corroborated each other.

Josh investigated the radiosonde data from NOAA and put it on Excel spreadsheets to examine.  He converted it to Fahrenheit. The raw data he got went back to 1958.  Fifty eight years of data from 800 balloon measurements every day at the same time, globally.

What does the data show.  First that the satellite data we used was reliable.  Second, that over a 58 year period The global surface temperature only changed 1.3 degrees Fahrenheit. One point three degrees.  

In the Northern Hemisphere it changed 2.0 degrees and in the Southern Hemisphere 0.8 tenth of a degree. (from column T)  That makes sense in terms of the Northwest Passage in the Arctic opening up and the increased size of the Antarctic icecap.  Also the Northern Hemisphere has much more land and urban population than the vast oceania of the South.

A valid scientific theory is defined these days by the work of Karl Popper.  He said a theory can never be proven, it can only be falsified.   If ever data falsified the global warming theory of an impending apocalypse it is this data.   There can be no impending global temperature rise of apocalyptic proportion.  This data shows it.  One degree Fahrenheit globally in 58 years.

The thing that is unfathomable to me is that this information has been hidden.  How can that be?  A Google search will not turn up this data except recently.  The world has a conference to stop global warming and 180 nations pledge to take action.  Yet here is the data that disproves that world conference premise.

Dan White and Jim Jones

There is a strong connection between Jim Jones of the Jonestown suicide and Dan White’s murder of Mayor Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk.  Many people don’t know it.  I know it well.

The calendar to look at is November 1978.  It begins with the 1st of November on a Wednesday.  The 19th is Sunday and all was peaceful in my realm and in San Francisco.

The next day was Monday the 20 and the press (we read newspapers in those days) was just beginning to report the deaths of 200 members of the Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple. Shocking to everyone.  I will write about this elsewhere and later.  I knew Jim Jones well.

Every day brought information about more suicides. 400 by Wednesday the 22nd. over 800 by Friday the 24th.  Everyone in the City was nearly hysterical.  Jim Jones’ Peoples temple had most of its members from San Francisco.  It was all happening in Guyana.  No one knew what was happening or why.

The hysteria was so palpable that I had to take action.  I was business manager of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco, with a heavily black constituency.  Peoples’ Temple was nearly all black.

I seldom dealt with the Sunday services.  But that Sunday I took charge of security.  Hired some extra plain clothes guards, went through the building twice with dogs and stationed a man on the roof with binoculars and a walkie-talkie.  

Nothing untoward happened at church.

The next morning, Dan White snuck in a basement window at City Hall.  Killed the major after a brief conversation.  Went down the hall to kill Harvey Milk and then went looking for Carol Ruth Silver to kill.  She hid under a desk.  I was dating her at the time.

Dan then went back to his coffee shop hangout.  His two cop buddies told him to go up the street to the Cathedral for confession and then to turn himself in.

Jones and White are connected.

Another rejection at a speech

In an earlier blog about a speech to a Cacophony group, I mentioned getting booed by the audience.

One time, it was worse.

I was hired (by some unfortunate person) at Bofors, the Swedish arms company.  The intent was to have me give a talk to the main company engineers about the kind of products and services that work in the consumer market.  Bofors, at the time, thought it was going to someday have to get into the commercial market.  

I was noted as the leading person in creating new businesses and had been doing that for a consulting firm working for a government agency in Sweden.

I was flown in a private plane from Stockholm to a Bofors hunting lodge.  The engineers, about 40, were assembled to hear me and answer questions. It was afternoon.  

My talk was about the need for openness in design and communication in the commercial market.  At the time, before Betamax vs VHS, my two examples were the RCA 45 record and turntable that were totally proprietary.  RCA got 100% of the teenage 13 yearold music market but nothing else.  A disaster.

Philips entered the market of tape recording with eight dominant systems from Ampex reel to reel to Madmax 8 track automobile cassettes.

Philips had a small simple one track cassette.  They charged a penny to use the cassette design and $2,000 to license the cassette reading head.    Within a few years, Phillips had 2/3rds of the total tape market.

Open design and licensing out perform proprietary design and marketing. Not something that makes sense to a military engineering company.

The engineers had no questions.  Instead of having a dinner with the Bofors executives, which was planned, I was served a dinner in a room by myself and immediately afterwards flown back to Stockholm.  

I did get a paycheck in the mail.

What is business?

I make a distinction between commerce and business.  Business is a subset of commerce and excludes a few activities that have unusual characteristics.  In the last blog I listed a few non-businesses.  Gambling is also one.  Its is legitimately commerce but not business unless you own the casino.

What is business?  It is offering products or services to customers and keeping track of the sales and costs with an accurate bookkeeping system that is designed to maintain the offering as long as the proprietor desires and with sufficient revenue to maintain the offering.

Hobbies are not business.  

Business may or may not have to do with profit.  Profit is defined as the surplus after the proprietor is paid.  Which is why a non-profit can be a good business.

Business can be moral like the Red Cross is sometimes, or immoral like the heroin trade.  It can be both like prostitution and alcohol.

Business can be a public operation with multiple owners with ownership traded in a market. It can be a sole proprietor, including a grandmother selling a childcare service.  Thus it can involve money for transactions or exchange of goods and services.

Business is simple or complex. Very big or very small. A business can survive only if it satisfies its customers and sells its goods and services for more than it pays for them.  

Or it can be subsidized by a government and then it is a quasi-business.

What isn’t business?

Since we have a candidate for president who got his business start in Real Estate in New York I can’t help talking about what isn’t business.

Farming is commerce, but it isn’t business in its normal sense.  A traditional farmer borrows to pay for planting and growing his crop.  He repays the loan when the crop is sold, if the price is viable.

He usually goes out of business if the weather he depends on fails to supply his crop or the price of the crop is too low to pay for the cost of growing it.  That isn’t business.  Depending on the weather and the global size of the crop is voodoo, religion or sad.

Making farming a business can be done by having a wide variety of crops and farm income, from animals products like wool, silk, honey, jam, etc.  Also growing crops in hot houses can also be a business.

Real Estate is often not a business. In most cases in real estate the operative is betting on a rising market.  That is gambling, not business.

Trading is not a business.  I’ve told the story about my client, the largest trading company in the world.  It has one set of books, into which every trade is entered on one line.  The purchase price and the terms of sale, sometimes a three way trade, with all the terms of financing.   That is definitely commerce but not business.  

People who trade in bonds, equities and other financial instruments are not in business.  They are speculators and sometimes they get good information and succeed.  But it is gambling with an algorithm that sometimes works.

As for the presidential candidate who started out in real estate, he got into business when he started buying and managing companies outside of real estate.  Apparently many of them are in a wide variety of fields.

Time to go to the core of modern pragmatism

Our academic world has lost its way.  Some colleges are trying to find their way back from Leftist-French absurdity.  I want to add my bit here.  Postmodernism is viable but it isn’t a simplistic form of relativism with no real truth.  Let me start with a description from our greatest recent postmodern thinker, Richard Rorty.  My interview with him is here.

" Postmodernists don't say that truth is relative or socially constructed, or at least my kind of postmodernist doesn't, the pragmatist kind. We say truth is eternal, objective, absolute, and so on, but it is not one; it is a bad inference from the claim that reality is one to the claim that truth is one. There is not a particular way that the world is, there are many ways the world is, as many as there are useful human vocabularies used to describe the world. This view suggests that no area of culture -- not physics, not theology, not biology -- is privileged in the sense of being closer to reality than any other portion of culture. From the pragmatist point of view, culture is a tool kit, and we pick up various tools as needed for various purposes. None of the tools has epistemological or ontological privilege; none of them has priority over any of the others".

My minor difference with Rorty is that I think the ‘truth’ or the ‘real world in all its multi-dimensionality’ is somewhat accessible.  I think that technology and its spouse, engineering, are somewhat more privileged along with surgery.  Not that these three categories have any theoretical advantage of any sort, but that they are truly empirical in their dealings with the ‘real world’.  When they move in the wrong direction, the bridge falls down and the patient dies.  They are among the rare forms of Darwinian survival available to humans in a variety of cultures.

I am the first to say the same is true for commerce.  It is a robust reflection of the ‘truth’ because it is Darwinian in its creation, form and function. Businesses and institutions survive when they serve an appropriate function.  And only then.

Is this time to build a new Republican Party?

It seems to me that Donald Trump will go into the Republican convention in Cleveland on July 18th with the most delegate votes.  This could split the Republican Party into the Old and New.

This happened in 1912 when Teddy Roosevelt (New York) failed to win the Republican Presidential Convention, though he was the most popular candidate with the American voters.  So he ran on the new Progressive Party ticket with the leading Progressive Johnson.

That split the Republican vote into the old party with 23% of the popular vote and the new party with 27% of the vote.   

The Democrat, black hating, war mongering, misanthrope, Woodrow Wilson won the election with a 42% minority.  Much like Bill Clinton, Democrat, major liar, who got his crooked dick sucked in the oval office, won in 1992 with 43% of the vote.

The New Republican Party can focus on being the party of commerce.  The Democrats are already the anti-commerce party with cronyism and class warfare as their tentpole policies.

The New Republican Party can also focus on sealing the Southern border which has aggressive smuggling; not restricting legal foreign workers including H-1B visas and farm worker visas.

Most importantly the New Party should support local police and other first responders nationwide in order to split the union movement that controls every major city.

Details include eliminating the crony Export-Import Bank and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau;  permanently reorganizing the IRS, CIA, FBI, Justice Department, EPA and NASA to remove all active political operatives and Democrat activists.  Also change the Treasury department so it can never tell banks what small business accounts banks can open or close.

Lastly, create the largest memorial in Washington D.C. to Alexander Hamilton and commerce.

Schismogenesis, we've got it

Don’t bother to look it up.  I got it from Gregory Bateson and his daughter Mary.  You can hear her radio interview here.

Schismogenesis occurs when two sides incite each other by giving conflicting and often escalating signals.  It comes from anthropology.

This can happen to an individual when each parent gives opposing instructions and rewards.  “You can’t watch TV tonight’, “You can when your father goes out.”

In the case of America today, we have a president who lies continually and makes completely false statements.  Such as ‘You can keep your doctor if you like him under Obamacare’.  ‘The Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam’. ‘The reason I haven’t passed my agenda is because of Republican opposition’.  ‘The rich and Wall Street don’t pay their fair share of taxes.’  ‘Israel won’t cooperate in negotiating with the Palestinians’.  ‘The Prime Minister of Israel is a chickenshit’.  etc.

Then add to the President’s lies the overwhelming majority of media outlets, 11 out of 12 that repeat the president’s lies without any correction or rebuttal.  Also look at the opposition party that allows the lies to stand.

The result is schismogenesis.  A separating away of the citizenry, that recognizes the lies, from the established institutions.  These citizens have no personal recourse to deal with the lies they know are being directed at them and affect their lives.  

These citizens rebel with growing anger at the major institutions around them.   The rebellion is fully underway and has been growing for 6 years.  Three elections have not assuaged the reaction to being lied to and manipulated by the president, the media and the political parties.

We have schismogenesis in America today; it has given us two unusual presidential candidates in Trump and Sanders.  Since it includes a corrupt IRS, State Department, CIA, FBI and Justice Department, it is hard to see how it will work its way out.

Democrats and poor people

I couldn’t resist this chart.  It comes from this article. The title is Why Middle-Class Americans Can't Afford to Live in Liberal Cities

I regularly blog about how the Left and the Democrat Party encourage and support poverty with their policies that harm poor people the most.  

My typical examples are the sin taxes on cigarettes, banning e-vape smoking, taxes on alcohol and very high environmental taxes on gasoline which hurt the poor disproportionately.

I also mention all the environmental penalties such a taxes on electricity, gas for heating and cooking and for older automobiles inspections and smog control.

The greatest part of Lefty hypocrisy is the class warfare of President Obama and the Democrat Party with their hate of Wall Street and billionaires.  The endless and meaningless rants about ‘income-inequality’.

This article and this data from the Lefty biased Atlantic magazine makes it clear that big Democrat urban areas with the highest rents, driving out low income workers are also the places with the greatest income inequality.  (Black dots are cities that voted overwhelmingly for Obama.) 

Lefties are terrible hypocrites.  It is their Democrat-union controlled cities that aggravate poverty and drive the poor out of urban locales with good jobs.  They do this with high minimum wage laws and an infinite array of perverse restrictions on new housing.

Cacophony 2

Part of the reason the Cacophony book fails is from lack of beautiful color photos. That is probably because the circle of people who can really have fun and the circle of people who take photos do not overlap.

My one great athletic event was organizing a party in the footing of one of the cables on the S.F. Bay Bridge.  There were about 15 of us.  We had to walk with our backs to a wall on a narrow ledge 50 feet about the boulders and water below.  No hand grips.  The hardest and most terrifying part was making a 90 turn around a corner.  

My job was to silence the alarm on the entry panel.  I may have failed.  We climbed inside the giant room about 50 ft by 50 ft by 50 ft. and had a great party for several hours.  Then we climbed a ladder out a different exit. We were greeted by two State Police officers.  It was mid-night.  I knew their shift was over at 2PM.  While one officer checked our driver’s licenses for arrestable infractions (no event member was allowed to have an outstanding warrant if they came with us) on the police car radio, which was a very slow process, I got the other policeman into a discussion about space travel.  It was a clear beautiful night with most of the constellations visible.  The conversation was so exciting and intense that when policeman #2 was finished policeman #1 was so excited about our discussion that he told us to forget about being arrested and bid us farewell.  

(Photo: the empty casing is the concrete just below where the lower part of the bridge, below the tunnel, connects to the island.)

Cacophony 1

I recently realized that I went to a party to celebrate a book about the Cacophony Society but never saw the book.  So I just bought it.  I was a little disappointed.

First, a book can not capture what the Cacophony Society is.  It is pure exuberant urban rebellion for the sake of fun.  Humans are mischievous and imaginative. (Until they reach adulthood.)  The book tells about Santacon, which has become a global event with people dressed as Santa going in hordes to bars, negligee stores and anywhere they are unexpected.  The book tells about St. Stupid Day parades and their various forms.  It reports about tours of sewer tunnels by people in tuxedos.  These events are fun because of their outrageous nature and their rebel component.  

Second, the book doesn’t cover any of my events.  Or my small role.   The father and founder of this urban rebel movement was Gary Warne, a good friend of mine.  Gary’s photo is the cover of my chapter 14 on Fun in our (Rasberry was a co-author) 1981 book Honest Business.  In that chapter, Gary’s bookstore, Circus of the Soul was described.  It was all about fun.  A barrel of books had the sign ½ off.  The books were cut in half across the middle. Any other book price was really half off if the buyer could hit a battery powered airplane on a string flying across the store with a dart.  Wearing a costume to the store got ½ off too.

Gary created Gorilla Grotto, a combination bookstore and lounge.  It had a backroom for meetings and films.  I gave a lecture one night on my plan to have a cruise ship from Hong Kong to Singapore for people who wanted to commit suicide.  The cruise ship had classes in the history of suicide and group  therapy sessions.  The audience booed loudly and was furiously angry at me.  I was only booed out of a talk two other times in my life.

Gary created the Suicide Club which, after his death while infiltrating the San Francisco Police Department, became the Cacophony Society.

Another important part of history is missed in the book.  The book gives credit to the bonfires at China Beach and John Law as the origin of Burning Man.  It fails to give credit to me for my role in starting the beach bonfire movement.  That is described in this earlier blog.  John has often given me credit, since he was at the bonfires I organized but it didn’t make it into the book.

More tomorrow.

Service monopoly

I keep running into people who believe in antitrust laws and believe that traditional monopolies are common.  Of course we have some traditional monopolies.  Most utilities are monopolies, as are taxi companies, Comcast, Kodak was, Amtrak is and the U.S. Post Office was.  Every monopoly that exists today in the U.S. and worldwide is the creation of government.  No exceptions.  No commercial businesses end up in the situation without government coercion to enable them.

What nobody seems to understand, and I make no exceptions to the ‘nobody’.  I have never seen any published material since I named the Service Monopoly in my book Marketing Without Advertising in 1984.

A service monopoly exists when any business product or service is so good that its customers have no reason to buy an alternative product or service. .  This can happen with products such as  WD-40 and the Wall Street Journal.  It is more common with services such as Google and Facebook and Netflix.  It can be associated with networks.  But the core service monopoly arises for reasons other than networking.  Superior product or service.

A service monopoly is never a true monopoly, it usually has 80% of the market.  People just don’t seem to understand this.  Service monopolies can disappear nearly overnight.   Good examples of disappearing are Yahoo on search and dial-up access; Microsoft on personal computers, Sony in electronics, Netscape in Internet, MySpace in social networking and Motorola in radio.

Service monopolies are wonderful commercial creations.  They occur wherever a product or service is so good that it comes to dominate its market.  Three cheers, we all benefit.

Dan White phenomenon

The country is in an hysteric mood these days.  I felt such a mood for the weeks before Jack Kennedy was assassinated.  Both conservatives and Lefties are feeling the same mood.  I don’t know how it will play out.

The problem for me is that I find no description or explanation of hysteria to be intelligible or substantial.

I suspect the problem is that hysteria is so obvious that we can’t see it.  

I’ve been through many hysteria’s in my life.  Some I recognized at the early stages.  The hippy belief in the core goodness of people was an hysteria, as was the hippy belief in the purity of life ‘in the country’.  In the 1980’s there was a national hysteria that children were being kidnapped on a massive scale.  (The number of non-family kidnappings never changed; always about 110 kids per year in the U.S.)  We then had an epidemic of kindergarten teachers accused of kidnapping kindergartners to participate in sexual satanic rituals. Dozens of people went to prison for this hysterical crime.  In the 1990’s we had an epidemic of women (and a few gay men) who had recovered memories of childhood sexual abuse.

I call this the Dan White phenomenon.  Dan White a former cop and San Francisco Supervisor, with premeditation, murdered the Mayor and fellow Supervisor, gay, Harvey Milk.  He went looking for another supervisor who hid under her desk, Carol Ruth Silver.  It was Carol who alerted me to the fact that the District Attorney was deliberating blowing the case on behalf of Dan White and the police department.  

The afternoon Dan White was sentenced to 5 years in prison for the double first degree murder, I felt a sense of outrage and headed for City Hall.  When I got there it was early evening and I joined a crowd of 40k to 60k other San Franciscans.  It was a cross section of the City, not in anyway gay.  The mood was ferocious.  I helped turn over a few police cars, while a few others were set on fire.  Everything within reach of the crowd for a radius of 5 blocks was broken, burned and destroyed.  The police and firemen formed a self protection line and never moved for the next two hours while the crowd rampaged.  There are no decent photos of the riots. The hysteria did not exempt any news photographers.  

I suspect that humans are hardwired for hysteria.  Our mind is a community organism.  Which is why our vocabulary expands when we are conversing with a smart person. Our minds must also be able to synchronize with other people on a more massive scale.  I suspect that it is an emotional connection that is the vehicle.

I don’t know any more than that at this point.  Please chime in.