Pro Commerce

Education

We all know how bad college and university education is.  Feminist, white hatred, victimology, safe spaces for snowflakes and 6 year olds, trigger warnings that Mark Twain and Shakespeare use derogatory words, raw hatred of America and commerce etc.  I have two granddaughters in college and hope they aren’t destroyed or even badly damaged.  I hope they have enough guts to reject this evil and see the genius of Milo and his fellow supporters.

What may be even worse is that all of this PC ideology is even more over wrought in K-12.  If you have kids in school you know how bad it is.  I only have a granddaughter I follow in K-4,  I don’t get reports on two others.  The one I have followed from K to 4 is in a charter school in the Los Angeles public schools.  Everything, I mean everything, is taught in terms of the coming global warming Armageddon.  Math questions are about sustainability, geography is about the destruction of the oceans with acidity, history is about the colonial invaders destroying the natural world and more and more PC garbage.

I have a friend who thinks the reason a majority of self defined Jews are self-hating Jews on the Left because Jews have been such groupies about academia.  It’s a reasonable argument.  The PC anti-male culture of academia at all levels is overwhelming and depressing.

Enough to be depressed about.  There is nothing to do about it except to use the national political forum and Milo tactics to make change.  I worked in education for several decades and no change is possible.  Only change in the overall culture will change the evil world of academia.

My next two blogs in March are more optimistic.

Memorials

My partner (female) and I have a tradition developed over many years.  We have been doing it for over two decades.  We keep a list of friends who died and read it out loud at the beginning of every year.  

I am a fan of traditions and behavioral acts that incorporate abstract ideas.  This is saying the name of a friend long after they have lived.  

We often go to a nearby hill that has a view of San Francisco.  Somehow this makes the ritual more important than just reading the list at the breakfast table.

I also favor a gassho (hand bow) to ambulances and fire trucks with sirens.  That is a physical recognition that a person or group of people are risking their lives to help a stranger.

We also celebrate the Sabbath evening candle lighting with wine and breaking bread.  We use the time, often with friends, to talk about our lives during the past week.  A behavioral way to make examination of ordinary life into a traditional ritual.

I think life needs to be reflected on as well as lived.

Honest about Siri and Alexa

Of course our personal assistants are predominantly women’s voices.  If you pay attention to the world of academics, technologists and feminists you will get a bunch of garbled meaningless explanations for this phenomenon.

As my regular readers know, I am willing to speak facts to popular mythology.  I tell the truth about black crime rate, very high, Obama’s innumeracy because he is half-black and has the black American cultural baggage most blacks carry.  

I talk about the horrors of modern feminism and its debilitating effect on modern commerce and the American society.

I want to explain why Siri, Alexa and Google Voice are female. I did research on this using multidimensional scaling with real humans and no reliance on language or questionnaires.

It is simple: men enter all rooms with strangers and look for danger, implicit threat.  Men are potential threats to men and women are not.  Women enter rooms and see other women as competition for the men. 'Threat' is an order of magnitude worse than 'competition'.

This is true of men and women as defined by their physiology before sex change surgery.  I have not done research on people who have changed their physiology.  No one has.

Therefore our electronic assistants need to have women’s voices.  The women’s voice is not a threat to our reptilian brain.

I can go one step further, based on watching the response of Americans to the dialect of foreigners who speak good English.  The most American accent is a slight Texas drawl much like we used to get when the pilot was speaking to passengers over the PA system on an airplane.  If a man has a slight Texas drawl he is considered more honest, more competent and more friendly.

Now you can go back to the regular world of lies, mythology and people telling the king how lovely his clothes are.

Marketing for Hershey

Hershey has been running TV ads, lately, for a range of new products with a big Hershey label on the packaging.  These include Hershey Cookie Layer Crunch and come in bags and bars.

It makes me want to write an entire new chapter in Marketing Without Advertising.

Hershey’s has bought dozens of companies and not changed the names of the products.  Hershey’s owns Almond Joy, Mounds, Reese’s, York Peppermint drops; Hershey’s sells Kit Kat, Rolo, Cadbury, Twizzlers and many others.  Each has kept its own name.  Each name is well known and stands on its own, meaning we know what it tastes like.

My concern is the new products that aren’t really variations on their existing candy bar are sold with a big Hershey’s logo.

They are trying to use the 100 year old brand of Hershey’s to promote a new product.  This will help introduce the new product but will slowly degrade the original Hershey’s bars and their close relative bars.  Consumers will slowly lose the the mental taste of Hershey’s bars and lose the powerful drive to buy them.  New consumers will have a confused sense of what Hershey’s is and will never have the ‘mainline’ desire for the original product.

The new candies should have new names.  The Hershey name should not be hidden but it should be small and related to the manufacturing information.  The new products without the Hershey logo would be slower to grow but they would have their own clientele.  

My new chapter would tell the story of ‘New Coke’ and its gigantic global failure.

Drugs

‘Drugs’ have a definitional problem.  What is a drug and what isn’t?  I consider soap and most cosmetics to be drugs.  They are sold in Drugstores and they are intended to have an effect of some sort on the skin, whether to make it smell less or look younger.  The same with all the stuff we put in our mouths to make them smell better or do something to our teeth.  They seem to me to be drugs.

This blog is about a question in my mind.  Or on my mind.  Why are we, Americans and people like us, such heavy users of drugs?

Where does it come from?  Many tribal people use colored clay or paint on their skin and decorate their bodies.   Some societies cover up women so completely that their is no call for makeup or relevant body drugs.   Men in much of the world use less drugs in the form of make-up than women.  Why. The Japanese put much more drugs in their body but less ON their bodies.

When it comes to other drugs such as pot, alcohol, tobacco, opium and heroin there is a strong male bias in their usage.  Across national boundaries. Why?

This is highly relevant to commerce because this strange division of drug usage has big consequences in the world of commerce.  What is going on?

I hope you get the answer before I do.

Japanese internment

The Democrat media that first tried to change the Electoral College vote, then denied that there was fraud in the vote and paid for some recounts, then claimed that the Russians got millions of anti-Hillary voters to vote for the ‘deplorable’, then sought impeachment, then tried to prove the president was mentally incompetent enough for his cabinet to remove him, has consistently claimed he is anti-Jew (when the Democrat Party really is) has most recently been claiming that a ban on terrorists entering the country is like the Holocaust and the deportation of alien criminals is like the Japanese internment.

I know something about the Japanese internment because I campaigned for Japanese-American victim repatriation.  My role was insignificant and ineffective, but I was in the movement and know the facts.

The most startling fact is that, while political polling hadn’t yet begun, the public supported the internment largely because the press had found a Japanese national managing a tea house in the Golden Gate Park who had a shortwave radio and was broadcasting to the Japanese.

Even better evidence is that no one other than the Quakers helped the Japanese-Americans being interned by holding their property for them, including farms, or any other form of help.  Democrats certainly didn’t help since the President, giving the orders, was a 'great heroic Democrat'.

German and Italian immigrants were interned in several camps specially for them.

The ACLU was not opposed to the internment and did nothing to oppose it.  Only one ACLU lawyer in San Francisco, Ernest Besig personally brought a lawsuit to end the Japanese internment.  The national board of the ACLU, all Democrats, voted to do nothing to help the Japanese-Americans.  

Congress, controlled by Democrats for the entire period, did not vote reparations for 35 years.

The U.S. Army brought 2,200 Peruvian-Japanese citizens to a camp in Texas to hold as hostages to trade for Americans held by the Japanese army.  None of them got reparations.

Everything else that the Democrats are saying about the Trump victory and Trump border actions are not credible.  How can this comparison to the Japanese internment be any more credible.

Emancipation proclamation

Exactly seven years ago, I wrote this in a blog: “We should plan to celebrate the signing of Emancipation Proclamation by the first Republican President, Abraham Lincoln, in the Lincoln bedroom (the Obama's should know this). The date of the 150th Anniversary of the signing is September 22, 2012.  The anniversary of it implementation is January 1st 2013.

That will prepare us for the April 9th 2015, the 150th anniversary of the surrender of General Lee at the Appomattox Court House.  We could also celebrate the May 10th capture of the Confederate President Jefferson Davis. I think that this time, unlike 1965, (when there was no celebration due to racial riots) having had a black president, America will be ready to celebrate the end of the Civil War and actually mark the end of that war.”

Need I tell my readers that now that the half black president is out of office, this is another indictable offense of our ignorant, uneducated former president. There were no celebrations and not even a few good speeches from anyone.

Not only did we not celebrate anything to do with the slave emancipation and the victory of anti-slavery forces, that killed over half-a-million men, we didn’t celebrate the end of the Civil War.

Part of this was because the half-black president didn’t know American history, but more importantly his purpose was to create a race war in America using all the powers he could muster.  Remembering the emancipation was contrary to his desire for a race war, so he ignored it.

Terrible man and worse president.

Simple living and used clothes

I have been a simple liver for more than half my life.  When you live simply you have infinitely more options for leading your own life.  You don’t owe on a mortgage and you aren’t worried about losing a job.

I wrote a book on the subject. Simple Living Investments for Old Age which my wife dejour edited for the second edition.

So I am happy to see any increase in simple living in the great American marketplace.  It gives us more free and independent people.  More open minds and creative spirits.

Thanks to an article in the Wall Street Journal I found the online world of sales of used clothes.  There are more than a dozen popular sites, aimed at the young and mobile phone market.  

Selling used clothes has been the backbone of yard sales and consignment shops.  Now it is even easier, online.  The online sites even help with the money exchange and shipping for the young crowd.

Wonderful.   I keep trying to estimate the proportion of GDP that is made up of simple living trading.  My estimate just went up 2%.  It is rising.

Impeachment and more

The Trump Derangement Syndrome has been volcanic around me lately.  For more than two months I have been hearing about ‘impeachment’.   These are not stupid and ignorant people.  They are just deranged by a political outcome that is incomprehensible to them.

I think it would be fair to call them stupid and ignorant, were it not for their blatant mental illness.

The constitution spells out impeachment.  The basis is ‘treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors’.  The House must vote the articles of impeachment with a simple majority.  Then the Senate, with the Chief Justice presiding, must vote with a super majority.  

Since both the House and Senate are controlled by Republicans it is hard to see how impeachment would be possible.  In fact it wouldn’t be possible which is the reason for calling the Democrat loonies stupid, ignorant or in reality mentally deranged.

Two presidents have been impeached.  Both Democrats.  Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton.  Johnson was a serious threat to the U.S. and we live with the horrible consequences of his failed impeachment to this day.  The racist bigotry of Black Lives Matter can be laid on Johnson for his blockage of the rehabilitation of slaves after the Civil War.  Slaves remained ignorant and destitute in the South while the Confederates built a Jim Crow society that survived for a century, and for high crime urban ghettos that have survived to this day.

Johnson was a Democrat under Lincoln, a Republican, because in those days the Vice President was elected separately.  John W. Booth was a Democrat and killed Lincoln with the intent to promoting a Democrat to the presidency. 

Bill Clinton just lied under oath about sex with an employee; he was a notorious liar and horndog.

Apparently the same buffoons who have been yelling about impeachment are learning how ridiculous that is and they are now talking about using the 25th Amendment that allows the majority of cabinet officers to declare the president unfit for office.  

The cabinet officers are all friends and appointees of the President.  This seems about as likely as a flea biting a tiger and killing him.  There are 17 regular cabinet members and another 10 ‘direct reports’ to the president.  This seems even harder to achieve than the impeachment.

Mental illness is a sad state.  Some sympathy is due these poor losers.

Retail failure

The financial press has written the obituary for brick and mortar retail.   Macy’s and Nordstrom are gone along with many others.  These failures are blamed on Amazon and other on-line sellers.

Bookstores were the first to face this issue with early Amazon that only sold books and Barnes & Noble.  I had several bookstore clients.  I also had tea house clients who were being hurt by all the coffee shops opening around them.

I had no trouble showing brick and mortar clients how to cope with the changing market place.  They have enormous advantages over online stores.  Those that followed my advice did well.  The rest closed.  Mostly for the reason most businesses close: the owners were too old, too bored and unwilling to make all the necessary changes.

For bookstores the need was to be more appealing to local customers than online could ever be.  Carry more locally relevant books and magazines.  Have live performances to bring people together with coffee and rolls.  Carry a good selection of local authors and used local books.  Focus on warmth and staff.  Have book clubs.  Have high demand objects in front of the store like newspapers and relevant magazines and maps.  Create a service that will get on-order-books the next day.  Have cards and magazines for local shut-ins and disabled.  Etc.  You get the point.  Become an important local institution.

Tea houses were faced with the problem that new customers could never figure out the absurd pricing system.  Constant tastings.  Simplified pricing.  Demos everyday. Tea pairings with relevant food.  Photos of tea history and video too.

Retailers have great advantages over online stores.  Macy’s has done nothing that is relevant to good marketing.  Brick and mortar owners need to go to Tokyo and look at the stores there.  Japan is the center of the greatest retail imagination on the planet.

The first floor of every department store has everything on wheels and the first floor changes completely every month.  Large tv screens are everywhere in clothing fashion stores and nearly everywhere in other retail stores.  One of my favorite fashion stores has rotating mannequins in outside windows on the facade on every floor and a similar display in the entrance area.  Another fashion store has an 11 story mural inside that relates to the sales staff and the way they dress.  

Samples are abundant in every store that can have samples like Costco, except more extensively. Classes and demos are going on everywhere and are open to passersby.  

Brick and mortar retailers have great advantages but they must change and be lively.  They also need to copy the online stores and have first rate efficient warehousing and inventory systems.  Walmart is going to do alright, so is Costco.

Western values in Trump victory

Our new president has saved the world.  Interestingly, in thinking about this I realize that Americans have saved the very world we created in the first place;  and for the same reasons.

In several long blogs I have made the point that is in the title of this blog, that modern commerce  is built on meritocracy, diversity and openness.  That the uniqueness of America is that these components of modern commerce came together in the vast opening of the West in our early history beginning after the Hamiltonian government was formed.  

The West allowed people who were uncomfortable in the hereditary elite world of the East Coast and the South to escape.  To create their own lives, using their own resources and individual ingenuity.  And they came together voluntarily to help each other raise barns and create local government.  The West was a melange of strangers working together, the purest definition of diversity, and the personal pistol and vast distances created an environment of openness.

It was that same ‘move West’ drive that united Americans to elect Donald Trump.  Americans are rigorously individuals who hate to be told what to do and how to do it.  Nothing is more un-American than the Post Cold War Democrat Party machines that apply union anti-meritocratic rules to everything and the lying drive-by-media that makes up news to try and control America.  The world of academia, safe spaces, trigger warning, anti-free-speech looks insane to the strong part of America.

Not only did our core DNA elect Donald Trump, but the same core values seem to be driving him in office.

Why Google and Netflix work

A few blogs back,  I pointed out that Google is thriving because it is not based on advertising, it is a listing.  Google lets viewers know about a good or service that is directly related to something they are interested in or searching for.  That is not advertising which is a scatter shot of information at anyone in the target area of the shot.  Listing is what you find on the wall of a building when you are looking for an office, or on a menu when you plan to eat or the outside of a coffee shop when you want a scone.

The entire ad budget of the world is somewhere around $180 billion and Google already directed one third of that into the much more effective world of listing.  

My point in this blog is that advertising only works in limited areas, with tourists who often lack a trustworthy source of recommendation and children who don’t understand the world at all.

Therefore businesses that survive only on advertising such as Facebook and Twitter have a long term problem surviving.   Ad agencies believe in their product and believe that the vast array of information that is now available to Internet suppliers helps advertisers target their message to people who are likely customers.  Which is not true.  I see dozens of ads, daily, on Facebook and Twitter that have nothing to do with me.  It is too much trouble to delete them, ignoring them is the preferred strategy.

The whole point of this blog is that businesses that depend on a reliable income stream and a desirable product like Netflix, Amazon and Google have a future.  Others who live on advertising have the same future as newspapers.

This is not investment advice.  I have pointed out elsewhere that all the tech companies are run by idiots (except Oracle) who give all their money to the anti-business Democrat Party at a time when they desperately need the support of a pro-businessman like Trump to thrive in the world of hostile foreign nations. 

'Place' as the hippies used it

I have several issues of a glossy covered hippie publication called ‘Place’. 1972. The theme was geographic locations and the importance of those locations to the life and flora associated with it.  One of the things hippies found credible were ‘ley lines’.  These were supposed ancient culture’s notion of spiritual and magnetic forces on the surface of the earth that were important.

I can’t comment on the spiritual importance of 'place'.  I have no form of evidence.

I can say from a life of observation that some locations are great for a business and others are terrible.  I have watched locations where no business survives over decades. Many close together where one thrives and another continually fails.  Even with different buildings and changes in the landscape.  But business depends on humans and human impulse which may be unrelated to anything invisible or unknowable.

What brings up the issue is a discovery a few days ago.  In a fairly bad part of town, San Francisco, a new and spectacular bakery has opened.  Called Frena.  It is kosher and run by some Israelis.  Next door they are opening a snack bar focused on hummus and falafel.  Across the street is a new and large Chabad House.  I met the young rabbi.

So who cares?

The location is bad and has been bad for a century.  It is the hangout  area for drunks and druggies.  

I set out in 1978 to create some humanity on this corner.  I build a park for street people, with toilets, grass, a water faucet, benches and a basketball hoop.  It was very popular; everyone in the neighborhood and the habitues loved it.  

It closed after three years from city hall pressure and the Puritanism of all the social services.  To this day there is no place in America, no park for street people.

Back to the subject.  In this photo the Frena bakery is on the Left and the large building on the Right is where my ‘Drunk Park’ was.  This is 6th and Minna.

Did I change the ‘place’ on that corner is some way that made it suitable for vibrant life 35 years later?  

Most of the world is tribal

This blog repeats several earlier themes.  It is hard to remember how exceptional American life is.

Virtually no one living in our modern world, who is not tribal themselves, has any conception of life in the tribal world. Tribal people constitute nearly 6/7ths of the worlds population..

That includes India, China, Africa and Arabia as populations that are nearly all tribal. In India your class designation is important to you but your family name and village are more important. In China it is similar. Your tong reflects a much larger family name but a tribal name nevertheless. In China an individual is also associated with his/her village of origin. Africa and Arabia are one hundred percent tribal.

When a baby is born into a tribe, that baby learns to rely on his/her family immediately in a way that is different from non-tribal babies. That tribal child's survival is entirely dependent on its understanding of its membership in the family. As the child grows he/she must protect and be protected by siblings, parents and extended family. It doesn't matter whether the child is born into a family of serfs or a royal elite.

In a tribal environment each family depends on its cousins or family hierarchy to come to its rescue in times of trouble. Trouble includes threats of illegal or criminal nature, threats to livelihood or threats to food survival. Families band together to protect each other, their family lineage and their entire tribe when necessary.

When you are born into a tribal environment you must learn how to favorably appeal to every member of your family from the closest to the most distant. Your survival depends on being accepted as part of the family.  You can’t be a rebel, outcast or deviant. Being an individual is highly restricted.

There is no way that we, who survive based on money, neighbors, friends and sometimes police to protect us, can understand the nature of tribal society. In many ways we are stand alone individuals.

We, commercial people, haven't the vaguest idea of how the real world outside of modern commercialism works. We live in a global tribal world in which our understanding of reality is trivial, wrong and often gets us into trouble.  Both we as individuals and as a nation.

That includes India, China, Africa and Arabia as populations that are nearly all tribal. In India your class designation is important to you but your family name and village are more important. In China it is similar. Your tong reflects a much larger family name but a tribal name nevertheless. In China an individual is also associated with his/her village of origin. Africa and Arabia are one hundred percent tribal.

When a baby is born into a tribe, that baby learns to rely on his/her family immediately in a way that is different from non-tribal babies. That tribal child's survival is entirely dependent on its understanding of its membership in the family. As the child grows he/she must protect and be protected by siblings, parents and extended family. It doesn't matter whether the child is born into a family of serfs or a royal elite.

In a tribal environment each family depends on its cousins or family hierarchy to come to its rescue in times of trouble. Trouble includes threats of illegal or criminal nature, threats to livelihood or threats to food survival. Families band together to protect each other, their family lineage and their entire tribe when necessary.

When you are born into a tribal environment you must learn how to favorably appeal to every member of your family from the closest to the most distant. Your survival depends on being accepted as part of the family.  You can’t be a rebel, outcast or deviant. Being an individual is highly restricted.

There is no way that we, who survive based on money, neighbors, friends and sometimes police to protect us, can understand the nature of tribal society. In many ways we are stand alone individuals.

We, commercial people, haven't the vaguest idea of how the real world outside of modern commercialism works. We live in a global tribal world in which our understanding of reality is trivial, wrong and often gets us into trouble.  Both we as individuals and as a nation.

Why didn’t I worry about my kids worldviews?

There are two issues that I never made any effort to focus on in influencing my children.  Judaism and politics.

As it turns out one child is strongly pro commerce and loves Israel.  The other two are pro Israel and one observes the Jewish holidays with her children.  Unfortunately two are Democrats.  One over the abortion issue and the other over environmentalism.

I ask myself why this happened.  The answer is surprising.  I could not see the future and the future turned out to be evil.

My children grew up from the late 1960’s to the late 1980’s. That was during the Cold War when two facts of American life were well established.  The Democrat Party was only slightly anti-commerce, with its strong base in labor unions.  Most of the Democrat establishment still supported American commercial and technical suzerainty because of the Cold War needs for both.

Jew hate was de minimis in America during that period. Especially after the hereditary elite disappeared in the early 1960's and after the Catholic Church changed its Jew hate teaching at the Second Vatican Council in 1966.  

I couldn’t see what we have today. 

• Jew hate has a stranglehold on the Democrat Party which had an openly Jew hating president in B.H.Obama and a large number of Congressional Democrats who walked out on a ‘life-saving request’ address by the Prime Minister of Israel.  
• A time when Jew hate is rampant on nearly every American campus. A time when Jew hate is well entrenched and protected by the academic faculties and administrators across the land.

Had I seen this neo-Nazi turn in a significant part of America I would have made sure my children understood their Jewish and commercial heritage.  I would have observed the Sabbath, enjoyed every religious holiday including fasting on Yom Kippur and taken them, many times, to see the greatest miracle in human history: Israel.  I would have paid for and encouraged their Bar and Bat Mitzvahs.

I certainly never foresaw that the end of the Cold War, with the failure of the USSR and Mao’s China, would lead to the American Left and the Democrat Party adopting the communist values that are anti-commerce and dedicated to the destruction of the American Enterprise.

I was already pro commerce when my children were young and learning. I was travelling the world to promote new businesses and better business practices.  I never realized that the Democrat Party would become the party of anti-commerce.  The Party that would turn the unrestricted Internet into a public utility, that would force banks to deny banking to thousands of thriving businesses (Operation Choke Point), deny favorable IRS rulings to hundreds of pro commerce and pro-Israel organizations and create local Democrat city governments to pass malicious laws that universally favored unions and punished individual initiative, private property and commerce.

While I was part of the group that created modern environmentalism, I never foresaw that the environmental movement would do everything in its power to become a universal religion that would promote Ludditism and hamper commercial development and building in every way that it could.  Globally.

I regret not teaching my children what I knew and understood.  I forgive myself. I could never have seen the rise of the horrible evil that now rampages across the earth.

False advertising

The first chapter in my highly successful Marketing Without Advertising (co-author Salli Rasberry) is about the public distrust of advertising.  I give many examples of misleading or openly dishonest advertising.  The examples show that the public distrust of advertising is warranted.

There seems to have been a few decades where there was less false advertising. Maybe as more people used 'photoshop' at home and more content went 'ad free'.

I was contemplating the issue as I started working on the 7th edition of the book. I started paying attention to advertising, something I find easy to avoid.  Turns out there is no real decline in false advertising.

Here is the headline of a recent ad: "Increase your home's value and comfort". I don’t remember whether this was for new windows, new doors or paving stones.  I do know that in the area where I live most houses sell for $800K to $1.5 million.  A new kitchen or new bathroom can raise the sale price by $10K but little else has an effect and little else will pay for itself.  False advertising?  Just wrong advertising.

Every evening on TV I am treated to a half dozen ads for face creams that will remove wrinkles.  Maybe for a few hours or a day.  But the implication is that these products will remove wrinkles for long periods.  False advertising.

Then there are the classic snake oil proposals.  Nutritional supplements are offered everywhere with promises to improve vision, generate more energy and fix a dozen maladies.  They don’t; as publicly announced by the CDC after decades of reliable studies.

What is this blog about?  Just that some advertising has returned to its old ways. Deception.  Which colors the general public view of all advertising.  

I can find plenty of new material for the first chapter of Marketing Without Advertising.

If you wonder about the elephant in the room, Google, which has captured more than half of the global ad budgets; stop wondering.  

Google was built on my book which was published in 1984 and been revised regularly ever since.  The book makes clear that ‘advertising’ is shotgun bluster, much like dog poo on the sidewalk that everyone has to step over.  The people Google is talking to are looking for a product or information.  It is therefore a ‘listing’ like the directory in a building lobby, like the old Yellow pages, or like a restaurant menu.  Big difference between a shotgun to the public and a ‘listing’ where individuals are looking for something.

Few people have noticed this even to this day.  Out of billions of people.

Traffic calming

‘Traffic calming’ is a Lefty euphemism for ‘we hate cars and an efficient society’.

San Francisco may be the big city with the worst case of ‘traffic calming’.  Nearly every street in the City now has an asphalt hump in the middle of both lanes.

The ostensible purpose is to slow cars down to the same speed as bicycles.  If it worked, like more stop signs and stop lights, it would increase the amount of time to get around the City.  I remember being able to drive to anywhere in the City in less than 15 minutes.  Now the same route would take double that amount of time. Fine if you are a trust fund kid.

I’m not pro-bicycle.  I’ve been to bicycle friendly cities, Tokyo and much of Europe fit that definition.  It penalizes old people, is ridiculous in rain and snow, is hostile to families with children, young mothers and most of the disability community. (Typical of Lefty programs.)  

The proof that ‘traffic calming’ is really anti-car and not pro-bicycle is that San Francisco streets have more potholes and bigger potholes as time goes by.  The relentless growth of potholes is not helpful to bicycles.  But it is easy to accomplish.  So it is.

Potholes are much more effective at traffic calming that speed bumps.  That is why they are increasing in San Francisco at such a fast rate.

Another car hate ordinance in San Francisco is the requirement that all new construction have only 3 parking spaces for every 4 residential dwellings.  When all new apartments cost over $1 million it is hard to believe that the buyers only have 3/4ths of car.  Many large apartments are built with no parking.

We are living in a dystopia that imagines only 25 year old unmarried tech workers who walk or ride the bus to work and have groceries and meals delivered to them by bicycle.  

The fervid conception of a communist Luddite city planner.

BART station name

My wife, riding BART from the airport, noticed that the name on the Fruitvale Station in Oakland on the map in the train had been changed to ‘Oscar Grant’.  

This was an issue that came up last Summer, six months ago.  Lefties of the Black Lives persuasion didn’t get the BART Board to change the name of the station.  So they began gluing their own names on all the maps.  Clearly the cleaning crews have not fixed the issue.

It is a rather brilliant piece of theater and hard to reverse, I imagine.

I don’t favor the action but must note its ingenuity and contribution to social action.

Oscar Grant was a black 22 year old trouble-maker.  He and his three buddies had been screwing around on one of the trains and were told to get off by the BART police.  At the station where they got off, they continued messing around and wouldn’t stop when told to.  One of the police knocked Grant to the ground and another tried to use a taser to subdue him.  The officer accidentally used his pistol instead of the taser and killed Grant on the ground.

As you can imagine, the black community went into paroxysms of hysteria.  And as usual, the black community blamed the white police officer not the out-of-control black men who were being rowdy and threatening to everyone around them.  

The young inexperienced police officer went to jail for 5 months before the sentencing and another 7 months in prison.

Modern anti-white racism with a severe penalty for a rowdy black and an innocent poor white.

Interesting enough that you might want to know about it.

More on zazen

Over the past 18 years of writing this blog I’ve occasionally mentioned my connection to Zen Buddhism.  I am a Jew and like many Jews I saw an intellectual side to Zen that I found interesting.

I was a close friend of the Abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, Dick Baker.  Founded by Shunryu Suzuki whose talks were incorporated into the most successful zen book Zen Mind Beginners Mind.  Dick had a brilliant mind and our countless private talks and trips together won me to Zen.  

I began sitting zazen in 1971 and sat daily from about 1976 until 2005.  Except for most instances early on, including several sesshins, I sat alone and have been chided for that isolated behavior.

The intellectual power of zen and a parallel power in Tibetan Buddhism can not be ignored by bright curious people.  The core teaching is simple but nearly impossible to grasp without teachers and great effort.  

You can, or certainly I could, stop my mind completely after three days of being still.  At that point you are able to live entirely in the unmediated present.  You can also learn how to live in that ‘always present’ state of mind.   

I later learned from a wonderful zen teacher who became a rabbi, Alan Lew, that many of the teachings of zen can be found in esoteric Judaism. And I use them.

Thank you Dick Baker and Alan Lew.  I have used zen practice to be awake and alive, one of the greatest blessing a man can have.

I am also a social activist. From the beginning of my interest in zen, I always wondered, and even hoped, that practicing zen would have social benefits.  That it would change people sufficiently to generate open minds.

My hopes were dashed with time and observation.

It doesn’t generate open minds among practitioners.  I now know as I observe dozens of abbots and other teachers who have spent their lives as zen practitioners.  Their minds and worldviews are frozen at the stage they were in when they started practice as late teenagers.  Communist or Marxist when young and communist/marxist when old.

Summary: Zen Buddhism may be helpful for individuals.  It has no social benefits in creating open minds among a large population. Sadly.

Oldest board game

I said in yesterday’s blog that the East Asian board game of Go was the oldest known board game.  It is mentioned in the earliest Chinese writing which dates back 3,000 years.

We have an historical bias toward history that is recorded.  That bias apparently infuses me too, though I made an offer to my editor at Random House to write a book on pre-written history.  She wasn’t interested.

In celebrating the antiquity of Go, I was ignoring my own private knowledge.

My daughter is an archaeologist.  Nearly a decade ago she went on an harrowing trip to East Timor to do her research.   The most interesting part of her report to me was that she and her group were served a roast pig. The pig was sliced into small cubes about 1.5 inches square with a machete.  One of the pieces she got had some teeth in it.

The part of my daughter’s report that relates to this blog is that she sat on a large boulder on the West side of the island and found two rows of small pits or depressions in the rock. Two rows of 14 pits.  That is the African game of Kalah or Mancala.

Which suggests that the earliest migrants may have brought the game with them.  

The ‘out of Africa’ model places the Indian Ocean migration to 50,000 years ago with final settlement of the native peoples in Australia.  

The current archaeology of the Pacific Islands places the migration at 3-5,000 years ago from Taiwan, based on language, genetics and pottery.

Whatever island settlement model one uses, it certainly looks like the game of Kalah is very old and possibly older than Go.

Go master

The board game played in China, Korea and Japan called ‘go’ is certainly the oldest board game in the world.  It was mentioned in Chinese literature 3,000 years ago.

The game is one of territorial conquest played by two people on a board with 361 squares.  The pieces are usually black and white stones.  Stones can be placed anywhere by alternating players.  The object is to encircle an empty space with entirely one color of stones.  The winner has the most enclosed space.

One year when I was in Japan I wished to learn how to play Go.  So I checked with friends about finding a teacher.  I found one in Kobe, an ancient coastal trading city.

I went to the teacher’s home and he set out the board and showed me a few ideal early moves.

Then we played.  

When we were finished putting all our stones on the board, he proceeded to count all the empty squares for each side.  At which point it was clear to him and generally observed by me, that I had won.

The teacher became very disturbed.  We would call him angry, except that the Japanese don’t get angry.

I think he thought I was a shill who was just trying to get a match with him and show off.

Actually it was my first game of Go.  And my last.

BART to the airport

The peninsula of San Francisco has produced another hero than Jane Stanford.  (See an earlier blog.)  Quentin Kopp.

What did Quentin do? (I know Quentin Kopp.)  

First it has to be understood that the main subsurface rail line in the San Francisco area is BART the Bay Area Rapid Transit.  It covers only San Francisco and the two counties of the East Bay (Alameda and Contra Costa) because the vote to fund this rail line was rejected by the two adjacent counties (San Mateo and Marin). The three counties that were and are the counties served by BART approved an $800 million bond issue in 1962.  Work was begun three years later and completed in 1972, ten years later.

The system had one good feature and two bad.  The good one was that BART connected to the San Francisco surface rail system.  The bad was that it didn’t connect to either nearby Bay Area Airports.

Since San Mateo County voted itself out of BART even before it started, there was no one to pay for a line from San Francisco to the San Francisco Airport which is in San Mateo County.

Nothing was done, nor could it be done for the next 30 years to amend these two serious mistakes.  San Mateo has a jealous and malicious relationship to San Francisco.

One man, changed that.  Quentin Kopp had been a popular Democrat supervisor in San Francisco for 15 years in the 1970’s and 80’s.  He was a State Senator for the next twelve years and then was appointed a Superior Court Judge in San Mateo County.

Quentin is a gregarious, polished and highly competent politician.  He knew everyone in public life in San Francisco, Sacramento and San Mateo.  

He was in the unique position to get a BART line connecting San Francisco to the Airport, which he did by 2003 when it opened..  The line was partially paid for by San Mateo County which got 6 stations on a 9 mile extension.

One man is responsible for the convenience that 40,000 people a week enjoy.  Thank you Quentin Kopp.

Big brother

My wonderful friend Per has been asking me my opinion about ‘big data’.

I have two responses.  One response is to the strident talk about its novelty.  As computers get faster and handle more data the data sets can get larger.  Nevertheless I have only seen one statistical technique to examine the data.  It is to observe the ‘variance’ in the numbers.  When two or more sets of data form a cluster with similar levels of variance the statistics allow one to examine the parallels in the numerical structure.  That last phrase can be called correlation.

Before you start looking at correlations, say between an individual’s age and their taste for chocolate you have to find the cluster of their age and their tastes that have a high co-variance.

Variance is arithmetically simple.   Take the numbers 2,3,4 and 3,3,3.  They both have the same average and when squared you get 4,9,14 for a total of 27. And the same with 9,9,9 for 27.  But dealing with paired results 2x3=6, 3x3=9 and 4x3=12 for a total of 27 which squared is 729. While 2x3 squared is 36, 3x3 is 81, 4x3 squared is 144 for a total of 261.  This difference between the sum of the pairs squared (261) and the sum of the squared pairs (729) is variance.  

Big data is a matter of looking for all the pairs of numbers in a data set that give a high difference in the co-variance of the pairs.  Then seeing if that high co-variance has a meaning.

I once did this on a the data for a few hundred people for whom I had their astrological sign and about 50 other pieces of miscellaneous information.  The only connection, only high co-variance I found was that some astrological signs were associated with people who listened to one radio station in San Francisco.  Nothing of meaning.  No astrological sign correlated with prison time, eating patterns or voting practices.

Big data doesn’t change anything.  It still has to be related to some theory of human behavior.  Like listening to rap connects with prison time and connects with dropping out of high school, but makes no sense when connected to preferring boxer shorts over low tennis socks.

So big data is meaningful only insofar as the user has some meaningful model of human behavior.  I don’t see many models that are useful in explaining human behavior.

The second issue is whether big data can be useful to ‘big brother’.   I call this the issue of technology and people.   The big brother countries: North Korea, China, Iran and Cuba don’t need technology to increase big brother.   Their systems work fine now and have for a century.  France has always had a big brother postage system and still do and it doesn’t protect them from regular and violent terrorism.  The same is true for the U.S.  

Big data, and NSA is as big as data can get, hasn’t prevented 155 Americans killed since 2003 in 65 incidences of terrorism.  Go ahead and count them yourself.  Also count the 15,000 Americans murdered annually, about whom big brother obviously doesn’t care since half are blacks killed by other blacks.

The real issue is that big data is a big Lefty and paranoid-others, worry.  If it works it is trivial in its effectiveness.  Partly because it lacks a civilian population that supports big brother in most English speaking countries.  Most importantly because nobody has a decent model of what type of data indicates a terrorist or any other kind of socially dangerous person.

Gay cities

Part of any explanation of politics in America has to deal with the concentration of Lefties in the big coastal cities.  This has given the Left immense power with its connection to labor unions and its large homogeneous populations.  Also, the end of the Cold War has allowed the Democrat Party to become unhinged and the heir to the great communist losers of the Cold War.

The demographic shift of young academic Lefties to big cities has been well documented.  A big question is what was the attraction for this newly graduated population from the early 1990’s until today?

I am a confirmed sex loving hetero male but I live in the original gay paradise of the world, the Castro district of San Francisco.  I’ve lived here from its inception.  The gay community is homogeneous, made up entirely of single issue voters who are blind to anything but the Democrat Party.

The gay community is so far Left and oblivious to reality that 103 gay men were shot in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando by a Muslim yelling 'Allahu Akbar'.  49 died and the only gay action were some scattered flowers on a corner in the Castro district.  When a trickle of Muslims were banned at American airports for 3 months, hundreds of gays demonstrated in the same district on behalf of the imaginary Muslims.

I think that it was the open gay issue and the comfortable gay settlement in major American cities ( NY, Atlanta and Hollywood) that attracted the immense Lefty young people to these cities.  What the gay population has brought to these cities is color, nightclub vitality, fashion and fashion related retail, arts of all sorts and a laissez faire environment that generates wildness and experimentation.

I think that the current political environment was the by-product of the end of the Cold War and the openly gay population in urban areas.

Speak-up if you disagree.

Stanford and California

In a recent discussion about taking California out of the United States (obviously a bunch of idiot lefties in the conversation) the point was made about how rich California is.

I found myself saying the reason for the financial success of California was one sexy woman, Jane Stanford.

Nearly all the wealth of California comes from the San Francisco peninsula and nearly all of that wealth over 60 years has come from the men who graduated from Stanford University and created businesses.  

Stanford University was created by Jane Stanford who funded and ran the university for the decade after its founding in 1891.  

Her husband, Leland Stanford, was one of the four founders of the great railroad fortunes of the Central and Southern Pacific Railroads.  Most biographies of the four founders make Leland the intellectual wimp of the four.  But the other three liked him and kept him in the group.  A convivial man who appears to me to have been controlled by his brilliant wife.  I call her ‘sexy’ with no evidence other than Leland’s intense loyalty to her, her great influence over him and their long life together with no apparent disruptions.

Jane demanded that her university have top-flight faculty.  In her mind it was the Harvard of the West and she solicited and hired on that basis.  She was also a political pro commerce person and fired the prominent Lefty economist on the faculty.

To this day the University has a far more politically conservative faculty than any other top school and is deeply intertwined with The Hoover Institution a leading pro commerce attachment to Stanford.

Stanford has also been a technological powerhouse.  With the first big operational computer center.  SPIRES that I have often talked about using.

The nexus of the peninsula tech power came from Stanford graduates Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard. Also important were Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy, Andy Bechtolsheim,  Reid Hoffman, Alan Liu, Evan Spiegel, the great Peter Thiel, Brian Acton, Jawed Karim (YouTube), the Yahoo co-founders and the Google founders Page/Brin, Reed Hastings and the Cisco founders.

You can read this list and see that Stanford graduates are the nexus of the great wealth of California.  For that Stanford deserves credit.  These men and women wanted to stay near their happy college memories and hire the highly competent techies they knew from their alma mater.

Full credit for the wealth of California goes to one person: Jane Lathrop Stanford.  There are many other places on the planet with good weather, beautiful scenery and fertile soil.  But California is wealthy at an exceptional level. Thank you Jane.

More on abortion and porn

You can read yesterday’s blog to learn about a grant I made to a group of women to start a low cost abortion clinic.  (Jerry Mander, a fellow board member, joined me in making the grant.)

About half a year later a group of women, including some from the earlier low cost abortion clinic group, visited me at my house.  By then the abortion clinic had been shut down.  These women wanted to tell me how they were using the money and to ask for more.

They lived in Oakland.  They had organized a large group of women to shut down a porn movie theater.  They were proud of their organizing.

I was very disturbed.  I had help found, Coyote, Margo St. James’ prostitutes union to decriminalize prostitution.  I was strongly in favor of pornography and everything else that opened up the repressed field of human sexual behavior.

Pornography is widely used by people who find it stimulating for their sex lives and is important to people who have limited sex lives.  Pornography is beneficial to humans.  These women were on a Puritan rampage that was mean-spirited and harmful to many people.

From that point on I vowed not to help any so called 'feminist' group.  The evidence I saw suggested that feminism was highly Puritan and repressive.  I subsequently taught some classes in financial empowerment and always made sure there were no anti-porn people in the class.

Fortunately the Internet has made porn free and abundant.  Generally taking that issue off the table except for Muslims and Muslim governments.

The Karman cannula

Don’t tell me you know what it is.  It is a narrow flexible tube used in early stage abortion, as part of a vacuum aspiration.

It came to me when I was on the board of Point Foundation, the foundation created with the money from Stewart Brand’s Last Whole Earth Catalog. I later became president of the board when Stewart lost interest in the responsibilities.

In late 1971 two women came to me from the East Coast with the intent of creating a low cost self help abortion clinic.  The fee was to be $25 dollars.  The technique used a small vegetable cylinder inserted in the cervix that expanded over night.  That allow for the use of the Karman cannula attached to a vacuum machine to suck out the contents of the uterus.

Point Foundation gave the women a grant.  They trained a group of activist nurses who opened a small clinic to provide $25 abortions.

In late Spring of the following year a group of women came to my house to explain to me that the Karman cannula was an abomination and I shouldn’t support the project.

The group grew to half a dozen women who met a few weeks later in North Beach to plan on shutting down the women’s clinic that was doing the Karman cannula abortions.

Their argument was that abortions were such a serious medical event that women needed counselling before and after the procedure.  Raising the cost to $125.  They shut down the clinic.

By January of 1973, the Supreme Court mooted the issue with the Roe v Wade decision.

It was from my involvement with the Karman cannula that I got a lifetime understanding of how women feel about the abortion issue.  There is and always will be internecine warfare.   Some women think an early stage abortion is nothing significant, others consider the whole issue laden with major human trauma.

Over time I went from seeing some women friends treat their early stage ‘vacuum aspiration’ as a minor procedure to other women who claimed it was a major trauma of their life. 

In the 1960's I helped two women friends get legal abortions in San Francisco.  In California, that required the signed authorization of two psychiatrists.  There were several dedicated feminist psychiatrists whom I knew who would gladly sign off for a modest fee.  Both women were grateful and neither treated it as a major event.