Pro Commerce

The Most Important Book in Human History

As promised.  The book I wrote summarizing my blogs of the past 16 years, 5,914 blogs, is now at Amazon in an ebook format ($4) and a paper ($7.50) version. The title of the book is the title of this blog. The book is really a monograph, 43 pages.

A wonderful review comes from the brilliant Bookwormroom blog.  Here is one paragraph: “It’s the rare writer who can, in simple, accessible prose, convey deeply important principles about economics, American history, intellectual diversity, and the incredibly important way the free market creates a meritocracy that allows the best ideas to flourish for the benefit of the greatest number of people. Thomas Sowell can do this and so can my friend Michael”

Any of my regular readers who have an offspring in college can write me for a free paper edition to send to the student.

Dan White, the whole event

Four friends and two experiences give me a unique perspective on the issue of Dan White.

Dan White shot Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk on a Monday morning in San Francisco 1978.  It was Monday November 27th.

Both George and Harvey were acquaintances of mine.  But they are not the four relevant friends I am talking about here.  

Monday the 27th was nine days after the Jim Jones Jonestown suicide.  It is relevant because we in San Francisco began learning about the event on Monday the 20th.  At the time we saw headlines about 2-300 dead.  We knew that most of them were black San Franciscans.  Then every day the news reported a larger number.  By Friday the 24th the number of dead had climbed to over 900.  The city was in a state of shock.  Some strange form of stunned hysteria.

On Sunday the 26th Glide Church was scheduled to hold its two regular morning services (called ‘celebrations’).  The atmosphere was so dark and unearthly that I, as the business manager of Glide, ordered a dog bomb search of the church in addition to the regular careful check of the church halls and sanctuary.

I also put a sniper on the roof of the church and hired three extra staff to handle the crowd. I sensed a very bad public milieu. Nothing happened at Glide that day.

On Sunday afternoon one of my closest friends, Bob Gnaizda, went to talk to Mayor Moscone.  I learned this years later.  Bob had been the main lawyer in getting a court settlement to integrate the S.F. Police Department.

White, formerly an S.F. police officer, had resigned from the Board of Supervisors two weeks earlier because he couldn’t live on the salary.  After friends said they could get him plenty of money, he asked the mayor to re-appoint him to his seat on the Board.  White was a vote against the execution of the court ordered police department integration.

Bob was the last person that day to talk to the mayor and he urged the mayor to not reappoint White. The mayor made it clear to Bob that Dan would not be reappointed.

The next morning Dan White went to his regular morning coffee meeting on Eddy near Van Ness.  He talked to his two cop friends. One was, Paul Chignell, the leader of the Police Officers Association, the union. Dan had his service revolver with him but may not have mentioned it to the others.  They talked about how much they hated the police chief, Charlie Gain, and his support for gays.

I knew about this regular morning coffee of Dan White and his two police buddies from Margo St. James.  Margo was a close friend of mine who I helped to found Coyote, the prostitutes union.  Margo knew many cops from her days as a hooker and from her continued connection to the dozens of San Francisco hookers.  She got a report of the Dan White morning, of the City Hall murder, a few days after the event.

Dan first saw the mayor, in his office that day, who said he would not reappoint Dan.  Dan killed him.  Then walked down the hall and found Harvey Milk whom he killed too.  He continued walking around the supervisor’s office area looking for another person on the Board he had planned to kill, Carol Ruth Silver.  Carol heard the shots and hid under her desk.  Dan didn’t find her.  

He walked back to the coffee shop and asked his two buddies what to do.  They told him to walk up the street to the Catholic Cathedral, St. Mary’s, and go to confession.  Then to turn himself in.  He did.

I wondered why Supervisor Silver had not used the pistol she conceal carried above her right front pocket.  However, in high stress situations people often do not respond as expected.  

I knew about Carol Ruth’s pistol because I dated her off and on over the year preceding this and the year after.

The issue of Dan White's trial was on everyone’s mind in San Francisco until the trial the following May.  In December I ran into my uncle Dick Guggenheim on the street and we chatted for a few minutes.  Dick was an advertising man in downtown and also a leader of the city's girl scouts.  He knew many in the police department and hung out in those circles.  

I asked him if he thought Dan White would get the death penalty.  He said “definitely not".  "He has Doug Schmidt as his attorney and Schmidt has already worked out a deal with Joe Freitas". (the District Attorney).  I was stunned by the conversation and never forgot the exact words and cocky know-it-all-attitude of uncle Dick.

A few days after the trial of Dan White started in May, I was out for the evening with Carol Ruth Silver; we first stopping at a political chicken dinner at the Dolphin Club where she shook hands with everyone.  Later we went to her home where I brought up the fact I had heard that no one testified against Dan White.  The next day she went to the court and demanded to be allowed to testify against White.

Days later the jury verdict came in, manslaughter, and the judge prescribed a seven year sentence.

I was outraged.  That evening, knowing there would be an uproar, I walked to City Hall after a meeting I had to go to.  When I arrived the Civic Center was full.  I knew from many events I had organized that the number of people there was over 20,000 and the crowd was very angry. Mostly men. The main streets at City Hall were blocked off with fire engines.  On the East side of City Hall were a number of police cars with people jumping on them.  The police and firemen stood at the edge of the crowd.  There was nothing they could do.  The crowd was so large and so angry no options for control existed.  I saw people break the back window of a police car and a minute later the car was in flames.  Two other police cars promptly went up in flames.

I walked through the crowd for an hour before going home. On the outskirts, people were breaking store windows and turning over trash cans and lighting them.

District Attorney Freitas was voted out of office the next year by an angry electorate.

That is the accurate story as I saw it up close and through reliable friends.  Quite different from the official story.

History, Search engines and our Bill of Rights

Having read much about Holland, especially the work of Jonathan Israel, I  am very aware that the Dutch conquered England in 1688.  It was the biggest naval offensive up to that time and the biggest until the Normandy Landing in 1944.  

After the Dutch put William of Orange and his wife Mary Queen of Scots on the throne, the two voluntarily agreed to a proposal offered by Parliament to conditions that gave the Brits, via Parliament, a series of rights.  It is known as the English Bill of Rights of 1689.

We Americans have important reasons to know about this Bill of Rights, several of our own Bill of Rights provisions came directly from those offered by Parliament and agreed to by the new British Crown, William and Mary.

Here are four:

“*That the subjects which are Protestants may have arms for their defence suitable to their conditions and as allowed by law;

*That election of members of Parliament ought to be free;

*That the freedom of speech and debates or proceedings in Parliament ought not to be impeached or questioned in any court or place out of Parliament;

*That excessive bail ought not to be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted;”

There are differences in our American version, but the source and the language are stunningly similar.

I hadn’t know about this Bill of Rights except for the Internet search engines, since this is not taught in even the best history classes.  Thank the gods of commerce for bringing us this direct reach into history.  

I and every historian of competence benefit from this great direct source.

IQ and PC

At some point we will have to confront and discuss the issue of average national and ethnic IQs.

People who don't know me will find this blog a good time to call me a racist.  I'm anti-Democrat so that alone qualifies me as a racist.

Charles Murray is not the only one to raise the subject of IQ in a non-PC forum .  This map indicates that others have done global work on the national distributions of IQ.

People all over the world have different average national IQs.  

The admixture of peoples in each country is important.  Israel is lower than Jews in the U.S. because 1/6th of Israeli’s are lower IQ Arabs.  Filipinos who come to the U.S. are higher than the ones left behind in their home country, self selection.  And the U.S. has an equally large African and Latino population that lower the national average significantly.

When dealing with average IQs there is little that can be said about individuals.  However, using the 15 point standard deviation from the 100 testing norm we can say that 50% of Northern-European whites in America are above the national average but only 20% of American Blacks are.  Therefore any norming based on jobs or skills requiring IQ need to take this into consideration.

Similarly, 20% of American Blacks and Mexicans are below 70 IQ and we need special jobs and institutions to provide work for this part of the population.  In the bad old days this IQ level was called ‘moron’ by scientists.  

That would be roughly 4 million black males and 5 million Latino American males in the 'moron' range.

Those blacks and Latinos between age 15 and 30, the high crime category, would total 1 million Black males and 1.25 Latinos below 70 IQ.  Good candidates for school dropouts, crime and prison.  Which closely matches crime statistics.

Ethnicity, crime and IQ is something we never discuss. Though this data is over 100 years old and never falsified.

I haven’t thought about average group IQ much beyond the crime issue, except to use the IQ argument to favor Japanese, South Korean, urban Taiwanese, Singaporean and Hong Kong immigration.

 

32 ft per second per second

Galileo Galili lived in Florence at the same time as Shakespeare lived in England.  Both his names are the same and refer to the Galilee in the Torah.  I lived there on a kibbutz for a few months in 1959.

Galileo was given credit for 32 feet per second per second when I was an undergraduate.  It refers to the speed an object falls at the surface of the earth.  32 ft per second is the speed it is travelling at the end of the first second and that doubles every second.  The distance traveled is half of that.

Galileo determined that fact by measuring a rolling ball on a sloped board. Apparently others before him discovered the same fact but Galileo wrote about it in mathematical language, giving him the historic honor of finding it.

He also argued, and some say ‘demonstrated’, that two objects fall at the same speed in a vacuum regardless of their mass.

Both issues had troubled me as I read about snipers killing men at distances of a mile.   The record is 2 miles.

On a sniper rifle the bullet leaves the barrel at 2,000 miles per hour and is going about half that speed at half a mile and less than 350 mph at a mile.

It takes almost 6 seconds to reach its target during which time it drops 400 feet. Based on the Galileo chart included.  

That is why sniper shooting records are based on the sniper lying prone on top of a hill.  

All of which strikes me as too much luck considering wind speed and the coriolis effect. (direction of the bullet relative to the earth’s rotation).

Does it make you think about the same thing?

I also wondered how long a suicidal jumper had to wait and think till hitting the water when jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. About 3½ seconds and then he/she would be going 60 miles per hour.

Galileo is still helpful.

How Trump Won, in Two Dimensions

The following article from the Wall Street Journal is too important for public dialog to be hidden behind a pay wall.  Here it is:

A study shows the 2016 electorate was more socially than economically conservative.

By F.H. Buckley

Before the arrival of Donald Trump, the Republican establishment tended to define politics along a one-dimensional economic axis. Their Democratic opponents were socialists while they were the growth and opportunity party. Mitt Romney’s candidacy embodied this view. His campaign’s 59-point plan of sensible free-market ideas was a manifesto for Republican insiders. No one but them ever read it. The Republican one-dimensional man was left in 2012’s dustbin.

The Voter Study Group’s Lee Drutman recently looked beyond the simple left-right paradigm in a questionnaire asking 2016 voters to identify both how they voted and how they felt about various economic and social issues. Mr. Drutman then mapped the results in a diagram, with economic preferences on the horizontal axis and social preferences on the vertical. The diagram revealed some surprising insights about American politics.

Most Hillary Clinton voters were deeply liberal on both axes. The surprise was the Trump voters, who were very conservative on social issues but moderate on economic ones. By Mr. Drutman’s count, 73% of all voters were left of center on economics. Most of the remaining Trump supporters were quite moderate on economic questions.

After the election, the so-called NeverTrumpers claimed that each of their favored candidates would also have beaten Mrs. Clinton. Mr. Drutman’s figures show what a pipe dream that is. A presidential candidate like Ted Cruz, who defines himself primarily through right-wing economic policies, begins with nearly three-quarters of the electorate in the other camp. Such a candidate isn’t likely to go very far.

While the great majority of voters were liberal on economic issues, a small majority (52%) were social conservatives at the top of the diagram, enough to swing the election to Mr. Trump. Only 3.8% of voters were libertarians in the lower-right quadrant, socially liberal and economically conservative. They split their votes evenly between Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton.

The crucial differences between the two parties came down to social concerns, including pride in America, immigration, and especially moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage. The social-conservative awakening that helped elect Mr. Trump came when voters recognized that the liberal agenda amounted to something more than a shield to protect sexual minorities. It was also a sword to be used against social conservatives.

The Trump voters might have grumbled about the Supreme Court’s 2015 Obergefell v. Hodges decision, but same-sex marriage didn’t pick anyone’s pockets and no great political protest followed. That changed, however, when homosexual activists employed their newly won rights to start putting religious believers out of business.

In particular, the Democrats gave the back of their hand to Catholic voters, the principal bloc of swing voters in America. Democrats of the past would have been horrified to learn that their party makes faithful Catholics feel unwanted: That’s what they thought Republicans did. But Mr. Trump courted white Catholics, and they provided him with the winning margins in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Michigan. Those three states determined the outcome of the election.

The sweet spot in American politics is thus the upper-left quadrant of the double majority: economic liberals and social conservatives. It’s the place where presidential elections are won, and the winner is usually going to be the candidate who’s won’t touch Social Security and who promises to nominate judges in the mold of Antonin Scalia. In other words—Donald Trump. Mr. Drutman labeled such voters populists, but I prefer the term that Mr. Trump himself has applied to them: the Republican “workers party.” They constituted nearly 30% of voters in 2016 and they split 3 to 1 for Mr. Trump.

What of the future? The Democrats know they’re in a bind. They want to learn how to connect with the forgotten voter in the heartland, but the “Better Deal” they trotted out last month is simply more left-wing economics. The problem for Democrats is they’ve already nailed the pocketbook issue. It’s on the social side where they’re weak. It’s hard to see how they can moderate their maximalist positions on abortion, Black Lives Matter and transgender issues. The entire current leadership of the Democratic Party would need to be replaced.

That’s not likely to happen. Instead, the Democrats will bet on the triumph of their socially liberal ideas, force-fed to students at our universities and preached by most media outlets. They assume that the arc of history, to which President Obama so frequently appealed, bends only their way and that all history moves in their direction. Everything that has gone before was merely a prologue for history’s apotheosis in the persons of Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton—it’s Herbert Butterfield’s Whig theory of history dressed up as a campaign strategy.

The Republicans won the 2016 presidential election, but it hasn’t made governing any easier. Because of the separation of powers, there are now two—or maybe even more—different Republican parties. For presidential elections, however, the Republican Workers Party will be the future of American politics.

Mr. Buckley is a professor at Scalia Law School at George Mason University and the author of “The Way Back: Restoring the Promise of America.”

Appeared in the August 10, 2017, print edition."

Why does America look like a 3rd World Country?

In the late 1970’s I created the world’s first and last park for street people (later called ‘homeless') in San Francisco.  During the time the park was open, I was constantly under pressure to close it for no apparent reason.  The Mayor, Dianne Feinstein, was embarrassed by the park.  The major newspaper wrote a multi-series article about the misery of the park habitues. Totally fabricated.

The question I was asked nearly every day was 'How many people are you helping to get sober, to get jobs, to get on their feet again?' 

I opened the park so people could sit peacefully and enjoy their lives without being harassed and maligned.  Quite the opposite of what the people around me wanted.  The exception were nuns and priests who liked the park.  I tried to give the park to Mother Theresa's convent in San Francisco but they were run by the convent in India which could not make up their mind in the six months I had to make the transfer.

That is when I learned why America, especially San Francisco with its massive beggars and ‘homeless’, looks like a Third World country.  We are uniquely a Protestant country, founded by Protestants and fully Protestant in the way we live.  (See Albion's Seed)

We are unique in the world in having vast richness, high tech everywhere, with public spaces and public facilities (buses and subways) that are filthy and used by only the poor and desperate.   And having towns like Palo Alto, Carmel and Pleasanton looking like clean paradises, close in.

The Protestant ethic says ‘work is done as a reflection of God’s goodness’.  ‘Work is an act of virtue’.  Gain and wealth are signs of virtue and God’s love and beneficence for the successful.’

Therefore in America we are surrounded by the many who won’t work and live in misery. Street people, homeless, dirty vagrants who use the sidewalks as public toilets.

At the same time we have the hard-working productive class who live in luxury, affluence and virtue. Often in gated communities with guards.

We live with the ugliness of the non-workers and the bounty of the prosperous to remind us of the connection between the two.  One is filthy and lazy, non-workers and the other is clean and hard working, virtuous.