Pro Commerce

News Media and how it operates

This blog is my attempt to understand why the American news media is deliberately divisive. It has been since the founding of our country. See my earlier blog when I recognized this.

First, I can understand part of it. Almost any collection of people with a strong attachment to a leader will be attacked by the news media. This has always been true. It was evident in the case of John Brown, an abolitionist leader who tried to raise a slave revolt. It was true for Jim Jones's People's Temple, Huey Newton's Black Panthers and Chuck Dederich's Synanon all three of which I knew personally. Exceptions may be made for religious leaders but many were chased out of Europe in an earlier era. Including the Mormons in the U.S.

This I can understand. Any stable society will try to invalidate the sources of revolution at its inception. It will attack the potential insurrection at the earliest point.

This does not explain the attacks on individuals from Hamilton, to Andrew Jackson, Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan. It may explain the attacks on Joe McCarthy and Donald Trump. Also the hatred of John D. Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.

As a matter of fact, it may explain these as well. These were strong men with a cohesive group of supporters. What is interesting is that these men were and are attacking the world view of the news media.

The media for the 19^th and 20^th Century have been believers in socialism, a zero sum world where any disturbance is seen as a redistribution from the existing order. The news media generally support the status quo including Fabian Socialism (mild social revolution).

This first explanation I started with, squashing potential rebellion, may be the only necessary explanation.

Certainly the current extreme divisiveness of the news media, with its unparalleled hatred of Donald Trump, is in recognition of Trump's magnetic appeal to a vast group of followers and his effectiveness in destroying the model of a 'global new world order'.

I'm satisfied with my explanation. Are you?

Now the question becomes 'Does this explain the tech giants, Google, Facebook et al'?

Yes, the super-billionaires and the companies they run have a stake in the status quo and are able to strangle dissent at its earliest stages.

Google, the best example I know, has an endless hiring-screening process that can last weeks, even months. That assures a homogeneous status quo zero sum worldview in its workforce.

I'm satisfied. Now I know.

Tracy Sims II

I can't find the original blog in the blog search so I am repeating it.  Tracy's current name is Tamam Tracy Moncur.  I just found her book and ordered it at this site. Here is the original blog:

On the right is a picture of Tracy Sims. This picture is from the early 1960s when I was actively participating in the demonstrations for civil rights in San Francisco

I do not regret my activity in these demonstrations.  It was a time when blacks were severely restricted from getting jobs and entering society as full members.  These demonstrations were effective in creating jobs for competent blacks.  I have thought about Tracy for over 50 years and thanks to Google I found that there was a picture of her and a story about her

Tracy was the dynamic force in San Francisco Civil Rights. She was smart she was competent and she was dynamic.  

One day she disappeared and there were no new effective civil rights rallies after that.  All of this time I have wondered what happened to her.  She wrote a book that explains how she moved away from San Francisco and started a new life.  I do not have the book but I will get it.

I seriously doubt that she explains the reason she left and changed her name.  It is my guess that her life was threatened. Whether it was by other envious civil rights blacks or by some more sinister political force, I do not know.  

This blog is to comment on the importance of one single supercompent black person in organizing civil rights at a critical point  and a critical geographic location.  San Francisco, whether anyone knows it or not, became the ground zero point for civil rights cases in education, police and fire departments as well as (my own case) in finance.

Tracy Sims deserves recognition and I give what little I can to her here .

A blind life

At 82 years of age, I am opening my eyes for the first time.

While describing my personal relations with Jim Jones to close friends, I realized that the media drove him out of the U.S. I arranged for some of his most influential friends to explain to him how important it is to not fight with or respond to the media. He had been viciously and falsely attacked by San Francisco Magazine. He ignored that advice and soon left the country.

Thinking about this overnight, I realized that I personally knew Richard Nixon, Huey Newton (a brilliant and wonderful man), Margo St. James (who was driven out of the country) and many others who were hated by the press. I personally worked with Synanon, the anti-anti-Whaling movement, Governor Brown's cabinet, many people in the Reagan administration, the Japanese government in the 1980s, and other organizations that were attacked or destroyed by the media.

This morning I started making a list in my mind of the people the media hated: Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Abe Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, Harry Truman. Joe McCarthy, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush and most ferociously Donald Trump starting when he ran for president.

The media hated the Vietnam War and falsely reported the U.S. victory in the Tet Offensive as an American loss, they hated hippies and have had a severe case of Jew and Israel hatred for decades.

Then I thought about the Declaration of Independence that reads like a media indictment of King George. Canada and Australia became independent of England without a war. The Civil War was fought over slavery which had already been disappearing in the Caribbean and Brazil for decades and was uneconomic in the U.S. with new machinery.

So what role has the media played today and for centuries in generating hate and dissent in the U.S. and elsewhere? How does the new Internet media play into that history?

I'm thinking about it.

My values may be the source of our crisis

My highest value has been meritocracy which in itself is the highest value in a world of modern commerce.

Meritocracy and commerce have become primary values in America since the 1950s. At the same time we have watched the core tendrils of cohesion disintegrate. While our commerce has been thriving, the Politically Correct culture has exploded.

The cohesive institutions were the Shriners, the Rotary, the Lions, PTA as well as the older I.O.O.F, Boy Scouts and the Masons. Churches and synagogues were also tendrils of cohesion. What each of these fraternal orders and religious houses had in common was the ladder of positions, their own hierarchy of leadership training. Some started the new member as assistant sergeant at arms and had dozens of small steps all the way to the top, president, and even president emeritus. Or cup bearers all the way up to president of the congregation, and even higher to elders.

These orders trained individuals for their roles, established roles, in the hierarchical society of modern life. But it was not training for commerce which had become meritocratic after the mid-20th Century. Meritocratic commerce is a positive sum worldview.

What is the opposition to the meritocratic commercial order?

What it has been for four centuries. Unions. Unions have highly defined jobs, skills and very short ladders of leadership to climb. They value stability, retirement and stasis above all else. They presuppose a zero sum world.

The modern values of unions have always been most comfortably situated in the social systems of fraternity and égalité (not liberty). The same values as Political Correctness. Also the values of socialism and communism.

This is where we are today. A society divided by the commercial values of meritocracy and the union values of égalité. A positive sum world versus a zero sum world.

(Credit for this blog to Scott Phillips)

My recent work on the origins of the modern world.

My recent work has been on the origins of the modern world.

I published on this subject in my book ​The Most Important Book in Human History. I have worked to promote this insight for the past several years. The sources of the modern world can be easily lost and we would revert to a static world. The static world is clearly envisioned in the Green New Deal promoted by a major U.S. party. It has been the reality of Europe since WWI and not visible because Europe has covered their stasis with American innovation.

The popular notion of the origins of the modern world focus first on the Enlightenment for the origins of modern science which is partially correct. It is more correct to focus on the Radical Enlightenment that is described in Jonathan Israel's book. Secondly popular opinion focuses on the Industrial Revolution.

That focus only takes us to the early 1800s with the steam engine and the Bell combine. From there on, the major innovations in the world came almost exclusively from  the United States.

From 1850 until today, 80-90% of all innovation has come from the United States. Why?

Not just because of America's large prosperous market, England had that too with its Empire.

As I look at this history and with my experience of working with hundreds of the people who created much of the modern innovation in the world (from the hippie world of the Briarpatch), I see the opening of the American West in 19^th century as the genuine source.

What happened in the western expansion of America was the fall of the static world. The static world is held in place by hereditary elites, all over the planet.

The oldest son becomes the trustee for the family and its elite status. But competence, imagination and innovation are genetically distributed to everyone, not just the oldest son of an hereditary elite family. Getting out from under the hereditary elite is what makes meritocracy and innovation possible. That was the great expansion of the West in America. The source of meritocracy and innovation.

The issue became fresh in 1960 when the WWII meritocratically-promoted officers from the American Army worked their way up and replaced the hereditary elite managers of American industry throughout the 1950s.

Today, as before, and with even greater vigor since 1960, America has contributed nearly 90% of all significant innovation in the world. Innovation in commerce and other fields.

Israel, a new country, a tiny delicate country that could only survive on meritocracy and innovation, has become the second largest source of innovation in the world. It lacks a meaningful hereditary elite. 

I would be remiss to ignore the important contributions to commercial innovation that come from post-war Japan. Japan has the only permeable hereditary elite in the world where meritocrats have been promoted into the elite.

Why am I so seriously worried that the great innovative commercial engine of the United States can be destroyed?

Because government is only a source of innovation in periods of wartime when meritocracy trumps the power of the hereditary elites. The world over, government suppresses genuine commercial innovation.

Unfortunately, American politics has no understanding of its true source of commercial innovation and a large part of the voting public wants more government.

It is this alarming reality that has been my focus for the past few years.

My contributions to commerce are slow to percolate in the world. My summary of the Briapatch genius is written in Marketing Without Advertising and embedded in one of its offspring, Google. Now 40 years after publication, 300,000 copies of the book were sold in the first two decades to a generation of entrepreneurs. In the past decade about 500 references, per year, are found to this book around the world in business universities and graduate papers.

That may not be enough to sustain commercial innovation in the face of enduring hereditary elites the world over and the new American barbarians.

Medicine, the Brain, our DNA and Statistics

I have no technical training in the first three of these fields.

I have a great deal of doubt about two parts of the field of medicine. I have great confidence in one part of it,

My personal experience comes from my paternal grandparents. My grandmother got her medical degree, MD from U.C. SF in two years. My grandfather got his dental degree, DDS from the same school in three years. American dentistry was the most advanced in the world at that time. After the 1906 San Francisco earthquake my grandfather moved his practice to Berlin to be The American Dentist to the Kaiser.

That shows me the level of accumulated knowledge in the two fields. Dentists were the heirs to the field of surgery. Surgery dates back to prehistory. The earliest book describing replacement of an ear dates to more than 600BCE in India (Sushruta Samhita).

Medicine was mostly wives-tales based on my father's recollection of my grandmother's practices. Her sister also had an MD and did research on leukemia.

Today's surgeons can go through the arteries and work on the heart. I have a heart stent. I am impressed with surgery with its history of experience dating back millennia.

On the other hand today's doctors have had effective medicines only since WWI when sulfathiazole was used as an antimicrobial. The first potent drug doctors had was penicillin which was used in WWII. Followed by the amazing Salk polio vaccine. For me, modern medicine only dates from that early Post War period. Today it is slowly becoming research and data based. Slowly.

Still mostly guess work. Doctors claim many maladies due to smoking tobacco and tobacco smoke. I've seen most of the research. No one who knows statistics could see it as anything but nonsense. It is the medical profession that claims the new vaping of nicotine is medically harmful without a shred to research evidence. Medicine, excluding surgery is still less than impressive.

One field of medicine that is totally fictitious is nutrition. Most of my growing years I was told not to exercise after a meal lest I get cramps. That sugar was very harmful and raised my blood sugar level, while egg cholesterol raised my blood cholesterol level. None of these are correct. All the while doctors knew little or nothing about the role of the flora and fauna in my intestines. Nutrition medicine is not much better than Puritan voodoo.

Now to the brain. There are several tools being used to study the brain. One is accidental damage to the brain with observation of the consequences. Another is eeg, Electroencephalogram and the third is MRI.

Much is known about what parts of the brain connect to functional parts of the body. I am impressed with the use of electrical probes inside the brain to control Parkinson.

Beyond good maps of the brain I see no genuine progress. I personally don't expect much of anything out of brain research for the balance of this century. The brain is too complex for modern science to understand and grasp.

The same applies to DNA and the two sisters RNA and the mitochonria. DNA is too complex to be amenable to useful understanding

I detect no humility in the face of the complexity of the brain or DNA. Consequently I see no significant progress in either of these fields.

Lastly, I am regularly pounded with the miracles of AI artificial intelligence. This is mostly black box arithmetic. I am a trained statistician, and a legal expert in the field. I worked in statistical analysis for 50 years.

AI seems to me to be the application of two well established techniques to large data bases. Most of which occurs in a computer black box with the application of human intelligence after the fact.

The techniques are reduction of variance and creation of logic trees.

Reduction of variance is easy to understand. Take three lists of numbers with the same range: 1,3,6,8,9 and 1,2,4,8,9 and 1,2,3,4,9. Total the numbers and square the total. Now square the individual numbers and divide the first total by the second total. You get a measure of variance 3.82 and 3.47 and 3.25.

If you want the most variance you see it in the first list of numbers and the least variance is in the last list of numbers.

Now take something you want to explain. Who likes the children's movie, Bambi? You have a population of people who are leaving a theater after seeing the film. You have everyone rate the movie 1 to 10. Now you apply a measure of variance to all the data.

You find that people under 18 have the least variance in their response. That is the first branch of the logic tree. People over and under age 18. Now you look for the least variance in the responses of the people under 18. You find a new variance difference at age 12. That is the next branch on the logic tree.

People under 18 are more in agreement about the movie Bambi than people over 18 who have a greater variety of judgments. Now on the second branch you find that kids under 12 are more of the same opinion than teenagers.

You now have the findings of an AI study.

It can be interesting and it can be useful.

AI has a future but it always takes the application of human intelligence to make something of it. Young kids are more consistent in their reactions to a Disney movie than teenagers who are more consistent than adults.

In summary. Surgery and AI are fairly reliable forms of human action based on tradition and experience. Modern medicine not so much. Research on nutrition, the brain and DNA are mostly hubris.

The Origins of PC: Not the Hippies

I am indebted to Allen C. Guelzo for his review of Bradley C.S. Watson's book Progressivism: The Strange History of a Radical Idea in the Spring 2020 edition of the Claremont Review of Books.

I have been struggling for two decades to understand the origins of Political Correctness which has taken over a major section of American society today. I made no progress until I read the Guelzo review. Guelzo explains how Watson traces historian's ideas to progressivism beginning in the late 1890's. He notes the confluence of three elements: Darwin's natural selection and the evolution of species, combined with a popular distress with the American Constitutional narrative of 'innate natural rights' due to the horrors of the Civil War and the consolidation of the two by American pragmatist philosophers in the school of William James.

These combined to create the idea that society could evolve over time by changing institutions. James actually used Darwinian references in his writing.

Where do I fit into this thinking?

I wrote a book in the late 1980s called Baby Boom Two: Projections for the 1990s. In the book I identify, for the first time, the original Baby Boom in the post Civil War era that created the People's Party which held its first national convention in 1892. The People's Party was a synthesis of the baby boomers and the Grange. The platform and the movement merged with the Populist Party by 1896. (Wikipedia has it all wrong.)

The platform and the People's Party became the Progressive Party by early 1910. The party remained for several decades with little or no influence.

The second baby boom followed WWII and came of age beginning in the 1960s.

At this point I must surprise my readers. I find many elements of the progressive movement among the Hippies of Baby Boom Two but not any in the PC culture of the 1990-2020s.

Let me show you. PC is viciously intolerant and based sternly on the idea of the oppression of identity groups. The hippies were wildly tolerant of everything except their parent's values. Tolerant of every form of religion and sexual behavior. They went out of their way to investigate every religion, food and international culture. The Whole Earth Catalog is a smörgåsbord of ideas, values, travel and curiosities.

The hippies went out of their way to avoid any form of identity. The hippy greeting 'What is your sign?' was part of disposing with formal occupations and social status. Wild clothing and carefree hitch hiking were part of the anti-identity hippie values.

The hippies, with experience on psychedelic drugs believed in tabla rasa, a mind free to move in any direction. In this they were connected to the earlier hippy-progressive movement. The hippies also wanted to shape the world in their image, and to a large extent they did. They used small business and commercial innovation. They loved small business and many parts of the hippie movement loved technology.

In a strange way the American political world moved in an anti-hippie direction with Ronald Reagan as governor and later as president.

The PC world came later. It is clearly an anti-hippie set of values and seems to have centered in academia. The hippies rejected academia. I would estimate that, over a decade, half of the qualified population, roughly 2 million young people stayed out of college.

This is a good place to explain that hippies were not political. A segment of the rebellious 1960s-70s population was political and very media focused. They were the organizers of the anti-Vietnam War protest and the violence surrounding the 1968 Democrat Convention protests. I personally knew Jerry Rubin, Abbie Hoffman and Tom Hayden. They were not hippies. The political group numbered, nationally, in the hundred thousands. The hippies, with drugs and music, numbered several tens of millions.

So where did PC come from?

Here I again rely on my personal experience. I was a graduate student at U.C. Berkeley from 1962 to 1964. I organized the Graduate Student Association. My treasurer was Mario Savio the leader, the following year, of the Free Speech movement.

U.C Berkeley was overwhelmingly facultied by Marxist. They totally supported Fidel Castro, in every department, especially my economics department.

It looks to me like P.C is the continuation and expansion of the Marxist university faculties, the absence of hippies as students, the ideas of Herbert Marcuse (on the faculty of U.C. San Diego) and the ideas of Michel Foucault combined with the deep American roots of unions and communism . Some credit for the widespread growth of P.C. must also be given to the academic love of Howard Zinn's twisted history of the United States.

Progressives were related to the Civil War baby boomers and to the WWII hippies.  Neither were related to modern Political Correctness which is rooted in American unions and Communism.