Category: Uncategorized

My daughter Laura got me to put on ice skates during Thanksgiving in Boulder. The skates were too small but I refused to be an old man. I was nevertheless.

There is a great speech by Michael Crichton about the religious nature of the environmental movement.

He sounds like me except that he hits the end of DDT much harder than I ever did. Environmentalism killed tens of millions of children with the ban on DDT and didn’t save any birds. I just remember that a kindly Japanese backwoods doctor, in 1977, had saved some 10% DDT powder and gave me some when it was the only drug that would work for some horrid skin eating microbe.

Thank you Michael C.

Its not hard to know the politics of San Francisco. I knew early in the most recent campaign (and wrote in my blog) that the telephone poll putting Gonzales ahead was wrong. I drive around the city and talk to many people. San Francisco is a small city. You only need to keep your ears open and do a little statistical calculation.

The photo is a scooter in North Beach dressed up like a South Asian tuk-tuk. The scooter captures the soul of the City. Hip young techie people, high on the exotic beauty of South Asian women. Everyone thinks he/she is an artist, part of Burning Man and part deep ecologist. All this together rolled into a sentimental longing for the good old days of 1934 when unions led a general strike to failure.

What actually happened in the election was sentimental sloppy vs sentimental neat. Both candidates are young, glib and sound like debate champions. They obscure all issues. Gonzales was sentimental sloppy, gaining support everyday by being the Howard Dean, anti-machine, “we’ll win through pure righteousness”.

Newsom was the old Catholic Irish-Italian voters backed by the Phil Burton mean democratic party machine.

There are roughly 460k registered voters in San Francisco. Over 300k came out to vote in the Gore-Bush presidential election; Gore won easily. That was considered a hot contest. The next hot election was the recall of Governor Davis for which 270k came out to vote; Davis won easily. Then a month later came the local elections and only 180k voters turned out; 40%. Low turn-out, low interest, the citizens had voted a year earlier to end run-off elections but the Democratic Party hijacked the legislation. When the real runoff happened on Tuesday 245k turned out to vote, a third more than in the earlier pseudo election.

In all San Francisco elections about 25% of the voters send in absentee ballots. The absentee ballots usually go for the person who was ahead a few weeks before the election (as they did this time) and they also favor the candidate who mails out the most absentee ballots to likely supporters. This is where sentimental but neat Newsom, won the election.

Newsom mailed out 70k absentee ballots to likely supporters and got back a surplus of 20k votes in his favor which won him the election. Gonzales had the momentum by election day, and actually won on election day, but Newsom had already banked (that is the technical term) his absentee votes.

The poll mentioned in my Nov. 17th blog was right about the District Attorney race, as I mentioned at the time. The cops and firemen held their noses and voted against the alcoholic incompetent K.O. Hallinan, and voted for the the lefty Harris who “couldn’t be worse.”

I have a unique personal position on the issue of Affirmative Action. From 1955 until the present, I have been an active supporter of black civil rights. Active and effective. When my biography is written (a long way off in the future) I will be given credit for a great deal of the success of affirmative action in the United States. I was on the front lines of affirmative action every day and every year for decades. I still am. Several times, in the black community, I have been thanked and publicly appreciated for my efforts.

Yet, I have changed my opinion on this issue. While I standby my past actions and I still believe that affirmative action is warranted in academia and in corporate employment, I now think that a by-product of affirmative action has created serious harm in the black community and a remedy is needed.

Black leaders have left the black community, have been promoted out of it, and the black community today is bereft of competent leadership.

Black leadership is non-existent.

American Blacks have succeeded in astounding ways. Colin Powell, Condi Rice, Franklin Raines (Fannie Mae), Justice Thomas and Vernon Jordan in public life; professors Thomas Sowell and Henry Louis Gates in academia. Most importantly blacks run Merrill Lynch, Stan O’Neal CEO; American Express, Ken Chenault CEO, Time Warner, Richard Parsons CEO; Aliant Energy, Erroll Davis Jr. CEO and Robert Johnson is the founder and CEO of Black Entertainment. Oprah Winfrey is a signal success as an entrepreneur.

I’ve not named the numerous black American successes in the arts and sports, because I am focusing on the leadership failure in the black community. I see no leaders in the arts or sports. Certainly no commendable ones.

What I do see in the black neighborhoods in San Francisco and the Bay Area is near disaster. Crime and murder continue at excessive rates, lower than in 1990 but horribly high. Black neighborhoods are blighted, public housing continues to fail and small business is non-existent. The whites I know who are working to help black neighborhoods face abuse and insults by blacks for their efforts. Racist anti-white bigotry is high and seemingly getting higher.

Worst of all, the black community is loosing political power after reaching a peak a few decades ago. In California, former L.A. Mayor Tom Bradley ran for governor and Willie Brown was the all powerful leader of California Democrats. In Congress, the black caucus is now 39 members, the historic peak.

The black caucus will never grow because blacks have reached the peak of their population growth and their electoral turnout remains low. The black caucus and black voters are loosing power because they are a small voiceless fraction of the left leaning powerless Democrats. Black voters and politicians have no will and no ability to shift their support between parties to gain political power. The black caucus is a moral embarrassment. The caucus voted against funding the military in Iraq but demanded American military intervention in Liberia. The black caucus supported the Republican effort for the largest funding of AID’s in Africa, then insulted the President who signed the bill.

Al Sharpton is fairly described as a buffoon, Jesse Jackson long ago sold-out to his self-serving interests; Julian Bond and Kwasi Nfume have become Democratic party hacks attacking all successful blacks as Uncle Tom’s. Blacks like professor Cornell West are solidly in the Farrakhan public anti-Semite camp that long ago alienated Jews, the strongest supporters of black civil rights.

The remedy for affirmative action that I think is needed, today, is an association of black business leaders who quietly form a national panel that meets privately and discusses ways to communicate with black ministers (the de facto leaders of the black communities). The message from the panel would hopefully be something like: “success in business is possible —- admire, support and imitate black business successes”. “Quiet, determined, hard work leads to success for blacks” George Washington Carver redux.

The American black community is basically conservative, pro-America, intelligent and caring. What the community lacks, in addition to a few honest leaders, is a clear and commonsense message.

I’ve been thinking about homeland security. I read about a bust at Kennedy Airport of twenty people who had been successfully smuggling drugs for decades.

My main concern was that these twenty people may have been discovered by some arm of the Homeland Security Agency. I hope it was accidental.

I have since checked and I find that the Homeland Security Agency has a department concerned with “counter narcotics” but Homeland Security hasn’t subsumed the Drug Enforcement Agency. The DEA is still independent.

This is good news.

Someone wise or someone politically powerful seems to have kept the DEA out of Homeland Security. Puritanism usually wants to lump drug interdiction with terrorist interdiction. Such a combination would be bad.

My reasoning is very simple. I can buy cocaine any day of the week, and heroin users can buy heroin any day. We know that commerce will successfully bring drugs across international borders everyday of every year indefinitely into the future. No DEA will stop, or slow down the relentless power of commerce.

The open channels of drugs coming into the U.S. could be effectively used by terrorists only if the U.S. government gave both groups, drug smugglers and terrorists, a reason for working together, like putting the Homeland Security Agency in charge of the DEA.

Fortunately the Homeland Security and DEA agencies are not merged and the drug smugglers who deal with big money are not likely to have an interest in the small time terrorist smugglers.

Dear Rea Hederman, Pubblisher New York Review of Books.

Your December 18th issue of NY Rev came with a Holiday Gift order form. Your Holiday issue was the final offensive act, the straw that broke the camel’s back.

I have looked forward to finding the latest NY Rev in my mailbox for many years. I have been excited to read the cover contents, often thrilled to read new writers and warmed by the hope of reading beloved old writers.

Today was the last time the NY Review of Books will enter my mailbox. The idea of sending your magazine as a gift to friends for the holidays is a thing of the past.

What is on the cover and included in this issue that is so offensive?

Mark Danner writes about how he hates American foreign policy, Henry Siegman writes about how he hates the Israeli government, Daniel Mendelsohn is outraged by a stylized kung-fu movie, Jeff Madrick hates all of President Bush’s policies, Gore Vidal’s insanity is a NY Review topic one more time, Anthony Appiah warms to Nelson Mandela who made headlines with his hatred of American foreign policy.

Too much hatred, too little reasonable stimulus. No intelligent debate.

Oh yes, don’t forget the Holiday paen to anti-American, anti-Semite Ezra Pound.

I frankly don’t want the flood tide of Upper West Side hatred mailed to my home in San Francisco. No more, please.

Maybe you didn’t notice that the New York Times has been adding balance lately with writers like David Brooks while you set more type for Tony Judt style hatred. Maybe you’ve also missed the reasonable dialog in Europe that suggests anti-American leftism is archaic, anti-Semitic and dangerous.

In any case. Do your managerial duty. End my subscription now and refund the balance of my subscription fee.

Why do the media miss important earth shaking news?

I’m thinking about three pieces of news that are very important, yet have not reached the level of public dialog. The first is that the global population explosion ended in the mid 1980’s. I wrote about this in the early 1990’s. The same is true of the Leavitt material about abortion legalization in the 1970’s that resulted in reduced crime rates in the 1990’s. The third is the paper that indicates strong evidence for non-human causes of the current global climate change.

The first two issues have been extensively debated in their respective fields and are now consensus positions. The later is a point in the middle of the debate where consensus is changing. Each of these newsworthy items can be found in one of my blogs: population, abortion and climate.

My hypothesis for the failure of the media is that numbers and statistics are just something that few in the media can understand. Certainly the media editors can’t understand numbers and statistics.

I know that this hypothesis is strong because I made a prediction back in the Spring when the accounting problems of FreddieMac and FannieMae were brought to public attention. I predicted that within two weeks, the NYTimes, the WSJournal or BusinessWeek would publish a summary that explained the accounting issues of these major American financial institutions. It didn’t happen folks.

I don’t think that people who can read numbers and statistics become journalists. Please show me that I’m wrong.

Does Commerce use coercion?

The rigorous description of commerce is: commerce is based on freely chosen associations. Commerce is voluntary transactions with no coercion.

My friends commonly have two problems understanding this description of commerce.

First, commerce is perfectly comfortable paying for coerced labor. This is confusing to many people: commerce pays for coercion, but commerce does not operate with coercion.

Commerce has always made use of slavery and has hired chain gangs. Commerce seems comfortable running prisons and hiring armies. Commerce even hires mercenaries who use coercion. So, commerce is not averse to hiring coercion. The description of commerce, to remain coherent, requires that coercion is delivered to the marketplace for sale to consenting buyers. The actors in the world of coercion almost always do offer coerced labor in the marketplace.

Coercion for sale involves middlemen who create the closed shell around which a voluntary transaction can take place. The management of a prison is offered as a contract in the marketplace. An army is offered for sale in the marketplace, you deal with one Army leader. The same is true for a group of mercenaries; you hire the leader who hires the followers.

The case of slavery is a little different; slavery involves a legal system that delivers the slaves to the marketplace. Think of the ‘Dredd Scott’ decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. The Court ordered the U.S. executive branch to return slaves to the slave states they had run away from because the slaves were marketable property in the states they fled.

We have similar domestic and international laws to this day. The laws are called extradition laws. Most states send people charged with a crime back to the state or country they fled or left.

The exceptions are interesting. Canada and France refuse to extradite people who might be subject to the death penalty in the U.S. The Dredd Scott issues have not disappeared. The laws of the state where the captive fled are important. Canada and France, in this case, oppose the laws of the U.S.

The second problem my friends have with the description of commerce is confusion about the notion of coercion. Going to work at the same Sears store for forty-five years is not coercion. Believing you must go to work in order to have a life style that supports your aging parents, your seven children and a car, is not coercion. Many people have trouble understanding this.

Part of the confusion comes from the 0 to 10 range of behavior we live with: from no coercion 0 — being a ballet dancer for the New York City Ballet Company — to total coercion 10 — prison. The ballet dancer may hate the master choreographer and feel compelled to go to work anyway, but that is not coercion. Even if the dancer believes that the NY City Ballet Company is the only one a “great dancer” could belong to, going to work in conditions the dancer hates is not coercion.

There are many forms of behavior in the middle of the 0 to 10 scale that are coercion, but are not seen as coercion. For example, serving on a jury for $5 a day involves coercion. Enlisting in the Marines for a four year tour of duty involves coercion. Violating parole and spending five more years in prison involves coercion. These three examples are part of the everyday experience that leads to confusion about commerce.

Many people are happy to serve on a jury regardless of the pay and many people consider jury service an honorable civic duty. This is confusing. Serving on a jury is compulsory; failing to do so can result in judicially ordered jail time. No boss in an American corporation has the power of an ordinary municipal court judge who can send you to jail on the spot for disobeying her orders. A judge has coercion; a job, a company and a boss do not have coercion.

Marine Corps officers carry a pistol to shoot deserters, which is still coercion even if you voluntarily signed up with the Marine Corps. Corporate bosses only wish they had that form of coercion available in the workplace.

What we have is a civic duty, reporting for jury duty — like paying taxes, that many people are proud to offer voluntarily. The reality behind the happy volunteering is that these activities are based on underlying coercion. It is easy to confuse voluntary actions and coercion. We’d like to ignore the coercive element of jury duty and the voluntary act of violating parole.

Loving something you do, like serving on a jury, is what confuses people. For the description of commerce in our first paragraph, the issue is not whether you love something, but whether there is coercion behind it. Serving on a jury is coercion because it is backed up by coercion.

The same confusion applies to joining the Marines. This initial act is voluntary, but ten minutes after you sign-up you serve four years without a choice about leaving or quitting. This is a voluntary act followed by a form of coercion that no employer, boss or corporation ever had or has.

The same confusion applies to the sweet young parolee who sells her lover a tab of meth or a joint. She voluntarily offered a sale to a lover … sweet. But once caught, a judge can order her to spend five years back in prison. A voluntary act leads to coercion. It is surprising, but two-thirds of all people released from prison voluntarily go back to prison. All it takes is a voluntary act of parole violation. This is voluntary submission to coercion. It is definitely not part of describing commerce.

The most common example that leads to confusion about commerce and coercion is the classic Company Town. The town owns your house, the local store, the jobs and everything else.

While most company towns in America were built on socialist notions intended to avoid shanty towns and ghettoes, company towns have a bad reputation. One company town that I know well, Crockett California, organized by C&H Sugar Coompany, is much beloved by its residents. In spite of this positive reality and negative literature on the subject, dwellers in company towns were always free to walk away from their jobs, just as the Sears employee can walk away from the job. Having seven children and needy parents is not coercion. It may be onerous to leave, but the forces of inertia are not coercion. The company town is not coercive regardless of the long history of negative literature.

Back to the issue of loving jury duty. Loving an activity does not describe its coercive or non-coercive state.

Many people work hard because of their emotional make-up. My daughter spent years working eighty hour weeks. She is a scientist, working because she loves her lab work. Another friend is a composer who works countless hours to perform her art. Still other friends drive themselves mercilessly at the work they love, technical, intellectual, academic, religious and artistic. Working hard and loving your work does not tell whether the work is coercive or not. In these examples, salary is often involved, but it is not coercion that drives people to work hard.

Many people love being in the Marine Corps and still others choose to live their life in prison. Neither situation keeps the Marine Corps or prison from being coercive once you are in.

The astounding victory of commerce in the current world is that most people work hard and work well even when they don’t love their work. They have been motivated by pay. Commerce has found a variety of human qualities that can be rewarded to produce commercial output.

Commerce is stunningly successful at motivating people and making them productive. About 90 million working Americans are in commerce.

Commerce is in fact the most successful of all motivators. Survey research finds that 60% of salaried workers do their job primarily for the money (or some form of health coverage).

By my calculation that is over 55 million Americans whose work is voluntarily induced by commerce. That compares with:

*less than 40 million who appear to enjoy their salaried commercial work,
*the few million in the arts and sciences who seem to love their work and don’t have salaries and
*the additional few million farmers and self employed who don’t have salaries and may or may not like their work.

The summary of this data is: The majority of American workers are in commerce and they work whether they love their work or not.

Another 20 million Americans are in the non-commercial sector, including prisoners. Most are not in coercive circumstances.

The point is that commerce creates workers at the rate of 4 to 1 over non-commercial work.

Less than 3 million people spend their time in coercive environments, prison, mental institutions and active military. Commerce induces workers to work at about a 30 to 1 ratio over coercion.

I actually feel sorry for my Lefty Fundamentalist friends and relatives. Not only have they missed the two great historic moments of the past few weeks: the Proclamation of Global Democracy announced at the National Endowment for Democracy and the Moral Outrage of European Anti-Semitism declared in London, but they also missed the high melodrama of President Bush in Baghdad.

Our President flying 15 hours, landing in a 747 without lights, prepared at any moment to turn back, dressed in Army track clothes, enters the Bob Hope dinning room to the words of Ambassador Bremer ‘I’m going to make the Thanksgiving remarks unless there is someone in the room who out ranks me’, wild applause, tears on the President’s face, greeting the crowd, meeting Master Sergeant Johnson, a giant black man, to whom he says “I’m glad we’re both on the same side’….and saying to the crowd that he had just dropped in ‘looking for a warm place’ to have dinner.

Maybe you had to have been a lowly soldier, like I was, for that story to bring tears to your eyes.

Russell Shorto has written a book on the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam and its influence on the founding of the United States. (Publication is due next spring). Shorto offers a brief précis in the NYTimes op-ed page of Thursday Nov. 27th. Shorto suggests that the American keystones of diversity and tolerance were laid in New Amsterdam. I’m readily willing to accept that idea, I look forward to the evidence.

In my late July blog I reviewed a book and discussed briefly the origins of modernity in Amsterdam from 1590 to 1680. I plan to write a brief history of commerce, for this blog, that locates the origin of modern commerce in Holland of that same period. I now refer to Holland in the 1600’s as the Cradle of Modernity.

I am part of the Dutch Revisionist movement. Our movement is not based on a new interpretation of traditional historic evidence, it is based on the work of American and English scholars who learned to read Dutch and found overwhelming and overlooked evidence right before our eyes. The Dutch themselves never seem to have known that the rest of the world didn’t know their history.