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I don’t buy the poll in the San Francisco Chronicle that shows Matt Gonzalez ahead in the runoff election on December 9th.

Polls have biases. I called the California polls wrong in August at the beginning of the Arnold race. I pointed out that the polls undercounted people who had not voted in the last election and grossly undercounted the potential turnout in the Central Valley. The polls got more accurate over the second month as they corrected their biases. The Field Poll was correct from the start.

The polls of San Francisco have a bias that is not clear yet. There are several factors at work.

Polls are usually based on calls to random numbers within select geographic prefixes. A high percentage of San Franciscans are now primarily on their cell phones so they don’t get into telephone polls. Another group only has a land line in order to have DSL. The remaining people, who have land lines and use them, are an unknown and small part of the population with an unknown voting bias.

The swing district in the coming runoff election is the Sunset. The Sunset is different in many behavioral ways than other parts of San Francisco. I am sure Gonzalez won’t get any support there, but DA candidate Harris might get support there. Sunset residents support the police who hate Harris’s opponent (Hallinan) more than they dislike Harris. The Chronicle poll showed both Gonzalez and Harris doing well. The election will give me a clue about the emerging bias of telephone polls in San Francisco.

After Nov. 24th when many people will begin the migratation of their land line phone number to their cell phone …. a whole new bias will be introduced, next year, into phone polls.

A lot of people will also be pissed to get unsolicited calls on their cell phones.

My friend who organized and supervised the elections in the Republic of Serbska and in Pristina is now off to organize the local elections in Iraq scheduled for late next Spring.

My friend is a good reminder to the Nattering Nabobs of Negativity that democracy is possible. He organized elections in one country that never existed before, the Republic of Serbska, and organized elections in another country that was 100% Albanian Muslim and had never had an open election. Both countries held their first elections safely and successfully. Rudimentary democracy is working in both places.

Both former Yugoslavic countries were small and Iraq is big, but Iraq has an electoral history dating back eighty years.

November 2003 may be remembered for two major speeches: President Bush’s radical and awesome declaration that America’s calling is to seek human freedom for all and Governor Schwarzenegger’s declaration of an end to partisan war in California.

I once explained to a female peacenik friend of mine that when men enter any new situation they assess the danger potential.

We do it in an unconscious manner. We check escape routes, potential weapons (just like video games) and we are particularly sensitive to other men. We ask the mental questions: are they stronger than I, are they mentally stable, are they hostile? This threat assessment occurs whether we are walking into a Burger King, getting on a bus or getting off the elevator at our lawyer’s office. We do it all the time, below the conscious level.

My female peacenik friend never heard nor understood a word I said. I’ll talk more about the moral, mental, historical and political problems with the peace movement in another blog.

A fascinating article in the Seattle P-I by Ruslan Tokhchukov who lives nearby in Redmond.

Tokhchukov summarizes: “One hundred years ago, 1 million Jews fled from Tsarist Russia to the United States after a wave of pogrom atrocities. Russia’s loss was the United States’ gain. The Russian Empire had violently collapsed in just a decade and the United States, which entered the 20th century as a third-rate power, emerged from it as the world’s unchallenged superpower.

“Let’s ponder the fate of all once-powerful enemies of the Jewish people: the Pharaohs of Egypt, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Inquisitor Spain, the Russian Tsarist Empire, the Nazi Reich. Did any one of them not suffer a brutal end?”

He points out that the Jews driven out of Spain and Portugal moved first to Holland. — which became the greatest commercial nation of the 17th century, and then to England — which became the greatest commercial nation in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Most of Tokhchukov’s article concerns the idea that Islam has done a good job of driving out the Jews in the past 50 years and will probably suffer.

Followers of this blog know that I am thinking hard about the subject of the body politic. First, I know that the term body politic is wrong. The subject we are discussing operates at many levels (city, state, national) and has different mechanisms in each domain. The correct term will convey the hierarchy of the subject.


Second, there is a communication mechanism built into the body politic and I can only faintly see the outline of this communication mechanism. The three parts I know are: * there are local city networks, with key nodes. San Francisco has about 30 key nodes (people) who can convey the relevant information that directs the body politic. * There are gatekeepers at every level of the body politic, people who have jobs that require paying attention to the concerns of the body politic and acting on it. Gatekeepers choose commencement speakers, for instance. After Vice Presidential candidate Geraldine Ferraro did a TV spot for Pepsi, she was never invited to give a commencement speech at a respectable university. She had violated a body politic taboo of running for high office and using it for personal and commercial gain.

The third communication mechanism is interesting. Lefty Fundamentalists hold the views of the Nation magazine, but less than 1% read the Nation magazine. Not all Lefty Fundamentalists even read. Some get their opinion clues just from conversation. * But the bulk of Lefty Fundamentalists get their political ideological updates from Doonesbury.

Other people than Lefty Fundamentalists read and enjoy Doonesbury, but others don’t make Doonesbury’s politics into religious orthodoxy.

Interesting isn’t it?

I know many of my readers are offended by the term Lefty Fundamentalist. It is the most neutral term I can find. The alternative, less precise but also less accurate, is Nattering Nabobs of Negativity.

My term Commercial Luddite™ is too broad to apply to Lefty Fundamentalists.

Its easy to like Joi Ito founder and CEO of Softbank. I like his blog, particularly his comments about cranky old men.

Ito san suggests that cranky old men have hot buttons that are the result of long battles and serious wounds suffered over long periods. I agree 100%.

I would add an observation. We (I’m definitely and proudly a cranky old man) have an ideology detector that becomes erect (the metaphor is intentional, I’m a male remember) whenever we encounter ideological zealots. When we are in a pleasant conversation and a hot button subject comes up at the same time our ideological detector turns red, we get furious. We have been baited, we have been misled, we have been deceived. This pleasant conversational person is a fraud. We have wasted our time carrying on the conversation. What we are really mad about is that we have wasted our time with this person.

How do I know this is true? Because I, like Ito san and other cranky old men, know what our hot buttons are. At a Friday morning coffeeshop conversation, two of my hot button subjects came up. Instead of getting angry, I calmly talked the other members of the conversation through the subject, carefully explaining what I knew and eliciting their information on the subject.

The reason was clear to me. The other people in the conversation openly proved that they weren’t ideologues. One was naive, and prefaced his comments with, “I don’t know this subject … I need to understand more about this subject …etc.” I will always be patient and supportive of a naive person.

Another person was knowledgeable, but open and curious and asked penetrating questions, “I didn’t know that…that’s fascinating, tell me more… what happens in the opposite situations?”etc. Openness and curiousity bring out the best in me. I’m a cranky old man that will buy you an entire meal if you are open and curious, and probably hire you if I have a job available.

I try to focus on commerce. But I can’t be pure. My thinking about commerce often leads to other thoughts.

This is about a four step scale of human perception. My direct observations come from watching friends deal with dates, lovers, political discussions, the world around them and their lives in general.

I have a small number of friends who are, what I call, adult autistic. They don’t perceive that other people have feelings and emotions. My friends in this category are able to function in the world because they were carefully taught how to function. They never knew the reasons for their precisely prescribed behavior. None of these people do well in business, though some have had stunning temporary success. Usually a wife or husband carries them through life.

The next group of friends, the largest group, are people who recognize that other people do have feelings and emotions. The second group, however, believes that most other people experience emotions the same way they do. “She must feel heartbroken, I know I would in her shoes.” This group of my friends has many romantics in it. They have abundant sympathy for others.

The third group, I call the novelists. This is a smaller group. They actually perceive emotions and feelings in other people that they themselves don’t have. The novelist category includes people who are able to project different emotions into other people. I call these people novelists because they actually could write novels, and in many cases they love reading novels.

My forth category of friends is the smallest. I am proud to have people in this forth category who call me “a friend.” I think I am one of them. The people in the forth category recognize that many other people have feelings and emotions that we never have, and couldn’t possibly comprehend. Some people we can comprehend but alot of people have feelings and emotions that way beyond our comprehension.

For myself, I am comfortable with a world with large amounts of mutual incomprehension. I don’t know how widely this comfort with the “other” extends to my friends.

Many of the women I know were strongly against the use of the U.S. military earlier this year. I have been perplexed. Many of these women are intelligent, many are strong people, some can be vicious fighters when they are angry. So why are they blind to the world we live in and so willing to live in their fantasy Camelot?

My memory suggests that this female anti-military wimpiness is recent. In fact, the few women I know who appreciate the necessity of war have the same element in common. They have lived on farms.

Which is why I bring up chickens. Chickens are sold live in Chinatown and Clement Street, almost entirely to Asians. I didn’t see any Asians in the San Francisco Peace Marches. The photo on the right is a truck at the Wednesday farmer’s market that sells live chickens. Only Asians buying them.

To me the connection is: If you have to kill chickens (and fish) to eat, you can’t be living in Camelot. Killing chickens to cook has always helped women in the past to be real human beings, not wimps. Killing chickens was always brutal and messy; it offset the fact that women were seldom in the military.

The story in the next paragraph leads me to reflect on a change in the business climate in the past thirty years.

“Nathaniel Heatwole, 20, allegedly slipped bags containing the box cutters and other banned items through airport security and hid them on Southwest Airlines planes on Sept. 12 and Sept. 14, and then sent an e-mail describing what he had done on Sept. 15 to the federal Transportation Security Administration, according to an affidavit accompanying a criminal charge.”

Many people, including some members of Congress, suggested that Heatwole be sentenced to work for the Homeland Security Agency. This is interesting because in the current business climate it is considered possible that such an event might occur. The example we all have in mind is that software companies hire hackers to test and design computer security systems.

Thirty years ago I was a friend of John Draper known as Captain Crunch. Crunch was the father of the blue and the black box, an electronic sound maker that was used to make free phone calls and manipulate the phone system.

Thirty years ago, I was a foundation president and corporate activist. I had helped Crunch on a number of minor projects. I realized that Crunch could be of great help to the phone company (there was only Ma Bell at the time) as an employee who deeply knew the phone network technology. I approached several of my friends in Pacific Bell about hiring Crunch.

My friends at Pacific Bell made it clear to me that no freak (they were called fone freaks at the time) could possibly fit into a corporate bureaucratic environment.

What was different in the business climate then that made hiring a freak so outrageous?

(1) MaBell was gigantic and the local Pacific Bell division would never take a wild idea to the somber headquarters guys in New York City.

(2) New York Headquarters had barely heard of San Francisco and the Peninsula (where Crunch lived) and certainly couldn’t imagine useful technology coming from the Bay Area.

(3) Independent contractor was a nearly unknown term at the time. People who worked for a company were either employees, outside auditors, board members or legal counsel. That was it.

There was simply no conceptual place for Crunch at MaBell.

Today, there are many ways that Nathaniel Heatwole could work for a bureaucracy ranging from independent contractor or individual consultant to employee of an outside consulting firm.