Category: Uncategorized

The poison pill that PeopleSoft is using to fend off a hostile takeover by Oracle is ingenious and historically noteworthy. (Described in the Nov.11th NY Times and WSJ.)

PeopleSoft is writing agreements with clients which offer 2 to 5 times the amount of the client contract as a refund if changes in PeopleSoft over the coming two to four years result in a decline in service.

We’ll see what the Delaware courts have to say. In the past the Delaware courts have ignored the worst and most flagrant poison pills. This is the first poison pill that seems to be in the customer’s interest.

The history of poison pills is that it takes a few years before a counter-poison pill strategy emerges or Boards of Directors find them “not in the Boards’ interest.”

George Soros referred to our President as Hitler. After 9/11 he made the same reference to Osama bin Laden. Much as I love commerce, I don’t think emotional, unthinking statements by rich businessmen are any more significant than emotional, unthinking public statements by actors or film makers.

One of my friends thinks there is something more sinister in Soros’s statements about our President; maybe Soros has something to hide and is preempting a regulatory expose of his business practices.

We are probably going to be living with jokes about the McDonald’s contribution to the Public Broadcasting Service for a long time. I have no idea whether it will be the K.R.O.C. Network or whether people will order an NPR burger with fries and a coke.

The automatic creation of a joke classification comes from the declasse’ marriage of Kroc and PBS. Like the Grand Ole Opry joining with the NY City Ballet. PBS is the snootiest snoot around and the Big Mac is the most declasse object on the planet.

For those who don’t know, back in the Reagan 80’s the centralized PBS changed course and gave all its money to the local stations so they could be autonomous and buy programming from each other. The central PBS, both radio and TV are very minor parts of the operation. It was the center that got the giant endowment.

I know that advertising influences news columns in newspapers, TV and magazines. It sure is going to influence PBS. I look forward to the day when NPR is no longer lefty.

By the way. Why is it so hard for editors and managers to know when their medium is left or right biased? All lefties know what is right biased when they read or see it, so do righties know what is left biased. How come the editors and managers get left out of the loop?

Will Krugman become a word like Bork? The poor guy has written a book and fifty columns trashing the current economy and we end up getting the fastest GDP and productivity growth in American history (yes, the fastest, because previous GDP growth had inflation problems that deflate the final number for earlier periods).

Krugman is like the psuedo-brave boy standing on the tracks while his friends scream at him to get off the tracks. Krugman expected to jump off the tracks when the 45 mph freight comes by. What he got is the 180 mph Shinkansen.

I just realized what I hadn’t realized earlier about the Gregg Easterbrook flap.

Easterbrooke had seen the Mel Gibson Passion movie a week before he saw the Tarantino movie, Kill Bill that led him to make an outrageous anti-Semitic attack on two studio Jews.

The whole public complaint about the Mel Gibson movie is that it will stimulate anti-Semitism. In the case of Gregg Easterbook, it did.

I pointed out on September 4th that the WTO vote in Congress (which hasn’t happened yet) and the Japanese vote yesterday were important.

We now have the results of the Japanese national election and something about the future is foretold.

The slide in the LDP power was not surprisingly strong. It was merely a slide. Completely unlike the pacifist anti-LDP rout in 1992 that changed Japanese politics forever.

My interpretation, as a person who hasn’t been in Japan for three months and who has few Japanese political friends, is that the voting public was supporting the idea of a two-party state. This was the first time a genuine and consolidated opposition party has arisen. The Japanese seem to like the two-party (American) system better than the multi-party legislature with single-party domination they have had for fifty years.

Again based on 1992, the Japanese are tempering their pacifist alarm at sending Japanese troops to Iraq with their immediate anxiety over a nuclear North Korea. The Japanese can and do openly say: “We need our alliance with America in dealing with North Korea.” That reasoning kept the opposition party from getting more votes.

Back in 1972 I started a business called Third World Tours. The idea caught on in San Francisco and seems to have spread around the world.

The Wall Street Journal had an article on it Wednesday 11/5.

The article reports: “…tour operators around the world are leading visitors to some areas that their local convention and tourism bureau would previously have spurned — neighborhoods like Anacostia in Washington, D.C., and north Philadelphia.”

My Third World Tours, the original wrong-side-of-the-city-tour, grew out of a confluence of three separate forces.

First, I had ridden on a standard Gray Line Tour of San Francisco, with a few drunken friends, in 1964. We did it as a lark.

I never forgot that tour. I was offended that the tour bus stopped at several junky places, including a Chinatown pseudo-temple that Gray Line owned, and encouraged tour passengers to put money in the little temple pond and buy trinkets. It was a foggy night so the driver could get away with telling passengers that we were on Montgomery Street “financial capital of the West” when we were actually on Sansome Street. Everything else I heard from the driver was equally wrong and applied equally well to a bland description of St. Louis as it did to vibrant San Francisco.

I was determine to fix that piece of fraud, some day, if I got the chance.

Second, I got the chance in 1972. I was business manager of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in downtown San Francisco. Third, Gray Line employees went on strike that spring.

At the time, the police department licensed tour operators and the corrupt police only licensed one company: Gray Line.

Being a church, a powerful church with a big endowment, I said fuck the cops, let them try and stop a church from running a tour on Sundays. The cops never said ‘boo.’

I hired and trained ten mixed-ethnicity people in their early 20s to be tour guides. I hired a 50-seat bus and did some promotion for Third World Tours directed at our large Sunday congregation. The first tour filled up. We spent three hours driving and stopping in Latino, Black, Lesbian, Gay, Hippy and Chinese neighborhoods.

The tour was a success. I hired a PR person (Nan Hohenstein). By the next Sunday I filled up three buses and the press that came along with us went wild. The story of the Third World Tours was covered in nearly every corner of the world. After a month, I stopped giving radio and press interviews. We were a stunning success.

The bus company I rented from got smart. They sent different drivers every week to learn the pitch and route.

Within two years, the police department had been forced to license 90 different tour companies, all modeled on Third World Tours.

I created this unique tour business because I love cities, I’m a city boy. I hope the spread of my tour idea to the whole planet has been positive.

An observation of no importance:

What do a beautiful person and a con artist have in common?

In my opinion the answer is: "nearly everything".

I once saw a very beautiful woman in a big Mercedes park in a ‘handicap parking space.’  When she got out and walked confidently in my direction, I couldn’t help but calling out, "I may think wealth and beauty are handicaps but the rest of the world doesn’t."  Yes, I really said that, and she gave me a vicious look.

The subject came up in my mind when remembering an employee who was a beautiful woman. She was lazy, too.  I had to let her go when I found out she was charging my business credit card for art supplies that she sold on the side. 

Of course any employee could be a con artist, but what struck me about this woman was that she expected me to complain about her behavior and forgive her. 

I’ve known many con artists.  Their usual worldview is that: their charm, glamor or impressiveness will let them talk their way out of nearly any problem they create.  Beautiful people seem to have the same manipulative view of the world around them, too.

Of course I’ve known a few beautiful people who didn’t fit this mold, or I didn’t know them well enough to know whether they did.

This blog has two points. First I want to be on record as having invented the term commercial luddite™ (with and without caps). It doesn’t come up on Google. The intended meaning is: a sympathetic term to replace anti-Americanism, anti-Globalism, anti-Commercialism and anti-Semitism.

Reading my blogs of the last few days, you can see that all of these loaded terms refer to the same rejection of the growth and spread of commerce. So I came up with a sympathetic term that describes the people who hold these tradionalist views.

Second, I added ™ to my new phrase as a joke. It has become all too common in our society to grab a traditional English word or term and claim ownership.

I received cease-and-desist letters from Green Grocers when I was involved with that type business. I’ve sent them to people who have used Greens Restaurant in other parts of the U.S. The whole issue of ™ for common words and phrases is stupid and foolish.

I offer the campaign to correct this stupid and foolish abuse of ™ to anyone who wants it. I have enough “change the world” projects on my plate.

If you know someone who recently had a baby, send them to this page. The Israeli Health Ministry is concerned about six brain damaged infants who all had a German infant soy milk formula in common.

I noticed this issue because I worked for years on the GMO issue and founded the first American activist organization: Project to Label Genetically Engineered Food. There isn’t a shred of evidence to connect the soy milk issue to GMO food. Germany doesn’t produce or use GM soy beans.

The slight chance of a GMO connection to infant brain damage would arise if the product were made outside of Europe. If there is an effect of GM soy beans on humans, it would occur with infants first. That is why I noticed the article.

If I were a stock speculator I would sell short all GMO producers. That includes the pharmaceutical company that bought Monsanto’s GMO division.

I hadn’t realized that President Bush’s great speech on democracy is going to have awful effects. However, after putting up excerpts from his speech, I read Natan Sharansky’s explanation of anti-Semitism in Commentary.

After reading the following ending to Sharansky’s article, you can see why Bush has increased the level of anti-American hatred in the world. Europe included.

“Despite the differences between them, however, anti-Americanism in the Islamic world and anti-Americanism in Europe are in fact linked, and both bear an uncanny resemblance to anti-Semitism. It is, after all, with some reason that the United States is loathed and feared by the despots and fundamentalists of the Islamic world as well as by many Europeans. Like Israel, but in a much more powerful way, America embodies a different—a non-conforming—idea of the good, and refuses to abandon its moral clarity about the objective worth of that idea or of the free habits and institutions to which it has given birth. To the contrary, in undertaking their war against the evil of terrorism, the American people have demonstrated their determination not only to fight to preserve the blessings of liberty for themselves and their posterity, but to carry them to regions of the world that have proved most resistant to their benign influence.

“IN THIS, positive sense as well, Israel and the Jewish people share something essential with the United States. The Jews, after all, have long held that they were chosen to play a special role in history, to be what their prophets called “a light unto the nations.” What precisely is meant by that phrase has always been a matter of debate, and I would be the last to deny the mischief that has sometimes been done, including to the best interests of the Jews, by some who have raised it as their banner. Nevertheless, over four millennia, the universal vision and moral precepts of the Jews have not only worked to secure the survival of the Jewish people themselves but have constituted a powerful force for good in the world, inspiring myriads to fight for the right even as in others they have aroused rivalry, enmity, and unappeasable resentment.

“It is similar with the United States—a nation that has long regarded itself as entrusted with a mission to be what John Winthrop in the 17th century called a “city on a hill” and Ronald Reagan in the 20th parsed as a “shining city on a hill.” What precisely is meant by that phrase is likewise a matter of debate, but Americans who see their country in such terms certainly regard the advance of American values as central to American purpose. And, though the United States is still a very young nation, there can be no disputing that those values have likewise constituted an immense force for good in the world—even as they have earned America the enmity and resentment of many.

“In resolving to face down enmity and hatred, an important source of strength is the lesson to be gained from contemplating the example of others. From Socrates to Churchill to Sakharov, there have been individuals whose voices and whose personal heroism have reinforced in others the resolve to stand firm for the good. But history has also been generous enough to offer, in the Jews, the example of an ancient people fired by the message of human freedom under God and, in the Americans, the example of a modern people who over the past century alone, acting in fidelity with their inmost beliefs, have confronted and defeated the greatest tyrannies ever known to man.

“Fortunately for America, and fortunately for the world, the United States has been blessed by providence with the power to match its ideals. The Jewish state, by contrast, is a tiny island in an exceedingly dangerous sea, and its citizens will need every particle of strength they can muster for the trials ahead. It is their own people’s astounding perseverance, despite centuries of suffering at the hands of faiths, ideologies, peoples, and individuals who have hated them and set out to do them in, that inspires one with confidence that the Jews will once again outlast their enemies.