Category: Uncategorized

Building a religious space. This is a photo of a garden built by a Mormon to, in my opinion, create a sacred space that communicated his sense of religious awe.

There is a website with more photos. I was interested because I have been to Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Baldasare Forestiere’s Underground Gardens in Fresno and I’ve followed Paulo Solari’sArcosanti.

Folk art often tries to do what Cathedral’s and religious sites (like the Cistine Chapel) do. I find that folk art is usually more effective. I’m highly conscious of this because Japanese create folk art religious sites everywhere. They believe in local, very local, gods.

Folk art works better than institutional art — because — individuals have the power to speak across time to each other. A really weird observation that comes from my reading of many ancient (pre-historic) texts that were transcribed from the oral traditions.

A friend asked me the other night, ‘When did we first notice that commerce was not a zero sum game?”

(The illustration on the left doesn’t illustrate the point. I looked up zero sum in Google images and this young woman was in the first part of the list.
She is used in a digital game called Zero Sum. She actually illustrates positive sum. In positive sum you get more from the interaction than you expected.)

The answer to the question of when we (“we” meaning the educated population that carries on a large scale dialog over centuries) first recognized that commerce was not a zero sum game, is difficult to answer. Adam Smith understood the concept but didn’t say it. The rapid expansion of global frontiers in the 19th Century that was associated with economic growth probably obscured the positive sum reality of commerce.

The term zero-sum came from game theory which developed in WWII. The term was probably a necessary condition to understand positive-sum games.

The main point of this blog is that I don’t know the answer. If you have an answer to my friends question — please write. When was the positive sum nature of commerce first explicated?

What I do know is that few of the people I know and deal with have actually grasped the fact that commerce is a positive sum institution. The few who realize it reject redistribution of income, punitively taxing the rich, increasing the size of government, restricting the WTO and globalization and don’t see increasing poverty in the third world as the result of commerce.

Mystic River, in its third week, had revenues of $7.6 million. Pretty good. The peak in sales was reached in the second week and now the revenues are falling.

The numbers are inconclusive as to whether Sean Penn and Tim Robbins drove away viewers. We will have to look for a better test. If the third week had been $4 million or less, it would have been clear that the public was reacting to overly politicized actors.

Mystic River was highly rated by critics and by the public. A highly rated movie can bomb inspite of ratings. This film did OK by Hollywood standards, definitely not good, nor terrible.

In the past year and a half I have detected a level of mean spiritedness around me that has no parallels in my 60+ years of memory.

The mean spiritedness grew as the social recollection of the Twin Tower Jihad Murder receded and the anti-war activitists came out of the closet in the San Francisco Bay Area.

I think the proximate cause of the current wave of insufferable mean spiritedness is the computer. The computer is indirectly to blame because the personal computer made possible the individual gerrymandering that all legislative office holders promptly seized to enshrine themselves.

The direct cause of American political mean spiritedness is: the personally-designed, gerrymandered districts that allow political extremists to get elected and remain in office. The elected political extremists feed the extreme positions of their followers.

The politics of gerrymandering creates mean spiritedness in the elected officials who in turn feed the mean spiritedness of their constiutuency.

In the past I have had the job of being the first to announce the end of the Cold War and the end
of the Population Explosion. Now I have the dubious honor of announcing the death of the Environmental Movement.

I am saddened by this loss because I do value clean air, clean water and vast expanses of protected landscape.

The three signs that confirm the death of the environmental movement are:

(1) the long term failure of the Green party to win converts. No growth of the Greens in Europe, Japan and certainly not in America.
(2) The complete failure of the Environmental Movement to improve miles-per-gallon in American automobiles over the last two decades. This single easily understood, environmental issue, has been a notable failure.
(3) The complete dearth of new issues over the past ten years, to energize the public, fill grass-roots coffers or generate political excitement.

The certificate of death gives the cause as ideological rigor mortis. Prominent leaders including Garrett Hardin, Paul Erlich and Barry Commoner all trumpted a Chicken Little the-sky-is-falling escatology. After the sky has failed to fall, the ideology becomes boring.

First we heard Erlich and the Club of Rome raging that resources were nearly exhausted, then the population explosion would destroy life as we knew it, then an impending global climate ice age spelled the end, then the 10% loss of rainforests worldwide meant future horror, we were warned about the end of corral, the end of frogs, cancer from the ozone hole and finally we were told that global warming was imminent and terrifying.

No environmental leader, organization or spokesperson ever confessed to the series of monumental errors. Worse, the ideological priesthood keep blaming their opponents, Republicans and corporate pillagers, for the Environmental Movement’s perennial failures.

Case in point: The Republican led American government’s failure to ratify the Kyoto Accords is cited as an example of environmental enemies destroying vital lifesaving policy. However, the U.S. and the E.U. supported a Kyoto Accord during negotitations when the accord was to include CO2 trading agreements, a position endorsed by Environmental Defense. The Kyoto Accords would have worked with a CO2 trading provision but the ideologically rigid Environmental Movement decided it was better to loose on principal than win the battle.

Farewell.

The majority of people who live in Salt Lake City are LDS, the Church of Latter Day Saints. Much of the remaining population, whom I met at Halloween parties, are LDM, the Church of Latter Day Marxists. The LDM are just as religious and just as doctrinaire as their brethern LDS.

The typical party conversation is based on Saint Doonesbury. It goes: ‘George Bush is stupid and is run by a gang from Halliburton.’

My main problem with this piece of doctrine is that I want to get in on the action.

I have looked up Halliburton on Yahoo and it is listed as a public company on the New York Stock Exchange with the symbol: HAL.

The problem with the LDM ideology is that if I had bought and held HAL in the summer before George Bush was elected or even two years later, before the Twin Towers Jihad Murder, I would now have half as much money.

Yes, George Bush and the Twin Towers Jihad Murder have reduced the value of my Halliburton holdings by 50%.

Is it in our genes to be so partisan that we can’t consider a policy issue in the light of day?

I have been in the fight to ban human genetic engineering for more than five years. I wrote a paper on the subject in 1999 .

Human genetic engineering refers to any modification of the germline (sperm & egg) cells in a human that will be passed on the the rest of the human population.

A bill has passed the House several times, banning human genetic engineering. (Japan and most of Europe already ban human genetic engineering.) The same bill only has 55 votes in the Senate and it needs 60 to pass because the Democrats are solid in threatening the use of a fillibuster to stop it. The 45 Senators who want to permit human genetic engineering are all Democrats. How can that be? What is partisan about this issue?

The answer is, contemporary American politics makes nearly every issue partisan.

What happened is that the subject is too complicated for more than a dozen Senators to understand. So the lobbyists in favor of human genetic engineering cast it as a “Right to Choose” versus “Pro Life” issue and made it partisan. Both parties lined up and saluted.

Of course it isn’t a “Right to Choose” issue. That is the whole point. No single person, no small group has the right to change the germline of the human species.

Dr. Jaime Grifo made news recently. He went to China to do his version of the three-parent human.
The article appeared last week.

Grifo takes the egg from a woman too old to fertilize, places the nucleus of her egg in the egg of a younger woman’s egg that has been de-nucleated and fertilizes the cell with the older woman’s husband’s sperm. The fertilized egg is then implanted in the older woman’s uterus. You get three parents: the nucleus and sperm of the couple that has the baby and the cytoplasm of the younger woman.

Trouble is, cytoplasm has mitochondrial DNA from a person not involved with the sperm and different from the mitochondrial DNA and nuclear DNA of the birth mother.

The consequence of the three parents has been, in animal subjects, a high death rate in the first few years of life.

In China the first offspring, twins, both died in utero and the Chinese banned the procedure.

I helped stop Grifo from doing his research in the U.S.

What nobody talks about is that 11 children in New Jersey and 11 children in Sydney were born using this technique in the late 1990’s. Nobody has published the data on the survival of these experimental children. Maybe no one has checked.

Arthur Murray dance schools have been long gone. But, because of good design, one studio, near Rodeo Drive in Los Angeles still remains with the original name on it.

I’ve seen three TV programs that seem to have caught a long term trend toward outsourcing our lives.

What do I mean by outsourcing our lives? It means the household unit does less household and personal work while hiring more people outside the household to do the work. Just like corporations hire outside workers to replace entire departments and call it outsourcing.

Obvious household examples over the past three decades are the increase in the number of people who hire tax preparers and accountants for their taxes — The stunning increase in the number of people who replace cooking at home with meals eaten ‘out’ — The rising number of house cleaning businesses and commercial laundries. We are outsourcing our lives. With children we have day care and after school care to help us.

The new trends are more personal, we now have weight loss clinics to advise and supervise our eating, we have personal trainers to support and supervise our exercise regimes and we have a whole range of therapists to help cope with family problems, marital problems and make our work lives more tolerable.

The three TV programs that take outsourcing a step farther are: Trading Spaces, Extreme Makeover and Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. Trading Spaces completely changes the physical environment you live in while keeping you in the same location. Outsource your living environment.

Extreme Makeover is plastic surgery to change your physical encounter with the world. Outsource your personality, in some sense.

Queer Eye is a combination of both. You outsource your lifestyle and get a new one.

TV understands