Category: Uncategorized

The movie Mystic River, starring Sean (Saddam’s O.K.) Penn and Tim (I hate America) Robbins gets a Yahoo A- rating from a total of 14 critics. Yahoo viewers give it a B+, which is very good for Yahoo viewers who usually prefer action movies.

So how did Mystic River do at the box office in the first two weeks? Total bomb.

First week $3.0 million. Second week $10.4 million.

How much of this movie’s failure is due to the public political abuse that America has taken from Penn and Robbins? I don’t have the answer but I will keep looking at business measurements that give clues to the answer.

I have seen half a dozen Norfolk Island Pines planted in fairly small spaces.

We need some institution to let every home owner know the problems with planting a cute little Christmas-like tree that will grow too large.

The Norfolk Island Pine in my yard is 80 years old and is 80 feet tall.

I’m sick of hearing this nonsense. If you know American politics you know every election in the past century. The relevant question is: “Under what circumstances does an incumbent president lose an election?” The answer is: it has only happened twice in the past 70 years. One election was in 1980 when Reagan defeated Carter and one election was in 1992 when Clinton defeated George Bush Senior.

In the 1980 election, the GDP grew from $2.56 trillion in 1979 to $2.79 in 1980, a growth rate of 9%. Inflation that year was also 9%.

In the 1992 election, the GDP grew from $5.72 trillion in 1991 to $6.04 in 1992, a growth rate of 5.5%. Inflation was 3%.

So in both elections the outcome couldn’t have been due to bad economic growth. Weak, maybe.

It is possible that the reference to the “economy, stupid” is a reference to unemployment which declined from an average of 7.1% during Carter’s administration to 6.5 in the year before the election.

For Bush the unemployment rate rose from an average of 5.8% in the three previous Bush years, to 7.1% in the twelve months before the 1992 election.

Neither Gross Domestic Product nor unemployment seems to explain incumbent election outcomes. Marxists need to cry about these numbers. The numbers don’t support a Marxist view of the world.

More likely the reason an incumbent lost was political.

Carter entered the election with more than 50 Americans held hostage in Iran and he failed in his military attempt to free them. Reagan won in a landslide.

In Bush v. Clinton, Ross Perot was a third party candidate. Perot got nearly 20 million votes. He drew much more heavily from the Bush vote which ended up at 39 million votes compared to Clinton’s 45 million votes. The Democrats were 50% of the registered voters at the time, compared to 38% for the Republicans. We should also remember that Pat Buchanan gave the opening address to the Republican convention and declared that the Republican Party stood firmly opposed to abortion.

Bush lost because of politics.

It’s not “the economy,” stupid. It’s politics.

Lefty fundamentalists have created a dilemma for themselves.

They worry about eating free ranging Pacific Ocean salmon that are often depleted and are definitely endangered in several rivers that matter to Native Americans.

On the otherhand, they worry about eating farmed salmon that imposes an environmental risk of a domestic breed escaping into the wild with rapid-growth genes. The farmed salmon are also a problem with pink coloring added and many lefty fundamentalist magazines claim farmed salmon are grown in self-polluted water.

I’m so glad I love farmed salmon at $4.32 a pound from Safeway. I’m even happier to not be a Lefty Fundamentalist.

A parking garage near Fisherman’s Wharf has this sign which says in large type: Parking $1.00.
In much smaller type it says the rate is $5.00 per hour, with the first hour reduced if you have a validated ticket. On another wall it says the garage only accepts cash, no checks no credit-cards. (Anchorage at Leavenworth and Beach)

The minor problem for me is that San Franciscans can’t do anything about this fraud. We have Terry (K.O.) Hallinan for DA and he will be re-elected in next months election. He has no genuine opposition. K.O. is the most bleeding hearted Lefty Fundamentalist DA in the U.S., maybe in U.S. history.

The serious moral problem is that this fraud is perpetrated on travelers. I have been a traveler all over the world and I have always been treated wonderfully.

Why are Americans so mean spirited to travelers? Why is it OK to cheat travelers?

After pondering this question for forty years I conclude that nobody in America considers him or herself to be a host. We all consider ourselves recent arrivals to a piece of land, town or city. Without the sense of being a host, we don’t feel responsible for visitors, unlike most traditional people the world over.

This lack of a “host sense” is somewhat true for me, even though my great grandfather came to San Francisco in 1852. I really should be campaigning to make MY city a warm and caring place for travelers.

Meanwhile, Lefty Fundamentalists, and our DA, campaign to make San Francisco a warm and caring place for the homeless.

IHOP new crepes.

IHOP has a new breakfast crepe with scrambled egg, cheese and a choice of bacon, ham with sausage, or a combination. It included toast, with potatoes or fruit.

I tried it. Tastes O.K. My observation is that this breakfast crepe will be a global hit. The second World food. The first World food was pizza.

The following image has double irony. It is big city (Santa Monica) pretending to be a small town. It is treating Arnold as just another local former football star who made good.

Gentrify is wrong

The term gentrification suggests an upward shift in social strata. The term gentrify is applied to low income and ethnic neighborhoods that experience an influx of high salary ‘white’ folks that is then associated with a rise in housing prices.

In looking closely at Venice, California and three neighborhoods in San Francisco, I find that the terminology is wrong. Gentrification is not what is happening. There can be a rapid rise in the average price of homes due to an influx of higher salary newcomers but I don’t find an upward shift in social strata or social-strata related aesthetics.

What I do see instead is that the influx of a small number of newcomers, maybe 2% of the neighborhood, drives up home prices. The newcomers drive up the prices because they create a sense of chic or safety that improves potential new home buyer’s perceptions of the whole neighborhood. They also bring into the neighborhood home speculators who transform dumps and eyesores into appealing marketable homes.

The indigenous neighbors become aware of the increase in the value of their houses and they respond to this stimulus by copying some of the aesthetic changes the newcomers made. Customarily the indigenous neighbors paint the outside of their houses, improve the landscaping, plant street trees and implement a few other very low cost improvements. The neighborhood remains pretty much the same demographically but it looks much more cared for.

What we have is a rising tide phenomenon, where very little change in social composition of a neighborhood results in significant changes in the outward appearance of the neighborhood.

From that point on, the change that occurs is driven by landlords improving their buildings to raise the rent of tenants. A continued pressure to raise average home prices.

Of course none of this happens near a traditional public housing project because the neighbors are mostly tenants not owners.

A new word is needed to replace gentrify. Suggestions?

Either I’m not reading enough political blogs or political bloggers are falling down on the job.

The new governor only has one reasonable strategy to pass legislation in the California legislature, as far as I can see. (I was once a legislative analyst). That is to pressure the Central Valley legislators, roughly one-third of the total legislators, to act as a body and vote with the governor. The motivation for the legislators is that the governor won overwhelming majorities in nearly all Central Valley counties from Shasta in the north to Imperial in the south.

The evidence that the new governor already knows that this is his most viable strategy is that 14 of the 68 people on his transition team are from the Central Valley. Those 14 are not famous, prominent or prestigious like the rest of the 54. They are on the transition team to work out a strategy to get cooperation from their Central Valley peers.

Do the LA Times and the New Yorker have something in common?

Yes, both of them did unique hit pieces on Republicans last week. The LA Times began an expose’ of the new governor of California on Wednesday October 1st and ran it up until the election on October 7th. .

The New Yorker ran a cover of President Bush on a horse with the President wearing horse blinders. The New Yorker with the attack cover was the October 13th issue. It reached the newstands last week.

The anti-Republican hit pieces are the only subject these two print vehicles have in common. The business consequences for the LA Times and the New Yorker are different.

I focus on commerce in this blog. Whether the hit piece on the new governor, in the LA Times had an effect is up to researchers to investigate.

Preliminary data from exit polls suggest Governor Schwarzenegger may have benefited from the hit piece. The proportion of women to men who voted for Arnold and the reverse percentage of men to women who voted in favor of the Recall doesn’t appear to have changed over the month prior to the actual election. No gender effect was probably positive, the hit piece was seen as dirty campaigning.

There can be business consequences to partisan hit pieces.

I don’t think the New Yorker will be hurt, because the readers of the New Yorker know the magazine is directed at the nattering nabobs of the Upper Westside of Manhattan. No surprises. The same is true for New Yorker advertisers who also know the nature of the readership. The magazine looses money and has lost money for decades…. so it can not be considered a business. Running the New Yorker is a hobby. Rich publishers buy and sell the magazine for social status purposes. Offending a few readers doesn’t matter. Only the charitable hobbyist who owns and subsidizes the New Yorker matters.

The same is true for dozens of national magazines from The Nation to the New Republic. If the owners of the New Yorker are part of the nattering nabob set, then the partisan hit piece probably had no consequence.

The opposide is true of the LA Times. The hit pieces by the new editor, John S. Carroll, will have serious, harmful consequences for the LA Times. The few thousand cancelled subscriptions are irrelevant.

The biggest problem is that Carroll has been trying to recruit good new talent for the paper. The LA Times, like many big newspapers has had a static to declining readership for several decades and the decline has been rapid in the past two years. Nearly 200,000 readers have left the LA Times.

The paper has also made the mistake of attacking a highly respected leader of the film industry. The film industry has its world capital in Los Angeles.

Carroll’s campaign to recruit good new talent has come to an end. The paper has suddenly earned itself a reputation as a partisan tabloid with the demagogic hit pieces that Caroll published last week. The LA Times has tarnished its own reputation for several years into the future.

To understand the consequences imagine a recruiting luncheon that Carroll might schedule with a rising star currently at the Herald Tribune.

Carroll: ‘We can offer you a great future as a journalist, high pay and the excitement of living in a vital and important city.’

Young hotshot journalist: ‘John, you can kid yourself, but you can’t kid me. My friends think you are trying to make the LA Times into a tabloid. That is not for me. You have taken sides with the Democrats in a state that will likely go Republican over the next few years. That doesn’t seem like a newspaper with a future especially since the suburbs of LA voted overwhelmingly for the recall and for Arnold. But worst of all, in your much vaunted city, your people are being left out of the excitement. The film industry considers you and your staff to be lepers.’

Carroll: ‘Is there anything I can do to change your mind?’

Young hotshot journalist: ‘That is your problem, not mine.’