I'm sure that most of my readers are aware that a doctor named Gosnell was convicted of murder in Philadelphia for his work at an abortion clinic. He was convicted of murdering three post abortion babies that attending nurses claimed were alive.

The prevailing argument about this case is that this will have some affect on the pro-and anti-abortion politics. I don't know about that because people have pretty much made up their minds.  The country is divided. Nearly 2/3rds of the country say they would not have an abortion personally nor recommended abortion to anyone in their family.  Simultaneously, half the population believe legal abortion should be available.

I only wish to point out that any doctor in the US who is conducting abortion procedures will now give a second thought to any abortion after the first trimester. Most fetuses are not viable even in the middle of the second trimester.  Post Gosnell, I can't imagine a doctor putting his/her life at risk now that a jury, made up mostly of pro-abortion citizens, would return a verdict of murder.

I think that will change the reality of work in abortion procedures.

I was telling a friend about a freshwater swimming pool that I used in the early 1960’s when I worked at the corner of Van Ness and Market in San Francisco. The pool was inside downstairs near the corner of Oak Street and Van Ness.

My friend told me about a pool in Austin Texas that is fed by a freshwater stream. I was delighted to hear about it.  I asked how Austin handled the sanitation issues. My friend said that the water changed on such a regular basis that Austin bureacrats seemed happy with the quality.

The fact is my friend didn't know.

My 1960’s pool was wonderful to swim in. It was in a basement and was freshwater fed from the Hayes Valley River that was, and still is, underground. It is one of several underground rivers in San Francisco.

My pool facilities were not heavily used and were not very well maintained. By that I mean that there was a constant smell of fungus in the dressing room and dark splotches visible on ceilings.

By 1964, the city had closed my wonderful freshwater, chlorine-free, pool. The city claimed that the water must be chlorinated. Chlorination was obviously necessary to satisfy some bureaucrat. Also obviously, the pool no longer had the revenue to bribe the local bureaucrats.

The bureaucrats continued to maintain their preposterous chlorination policy until 2010.

I know that because the gigantic pool at the University of San Francisco, I swim in, was designed in the 1970’s to have an ultraviolet-light purification system. The bureaucrats would not let the ultraviolet system be used and required chlorination.  The ultraviolet was finally permitted in 2010.

Miscellaneous information for more readers.

There are several cities known for dressing up in costumes.

San Franciscans put on parties all year long with dress-up themes and costume.  That includes the Symphony, Opera and Ballet.  They all put on dress-up and costume parties regularly.

Hippies had regular costume parades and parties all over the city all the time for decades.

The biggest events in the past few decades have been the costume parties of the Exotic Erotic Balls and the Gay Halloween event. Because it grew so big, the Gay Halloween event has been suppressed to some extent. San Francisco has an event called the Bay to Breakers Race which is a costume event with 70-90,000 participants.

I asked myself why San Francisco is so in love with costumes and dressing up.

I have two answers.

Number one: San Francisco is where people come to find out who they are. The use of a costume to cover up the real person as he searches for his or her identity, makes sense. Once people have found who they are, they leave San Francisco and go where their character is most appreciated.  

Children raised in San Francisco tend to know who they are and move away after high school. Almost no one I went to school with in San Francisco lives in the city today. That is true for the few other people I’ve met who grew up in San Francisco.

People are in the City to find out who they are and costumes are like a chrysalis to hide the developing product.

The number two reason: San Francisco is a city of façades. The most common architectural style is Victorian. Victorian homes and buildings permeate the city. Victoriana is rococo, pure façade.

Many of the Victorians and architecturally related houses have a fake roof line on the top. Like buildings in old Western movies.

This fake roofline is a sham.   It is very visible and common in the city.

In my opinion this environment of façade and fake rooflines is consistent with the idea of costumes and dress-up.

I have been the business advisor on many restaurants. The first, Victoria Station, was in the late 1960s. It grew to become a chain of 100 restaurants. Another was Green's at Fort Mason. Greens is a high quality vegetarian restaurant with over 180 seats that has been full throughout its 33 years of existence.  That is a hell of a long time in the restaurant business.

Whether a restaurant will be a success or not has to do with hundreds of factors.

Whether it CAN BE a success is a different story. It is so rare, as to be almost nonexistent, for a restaurant to open slowly and grow slowly to reach capacity and success.

From my experience, if a restaurant is to be successful, ever, it must open its doors at full capacity.

It doesn't really matter how the customers come to the initial opening, whether it is because they are friends, because they have personal invitations or whether they get special treatment....  none of that matters. What matters is that the restaurant opens full of people and remains full of people for the first weeks and months.

You will often see a full restaurant next door to an empty restaurant. It is my experience that the full restaurant opened to capacity and the empty restaurant opened nearly empty.

This is just a blog to point out the obvious.

Nearly everyone has noticed that our attention span has become much shorter because of the Internet.

That is not my observation. My observation is that as information becomes more abundant, as intelligence proliferates and as we have ready access to facts, that we have changed the nature of our communication.

We communicate important and useful information in much shorter segments.

To someone who has been reading fiction from  the past few centuries this pattern is visible. The great novel of Moby Dick is filled with long rambling arcane sections on every imaginable type of information that was interesting to someone in 1850. Contemporary fiction, such as is common in Japan, has almost no background, scene setting, or similar baroque digressions.

Business letters by the end of the 20th century were curt and to the point. The opposite of the beginning of the 20th century.  They were flowery and long.

The reason is straightforward. As our common knowledge and education expands, our ability to grasp new information requires less background and support. If we need to know something, we can look it up quickly on our smartphone.

The best example of the institutionalization of this reality is the fact that most TED talks, that are widely circulated as intelligent comments, are only 10 min. long.

Since 2005 there has been a dramatic decline in American auto fatalities. Roughly a 30% decline. This is an amazing statistic and very important.

In looking at the reasons, there appears to be one outstanding explanation. Most states are restricting the use of automobile licenses for people between age 16 and 21. Restrictions such as immediate suspension for any driving problem.  Even minor ones.

We should all be pleased with the success that state governments have had in carrying out this humane effort.

We could do twice as well. We could cut the current number of fatalities in half.

We could save 15,000 lives a year and over 100,000 disabilities.  More than all the gun fatalities.

The two countries whose driving habits I have examined, Japan and Germany, have half the auto fatality rate that we have.

The Germans, drive on autobahns at speeds in excess of 150 mph. That is why their cars are so good. The Japanese went from no seatbelts to everyone wearing a seatbelt with no change in the fatality rate.

So how do these Japanese and Germans do it?

Answer: both countries have extremely difficult drivers tests.

The preparation for the test is expensive with roughly 40 hours of training. The drivers test for an automobile are almost as difficult as the tests I took to become a pilot.

When we want better and safer driving in the United States we know how to do it: have a difficult drivers tests.

I have a unique vista on Africa. A 200 year perspective.

As a graduate student in economics I was hired to read every book and look at every map of sub Sahara Africa before 1850 and record all the economic transactions and prices. The project was for a Professor Miracle at the University of Wisconsin. He later published the first book on African economic history.

I also traveled through West Africa examining development projects in five countries for an organization out of Washington DC, where I was a board member.

I can state authoritatively that the entire sub-Saharan Africa has a common behavior. When anyone generates a success, more income than everyone else, he or she is expected to distribute the surplus to tribal relatives. It is always done.

No one is allowed to rise above the equal income level.

You may know stories about rich tyrants. Since you are not there you are not aware that the rich tyrant has always made his entire tribe rich following the core African value of the equality among tribal members.

There are many explanations, by economic experts, of the reason for Africa's complete absence of development despite an often well-educated workforce and vast natural resources.

Except for the fact that it is a sheer rebuttal to Lefty 'redistributionist' ideology, it must be clear that a society or continent that values equality over everything else, is doomed to economic morass.

A group of Lefties, environmentalists and food fetishists in California recently put an initiative on the ballot to label foods as being genetically modified (GMO), when they are.

More than 20 years ago I started an organization called the Project to Label Gene-Altered Food.

I began the organization after listening to a number of Boston intellectuals tell me that genetically modified food was the same as all previously developed foods using selection and breeding.

I knew that was nonsense. No breeder could put a pig gene into a banana. But there were genetically modified foods with that combination.

Because the metaphor being used was so ridiculous I decided it was important to warn people that they were eating genetically modified foods in order to follow the actual population risk of genetically modified food. To follow it  for several decades. That would be the only way to detect serious problems if there were any.

I learned the genetic food and animal field. I met all of the important activists on all sides of the issue.  I influenced the Japanese legislation on the issue of genetically modified organisms.

At the same time, the Department of Agriculture was examining the definition of ‘organic’ in order to create a national standard. A national standard was intended to replace the many state organic certification organizations.

My organization immediately joined the campaign and got my allies to do the same. (Here is the letter my organization sent.)  We realized that by excluding genetically modified food from the term organic we would accomplish our goal of having a category of food (page 12) that had no genetically modified components.

The campaign to label organic as excluding genetically modified food along with irradiated food and urban sewage waste was joined by several hundred thousand people. The largest public campaign in the history of the Department of Agriculture.

For the past 15 years, organically labelled food automatically excludes genetically modified foods.

So, what would legislation  labeling all food with genetically modified organisms do that is beneficial.? Nothing. It increases the cost of all foods.

In the twenty years genetically modified foods have been on the market no problems have been detected.  The issue is now moot.

Increasing the cost of foods, of course, impacts poor people more than anyone else. But environmentalists, Lefties and food fetishists don't care about anyone else. And they are not willing to shop for all their own products at Whole Foods.

That is the source of the title of this blog.

At least until now my efforts have been successful. ‘Organic’ in the U.S. still excludes genetically modified food and we are not burdened by additional costs of labelling all other foods.

In 1971 I believed in a concept called corporate social responsibility.

I played a major role in getting the socially responsible investment movement going.

I paid for and convened a conference in Inverness California of the 30 leading organizers in the corporate social responsibility field. We used that conference to create common plans and joint projects.

As a foundation president, I funded research into the 'social-issues-behavior' of public corporations and funded publication of the results. I funded and supported many activist proxy battles.

I solicited funds for the newly emerging socially responsible mutual funds to help them get started.

As a corporate treasurer and foundation president I personally visited all of the major foundation managers and treasurers in New York to encouraged them to use their portfolios to support their programmatic values. In every case, the treasurers laughed at me. They said ‘if you don't like the corporation sell the stock’.

Over the years, I have come to regret my involvement in this movement. Corporations have absolutely no social responsibility. As Adam Smith so wisely pointed out, by seeking to lower costs,  creating jobs and expanding their markets they're doing everything that anyone should expect of them. They are doing more for more people than any other entity or institution on the planet.

Over the years, the core problem of the corporate social responsibility movement became obvious to many others. The socially responsible causes had multiplied and changed. In the early 70s it was napalm, Native Americans, baby harp seals, women and minorities on boards of directors and investment in South Africa. Over the years, new causes were added from food safety and health issues to animal testing in cosmetics, animal products in pet  food, LGBT, investment in tobacco.....  and the list goes on and on.

What is socially responsible corporate behavior is chimeric.... it changes with the month. It is trivial, flippant and irrelevant to business.

I just did a simple calculation in my head.

The social cost for raising a child who is born in the United States up to the age of 25, when presumably they have left their home and got a job, is in the hundreds of thousands of dollars.

The cost of importing a child who has already demonstrated physical and mental health and who is younger than 25 is less than $10,000. A big difference.

Since the United States remains a magnet country for immigrants from the entire planet, it will always be possible for the United States to grow vigorously by importing desirable young foreigners.

I know there are some drawbacks to this observation. Some of the money these new Americans would earn would be sent back to their families. Some of these new immigrants would be supported by our welfare structure. Hopefully not many.

When I look at this option, which is politically possible, I can see that the American population has a long-term positive growth rate, regardless of domestic reproduction.

There is a steady drumbeat in the political world about the growing importance of Mexicans and Latinos.

I think these projections overlook a much more important demographic population that is growing rapidly: Asian Americans.

This rapidly growing population has several advantages over other immigrant groups.

First this population does extremely well, better than the rest of the American population, in intelligence tests and in academia.

Second this Asian-American population is also very successful in business. Both Silicon Valley businesses and private retail stores. At this point in California, several Asian-American populations are becoming dominant in medical, elderly healthcare, electronics, engineering and accounting.

Third, and most importantly, with my own eyes I am seeing a vast number of couples dating and married in public who are a combination of Asian-American and non-Asian American. This type of intermarriage seems to be proliferating which means that assimilation is moving at a rapid pace.  I don’t see a similar pattern of rapid interracial activity among Latinos and Blacks with others. I live in California.

I call the subsequent assimilation and rapid commercial success rate of the Asian-American population the coming Asian Wave.

A new Lefty friend asked a question that gave me great pleasure to answer.

Why is Walmart able to offer such low retail prices? 

The answer is: government subsidies. Does a Lefty like to hear that?  They don't.

Here's the story.  During all your life and mine Federal tax subsidies to farmers have been in the range of $30 billion current dollars per year.  That money just poured into the farmlands of America with virtually no place for farmers to spend it.  In 1962 Sam Walton started his retail shop in rural Rogers, Arkansas.  The farm money started to role in because Sam had plenty of interesting items that farmers had always had to drive into big cities to buy. The farm money kept pouring in and Sam kept opening rural department stores.

If you want to see a fascinating video, here is one that shows the expansion of Walmart stores from one in Rogers, Ark. to the entire farmland of America and then into adjacent suburbs.

With this kind of size and buying power Walmart, thanks to nearly thirty years of $30 billion a year in Federal subsidies to farmers, just did what any large retailer would do: improved distribution and started outsourcing.  The distribution system is a marvel of standard business, the outsourcing to China came earlier than everyone else and owes to the brilliance of Walmart management in seeing the future of China.

P.S. Mall of America tapped into this same ocean of money in 1992. It has over 500 stores in southern Minnesota.

I have received some emails from a woman who wanted me to mention her graduate school reference index in my blog.  

The Index includes several thousand university graduate programs including online schools. It has a number of components on which you can create filters to identify the schools or programs most relevant to your interests.

I genuinely wonder if this index is broadly useful for domestic college students. The traditional way to find a graduate school is to ask your peers and the professors in your field of interest.

For many, the specific faculty members at the graduate school you will want are highly specific to your needs. You find out where they are or you already know where they are.

In the two fields that I know, economics and statistics, any undergraduate with a modicum of competence will know exactly where he or she should go.

To all of this I would add a very serious reservation.  First, many graduate schools are run by ideological Lefties and everyone needs to be warned about the deleterious environment that Lefties create.  For better or worse I would have been a PhD economist except that my graduate school at UC Berkeley was a pro-Castro hive of Lefty malice. By the end of two years, I had finished my course work, I realized they would never give me a degree. The PhD index does not give any warnings about Lefty hellholes.

Second, it is increasingly common to find out how many of your doctoral peers will be Asians and Asian-Americans.  Asians are attracted to the top schools and their choices reflect the popularity of the PhD's in their home country. They have a significant influence on academic issues. The PhD index does not give a measure of Asian students.

Most of what I consider important about graduate schools and programs can only be learned by discussion with your peers.