Two things its hard to give me credit for: tilapia and Kite Hill.
I’ll start with tilapia, a rather bland tasting small fish. We have it in the U.S. because of me. But what I did was to use my phone and my networks which are not visible to the world. Here is how it happened.
Tilapia
I had a few clients in the Central Valley of California who were professional entomologists, advisors to farmers on pest control. In general they favored alternatives to commercial pesticides.
One of them phoned me to ask if I knew of a way to control mosquitoes in rice fields? It was a problem for his clients in the Sacramento Valley. The fields in that area are flooded for rice cultivation by several large rivers. Rice grown in this area is one third of all the rice grown in the U.S. There are cities and towns in the area where mosquitoes are a problem during rice flooding periods.
I phoned my friend Katsu in Japan who was the head of the organic farmers in Japan and a close friend. I put him on the board of a Third World aid group in Washington D.C. where I had influence and made a few phone calls to get him the presidency of the world organic farmers group.
Katsu told me Japanese organic farmers used a fish called tilapia, in English, to live in the rice fields and eat the mosquitoes and their larva.
I phoned my friend the entomologist and told him and within two years all the rice growers were growing tilapia and selling them on the commercial market.
No one saw me make those two phone calls. If you like tilapia, 'you're welcome.'
Kite Hill
The large park area next to my house in San Francisco is called Kite Hill. In this case it was more than two phone calls that created this park.
A neighbor called me, Felicia Ortiz, to say she wanted to create some vest-pocket parks in open lots in San Francisco. The term ‘vest-pocket parks’ apparently came from a friend of mine Bonnie Ora Sherk. An environmental artist.
I told Mrs. Ortiz that I would help her if she was willing to be chair of a group to create the parks and the first park would be on the large open area near both of us that I had gotten down-zoned to single family homes a few years earlier. She said ‘yes.’
I then phoned three political friends of mine. I asked one to create a political action group to design and commission vest-pocket parks, with Mrs. Ortiz as chairperson. The second one I asked to create a bond issue for the next election for $12 million to create vest-pocket parks. The third one I called to ask him to raise $50,000 for the bond issue and to buy the appropriate media.
We won easily and bought the land for the park. The Park and Recreation Department takes care of our park.
Just phone calls and my network of friends. I take credit but the evidence for my role is not visible.
I am amazed by Abu Dhabi and Dubai.
I know about these two because a relative of mine and her family live in one of them. These are modern cities with every fully developed aspect of commerce and technology. How is this possible, when the leaders are first generation, live in tents, desert Arabs?
The answer is that both commerce and technology developed very slowly over 400 years, starting in Holland, but now both can be bought on the open market. Anyone, anywhere can buy a high-powered computer, a jet plane, a modern hospital and a nuclear reactor. The highest technology is on the market, including synchrotrons and Nvidia chips.
What surprised me is the realization that commerce, too, can be bought as it is in Abu Dhabi and Dubai where banks, stock markets, courts, insurance companies, university graduate departments, medicines, tall building architecture, urban planners, communications industries, manufacturing and even research laboratories have been acquired on the open market.
That means that commerce and technology are very similar or may be the same.
What they both have in common is that innovation in technology can only thrive where individuals have great autonomy and innovation in commerce can only flourish where there is no hereditary ruling class or a very weak one.
America created the celebrity sometime around the first World War. There was Edison, Ford, Lindbergh, Einstein and Rockefeller, Carnegie, Chaplin and many more.
Just from looking at that list you can see that some were treated as positive and some as negative.
I want to make a simple point. If you are treated as negative you have only two choices: ignore it all or fight back. If you are treated as positive, just sit back and enjoy it.
This is of current concern because two celebrities have been treated as negative, Trump and Musk and they have chosen to fight back at the hatred fired at them.
This is a problem because Trump is a great business builder and an even greater man as the first businessman to occupy the presidency. He will be remembered as the man who made Jerusalem the Capitol of Israel after 2,300 years; as the first president to recognize that government regulation was the greatest harm the American government can do.
Musk is the greatest engineer-businessman in an entire century.
Such nasty treatment of both men is flat-out immoral and historically a sign of sub-human behavior by a large part of the public.
Many people have ignored celebrity-hood and been badly treated for the rest of their lives. Two classic examples are John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie. Three recent examples are prescient Richard Nixon, a truly great and visionary president. Woody Allen, a historically important filmmaker was treated miserably and Senator Joe McCarthy who foresaw the problem of embedded Communists long before the majority of Americans, many of whom have never seen it.
Just from looking at history, the choice of what to do when cast as a negative celebrity, the best choice is to attack your enemies, including the very powerful newspaper and TV media.
One of the hippy successes was the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a masterpiece of a new form of encyclopedia and was the first version of the future Google.
I’ve written about many of the hippy successes and of the great social changes that hippies invented. They include the modern universal bicycle, hang gliders and their offshoots, comfortable beds and countless artifacts that are too numerous to mention here.
The greatest impacts were in the extraordinary expansion of the American urban diet and cooking methods, the vast expansion of unusual religious orders and related thinking as well as the love of flowers and craft skills. While not discussed openly, a wide range of psycho-active drugs gained widespread acceptance. Non-religious simple living and right livelihood gained ground as did homeschooling.
But what were the failures?
The greatest hippy failure was their inability to promote the optimism that engulfed the hippy world view. The hippies were joyous; the modern American world is grim and depressing.
The hippies loved hitchhiking. It couldn’t succeed because there is a small criminal underclass that can never be ignored.
The biggest failure was in finding new social organizations. Americans just can not live comfortably together in groups. Communes, group houses and every form of communal living failed. Many pairing and mating structures failed as well, whether it was open marriage or any of the various forms of polyamory.
Hippies never indulged in politics even though the press confused them with the anti-war Left. The worst hippy legacy is the modern street people who have destroyed San Francisco and a few other cities. Hippies made living on the street and in publicly visible areas a tolerable behavior that the future social outsiders, hobos, made a serious public nightmare.
The hippies founded environmentalism but focused heavily on the population explosion which later changed into human caused global warming eschatology. The hippy fear of nuclear power made the situation worse.
All in all, it is too early to make historic judgments about the hippy era. And I was too much of a central figure to also be involved in the historic evaluation.
Harold Geneen, Coco Chanel, Peter Sellers, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Cole Porter lived in hotels for many years of their lives. Harold Geneen, the CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph in the 1960s and 70s lived in many hotels and kept a complete set of clothes in each one.
I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments in 1979. It still sells. The theme was Simple Living for non-religious or spiritual reasons. My strongest arguments for simple living were that owned objects clutter the mind and life is freer with many more ways to live if one has a simple daily practice.
At one point I had less than 100 objects in my van and lived as a house sitter. That is much harder to do with a spouse and children. It makes a conventional lifestyle more difficult. But I made the point that having or accumulating money was not in conflict as long as it wasn’t used to buy objects like houses and cars that divert attention to maintenance and worrying.
I’m a pilot and a sailor. But I never owned a plane or a sailboat. For fifty years I was an active pilot with a single-engine plane that I used as a member of a flying club and sailed as a partner in a 30-foot sloop where I paid the moorage fee and paid for repairs resulting from racing.
I was always impressed with creative people who lived in hotels for the simplicity of daily living that that made possible.
Many prominent mathematicians seem to live with virtually no possessions, just living on friends' couches and thinking about math. There is Elon Musk who seems to own no houses but lives with friends and on the airplanes where he spends much of his time.
The subject comes up because of my friend Alex who is handsome and very bright but lives in a modest apartment with very little furniture. Alex has plenty of money. Many women rapidly stop dating him after they see his modest apartment.
My biggest and most famous lawsuit was about employment discrimination against women and minorities; it was an immediate societal success. I have since figured out why it succeeded.
The case was brought in 1971 by Bob Gnaida of the law firm Public Advocates against the Bank of California. We won and the decision demanded an aggressive program with supporting money to promote women and minorities into management at all levels, promptly. I brought the suit after leaving the Bank of California as a Vice President. I took with me all the incriminating internal evidence.
The major banks in America signed consent decrees to the settlement and banking quickly became the most integrated industry in America.
I tried to establish similar anti-discrimination lawsuits in housing and private clubs.
In housing I carried out many ventures with my wife in trying to rent apartments in upper income neighborhoods where we were followed by black couples (friends) who tried to rent the same apartments on the same day. They never could rent the same apartments that we could. We had overwhelming evidence of discrimination against blacks but were never able to put together a lawsuit. No law firm and no government agency would take the many cases offered.
Unlike the banking case where I had overwhelming computer printout payroll evidence, as was true throughout banking, in the case of housing, there were countless acceptable semi-legal reasons given by landlords for their preference for white renters.
In the case of private clubs Congress amended the anti-discrimination laws to exclude private clubs with less than 200 members and included only club lunches because the rest of the private club world didn’t directly seem to involve business issues.
I’ve spent time around the world with influential people. One thing is clear and very important: They get their news from the New York Times. Journalists, around the world, also get their news from the N.Y. Times.
The two things in the headline to this blog that need explaining: ‘Jews’ and ‘Responsible.’
Jews. The New York Times has been on its last legs, financially, for nearly a decade. Even the most recent online readership recovery due to puzzles and games has not relieved the financial finale. What would destroy the New York Times, in a week, would be if most New York Jews canceled their subscriptions.
Responsible. The greatest surprise to me and nearly everyone else was the October 8th discovery that much of the world and nearly all of American academia hates Israel.
The U.N. has always reflected this global hatred of Israel with little consequence (except for the recent UNRWA troops in Hamas.) The United States has always stopped the U.N. calumny. Except for Obama’s last minute expression of vitriol.
The New York Times has been consistently an Israel hater and a Jew hater. The Jew hatred has been evident since the 1930’s when Arthur O. Sulzberger was the publisher and tried to pass for an Episcopalian. Arthur O. denied the Holocaust and was strongly anti-Israel before and after its founding. This has continued with A.O. Sulzberger, Jr. It can’t be missed by accident. Every Israel based reporter has written false and defamatory articles for the Times. Every article about American Jewry, for decades, has been malicious, such as the recent coverage of Haredi education.
New York Jews just march on as if it didn’t matter.
But it does. The New York Times has been the fertile soil for global Israel hatred. New York Jews could have stopped it.
The civil rights movement failed. That is why the wokies say America is racist.
On the one hand, I was made president of the San Francisco organization that was created to save Lowell High School, the merit-based high school that the school board wanted to make open to all students. We won that battle and then had to fight it again,70 years later, in 2022. I still believe that merit is a core ingredient in the structure of America. All three of my children later went to Lowell.
On the other hand I played a significant role in the design and implementation of school busing in San Francisco, the first city outside the South to have court-mandated busing. I vividly remember making a presentation to the parents at Hoover Jr. High on the busing plans for their school. I have never faced an audience with so much hatred in my life. Parents couldn’t stand the idea of busing for racial integration.
Busing was a total failure. Half the population of public school children left the public schools. From 80,000 enrolled in 1964 to 40,000 by 1984. Parents with school age children moved out of San Francisco or enrolled their kids in private schools. The black school children did not improve their test scores. Nationally school busing was a failure.
Add to that failure, the generous Civil Rights payments to blacks from 1965 for the next two decades did little to change the status of the general black community. Since it provoked the destruction of the black family, it degraded the status of blacks and brought on the greatest expansion of black crime in the 20th Century. The second failure.
I also brought the first and most successful employment discrimination lawsuit on behalf of minorities and women in 1971. This had positive benefits for all groups but ended up having two perverse effects.
It was not appreciated by any groups, though the reality was impressive. The results were viewed as failures partly because the homeless population grew rapidly, made up largely of black men, who became very visible. Leading to the growth of the perverse DEI (Diversity, equity, and inclusion) of today.
It also brought women into the higher ranks of business, successfully. Which had the perverse effect of raising the income of married couples which in turn dramatically increased the price of housing in America. An increase in prices that today is a major barrier to home ownership by everyone in their 20’s, 30’s and 40’s.
Multiple failures and I was there at the start. These failures have resulted in the ‘wokies’ of modern life who have tried to create more equal outcomes in life for blacks, primarily, due to the failures of the past five decades of government programs.
At our recent Thanksgiving dinner I asked two family members what they think of Wikipedia. One ‘loves it so much’ he sends money monthly. The other considers it ‘a truly reliable source.’
I personally approach Wikipedia with caution. If an entry can be slanted in a Lefty direction it will be. I am an expert witness in American courts in nine subject areas and have been cross- examined many times in my life as a legal witness. Much of the time where I know a subject because I have taught it at the university level or because I worked in the field for many years, Wikipedia is wrong. In the dozen times I’ve made a correction with appropriate references, my correction disappears the next day.
The subject of this blog is the disappearance of reliable sources today. The best thinker on this subject was Marshall McLuhan, his book was The Medium is the Message. The medium of our time is the Internet. The Internet is the reason 'authoritative source’ has disappeared. And has been gone for nearly two decades.
There never was a ‘truth’ other than in a syllogism. We have always relied on authoritative sources ranging from leading academics, to the New York Times, or scientific consensus, or expert opinion and maybe a professional or governmental authority.
I don’t need to recount the downfall of all these authorities.
Any statement based on authority will lead to an Internet lookup which will give a variety of answers and many credible videos.
Virtually anything of importance that is treated as authoritative by one part of American society will be doubted or disputed by a large different part of our society. Thanks to the Internet and Internet video.
Thus, our society is deeply divided on many important issues. There are no commonly agreed authoritative ideas, issues, or values today.
What does that mean?
I would guess that we are returning to a tribal society where we only trust our own tribe. Our tribe is our authority. And vice versa.
The fascinating genius of America has been that our assimilation has been so effective that tribal allegiance has virtually disappeared. This in turn has allowed commerce to thrive. The consequence of tribal return will be direct harm to modern commerce.
Imagine going to work where people of different tribes can’t get along. Much like China where Wongs only work with Wongs and Gees only work, bank, and rent from Gees.
I just finished reading Merlin Sheldrake’s book on mycelia. I didn’t read it for months because my daughter (a PhD in biology) kept recommending it and I kept saying, “I knew him, I don’t need to read it.” I was wrong. I knew his father in hippy days as everyone did, Rupert Sheldrake.
The book is excellent and easy to read. Merlin, like his father, is a little grandiose and has a slight tendency to exaggerate. I’m not complaining, I do it myself. Mycelium are terribly under appreciated.
I am a mycelia fanatic. I love an organism that was not recognized as its own phyla until I was 25 years old and still doesn’t fit into the Linnaean categories. Like I love pointing out that medicine was mostly wives’ tales until I was born before WWII when penicillin was first used. Penicillin comes from mycelia so the two issues are related.
Merlin Sheldrake likes to focus on many of the problems in our understanding and thinking about mycelia. I enjoy that about his book.
The whole biological sphere has a problem. Fungi can’t get energy directly from the sun, and green plants that do so through photosynthesis, can’t get many vital chemicals such as nitrogen and phosphorus from the air or the soil. The relationship between mycelia and plants that allows the plants to get the vital chemicals to exist and the mycelia to get the energy (sugars) to exist has the wrong name.
The name for this exchange is generally called parasitism. But that is definitely wrong because there is a symbiosis, both giant categories need the other. There is a mutually beneficial exchange that takes place. Sheldrake makes that clear; he also points out that biology is deficient in words to explain the mutual dependence that takes place.
This is where the word ‘commerce’ is needed. What takes place between the mycelia and plants is a mutually beneficial exchange. The very definition of ‘commerce.’ It is biological commerce.
Commerce is the right word but most people don’t understand the common use of the word. Commerce is always mutually beneficial. One of the few human endeavors that is mutually beneficial.
Commerce is 99.4% cooperation. Go to any commercial establishment and see that it only works because everyone cooperates. Not just everyone who is visible, but also the suppliers, the whole supply chain, the advisors, the consultants, the outside workers and the landlords. The 0.6% consists of the government agencies that represent all the present and past hostile forces to the healthy thriving of the commerce and to some extent people who believe they are more suited to supply the clients, often called competitors.
When we truly understand the unique attributes of commerce, what it really is, we will appreciate this greatest of all god’s gifts and we will be able to apply it to biology.