Pro Commerce

What I Know About Joe Biden From the News

I know that over one million people world wide have known for more than four years that Joe Biden is senile and incapable of being president of the United States.

The million people consist of every foreign office on the planet, every journalist on the planet, and their friends.

I knew that Joe Biden was senile when I saw him on YouTube in his campaign in the Summer of 2020.  

After the election I asked my youngest daughter if she could see that he was senile.  She said ‘no.’  I asked her to check with my 16 year old grandson. He said ‘senile.’

I knew Joe Biden was a mean person when I learned that his third German Shepherd had bitten his fifth Secret Service agent. That means Jill Biden is also a mean person.

The fact that he is most lucid when he is angry in public speeches is also evidence that he is a mean person.  

I knew he was corrupt when he was forced out of the Democratic primary Presidential race in Fall 1987 for plagiarism.

I knew that he was using his public office for corrupt personal gain when I learned his son was on the board of the Ukrainian power company Burisma.

I knew he was racist about the same time because his two closest Senate friends were Strom Thurmond and Robert Byrd, both KKK members.

Joe likes to sniff children under nine years old.  Weird, but out of his control in his senile years.

Joe Biden had no sense of decency or a moral center which I learned upon his taking office as president and directing the Chief Legal officer to begin directing criminal lawsuits against former president D. J Trump and some of his staff.  One of the most corrupt and illegal actions in American political history.

Nothing will go down in the history of the Joe Biden presidency that compares with his refusal to help two stranded in space American astronauts by accepting Elon Musk’s offer to recover them. Biden feared acceptance would benefit Musk’s friend presidential candidate Trump.

In summary, the Democrat Party nominated and the American people, with the encouragement of a vast dishonest public media, elected the most horrible human being to ever hold the office of American president.

I’m an Economist, the Rest Aren’t

After three years at U.C. Berkeley graduate school of economics I should have been given a PhD, in 1964, but the pro-Castro faculty made that an impossibility.

Let us begin. Capital is not factories, planes, buildings, or anything else physical.  Capital is all accurate knowledge.  After the War, Germany and Japan rebuilt and promptly returned to their former GDP levels.  Simple knowledge of where everything went and how it worked was the capital. 

Many things are called ‘capital.’ Like ‘market cap.’  But the words capital are meaningless; some capital can buy a cereal box full of cocaine and other capital can buy 100 car operating railroad. Money is the language of commerce. 

I explained capital in 1964 in my PhD thesis sent to the American Economic Assoc. Journal and returned to me for a revision to 40 pages because the journal wouldn’t publish anything that was 60 pages long. I didn’t bother.

The Fed was important, for decades, in regulating the American money supply. That stopped sometime in the 1990’s when U.S.debt went from $4 trillion to $10 trillion while the global debt went from $50 trillion to $100 trillion. The global debt tripled over the next fifteen years. 

The Fed diddling at the margins of American debt while the money sloshing around the world reached significantly large numbers meant the Fed became unimportant.

We have had three oil induced inflations. 1974, 1979, and 2021.  Nothing to do with anything but the price of oil.  When the price of oil rises dramatically which it did in 1974 because the Arab oil countries were punishing the U.S for the military actions of Israel, and in 19
79 because of the American war against Iran and in 2021 because senile President Biden attacked the American oil extraction industry by executive order, every core industry faced higher operational costs.  Especially transportation industries. Higher costs, transmitted throughout the economy, is the definition of inflation.

America is the center of global commerce. It is gigantic. Every other country is forced to invest in America because it is so big and so productive. The American stock markets contain $60 trillion of public corporation capital. Nearly all of that is in the eighty five percent that is in the top 500 public corporations.  The U.S. is 45 percent of the global financial market.

Only two countries in the world are truly and consistently productive: The U.S. and Israel. Nearly all technical and business invention comes from these two countries.  The reasons are straight forward. Their cultures and societies reward innovation. New ideas are disruptive. In these two countries the government and the social elite are not able to discourage innovation.

There are three kinds of commerce. Trade, Clientry and Industry.  

• Trade is the most common and the origin of most commerce.  The trader buys products and marks up the price to cover the costs of his/her business with enough additional to pay operating costs and stay in business. A flower shop or baker is an example of trade.
• Clientry is a business designed to cater to the customer for a lifetime. A lawyer, dentist, and a banker are examples of clientry.
• Industry is what Adam Smith recognized. It is a form of commerce that reduces market prices by the use of specialization and economies of scale.  Companies that are industrial provide only a small part of employment but the majority of economic output.
• Businesses that have an owner but no employees plus those with less than ten employees comprise nearly all businesses in the United States, over 95% of all businesses. The remainder, 5%, those with 11 or more employees produce more than half the GDP of the country.

In recent years, the incredible dominance of American electronic technology in the global market has generated such a large inflow of wealth that the U.S. has had the longest period in history without a recession.

How Elon Can Take Over American Politics

Let’s start with national electoral politics.  Of the 535 members of Congress, about 100 are not vulnerable to change because their home territory is controlled by their own machine.

Now, X provides an advantage that has never been available before.  A careful screening of users can be undertaken to make sure their politics are right for the long term. I found over 900 MAGA supporters on my account.  Once the group is initially screened then they can be asked their address to fill up all relevant American Congressional and Senate seats.

Next is time to ask three simple questions to sort out people who have an inherently political view of the world.  Not necessarily the brightest or even the most decent people, but being political is necessary.  

Now they are to be taken to a training school.  Only a few days.

I have run a number of political campaigns at every level.  Training only needs to be modest. Five steps:

• The perceived tallest wins. I once had a candidate for mayor who was the shorter one.  I created his campaign poster with him bending over to shake hands with a Chinese male in a man-hole.
• Every electoral district has a small elite group that exercises influence by word-of mouth contact.  This group must be met and groomed in coffee sit-ins. Often these elites are union bosses.
• People not in networks are usually likely to vote for the perceived most popular candidate.  They often judge by the most house signs, bumper stickers and similar media.
• Election day turn-out efforts are a waste of time and money.
• Campaign finance laws are often arcane and complex. Every campaign needs a qualified finance person.

Now, go and make America a decent country again.

Revolution or Counterrevolution

This may be the greatest moment in human history. 

The major revolutions in history were the American (really a nationalist rebellion), French (really several waves of class revolution), the Russian, the Chinese and a few other dictator uprisings.

What makes the current revolution or counterrevolution a cohesive movement:

• Open Trump rebellion in America against the Nazi takeover of the streets, colleges, and universities. Why call the pro Hamas groups and their administrative sympathizers ‘Nazis?’  Their heroes are wantonly killing Jews, all and any Jew.  That is core Nazism.
• Jews forced to start their own schools, colleges, and universities and bring lawsuits against many existing institutions.
• Democrats, Biden’s and Schumer’s, open hostility to Israel at a time when its survival is at stake. Israel is surrounded by hate filled nations.
• Democrats and government agencies SECRETLY import over a million aliens and give them hotels and credit cards.
• Democrats everywhere malign the police and reduce their funding.
• All sorts of institutions replace meritocracy in employment with racist criteria. Many are forced by the government to do so. DEI.
• The first time in American history a former president and his supporters are criminally sued and threatened by the opposition Democrat office holders.

I think we should call this a counterrevolution. The confusing thing is the small revolutionary part around RFK, Jr called MAHA.  This was a core part of the main revolution, the hippie revolution that brought us organic food, organic crops, Whole Food stores, acupuncture, new religions and alternative medicine.

Otherwise the counter revolution brings us a demand for meritocracy, abandonment of the thesis that America is racist, and that gender differences are merely a social construct that can be wished away.

Also elevation of the idea that politics has a core of civility to it which excludes assassination and legal destruction of political opponents.

Three Key Concepts to a Better Life

Three Key Concepts to a Better Life

1. Positive sum outcomes occur in nearly all human actions.
2. Cooperation is the mode of modern commerce.
3. The American model of government is an improvement over all others.

Every day of my life I have had to deal with people who fail to understand these three fundamental principles of reality.

Every child starts out saying ‘mine’ and adults have to teach sharing because the world doesn’t work for anyone if there is no sharing. Multiple children can share a single toy but when they don’t share only one is happy and that is not real happiness; it is power over others.

Most games are zero sum. Only one winner.  But in the real world, with technology and commerce, there are multiple winners.  When three people make bread there is more than three times as much as when one person makes bread.  Specialization allows for non-zero (positive) sum output.  So does technology.  The 90 car freight train can pull thousands of tons more of anything per worker than a single tractor trailer truck.

Many young people rant against ‘capitalism.’  All societies have capital; the idea that some are based on capital that is owned by the state is an historical error of language and politics. Socialism has been tried in the biggest country, the country with the largest population, an island country, a country with the greatest resources and every other element and always fails. The word should be commerce not capitalism. Every society has it, and some are better run than others.

All societies have commerce. The ownership of capital is seldom any different among them. The ones that promote commerce the most are the ones with the greatest wealth and the greatest ethnic and social diversity, like the U.S. and Israel.

Commerce thrives with cooperation, not competition. In any business, including some with a million employees, the employees work together, the businesses work in cooperation with their suppliers, landlords, banks, neighbors and broader communities.  Commerce is 99% cooperative and only competitive in 1% of all transactions. That is reality. 

America has generated thousands of homeless on the streets since 1978 and the number of billionaires has increased from a dozen to 750 in the same period.  There is no possible connection. One billionaire could not be created with all (by confiscating) the lifetime production of a hundred thousand homeless people living on the street.

Two giants, Standard Oil and AT&T, were broken up by the government and two decades later they were back to the original voluntarily, because it was so much more efficient.

The American model of government is seldom appreciated. But it is the longest stable government on the planet.  While America created the Japanese government and the UN, the model its creators used was the English parliament with the parliament selecting the government.  The UN doesn’t work.

In the American model there is a local plebiscite for the executive office and two legislative bodies.  The high court is chosen by a combination of both.  In Israel the judiciary selects itself and has failed to maintain its popular survival.

The reason for the great success of the American form of government has been its weakness: with power divided against itself and among the states. Liberty and individual freedom has been able to thrive with a weaker and more inefficient government.  Few people in the world appreciate this, especially immigrants who hope for a good president, not for a weaker government.  The U.S. survived for four years with no president (Biden).

Yet these three aspects of reality mean nothing to the wokie leftist ranting about the evils of America and capitalism.

How I Succeeded

How did I carry out three projects in San Francisco out of many that I will describe in the future?

*The oldest, most successful high end vegetarian restaurant in America.

*The beautiful East Bay Bridge.

* A gorgeous small park.

The oldest, most successful high end vegetarian restaurant in America is Greens in Fort Mason; already 47 years old and thriving. Always listed in San Francisco’s top ten restaurants.

That is what I was going to write about and will do so later.  In searching the web I find no real history of the modern Ft. Mason. An important history that is unknown. All I could find was this:

Fort Mason Center, a nonprofit organization, partnered with 

the GGNRA and opened in 1977. It was the first conversion 

of a military base to peacetime use and as such, has served

as a national model. Each year more than 1.5 millions visitors 

connect with arts and culture on the historic waterfront campus. 

Through special events and resident organizations, Fort Mason 

Center offers musical and theatrical performances, exhibits,

workshops, and classes that inspire and foster creativity for 

visitors of all ages. Within the historic warehouses are free

museums, a bookstore, classes, restaurants, and theaters. 

It began in 1977 when a mature and attractive woman, Ann Howell, came to me and said that the lower part of Ft. Mason, buildings and wharfs, were going to be made a public facility, part of the Golden Gate National Recreation area, the first military facility in an urban area to become public.  

She wanted to apply for the role as operator. She had gathered the names of 110 non-profits, nearly all the hippy groups that came to a Kohotec celebration that had been held in the Civic Auditorium across from City Hall in late 1973.The Fort was going to be given to a non-profit.  So I told Ann to form a non-profit 501:c3 organization and suggested some prominent names of my friends for the board. Ann did everything I told her to and to my complete astonishment she won the property. 

The reason a sweet innocent inexperienced woman won the management of Ft. Mason was probably that the man who had to decide, Bill, was beleaguered by the most powerful organizations, the University of California, the U.S. Congress, the U.C. Med School, giant hospitals and City Departments.  He was under extraordinary pressure.  Probably hated it.  So, out of pique and revenge he gave the Fort to Ann and her hippy gang.Ann and her boyfriend moved into one of the three giant empty office buildings and started renting the other spaces to 60 non-profits that she could find on her Kohoutek list. Everyone wanted a 50 cent per square foot rent.

When it had been nearly filled up, with an eclectic collection, she asked for more advice.  I said then that she needed a center for the entire community to converge on to create a durable and stable community.  A restaurant with a coffee shop, in the mornings, and a copy shop.

She didn’t know how to get a non-profit restaurant. So I said I’d do it.

I chose a location: the old Army vehicle repair shop.  I went to two dear friends. Dick Baker, the Abbott of the San Francisco Zen Center who ran several non-profit businesses, the most successful being Tassajara Resort. I showed him the site and he was excited to run a vegetarian restaurant in a beautiful location with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. I then went to Rudy Hurwich, another good friend, president of the non-profit Fort Mason board. He supported the idea.

Three problems that had to be solved.  First the concrete floor was covered in oil that could never be cleaned. Problem solved by California State architect and friend Sim Van der Ryn, who made a new floor 4 feet up which also gave a view out the windows to every table. Second, a fine diner needs wine. The Zen Center voted to make a beer and wine license an exemption to Buddhist tradition, worthwhile.

Third, a great chef was needed. Abbott Baker got a great Zen cook, Debbie Madison, to spend a year studying with pre-eminent chef Alice Waters. The first chef, Debbie, published many cook and food books over the coming years. The two successor chefs have been equally great. The current one, Katie Reicher, continues the tradition as a genius.

Finally, I introduced a marketing idea I had first developed 15 years earlier: to create a grand opening and a loyal customer base.  Everyone within range of S.F. Zen Center and friends of friends were invited to a two month crowded opening.  That came to nearly 10,000 people.  Many were given complimentary wine and meals. Greens was full from then to now.

Abbott Baker was responsible for the aesthetics of Greens. I later contributed the welcoming values to other restaurants and food events, knowing that more food related business was good for Greens.  Business is not competition, it is synthesis.

Two of my ideas were not adopted by Greens.  One was to give people who wanted ‘left over’ containers, one out of five people, a high quality freezer box with the name Greens on it.  Greens already had enough business. The second was to designate a small room, the Steve Jobs room, where Steve ate regularly and had his wedding night meal.  No one else liked the idea.

How did I create this historically important exemplar?  

The most important was my vast network of friends and associates.

My personal reputation as someone who is good at business as a: former banker, creator of MasterCard, open to new ideas and a receptive non-judgmental listener. 

Someone who doesn’t seek personal credit for my many accomplishments.

Retainer of vast collections of trivial information. I stayed awake when I was in the Army and we listened to lectures and saw movies during my reserve duty special trips to Fort Mason from 1962 to 1967. 

Finally, I pay close attention to how society works.

 

Measuring Global Temperatures

There are two serious problems in measuring global temperatures.

1. The first is that an average is usually meant to be based on a ‘normal distribution.’  But any temperature measure of the earth’s surface is not a normal distribution. Therefore the measures of mean, skew and variance are off the mark.

The Earth’s total surface is roughly 200 million square miles.  Of this 14 million square miles is the ice of Antarctica and the Arctic, which is always at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. That means 7% of the Earth is the same minimum temperature. Not a normal distribution.  Ice does not go below freezing temperature.

The land mass not covered in ice is 40 million square miles. That is 20% with widely fluctuating temperature.  The remaining 73% is ocean which cannot freeze, setting a lower temperature boundary of 32 degrees.  Definitely not a normal distribution for the surface of the planet.

I’ve swum at the equator so the upper temperature of the ocean is below 80 degrees.  The ocean is always within a 50 degree range.  Again, not a normal distribution. The average ocean temperature for the globe is 61 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is close to the midpoint of 80 plus 32 which is 56 degrees. 

My calculation of the global surface temperature based on satellites and balloons is 57 degrees, which has been steady since 1950.

2. The second problem in measuring the surface temperature of the earth is also that it is not a ‘normal’ distribution.  The bottom temperature that can be measured is very sticky around 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  On the 20% that is land mass the temperature can rise to any number or drop to any number, but the remaining 80% of the Earth is bounded on the bottom by the 32 degrees.  That is a very bottom truncated distribution.

This means that the global average can rise faster than it can fall. Making the surface temperature more sensitive to the volcano rises than to any factors that will lower it.

Summary: because the global temperature is not normal, because it is truncated at the bottom 32 degrees Fahrenheit, global temperature can rise faster than it can fall, it will have erratic measurements over time. Global surface temperature will rise rapidly for volcano events such as Pinatubo in 1991 but fall slowly thereafter.  The potential for overstating a global temperature rise is significant but largely a statistical anomaly.

Unions Seriously Harm

One important lesson from the Palisades fire is that rich people or people who form their own fire district can hire a private fire fighting company.  A real estate developer in Palisades did just that and saved his entire shopping mall.

Now that everyone knows that urban entities like Los Angeles County and the California State government are incompetent at the most fundamental government functions, private companies will take on the relevant work.  Rich people and rich populations will hire them in the future.  Equity be damned.

How does that one example matter so much? 
We will now see hundreds of private firefighting businesses created to be alternatives to the politically controlled standard municipal fire departments and water supplies. People who can afford private government functions will no longer tolerate low quality public service to them.

The same has been increasingly true in education.  Parents have always paid for parochial schools in hopes of getting better or safer education for their children and they have paid for private schools in hopes of better education.  Homeschooling is an alternative for those who can’t afford private schools.  The public schools are controlled, nearly everywhere, by unions which make good education impossible with firing provisions and promotions that are irrational.

Most people don’t know how unions have seriously harmed fire and police departments.  Fire departments are three times too large.  They were never cut back when the causes of home fires were reduced due to safer bedding, the decline in smoking and better home-building electric and gas codes.  Making public fire departments far too expensive.

Put two and two together: unions in schools, fire departments, police and other government services and their control of urban governments have made urban government services inadequate and incompetent.  

People with money will create their own private government services.

Ann Landers and Israel

Longtime readers know my view of my own Judaism.  We Jews are the chosen people. Chosen to help humankind be ‘better.’  Jews are hated because they have been able to read, write, and do math for 3,000 years and virtually nobody else can or could.  They have also been good at commerce, globally. And yes, those skills have included most Jewish women.

Israel’s role today is to continue the roles Jews have played in society for millennia.  To improve medicine, technology, food and day to day life. Israel is the moral leader in its military behavior and in countless social issues.  Menachim Begin was the true founder of the country, a moral giant.  Bibi Netanyahu is one of the greatest men in human history, an incomparable leader for all time.

So what does this have to do with Ann Landers?  Ann’s real name was Esther Lederer and her sister (Dear Abby) was Esther Phillips.  Both Jews which is the point of this blog.

I started reading Ann’s column when she started in the Chicago Sun Times and I started at the University of Chicago in Fall 1955. 

The total readership of Ann and Abby reached two thirds of the adult population of America for several decades.  The advice they gave concerned all aspects of daily moral life. To put it simply, America’s moral life for an important part of the 20th century came from two Jewish women.  That, to me, is the work of the ‘chosen people.’

Another Jewish moral advisor was Ruth Westheimer, Dr. Ruth. She was a powerful moral teacher to Americans for two decades, reaching audiences nearly as large as Dear Ann and Dear Abby at times. Her focus had more sexuality in it.

The demand of ‘the chosen people’ is to be moral leaders for all time.  Not an enviable burden.

I Was There

I was there at the beginning of the Beatnik movement, the hippie movement, and the Whole Earth Catalog.

The Beats were mostly in New York and San Francisco.  I went to the U. of Chicago, in the geographic middle, in August of 1955 and was in the male dormitories in 1957 for six months. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was a widely known radical organizer with a sweatshirt, blue jeans, disheveled hair and a full beard. The Beats were visible in the youth population of the time.  As they traveled from Coast to Coast they stopped in Chicago at the University where I got them dorm rooms to stay in.  I knew about a dozen of the Beats at the time.  An article in Time magazine in 1959 said I was one of the Beats.

When I returned to San Francisco in 1960 to go to grad school at U.C. Berkeley in economics, my wife, Helen, and I lived in San Francisco on Broadway a few blocks from North Beach. The Beat scene was centered around City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were five other Beat businesses.  The most important was a small restaurant at approximately 575 Pacific Ave. that had a monk’s bowl of rice and meat and some veggies. Across the street at the Columbus Tower was a street level window with a few seats that had a chrome Italian espresso machine, the first I ever had in the U.S. In the next block North on Columbus was a second-hand bookstore, a bar on what is now Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights. In the next block of Grant across Broadway was The Saloon where heavy beatnik drinkers hung out.

In 1963 Salli Rasberry arrived with her boyfriend. They went immediately to North Beach where the Beats had created a jazz and comedy scene. Raz, whom I didn’t meet for seven years,  moved to Masonic Boulevard in the Haight-Ashbury. Jazz was the overlap of the two youth cultures. Both smoked pot. The Beats had speed which was sold to students and truckers.  Raz and her bunch, later called hippies, soon got LSD from the gang around Stanford that got it from psych researchers.

The Beats were a little older than Raz and her bunch; most were in their mid to late 20’s.  The Beats wore d ark clothes and had long hair.  Their view of the world was summarized perfectly in Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. Grim, rejectionist and hopeless.

Raz and her crowd were also rejectionist about the stultifying society around us, but they were ecstatic, joyful, optimistic, and full of color and vitality. Their clothes were rainbow-exciting, their music loud and wild. They intended to change everything.  Starting with food, sex, and living arrangements.

North Beach was the primary overlap of Beats and hippies.  On a personal basis they met at a house off Kings Mountain on the road over the top, from Palo Alto to Pescadero.  It was a fairly large primitive house just a mile west of SkyLonda coffee shop. That was where Hippies, the Rainbow Bus, Kesey, the Beats, and the outlaw gang of Hell's Angels bikers hung out.  I went there twice with Portola Institute (the core of the Whole Earth Catalog) friends to hang out.

I was well known in the hippie crowd as the banker at Bank of America from 1964 to 1966 and later as VP of the Bank of California who invited all the hippie movers and shakers to a Japanese lunch on Fridays from 1967 to 1970. When the first Trips festival was organized by the Beats and Stewart Brand in January 1966 at the Longshoreman's Hall, Stewart asked me to handle the ticket sales and money collection at the door.

I collected the money for an hour, but the whole scene was too exciting and too many of my friends were there, so I asked the one person I trusted, Bill Graham, to take over the door for me.

I finally met Rasberry officially in Spring 1971 at the Demise Party of the Whole Earth Catalog. We had met many times but that night we sat on a bale of hay talking from 3 am till sunrise at 7am and became lifelong friends.

This is a good place to point out to the historians of the future that the political Left never was connected to the hippie movement.  Hippies joined all the parades of the anti-Vietnam era for the dancing and music.  I know because I knew the Lefty organizers.  I started the Graduate Student Union at U.C. Berkeley and Mario Savio was my Treasurer in 1963. He became famous in 1964.  

Tom Hayden used my living room in San Francisco to try and organize the East Coast media to cover a hippie be-in in Golden Gate Park.  I was opposed to any official publicity and stopped it.

Abbie Hoffman was a colleague who helped me put on a fundraiser for some forgotten cause but he pulled out when stoned and paranoid. I handled the gate myself and returned the money to anyone who wanted it.