Pro Commerce

Speculation

I can’t help but speculate on the work of speculators. 

I went to the August 8^th Board of Supervisors meeting where two towers near downtown San Francisco were approved, one 55 stories and the other 45 stories with over 700 residential units.

The reason I speculate is because this was a case of visible corruption. This is a ....

Hippy dream

In an earlier blog and the discussion that follows I consider the hippy dream of creating a better world for all of us to live in. 

We hippies never did succeed, and I may have been the hippy that failed in this regard. The closest thing to a hippy village is Christiania in Copenhagen which I understand will soon be closed.

The important point is that what the hippies didn't do, the gay community has done.  I live in the gay community, the Castro in San Francisco.  Gays live openly in the Castro and have since 1975.  They have every business service they want and plenty of political representation.  The neighborhood is one of the safest in the U.S. It is clean and attractive and caring. When AIDs hit the community 25 years ago, the members created hundreds of caring and wonderful institutions to help each other. The gay community succeeded.

We hippies failed. In the mid-1970s I took a group of fellow hippies to the hills above Brisbane, a town just south of San Francisco.  I showed them how we could buy a few dozen homes and create the beginnings of a genuine community.  Everyone was gung ho.  Before we could make bids on the inexpensive hillside houses the prices doubled in one month as Saudi Arabian money poured in to buy half the hillside.  We gave up. 

I had also created a hippy business network (the Briarpatch) which was a wonderful model for a new way of living. Much of the Briarpatch has been assimilated into the larger society.

What year is this?

I am particularly aware of what year this is.  A fellow swimmer stopped me this morning and asked 'What year this is?'

'Did I bump my head?'  I replied, concerned because emergency crews usually ask you what day it is to see if you have been disoriented by your current condition.

I know the answer because I get three bank statements with three different years.  My local San Francisco bank uses a calendar that is the same as this blog, the neo-Christian calendar.  Neo, because we know that the Christian messiah was not born in the year zero or one.

I have a Tel Aviv shekel bank account, which is what the swimmer in the next lane had in mind, and the date on my statement tomorrow will read 5766, the month will be Tishrei. 

I have a yen bank account in Tokyo and the year is 17.  That refers to the 17^th year of the reign of Emperor Heisei.  Heisei is a formal name for the current era, just as Meiji and Showa were the formal names of the eras related to specific emperors.  The common name for the current Emperor is Akihito. He is the 125^th emperor.  Many of my well educated Japanese friends can list all 125, since roughly 600 BCE. I once listened to the list on an overnight drive into the mountains.

Balinese are the new Jews

The bombing of tourists in Bali spells the death of the Balinese. 

There were two important lessons from the 20^th Century: Marxism is a bad idea that led to great evil; pacifism is a bad that has led to great evil. The failure and evil consequences of Marxism are fully evident to all but the mentally blind. The same is not true of pacifism because the history of pacifist failure has not been written. (See my earlier blog.)

The Balinese are a peaceful people living in a hostile nation (Indonesia bans Israeli passports.) They can not escape the Islamic nation that controls them and is now depriving them of their livelihood. They are trapped pacifists who will return to their pre-colonial status of tribal life and will still be attacked by their hostile Islamic neighbors until they are possibly all gone. Think Tibet. Worse than Tibet because the Balinese don’t even have a religious hierarchy to move them to exile. Unlike Jews, the Balinese can not become Israelis with an army and a fighting character.

We get to watch the great tragedy of pacifism unfold before our eyes for the rest of our lives.