Pro Commerce

Loser generation

Almost everyone I know including some of my family are members of the loser generation.

A loser is someone who believes in and has oriented his life around an idea or ideology that has failed. An idea or ideology that is flat out wrong. Such an idea or ideology was that the earth was flat, that the universe circled the earth, that scurvy could not be cured with limes, that large quantities of vitamin C can prevent cancer etc.

Today's loser is the person who doesn't realize the lesson of the 20th century.

Half of the world's population and half the world's populated area has rejected the idea and ideology that government planning can generate prosperity and avoid starvation.

Russia, India and China have all suffered from starvation and poverty while following a government policy of income equality and anti-capitalist central planning.  

These populations have come to realize that supporting commerce and helping commerce to thrive is the only way to have food abundance and a life of freedom and opportunity.  Commerce is the only means to a society where individuals get to fulfill their unique destinies.

That is the lesson that has not sunk in to the Left wing and Democratic Party of the United States.  The Left and the Democrats are still pro-income equality and anti-capitalist. They are in the last century supporting equality of income over commerce. Despite overwhelming evidence they still  wish to replace an open market in healthcare with a government mandated system. The Left is still willing to sacrifice markets, trade and commerce for illusions of harmful CO2.

Losers are all around us. Sadly.

Obese are not the majority

A short while back an old friend of mine Michael Jacobson at the Center for Pestering Americans about pseudoscience (CSPI) announced that the Cheesecake Factory has the two or three highest caloric items of any chain restaurant.

The response from the Cheesecake Factory was that they are in business to serve people not to sermonize their customers. Many of their customers put the extra food in containers to take home, others share the dishes but most importantly the Cheesecake Factory has a supplemental menu (that I always use) made up of dishes under 500 cal.

All of this is what led me to think about the way a minority is running the food industry in America with complete disregard for everyone else.

What are the facts on obesity?

Obesity is defined as a body mass index, BMI, of 30 or more. Using that definition when applied to the entire American population from age 5 on, the obese minority is less than 30% of the population.

So what does a BMI of 30 or more mean?

My personal view is heavily biased because I have always weighed between 175 and 190 and  been 5'7"to 5'8". That puts me on the borderline of obese and definitely in the category of overweight. Nonsense. I am athletic and agile and have always been comfortable with my weight. Until age 45 I could eat anything and not gain weight.

A system that defines the ordinary American adult male of 5’10” as obese when their weight is over 205 pounds has problems itself.  The average woman at 5’5” is defined as obese at 180 pounds. Heavy maybe, zaftig? possibly. Obese.. no way.

The whole point of this blog is that the food fascists who are determined to define the correct foods for America are creating their agenda with a farcical definition of obese and they are lecturing the vast majority of us, more than two thirds, on what we must eat.

There is something rather sickening from the food tyranny that we are living under these days.

U.S. productive?

I know that the current administration is very anti-commerce and is doing everything possible to screw things up, deliberately. The increase in capital gains and dividend taxes will probably have very harmful effects on our output.

The Democrats complete disinterest in international trade is a strong anti-commerce pill.

Nevertheless, unless this barren period of anti-capitalism lasts more than four years, the United States will recover.

The reason is that the United States is a uniquely productive state on the planet. On the planet. Japan has some unique innovation. Israel is second only to the United States in innovation.

The innovation in the United States is a result of the death of all our habits of heart that are listed at the top of this blog. We accept diversity in every form (many of our fools think diversity is skin color alone), we are intolerant of any system that rejects merit which is why labor unions have been shrinking for 60 years, and lastly we favor markets over government planning.  

On the planet, we are unique in having the level of diversity that we have in the United States. Part of this is because we got rid of our hereditary class which is also connected to our habit of heart in supporting meritocracy. Our greatest institutions, from Bell Labs to Google are overrun with immigrants and weirdos. That is diversity in the eyes of commerce.

Most importantly, we have on the West Coast and a few other isolated spots a very weak and inept social structure. There is very little social hierarchy and very extensive horizontal social mixing.  You will see couples on the street made-up of every combination of ethnic, social and national origin.

None of these elements are found in any other society. These elements are a source of American productivity and there is very little the anti-capitalist Democratic Party can do to destroy it on a large scale.

Chicken redemption

When I first set up housekeeping after the Army and before my first child was born, the main meats that we ate were beef, in its many forms from hamburger to brisket, and pork.

It was very rare that we ate any form of chicken or turkey. The same for fish even though I was living in San Francisco.

There has been a radical change in America's eating habits.

Today, the most common food on the table is chicken. Almost any other meat is less common and beef has become a rarity for many. (There is a current resurgence of hamberger and steak restaurants.) Turkey is also very common but I am not a fan.

This redemption of chicken has not occurred because of fat, cholesterol and heart attacks. This redemption of chicken has not occurred in the Midwest where beef and pork are still dominant on everyday tables.

Chicken has grown to its central role on the coasts because the chicken has grown significantly larger and cheaper.  Thanks to the of genius technology in animal husbandry.

Just pointing it out.  Commerce is always disruptive.

Cleft palate and commerce

A friend at coffee this morning was discussing the problems of dentistry in 1840. Any tooth pain was likely to result in an extraction using alcohol as the sedative.

Dental problems were the least of the problems of that era. Children were commonly born with cleft palates, with one leg shorter than the other or cripple.  There were many common physical problems including limited vision, scoliosis, severe pock marks on the face and a wide range of visible deformities.

What is most significant to me is that people with most of these problems were relegated to the status of outcast or at best demeaning work.

It was extremely rare, maybe one in 1000 cases, where the true qualities and virtues of these individuals were allowed to develop and shine.

It is the extraordinary genius of our commercial era that gives people the opportunity to develop their unique talents and capabilities.

It is also the fact that commercial development over the past 150 years has allowed medical technology and surgery to evolve, enter the marketplace and be available to promote the modern man.

Boeing engineers

One of my friends was the psychologist on the team of Boeing engineers that designed the 707 727 737 and 747.

He said that this team was the most extraordinary group of engineers he had met in his lifetime and was doubtful that future airplanes could have the superb engineering that he saw.

I have no idea whether his observation and prediction was accurate. I have worked on airplane engineering and I have some idea of the complexity in such extraordinary engineering feats.

I have also noticed that extraordinary engineering feats come out of very small groups of engineers who are at the top of their fields. Such as spaceship and rocket design, aircraft, computers and biotech. These fields keep changing and the brilliant people keep moving on. You don't see such genius in engineering in old fields such as railroads, public transit or even automobiles (except for the Toyota hybrid).

Certainly the complexity of an airplane system and the extraordinary stresses that an airplane encounters suggests a very high level of engineering competence. Such competence may not be widely available to any industry. Certainly no bureaucracy could build a modern airliner.

To my surprise

I published a blog (Living at ground zero) a few days ago focusing on my hypothesis that we are approaching the second Civil War.

I was surprised to find that the readers who wrote in comments had no sense of what the possible new Civil War is about.

I had better explain it.

Americans are deeply divided on several issues that are closely intertwined.

Republicans, conservatives and the Tea Party are convinced that government expansion has reached the limits at which a free commercial society can operate successfully. They, we, believe that the country has seen serious economic decline as a result of expansion of government employment, government debt and regulatory restrictions.  The economic future looks grim.

This alone would be a political division but would not generate civil war like feelings.

On top of this there is a sense that the Democratic Party and the president have absolutely no regard for constitutional limits on their power.

* The Congress already passed a health care bill that the public opposed. Congress used unprecedented manipulative tactics.

* The president never hesitated to make Labor Board appointments that the Senate opposed.

* The president has directed his regulatory agencies to vastly expand their commercial inhibiting regulations without any congressional support.

The Democratic Party is pursuing, with complete unwillingness to admit any dispute, shackles and onerous restraints on American commerce in the belief that the planet is warming at a dangerous rate caused by humans in their daily activity.

Lastly, the president and his political minions have unhesitatingly insulted the opposition party and refused any bipartisan negotiation in the interests of the country. A precedent unseen in America since 1862.

All of  this, with the exception of one media outlet, has massive media support. The vast mainstream media has condoned and enthusiastically supported most of this Leftist behavior at a time when more than half of Americans disagree.  The public hears virtually no major media criticism of the dangerous behavior they observe. This onesided argument is inflamatory.

This sense that America is being betrayed by its major institutions and by a president who represents a small part of the public is the source of one side of the civil dispute.

The other side, the Democratic Left, has felt that they are the dominant mainstream of America.  They are entirely right in their historic mission to civilize America. They are furious that there is opposition to their rational and humane goals. They vilify those who don’t believe in greater income equality and support for the under class.

That is the basis for our imminent civil dispute.  

That may be enough to bring angry guerrillas into the Castro District of San Francisco ready to fire on anyone they see.  They feel the way John Brown did in 1859 at Harpers Ferry.  You know the name John Brown because his moral outrage became the marching song of the Grand Army of the Republic.

Richard Nixon

There is an extremely sympathetic historical revision going on. Many of the great qualities of Richard Nixon are being remembered.

While I have no appetite for Pat Buchanan his praise of Richard Nixon in this article is accurate and warranted.

I knew Richard Nixon in the early 60s and worked on his campaign for governor of California. I spent many hours with him at work and late in the evening in his hotel room.

Nixon had many amazing qualities. First, many of his allies and friends were gay. He didn't notice and didn't care.

Second he worked incredibly hard for very long hours and was a genuinely warm person when you had time to sit down and talk to him about politics, the subject of his greatest interest.

He was generous with me in making suggestions and discussing issues. He was humble and loved history.  

I always found him to be exceptionally honest and concerned about the people around him.

I think that any historical revisionism that elevates Richard Nixon to the level of a 20th century great man will be fully justified.

Home technology

My girlfriend has been recently looking at some of her ancestor's biographies.

What is most striking is that the women were working in the home because there was so much work that had to be done earlier in the last century.

I set to wondering what were the main technological changes that brought women out of the home and into the commercial realm.

The washer and dryer are usually singled out as critical tools. I do not dispute that because laundry constituted a large household function usually done by women.

I would like to add to that the introduction of polyester in the late 40s early 50s because that eliminated the enormous task of ironing. I remember mangel irons which were used to iron shirts and slacks.

Lastly, there was an entire packaging revolution in the food industry that brought us frozen foods, frozen dinners and fresh fruits and vegetables from neighboring regions and countries.

The food Revolution played an important role in allowing women in the household to prepare meals quickly and efficiently.

This blog is merely to add to our history polyester and the food preservation technologies that allowed women to participate directly in the world of commerce.

Living in ground zero

In the previous blog I have suggested that we are living in a dangerous era. The president of the United States and his minions are creating the most divisive environment in our country since the last Civil War. I say the last Civil War because so much of the current administration is moving us toward a second Civil War.

If we are unable to head off this calamitous social destruction it will be warfare between the suburbs and the agricultural states versus the big cities, particularly on the coasts.

During the last Civil War there were many people on both sides who did not concur with the predominant values of the area in which they lived.  Not just the slaves in the South but a good percentage of the southern urban population did not support slavery or the Confederate efforts to protect it.  Many in the North opposed slavery but were uncomfortable freeing the slaves.

During the coming Civil War the same will be true. People like me will be living in the urban areas that will be attacked by the rural and suburban population.

As I think about this scenario, I realize that I live in ground zero. San Francisco is considered the most radical Left wing city in America even though nearby Marin, Berkeley and Santa Cruz are more extreme. Within San Francisco I live in the most perceived Lefty neighborhood.  The gay Castro district.

If such an imaginary Civil War II occurs, guerrilla squads will come to the center of the Castro and start firing on people.

The most defensive act I could take would be to put on my military clothes. When I was in the Army Reserves during the hippie era we were always assured by our officers that the military would never be used to put down civil uprisings. I think that would still be true.

I know this sounds a little paranoid, maybe very paranoid, but I say it with the intent of suggesting this as a possibility not stating it as fact.

Reading Cultural Revolution

I have been reading Nien Cheng's Life and Death in Shanghai.  It is so disturbing to me that I have to put it down regularly and come back to read more a week later.

Mrs. Cheng is a brilliant writer, an extraordinary woman of power and grace who writes about her life as the wife of a diplomat and as a plenipotentiary for Shell oil company in China before the 1966 cultural Revolution.  

Her house and belongings were ransacked, confiscated and great pieces of art were destroyed before Mrs. Cheng was imprisoned in a hellhole.

Reading the chants of the young Red Guards marching through the streets of Shanghai is alarming. Urged on by Mao Tse Tung they were chanting their hatred of capitalism and the capitalist class. They destroyed as much of the history and culture of China as they could. They promoted starvation, ignorance and hatred. These were the messages that the great Socialist Revolution was bringing to the proletariat.

Every chant every banner reminded me of the president of the United States. Our divisive president has expressed his hatred for 'hedge fund managers, Wall Street, bankers' and the entire capitalist class whom he says 'does not pay its fair share of taxes'. This president generated a filthy, smelly and incompetent protest movement (Occupy Wall Street) made up of the same young people that Mao appealled to in his anti-capitalist campaign.  Plus Obama got the homeless to join him along with every elected Democrat in the country.

It is hard to comprehend the evil that socialism and anti-capitalist hatred has generated in the world and the number of innocent people who have been tortured, mutilated and murdered in the name of this ideology. So far Americans are not being killed by this ideology.

I consider myself among the few who are working to counter this evil. The answer is pro-commerce.

Good places to launder money

A friend was speculating about two restaurants next door to each other where one was full and the other was always empty. He suggested that the empty one was laundering money.

Sorry, a restaurant is not a good business for laundering money.  The reason is simple: for every dollar of revenue that a restaurant shows on its books there must be a comparable $.75 or more in cost of goods and labor. The IRS can check those numbers easily.

Laundering money has a bad name. I am strongly in favor of legalizing laundering money.

If you make your money illegally you want some way to be able to spend it. If you buy a fancy house or several fancy cars with cash and cannot show an income source for that cash and a US tax return, you will go to jail.

If you want the fancy house and the fancy cars you must find a way to pay federal and state income tax. That is called laundering money.

The best way to launder money is to have a business where the gross revenues have little or no relationship to costs..... then pay yourself high profits and your friends very high salaries.  Such is the case for a music hall where the money can pour in the front door and the costs do not go up proportionately. 

The ideal business is one where you can have large gross revenues or capital gains with little or no expenses. Our restaurant is a terrible source of money laundering.

An art gallery is a good example for money laundering because the cost of the art cannot be known by the IRS for certain. I have told a story about this in an earlier blog. A similar example would be rebuilding a burned-out house. You pay the workers with illegal cash and the sell the finished building for capital gains. Pay your taxes. You have laundered your money.

There are many other examples but you get the idea.

Hippies and wine

I was in a restaurant last night. Every table had ordered at least one bottle of wine.

I am wondering what contributions the hippies made to this ubiquitous phenomenon.

In the early 1960s, before wine became the drink of choice for dinner, it was common to see adults with hard alcohol, beer and coffee. Wine was very rare and bottled water even more rare.  I think hippies played a role in the wine. The yuppies brought us bottled water.

While I vividly remember in the 60s that hippies drank gallon jars of cheap mountain red wine, I am not certain that this was the source of popular growth of wine with dinner.

Hippies drank mountain red wine much of the time when they were doing marijuana and often during dinner.

The problem with my memory is that by the early 1970s I had friends investing in small specialized wineries. Often buying land and growing specialized grapes. They saw the rapid growth in wine consumption. But I'm not sure that what they were watching were the hippies.

California arrogance

If you don't live in California, you are not aware of how snide and vicious Californians are toward you.

We have a gastronomic fantasy called "eat local." This means that the food that everyone eats should grown locally (within 100 miles) all year round, and served fresh from the farm.

Most gastronomic imbeciles, my friends, continue to violate this notion a dozen times a day. We do not grow good black pepper, good coffee, good tea, bananas, corn or wheat in California. Most of the year we do not grow fruits such as blueberries or cranberries in California. Most of the fruits and vegetables in our grocery stores, including whole foods, come from Mexico, Chile, Australia and other southern hemisphere countries between October and March.

When I was working with organic grocery stores in Oklahoma City in the 1970s the only fresh vegetables they had in winter were root vegetables, potatoes, beets, yams and onions. Now they have the same vast selection year-round as California when they go to Walmart.

If most of the people in the United States had to eat local foods year-round they would be eating the same foods that Abraham Lincoln ate all of his life. The same foods that Confederate soldiers were served all year long.

Environmental foodies really do want human beings to suffer and live in an imaginary past.

More climate nonsense

This is a very sad blog.  The National Atmospheric and Oceanographic institution as well as the National Weather Service are corrupt. They are as corrupt as I discovered the East Anglia global climate reporting group to be.

You will recall how offended I was to discover that the East Anglia academics were going back and changing earlier data to make it conform to their political ideology. I had some of the earlier data and could not believe my eyes as they changed the data and gave a stupid convoluted explanation of their reasons.

It now turns out that my own government is doing the same stupid convoluted political nonsense.

This all began as I looked into the statement that 2012 was the hottest year in the continental United States on record.

First of all, this disclosure was perverted because it did not include Alaska which is 17% of the landmass of the US. When Alaskan data is put back into the totals, the 2012 year was not the highest.

Second, the number that is given for the highest temperature of the past century and a half is based on an average of daily highs and lows. That is not an average. If you took the average of the tallest and shortest people to walk into a coffee shop in one day you would not have the average height of the people in that coffee shop. You would be better off averaging the height of every 10th person. Height is skewed. The year 2012 was also the year of warmer than trend nights.

Third in the very document from which the press release was compressed the statement is made that "the United States has experienced warming trend equal to .06°F per century". That is 6/100 of 1°F. Most mercury thermometers are not accurate beyond 0.9°F.  This anti-global warming fact was not included in the press release from our government agencies.

Lastly, our weather agencies are going back in history to correct the data. According to their absolutely convoluted statement they have divided the United States into a grid pattern and are creating averages for each grid. They are removing data that gives too much information for any one grid and extrapolating for any grid that lacks data.

I spent my professional lifetime looking at data and can state empirically that you have more reliable data when you don't try to create missing numbers.

One reason given for removing data is that urban areas create heat islands. Presumably urbanization increases air temperature. This may or may not be true. I looked at the data for 140 years of Salt Lake City which went from desert to sprawling city and found no change whatsoever in the temperature over that period.

What heat island has been proven?

All in all our government is dishonest with climate data and scientists and those associated with scientists are tragically corrupt bunch.

Applauding a strike

At Rick Prelinger’s Lost Landscapes show recently there was strong audience applause that disturbed me.

Lost Landscapes is a synthesis of old film footage of San Francisco combined with many short snippets of home movies, over the past century. The audience was San Franciscans interested in the city's visual history. What we saw was only section 7 of seven completed segments so far.

What disturbed me was the audience applause for a segment of footage about a longshoreman's strike in 1938. The audience was applauding this horrible nightmare. The longshoreman's unions with their very strict work rules and overwhelming wage and benefits, completely drove the middle class, working man, out of San Francisco and created this current milieu of extreme Lefty dilettantes and trust fund heirs.

Unions have done everything possible to destroy this city. What survives and thrives here is all outside the realm of the poisonous unions. The pathetic audience, made up mostly of Internet geeks and their friends, have completely rejected unions in their own lives. While unions have destroyed the city government, the municipal Railroad and the public school system, these buffoons are applauding the very institution that they reject in their own lives.

The reason unions make such hash of everything they are involved in is because of their anti-merit system which can never be functional, imaginative, competent or alive.

Do you think I am too harsh on unions?  Or maybe not harsh enough?

Economists agree with me

The University of Chicago business school has a panel of 40 prominent economists who periodically answer questions. It is a wonderful sample of economists and gives a very reliable measure of economic thought.

Recently the panel of economists was asked whether “The federal government would make the average U.S. citizen better off by using policies that directly focus more on increasing small business growth than growth of economic output overall.”  The answer was: 73% said ‘no’.

I would also say emphatically ‘no’.  I have worked with well over 1000 small businesses.

The problem is that there is nothing in particular in federal government policy that stands in the way of successful a small business. Individual locales have very hostile policies toward small business and many zoning regulations are detrimental to small business but these are not federal issues.

Most small business people do not pay federal taxes on their income until the business is successful. So federal taxation is not automatically a problem.

Regulations are a perennial problem for small businesses but the main issue is that the small business doesn't have the time, resources or professional services to cope with these regulations that larger businesses can afford. It is hard to identify all of these regulations, tens of thousands, and modify them for small business.

The national associations of small businesses are a farce. So are small business lending and support organizations inside the federal government.

I would hate to see any of these absurd bureaucracies used as advisors on small business issues.

In summary, the federal government cannot do anything to help small businesses. Anything that could be done would help all commerce to thrive and that is a tall order of business.

What helps commerce thrive is the subject of this blog. Major issues concern expanding international trade, reducing the power of unions and standardizing many commerce related legal issues across the entire American continent.

Two good tests

We are living through two important commercial tests. One just passed.

The first test was of the hypothesis that the stock market effectively discounts future news.

Since the election of Barack Obama it has been clear that January 1 constituted a significant date for the stock market. The fiscal cliff would have meant a serious and almost certain recession.

The price of the stock market should have reflected the anxiety about the fiscal cliff and after the cliff issue was largely resolved the stock market should again have reflected the relief from the uncertainty.

We now know that the stock market does not discount future news. It showed virtually no change before January 1. There was no greater volatility there was no greater upward or downward movement than for the previous 9 1/2 months. After the January 1 fiscal cliff issue was resolved the market only went up a few percentage points.

The stock market does not discount future news.

We are now living in the second test.

United States has dramatically increased the taxes on dividends and capital gains. Dramatically.  This should result in a change of investment behavior in the United States. There should be a decline of some types of investment and  a movement to other types of investments. We shall see.

There was also an increase in the income tax rates. It will be harder to determine the extent of this effect on our society but it is also a test and we shall see the effects over a few years, particularly in states where the federal rate is added on to a high state rate.

Fun? Not if you have to pay more taxes and can’t figure out how to avoid it.

No label party

A brief examination of the No Label party on Wikipedia is sufficient to let me know that it is nonsense. It is completely out of touch with politics. It is probably in touch with the absurd field called political science.

Let us begin with the first absurdity. The No Label party claims to be a midpoint between the Tea party and Moveon.org.  The Tea party is millions of people who have come out of their homes and marched in the streets all around America and brought about the most historic change in Congress and state legislatures in American history. Moveon.org are people who have clicked on a website on their computers. A small but unknown number of people.

The No Label party cites the early 1990s following of Ross Perot as a measure of the number of people who reject the Left and Right in politics. Again an absurdity. Ross Perot's followers were angry at politics for a variety of reasons and they consisted mostly of existing voters as measured by political surveys. There is no evidence that they had any policy or policy wonk agendas.  Ross Perot didn’t stand for any consistent policies.

All voters are in the category of the dissatisfied. As I have discussed before, the half of our population that does not vote are the ones who do not feel dissatisfaction with the political world.

Voters are the ones who are dissatisfied and try to organize their dissatisfaction into the two major political parties.

The Wikipedia list of proposals from the No Label people shows a stunning ignorance of what is going on in Washington since the No Label party’s founding in early 2011.

What is going on is that the Tea party is powerful because it represents the deepest American tradition of hostility toward more government spending and more government expansion.  Being unwilling to deal with this reality creates a farce that is the No Label party.

I cite only three proposals to show their ignorance and absurdity.

They want Congressional pay tied to passing a budget. This was done in California and resulted in a fantasy budget being passed on time. The budget had many loopholes to be filled in the future. Any Congress could duplicate the shenanigans of the Californians.

They want a five day work week for Congress. Don't they know that members of the House have to go home to raise money on Mondays and Fridays?  The proposal is politically blind.

They want the president to answer questions directly in front of Congress. This absurd Lefty copy of British traditions has been tried in San Francisco and the legislators fall asleep. It doesn't work.

There is a genuine divide in America, the Congress accurately reflects that division. Most of the people in the No Label party are Lefties who are unwilling to honestly look at the division in America because they deny the danger of an unlimited growing government and growing deficit.

Rich society woman

This is another story of embezzlement.

A rich society woman came to me awhile back. She had originally met Raymond a year and a half earlier. Raymond let her in on one of his Alaskan moneymaking ventures. Each quarter he paid her 20% on her money and she kept giving him more money to earn a return on.

By the end of the first year she had brought many of her rich society heiress friends and matrons into the investment.

When she came to visit me, it had been three weeks since Raymond had skipped his regular quarterly payment and she had been unable to reach him on the phone.

I gave her the correct advice.

I told her to immediately hire a private detective. I gave her the name of a man I trusted. I said the job of the private detective was to find every single asset that Raymond had and put a lien on it. That was the only way she could possibly get her money back, if he still had any assets in California.

She asked me whether that would protect her friends. I said that I doubted it. She would be lucky to get even a small segment of her own money back.

She didn't listen to me and told me when I phoned her a few days later that she had asked her lawyer, a prominent society lawyer, to write Raymond "a strong letter".

Lesson?  

Any high return is probably a scam. Rich people like most people are embarrassed to admit they have been fooled. They rarely bring the police or authorities into financial scams. This is why embezzlers are such successful people.

Dick Baker effect

I often think about the wasteland that I inhabit.

If you live in New York or Boston and to some extent DC, whatever you do of importance will become known and put into an historic context. The New York nexus never really noticed the Beat generation and was openly hostile to the massive hippie movement that drastically shaped our society involving 25 million people directly. It also missed the Tea Party.  

Virtually nothing that happens on the West Coast is of any significance in the New York nexus. If it is noticed in New York, the New Yorkers take credit for it.

I pointed this out before when the entire world of mixed cocktails was created in San Francisco in the 1990’s because of a California legal anomaly concerning shochu.  The New York nexus claimed to have discovered the mixed cocktail phenomenon happening in New York and DC years later.

The standard explanation is that the media are centered in New York. I have never accepted this explanation because the media is also located in Los Angeles, part of the wasteland.

In the 1970's the abbot of San Francisco Zen Center, Dick Baker, was a man of extraordinary talent and gregariousness. Dick created a vast network of friends and important people around him. This network was able to visit with him and have regular social events based on the background financial support of the Zen Center.

This network was extensive and global. It included people, leaders, from every part of our planet. When anyone of importance visited or passed through San Francisco they stopped in to see Dick Baker and meet relevant members of the network.

It is my opinion that the New York nexus began in the 19th century with some very powerful social networks and a little bit of wealth that provided the same function as Dick Baker. Over time there were more and more Dick Bakers in New York. They created the powerful multi-level social networks that span the globe and bring trusted people together.

I think that such networks were fostered by many different kinds of people, often women, and were joined with the publishing world in New York.

I also think they existed independent of the hereditary elite. They were social networks built on competence and trust.

The New York nexus remains. And I remain in the wasteland as long as I am outside of New York, Boston or DC.

Women and citizenship

This is part of an ongoing discussion about the first human right. The right to self defense.

I notice something lacking in the citizenship quality of many of the women I know. They do not operate with the certainty and confidence that I find more common in men.

I attribute this to the fact that women do not have the first human right. They are not able to operate in the world with the certainty that they are entitled to the full benefits of self-defense. Many if not most women assume that men are stronger and able to subdue the woman in a violent situation. Most men assume they have the ability and the willingness to use deadly response if necessary.

Since any confrontation with violence requires the judgment about intent, means, opportunity and evaluation of the situation.... the right to self defense requires a constant evaluation of the world around us. Intent means we evaluate the mental state of the potentially violent opponent we encounter. Means requires evaluation of the opponent's tools or weapons and the level of lethality. Opportunity deals with our ability to escape, manipulate or find alternative defense. And lastly evaluation relates to the way an outsider would see our confrontation. Would they believe that we had made the three previous decisions in a fairly rational manner.  If so, we can use deadly force.

If any member of our society, someone who has reached the age of citizenship is not capable or willing to use deadly force for self survival or protection of their family, then I question their level of citizenship.  It is not full citizenship.

This has led me to suspect that women who accept their full level of citizenship have either developed the physical ability to ward off violence or they carry an appropriate weapon.

I know very few  women who meet either of these two criteria: the self protection physical ability or the appropriate weapon. The weapon does not need to be a pistol, it can be a box cutter.

Random day

I actually had one random day. It began in the morning on the main street closest to my house. I was with my girlfriend dejure.

We flipped a coin to decide which direction to go. When we got to the end of a block we flipped a coin to again decide whether to take a bus or walk. On the bus we flipped a coin to determine which stop we got off at.

This process continued all day.  We would decide whether to enter a store by flipping a coin. We alternated flipping the coin. Often deciding how long to do something and when to start or leave something else based on the coin flip.

This process took us to neighborhoods of the city, San Francisco, that we had never been to before. By the time night fell, we had met half a dozen people from jobs and backgrounds that we would never have met under any other circumstances.

By this coin flipping process for decision-making we had entered a completely different world. A world adjacent to our world but completely different.

I only did this once. The experience was so complete and overwhelming I only needed to know what it was about. It was a new world I was not prepared to live in.

3 mixed marriages

The mixed marriages that I am referring to are Republicans married to Democrats.

In all three of these mixed marriages the Republican is the male.  This fits national data as men are disproportionately Republican.

What is interesting to me in each of these cases is that when I begin to talk government, international issues or election material with the husbands, the wife says something nasty and walks away.

Is anyone else having this experience?

It coincides with my long-term dealings with human beings: the happy people are Republicans and conservatives, the unhappy people are Lefties.

Moreover, I find that Republicans and conservatives are curious and want to find out what other people are thinking about. When it comes to the entire domain of government and political thought, I find very few Democrats or Lefties enjoy a broad-based discussion. Lefties are happiest talking to people who mimic the same ideology and memes. The NYTimes, the New Yorker and Doonesbury.

I hate to be rude to my many Lefty readers (you are much appreciated) but I am actually curious about other peoples experience in this form of mixed marriage. Three is too small a sample.  If I had a dozen examples I would be much happier.

Chinese labor then and now

Many of my readers know that there were anti-Chinese uprisings all across the western United States at the end of the 19th century.  San Francisco had some of the worst.

To us Jews, these were pogroms right here in the United States. Most of them were organized by labor unions and most of these pogroms were encouraged by Irish immigrants.

What is interesting to me is that Americans were hostile to Chinese coming to the United States to work and doing the vital work that America needed including roads and railroads. The Chinese workers were only allowed into the country as long as no women were with them.

This did not keep the Chinese population from settling down and growing because women were brought in separately for prostitution.

This same disgraceful American behavior continues to this day. A century later. Both candidates for president in 2012 expressed the prevailing racism against Chinese by constantly blaming Chinese for being too productive, too efficient and reducing the cost of products that low income Americans need.

Why do Americans still hate Chinese? Why are we still so racist?

It disgusts me and I have no answer.

I can only wish that there were some national figures with the decency and honesty to call the American people and their politicians on this disgraceful behavior.

Embezzlement story

From my many years in finance I have been exposed to many variations on embezzlement.

I will start telling a few of these stories and hopefully will draw some simple conclusions from each one.

The first I encountered was in my new job starting the marketing research department at Bank of  America in the early 1960s. The bank had a very good personnel policy and made every effort to give me a broad grounding in banking.

I was put on a committee to investigate a recent embezzlement from the bank.

The bank's first female manager, Dolly Gee, was discovered to be embezzling.

Because many Chinese still living in Hong Kong and China had great confidence in an organization with the name Bank of America, there were many large Chinese deposit accounts at the Chinatown branch where Dolly was manager.  

Since most of these accounts had no activity, they were considered dormant. A very common condition for bank accounts held by overseas customers.

Dolly had begun gambling with some of her own money. After losing far too much she began taking small amounts from these dormant accounts. Like many gamblers she believed she could win enough to repay the borrowings.  

This went on for several years before the bank’s audit department noticed the peculiar activity in the dormant accounts. Ordinarily the bank would be charging a fee for a dormant account but these dormant accounts actually showed activity just before the dormant charge would have been applied. The state of California later prohibited such fees on dormant accounts.

You can look at an article here that gives a very different story about Dolly Gee’s embezzlement. It looks like her lawyer helped her come up with a heartwarming story to get a very light sentence. My story is accurate.

The lesson for me has always been to be cautious of financial employees who gamble. Additionally, any dormant money gets top priority for auditing, if I have anything to do with it.

R. Crumb and Kominsky

There has been some recent publicity about Robert Crumb and his life in the backwoods of France.  Crumb has been a cartoonist star since the late 1960s.

I knew him in the early 1970s when I was business manager of Glide Memorial Church.  Glide had published some of Crumb’s work and he regularly came by to chat.

One day a young woman came to my office and showed me her cartoon work (I liked it). She was new in town and wondered how to get published. Her name was Aline Kominsky.

What was stunning about this young woman were her legs.  They were large. She immediately reminded me of the women in Crumb’s cartoons.

I suggested that the person who would best be able to help her was R. Crumb himself.  I arranged for them to meet.

They were married shortly thereafter and are still married.

My yacht club

During most of the 1970s I was a partner in a 29 foot Columbia sailboat (sloop).

Because my partner had been a military officer we were allowed to join the Presidio Yacht Club which was in Fort Baker just under the Golden Gate Bridge. It is the most spectacular yacht club on the Bay.  There is always a 10 knot wind and you can leave under sail from the dock ....  in 1 min. to be under the Golden Gate Bridge.

There were not many moorings.  The clubhouse was so run down, we called it the Polish Yacht Club. It only served beer and hotdogs. There were occasional barbecues of hamburger.  

I loved our humble rag tag yacht club.

The newspaper tells me that the harbor is going to be upgraded with fancy well-designed moorings, retail stores and a significant yacht club.

It looks like my simple living paradise will be no more.

Have the Russians lost every war?

In recent discussions about the Middle East the issue was raised about the influence of Russia.

I don't know what made me say it but I asked “Hasn't Russia lost every war in the past two centuries”.

Technically, Russia defeated Napoleon. But Russia didn't really defeat Napoleon's army. The Russians burned the entire landscape West of Moscow.  So Napoleon's troops starved in the Russian winter. The Russian troops pursued the disintegrating Napoleonic Army as Slavs have always done. That was considered a victory. I consider it a victory for Russian winters.

The same thing happened to Hitler's armies. On their way back to Germany they killed millions in their retreat. Russia was armed by the US and again had the help of the Russian winter.

Russia was defeated in 1905 by Japan. Which put Japan on the world map of great military powers. Russia was defeated by the Afghani guerrillas in 1987 and forced to retreat

Russian arms were completely defeated by tiny Israel in the 1967 war.

Russia has over centuries defeated Georgia and many satellite countries. Rarely in the form of warfare, mostly by threat of a giant versus a midget.

Russia lost the Cold War.

That leaves me with my original claim that Russia has never won a war and we should not be afraid of her in the Middle East.

Space station

In the early 70s when I was president of the Point Foundation (money from the Whole Earth Catalog), a physics professor from Princeton came into our office and described a project to work on designing a planet near the moon.

The Executive Director of Point, Dick Austin, knew I had started an organization called the Committee for a New Planet.  My committee was a conceptual project to show that different societies around the world have different conceptions of the future.

Dick did not understand this so he sent the professor, Gerard O'Neill over to talk to me.

O'Neill described his hard work in trying to get students to a conference to design a man-made structure at Lagrange point 3 which is a stable location between the earth and moon orbit.

O'Neill had gotten nowhere with fundraising or attention. I explained to him that the $500 I was granting to Princeton to put on his conference would set the Princeton PR department in motion and he would get plenty of attention.

He got even more attention than I expected. The New York Times and the New Yorker both picked up the press release and carried the story. Both treated the issue as humorous.

I knew at the time that new ideas enter our minds first as ridicule, then as interesting and finally as conventional.

NASA hired O’Neill to work on his space colony pretty soon after the press coverage.

My failure

Yesterday should have been a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation. It didn't happen.

I began my campaign to have this date celebrated two years ago. About 16 months ago I found a black activist leader in Oakland (Len Canty) who agreed that it was an important date to celebrate. He began organizing and talked to many of the people he knows around the country. He found most people were receptive but needed a great deal of prodding to get anything done.

Around June Len began having trouble working full time. He was unable to continue the work but considered it his project. He died of cancer in September. He asked his son to continue the work.

I don't expect to be around to try and organize again for the next anniversary in 50 years.

I am convinced that if this were going to have happened  yesterday it would have been organized by a black.

I think part of the reason that the celebration did not occur yesterday is because the Civil War is still far from over and the freed slaves still have not accommodated to the idea of citizenship.  

We did not celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the end of the Civil War in 1964 because the war was still going on in the ghettos and in the ideology that frames the American consciousness.  Many still view the Civil War as the Great Lost Cause. A Confederate perspective on history.

I think the remnants of both of these issues and the discomfort that blacks have around whites and vice versa continues to be an impediment to my project.

I failed.  

From the outset I knew this celebration was an issue of public sentiment not an issue of organizing.