Pro Commerce

Student loans

I may be a little late in discussing the subject of student loans.  I am certainly not a direct participant in the issue. In the era in which I went to university there were abundant scholarships and jobs for students.

I do have family members for whom heavy student debt is a concern.

My blog concern is in terms of pro-commerce. There is a large population with a student loan overhang that is exacerbating our economic problems. There are nearly 40 million people who have student debt and 12 million new people are added annually.

My first concern is that this will make family formation even less desirable than it is today. The U.S. and every developed country, except Israel, faces declining population when immigration data is removed from the totals. In general, population increase or at least stability is desirable for a commercial society. In terms of family formation, the student loan overhang is a serious problem.

Secondly, the overhang of student loans is far in excess of potential repayment income, (see chart). It is likely to stifle one of the three pillars of economic growth, homebuilding.

Third, and most important to me, is that millions of young people feel pressure to get salary jobs which are rarely as productive for society as entrepreneurial ventures. Again this is a future source of economic harm.

I have in the past supported the idea of student loans repayable by the earnings benefits from education. But that stopped being true long ago when the benefits of education were significantly less than the consequences of not going to college and staying in the marketplace. Plus I am sympathetic to many of the people who study humanities at university for whom education is not directly applicable to the job market (not gender studies, black studies or anti-American studies).

Moreover there is additional harm from diverting low skilled and educationally slower students into academic fields that do not take advantage of their skills in the marketplace. That creates an economic distortion.

Lastly, the excessive funding available for academia has created an entire class of evil zombies with no real world experience (faculty) who are promoting their anti-commercial values to the gullible teenage population. Student loan programs are funding Lefty pathology.

At this point it looks to me like nearly 40 million student debtors of which roughly 15 million are over 40 years old will be a political force and likely, in the next decade, to abrogate their trillion dollar loan agreements. In return they might agree to repay the loans with some petty do-good projects.

I support that.

Driving with signs vs pedestrians without

We are in an era, in the United States, where automobiles and bicycles are learning to accommodate each other.

I argue that this accommodation is slow in coming because we treat drivers as incompetent children.

I say this based on the contrast between pedestrians and cars.

Pedestrians do not bump into each other, they do not give each other the finger, they do not get angry at people who respond the way they are not expected to, and most of all when bicycles and unexpected objects appear on the sidewalk the pedestrians accommodate and behave civilly.

I argue that cars are overwhelmed with signs and instructions, yellow lines, white lines, double white lines, red lines and countless stop lights. Since cars are traveling at low speeds in urban areas and in residential areas (only a little faster than horses) where they would not cause serious collisions with each other,  the excessive number of signs and restrictions treat automobile drivers as incompetent children. As a the result, drivers behave childishly. Drivers do not act like adults in dealing with anything including bicycles because their behavior is treated as irresponsible.

I would argue, without hesitation, that if we reduce the number of traffic signs and controls by 90%, the number of accidents would decrease and driver behavior would be more responsible. Bicycles would be much safer.

It is unfortunate that we treat adults as Incompetent children.

The history of the automobile and its difficulty in fitting into our earlier horse society explains our strange treatment of auto drivers. It is no longer justified.

 

Jacob Phillips and steamboats

What is this blog about? It is about technology and history.

Jacob Phillips was my great grandfather who arrived in San Francisco in 1851 in response to the gold rush. He was 21 and had walked across the Panama like nearly everyone else. He looked around and saw that San Francisco was a peninsula town on sand and very small. The East Bay was covered with oak trees and would be difficult to farm. So he looked to the North and found a wonderful farming area surrounding a village called Petaluma that was on a river. He probably figured that the farming area would be supplying the Bay Area and all of the Sierra where the gold rush was.

Based on his European experience, the Petaluma River would support extensive barge traffic pulled by horses as was common in the Europe he came from.

So he settled in Petaluma, the city he expected to be the main focus of commerce for the gold rush and Northern California.

Within a few years, the steamboats that were already plying the Mississippi came to the Bay Area and took food and commerce up and down the Sacramento River to the gold country. Steamboats became the supply line that made San Francisco the center of commerce. Sailboats offloaded their goods, San Francisco created the market and finance and the steamboats took the products up the river to the miners.

Because of the new and unknown technology of steamboats, Jacob and my paternal family settled in the wrong place for me to inherit wealth from that side of the family.

Jacob did well enough, being a taylor and opening a haberdashery. He got a wife from his family city in Holland and had a prosperous life.

My brain takes two weeks to work

The late Rev. Lewis E. Durham deserves credit as one of the most original and creative minds in our society. He was the Methodist minister who created Glide Memorial United Methodist Church in San Francisco. Glide became the center of social change in America and the focus of much of the hippie movement in San Francisco.

I went to work at Glide as business manager and treasurer eight years after Lew created the organization. At that point it was a thriving complex center of urban life.

Lew figured out, after a very short time, that I have a very insightful mind that could be useful to him.

On a regular basis, when Lew was confronted with problems or difficult issues to deal with, he would come to my office tell me the problem and ask me to think about it. He announced that he would be back for an answer in a couple of weeks.

Lew had noticed a phenomenon of my mind that I was not aware of. I have a capacity to think about a problem for two weeks and come up with a unique and original solution. I had no idea about this pesky capacity. Lew found it and used it.

Thank you Lew, I am very appreciative and I hope I will be able to continue using it for the remainder of my life.

You, my wonderful reader, may have such a capacity. I have no idea how someone can make use of that for you. Have them ask you a difficult question and give you two weeks to come up with an answer. It might work for many smart people.

Bob Gates and 'Duty'

I have now read the Robert Gates book Duty. Gates is the Secretary of Defense who served under both Bush 43 and Obama.

I see a great deal in the book that is not mentioned in any of the reviews, so far.

For example Bush 43, as Gates refers to him, because Gates was the CIA director under Bush 41, was the best friend the Jews and Israelis have had since Cyrus the Great, the Persian ruler 2.5 millennia ago. There were people around Bush 43 who did not agree with him on the issue of Israel but Bush was a very strong man and very determined.  All of this was visible to people outside D.C.

The other things that Gates supports is that Bush 43 was warm, generous, kind and a superb manager. He was decisive and able to ignore the vicious world of tirades and hostility direct at him from the press and Democrats.  He had many good friends around the world.

Bush was surrounded by experienced and wise advisors. That included Gates himself after Bush changed his strategy in Iraq and let Rumsfeld leave.

Some of what I've read in the book is between the lines and is not explicitly stated.

Obama, his cabinet and the sycophants around him in the White House hate Israel. Some of this was public early on.  Gates goes out of his way to falsely claim, in gratuitously inserted paragraphs (that he didn’t write), that these Obama people, including himself are sympathetic to Israel.  The hatred of Israel and strong antagonism never subsided despite some military equipment support.

None of Bush’s positive qualities can be found in Barack Obama. Gates, after a life in government, got along well with Obama and agreed with Obama in the early part of his service particularly in the drawdown of troops in Iraq and the build up in Afghanistan. Obama rarely lost his temper in the first few years working on defense issues.  Gates takes credit for a superb and aggressive termination of 30 programs in the Defense Department that he didn't feel had a future. Obama was delighted to cut the Defense budget. Gates was probably right. Defense is bloated, stuck with Congressional pork and unable to adjust to the changing strategic world.

Obama began his administration surrounded by political activists completely ignorant of government or administrative functions. They never got any better. They meddled in every department without any understanding or comprehension of their ignorance or the damage they were doing.

For the first few years of Obama's term the White House spent every waking minute bitching and moaning about how much they hated Bush 43. Very juvenile, very irresponsible and it reflected the mindset of Obama as a political ideologue.

Obama appears to be a man of boundless self-confidence, who is vicious and mean-spirited.  Obama seeks revenge against political opponents and people who disagree with him. His policy concerns are invariably focused on politics and reelection…. often to the detriment of the nation.

There were several semi-secret details that seem to have leaked out in the book. First, our mobile antimissile defense system the SM-3 is highly functional. It works. Also called the Aegis. This was not true of many of the early antimissile systems. The tactical problem is that it would take three SM-3s  to bring down an entering warhead. So a launch of only a dozen enemy missiles would not be completely stopped.

I have long suspected that the Pakistani and North Korean nuclear weapons are a fiction and the tests carried out were nothing but underground explosives. Gates makes it clear that the North Korean nuclear weapons test failed.

I have commented here that the bomber based laser defense system was canceled because it was not rechargeable rapidly. Gates says the problem was that it would only work up to 50 miles in the atmosphere. That exposed the weapon to dangerous enemy countermeasures.

Lastly, I was surprised to find that a status of forces agreement was put in place in Iraq from 2008 to 2011. Obama and Biden made a weak effort to extend it. We don't have one now to our great detriment.

Throughout the book Biden is characterized as a charming, humorous, completely incompetent boob who is on the wrong side of every policy and international issue. Biden is perversely determined, even after being overruled by Obama, to persist in pushing his point.  He lies without hesitation or qualms.

The biggest take away from Gates' book is that Obama and his acolytes in the White House form a very closed insular circle who meddle in every single governmental decision and policy. Obama consistently lies with a straight face when he says he didn't know about any IRS,  FBI, Justice Department or Health Department program. He never stops meddling with the details of everything that is going on.

Thank you Mr. Gates.

Science diminished when conversation mattered

I have been thinking about the period in my life when I went from being a science geek to being a broader thinker.

That transition occurred when I arrived at the University of Chicago. Before that I found my K-10 education so boring and irrelevant that I doodled and fantasized in class.  Outside class I read science books and did science experiments.

Science for me had many of the qualities of magic. And it presented a very complete systematic approach to the world. Just like Marxism which is also appealing to teenagers. Science had that wonderful epistemic quality.

As I now think back on it, science was wonderful, didactic and had a comforting feel that I could explore the world by myself because it was laid out pretty much like railroad tracks in a straight methodical line.

When I got to University I was confronted with small classes of 20 other intelligent human beings where we discussed common ideas in the vast world of the humanities.

There is nothing about a discussion among intelligent beings that compares with the straight line of railroad track, didactic, methodical science. It is like comparing a great Sequoia to a small fennel bush. I never looked back on science as interesting and certainly not as exciting. I had gone from the dimly lit room of science into the bright sunshine of human interaction and open stimulus among exciting minds.

To this day I have had a general distaste for science. When people talk about global warming and the fiction of ‘scientific consensus’ as a source of discouragement for up-and-coming bright students, my first thought is:  ‘if they are never exposed to conversation among intelligent people about the humanities they might be encouraged by science.  But without that alternative of exciting stimulus the absurd idea of a global warming consensus and its hostility to data won’t be enough to turn them off to science.

I think the problem science has is that the Internet has the effect of being a modest form of conversation, stilted conversation, but conversation nevertheless. And conversation among peers about interesting subjects will totally swamp any interest in the didactic, straight line railroad of science.

My longtime readers know that I do not consider science to be important in our world. It is merely the application of hypothesis to the real world of technology. Technology is what creates modernity because it is entirely empirical. Science is the overlay of theory and hypothesis that we need to explain the stunning power and discoveries of technology.

Is this contrast between science and genuine conversation an original idea that belongs with my Phillips’ original ideas?  I depend on my readers to tell me because I haven’t seen it anywhere else.

In praise of deflation

For those of you who do not follow the economic and financial world,  I am letting you know that there is a very widespread nearly universal view that deflation is bad. National central banks do everything possible to create inflation today. They all believe we are at risk of a deflationary period.

This affection for inflation and hostility to deflation is universal.  The fear of deflation is deep and abiding for the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank as well as the European and Japanese central banks.

Unfortunately this is a blind prejudice in the economic world without any basis in historic fact.

Japan has survived a deflationary period for the past 20 years.  Japan's deflation was caused by a real estate collapse and a subsequent unwillingness of  badly damaged banks to lend.

The United States and most of the rest of the world have experienced a deflation in consumer goods prices for the past 20 years, thanks to Chinese productivity. The exception to deflation is often domestic union cartels as in the case of America.  We have an American inflation that offsets the real deflation. The offsetting inflation occurs in cartel based domestic industries: education, homebuilding and medicine.

Inflation favors borrowers and deflation favors lenders. When you borrow $100 in a deflationary period you pay it back with $100 that cost more to you (it can buy more) and is worth more to the lender. Since most voters are borrowers and most borrowers are consumers, economists and politicians have always favored inflation which benefits borrowers rather than lenders.

However the real effect of inflation and deflation is a redistribution of income in the society. Since consumers in the middle-class spends a much higher percentage of their income on consumption and the wealthy spend a very small percentage of their income on consumption, falling prices of consumer products, deflation, favors the middle-class and lower earners.  

Inflation is good for rich people. Inflation occurs in times of economic turmoil which usually benefits capital and the wealthy who are intensely active in the investment world.

If you want a more even income distribution, support deflation.

When this complex, arcanely difficult, intellectually stressful idea of the benefits of deflation finally sinks in with economists and central bankers they may look more favorably on deflation. The same is true for voters.

I don't expect that to occur in my lifetime.

Women should be different by now

I have already said in earlier blogs that women remain second-class citizens. If you doubt me, suggest that any woman you know, of almost any age, go out for a walk in the dark in an urban area at a time when a man would be willing to walk in the dark.

There are many times after dark when men are perfectly comfortable walking urban streets and women are not. That is why I say they are second-class citizen. They live in fear and dependence on men.

This should not be true.

Women now have the ability to earn a living at levels equal to or greater than men. They have the morning after pill so they cannot be forcibly made to have children.

If women were demanding first-class citizenship, meaning the right to walk on the streets of any city at the same time as a man, they would demand the right to carry a pistol.

Apparently this is becoming the case slowly. At present 25% of American women own a firearm. When women can use a pistol and carry it with them and more than a third of all women do so, women will promptly become first-class citizens.

The transition of women into modernity has been fairly rapid and has been underway now for 50 years. In another 50 years it is possible that women will become first class citizens and be able to walk at night with the same level of confidence that a man can.

If there are women readers of this blog who are foolish enough to think that society is going to protect them by disarming aggressive criminals and rapists, then such a reader is still thinking like second-class citizens. Full first class citizens take full responsibility for their own lives.

Current long war

If you put this article by Michael Totten, the man I most highly regard in reporting on the Middle East, together with this book by Max Boot, the greatest military historian, you can make an intelligent synthesis. We are in a long global war.

Totten points out that the recapture of Falluja by the Al Qaeda allied militants is a small part of an  ongoing war that began some time in the early 1980s after the capture of Iran by Shia Islam.  It is still a guerrilla war for the Sunni that will not be stopped by any form of bombing, Army or military action. It will have to wear itself out much like communism finally did after nearly a century of combat and aggression.

Max Boot points out that guerrilla warfare has often been a successful tactic. Sometimes it withers away when it loses the support of the indigenous population. But it is often a successful tactic in itself. The Maccabees defeated the Greeks using guerrilla warfare as their cause became more popular among the local Jewish population. The KKK was successful in its guerrilla tactics as the local population came to accept its ethnic cleansing ideas.

Sometimes the guerrilla tactic evolves into traditional battlefront warfare as it did for Mao in China and Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam.

The success of guerrilla tactics requires its acceptance by the larger population it is aimed at. The generic Al Qaeda is aimed at defeating modernity. The Left in the United States and Europe already has a strong dislike of modernity and the success of neo Al Qaeda will depend on its own strength and endurance as well as its ability to continue expanding its number of supporters on the Left in the United States and Europe.

Communism and anti-anti-communism were widely supported in the West right up until it's last days as the Berlin Wall fell and Mao died.

Looking back on history, religious wars often take a century or more to play themselves out. That was true for the Protestant-Catholic wars over several centuries, the Catholic-Moslem wars as well as the communism-modernity war.  We also see it in active battlefront war between Iran and Iraq,  In all these cases including the current neo-Al Qaeda we are dealing with a tyrannical religious view that finds fanatic supporters as cannon fodder and young Leftist followers as allies.

It will take decades before most of us come to realize that we are in a long-term war of fanatic Islam versus modernity. It is my hope that this will strengthen the pro-modernity pro-commerce side of the war.

Need for more gun control laws

The title of this blog is intended to be ironic.

People in the gun community and the pro gun community are fully aware of the strong correlation between the number of guns and gun related crimes, state-by-state. The correlation is negative meaning more guns less gun related crime. There are many reasons given for this negative correlation by anti-gun spokespeople.

What I am pointing out, for those outside the gun community, is that many political entities pass anti-gun legislation and the consequence is rapid purchases of guns in nearby jurisdictions that don't have anti-gun legislation. That was the essence of a U.S. District court judge in Illinois this month for objecting to gun control laws based on geography.

Finding data on gun sales is not easy. The data is usually several years old, for legal reasons. The main source of gun sales data is the stock market for gun manufacturer listings. If that is reliable, we would be stunned to see that the sales of Strum Ruger (RGR) stock, which is similar to other gun manufacturers, has risen from $10 in the year 2005 to $85 this month.

Gallup polling data shows women gun owners increased from 13% in 2005 to 23% 2012 and Democratic households with firearms in their homes rose from 30% in 2009 to 40% in 2012.

The data from the Bureau of ATF shows in increase in pistol manufacture and sale from 1.1 million to over 3.2 million from the year 2005 until 2011. Rifle sales grew from 2.1 million to 3.3 million in 2011. 

That is a large increase in gun sales, a particularly rapid increase in pistol sales that far exceeds the growth in US population.

It does appear that increased anti-gun legislation results in increased gun sales. That is certainly what the New York Times and others find when talking to stores that sell guns to the public.

For those who are determined to make guns illegal in the United States I offer the advice of Catherine Campbell, a leading lawyer in prison and crime related issues and a strong Leftist: change the second amendment or don’t waste your time.

Indians for ignorance

In the late 1960s and early 1970s there was a black activist demand for black studies in the academic world. In imitation of this we got women's studies, gender studies, Native American studies and other ‘special pleading’ groups. Most of the people who teach these study programs are incompetent.

What they teach is usually irrelevant to the modern world and encompasses nothing more than Lefty guilt.

Many of these studies groups on campuses form associations. These associations are even more idiotic, incompetent and stupid than the people who do the teaching.

I am not speaking as an armchair observer. I have known people who teach these absurd courses, even more people who have taken these courses and still more people who are on faculties and have to deal with these incompetent teachers and students.

The unfortunate problem I want to address here is that a recent group of Asian Studies instructors in their association expressed their public Jew hate. Hundreds of universities wisely denounced this evil behavior and claimed no association with these incompetent bigots.

For me the problem is that the Native American Studies group, who did the same thing, expressed their Jew hate publicly, did not get publicity denounced for their stupidity and bigotry.

I think the reason is simple. Asian groups around the country, of  which I am consultant to a major one, immediately rose up with press releases and criticized the stupid bigotry of the Asian Studies Association. The world knows that real Asians are not stupid or uneducated like thier academic peers.

But Native American groups seem to be completely silent on this issue. No public rebuttals.

This is very unfortunate because it suggests that Native Americans are considered uneducated by the public. Native American academic grades certainly fit the stereotype.

I hoped that the Native American Museum in Washington D.C. would've said something about the stupid bigotry coming out of a group with a Native American name. It doesn't appear to at have happened, Nor has there been public denunciations by the many anthropologists and archaeologists and museums who work with native Native Americans. 

The stupidity of Native Americans as evidenced by the public statement against Jews, or should I say lack of education, arises from the fact that the native people of Israel are Jews. Jews have been continual inhabitants in Israel for longer than any Native American tribe in the Americas.

As with all populations, no single tribe, no single ethnic group is likely to occupy any geographic location from the beginning of history to this day.  Not the Celts, Brits, Saxons, Fulani, Lao…..etc. How they got to their current geographic location differs in many ways.

Sometimes the natives exchanged property with neighbors, sometimes natural forces drove one group out for a short time and others came in, in some cases as is the case with Israel the larger  population of newcomers bought the land from the tiny population of the most recent Arab settlers.

In almost all cases war was what changed the occupier of a particular piece of land.

In the case of Israel it was the Arabs in and around Israel who started the war. Attacked the Jews. The Israeli Jews defended themselves and WON.  Imagine the U.S. today if more Native American tribes had won their battles.

Unless someone can explain this to the Native American population and their friends, the most recent Jew-hate news is going to support the stereotype of Native Americans being uneducated and ignorant.

Population. reproduction and threat

As my readers know the population of every developed country in the world is declining, with the exception of Israel. Immigration makes the data look less significant in the United States.

It would appear to me that Jews have always had population growth because they have always been surrounded by survival threat. That is particularly true for Israel today. Also that awareness of mortality is stimulated by universal military service for men and women  where they get to work with each other as peers in the same age cohort.

Thanks to my friend Alex G. I've come to see that the issue of reproduction is really an issue of modern life. We have not accommodated our thinking to the realities of modernity.

Fifty years ago women entered the labor force for good. They no longer needed husbands. At the same time female birth control made family-planning a simple matter.

The two earlier needs for children, (1) to keep the tribe large enough to protect itself (2) and in agricultural environments, to have enough children who survive to do the agricultural work.

With a tiny fraction of our population in agriculture and even fewer in fields with apprenticeships there is absolutely no reason to have children.

Mores have changed sufficiently so that couples can live together and have sex without having children. Having a live-in protector in old age seems to result in a few older people pairing-up without having children.

That is the reality of modernity.

Unless humans begin to see an external national threat, and I do not exclude that possibility, it is going to be hard to see why people would want children.

Of course there are some people who love children and who love to watch children grow to adulthood. I doubt that group will ever comprise a large subset of the population.

I can't see a future where people will have the motivation for having children. But that day may come.

Simple Living and the GDP

Two days ago I wrote a blog about simple living and the way modern life and the Internet are going to make simple living a much easier choice for millions more people.

As an investor, this raises the question in my mind of the effect this will have on GDP.

The answer is far from obvious. Initially people will be buying fewer new goods and have more money to spend on other services. That change in consumption will not impact the GDP directly although large-scale corporate investment will be restrained. That will have an effect on GDP. A slight reduction.

The greatest effect will occur over time as fewer people see the need to earn significant amounts of money. Since earnings are a key component of GDP, we will see simple living reduce earnings and reduce the GDP growth.

On the positive side, more simple livers will mean more small businesses and far more productivity for the society.  For the same reason we will see far more exports as the genius of simple living is translated into new products and innovative services.

I cannot predict the net outcome of these intermingling forces. It is my guess that a smaller workforce will provide the necessary revenue for a larger non-working population. In the hippie era one person working could support 20 others living communally.

Black innumeracy

It takes guts to write this blog today because the Democratic Party has destroyed respect for the wonderful capacity of human beings to cluster observations and data into a useful form.  The Democrats have created a vicious tirade directed at people the Democrats don't like and they call this wonderful human capacity ‘stereotyping’ in general and ‘racism’ in particular.

If I eat enough capers over time I find I get very bad breath. So I generalize to the statement that capers can create bad breath in large quantities. That is an empirical observation that is a stereotype and helps guide my life away from bad breath.  Capers can be wonderful as individuals and a large quantity can be accurately stereotyped.

Young black males, wearing droopy pants and hoodies, are 5 to 6 times as likely to commit a crime as other young people. When they are in a group they are even more dangerous. That is an empirical observation that is also a stereotype and Democrats attack it as ‘racism’.

I operate on that stereotypical-racist basis and so do 97% of other intelligent people. We will cross the street if we are confronted by three or four young black males in hoodies.

My observation, that is the core of this blog, is that in dealing with the black population of America, excluding old-line black families from the North, a high percentage of blacks are innumerate. They cannot do rudimentary math. In the very few situations where blacks have been given financial responsibility I have too often seen fraud and corruption. Think Jesse Jackson Jr.

Simple math is increasingly a minimum job requirement in the modern world. A phone calculator won't help someone who is innumerate.

It does not surprise me that a President of the United States who is half black is also innumerate. Almost any time he uses numbers he uses them wrong. He has said 300 million Americans when the correct number was three million. He has said 20% when the number was 10%. He makes numerical errors almost any time he uses numbers. So he avoids using numbers.

When Obama is out of office and we get all the inside stories I am confident we will be told that nobody ever presented him with numeric data if they wanted to convince him of anything.

Creating jobs

This blog is about a problem I found in England that is pervasive in heavily government managed 1st World societies.

Because I had created the Briarpatch Network in the San Francisco Bay area which regularly had 600 small businesses members (and over time many hundreds more), I was invited to Sweden, to France and to Western England to create small businesses of the Briarpatch sort.

The 600 Briarpatch small businesses members, in any particular year, employed roughly 2000 people.

I was very successful in Sweden in generating small businesses, slightly less successful in France, doing best  in Lyons. But I accomplished very little in Western England.

In Western England everyone asked me to help them create jobs. Jobs?

I was faced with a hopeless task. I could not and still cannot create jobs. What I could do to help was to create small businesses which were sometimes able to create jobs. The Swedes and the French understood that and understood that an innovative society needed small businesses.

The English never understood that and still don't.

It is not possible to create jobs. It is possible to help generate small businesses. I was unable to do that in Western England because the willingness of young people to start businesses was nonexistent. They were looking for jobs.

Somehow most people in the world do not understand that jobs come after businesses are created not before.

Simple living has arrived

I have been a simple liver for most of my adult life. The conversion came when I was a highly paid bank vice president and walked into Abercrombie and Fitch (the old style store). I found nothing in the store that I wanted to buy. At that point I realized that buying anything was not a source of pleasure for me. I became a devotee of simple living.

Fifteen years later I wrote a book on simple living which is available online.

I did everything possible for a married man with children to lead a simple living life. I told each child as he or she was born that they had to pay for their own college and university or get scholarships. I had a wife, and subsequently other women with whom I lived, who shopped at Goodwill or Salvation Army. For several decades I owned only 200 objects (excluding work related implements) and lived as a house sitter with all my possessions in my car.

Also, within three years of realizing that I did not need money for any objects, aspirations or for social climbing I became self-employed. From that point on I lived off of my own directly generated earnings.

Enough about me. This blog is about the way in which the world, through the Internet, is making it feasible for millions to become simple livers.

The greatest benefit of simple living is that your mind is clear of all the possessions that typically clutter it. From a human point of view, the reward is that you can do any type of work or play you want without needing a salaried job.

The Internet has brought us Air B&B which allows one to travel nearly anywhere comfortably and inexpensively. For me as a simple liver I always depended on staying with friends or the communities of the hippie era. That limited my domestic travel and made foreign travel more difficult.

The Internet has brought us Craigslist which opens the entire world of second-hand objects and low-priced living to each of us. EBay has been helpful in that regard too.

And most importantly Taskrabbit has allowed us to earn a living at our own pace and use the great variety of our own unique skills.

Today, it is easier for anyone to become a simple liver if they have the determination and the desire.

Sumo in Mongolia

Back in the mid-1970s a friend and I conceived a way to play a role in international politics.

We decided to pressure the United States into recognizing Outer Mongolia. That would make us players in the international confrontation between the USSR and the USA.

The USSR had divided Mongolia into Inner and Outer Mongolia so that the USSR could get more votes in the UN. The UN in its Lefty- Jew hating milieu accepted the division. The United States never did.

So I held a press conference in Tokyo at the American Press Club.

About a dozen Japanese and international press reporters showed up. I announced that a group of Americans  had formed a committee to recognize Outer Mongolia.

One of the Japanese press asked me why I chose to make this announcement in Japan. I said “Because the Japanese have a close relationship to Mongolia where sumo was invented.”

The entire press group denied that Sumo came from Outer Mongolia and promptly left.

The story would be irrelevant and rather pathetic except for one simple fact.

The champion sumo for more than a decade have been Mongolians.  One of whose father was a Mongolian national champion. Mongolia and sumo remain closely related. (2003 Asashoryu, 2007 Hakuho and 2012 Harumafuji; all great fighters).

Have I been vindicated? Probably not.

Casinoland

I'm sure that nearly all of my readers have been to a casino.

If you are not a gambler would you have any reason to go look at a new casino to see if it is different, interesting or might have some unusual architectural or design attributes?

That is the point of this blog.

When you step into a casino anywhere on the planet you are stepping into another world. Every place you step into that world, whichever entry door you use, you are stepping into exactly the same world. All casinos on this planet look alike.

I admit I have only been to casinos in about five different countries plus Monaco and Jamaica.

They all look the same. They all sound the same and they all smell the same.

I doubt that cigarettes will ever be outlawed in casinos or that alcohol service will be eliminated. Casinos have a color, a color pattern and cigarettes and alcohol in common. Somehow or other in this gambling world the ingredients that go with the gambling are almost the same all over the world.

Just an observation. I don't know what leads people to gamble and I would be embarrassed to speculate.

The only test I know of was done by a friend of mine on bingo. Bingo is not a universal gambling game. My friend turned the winning awards for each bingo match into something humiliating. One award was an elegant toilet seat, another was a certificate for a new girdle from a local store. The audience in these bingo games went wild and applauded the winners. My friend found that humiliation seemed to be a gambling motivation in bingo.

The rest of the world of gambling is a mystery to me.

3rd world collections

I was recently in a house that had a spectacular collection of objects from third world countries that the owners had visited over their lifetime. There were masks, stools, hundreds of baskets, paintings on wood and ceremonial objects of many types.

One could certainly get the feeling that the world was represented on the walls and shelves of this house.  A sample of the world created by people who collected the global artifacts of human production.

However, a simple look at the food shelves in an ordinary urban kitchen would indicate that the world is infinitely smaller than represented by a collector's Third World artifacts. The Third World artifacts come to us over decades or maybe a lifetime of travel.

Our connection to the world is daily,  weekly or monthly when it comes to our kitchens. I simply want to give you a list of the sources of many of the spices on our shelves and their global connection.

Cambodia: black pepper, Dalmatian Islands: Sage, Indonesia: cinnamon, Grenada: Mace, Congo: red pepper, East Indies: ginger, Comoro Islands: vanilla,  Iran: licorice,....

There are also global sources for much of the common food we eat. On a daily basis I eat food that comes from New Zealand, Chile, Ireland, Guatamala, Yemen and Nigeria.

Commerce is connecting us to the Third World every day.

 

I vote for tau

My son mentioned this issue to my granddaughters and showed them a computer video.  I had no idea this debate was raging in the world of mathematics and geometry.

You can find, virtually anywhere, the debate about tau (τ) versus pi. Tau is actually 2 π.

The debate results from the strange phenomenon that has happened over the history of mathematics.

The Greeks and maybe some earlier Babylonians discovered that the radius of the circle was related to the circumference of the circle by an irrational number that they called π.

Over the millennia since then we have developed concepts of harmonics and sine waves and a whole range of mathematical and physical phenomenon that use 2π. You will find it in the Fourier transform, Planck's constant and almost any other physics equation.

It turns out that tau not π is the number that seems to define our universe.

While I'm very opinionated and have a surplus of opinions, I now have an additional opinion that we should be using tau instead of π.

Here is a wonderful 10 min. video that I hope will convince you that we should be teaching tau in addition to pi.

Pregnancy and drinking

Women are regularly mistreated. Abused as a matter of fact. They are abused by women and men any time they are in the range of alcohol when they are visibly pregnant.

Everyone knows that a woman must not drink alcohol during her pregnancy. Everyone everywhere. And they say it publicly to every pregnant woman within a foot of alcohol.

Unfortunately this abuse of women is unwarranted and based on unsubstantiated evidence.

I worked closely with the national alcohol study group(National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism) in the United States. One year they were trying to create a sample made up of women who drank during pregnancy so they could follow up on the ‘fetal alcohol syndrome’.

I worked with the people who searched the country for doctors who had alcohol consuming pregnant patients. Who searched the country for bartenders who were serving visibly pregnant women. They never found one, not one ordinary American woman who was drinking during pregnancy and could be found. They even went to AA meetings and asked for references and went to rehab centers and asked. No one could be found. Most women have no taste for alcohol during pregnancy.

So where did they find pregnant women who drank during pregnancy who created the data about ‘fetal alcohol syndrome’ ? Only on Indian reservations. Only on reservations where Native Americans were living.

Now a good study has been done in Denmark. Survey research studies done in Denmark on medical issues meet my standards for high-quality. The outcome of the study is reported here and the methodology for the study is mentioned here.

The findings are startling for three reasons. First, they show that women who drank a little, call it moderately, during pregnancy had children, as carefully measured, at age seven who were emotionally healthier than children whose mothers had abstained.

God dammit; feel free to drink when you're pregnant. Don't drink too much maybe a glass of wine or beer a week.  Or a Tom Collins now and then as my wife did.

This study teaches us two other things that I think are relevant to having healthy children. The kind of woman who will drink a glass of wine regardless of what other people think, is a defiant woman who  will have more interesting healthier children.

These same woman live their lives more fully.  If you like a glass of wine now and then or a beer, do it. Women who lead full and enjoyable lives are going to have more interesting healthier children, regardless of alcohol.

I can be accused in this case of self-serving interests.  I come from a generation where my mother and her female ancestors and my friends’ mothers and ancestors didn't hesitate to have a little bit of alcohol. I know we turned out fine.

A book on Israel

A friend of mine suggested I read a recent book on Israel. From the reviews I can see that it is an interesting book written by a Lefty who appears to have some balance in his observations.

Frankly, I don't give a ship (yes, that is how my dictation program spells ‘shit’) about any book about Israel unless it is really a history. I loved Michael Oren’s history of the Six-Day War.

I also don't give a damn for current books about Japan. I go to Japan every year and I have my own opinions, observations and contacts.  I would say they are as good as anyone elses. The same is true for Israel.

However Israel is different than Japan. The current opinion books about either are irrelevant to me.

There is one reason and only one reason why Israel is significantly different than any other country  on the planet.

The Jews in Europe are facing a new Holocaust in the not too distant future. The clouds are visible to anyone who is willing to look. The Jews in Europe can see it coming. The Jews in Norway and Sweden and the much larger number of Jews in France are already moving to Israel. More than half the British Jews have already left.

Israel is where Jews go to know they and their children will survive.

That is the second reason I don’t bother to read books about Israel.  Books don’t matter. In terms of history what a book decides to tell us about Israel is meaningless. Israel was and is the only safe refuge for Jews from the horrible treatment the the rest of the world so willingly administers to us.

(The photo is of a sign in Scotland.)

Wall Street doesn’t exist

That sounds like a silly statement, ‘Wall Street doesn't exist’. But it is accurate. There is a street called Wall in New York and there is a financial industry in that neighborhood. Ninety percent of finance takes place elsewhere.

What I'm talking about is the phrase 'Wall Street' and the image Wall Street. In both of these instances it is an illusion. The financial world does not exist in any one geographic locale. Certainly it is not focused in lower Manhattan. Nor does this fantasy world of ‘Wall Street’ have nearly the imaginary political power that is ascribed to it.

Let's start with the absurdity of a geographic center of finance. The film The Wolf of Wall Street is about a man whose financial scam operation was located on Long Island.

Two of the four largest financial institutions (and banks) are located outside of New York. Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Charlotte and Minneapolis respectively. The actual operations of the two that are in New York, Morgan and Citi, are in New Jersey.

Both Bank of America and Wells Fargo grew to their giant status in California not New York. Both grew from headquarters in San Francisco not New York City.

While the New York Stock Exchange is still in New York it is insignificant compared to the five largest stock brokerage houses that do all of the actual stock trading online (bond trading is done over the phone). The largest is a Canadian company TD Ameritrade, number three Fidelity is in Boston and number four, Charles Schwab, was started and still operates in San Francisco. The other two are totally online.

That  leaves only the investment as part of the financial world. The investment world is on the San Francisco Peninsula. That is the location where most new businesses get their financing.

That leaves only the metaphor of Wall Street as a powerful political institution. Once again, we have a fantasy.

In terms of power to influence the U.S. Congress the sources of power are as follows: the most important business to shape Congress is agriculture (including the diary industry); followed by automobiles, oil and gas, construction, military suppliers and number six is Wall Street. Wall Street, more accurately the world of finance, seldom agrees on anything so even in position number six in terms of political power they are not a major player.

Wall Street was an important power at several points in American history. It was also the great boogie man for the first century of American history as the Jeffersonians, the Left, the Southern-slave owners, the  Democratic Party and the many Populist politicians focused their ferocious hostility on Wall Street. They all really hated Wall Street.  

Wall Street was also like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a boogie man for those who were paranoid. It still plays that role today for the paranoid, the Left and the Democrat-Union Party.

I don't have an alternative term for the world of finance but the metaphor of Wall Street is just wrong.

Resource for you

I know that my readers are very interested in ifascinating data. Unlike the Left that has ideas and occasionally searches through data for support, I and my colleagues and readers enjoy studying reliable data.  We use it to help us form our ideas of how the world works.

We do not start out with an ideological image of how the world could be made more perfect. We do not assume that human societies are easily malleable into some ideal model. Or at least we do not believe human societies can be molded without serious negative consequences as we blatantly see in the 20th Century worlds of Russia, Germany, China, Cuba and many other countries. Invariably, where society was radically changed the consequences were horrible. Such ideal visions of society are not for us.

Therefore with that rather untoward introduction I want to make sure my readers know about this website. It is an historical atlas of the U.S. from its beginning. There are nearly 700 maps covering a wide range of subjects from voting to transportation to geography to trade and commerce.

Here it is online. A magnificent collection worthy of everybody's efforts. I hope many more people take this data and these maps and animate them as has been done in an introduction you can see on the first page.

I only looked at the import-export maps from the 19th century but the material is clear. First it shows that the South may have been rich at the beginning of the Civil War but that it was the North that gained economic strength during the war and became the major exporter of the United States after the war. Much of it was in manufacturing. You can also see that Europe was the primary market for export and import.  Asia was surprisingly important too.

Enjoy yourself. I did.

Baby boom and housing

The financial collapse of 2008 remains a fascinating subject for me and most other people interested in business cycles.

There is trend material related to 2008 that is becoming important and I wish to let you know about it.

We know that the financial collapse of Fall 2008 does not resemble any previous business cycle patterns. I have followed business cycles for nearly 50 years and this was a genuine exception.  It resembled the financial panic of 1987, but that was a very short-term event.  2008 is still having repercussions on the economy five years later.

The 2008 event was systemic which makes it of greater interest. What creates a systemic failure is not the same as what creates an economic slow down or acceleration in business output... which is what a standard business cycle is.

I identified a source of systemic failure in the 2007 change in accounting known as 'mark to market'. I have given that accounting change unusual importance because it had systemic effects, but I have always been aware that there were underlying trends that I could not recognize.

'Mark to market' made visible some underlying trend because the 'market' was no longer responding positively to the underlying financial instruments.  The market value of a bond had become very different from its original issuing value.

The following article shows the data that is necessary to identify the trend.

The basic cause of the 2008 financial collapse was a change in the demographics of the United States. The baby boomers between 2003 and 2007 reversed their residential buying patterns. They went from buyers of suburban homes to sellers as they moved to smaller units and into urban areas.

You can see what they were doing in figure number two. The places in which the greatest switch from buying to selling occurred are in the very same locations where the greatest collapse of the housing market occured: California and Nevada. Those are still the two states with the largest overhang of repossessed homes.

Now we have it. Now we know what caused the crash of 2008. The combination of the baby boomers moving from buying homes to selling and the change in accounting rules that dramatically influenced financial institutions and banks.

With my own eyes

I have seen three things with my own eyes that give me a different sense of history than most anyone else.

When you see something that is part of the real history, different from academic textbooks, it has a special impact on you. It goes to a gut feeling that is not anchored in your brain or your mind but goes to the tent poles of your world view.

The first and oldest thing that I have seen that shaped my thinking were oil paintings, portraits of Egyptians. These perfectly photographic oil portraits were done in the first century BCE. They were as perfect as any painting done in oil in 17th century Holland.

That gives you a sense that art history as we learned it is flat out wrong. The ability to make photographic images with paint is very old.

The second was a pile of objects that I saw in a storage building in Nara. Nara dates back to fifth century Japan. It is a short train trip from Kyoto.

What I saw in Nara was a pile of rectangular silk weavings about 4ft. high. Newspapers separated each weaving from one above it in order to keep them all dry.

On each weaving, all of which were gorgeous and bright, was a small piece of cotton with the name and date of the sender.

What I saw with my own eyes was a piece of woven silk roughly 3 ft.x 4 ft. sent as a gift to the newly installed Emperor of Japan in 610 CE by the ruler of Persia. Every other ruler between Persia and Japan had sent a similar silk weaving. There were many emperors of Japan over several centuries who received these silk gifts.

Does that tell you the extent of trade and commerce in the 5th and 6th centuries in Asia?  Does it tell you the level of communication and government stability at the time?

The third object I saw is at the Library of Congress. It was a large two-volume book part of 41 volumes in Chinese with illustrations. This was a 15th century, 1408, encyclopedia of China. The Chinese Emperor sent out scribes to record every detail of Chinese life including drawings of all the technology, construction and transportation mechanisms of the era.  It also included a census and maps.

Does this give you a sense of the level sophistication of China 600 years before the rest of the world?

I saw all of these with my own eyes.

Bambi was a Jew

I have on occasion mentioned the fact that movies have no impact on society. No impact or very little impact. (Except for the money the Hollywood pedants give to incompetent Union-Democrats.)

There is one slight exception to this observation. That is the film made by Disney about Bambi. The film itself originally had no effect but when video tape became available in the early 1980s every child in America got to watch their favorite movie at home... which was Bambi.

From that day on you can see the number of hunting licenses in America began a straight line decline. Bambi had an indirect effect on hunting. Children wouldn’t let their parents shoot Bambi.

Because Disney and Bambi seem to be so WASP, it is hard to think of Bambi as a Jew. But Bambi is.

The book about Bambi, on which the movie is based, was written by Felix Salten an Austrian Jew.  Salten was a friend and strong supporter of Theodore Herzl the father of modern  Zionism.  The book Salten wrote simultaneously with Bambi is a book about Jews escaping European Jew-hate and moving to Palestine.

Bambi thus becomes the fiction version of an underdog who is hunted by the Jew-haters of Europe.

Bambi has recently become my favorite movie because America is beginning to adopt the Leftist attitudes of Europe and the universal hatred of Jews that is so prevalent there and in the Moslem world.  We all have a great deal to worry about.  Europe is on a direct line to new Jew slaughter.

It would be nice if we can let everyone who loves Bambi, before their brains become solid concrete at age 23, know that Bambi is a Jew.

Joseph Epstein on WASPs

In this article Joseph Epstein waxes sentimental about the good old days when WASPs controlled America. One of my friends objected that WASPs were largely anti-Jew. True, and I experienced it.

I consider Joseph Epstein to be one of the great fiction writers and commentators of our time. I don't read fiction, except in rare instances.  I was spoiled at the University of Chicago by all of the great fiction. Some of the world's crappiest English writers are celebrated as good writers today. It's a waste of time to read their trash. Alice Walker is a perfect example.

I do read Epstein's short stories.

I feel somewhat the same as Epstein does about WASPs because we have one of the most dishonest, incompetent, mean-spirited human beings as president. Barack Obama (and Bill Clinton) could never have come from a WASP background. They were not fundamentally raised to be  decent competent public servant's (they weren’t ‘raised’ at all). The outrages of Obama are so horrible as to make one miss the old WASPs .

We can afford to be sentimental because we, America, have become the first country in the history of the world on the planet to have gotten rid of our hereditary upper class.

We did it as of 1960. I experienced the world of WASPs  before that and continued to experience it while the structure was falling apart in the early 1960’s. It is gone. We can joke about it now; we can wax sentimental. It is gone.

If you have the slightest doubt that the WASPs world is gone, look at the top hundred richest Americans. They do not know each other, so there is no social class, and there is not a single old line family in the bunch. All the people, or their father’s, made their money in the contemporary non-WASP world.

Sadly, every American city is now run by disgusting, demonic, zombie union Democrats who have replaced the old WASP hierarchy.  Detroit started its tragic decline just when the WASPs died out.  Detroit is the future of many American cities. It's tragic what the Union-Democrats are doing now.  But the old WASP world was much worse for commerce as a whole.

Israel’s future

I hope that you can take the time to look at this website of the hottest Jewish women. It is the subject of this blog.

In some ways this website is a comment on the future of Israel.

At the moment, Jew hatred around the world is so great that no message gets through about the genius of Israel. However, this may not always be the case.

I believe that people under 23 years of age trust word-of-mouth from their friends more than they trust the prevailing prejudices.  As people get past 23, they become hard boiled eggs, reality no longer matters.

I have already noticed that the gay community is slowly beginning to understand that the hottest gay spot on the planet with the best beaches, the best music and the best nightlife is in Tel Aviv. Despite the hate filled crap that most people hear and learn about Israel a few gay men are beginning to listen their friends and to see that Tel Aviv is the great gay hotspot.

Israel is also a major source of innovation in the Internet. Unfortunately this doesn’t get through the wall of hate. Nobody gives a damn except the corporations who rely on Israeli innovation. They are opening offices in Israel and buying Israeli companies left and right.

Israel is also a major source of innovation in medicine, pharmacology and medical appliances. Again, nobody in the hate filled world gives a damn. Just like the people who come out of emergency wards whose lives are saved every day by Jewish doctors, nobody cares. The fact that Israelis have always cared for the sick and wounded of their enemies means nothing to the wall of hate Jews have always faced.

Now I think I see a different subject, relevant to Israel.

Since men tend to think with their penis, it is my hope that when word gets out that many of the most beautiful women in the world are Israeli, that the horny men on the planet will go to look for themselves. They may change their minds about Israel….  which is surrounded by ugly women who cover their faces with scarves.

Am I being too chauvinist? Am I being too hopeful?

I actually think the only thing that can possibly break through the wall of Jew hate will be male attraction to beautiful women.

Global eschatology

There are members of my family who are believers in the human caused global warming nonsense. This is alarming to me because I know that they are warm, loving, intelligent and caring people. How is this possible?

One of the truly great ethical thinkers of our time, whose work has definitely shaped my views, is Charles Taylor. In the following paragraph, which may be difficult to read because it starts with a long dependent clause, makes a case that I believe is significant.

“Only if I exist in a world in which history, or the demands of nature, or the needs of my fellow human beings, or the duties of citizenship, or the call of God or something else of this order matters crucially,can I define an identity for myself that is not trivial.  Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands. “ (Charles Taylor, 1992, pp 39-41)

My interpretation of this is that my family members who believe in an idea that is demonstrable nonsense are doing so because they believe they are working for the good of nature. Therefore when they sort their garbage or drive their electric car or grow some vegetables they are being good, upstanding, righteous people. They believe they are doing something that matters to the world because it is helping the forces of nature in a positive manner.

I cannot exclude myself from this Taylor analysis.

A careful reader of my blog will see that my behavior, throughout my life, has always been intended to make improvements in the social structure of the society into which I was born. That means that my nontrivial-greater-than-myself attachment is to history. A common worldview among Jews.

As a Jew we are all very conscious of the long reaches of our history. Our ancestors wrote down their own history just to make sure we don't miss what they did and what they were. We’ve been writing and talking about it ever since. Keeping records ever since.

I trust, in the future, I will be remembered in writing and other forms for my contributions toward improving the structure of the society in which I live.  That makes me a ‘good, upstanding, righteous’ person.

Charles Taylor did not create the entire list of externalities that shape our lives but his list is comprehensive in terms of the people I know.

What entity greater than yourself gives meaning to your life?

Kaiseki influence

Kaiseki is a multicourse Japanese meal with each course, often 12 courses, served in a unique beautiful dish in a very small amount. Kaiseki dinners are served over long periods of time along with elegant and often alcoholic drinks.

This elegant, slow, delicate meal seems to have originated in monasteries which is where it's tradition continues to be maintained. The first kaiseki meal  I had was in a private guest room at Eihei-ji,  the primary monastery of the Soto Zen sect in the mountains. I will never forget it.

One year a friend of mine came to visit me in Tokyo and we had at least four kaiseki dinners because he is a fervent gourmet. They are expensive and they are spectacularly imaginative.

The kaiseki idea of dining is not the kind of eating any other people in the world would adopt. It requires an aesthetic that is unique to the Japanese. It is also associated with the incomparable Japanese Tea Ceremony.

I went to the finest restaurant in San Francisco a few weeks ago, Quince, and was served a regular dinner of three courses and coffee at the end.  In between there were 14 elegant tiny food creations in unique dishes. Pure kaiseki.

I eat the most elegant available food in the United States two or three times a year. The use of kaiseki is universal in the world of elegant food.

Thanks to the Japanese again for the hundredth great contribution to American life.