Pro Commerce

Social mobility

An article that appeared in the opinion section of the New York Times by Gregory Clark has generated a great deal of discussion. One of my close friends asked for my comments on it.

Clark reports on the study of surnames in many countries over centuries. Surnames were used to examine changes in social status. There are so many errors and omissions and failures to understand history and sociology that it is a waste my time to criticise his work. The comments at the end of the article did a superb job of pointing out the many errors.

Social mobility is a core issue in sociology. For one reason. Most societies began as tribal and remain tribal to this day.

Tribal societies are static. Hereditary positions survive for many generations. This presents a problem because 3-4% of every generation has meritocratic attributes that make that person more valuable to the society than all other members. Therefore it is necessary for every society to have a mechanism for the meritocratic members to rise and pass through the hereditary structures.  The alternatives are regicide, revolution or civil war.

In the past three centuries two important mechanisms have arisen globally to change this pattern. The first was the creation of colonies around the world. These colonies were created by the rapidly growing commercial societies in Europe: Spain, England, Holland and France.

The colonies created an effective mechanism for the meritocratic members to leave their home country and establish their impressive credentials (think Churchill, and Gandhi) and return home to a suitably higher status position.

The second great mechanism for accommodating surplus meritocratic populations born into the wrong hierarchical levels was the creation of the American colonies and later the American states. This vast opening of land in a politically open society allowed the meritocratic populations of the world to migrate in large numbers.

As a consequence the United States became the home of the world’s meritocratic population. It also has become the global giant in every commercial and cultural venue.

One book is proof of this American reality. That is the telephone books of the Bell laboratories from the 1950s and 60s. The names in this telephone book, at the center of the technological world, are the names of the entire planet Chinese, Indian, Persian, Jewish etc.

The new world, the American colonies, after its founding in the 18th Century, rapidly created an hereditary elite structure. The structure was highly mobile, as any sociologists can tell you (except for the imported African population). It took only two generations for a meritocratic child to migrate with his family into the top hereditary class. Schools were one mechanism but it has mostly been success in commerce.

Also meritocratic people moved into new geographic areas and immediately filled the niches at the top of the hierarchy.

All of this came to an end in the United States (and only in the United States) in 1960. One book makes this clear. The Social Registers all over the U.S. were published for the last time in 1960.

We can now look at a list of the 100 richest Americans and not find a single name on that list that comes from the earlier American hereditary elite.  In fact every single name corresponds to a business that succeeded after 1960.

This disappearance of the American hereditary elite occurred for two reasons. First was creation of public universities all over the country. Second was the commissioning of all college graduates into the officer class in World War II. These meritocratic officers became the top strata of American business by the end of the 1950s. Commerce was growing until WWII and exploded after that point.

Clark is correct about one thing. There is a regression to the mean from higher elite status within a few generations. It does not take more than four generations in the United States. I have worked with two of the oldest wealthiest American families and not one of the hereditary children in the fourth generation has any status whatsoever. A few of the direct descendent women married meritocratic men and have higher social status because of that.

None of this raises an issue about genes or culture. Clark is an economist and cannot be expected to know sociology. Social institutions are the sole mechanism that is used to maintain elite social status. These institutions include membership clubs, social rituals, and physical attributes such as frequency of eye blinking that allow members of the elite status to recognize each other in a large population.

Lastly, to fully understand the reality of hereditary social status one needs to look at Japan.

For several thousand years Japan has retained a strong and stable social hierarchy. This is achieved with two mechanisms. One, the Imperial family is symbolic and leaves the political realm to the world of meritocratic power battles. Japan is now on the 125th emperor.

Two, high status families adopt the meritocratic offspring of the rest of society. The meritocratic offspring assumes the family name of the elite family and becomes a member of the new family. This assures that meritocracy moves to the top of the social hierarchy without any disruption.

To summarize. All societies, except for the current U.S. have hereditary social elites. They all have a mechanism for the 3-4% of meritocratic births each generation to rise and a mechanism for everyone else to revert to the mean over many generations.  The last three centuries have introduced geographic dislocations into the mechanisms because of the growth of commerce.   We will continue to see these kinds of disruptions.

 

Origins of new Civil War

I continue to see a Civil War on our domestic horizon. I don't know when it will start and I don't know how it will be carried out. The two sides are already defined as red and blue.

What is fascinating to me is that the new Civil War is a remnant of the last Civil War. How did this happen?

First it is important to understand that the last Civil War was never resolved. On the 50th anniversary there were many parades where brothers who fought on both sides marched in the parade but no blacks were ever in the parade. On the hundredth anniversary there was no celebration whatsoever, on the 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation (a month ago)there was no celebration and I am certain that the 150th anniversary of the end of the  war will not be celebrated. The war is not over.

Two things happened to perpetuate the frictions of the first American Civil War.

First was the federal court directives to desegregate public schools using busing. This divided society into bigger middleclass suburbs and rich urban areas. Middleclass whites took their children out of the urban areas and left only the rich whites who could stay in private schools. This migration continued and even accelerated into the 1990s. By then the white flight was driven by the endemic crime in the middle-class urban areas.

The second force generating the current leadup to a Civil War was the Lyndon Johnson war on poverty. The war failed and instead generated a permanent, dangerous black underclass of criminals and illiterates.

The only people who remain willing to live in urban areas with this dangerous black permanent underclass are Democrats and other ideologues who deny the black danger.

That gives us the red and blue division necessary for the coming Civil War.

Bodes ill for the Jews again

I regularly comment on the tribal nature of Arab society. These tribes not only have social values and practices that make no sense to us.  These values are passed on for many generations as part of family and tribal tradition.

Arabs remember their defeats and embarrassments for millennia. It is not uncommon for a small village to remember that Alexander the Great, 2300 years ago, defeated this small village, unfairly by attacking at night from over the impassable nearby mountains.

Even gypsies (Rom people) remember the time they were driven out of India by invading moguls who, we are told, unfairly fought early in the morning like cowards. They drove the gypsies out.

Recently a candidate for the legislature reminded the Greek population (he was actually in Macedonia) that the Jews had defeated the Greeks 2200 years ago.  It was the Maccabean victory which the Jews still celebrate as Hanukkah.

Since the Jews have regularly defeated  Arabs on all sides by resounding victories we can assume the Arab memory will retain these affronts for several millennia into the future... if the Arabs remain tribal.

Nudity in Germany and sex in Japan

Here are two images that stick in my mind that are part of the modern world and seem to have no suitable explanation.

It is not uncommon for women to get naked and try and attract attention to their political cause with a photograph of their naked bodies forming some image. It is meaningless because women without clothes are the subject of interest and their political message never gets past the issue of their being attention seeking extremists.

This photo of naked Germans could be used for any political issue but the focus would always be on 'why are they naked?' Germans in general have a greater propensity to appear naked, for reasons I don’t quite understand. When Germans first came to the United States in large numbers in the latter half of the 19th century they established resorts, spas and outdoor pools as part of their nature worship. Maybe that’s it.

The video below is equally shocking because it is a big room full of Japanese young males and females practicing sex in a large group. This would be unheard of anywhere else in the world. The Japanese have three attributes that make this possible.

* First they are avid learners and will take a course in almost any subject.

* Second they are confident that there must be much more to learn about sex because they live in an environment where sex is considered a skill. Geisha exist because society believes that women can become highly skilled in the sensory and sexual realms.

* Lastly the Japanese are not a puritanical society so carrying out sexual acts on a large scale is not morally offensive.

I have only included the URL for this video here. There are many such videos and some are just trick photography and mirrors. I have no idea how many of my readers would be offended so I am playing safe by not embedding the video.

Pro commerce women

In an earlier blog I suggested that a great deal of Jew hate would be ameliorated if Israel were portrayed as a country with many beautiful woman.  It will happen when more beautiful women are prominently featured in Israel related issues.

I realize I need to heed this advice myself.

Therefore this blog shows the photographs of two beautiful and brilliant women who are supporters of pro-commerce.

The subject of beautiful smart women should be highly relevant to anyone who thinks about the pro commerce issue and wishes to promote it. The caps are available from the online store listed in the left-hand column (a ProCommerce logo gift). Please don’t get too excited, both women are  married.

I think there is both a male and female appreciation of beautiful women and a willingness to take recommendations from them slightly more seriously than many other sources.

 

Hysteria doesn’t exist

I don't know much about any of the psychological uses of the word hysteria. Freud became famous for having a way to treat the hysterical behaviors that were found in American soldiers returning from the First World War.

What I'm talking about is group hysteria. I have seen it myself on many occasions in both physical form and in its social  form.

The wildest group hysterical population I was ever part of was the night when Dan White, a man who deliberately murdered the San Francisco Mayor George Moscone and Supervisor Harvey Milk (both friends of mine), was sentenced to five years in prison. 25,000 people around me at Civic Center went on a rampage, burning police cars and destroying anything that could be found from trash cans to windows of retail stores.

There are perpetual social hysterias as opposed to physical group hysteria. An example of a social hysteria is prevalent right now in which hundreds of millions of people believe in global warming despite factual evidence that it doesn't exist. That is social hysteria.  Nothing can convince a person who is within the hysteria that it doesn’t exist.

The number of such social hysterias is vast. I recall one in the 1980s in which Americans universally believed that hundreds of thousands of children were being kidnapped annually. FBI data showed that the correct number was 110... nationwide.

Shortly after this there was another social hysteria where tens of millions of Americans believed that young kindergarten children were being terrorized by satanic cults. Dozens of innocent teachers and administrators went to prison on the testimony of six-year-olds.

There was a subsequent decade of ‘recovered memories’ in which thousands of women remembered being sexually molested by adults.  There was never any evidence to corroborate these reports.

There is no question in my mind that each one of these phenomena was real. People really believed in these as factual.  Despite it being contradicted by the evidence and solid data.

I'm sure I am part of some social hysteria right now.

I have slowly come to believe that social hysteria, by groups of people, a perception of the world, that is not amenable to challenge by data, tradition or fact, is a standard way a large part of the human mind works.

It works this way daily,  monthly and yearly. It works this way on a small scale among dozens of people and on a large-scale among millions. It is not a separate mental event that can be designated with the words ‘social hysteria’. It is the way the  human mind works.

Some day when we know more about the mind I expect us to find that it has substructures that are based on vital human passions that are not amenable to any form of examination. The only solution is the Jewish-America model.

The Jewish model is the multi-generational Talmud.  In the Talmud, many generations think about and dispute any issue that requires thought and rational consideration. What finally gets written down has survived generations of thinking and examination.

The American model is in the separation of powers that assumes that hysteria will sweep the population regularly and the best way to deal with it is to create different representative systems, judiciary, Senate the House and to allow different lengths of time for their processes to work. Hopefully sufficient time to resolve an issue will subdue the most extreme and dangerous of the social hysterias that arise.

Both the Jewish and the American model of social hysteria assume that the only solution is to wait it out.

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(* The lower photo is the police looking for the underground room where children at the McMartin Kindergarten said they were sexually molested and tortured. They didn't find anything but dirt.)

Big cruise ships are a new institution

I would beware of taking a cruise ship with more than 1000 passengers. Or a cruise ship weighing more than 75,000 tons.

We now have cruise ships with 4000 passengers and 400 crewmembers. Some over 130,000 tons. Most of these go on cruises of 5 to 7 days.

I would make an exception if you are going to be on a naval carrier. Carriers can have a crew of 5500 on a tour of duty with no port for three months.

What is the difference between a carrier and a cruise ship?

The Navy has been building larger and larger ships with longer tours of duty for the last 75 years. The Navy has a highly disciplined managerial structure and a century of experience with large groups of men and women living in very close quarters. The military has learned from experience.

The private commercial world of ships and ships’ engineers have a long experience but it's experience with large ships and large populations on the ships is less than 30 years old.

Based on the multiple disasters in the past five years on the Carnival cruise ships, it is my opinion that we do not have institutional knowledge sufficient to operate ships of this size.

Carnival Cruises have had engine failures, rampant communicable diseases of many sorts and a number of mechanical failures from a variety of causes. They even have a sinking off the coast of Italy with a totally incompetent captain and untrained passengers.

It isn't that the commercial world lacks a history of occasional disasters and a history of learning from these passenger ship problems  The problem is that the rapid growth of cruise ship size over a short period of time has not  resulted in the necessary institutional learning time to provide safety.

Don’t go. Don't take the chance.

 

Modernity 2.0-2

I did not say enough in an earlier blog about the nature of modernity.

Modernity is the introduction of commerce in a society that has already seen a breakdown in its tribal structure. Putting commerce on top of the tribal structure means that the tribal family systems will slowly disappear. That disappearance of family structure had already appeared in places like Australia and the United States.

What Australia, Israel,  Holland, much of Scandinavia and the United States have in common is what I call modernity 1.0. Most other countries have a more traditional tribal -family structure as well as class barriers. There are many countries that are tribal with an overlay of modernity 1.0

We 1.0 countries are slowly seen the emergence of modernity 2.0.

Commerce is becoming more important  more comforting and more pervasive in our societies. More and more people are part of the commercial world and spend more time there. In the commercial world meritocracy is of paramount  importance and that requires a high level of honesty, constant reliable evaluations of productivity and complete rejection of familial loyalty (called nepotism.)

The commercial world is more and more reflected in our daily lives where we have fewer and fewer families and fewer members of our families. We also have fewer friends who are based on our personal experience and history. Increasingly, because of meritocracy, we're making friends and partners based on merit… on  their ability to help us or to make use of us in helping them. I call these pseudo friendships: ‘instrumental relationships’.

Because we must live in a diverse environment in order to support genuine meritocracy, we are surrounded by people whose values, religions, opinions and private behavior are unacceptable to us. As a consequence we now censor all of our conversation and communication in such a way as to make it inoffensive to others. We work with Sunnis, Taiwanese and Mormons. We learned not to discuss any issues, political or moral, that will in any way offend our coworkers. We call this politically correct but in fact it is simply modernity 2.0.

All of these changes in our lives are the consequence of expanding our commercial world and making it more productive.

We don't yet have a political worldview that I would call pro-commerce. Neither political party is close to being for or against commerce.  The Republican party doesn’t come close to having 50% of a pro-commerce platform or 5% anti-commerce and the Democratic Party does not even come close to a 65% true anti-commerce platform.

More than anything, we have no foreign-policy that understands that the commercial world is at war with the tribal values that are dominant on the planet.

We have yet to develop domestic policies and values that could be called pro-commerce.

We have not even begun thinking about how the commercial world can operate in a largely tribal global environment.

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The three comments below by D. Boxenhorn, Peter Everett and Scott are relevant and important.

No tail

Not too long ago there was a discussion about long tails and the Internet.

The discussion was about the fact that in retail commerce, outlets are likely to have only the top best-selling products. When thinking about these best-selling products as one side of a bell curve distribution the store only carries the top 75% of goods that sell best.

The long tail argument about the Internet was that the Internet could supply the remaining 25% of products and take business away from retail outlets. The warehouse and storage space is in Nevada.

My personal experience, recently, was in looking for three everyday products. The three could not be found in ordinary retail stores in San Francisco. I wanted a bottle of rubber cement, an enzyme pre-wash stick (as opposed to the liquid) and a heat resistant glove for hot objects in the kitchen that was not white (the Ove-glove is off-white). None of these were available.

I had to go online and order from Amazon.

The consequence of this retail ‘No tail’ experience, which is now being carried to an extreme, is that I will automatically go to Amazon from now on.

The shortsightedness of the retail world is going to accelerate their own short remaining lifespan.

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Addendum: I was recently out in the suburbs where I visited several large standalone retail outlets. A quick visit and I found everything I was looking for.. We don’t have these national large stand-alone’s in urban areas.

Non-workers and government laggards

What could be more discouraging to a productive worker who loves their work and works hard than to see all the nonworking lazy people around?

While thinking about the impact of government and unions on our future GDP growth I struggled with this issue.

A new person entering the labor market today will never have a chance to make real choices.  They face a low probability of earning a lot in the world of commerce but they face a certainty of earning a fortune with gigantic benefits working for the government. Anyone choosing the private world of commerce will be facing a probable moderate income compared to a certainty of high income and astronomic benefits from working for the government doing absolutely nothing. A permanent job and early retirement with Cadillac benefits.

In the commercial world there are plenty of lazy people working alongside highly productive people, but nothing like the government.

In the commercial world there is more likely to be recognition and rewards for the hard-working people.

None of that has direct bearing on my thinking about future GDP growth. I know it is a source of distress to many to be working next to someone who is not a hard worker. Or living nextdoor to a highly paid government zombie. I sympathize.  It is unjust.

What I have observed is that the injustice isn’t relevant to overall economic growth.   Entrepreneurs like the freedom of the commercial market and would not consider the stifling environment of zombie working conditions in bureaucracies of any sort.

I have also observed that the highly creative people in technology will go wherever the greatest challenges are. They are not attracted to the mundane but high-paying jobs that are abundant for competent people.

Which leads to the following summary: As long as there is a significant commercial market that is fairly unrestrained and meritocratic, the horrors, the malice, the evils of government and boring work will not stifle market creativity.

Infinity

This blog is about infinity.

You can see that the bulk of it is concerned with explaining why all infinite series total the same number. -1/12.

I want to comment on how infinity played a minor role in my marketing contribution to America and the financial world.

When I was a banker in the 1960’s,  bank passbook savings interest rate was set at 4% and by custom it was paid quarterly. Savings-and-Loan associations were allowed 5.25% interest paid quarterly.

I introduced, to banking, a consumer certificate of deposit. That allowed banks, which formerly had by custom only sold CDs in amounts greater than $10,000, to sell them to ordinary customers.

In the 10 day grace period at the beginning of a January quarter in 1968, I had my bank run ads for our 5% savings CD available in any amount. We got $50 million in new savings and every bank in America copied us, immediately.

My next move, based on my knowledge of calculus, was to announce that my bank would calculate and pay interest every second.  It was actually a first derivative. That allowed us to compete directly with the savings-and-loan 5.25%.  The S&Ls then went to continuous interest computation as did everyone in finance.

I blame myself for the 1980s failure of savings-and-loans because they no longer were getting cheap savings funds from retail customers.

I am not really to blame because in the early 70’s the money market fund was invented and it probably did much more damage to savings-and-loans than my banking innovations.

If you know physics or technology you are not surprised that there is a known total of infinite series. If you really know math, which I don't, you will recognize this solution as a subset of Ramanujan's multiple infinities.

Real economic growth

There is a vigorous debate underway, globally, because the United States has faced no real growth in the past five years. The same is true for Europe and most of the world excluding China and India.

Why hasn't the United States seen the kind of growth that we experienced for the previous 60 years?

I suggest several reasons. Based on my personal experience.

One of the driving forces of economic growth is productivity. I personally helped the leading edge of the great hippie generation to generate more small businesses and new businesses than had ever been generated in America before. I think this productivity combined with the consumption practices of the baby boom generation (a whole new world of food), including their home building and home selling practices explains much of the growth from 1982 to 2004.

There is no young rebellious population today and there is no population boom

The second reason I propose is that we have had a steady expansion of government regulations over the past 20 years since Reagan. And an explosion of regulations since 2008. Very little can damage the impressive power of productivity in the open market of commerce. The exception is when business resources are diverted from productivity and creating new markets to paying for government regulation. We have expanded regulations of every sort from FDA, to OSHA, to environmental issues of every form. We have a mini world of union based business controls driven by malice and pure commercial evil.

I am not pessimistic about our future growth. I simply expect it to be lower than in the past unless we have a revolution in eliminating government regulation, in thwarting union zombie mentality and if we develop a warm love for pro-commerce policies.

Occams razor and climate change

I have said regularly on this blog that science has been destroyed by several environmental movements. The destruction began with the population explosion that didn't happen and global warming which hasn't happened. Science has justifiably fallen into disrespect.

One of the intellectual pillars of science had been its reliance on falsifiability. Global warming with nearly 20 years of no warming turns out not to be falsifiable.

There is another problem. Science has always used Occam's razor as an important pillar. Occam's razor requires that a simple explanation be preferred to a complex explanation.

Again global warming fails the Occam's razor test.

The test would look solely at global surface temperature which has been 58°F or 20 years and has only risen half a degree Fahrenheit in the previous century. That would be the simple test of validity.  Instead, the global warming advocates have pointed to a dozen different irrelevant pieces of evidence to support their theory. Rising oceans, stranded polar bears, shrinking glaciers in the northern hemisphere and any change in the weather from too hot to too cold.

Occam's razor remains a core instrument in the tools of clear and competent thinking. It is no longer relevant to science since science has been so badly sullied.

Modernity 2.0

Most of us are living in modernity 1.0.

Modernity 2.0 is only a small part of our lives.  Modernity 2.0 is about a more refined commercial society. Modernity values are seen at the top line of this blog. They are meritocracy, diversity and openness.

Modernity 1.0 is the bulk of our life outside of work. If you work in the private sector, much of your time is spent in the world of modernity 2.0 because meritocracy is the dominant motif of the private commercial sector.   You work with diverse people, you judge people on their productivity not their family status and your work is open to examination by most everyone.

In our outside life, we still have some semblance of traditional families and friendships that are part of modernity 1.0.   We still have friendships based on common mutual experiences and longevity.  Most friendships in 2.0 are instrumental meaning they are based on what we can do for each other. We work with people who are productive not just sweet or loveable.

2.0 can be exemplified in some minor changes that we were making to our lives. For example we are using computer dating to replace our friendship networks for meeting new people which was 1.0.  Dating and romance, in turn, replaced family arranged marriages which are tribal.

There is an interesting recent switch from listening to telephone messages to relying exclusively on text messages.  This is a movement from the intimacies of friendship and conversation to much more instrumental texting relationships where intimacy is discarded.

Don’t expect to the like coming social changes.  Imagine an adult man going straight from 1934 to 1974.  No more smoking cigars at home with male friends and brandy.  No more having a clean white shirt ironed and starched by your wife. Big, unpleasant changes.

The Internet and hacking are bringing new openness to government which I am happy about.  The U.S. government is colossally incompetent and these days especially malicious.  We need to have it exposed.

Retirement and work

It's true. There is an old adage that 'if you need something done ask a busy person'.

When I was an activist working on 14 or 15 simultaneous projects as well as working for pay with many consulting clients, I always found it possible to do one or more additional projects. I could abbreviate the time on one project slightly, I could get up earlier or work later or I could give up some minor event like coffee or lunch. 

To understand the nature of my flexible time and my perception of that flexibility, I faced a dramatic challenge when working with the leader of the disability community Ed Roberts (and Judy Heumann). I found that my management style traditionally encouraged people to do some of the powerful and corrective work needed by spending more time to accomplish the corrective goals. Ed could not do more work than he was already doing. Every day he had to go to his iron lung in the evening to breathe and sleep. He had no additional time to work on my management recommendations.  

My resolution of this challenge was to make suggestions for changing his standard daily behavior. He had to shorten the morning briefing with staff and use that extra 15 minutes to plan for new training sessions, as an example.

Now, I have a new perspective on the issue of work and workflow. I do much less work today that I did in my earlier years as an activist. Only four or five projects.  I have time during the day to read books and take naps.

It is much harder for me to get work done. I can always say to myself that the project can be done later in the week. And I do say that to myself.

These days getting a project started, underway and finished is much more difficult because I am not maintaining a heavy duty pace.

I'm not complaining because I don't get nearly as many projects completed as I would like to. But I am delighted to read leisurely and take a nap.

Google and real conversation

For many years I have been traveling around the world and traveling extensively in the United States for one reason. I need good conversation. Conversation is vital for my thinking. It is stimulative. When I am talking to an intelligent person I become more intelligent. If they ask me questions that are complex and interesting my mind aggressively expands.

I believe that is true for a large part of the population. Except there aren’t  many intelligent people available to converse with so the level of intelligence in society is stifled.

It is now my observation that an interaction with Google is a modest substitute for real conversation with intelligent people. Google lacks any form of interrogation or response. However Google does have the stimulative effect of constantly offering new references that are easily investigated and expanded.  Like the wandering path of a conversation.

Using Google, a simple search can become a complex and interesting investigation.

In that way, Google possess an important element of conversation.

I will definitely argue that the presence of Google and its ubiquitous availability is a source of increased intelligence in modern-day society.

I do not in any way deprecate the power of vital real conversation. There is no substitute, there is no alternative to real conversation carried on by two or more people who are listening and interacting with you. Google is just an interesting service that can be a supplement of great value in the world of desperately needed conversation.

Google the seven laws

My first book, The Seven Laws of Money, was written based on a paper that I had dictated a year and a half earlier. That was some time in the spring of 1973. I gave the paper the title The Seven Laws of Money based on the contents of the paper itself and the fact that I dictated it in the presence of Salli Rasberry who wanted guidance on the money issues that she could use in creating the modern world of homeschooling and in the presence of my longtime college friend Charles Roll who was an expert on sinology. It was Charlie who told me about the seven structure in Chinese literature and poetry. I used that in the construction of The Seven Laws of Money. I also used Rasberry’s illustrations and Charlie’s poetry.

In the late fall of 1973 before the book was to be published in Spring of 1974, Rasberry and I went to the Library of Congress to see if that title has been used before or if a similar book had been previously written. There was one book with the title seven in it, it was a 1900 children’s book about a rabbit.

Now we have Google and no longer need to visit the Library of Congress to get comprehensive access to published material. If you Google the seven laws, my book is number four or five. It is not the original book shown, it is a reprint by Shambhala that is still in print. Along with my version of the original book.

Google presents us with other publications titled the seven laws.  Several of the titles were not in the Library of Congress because they were not books.

The other titles are about the seven laws of Noah. While I am a well educated in Jewish history, I did not know this terminology. Or if I knew it it was submerged very deeply in my subconscious.

The seven laws of Noah were created by Maimonides in the 12th century. It is an abbreviation of the 10 Commandments of Moses. Four of the first six have been removed because they concern Jews and the contract between God and the Jews. Two have been added which were needed to believe in an afterlife and rebut false stories about Jews. Maimonides was surrounded by Catholics and Mohammedans for whom an afterlife was very important. Maimonides was forced to add this to the Jewish repertoire for survival reasons.

Was the seven laws of money derived from Chinese literature or the Jewish literature in my subconscious?

Good study, good data

There is a wonderful study that has been done by the Department of Education.

It is a longitudinal study. Meaning that 14,000 students were interviewed when they were sophomores in 2002 and are being followed-up over time. The most recent follow-up was in 2012, roughly 8 years after most of them finished high school.

The most interesting findings for me will be based on cross tabulations. I have not found the source of the crosstabs to look at. Crosstabs shows the important tables broken down by the significant sub categories. For example the first table in the published report shows the level of educational attainment by all of the major categories such as sex, race, parents economic status and parents educational achievement. In a crosstab you could look at the racial composition of the parents educational achievement. Blacks probably start out with an economic and educational disability.

The following are the interesting findings that I have gotten from reading the tables that I think may be of interest to my readers.

Women are getting bachelor's and higher degrees at a significantly higher level than men. 30% versus 36%. Asians are getting these degrees at 51% compared to blacks at 20%. Bigger differences than I suspected.

Parental economic status has an enormous impact on who gets a bachelors degree or higher. Low economic status parents mean only 15% of their offspring will get a bachelor or higher degree;  whereas 61% of the children from the top economic status will get these degrees. Economic status of parents results in outcomes even higher than the average of Asians. (Without cross tabs we can't tell the economic background Asians).

The survey asked the educational expectations of the sophomores in their first interview. 85% expected to complete college. In fact only 33% did. What accounts for this difference? Is it socially important to say you intend to complete college when you are in high school?

Not surprisingly public school students weren't as likely to graduate from college as Catholic and other private school students.  31% compared to 60%.  All students getting under 3.0 grades have a much lower college graduation rate, under 25%. Compared to 50% who had a 3.00-3.49 grade average and 77% of those with a 3.5 grade or better completed college. Think of them as academically inclined.

Is it a good idea to take a year off from academia before beginning college? Not really. People who took off a year only graduated at a 26% rate compared to a 42% rate for those who started immediately after high school.

High school sophomores who were in private nonprofit schools had an astronomically higher percentage of college graduates than those who were in public schools 32% versus 50%.

College loans are a significant burden. Going to college at any level meant 45% have college loans of roughly $33,000. And 27% have college loans of roughly $60,000.

I was surprised to find that roughly 5% of those who got some degree felt it was not of any value in their work or career.  Lower than I thought.

Examining employment income eight years after high school it turns out that only the bachelors degree made a difference in the level of income earned for those ending up earning between $15,000 and $40,000 a year. Not too surprising.

Marriage, the number of children and living alone or with parents are unrelated to education. That surprised me. I thought a bachelors degree was supportive of family formation.  I thought college debt was harmful to family formation.

The overwhelming majority of people, interviewed, live within 10 miles of where they were in their sophomore year a decade later.  We don’t move as much as we think we do.

When I get crosstabs I will add to this blog.

Tom Perkins

This is more on the issue of our approaching American civil war.

Tom Perkins wrote a letter to the Wall Street Journal which was picked up widely. Perkins is a  wealthy man, one of the founders of the tech investment firm of Kleiner Perkins, who was married to author Danielle Steel and is notorious for his public investments in environmental businesses.

Perkins complained in his letter about the public political attacks on the 1%. For his candor he was smeared and excoriate by nearly everyone.

It is my contention that Perkins felt the social heat of the impending American Civil War from both sides; from the Blues and the Reds.

The Blues are the ones he specifically mentioned because they use the terminology of '1%'. They act out of sheer envy and Marxist ideological bilge water. They hate successful people and wish them ill.

The Reds are the ones he may feel but is not consciously aware of. They are the people who believe their country and their values are being trampled by the Democrat-Union party. They know that environmentalism and union values are hostile to their own livelihood and family survival. So when they see a rich person who made his money in the commercial world who turns around and uses that money to destroy the same source of success for other people, they are also angry and wish that person ill.

Tom Perkins and many people like him are the targets in the middle of both sides of the emerging American Civil War. I suspect they are increasingly feeling this heat without knowing the reason they are feeling such discomfort.

Time to rebel

If you haven't seen this modern version of the Declaration of Independence, I recommend it.  

I have said in this blog that the most powerful agency of government is now the most corrupt.  This is the proof.

 The criminal behavior of the FBI, OSHA and the EPA suggest the most corrupt administration and government in the modern world.  In all of American history. 

Tribal view of the world

I consider this an important blog.

Virtually no one living in our modern world, who is not tribal themselves, has any conception of life in the tribal world. Tribal people constitute nearly 6/7ths of the worlds population..

Yes, I include India and China as populations that are nearly all tribal. In India your class designation is important to you but your family name and village are more important. In China it is similar. Your tong reflects a much larger family name but a tribal name nevertheless. In China an individual is also associated with his/her village of origin.

When a baby is born into a tribe, that baby learns to rely on his/her family immediately in a way that is different from non-tribal babies. That tribal child's survival is entirely dependent on its understanding of its membership in the family. As the child grows he/she must protect and be protected by siblings, parents and extended family. It doesn't matter whether the child is born into a family of serfs or a royal elite.

In a tribal environment each family depends on its cousins or family hierarchy to come to its rescue in times of trouble. Trouble includes threats of illegal or criminal nature, threats to livelihood or threats to food survival. Families band together to protect each other, their family lineage and their entire tribe when necessary.

When you are born into a tribal environment you must learn how to favorably appeal to every member of your family from the closest to the most distant. Your survival depends on being accepted as part of the family.  You can’t be a rebel, outcast or deviant.

There is no way that we, who survive based on money, neighbors, friends and sometimes police to protect us, can understand the nature of tribal society.

We, commercial people, haven't the vaguest idea of how the real world outside of modern commercialism works. We live in a global tribal world in which our understanding of reality is trivial, wrong and often gets us into trouble.  Both we as individuals and as a nation.

Second screen

For those of you in the world of media the term 'second screen' is meaningful.

For the rest of us an explanation is needed. Second screen refers to a smartphone or tablet that is used while watching the main TV screen.

To understand the impact of the second screen I was shocked when my partner and I watched a movie on the TV screen and we talked about it afterwards.  She was reading on her smartphone.

She had already looked up the characters in the movie as well as the real life story behind the film.

My partner knew how the characters in the film had been cast in a way that contradicted the values of the real-life story and she also knew the outcome of the events portrayed in the film.

I saw the film and accepted the storyline and character premises as close to the truth. It was a slow moving but heart warming film.

She saw a film about deception, ethnic malice and a subsequent tragedy that took advantage of public gullibility.

So to put it mildly, the second screen can a have dramatic and far-reaching impact on the way we perceive what is on the main screen.

 

Madoff did some good

Can there be something good we could say about Bernie Madoff?

Madoff carried out a billion dollar Ponzi scheme over a 20 year period.  Many good but unsuspecting nonprofits were harmed.

However this article points out something that Madoff did inadvertently that we can be grateful for.

A couple of artists had given Madoff their life savings and in the early stages of his Ponzi scheme he made them quite a bit of money.

They then made serious progress on their project.  By the time that Madoff stopped generating funds for them they had spent all their money and were broke. Dirt broke.

What was their project?

They were building houses that were totally uncomfortable with slanted bumpy floors, windows in irrelevant locations and walls without doors. Their theory was that having to struggle daily with one's environment would lead to a significant increase in lifespan…. to immortality.

Increasing lifespan significantly is one of the oldest con games known to man. Think of Ponce de Leon and the fountain of youth.

It doesn't bother me that one Madoff failure resulted in the failure of two other con artists. In fact it is a case where a bad person turned out to be good for the many others who would've been gullible enough to buy into this immortal project.

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What the two artists did, Arakawa and Gins, did was interesting if treated solely as art.

 

Inflaming Japan hate

Four months ago I wrote about the appointment of Caroline Kennedy as ambassador to Japan. The woman has no experience but she does have good connections which I thought was a possible basis for her ambassadorial appointment.

I was wrong. Caroline Kennedy is a stupid and incompetent appointment that only an anti-American president and in an incompetent Secretary of State could have created.

An ambassador has multiple goals in their portfolio of activities. One is to subdue or mitigate hostility between the nation been represented in the nation being visited.

Ambassador Kennedy, in her vast ideological ignorance, has inflamed relations between Japan and the United States. For no good or justifiable reason she has criticised the Japanese for a small fishing village that kills dolphins once a year. She is a disaster. Mitigate not inflame, you fool.

Nearly 40 years ago I headed off conflict between the American enviro-lunatics and the Japanese. I published a sympathetic article about dolphin harvesting in a small North Sea Japanese village. The article was in the main environmental publication. I appealed to the enviros to support the natives, the cooperative fishing company and local sustainability. I was able to suppress the dolphin harvesting issue for nearly 30 years.

Caroline Kennedy did the opposite. She had the audacity to say that the recent harvesting of dolphins in this small village was offensive to America. She represents the most ignorant blind malicious aspects of the American environmental movement. She failed in her duty as an ambassador.

Ambassador Caroline Kennedy is a mistake.

Skin color and race

A professor in the San Francisco area did an interesting experiment.

He interviewed more than 100 blind people about their experience with race.

You can look at a  summary of the findings. But don't bother. He's a Lefty and you get nothing but PC crap. He could have found many interesting things but his Lefty PC ideology made him as ideologically blind as the physically blind people he was interviewing.

Blind people do not make judgments about people based on the amount of melanin in their skin. They use four non-visual senses.

* First, for most American blacks there is a distinctive difference in smell. It's not always the case but it is often enough for a blind person to detect it (black taxi drivers often use pine odor cards hanging from the rearview mirror).

* Second everything in our society warns you that black neighborhoods are dangerous and that black young people on the sidewalk in public are potentially dangerous.

* Third, many young black boys are out of control in public and one would have to wonder what the developmental consequences of this could be.

* Fourth, many black people speak a colloquial language and many others have the accent associated with that colloquial language.

For a blind person American blacks are a distinct group of people.

If the researcher had not been a Lefty ideologue he could simply have done the same research with questions about other people with high melanin counts. Indians, Malaysians, Filipinos and Pacific islanders.

He would have found that in most cases blind people have no awareness of skin color except in the case of American blacks. Prejudice is usually based on data from group behavior not from social constructs.

The professor could not understand this reality therefore he never tested for it.

Hack the IRS

This blog is about a change in my opinion.

I have considered the actions of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden to be treasonous. I have changed my mind.

The revelations by Congressman Darrell Issa that the Democratic Party and President Obama had captured the IRS for his own malicious and self-serving purposes have led me to consider the IRS behaviour the greatest political crime in my lifetime.

It is necessary to understand four attributes of the IRS to fathom the magnitude of this crime.

The IRS has more power over individuals than any other agency in government. The IRS can close a business without prior legal processes, it can seize an individual's assets with no advanced legal procedure as protection. The IRS has the power to interact with any citizen without a prior legal selection process, such as evidence. The IRS is the agency that we depend on to generate the necessary trust to encourage the citizenry to pay its individual taxes, honestly.

The IRS is distinct and unique in all of these aspects. When the IRS becames a tool of the Democratic Party and a malicious president it has permanently stained its reputation. The IRS should be abolished and re-formed.  Control of the IRS by the party in power is the greatest violation of trust imaginable.

In trying to think about my response to this horrible event  I considered every personal action available to me. My friends made it clear the IRS would not respond to political defiance. Instead the IRS would use its awesome powers to punish me individually.

The solution is to follow in the footsteps of Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden: to hack the IRS and make public the internal documents that show the malice of the criminal actors inside the IRS.

That is why I have changed my mind about Manning and Snowden. They have shown all of us that there is a way to cope with a vicious and out-of-control government. The Second Amendment is not the modern tool to protect us. It is hacking. Hacking is our Second Amendment right.

Can I encourage anyone with the skills to hack the IRS? If someone does the hacking, don't waste your time on looking into the top four people. They communicated verbally. Look for the people around them who may have sent e-mails to their friends commenting about the crime going on in their offices.

To my knowledge it is not yet illegal to encourage hacking. It may be illegal to pay someone for hacking. If you have the answers to this legal question please let me know. Let us all know.

Back to Manning and Snowden. Manning released communications between consulates and the State Department. I have seen several such memos before and consider them trivial.

In both cases the names of assets were published and the assets had to be extracted immediately. According to the Bob Gates book this was done successfully. We lost assets but we gained awareness of our government's incompetence and in the case of Snowden the clear overreach of the intelligence community.

 Thank you both for showing the way to deal with an out-of-control government.

(You can donate to 'Find the smoking gun fund' here.)

Evidence for civil war

I personally believe that we are on the verge of a civil war. My readers know that I have struggled because it is very hard to conceive of a civil war where the geography is complex. However, precisely such a civil war is going on today in Syria and Afghanistan.

You can see the simple outline of the future geography of our civil war by going to this page which shows the Google entries for each state. These top Google searches show that many people are exploring their options to secede from the United States.

I count 13 states where the population is openly considering the idea of seceding. I see that in 18 other States people are talking about related issues.

That means nearly 2/3rds of American states have a big population that is very unhappy with the current politics of the American union.

To understand what they are unhappy about one need only look at this survey result which shows the level of hostility toward an incompetent White House and associated anti-commerce, anti-gun, isolationist government.

If you have read this far and still have no idea why such a large American population would be willing to seceed, you need only ask your friends what they think about Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Invariably they will assign a malignant and powerful force to these two entities. Check our malicious president on that subject yesterday, he blames Fox as he often does.

Keep in mind the level of disconnect that Lefty society must have to think that a few million people watching Fox News are a serious problem when Fox is operating as the sole contrast to seven mainstream media sources and local media by the thousands. Fox exists in contrast to a government authorized public media. We have one cable channel versus thousands of Lefty sources. Consider the level of fear this generates on the Lefty side of the civil war.

On the other hand the person the Left hates so much and to whom they attribute so much power is Rush Limbaugh.  Limbaugh has 21 million listeners a week. That is a sizable number of people who are on the conservative side of the civil war. They constitute a group of very angry people who listen to a moderate humorous radio personality. It is the content of his reporting not the humorous way he delivers it.

Let's add to this war potential the fact that there has been a rapid increase in purchases of firearms in the past five years since Obama has been president. Roughly 15 million households have bought firearms that didn't have any before.

I think there is a growing probability of hostility on both sides that will generate the new American civil war. Since I am writing this in February of 2014 I suspect that the outcome of this year's congressional election will play a role in the speed with which we reach the tipping point for a civil war. The election of president Obama, in circumstances where he did not appear to be the likely winner, helped create serious conservative antagonism.  

A victory of Republicans in the Senate may do something to diminish the civil war potential on the conservative side and increase it on the liberals side.

I have often been right about social movements in the past but I am often wrong about their timing. So I will not venture a guess on when this wrenching of our social fabric will occur.

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The photo of a blonde in a Mercedes needs an explanation. For me, she is a symbol of the first war target.  She is rich, which antagonizes the blue Whole Foods Left, and she is part of the ostentatious-rich-who-probably-donate-to-the-Democrat-Party which antagonizes the red Walmart ProCommerce side.

Fairness and Buddhism

A friend, who is planning to open a psychotherapy office, plans to put a sign on the wall that says "The world is not fair".

He suggested that this statement parallels the concept in Buddhism that 'all is suffering'.

I don't think so. In fact I think this understanding of contemporary Buddhism is useless and inappropriate.

Until 70 years ago nearly every disease we have ever heard of, was plaguing  the human race. At birth most people faced foot, leg, facial and spinal distortions in addition to the high probability of killing their mother as they came out of the birth canal.

Before that, going back to the 1850s, most people faced a life of hunger, a life with only a few dozen potential lifetime occupations and they were entirely dependent on where they were born in the social hierarchy.

I call that a life of ‘suffering’. That was the old, irrelevant Buddhism. For us, it is gone.

What we have today is a world that is not ‘fair’. If fair means that everyone gets 100% what they want. The fact is that most people do get 85 to 95% of what they want.

People going to psychotherapists tend to be in circumstances that are often created by their own misperception of the world. Correcting that is the function of the psychotherapists. If they know what they're doing they can help reconcile the conflict between self-concept and social reality.

I think Buddhism has some intellectual contributions independent of the concept of suffering.

Fortunately.

Huey Newton

This is a good time for a confession.

On my my bookshelf is an Olympic style gold medal awarded to me by my friends for being on the United States ‘No Fly’ list. I am very proud of that medallion.

In the late 1970s I asked for a freedom of information report on my intelligence files. What I received was a folder of 100% redacted papers with nothing but black lines. I already knew that my file in Washington and in San Francisco took up an entire file drawer. Only the FBI, in its incompetence, could think that I was a threat to the government of the United States.

Which means it is time to introduce the fact that I was a friend of Huey Newton.  I thought very highly of the man. The Wikipedia entry on Huey is reliable and quite sympathetic as it should be. Huey was a very intelligent, sensitive and competent person.

You can see from the following paragraph that his intelligence and competence led him to conclude that our black population needed to arm itself in order to gain power. I have said this many times about the need of every second class citizenry, including women. They need to achieve first-class status with firearms.

“"During those long years in Oakland public schools, I did not have one teacher who taught me anything relevant to my own life or experience. Not one instructor ever awoke in me a desire to learn more or to question or to explore the worlds of literature, science, and history. All they did was try to rob me of the sense of my own uniqueness and worth, and in the process nearly killed my urge to inquire."

Newton graduated from Oakland Technical High Schoolin 1959, without being able to read. He later taught himself to read, going on to read The Republic by Plato as his first book. As a teenager, he was arrested several times for minor offenses, including gun possession and vandalism at age 14. Newton supported himself in college by burglarizing homes in the Oakland and Berkeley Hills areas, and by committing other petty crimes. Newton once wrote that he began his law studies to become a better criminal, although he said that he had been a "big-time fool" for having such narrow ambitions.”

I spent many hours sitting quietly and talking with Huey.  One of our conversations was about biology and was based on the Masters degree he had earned in that field. Our later discussions were about social thought, based on his doctorate from the University of California.

I met Huey because he had questions about Zen meditation based on his time in solitary confinement. It was at that point that I learned how permeable prisons were. Huey was able to run his Black Panther organization while in solitary confinement using audiotapes.

At one time I made a grant to Huey to provide him with an office in San Francisco. He didn't use it much.  Oakland was more comfortable for him.

I  feel it is necessary to write this blog to make sure that the world understands that Huey Newton was a brilliant man with clear goals and he acted entirely on the behalf of the common good for his black community. It was his strength and vision and his organizational skills that made him appear to be a threat.

If he committed violence it was because the community surrounding him was immersed in a world of violence (and still is) and Huey was always vulnerable.