Pro Commerce

The Bay Guardian

The good news is that the Zombie-Marxist newspaper in San Francisco is closing after 50 years.

The market killed it twice but the legal system kept the Zombie alive. The Bay Guardian was a free handout weekly based mostly on ads from escort services, low quality eateries and massage parlors.

The paper sued the two major dailies when they wanted to merger in the 1980's and got a $25 million anti-trust settlement to arise from the grave. It did the same thing again, 15 years later to another local throw-away and got an additional $21 million anti-trust settlement.

A Vancouver newspaper owner bought it and two other local throw-aways and published all three by trying to expand to the suburbs. The Internet had dried up the advertising. Good riddance.

I doubt the Bay Guardian ever had any political relevance. In every election I followed for decades, no local newspaper had any influence on the outcome. It may have had some impact on one or two districts after San Francisco got district elections at the beginning of the Second Islamic War in 2001. I had stopped paying attention by then.

The story I want to tell is about the owner, editor of the Bay Guardian, Bruce Brugmann. He was a very simple man, driven solely by hatred. His main hate target was the local utility Pacific Gas and Electric.

Brugmann wanted utilities to be public. It started out that way for San Francisco in 1905, but as capital costs got out of control, the city signed a lease with a private company to deliver electricity and gas. The City signed away its electric power supply on a 50 year lease in the mid 1920's

Brugmann was not a very bright man. I met him a few times. When the 50 year lease came up for renewal in the mid 1970's, PG&E began secret negotiations with the San Francisco Board of Supervisors. Everyone of the 12 supervisors and the Mayor kept the secret negotiations secret from Brugmann. One day they signed another 50 year lease.

Brugmann, the idiot, had never paid attention to the 50 year lease, and never had any friends in local politics to let him know what was going on. His nemesis, PG&E, was much smarter and more competent than he. They got a 50 year lease renewal with the City behind his back.

It doesn't take much in the way of intelligence to publish a throw-away newspaper.

Maurice Tempelsman

In a recent conversation with friends I mentioned that I had met Aristotle Onassis on a train in Italy when I was just out of college. This led to a discussion of his later wife Jackie Kennedy. As well as his lover of the time Maria Callas.

We finally got to Jackie Kennedy's last lover, the man who presided at her funeral Maurice Tempelsman. Tempelsman was among the men who could afford Jackie's million dollar a month shopping habit. Jackie must have been interesting, sexy and alluring in other ways. Tempelsman was a very smart man.

I am including the wonderful poem he read at her memorial. It comes from Constantine P. Cavafy a Greek poet who lived in Alexandria. Ithaca

As you set out for Ithaka

hope the voyage is a long one,

full of adventure, full of discovery.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:

you’ll never find things like that on your way

as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,

as long as a rare excitement

stirs your spirit and your body.

Laistrygonians and Cyclops,

wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them

unless you bring them along inside your soul,

unless your soul sets them up in front of you.

Hope the voyage is a long one.

May there be many a summer morning when,

with what pleasure, what joy,

you come into harbors seen for the first time;

may you stop at Phoenician trading stations

to buy fine things,

mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,

sensual perfume of every kind—

as many sensual perfumes as you can;

and may you visit many Egyptian cities

to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.

Arriving there is what you are destined for.

But do not hurry the journey at all.

Better if it lasts for years,

so you are old by the time you reach the island,

wealthy with all you have gained on the way,

not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.

Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.

Without her you would not have set out.

She has nothing left to give you now.

And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.

Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,

you will have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.

Important key to understanding America

My son has come up with a brilliant analysis of contemporary America. I use his material at my peril; he does a much better job of explaining and using it.

America's colleges and Universities were founded to protect and maintain our domestic hereditary elite. The same was true of the media which was owned by the landed class for 150 years and promoted the interests of the hereditary elite for most of America's history.

The hereditary elite gave way to commercial meritocracy in the late 1950's due to the rise of meritocracy in the WWII military. We lost our hereditary elite and its extensive interconnected clubs and social registers.

The hereditary elite is gone but the structure remains.

That is why we still have 'legacy preferences' and tenure in academe and all the media, but one, are now owned by arcane corporate giants.

The Left has scrambled to take the place of the hereditary elite at the top of the academic and media pyramids. They have three elements in common with the old order.

• 1) The Left tolerates no dissent and no free thinkers.
• 2) They look backwards to the socialist European order.
• 3) They are fervent advocates of the status-quo-anti with their anti-commerce-Armageddon environmentalism.

It is these commonalities with the old hereditary elite that direct their energies to achieve success in academe and media. They are also losers because they choose the two worlds with no connection to the meritocracy of the work-a-day world of commerce and engineering.

This explanation does a lot to explain the persistence of a dead and malignant Leftist world view. A world view that was destroyed in the 20th Century with its many failures and disastrous outcomes.

Gay vs polygamy

So where are the demands for polygamy in America today?

The logic of accepting gay marriage was challenged by the argument that it would be followed by demands for polygamy.

(Well, actually there are plenty of polygamous marriages in the U.S. it is just not legal. Muslims all over America continue to practice polygamy but nobody bothers to prosecute them. No one has dared challenge the legal issues surrounding the subject for decades.)

My point is that the absence of demands for legalizing polygamy supports my explanation of why gay marriage was so readily accepted in America after the Islamic Terror War began in 2001.

We are, as a nation, thumbing our noses at Islam which is so hostile to open gay behavior. It is our way of defining an enemy.

We did the same thing at the beginning of the Cold War against Communism. We put 'Under God' in our pledge of allegiance as a defiant show that we were a religious nation and the USSR wasn't.

Argo and the gyre

I assume my readers are open-minded. Otherwise two thirds of what I write about would be offensive or repugnant to the closed minded.

In a recent discussion I heard for the umpteenth time while living in the Lefty swamp of San Francisco, about that Pacific gyre that accumulates massive amounts of plastic. This whirlpool of ocean, called a gyre, is a major reason why, first, San Francisco and then California banned plastic bags for use in carrying retail food and merchandise. It is presumed that these bags end up in the ocean and act as clutter finally forming a plastic island in the Pacific gyre.  (These pseudo-pseudos are not referring to the real gigantic gyre that is the Japanese Current.)

This gyre is supposed to be somewhere between Hawaii and Japan. There happens to be no subsurface structures that would create such a phenomenon. In the Atlantic where we have a strong Gulf Stream circular flow, that flow passes the Caribbean islands and actually does produce an occasional small gyre. But you never hear about the plastic in the Atlantic gyre. Maybe the hundreds of millions of people who live on the Atlantic in Africa and Latin America and the American East Coast never throw plastic in the ocean.

I get so infuriated by these fantasies that I finally found a way to disprove this environmental B.S.

I knew, and you should know, about the Argo experiment. Argo began in the 1990s and was manifest beginning in 2002 when hundreds and then thousands of buoys about the size of a human were dropped into the ocean. These buoys are capable of submerging to 3000 feet staying there for a month and returning to the surface to transmit data about ocean temperature, salinity and their location. Satellites are now tracking nearly 4000 of these buoys. The buoys float with the tides. One of the intentions is to follow the ocean currents.

These buoys float just like the plastic from a six pack beer wrapper. Below is a map of the Argo buoys.

Please show me where the Pacific gyre is. Or alternatively announce publicly there is no such fictional Pacific creature.

Strawberry fields

When I told my friend Bob what I had seen in the strawberry fields near Salinas, I saw a look on his face of total disbelief.

Bob was a founder of California Rural Legal Assistance, more than 45 years ago. He lived in Salinas for several years and worked on the legal issues of immigrant farmworkers. Most of what he saw was hard work, low pay and difficult working conditions ( yes, Cesar Chavez was an arrogant self centered martyr, who was no help).

What I saw, and what I showed him in a photo, was a strawberry farm with a tractor pulling a mobile 35 foot table covered with an awning. On the table were boxes of the final strawberry product that you see in the grocery store.

The workers were picking the strawberries and putting them directly into the final retail boxes and moving slowly with the tractor in the shade. They were bending over but the distance from the strawberry to the box was less than 3 feet.

We saw the same harvesting practices with other crops including brussels sprouts.

The highways adjacent to these farms had dozens and dozens of cars parked on the side of the road. The workers cars were almost always newer than the one I'm driving and in better shape.

The chemical toilets and handwashing stations were ubiquitous.

This appears to be the modern environment of farmworkers. A far cry from the political images that led to the creation of the California Rural Legal Assistance.

Aquarium vs fun

I recently went to the Monterey aquarium. For two hours of entertainment, it is $40.  The kelp forest is interesting especially for me as I have spent time in the actual kelp forests at Monterey. When I surfaced I tried to swim on the tops of the kelp and failed. Scary.

The tentacle exhibit was interesting, as we slowly come to appreciate the extraordinary nature of our intelligent tentacled friends and begin to wonder whether they actually are in the kingdom of ‘animal’.

The jellyfish exhibit was even more interesting. It is very hard to see the extraordinary variety of jellies and consider these elegant organisms as related to us or anything else in the ocean.

Despite my enjoyment of the aquarium, every room, every sign, everything carried a preposterous message about how humans are monsters. We human idiots are destroying everything in the oceans.  Someone believes with enough signs to intrude on our enjoyment of this pseudo scientific environment we will probably be cured. At least the Puritanical-goody-goody bumble brains who run this aquarium think this.

It is disturbing to me to have this false knowledge, this pseudo-everything crap being shoveled at elementary school students. Science is already in the hands of bungling ideological bimbos, but to have these bungling ideological bimbos intruding on such a beautiful place as an aquarium is a flat-out insult to any moderately intelligent human. Of any age.

Extractive economies

My friend Hans recently drove to Alaska. As he passed through Canada he was struck by the working class people he met everywhere. It then occurred to him, based on our joint knowledge of Canada, that Canada is really not a giant industrial commercial nation, it is an extractive economy based largely on mining, oil, timber and some agriculture.

I published this material elsewhere and it was promptly pointed out by a wise reader that Canada actually does export automobile parts and a few large assemblies such as Bombardier airplanes and railcars. In further investigating I found that most of this work is simply American corporations out of Detroit working across the border for lower wages and better business conditions.

This led me to think about other nations that we often put in the top industrial commercial category but don't belong there. After Canada the second most important one is Australia, which is predominantly an extractive economy. After that come many less surprising societies including Russia, Mexico, the Middle East and most of Latin America.

What does this tell me?

It reminds me that the United States and a few other countries Japan, Israel, Taiwan, South Korea, Germany and China are the driving economies on the planet and the rest of the world is metaphorically sucking on our teats.

Minimum wage again

Back in April I wrote four blogs about the impending San Francisco minimum wage. Those blogs made it clear that thousands of businesses would be forced close because of the new $15 minimum wage due in three years and tens of thousands of workers would lose their jobs.

We are now less than two weeks from the vote on this issue. There is no question now, as there was no question in April, that the Lefties self-damaging-San Franciscans would vote for this because a black president has insisted that they do so. Intelligence, knowledge, data are irrelevant. Racist Democrat-Union hysteria has its supporters in thrall.

What was somewhat surprising to me, when I looked at the voter’s guide with the ballot information in it, it had not a shred of evidence about the damage that this policy will wreak on the city; it had a feeble protest by two weak local organizations. Virtually no money has been spent to defeat this minimum wage proposal.

Seattle implemented such a mean-spirited policy in the early summer.

In Los Angeles the Board of Supervisors passed a similar ordinance but excluded unionized shops in order to give unions in Los Angeles an advantage in organizing the tens of thousands of businesses that are likely to fail with a higher minimum wage.

In San Diego the Board of Supervisors passed a similar ordinance and the Republican mayor, the only person in San Diego government outside the bubble of stupid hysteria, vetoed the bill and was overridden.

We now have an Obama caused hysteria within the Democrat-Union party that has become part of our society.

We get to watch Democratic-Union-idiocy self-inflict significant damage to urban areas. We get to watch as businesses are forced to close, to automate retail staff and we will soon listen to the Lefty debate about why they are closing.

This disaster may raise the level of public consciousness and we may be able to head off the disaster.

Or we don't. And the public attention moves on to some other subject without any concern for the businesses destroyed and the workers who are punished.

Government vs commerce

There is some point at which government is so large, so parasitic and so demonically supported by its subsidized citizens that it effectively suppresses innovative commerce. Do we know that point?

We can begin by looking at Europe. Europe is dead from the vantage point of innovative commerce. Since WWII Europe has not produced significant technological innovation. To know how preposterous the counter argument is, compare the hundreds of millions of Europeans, including East Europeans to the miniscule several million people in Israel. Israel out produces Europe in commercial innovation 10 times every year. Europe is a commercial zombie.

Europe has a government to GDP ratio of between 45% and 50%. The vitality that Margaret Thatcher brought to England was promptly washed away by a high and overbearing government assault. We can therefore know that 45% of total commercial output diverted to government is fatal parasitism.

The United States is not such a clear issue. We have a ratio somewhere between a 30% and 35% parasitic government burden.

That burden is greater in some states than others; even a 5% difference between states results in the migration of business and workers.

What is unique about the United States is that American government has always been built up from the bottom and consequently is magisterially inefficient. That inefficiency results sometimes in high taxes but low regulatory interference.

The other unique issue in America is that we have a cheese grater form of taxation. It is so full of holes that tax corruption allows many businesses to thrive on very low or no taxes.

I cannot achieve the goal I set out for in this blog. But I can estimate in crude terms that the government percentage of parasitism below 35% of GDP does not suppress commercial vitality. At 45% and over commercial vitality is dead.

The next point we need, in understanding, this issue is some measure of regulatory tyranny. Europe, which tries to destroy every major American innovative industry, with lawsuits and antitrust malice, is aggressive in its destructive efforts. Obama and the 21st Century Democrats are ingenious in their commercial obstruction and tyranical malice. That needs to be measured.

Zombies

The wonderful journalist and Middle East reporter Michael Totten has raised the issue that we are in the era of zombies. He wrote an article for City Journal that summarizes the situation. It is fairly clear that we have gone through an era of popular zombie fascination. Many of my friends and my son are zombie fans. My son argues that a measure of democracy is freedom to make zombie films, which are still not made in China.

There is always a connection between a long term popular subject matter and contemporary life. The great masterpiece of this analysis was West of Everything. Jane Tompkins showed that the Western story and film were expressions of the emotional sentiment of an industrial society;  men were required to persevere in the face of blinding boredom. There was no religion in Westerns, the cowboy was buried on Boot Hill. There were very few women except for warm hearted hookers. The moral of every story was the determination of the good cowboy to right the wrongs.

Michael Totten argues that the zombie issue of our day is really an expression of our sense that the world around us is far too complex; that it could fall apart at any moment. The apocalypse of a completely dysfunctional society is everywhere around us.  It is Detroit, Somalia, Liberia, Argentina and Venezuela.

Totten argues that learning rudimentary survival lessons is the main story in the zombie world.

Many of my friends agree with Totten's analysis.

I find the issue to be much more political. I believe that both the Democrats and the Republicans have the sense that the opposition is blindly following ideas and emotional structures that are impossible to confront. That their opponents are aggressively belligerent but cannot be defeated with logic or argument. On the conservative side it appears that the entire media structure supports the zombie position. On the Left side the hostility is toward Fox News as a mouthpiece for zombie values

That's my explanation of the zombie era that we are in. It is also my sense of what leads me to suggest we are not far from a Civil War encouraged by a president who inflames racism and class envy.

Our era

I believe that there are several pervasive social phenomenon occurring in our current era. One is the dominance of Puritanism.

Puritanism is not merely the repression of sex. It is the repression of all forms of pleasure that are enjoyed by someone else. Clearly, sex is a subset of the larger category Pleasure. Puritans were hostile to dancing and Jazz.  They were opposed to all music and singing other than liturgical singing. Stylish clothes were also on the Puritan banned list.

Of course there is always a reverse side to the Puritan quilt. Puritans did encourage sex inside of marriage and encouraged it to be vigorous. Women also wore lavish colorful and sensual undergarments.

I do believe we have entered a very Puritanical era. I see it in the national worldview that is socialist and determined to intrude on every aspect of our lives. It is rampant in California where we are not allowed to eat goose liver pate, horse meat, eggs from chickens forced to live in low income housing and countless other daily intrusions; very much like the Puritan controls of clothing and style.

There is also another element of the Puritan ethic that I learned about when I built a park for Street people. I was incessantly questioned and pressured as to how effectively I was finding jobs and rehabilitation for the Street people who idly hung out at the park. Puritanism is very hostile to people hanging around and enjoying themselves, talking to each other, drinking sugared liquor and basking in the sun.

We want adults to be off the street. We vote astronomical amounts of money to house the homeless who don’t want housing. We focus heavily on poverty to such an extent that our envy of the rich somehow leads us to believe that taxing them will make sure that 5,000 years of human poverty can be erased merely with more government money.

These issues are Puritan issues.

Exposure pervert

San Francisco is on a peninsula. One of the towns further down the peninsula is Palo Alto. Palo Alto is a rich town that includes Stanford University and a high-end shopping mall. It is the home of many tech executives.

A few nights ago my TV news reported that the entire Palo Alto police force available, meaning those on duty plus those who wanted over time, were called out to patrol the streets of Palo Alto.

What was this extraordinary danger that the police needed to protect citizens from?

They were being protected from a man who was driving a car and apparently opened the door of the car to expose the fact that he didn't have any clothes below his waist. He was exposing himself, most likely, to teenagers. The news didn't say. This happened four times, over a week, in order to bring out the full protective force of the Palo Alto police.

I know I must be a pervert myself to consider this among the most trivial social violations. It is clearly more serious than talking on your phone at the dinner table. But it is also not more serious than playing with your nieces or nephews genitals. In any case this suggests the next blog.

It tells me that we are in an era in which very little of news consequence is happening except Ebola. The Puritan ethic is crawling out of our pants.

'Swimming' pools?

I stayed in a Marriott hotel last week that said on the website that it had a swimming pool.

I probably wouldn't write a blog on this subject except for the fact that 15 years ago I gave up running every weekday for nearly 30 years in favor of swimming. After swimming in an inadequate pool on my back looking at the sky for a year I finally ended up in a legitimate swimming pool with lanes and laps.

For the last 14 years I have been swimming laps three days a week and loving it. It is great exercise. My current pool also includes a sauna.

You can guess what the swimming pool at the Marriott Hotel looked like. Very much like every other hotel swimming pool.

It is basically a large lukewarm tub. It also has a small hot tub next to it with air spouts . The big tub is mostly for children to jump in and splash around. There is no earthly way a person could swim a single lap.

Lap swimming is usually is done in pools that are 25 yards or 25 meters long. Standard pools are 50 meters long and 25 yards wide.

Most people who swim, I mean specifically the word 'swim', expect to be able to swim a lap. That requires somewhere between 23 and 25 yards of straight line swimming.

I'm not going to change our language. I know my blog will have no effect on this issue during my remaining lifetime. I am resigned to that reality and it isn't very important.

However, we should draw a distinction between a swimming pool and a plain pool. The Marriott and most hotels have a plain pool not a swimming pool.

What an anti-commerce government does

A friend of mine, who was the economist for the City of New York, asked why the following chart is such a puzzle since we have never seen anything like it before.

I answered that it was the result of Democratic party policies and Obama's socialist anti-business agenda. He wanted me to cite examples.

The following is a list of my examples.

Anti-commerce acts of the U.S. government in the past five years:

1. Three completed free-trade agreements were held up in the Democrat Senate for three years.

2. Two major Pacific and Atlantic free trade agreements never given necessary fast-track  status by the Democrat Senate.

3. The Dodd-Frank Act had a severe impact on bank lending and capital demands.

4. 4. The Dodd-Frank Act impact on short term ‘repo’ finance was bad for business.

5. 5. There was significant CFPB restraint on consumer lending and small business expansion since the agency was created by a Democrat Congress.

6. The EPA gained important administrative control of CO2 in 2009. Resulting in massive regulatory business barriers.

7. Government decree to ban expansion of drilling on Federal Lands or Shorelines despite new technology to open old wells for new oil.

8. End of the XL pipeline for Canadian oil.

9. Rulings in 143 NLRB cases against business filed and then put in limbo due to illegal appointment of board members.

10. Failure to negotiate immigration laws to allow H1B visa expansion that is vital for business.

11. The Justice Department forced banks to close small business accounts for ‘moral reasons’. Operation Choke Point.

12. Excessive antitrust attack against Sprint, AT&T, Office Depot and Google.

13. Malicious destruction of the largest for-profit college for reasons that don’t apply to any other form of college or university.

14. High tariff barriers applied to imported Chinese solar panels.

I told my friend that I could add a dozen more examples.

We have been living the anti-commerce dream for five years in the most anti-commerce American environment since Lyndon Johnson and FDR.

In a separate blog I will discuss how much damage the government can do to commerce before we look like Europe.

Did France win WWI?

My question in this blog title would seem to be fairly irrelevant.

France was on the winning side of World War I and played a major role in eviscerating the losing Axis side.

But would it be reasonable to say that France won World War I?

I say “yes” because France is the heir to the French revolution in which the citizens rose up to slaughter the ruling class and to institute murder on a mass scale. That destroyed French culture, destruction similar to Mao’s in his Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The French revolution did not bring democracy or commercial values and it did not succeed in eliminating the hereditary ruling class.

The values that the French revolution promoted, equality and nationalism are the very elements that created the modern moribund Europe. Europe is a socialist world where most people

• don't work hard,
• the governments are diaper changing nanny states that dictate miniscule elements of everyday life and
• the idea of meritocracy or even making cultural contributions is gone.

These are as far gone in Europe today as they were in the Soviet Union.

When East Germany rejoined West Germany, the consequence was the same as the French winning World World I.  All of Germany became less productive, more socialist, culturally and technically barren.

In this sense, France has spawned for the world, the concept of lackadaisical irresponsible citizens who are self-righteous.  France has spread those values to their neighbors because France really won the first World War.

On happy donkeys

A lovely Austrian friend of mine and the I were discussing my desire to have a word for people who are well-educated but stupid. This comprises many people on the Left and a disappointingly large number of my Lefty friends. For example: it is stupid to think raising the minimum wage won’t create unemployment for low income people. Stupid.

We have not come up with a word but my lovely friend said there was a German phrase that capture some of it.

‘Wenn es dem Esel zu gut geht geht er auf das Eis tanzen’

That phrase, by the way, president Obama, is German, the language spoken by Austrians. President Obama would be one of the first people I would use a new word about educated but stupid on. Actually I wouldn't. His main qualities are arrogance and mean-spiritedness.

The phrase is best translated as: the donkey when he is happy goes to dance on the ice. A donkey dancing on the ice is very likely to hurt himself or break through the ice into the freezing water.

I like the phrase because it suggests that donkeys, meaning people who really can't think or haven't thought since they were 23 years old, can get blind-emotionally-happy. Their happiness instead of leading to understanding and constructive behavior invariably leads to blind-ignorant behavior.

We have been through this throughout the Obama era;  the Democrats perversely passed Obamacare and created a dozen other administrative monstrosities. Still the Democrats in the press and in academia dance with glee; they fail to see the horrible consequences.

Must we hurt happy people?

Some of my readers know that I live in one of the most hostile environments for poor people and minorities in America. San Francisco. It is also one of the most hostile places in America for people who are happy. The local Democrat-Union government puts a high priority in running people's lives. It is a nanny government with a Puritan malice that seeks out happy people and punishes them.

Do you think I'm kidding?

Just last week, the Board of Supervisors passed an ordinance that virtually eliminates a new business called Airbnb. Airbnb is an Internet based house sharing operation.  Not only did the Sups tax it at 14% in order to support city pensions for a city that spends 40% of its budget on pensions for unionized city employees but has three times the number of employees of a larger neighboring city, San Jose.

The single provision that is most hostile to Airbnb is one that limits the total rental of a house or apartment to 90 days a year.

Where are the happy people that are being hurt?

It is the people I know who use Airbnb and are ecstatic about being able live in a comfortable home where they can cook, relax, invite friends and walk in the neighborhood. This is what visitors love; and this is what the city is taking away.

The city's next intrusion into the world of happiness is its goal to eliminate Uber and similar successful ridesharing businesses based on the Internet. Riding in an existing taxi has two problems.

• First the existing taxi services are unreliable; you only have to miss a few meetings or airplanes to never use it again.

• Second the existing taxis are pretty grotty. Getting into a San Francisco taxi is pretty much like having sex with a toothless street hooker over 50 years old. It's gross.

Uber and the other Internet rides are the opposite. They are sheer pleasure. Every time I have taken an Uber ride I  express my ecstasy to the drivers who reports 'comments of that sort all the time'.

The real shock for me, is that some of my friends who now depend on the revenue from Airbnb and will have to change their lives to accommodate the nanny government, will still be voting Democrat-Union the rest of their lives.

Punishment doesn't seem to affect the thinking of Democrat Lefties.

Point poor family road trip

The ‘point’ in my blog title refers to the Point Foundation started by Stewart Brand in roughly 1971 with funds from the Last Whole Earth Catalog.  Google seems to take the word ‘point foundation’ to a separate organization that makes grants to LGBT's.

There are plenty of documents that the Point Foundation I am describing left behind. They don't appear to have been digitized and put online yet. Point Foundation had six board members.  By the second year Stewart Brand was no longer able to serve as president and I was made president.

Very early on we decided that as an experimental foundation we would get the most experiments underway by having each director plus a regular guest board member make personal grants, take full responsibility for the grants and report back on the outcomes.

Stewart himself launched a very interesting grant.  Then, as now, every bleeding heart believed poverty was a major problem in the United States and was curable.

Stewart's ingenious plan was to fund a fellow he met who had five young children and a wife, all of whom looked and dressed like Okies. They were driving an old Buick station wagon.

Stewart gave them a grant to drive all around the United States and have their car breakdown outside of every significant town. They were then to solicit help as people in need. They were also to report back regularly on the progress and the treatment they received. They were white.

Would you like to guess before I tell you the outcome?

In every single town and city in America, where their car broke down, they were treated to the most generous, professional and civil behavior imaginable. They were offered lodging and food and health care and guidance. No exceptions in any part of the country.

The biggest surprise to those of us on the board was that on Thanksgiving day they were lavishly treated but they had no expectation of that.

In America it is common, (it was common in my family), to invite a stranger to the Thanksgiving dinner. These people did not know that. That is part of the reason we concluded that many people are poor; they simply don't know how the institutions around them work.

Zinc Acetate

I recently had a cold and could not find the appropriate zinc lozenge to treat it. So I bought a box of lozenges online in case I got another cold. One morning last week I felt all the symptoms of a cold coming on, sore throat, sore muscles, slight headache and low-energy.

This time I was able to take the zinc lozenges as directed every two hours on the first day of my symptoms. By afternoon, the symptoms had disappeared and I was feeling fine. The next day I returned to my full exercise schedule.

Here are two articles that are relevant.

The first describes a well-designed and well run test on zinc acetate at 12.8 mg administered as lozenges at a medical center in Detroit. The evidence is overwhelming that the severity of the colds were significantly reduced.

The second is a long article by George Eby, a medical professional, who examines the amount of zinc that finally reaches the blood system and is likely to be effective.

Looking at his table you end up either buying his product or a zinc lozenge from Walgreens.

My experience was that the zinc lozenges I used before the symptoms of the cold turned into a full-blown cold were surprisingly effective.

That's my personal experience and I recommend this to my friends and readers.

Starting a business in Cairo

A few blogs back, I was talking about the positive elements of pro-commerce, as I usually do.

In that instance I was thinking about what type of philanthropy might have long term positive benefits for humans by encouraging commerce. I imagined a philanthropist in the U.S. in 1800.

I then, in my own mind, did a thought experiment about what such a person could do if he were living in Cairo in 1800.

The real problem is there is nothing he could do to promote commerce in 1800 or in 2000 in Cairo. That is a product of my thought experiment.

Cairo, like one third of the world, lacks the most rudimentary institutions for commerce to function. I do not mean all of commerce, because trade is carried out in Egypt effectively as it has been for the past several thousand years. And as it is carried out all over the planet.

What is missing is industrial commerce. I pick Cairo for two reasons. One is that the British tried to start cotton factories in Egypt in the 1870s and found that equipment, technology and knowledge were irrelevant. Industrial factories in Egypt required six times the number of workers as were required for the same project in England.  A very unproductive environment.

In a separate instance, a friend of mine tried to find every exportable item in Egypt and to sell in a store he opened in Shibuya in Tokyo. He had been a Japanese foreign officer in Cairo.

I visited this store. It smelled good. It only carried a few products other than spices and fabrics. That is all that Egypt exports.

Now we can ask ourselves a question:  ‘what are the rudiments required for industrial commerce to operate’?

Everyone, in the field, seems to agree on the need for strong legal protection for private property and a low level of corruption (which may be almost the same thing). There are several that I would personally to add to those two: a diverse population and a national psychic commitment to meritocracy. In a tribal society, including Cairo, the latter two are simply not possible.

I am inclined to think that we are somewhere close to the limits of the expansion and growth of industrial commerce in the world at this point.  If it hasn’t happened already it may never happen.

The shock of defriending

During the recent Israeli defense of its citizens from the rockets launched on its cities from Gaza,  there was a furious explosion of Jew hate throughout Europe and to some extent in the United States.

I found myself defriending six people on Facebook who would previously have been considered friends. In four cases I told them what form of Jew hate they had expressed before I defriended them. In two cases I figured they were too dense and too vicious to understand who they are.

This episode came as a shock to me. The worst Jew hate I have encountered in my adult life was at San Francisco State post-high school institution. I can't bring myself to call it a college or university, it is a pathetic institution that has nothing to do with education or learning.

At San Francisco State, during the 1990s there were many episodes of Arab students expressing their virulent Jew hate on campus and finding plenty of official protection, support and defense for their ignominious behavior.  All the Jewish faculty I knew left. I haven't paid attention to the campus since then.

To now find such extensive Jew hate among people I know has really shocked me. The United States has always been a relatively tolerant place and safe home to Jews. There has been a warm welcome from evangelical Christians and both American political parties.  That was true up until the Democrats began ending their support for Jews, in the last five years. They already had a major Jew hater in Jimmy Boy Carter and a minor Jew hater in Billy Clinton.

I cannot see the future. I have great confidence in the institutions of this country. If it were not for the vast support of the evangelicals in America today, Jews would be in a much worse situation.

While we have moved from maybe a 1 to a 3 on a Jew-hate-scale of 10, the movement is still not alarming. Europe is already a 6.  

My confidence in America is slightly shaken.

The movement from 1 to 3 among people I know, possibly could be attributed to the Internet which has made this kind of evil visible.  

Nevertheless it is uncomfortable and unwelcome.

Europe: religion gone, Jew hate remains

When you read the extraordinary history of Jew hate in Europe in David Nirenberg’s book, you are inclined to see it as central to Christianity both Roman Catholic and Protestant. Hundreds of thousands of people were killed between these two religious sectors (as well as others living in Europe) over the issue of religion. Both sides had their version of why Jews were so hateful. It changed a little over 1,700 years.

Something about WWI changed this Jew hate significantly in post-Enlightenment Europe from a mild tolerance of individual Jews in daily life, in academia, in business to a more pervasive Jew hate that by the late 1920s and early 1930s was making survival difficult for Jews in every part of their lives.

Now we are two generations beyond World War II, when nearly all Jews who lived in Europe were either murdered or migrated, many to Israel.

The European Jew hate has followed Jews to Israel. This Jew hate is also written on the wings of Leftist's ideology and spread in a new form throughout Europe and even to academia and journalism in the United States.

I am forced to come to two conclusions.

• One conclusion (that I have already proposed in the past) is that Jew hate is a reflection of a class society with an hereditary upper class that uses Jew hate to divert attention from themselves.

• Two, that Jew hate has merely migrated to a new ideology which is Leftism and environmentalism. The migration was easy because the new ideology, Lefty-Jew hate, is very similar to the mature Jew hate of the early part of the 20th century. The earlier version was that 'Jews control the emerging successful commercial world'. The Left hates the world of commerce. Leftism now accommodates the old Jew hate perfectly.

Islamic spin offs?

I truly wonder about the level of historic knowledge among most people in the world.

On the Left in the United States there is the preposterous notion that Islam is not a threat to Western progress.

Some on the Left argue that there will be a modernization of Islam that will create tolerance. Others argue that Islam at its core is a peaceful religion and that only extremists are visible and dangerous.

We have a history of religion in the West that goes back several thousand years. We have a history of a single christian church that was dominant in Europe and much of the rest of the world for 300 years until Islam drove it out of the desert and South Asian belt. It remained dominant in Europe for the next 1200 years, regularly fighting Islam at full Army strength.

That Catholic Church never stopped fighting nor showing its intolerance until roughly 1960. I lived before 1960 and I know that the Catholic Church promoted hatred of Jews and Protestants throughout the lands in which it had control from Mexico on the American border to Antarctica. It had been fighting against Protestantism and the Masonic Order for the previous 500 years. Fighting as in the word Army. Fighting as in the word Irish Republican Army.

There is no evidence whatsoever that a majority of individuals in the Catholic Church considered this belligerent, aggressive, intolerant behavior to be unacceptable to them. If they had they would have left the Church and started an off-shoot. There were only a few offshoots and most of them were as intolerant bigoted and warlike as the mother church.

The same is true for current Islam. Muslims are not spliting off to form 'tolerant' sub-orders.  Nor are they swelling the few tiny existing sub-orders (Sufism).

With a genuine knowledge of the history of religion, I cannot find any possible logic that would expect Islam to become a peaceful religion; they will be attempting to kill all non-Islamists for ever. Forever.

Minorities, classes and commerce

My son pointed out that the current Lefty hysterical academic creation of every possible minority-oppressed-group is inappropriate in the world of commerce.

Commerce is based on meritocracy and diversity. Commerce thrives in the most diverse social environments. It does much better in the United States, Canada and Israel than it does anywhere else. That diversity is not definable but it is made up of the wide range of human variability.

Fundamentally commerce thrives on meritocracy. The person who does the job should always be the most capable of doing the job regardless of whether they have one eye in the middle of their head or wears a pink turban.

Into this reality is thrown the preposterous Lefty notion of feminism, racism, sexism, homophobia, imperialism and god knows how many other efforts to categorize people into meaningless cohorts.

The obvious failure of this academic malice is that many extraordinary people who we now appreciate entirely for their merit were not limited because of their modern-day academic classifications. George Eliot is a master regardless of gender. The same is true for Martin Luther King Jr. and Genghis Khan.

There is an apparent contradiction in my life, I confess. I was the leading person in the United States to seek and obtain dramatic increases in minority and female employment in the financial industries, by using a lawsuit.

I did it because there was a strong ingrained bias against minorities and women within the executive class in business. This had to be broken using legal methods; at the time. I have no doubt that commerce would have brought about the same outcome in other industries as it did in finance. Given sufficient time. But commerce and the diversity and meritocracy elements were not well understood at the time and they still aren't.

My personal action is an argument for the use of legal power in times when it is clearly beneficial to wipe away the cobwebs of previous legally ingrained bias.

It in no way relates to the academic absurdity of creating minority intellectual hovels based on ephemeral qualities. That remains anti-commerce and inherently bigoted.

Ideas of statistics

In the last blog I mentioned riding on the shuttle seated next to a PhD candidate in statistics. One of the startling pieces of information for me is that the Common Core educational curriculum includes sections on statistics and probability at the high school level.

That is fantastic.

I believe statistical understanding and probability are fundamental to living effectively in the modern commercial world around us.

I then realized that I have three fundamental ideas that I attach to statistics and I wonder if they are taught in the Common Core curriculum.

The first is the law of large numbers. This must be learned at a gut level as do my two other fundamental statistical understandings.

• If one fills up a series of small bags with beach pebbles and weighs each bag, the weight of all the bags together will be nearly identical to the average weight of each of the separate bags when totaled. This is something that is not obvious and must be understood at a gut level.

• The second gut understanding deals with variance. Variance is a fundamental statistical concept. If a student is shown one set of 10 numbers but all of them are between one and nine (4,9,5,2,3,8,6,1,1,2) and also shown a series of 10 numbers with the various numbers between one and 100, (43,25,61,38,71,72,55,48,51,60) can the student look at the two sets of numbers and understand that the first set could have more variance than the other regardless of the range of numbers? Again a concept that needs to be understood at a gut level.

• Lastly, can a student look at two sets of numbers and recognize one as human made and the other as random generated. ( I have found this to be another gut level and very important statistical understanding. (43 25 61 08 71 72 55 48 91 60).vs.. (10 41 48 53 37 85 14 99 69 35) The first set of numbers is human created. The second is random from a table of random numbers.

Modern statistics

Last week I rode on a shuttle from Denver airport to Boulder sitting next to a PhD candidate in statistics. What a pleasure.

What I was delighted to find, was in the 50+ years since I taught statistics as a TA at San Francisco State College, there have been no significant improvements in statistics.

My shuttle friend described her various doctoral projects and all of them were easily understood by me with my lifetime of work in the field.

There was one particular statistical term that was new in the past couple of decades: bootstrapping. You can look this up in Wikipedia.

Bootstrapping did not come as a surprise to me in any way. One of the perennial problems of statistics has been to fill in the gaps in a typical database in such a way that you do not distort the outcome. Over the years, many techniques have been developed for filling in empty data points.

Bootstrapping is a logical and mathematically defensible method. I have been using many similar approaches to my own data without having the mathematical proof built into bootstrapping. (Aside: the proof uses the Bayes Theorem which I consider a weak theorem.)

My great delight was learning that statistics remains pretty much the way I learned it;  the innovations have been pretty much the simple solutions I evolved on my own.

I wonder how many other powerful fields of study have seen so little evolution.

What does Haiti teach us?

Haiti is part of an island. It is the black African part of the island. The other half is Spanish and Latino.

Haiti was a slave colony that had a rebellion and threw out all of the French, Spanish and British overlords more than 210 years ago. Haiti has been total chaos and poverty ever since.

Every effort has been made by France, the United States and every other European aid giving nation to try and rest Haiti from its abysmal poverty.  Every form of aid and assistance has failed for 210 years.

The first lesson from Haiti is that poverty cannot be alleviated. Poverty cannot be alleviated with money, aid or donations. It is endemic.

At least seven generations of blacks have grown up in Haiti since it became an independent nation. The second lesson is that the culture they brought with them from black West Africa is a permanent poverty culture.

Haiti is not the only example. If we look at Liberia, a poverty stricken West African nation, it is very much the same; except that the slaves went from the United States to Liberia and brought their culture of poverty with them.

The identical island that has the abysmal poverty of Haiti, also has a relatively healthy modern nation: Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic has a Spanish-Latino population that is healthy, stable and fairly prosperous.  Same island. Different people.

The lesson of the Dominican Republic is in comparison to another smaller island: Singapore. Singapore is probably 3 to 4 times richer and far more prosperous than the  Dominican Republic. There is one reason: Singaporeans are Chinese and they bring a culture of pro commerce to their island.

These are three lessons that every bone in the body of a Leftist will rebel against. Poverty is endemic and probably permanent. Africa is not going to produce any prosperity ever. A culture of commerce is the only source of prosperity and health.

Business, anthropology and sociology

If you think about sociology and anthropology, you'll notice that they are both fields that study the relationships between people as they exist in groups and they are the study of those group interactions.

A University of Washington anthropologist studied the extraordinary fishmarket in Tokyo, Tsukiji, which provides most of the fish in Japan and much of the important fish for the world. It is a central clearinghouse for fresh and frozen fish and it is extremely complex with small vehicles scurrying around at a pace and rate that is alarming.

This anthropological study of Tsukiji focused on the leaders and the levels of intermarriage among the various business groups. The anthropologist found many patterns and some hierarchy in the transfer of resources in the market as well as patterns of marriage that sustained the working environment.

When I read the book, I was forced to laugh. It is hilarious and ridiculous. It is like looking at the ties and collars on business people as an explanation of their behavior.

Business is carried on in the ways which I have elucidated in this pro-commerce blog for decades. Marriage, tribes, habits and hierarchy are the byproduct of the simple trading function in this microcosmic market. Voluntary exchange for mutual benefit is the driving force of commerce.

But it does point out to me, as I think about it now, that anthropology and sociology do look at the world in terms of groups of people and how they interact. Business does the same. We are always looking at where people live, what their patterns and habits are, and most importantly what are the active stimulants for any group or segment of that population.

What we differ on, in business analysis, from anthropology and sociology is that we have no bias toward child-rearing, tribal patterns, hierarchy or traditions. Take out those elements and you would have a business school.

Pot and business

There was a rapid surge in the number of small businesses and commercial innovations in the United States beginning in the mid-1970s and extending into the late 1990s.

Since I was personally involved in the development of this small business climate and many of these innovations I did notice a phenomenon that I haven't seen commented on in other places.

The underground sale of marijuana played an important role in the creation of new businesses and marketing innovations.

I say an ‘important role’ but not a central role. It was the hippies own determination to create a ‘new world’ that was the driving force.

What I noticed is that from an early age, teens, many young people were learning the principles of trade. You buy a product where you have unique access and you resell it to a satisfied buyer for a higher price.  The sale price allows you to restock your merchandise and carry on the business. That is trade.

It is my guess the tens of thousands of young people learned their trade skills from selling marijuana and a few other drugs to their friends.

I did see many people using these trade skills to start other small businesses. I also saw the money that these young people made from drug sales used as capital to finance other small businesses.

The same was also true, to a lesser extent, for the rock bands and their business managers who learned their trade skills in music and provided their friends with small business capital.

While I have seen data that shows the most rapid growth of small businesses on the planet occurred between ‘75 and ‘85 in the San Francisco Bay Area I have not seen any comparable data for the development of trade skills in the marijuana business.

Positive philanthropy

A brilliant friend of mine read my earlier blog saying there is no such thing as philanthropy that works. She has been involved in philanthropy much of her life and asked me what could be done to have a positive philanthropy.

I suggest a mental construction. You are in the United States in 1800 with a large sum of money that you want to use to generate well-being for people in the future real-world. What could you do?

Only commerce can generate health, prosperity, freedom and personal well-being. How can you generate commerce in 1800 USA?

At that time the driving forces of commerce were international trade carried out by corporations formed in England and Holland. You could have supported a stock and bond market; a functioning American bank and a campaign to reduce American tariffs. But none of those would really have worked in the absence of an existing commercial environment.  You would have been Alexander Hamilton; unappreicated to this day.

Today we have a commercial environment.  What can be done to stimulate it?

A few years back I was impressed with a program called Junior achievement; it encourages schoolkids to start small businesses. That's an example of a desirable existing project.

We completely lack books, studies and monuments honoring the great commercial heroes of the last two centuries and the great innovators. That can be remedied with positive philanthropy.

We have many programs that encourage innovators today: makers faires, hackers conferences and a range of pro-commerce voluntary groups. These can be supported and organizers can be dispatched to create more.

The world of culture is completely lacking in stories about the creation of corporations and the positives of life within corporations and at the management level. Movies of this sort can be encouraged as well as film festivals on this subject.

There is yet to be a conference or ongoing focus on the history of commerce. That could be funded.

The field is wide open for charitable contributions that could promote a love of commerce. I encourage creating prizes simply for people who can come up with new ideas that are pro-commerce.