Pro Commerce

Me and cybercrime

There was a big brouhaha about the cyber attack on Sony films. This led to a discussion of cyber protection among my morning coffee friends.

I have relevant experiences.

First, a good friend was one of the earliest hackers, John 'Capt. Crunch' Draper, who hacked the telephone system and was able to do virtually anything on the telephone network, most of which was operating on computers. It was free and John had complete access.  He gained hundreds of young accolytes and helpers.

The telephone system was very secure. It was secure only because the technical knowledge and equipment were highly restricted and not accessible to much of the population. This is not true of digital code or anything to do with digital technology.

Nevertheless, I asked John how he got the secret codes for most of his attacks on the telephone system. John called it social engineering. What he did was to concoct some story and late at night call some innocent worker in a telephone center and explain how he, a fellow employee, needed help in getting the passwords for access.

John learned from social engineering that there was always a person somewhere who was willing to give him access to that gigantic computer phone network.

Considering that every such computer network has many vulnerable people who know how it works and have access to it, there will always be a person who can be found to let a hacker get access.

Which goes to the second issue. I have dealt with many financial frauds both in banking and in the corporate treasury world.

There is a simple methodology to protect highly secure information from social engineering. Make sure that two or more people are required to put each part of their passwords together to get the final password. Make sure that that information is redundant somewhere at the highest levels of management.

San Francisco had the wonderful experience that it's chief information officer changed the main administrative password quit his job and demanded hostage money. The City was without computers for nearly a month. The money was not paid and the deal was never brokered. Specialized cyber hackers were hired to break into the system.

It turns out that such truly elite hackers are hard to find and very rare in the society. San Francisco was lucky its system was so simplistic and naïve.

Fog and Allah

I woke up this morning and my house was surrounded with a dense fog.

A dense fog could be frightening if I didn't know the physics behind its creation. We get dense fog every once in a while in San Francisco because the humidity is right, the temperature of the air is right and the radiant temperature from the ground are also perfect to create fog.

I now think about what it is in my physical environment that keeps me from trying to behave in such a way as to protect myself from the fog and to protect my society from the fog in the future. Sailors of yore always dreaded the fog.

I am sheltered in a stable man-made construction with a waterproof roof; my home is nearly immune to earthquakes. It has electricity coming to it with water and natural gas. It is also a repository for the abundant food that I can pick up any time. I am immune to temperature, weather, many illnesses and diseases and my bodily functions are all attended to including washing.

If I were in an environment of cold or hot where I had to travel to get the water, where I had to search for the wood or coal for fire and the food supply was tenuous, the weather would become very important to me and its sources would be obviously the work of gods.

Possibly, someone might convince me that the number of gods I had to appease to get necessary protection for my risky life and survival might only be a unitary God. I could be convinced. Just as Amenhotep was, just as Abraham and Moses were and just as Mohammed was.

It is our secular understanding, plus the world of commerce that has brought us to safety, security and abundance that has made God or gods significantly less important to appease.

Harvard vs Stanford

We have a wonderful comparison of the East Coast society and the West Coast. The great universities of Harvard and Stanford are the valid comparison.

The East Coast is built on a traditional hierarchical inherited society that no longer exists in America. Harvard was always a central pillar of that society. Harvard today still reaps the rewards from two centuries of elitist hereditary power. It is still the locus for people who expect to be powerful in the future in government and law, and on Wall Street. In fact the most famous institutions at Harvard are concerned with government and law.

The West Coast is a non-hereditary society built on hard work competence and ambition. The school for the West is Stanford. At Harvard the engineering, computer and mathematical skills are focused at MIT.  At Stanford they are the major important departments, including one of the first core computers used in forming the Internet.

Harvard is a model of modern day Leftwing sorcery and Lefty environmental voodoo.

Stanford on the other hand, had Condoleezza Rice as a Dean, and has the Hoover institution as its leading intellectual home.

Harvard is the past and Stanford, with its creation of Silicon Valley, is the future.

Masonic Order

In yesterday's blog I looked at the question of a nation that has failed and is in chaos. Russia in chaos fell back on its strongest previous institutions the government and the Orthodox church.

So what did the wild West, the new parts of America rely on as an institution to prevent chaos?

We know that they set up elections to create water districts and sheriffs. That is part of American history. They later organized community life around churches and bars. Still later, banks and funeral homes arrived as well as everything to do with horseback transportation.

What most people don't know is that the most powerful institution that was re-created in every single new town, village and county had already been established on the eastern coast of the United States, it was the: Masonic Order.  In most of America, the buildings still survive.

The Masonic order was the backbone of every new social community. Members got to know each other, elected officers and from these Masonic orders actually found the elected people to run the local secular society.

Most importantly the Masonic order provided contacts for business and the financing for new businesses.

There are several historic references that I find useful. John Paul Jones, who created the American Navy, had to raise funds to build his first ships. He went to Masonic lodges all over the East Coast to get support and raise the money. He succeeded.

In telling the story about his grandfather, Wallace Stegner, who didn't really understand history, does make it clear that his grandfather in Angle of Repose, was able to travel the Rockies in the North West Territories and get jobs for himself building hydraulic facilities, including dams, and sewers entirely from his visits to the Masonic lodges.

In the United States, the powerful institution that brought people together who were known to each other to be responsible adults was the Masonic order. It was the invisible backbone of American society.

There are several historians who argue that it was the Masonic order that created the industrial revolution in England and brought it to the European Continent.

When we look at new countries being formed out of chaos, and our efforts go into nationbuilding, we should understand that it is the strongest institution on hand that gains power in the new society. In the Middle East that is religion and tribe.

What I know from Russia

I tend to learn from my life. I remember interesting things that people tell me about the world and I deliberately seek experiences that will better inform me.

I visited the USSR in the early 80's. I know what a desperate environment it was. In the most elite sections of St. Petersburg and Moscow the public food available in hotels and restaurants was abominable. The water was dirt brown in the faucets and showers. There was nothing that resembles the word retail. The black market for everything was vast. I left the USSR on a plane from Moscow to Tokyo. I kissed the ground. When I got off the plane. The ground in Tokyo was cleaner than anything I had seen in the USSR.

I have not been back since that tragic world became Russian. But I have many friends who have worked in Russia. Many friends who worked in the 90's and in the 2000's in Russia.

Three friends made it clear that Russia's most serious problem is that the willingness to work is almost nonexistent. One friend is a consultant in agriculture. After the fall of communism he found that farmers preferred playing games on their computers to raising crops. 

Another friend bought a hydroelectric power equipment plant in St. Petersburg. He found that it took 2600 people to run the factory. The same factory required less than 200 in the United States. When he found he couldn't let many people go, he was forced to sell the plant at a big loss.

Still another friend who was there all during the 90's helped a new business get started and grow to fairly large size. At that point, in the late 90's, corruption and government intrusion become too onerous to stay in business.

All three of these friends expressed the difficulty of getting around Russia because there are no roads, there are no truck routes, there are only a few railroads, and everyone travels all distances by airplane. Moreover, much of the 90s was characterized by high crime, and higher corruption.

The generation of voters who brought in Putin acknowledged that he created a new government in which his personal friends ran the businesses. But safety was returning to the streets and corruption was limited to standard government channels.

I think those descriptions of the transition from the USSR to Russia are accurate.

What we have is a society that fell apart and the strongest institutions are the ones that survived. It was only the government and old Russian orthodoxy that survived because there was nothing else to begin with.

Overseas banking

There is another way that our government has screwed us. I mean screwed us seriously and painfully.

Americans are not allowed to hold overseas bank accounts, even if they live full-time overseas, without reporting those accounts to the IRS. Moreover, all foreign banks on the planet are required to notify the IRS if they have an American citizen's account.

You can guess what that means. Banks outside the United States do not want any American accounts. Unless the accounts are very large and justify the paperwork of submitting to the American IRS.

This has nothing to do with American taxes. Americans earning income overseas pay local taxes and are allowed to deduct those local taxes from their American IRS returns.

There are some people who cheat. So every other overseas American, that is millions, are being punished.

For me, this is not an abstract evil on the part of the American government and the IRS. I have one account in Japan, that was closed because of this regulation. It was a simple savings account based on the surplus funds I leave in the years I visit.

The other account was more serious, it was in Israel. I was required to have a bank trust account in order to buy domestic Israeli securities. I wanted to invest in Israeli corporations on the Israeli stock exchange. I did for many years until the bank was forced to close my account.

I consider governments to generally be evil, certainly in comparison to the world of commerce. This particular outrage is an example of evil that harms commerce; where Americans are punished by Americans for perfectly reasonable and necessary behavior.

Obesity

I was having dinner at a restaurant the other night and sitting at the adjacent table were two very fat women. In listening to their conversation, it became clear that they were very nice people. Tears came to my eyes.

In our current environment it is very easy to become fat. In fact, only two categories of people are not fat in America. (1)Those who have such overwhelming social pressures that they can reduce their consumption, people who are vain, social climbers and gay men who are horny. (2) And those who were born with skinny jeans (genes).

I have explained what makes the rest of us fat in earlier blogs. It has nothing to do with exercise or activity. I put on weight and I am in the top 1% of active people.

Also speaking for myself, I have been perfectly capable of losing weight in Weight Watchers by reducing my consumption. But I gained it back. Just as nearly everyone else in every controlled study has done.

My daughter Cynthia has half the answer: ‘if you put on weight, its for good’. (An appropriate Merry Christmas warning).

My explanation for why people put on weight: We are confronted with a Darwinian process in the food market. Food producers are constantly seeking new foods that we will find to be so delicious that we cannot restrain ourselves. New products are constantly coming to the market to tempt us.

In a society like Japan where nearly all food is traditional, few people get fat.

Until we have some pharmaceutical way to effectively lose weight, I am going to have great sympathy for all people who are obese. It is hard work carrying around that fat and there is no simple or reasonable way to lose it. It is also very difficult to avoid becoming obese.

Fairness

The Google definition of ‘fairness’ has many attributes. Don't waste your time looking it up. If you are an American or have American values, you have your own definition of fairness based on your entire life history.

My co-author, Sally Rasberry, dealt with young children for many years. Each one would come to her complaining about some other child's behavior that wasn't fair. Raz would always say ‘there is no such thing as fair’.

I can't argue that point one way or the other. I am a champion of the only known fair system that humans have created.

One of the clear meanings of fair is that the person involved in distribution of goods or benefits is operating without bias, and is using an abstract, impersonal mechanism for making any division or selection.

The only term that fits that definition is commerce. The person selling an object makes no distinction between customers except whether they can pay the price. The same is true of business organizations in a truly pro-commerce environment. Non-biased productive output, meritocracy, is the only criteria for rewards.

There are people who consider the commercial world to be unfair because the distribution of incomes is far from equal. That is their problem. In that sense fairness does not apply to biology that produces small blades of grass and giant trees, small smelt and giant whales. It doesn’t apply to physics where some parts of the globe have high temperatures all year round. Others low temperatures and still others variable temperatures. It is not fair; physics and biology are not fair.

When dealing with humans. The only fair system is commerce.

This is not an original observation of mine; it came from my son. Thank you Scott.

Hundredth monkey

In hippie days, an acquaintance of mine, Lyall Watson, published a summary of a Japanese monkey study.  It immediately became fact among the hippies of the world.

When Lyall’s material was later discredited as research findings it remained among hippies and New Agers as a parable.  

Lyall’s version was that monkeys on a river near Kyoto were given dirty sweet potatoes and observed.  The potatoes were to attract the monkeys to the research station.  The researchers, after a few years, observed that more and more monkeys learned to wash the sweet potatoes before eating.  They observed that this phenomenon spread to other monkey troupes all over Japan including other islands.  Watson said that once the number of monkeys who washed sweet potatoes reached 100 it spread to the entire population promptly. That was his ‘hundredth monkey theory’.

This became a parable, that when enough people hold a new insight it spreads by mysterious waves to every other human.

Careful review of the data found a real truth that I hold dear.  

Only young monkeys learned to wash their sweet potatoes.  Old monkey never did.  Young monkeys taught other young monkeys in other parts of Japan.   It spread by direct contact and only slowly from young to young.

The truth I learned from this study is that only young animals are capable of learning new things.  At some point the brain becomes hard boiled and no new learning occurs.  

I have picked age 23 as the point when human beings become unable to learn anything new.  They get stuck in the world view, the values and often the lifestyles they acquired before age 23..

Maybe a few people out of a hundred can learn after age 23.  They are the anomalies that occur in all natural phenomenon.

This explains a great deal of human behavior that I observe.  Nearly everyone is stuck with the brain they had at age 23 with no capacity to learn thereafter.

Weird brain activity

When I was doing interviews for my Social Thought radio program, one of the most interesting interviews was just off the campus of UCLA with a psychiatrist named Ronald Siegel who had written a book on paranoia. The interview is here.

In his practice, which focused on paranoids he had come to the conclusion that paranoia was a chemical disease generated in the brain. Generated by something in the amygdala, the core of the brain that creates fear and is transmitted to the higher orders of the brain.

Since he consider this to be a common chemical process. He focused his efforts on dealing with paranoids by helping them to cover-up their behavior so that it did not appear strange to others. Those people who needed to wear tinfoil inside their hats to protect from outer space observers were encouraged to keep that little secret, secret. If they needed to have tinfoil covering their head. They should wear hats, caps, or wigs and shut-up.

His logic was very clear. You have a chemical problem that will disturb other people so paranoids have to learn how to hide it.

This observation about the amygdala transmitting fear to the higher brain has stuck in my mind.

I now surmise that Jew hate is caused by a chemical or other transmission from the amygdala to the higher brain. There is nothing that can be done to deal with people who hate Jews and are paranoid about Jews controlling the world. We just need to put social pressure on them so they don't communicate their absurd and dangerous views to others. They are not going to change. They simply need to be socially isolated.  

Does this make any sense to you?

Ideas for blogs

I occasionally wonder about whether I will run out of ideas for blogs someday.

I have been writing blogs since before the year 2000. Sometime during that year I got in the habit of doing one daily. Early on I was using an Excel spreadsheet to organize the blogs each day of the month. A new sheet each month.  I was writing a blog a day.  I’ve have never stopped.

While I have repeated roughly half a dozen blogs, by writing them from a slightly different perspective my total number of blogs is roughly 5000. That is 5000 highly personal comments on the world. My poor biographer, if there ever is one.

I write new ideas on my smartphone; ideas for coming blogs. I try to keep the list above five. Before smartphones, I carried a small pad of paper and pen. Which I started doing after Bucky Fuller told me that the same idea will pass through my mind only once every ten years.

It actually amazes me to see so many and such continuous production of novel insights.

I suspect that this reflects a somewhat pre-concious pressure to produce blogs. I think it is generally beneficial for my thinking process. My original ideas come spontaneously and are always unexpected. I presume that the generation of blogs in some way contributes to the generation of original ideas.

Ames Iowa art exhibit

For the first five years of my teenage life I was actively an artist. I have not stopped creating art whether it is furniture, sculpture, or even painting. I do it occasionally. During that teenage period I was actively painting.

Was I any good?  My mother thought so. She had a masters degree in fine arts.  She took me to visit a great artist of the day along with my paintings.  We talked with Isamu Noguchi, the man who gave us our ubiquitous paper lamps and much great sculpture.  He told my mother that I could be a great artist if I worked hard at it, many hours a day, as he did.

At the beginning of my teens I was doing watercolors which impressed the gallery in Seattle where I was doing them at age 13.  It was the Frye and they put them in the entrance area of the gallery. Maybe a dozen of them.

When I was at the University of Chicago I was doing oil painting in the art lab. Still not thinking of becoming an artist.

I had a roommate in Chicago whose brother was studying art at Ames at the State University of Iowa. He was desperate. At the end of a semester of painting, he hadn't done any work. Unknown to me, my roommate Charlie Roll sent one of my paintings to his brother to use as his semester final project.

That painting was selected, by the school as an outstanding work of art and bought by the Ames State Art Gallery. Charlie told me this about six months later.

So one of my paintings with the name Roll as the artist is in the Ames State art collection.

Should I have feelings about this one way or the other? I don't.

Gas price drop helps some

The Left and the Democratic Party are hypocrites. They claim to have an interest in low income people. All of their actions, including the actions that are environmentally supportive harm low income people and make life more difficult for the same people these hypocrites claim to care about.

I don’t use the term ‘poor’ because it is a value judgement not a description.

The most striking example that I can think of is that these Lefty, Democrats, in the interest of environmentalism and ‘groundwater’ have strongly attacked and tried to restrain fracking. Fracking was originally used in natural gas to extract gas from shale. Because it was so effective, along with horizontal drilling, it was expanded to include shale oil.

With complete disregard for the Lefty Democrats and environmentalists, who still restrict oil and gas exploration on federal land, the private commercial world went ahead with fracking of both oil and gas wells in the U.S.

Two consequences: first, there is now so much oil that  the price of oil has dramatically dropped from nearly $4 dollars a gallon at retail, in many areas, to under $2 dollars in several states.

Second is that the greatest beneficiaries of this dramatic price drop in gasoline are low income people who have bigger more  gas guzzling older cars and for whom gasoline expenditures are a much larger proportion of income.

Roughly, based on an ordinary commute of 25 miles and a low gas mileage vehicle at 15 miles per gallon, a low income person saves over $120 a month. A five percent increase in disposable income.  Thanks to fracking.

I would hope someday that low income people can recognize that the Left and the Democrats are their enemies.  I look forward to marches with signs saying: ‘Democrats: Frack you’.

Gazans and Facebook

In quantum physics. There is a concept of action at a distance. I had my doubts when I first encountered it 50 years ago. And I have waited to see a reliable test based on significant distances.

Action at a distance deals with two atomic particles that are paired. Each has a spin that is the opposite of the other. The math in quantum physics says that regardless of distance, that the spin of one, when it is known, determines the spin of the other. Since the equation doesn't include distance this action is assumed to occur in the universe, even though each atomic particle may be at the opposite end of a galaxy.

Something like that helps explain the strange phenomenon that the hatred of Jews on a smidgen of land called Gaza transmits its hatred of Jews to me in San Francisco.

The distance doesn't seem to matter. Wherever I detect Jew hatred in Gaza or among my Facebook friends. I take the opposite direction. I removed those people from Facebook and from my life and make sure that they stay removed. I eliminated five friends on Facebook and have made certain I will not go to Gaza under any future circumstances.

Note to Israel.  See how the world works in my: social sorting.  The decent people long ago left Gaza.  Only the monsters remain.  This will keep happening in each new generation.

 

Not quantum action at a distance but a connection worth noting.

 

Uber and horses

In both San Francisco and New York the use of horses to pull carriages is being banned.  In both cities there is a concurrent effort to ban Uber, the marvelous smartphone taxi business.

The same brain function applies to both, interestingly. Leftist sentimentality.

Leftist look at the horses, working at a meaningless job and feel sorry for the horse.  They have meaningless lives themselves, usually doing meaningless work and identify with the horses.  What they can’t see is that horses have virtually no other function on the planet.  Horse meat is delicious, but the same sentimental people have eliminated horse meat in the U.S.  Riding a horse remains a use of the horse but an honest Lefty would recognize that as just as meaningless as pulling a carriage.

Uber is a case of similar Lefty sentimentality.  Just as the auto made the horse trivial and irrelevant, Uber makes the telephone dispatched city regulated taxi trivial and irrelevant, a century later.

The poor poor taxi drivers.  Uber, with its flexible hours, personally owned cars, better wages and happy customers makes the old fashioned taxi drivers trivial and largely irrelevant.  Especially sitting in their cabs for hours at the airport or in a line at a hotel.

So the sentimental Lefties want to ban Uber.  Sentimentality will lose in the U.S., sooner or later.

However, all over the world Uber is being attacked by the status quo Luddites.  Anti-Uber has traction outside the Leftie U.S. cities because the Left has now combined with America hate. Much of the world is Lefty, hates modernity, hates commerce, hates Jews and especially hates America. That is a potent combination for Uber to confront.

No future

Questions people ask me often turn into blogs.

I was recently asked about the particular innovation in government that I proposed 45 years ago. Random legislature.

The question was, is a random legislature, particularly beneficial in coping with future generations. The questioner meant, would a random legislature be more adept at thinking about future generations than other forms of legislature?

My answer is "no". No one, despite their do-good views or their do-good self description, such as Seven Generations, actually thinks about future generations.

This is not to say that people do not think about future generations and their grandchildren or populations sometime in the future. Stewart Brand is thinking about the world over a 10,000 year horizon and has built a clock for those who wish to think along those lines.

Because of the very simple law of physics, biology, and human behavior; there is really no such thing as the future. That law is the 'law of unintended consequences'. We live in a world that is so complex as to be incomprehensible. Any efforts on our part may have the desired outcome for a short period of time, but inevitably they will have consequences that are impossible to contemplate or anticipate.

If we were honest with ourselves we would say that means there is no future. Technically of course there is always a future. But in the sense that is noble, understandable or even a future that can be anticipated, is erroneous.

I personally do not think there is such a thing as the future. In Japanese, there is no future tense. The same is true in Hebrew. I rank the Japanese and the Jews among the more insightful populations on the planet.

Charles Manson

Charles Manson may be back.

Charles Manson was the head of a late 1960s cult. Manson ordered other cult members to go to the home of Sharon Tate, a movie starlet and kill the people there as well as a few others. They did, and he is still in prison based on his sentencing in 1971.

It has always been feasible to get the home address of celebrities. It was not so easy in Manson's day but he did understand that murdering celebrities and their friends would attract attention to his particular ideology; it did.

Today it is even easier to find the home addresses of celebrities. They are now on the Internet thanks to a hacking group that hacked into Sony Universal studios computer files and has published 47,000 names, addresses and Social Security numbers from their 1099s.

Some of this data is very old and the people who are now celebrities made no effort to hide their own address. Many are people who were paid only a small amount and didn't bother to hide their address.

It strikes me that many celebrities now have their home addresses readily public at no cost to the malicious people who might pursue them. The cost of moving is high and few people want to move in the first place.

At this point they either need to hire guards, buy weapons and become proficient at them or expect some new followers of Charles Manson to visit them inappropriately.

Hacking may a be a more serious crime than the law presumes.

Stephen Hawking

Stephen Hawking is an amazing human being because he is a talking brain in a zombie body.

I am not surprised that his words are treated much like the Wizard of Oz.

However, a few words of caution are worth considering regarding Dr. Hawking. I have never read his books and don't plan to. Nobody I have talked to who knows physics has wasted their time on them.

His periodic pronouncements about black holes and the evolution of the universe do not strike me as being extraordinary and outside the realm of most ordinary physics.

One statement he did make shows that his physical disease has damaged his brain. He has a mental illness of serious consequence. His amygdala has been taken over by hatred of Jews which to me is a sign of brain dysfunction.

He continues to be the Wizard of Oz making statements about artificial intelligence, on global warming and the human future that seem to bear no evidence of intelligence.

This blog remains as a tribute to the view the Stephen Hawking's is grossly overrated in every way except for his ability to cope with his disabilities.

Tribal evolution

We moderns are the result of tribal evolution.

I think that there is a process in the functioning of human tribes that resembles Darwinian evolution with species. I'm not aware of much study that has been done along these lines.

I have observed many tribal groups in Central America,the MiddleEast, Africa and India and it appears to me that they have evolved very different social mechanisms for survival. These mechanisms are very durable and persist over hundreds of generations. They are not based on genes, they are not species.

Tribes do grow and become dominant and they do disappear on a regular basis when their enemies destroy them or absorb them.

What is a tribe? It is a group of people, usually genetically related, that have well established living patterns usually acclimated to a specific environmental niche.

As environmental niches vary, tribes expand and contract; dominate and disappear.

Tribes have behavioral patterns that have been well studied by anthropologists. The patterns deal with family structure, child rearing, management of resources, technical skills and much more.

What appears to me, is that in some parts of the world particular tribes have become dominant because their internal mechanisms gave them robust facility for dealing with their environment and their neighbors.

The Yayoi Japanese came to dominate an archipelago and were extremely capable of adapting to modernity; they had a meritocratic family adoption system. The Han in China came to dominate all of their surrounding tribes and ultimately became such a powerful central government that they have become important world players. They used meritocratic testing systems. I can't say much about India because I don't understand Indian tribal structure.

In northern Europe, one particular tribe, the Germanic, came to dominate all of northern Europe where they still are the dominant tribe. In the instances where that tribe settle in new lands, Iceland, Greenland, England they had an internal structure that rewarded meritocracy. The Germanic tribes (Vikings) had extraordinary skills in dealing with trade and commerce and most importantly provided for social stability at levels never before seen. Their ability to absorb conquered tribes was their greatest tribal survival attribute. It still is.

After creating the modern world, the Germanic tribes in Holland transferred their commercial and governance competence to England and ultimately created the most powerful force in the modern world.... in America. We Americans are truly still one tribe with extraordinary ability to assimilate others into our tribe.

Biosphere II

In the early 90’s some wealthy New Age Texas environmental money, in magnitudes well over $100 million were poured into a 3 acre structure in Arizona that was to simulate the earth in a closed environment. It was called the Biosphere II as opposed to Biosphere I…. the earth.

I knew some of the biologists and environmentalists who were working on the project and it was a popular project around the Whole Earth Catalog crowd. The idea that we could simulate the earth and practice future off-planet living was appealing to many.

I, as the initial funder of the project to build space colonies between the earth and the moon at Lagrange points, had a stake in the issue.  I paid attention.

I knew two things before the project started which were completely unknown to my optimistic fellow Whole Earth people. And the Biospherians.

One, we know far too little about the Earth's biosphere and inter-coordinated functions to think that we could accurately simulate them. The preposterous global warming equations that have since made such terribly wrong predictions, confirms my view.

Number two, human beings cannot live in a small environment without several important elements. One is a government enforced hierarchy, which is why submarines work.  The other is specialized psychological training along with unique personnel selection in order to have a group of people who can cooperate.

Neither of these issues were built into Biosphere II. I predicted ‘mud’ on both scales.

That is precisely what happened after a group of 8 people entered the environment for two years. The oxygen level fell dramatically and had to be supplemented. The amount of food available left most people hungry all the time. Many of the species that were important for survival were destroyed by ants and cockroaches. I would call the environmental test outcome: ‘mud’.

The group of people came out of the environment with a strong hate for each other and deeply divided into two hostile groups. Again I would call that ‘mud’.

To my knowledge inadequate study has been done on either issue. The project was a waste of money.

The headline summary of Biosphere II should have read: ‘We don't know much about our environment and how it work’s. ‘The conditions under which people can cooperate in a confined space for two years are very limited.’

In the real Biosphere I, we have the commercial world.  So it  doesn't matter to much how people can cooperate.  Commerce allows for much diversity among peope and allows a wide range of people to be able to function together. 

New York Times' mind

My readers know that I have no sympathy for the New York Times or its Jew hate and its racist Obama left wing support.

I wonder what goes into the mind of the NYTimes that that makes it so harmful. Large amounts of over-the-counter medicines will not kill you. Just add a little bit of arsenic and they will kill you.  That seems to be the nature of the New York Times mind.  Not lethal most of the time but fatal the rest of the time.

The core mind of the NYTimes is a New Age perspective on the world. I know you're laughing.  To the New Age mixture is added the arsenic of Jew hate and Obama ideology: a lethal combination. That is the toxic mixture.

I don't read the New York Times but I am sent a dozen articles a week by friends who adore this Manhattan based monster.

You may doubt that The New York Times is a New Age institution. Let me give you a few recent headlines: ‘How Hepatic Holograms Let You Touch the Void’: 'Can Mushrooms Treat Depression?’: ‘The Invisible History of the Human Race’: 'Stephen Hawking's Warns Artificial Intelligence’: ‘Inhalable Chocolate’: ‘Indigestible Ideas’: ‘Trippy tots, How Babies See the World’.  That's New Age.

The New Age is alive and well at the New York Times.

If I haven't made it clear in the past let me make it clear now: hippies and the New Age were not the same although they had common roots. The one distinction they both had in common was a complete unwillingness to make judgments about the world. Astrology was just as good as astronomy. Lead could be turned into gold with sufficient force of mind.

It is this willful disregard for rationality that makes the New York Times what it is. The NYTimes is the home to Obama ideology, Jew hate and New Age woo woo.

Children without parents

The Finders were a middle class commune in Washington D.C. They were friends of mine. There is a description of them here and a story here.

This is another story.

The group had six or seven children from the women in the family.  For my purposes, too many of the males were named Michael (my name). I only remember having sex with one of the women.  Among the Finders the women chose their sexual partners, not the men.

One day the women decided they needed some time by themselves.  So they sent five of the children aged 4 to 6 off with four of the men in a van to Florida.  The men, as was their custom, always wore suits.  The kids, as was their custom, wore whatever they wanted and always looked like dirt poor rag-a-muffins.  

They arrived in some northern Florida town and parked next to a play ground.  The men sat on a bench or walked around while the kids played.  

Soon the cops arrived and arrested the men and took the kids to ‘child services’.  The guru of the Finders told the men to just leave everything as it was, not bail out and say nothing.  The local cops called the D.C. police.  Who said they thought the group was either running drugs or was an international spy network.  

Over time, several months, the mothers slowly went to Florida and reclaimed their children.  The charges against the men were dropped and they drove back to D.C.

The key part of the story is what happened a few days after the mass arrest.

The local paper published photos of the five kids asking who the parents were.  The paper got 113 phone calls claiming the kids to be their own, from self identified parents, in a three day period.

That is something important to know about our society.

Also note a recent news phenomenon.  A celebrity, in his old age, is accused of sexual harassment a decade ago, and dozens of women go to the press to claim the same thing over a forty year period.

Hon whod

Do those two words have a meaning separately or together?

There is a game on Android called “Words with Friends”; it is a variation of Scrabble.  But it doesn’t use the Scrabble dictionary.  It has an invisible dictionary.  You only know what the game considers an English word by entering it.  That means many words that have no English meaning are part of the ‘Words with Friends’ vocabulary.  I don’t play the game but my friends who do seem to get great pleasure from finding these imaginary words.

Which takes me to the main subject.  Improvisation.  I took some improv classes from Keith Johnstone.  I loved it. 

Improv is the opposite of Leftism.  It thrives on optimism, ridiculing social status and imagination.  That is why I love it.  I also enjoy the TV improv program ‘Who’s Line Is It anyway?’

Optimism?  Nearly all conversation moves ahead with a positive response.  ‘How are you?” “OK” is a dead end.  “How are you?” “Except for the new thumb I’ve grown, everything is fine."  That can move into an interesting conversation.  Status.  ‘What are you doing on the floor?’ ‘Looking for my winning lottery ticket, I hid it when my daughter came to borrow money last night.’

Doesn’t commerce have some of the qualities of improv?  It creates optimistic societies which thrive as long as they are optimistic.  It raises the Nobody to great riches and status.  It is the only human system that worships innovation and thrives on it.

Commerce, improvisation, vitality.

Capitalism is a fantasy

It is time for this blog. I regularly remind my readers that the term “capitalism” is Lefty nonsense. It is an empty term with no meaning. It is a term given respect by the world of commerce, lacking a better word.

“Capitalism” is a term defined in opposition to “socialism” and “communism”. It is used by Marxists to define the difference between GOVERNMENTS that rely on independent business versus a mixture of Independent business and government owned business and business entirely owned by the government.

That has nothing whatsoever to do with the contemporary world except for North Korea where the government owns everything but the small farmers markets.

It never had any meaning. All systems of government have capital. Capital is highways, machine tools, maps, textbooks. computers and dancing girls. All societies have these. Who owns them is always ambiguous even in the USSR and China.

The correct term for the world we see around us is “commerce”. “Industrial commerce”  is the unique part of commerce that has grown most rapidly in the last 200 years and has brought us the modern world of prosperity, abundant food and extraordinary health..

If you would like to use reliable, accurate, meaningful English, use the word “commerce” or the words “industrial commerce”. Forget the ideologically vapid term “capitalism”.

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Footnote: I don't use the standard economic definition of capital. To me capital is knowledge embedded in institutions and products. It consists of 90% embedded knowledge. But it simply doesn't matter. “Capitalism” is nonsense regardless of the definition of capital..

Europe today and tomorrow

The European parliament voted to authorize pursuit of the idea of breaking up Google and a few of the other ‘gafa’ (Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon) for antitrust reasons.

I’ve explained here that none of these is a monopoly in the traditional 19th century sense where industry entry is too costly (no longer a possibility with the level of distributed capital in the world) nor are they buying up potential competitors.

They are ‘service monopolies’ a term I invented more than 30 years ago to describe a business that gains a dominant share of the market because it serves its customers so well, that movement to a competitor only occurs when the ‘service monopoly’ fails to match the quality of the competitor.  People stay where they are, shop where they do, behave as they do so long as it is comfortable.  They only change when the change is worthwhile.

The Europeans claim to want to generate local competition and get more taxes from the ‘gafa’.  Its hard to tax anything that is electrical and international.  Too bad.

As for creating local competition: you European idiots never stop driving entrepreneurs away from Europe.  First it was communism and socialism, then pervasive ‘Jew hate’ and for the past half century it has been work rules only an incompetent zombie could like.  

Europe, you are dead.  Get used to the coffin you live in. Leave the rest of living people alone.

Alpha and beta errors

I written several blogs on the necessary minimal statistical knowledge needed for the modern world.  I may have been writing for the visiting Martian aliens.  

One of my two oldest granddaughters was doing her 3rd year high school math for an IB class.  IB is similar to AP advanced placement, except it is an international standard.  She wanted my help on a statistics project.  

I was astounded.  She was using statistics with nearly the same agility as I.   And she loved it as much as I do.  

So I am not writing this for my progeny, maybe for Martian aliens.

Knowing about alpha and beta errors is important.  It probably saved my life several decades ago, at least kept me from ruining it.

Sometimes called type I and type II errors, these are erroneous test outcomes.  An alpha error is finding a result that doesn’t exist, and beta is not finding a result that does exist.

When I was first married and had a blood test for something-or-other, the test showed I had syphilis.  Further testing showed that I didn’t.  If that idiot doctor who did the test and the technician who told me the results had told me that the test (the Wasserman) had a 23% alpha error I would never have taken it.  That is a bad alpha error.  My wife and I knew it was a mistake but it could have seriously disrupted a happy marriage for a few weeks while the more reliable test (TPI) was done.

Nearly 20 years ago a doctor recommended a PSA test for prostate cancer. I looked up the alpha and beta errors.  Both were too high for me to trust the test outcome.  Mostly the alpha was too high.  I’ve never taken the test.

Several of my friends took the PSA test, merely because they were getting older.  They had the surgery and the various follow-ups.  Nearly all of them had incontinence problems and all of them had erection problems.  That defines ‘near death’ for me.  

Did they have prostate cancer? Who knows, the PSA test is crap.  If they had cancer was it dangerous?  Again, who knows.

One of the few doctors who could pass for a competent scientist wrote a book on How We Die. He paid for 14 autopsies on men who died of ‘old age’.  One third of them had prostate cancer.  They didn’t die from it.

People should understand alpha and beta errors.  It matters to our lives.

Online magazines

A friend recently sent me the URL for Tablet an online somewhat Jewish magazine.

I read two articles that I liked.  They were long and I didn’t like reading them online.  

I realized that I have online subscriptions to three or four magazines and the WSJ.  I don’t look at the online magazines and only read the online WSJ when I’m travelling and can’t buy the paper edition.

Why?

The answer is simple.  Reading on my big screen (actually two screens) is ‘work’ which I do at my desk.  Reading for pleasure is done on a couch with light reflected on the page.

Just my division of work and pleasure, which matches computer screens and paper.  The same applies to the iPad.  It feels more like work when I read a backlit screen.

Environmental lesson

In the most recent election, the 2014 midterm, a local San Franciscan named Tom Styer put nearly $60 million of his own money into supporting environmental candidates.

I don't know who he actually supported. Nearly all environmentalists in the United States are lefty fundamentalists Democrats. It is a political religion for them, after all.

What I do know is that the Democrats lost miserably. Everywhere, at every level. Enviro-Democrats probably lost more seats at every state and federal level than they had ever lost before in American politics.

This election was not a wave election, it was a tsunami election. I don't think a single penny of Tom Styer's money had any positive effect.

The environmental movement did not benefit from his $60 million. One could argue that without his money they would have done worse.  I'm sure many Democrats told him that.  But he couldn't have had a bigger loss. 100% loss is the upper limit.

It is heartwarming to me to know that so much money funding the environmental movement was completely wasted.  The movement long ago became an armageddon driven religion.

This waste of money is not unusual since nearly all money poured into political campaigns by naïve people is wasted. See the last blog of November.

What is most heartwarming for me is to see that people who believe in simplistic memes ('money is important to elections') are punished by the political system for their naïveté. You do not learn about politics by donating money.

Relationships

I never discuss relationships in this blog. It just isn't me.

I have a good sized sample in my personal background but I rarely give it much thought.

I was recently asked to deal with the issue in a family matter. The issue was whether a couple who were getting back together would stay together.

I explained the metaphor I use: a relationship begins with a large house with many rooms and many doors. Each time the couple finds an irreconcilable issue, say whether to put the toilet seat down after use, one door closes. Whatever the solutions, the issue never comes up again so as to avoid disputes. That door is closed. Common issues are tooth brushes, politics, who pays, driving and neatness with clothes.

As the relationship develops more and more contentious issues are encountered and more doors close. Sometimes the issues come up again upon the return from a trip or time apart. One party has forgotten a door that had previously been closed.

Relationships end when too many doors have been closed and one party feels that the relationship is too restricted to be comfortable any more.

Does that metaphor work for any of my readers?

Soccer again

One of my friends has a phrase that is powerful: 'its the number'.

He was a 'trader' in steel, chips and a few other products. Traders are rare people who can win and lose everyday and still keep on trading. What my friend is saying is that a trader will be hired by any company to sell anything if he/she can deliver the net profit. 'The number'. If the goal is a $100 million a month net revenue in bond trading, anyone who can deliver that number will be hired as a trader, regardless of charm, skin color or previous condition of servitude.

The reality of modern commerce is that we use numbers to evalute most workers from the top CEO to the bottom maintenence man.

Which brings me to soccer. A national sport is based on a metaphor for national life. Most of the world loves soccer. Americans really don't care.

The metaphor for American sports is 'the number'. Commerce is based on numbers. If you watch any American sport on TV you will see an endless stream of numbers. 'This quarterback has thrown 102 times in 5 games with 63 completions'; 'four successful rebounds in this game at home compared to an average of 6.2 in the previous 6 games at home'; ' 33.6% of his hits are to right field so far this season, with 7% fly balls'.

American sports is about 'the number' because America is the commercial leader of the world. Our sports are a metaphor for commerce. Maybe the only real commercial nation on the planet. Certainly the engine of global commerce... a point I make regularly.

I might add that Japan loves baseball and the numbers there are of the same importance as in America.

Soccer has no yard lines on the field, the scores are usually one digit, virtually no numbers during the TV game and it is fine for a world that generally hates America and commerce.

Fashion retailing

The photos on this page were taken at a Uniqlo store in San Francisco.

I go to Japan every year so I saw the first Uniqlo store there, not too many years ago. I bought several long sleeve shirts because they were low priced and high quality.

Uniqlo has grown to be a global retailing giant. It is now forth in gross revenue after H & M (Swedish), Zara (Spanish), and Gap (San Francisco). Uniqlo is growing the fastest.

This is the most comprehensive article on the marketing methods of the four stores. Zara is the most automated and can catch trends the fastest. Uniqlo is the most analytic and goes for a trend in a core style.

Last year Uniqlo opened a new 8 story store in Ginza. On each floor above the first were a row of rotating mannequins behind a glass wall. Inside the store were similar mannequins arranged to show the goods on each floor. The heavy use of mannequins seems to be a Uniqlo innovation.

On this page I have photos of the use of mannequins in Uniqlo stores, even on the upper walls. The most surprising is the use of miniature mannequins on the outside of the store, a tiny version of the Ginza store.

To me, the use of mannequins to show the near infinite variety of combinations of clothes that are stylish and possible, appeals to the current fashion trend to: 'be unique but still well put together'. It is a way to stimulate fashion imagination and make a limited store inventory look very large.