Pro Commerce

European antitrust

The question is not ‘is Europe dead?’ the question is ‘How much damage this moldy-smelly zombie can do to the rest of the world?’

When you look at the European antitrust racket and the general European hate commerce ideology. the answer is: ‘Europe is doing real damage to the rest of the world of commerce.’

The EU hassled Microsoft for ten years over antitrust issues.  The EU gained nothing, there is no competitor to Microsoft in Europe; Microsoft didn’t change for the better because of Europe.  Microsoft lost its spirit of innovation and plays no leadership role in the tech world since the fight with the EU.  Fighting a bureaucracy often creates a bureaucratic response in the victim.  

The EU has been fighting Google for nearly a decade and created a stupid penalty on the Google operation with no positive outcomes.  We have yet to see if the EU bureaucracy has badly damaged Google.

The EU and France in particular are fighting Uber with a viciousness Europe usually reserves for Jews.  Nothing positive will be gained.  How much damage the EU will do is yet to be seen.

Much of the EU is going directly after Jews, as is their long standing multi-century habit.  There is a never ending stream of Jew-hate-boycott-Israel actions all over the EU.  That is independent of the EU foreign policy which continues to be one of hate Jews.  Norway and Sweden take the lead in the Jew hate European world; but they are only incrementally more aggressive.

The answer to any question about Europe and commerce is: Europe is to be dreaded not just treated as an old pathetic dying creature.

Is this the effect of 9/11?

I have long speculated that the divisiveness and anger of the Democrat Party is the reason for the no-growth recovery from the 2008 financial recession.  The reason for this speculation is the optimism associated with starting new businesses that is thwarted by the Democrat anti-commerce ideology..

Economic growth and vigor require a large number of new business formations and the associated innovation.  This ultimately results in spurts of productivity.  Since I played a role in helping the hippies create a great flowering of new businesses in the 1970’s that resulted in the burst of economic growth in the 1990’s I saw the connection with my own eyes.  Our explosion of small businesses created the personal computer and the Internet.

While I am not back tracking on my view of the damage the Democrat Party does to American economic vitality, my recent blog on the vulnerability of our 150 year interim era of modern commerce has forced me to consider that the Islamic attack on the U.S. on 9/11 may have had a more profound effect that took several years to become visible.

I say this because nearly all the currently vital corporate powers and the source of our great vitality pre-dated September 2001.  

Amazon 1994

Netflix 1997

Google 1998

Itunes  Jan. 2001

Wikipedia Jan 2001

The only exception is Facebook which dates to 2004 and grew initially on a college campus surrounded by young people.

We are in a sterile era today that has 100% of its roots in the prosperous optimistic 1990’s.

It is very possible that the shock of the Islamic attack on the U.S. is being felt today.

No Fed: zero interest rates

We live in the most unusual economic period in history.  Never before have we or any people in the world lived with a ‘real interest rate’ of zero for 7 years.

Real interest is an economic concept introduced by Abba Lerner at the same time he gave meaning to Keynesianism in 1943.  His real interest rate deals with the type of capital investments made by a society.  When real interest is low, bridges and highways are built, when real interest is high, quick return is abundant, like retail coffee shops and liquor stores.

With 'real interest' near zero it would be time to make long term investments, but there are very few.  Corporations prefer bonds because long term investments have disappeared due to environmental studies and environmental legal battles that take eight years to settle before a project starts. (Example: a desalination plant in San Diego.)

I think the Fed no longer exists.  Sure it has dozens of expensive buildings and thousands of employees supported by a tax on private banks, but it has little or no monetary effect.

Interest rates on domestic loans are based on a combination of long term U.S. bond rates plus a percent for risk.  Prime one year corporate loan rates are a combination of U.S. bond rates plus 2%, for home loans it is bonds plus 3%, auto loans plus 5%, credit card loans plus 14%.

The Fed currently makes ultra short term loans to member banks (weekly market) at the ‘window’ which only determines bank profitability.  

The open market behavior that is supposed to determine interest rates and the exchange rate of the dollar, no longer works.  The Fed has a trivial effect on the $40 trillion U.S. bond market.  The bond market is a self determined market of its own.  Like the $25 trillion stock market.

The U.S. bond market determines the value of the dollar relative to other currencies, mostly based on the relative rates of return for financial instruments and the 'balance of payments'. (Not the 'balance of trade' which is different.)

Inflation is determined by the same forces as those effecting the value of the dollar.  A strong dollar based on balance of payments creates a low inflation, zero inflation or deflation.  The Fed is just as irrelevant in the inflation issue as it is on the value of the dollar.

The Fed has been stuck in its real role: irrelevant, for seven years; just as the Bank of Japan has been stuck there for 25 years.

 

Close friend changed his mind

I have, on regular occasions, expressed my view that primates only learn before they become adults.  The onset of adulthood is the end of an open mind capable of change, new insight.  Human adulthood onset is age 23.

Based on examining my thousands of friends I estimate that only 1 out of 200 people is capable of new thought after age 23.

I now have to change my number to 1 out of 175.  A very close friend of mine changed his mind for the first time in the decades I have known him.  

Here is what happened.  After reading Michael Oren’s account of his years’ as Israel’s ambassador to the U.S. I concluded that Barack Obama is a vicious person, not just a Jew hater.  I had read Oren’s two masterful historical works and even did personal supplemental research on one.  Oren is a brilliant, honest and competent man,  

What Oren said in his book Ally changed my mind and shaped my views.  I  occasionally mentioned this to my close friend and he treated it like a ‘good friend with a bee up his ass’.

Then as a last ditch effort, I gave my friend this review of Oren’s book by Elliott Abrams.  My friend changed his mind.  He now sees what a vicious Jew hater Obama is.

I have had to change my mind from one in 200 to 1 in 175 people can change their mind after age 23.

Awaken my readers!

We are in a the middle of a mass hysteria.

There is no spokesman to say the simple thing that needs to be said.  'Strong socialist, fascist and communist governments in the last century killed tens of millions of kind, loving, productive and wonderful people.  A strong centralized government is a horror that we must never allow to gain power again.  Yet it has in the U.S.'

We have an IRS that carries out political campaigns against the Democrat Party enemies.  The NASA has been actively promoting a human caused global warming apocalypse with falsified data. The Department of Justice is jumping into local cases and deliberately promoting racial violence and harming local police efforts to calm rioting.  The list goes on.  

Our own government is out of control with an exposed criminal, Hillary, running for president and the rest of the Democrat  ticket consists of a clown, a politician who helped cause the Baltimore riots and a socialist who promotes envy and solutions that have failed everywhere they have been tried.

I have been able to recognized three mass hysterias before. The first in the early 1980’s when nearly everyone believed there was vast child kidnapping going on by strangers.  Everyone believed it was in the hundreds of thousands.  (Actual data was 110 stranger abductions per year.)  There are still residual effects with children not allowed to walk to school and  phony ‘Amber alerts’ all over the U.S.

The second was the satanic abuse hysteria in the late 1980's.  Daycare centers all over America were accused of carrying out satanic rituals on the children in their care.  Child testimony was sought and used to put dozens of innocent devoted daycare workers in prison.

The third was ‘recovered memory’ in which adults in the early 1990's accused other members of their families of crimes that ‘had been forgotten’ until the memory was recovered by therapists.  An unknown number of families were shattered with these fictitious accusations.  This therapy was weakened when a prominent psychiatrist wrote a powerful article attacking the hysteria in the New Yorker.

Nothing ends an hysteria.  I runs its course.  Everyone who yesterday firmly believed in Bernie Sanders as a new leader and believed in the wonders of government solutions to major problems, the day after the hysteria ends, deny they ever believed it.

I hope this Lefty-Enviro-Racist hysteria is over before the election next year.  Our society can be destroyed if we don’t wake up soon.

Meaning of MAD today

When the Iron Curtain came down it was quickly discovered that the USSR never accepted the MAD, Mutually Assured Destruction, doctrine that had guided the U.S. nuclear strategy for 35 years.

The MAD doctrine focused on the use of a second strike capability.  If the USSR or China used a first strike to attempt destruction of the U.S. then a second retaliatory strike had to be a certainty.  That would make sure a first strike never occurred.

The USSR was found to ignore MAD and assumed that a first and second strike would deplete both arsenals and leave the USSR in a survival state because of good civil defense ( Moscow subways are very deep underground) and able to fight a traditional winning war.

At this point we have a different scenario.  We have nuclear Israel vs Iran and nuclear North Korea against Japan.

These are different situations than MAD or USSR ‘survival’.  Israel is two major targets with 80% of its population  and Japan is also two targets, both very large but about 70% of the population.  Iran and North Korea each have one target about 80% of their population.  

Since neither Israel nor Japan will start a nuclear exchange I argue that they are relatively immune to a single enemy that could be considered a ‘mad man’.  

Both Israel and Japan have a narrow target area, in the sky, relative to an incoming missile.  Therefore both countries can afford a massive missile defense shield with dozens of defensive missiles.  This is true as long as the risky enemy is known and identifiable.

From a survival point of view I think both Israel and Japan can deal with their single enemy being armed for many decades into the future.  If those enemies obtain nuclear armed submarines, the situation would change.

However despite this analysis, it is my opinion that even one nuclear bomb exploded by an enemy will bring the entire modern world to an end.  The level of freedom necessary in the U.S. and most of the world for modern commerce to continue would be destroyed by the fear engendered by one nuclear exchange.

MAD may be gone, but the nuclear bomb era is more dangerous than ever.

How fragile is modern commerce?

A few blogs back I considered the possibility that the great 150 year era of modern commerce is coming to an end as the world and the U.S. succumb to Lefty anti-commerce ideology.

Here I want to consider the resilience of modern commerce and the possibility the the era may have a greater lifespan.

I have to use nations as my test cases.

The first example is Holland.  Holland became the first truly modern commercial society.  In a short span of 70 years from 1620 to 1690 Holland created nearly all the modern financial instruments from a bond market to worldwide insurance.  Holland created the Hanseatic trading area in which all the North Sea countries began thriving.  That ended when Holland conquered England in 1688 and England became the overwhelming ‘big brother’ and global suzerain.  Holland lost its vigor, its expansionist dynamic and its central role in European intellect.  Probably due to the transfer of its genius to a larger population.

The second and most horrible example is England and Northern Europe.  This area had extraordinary dynamic commercial growth and innovation from the 1830’s in England and the 1870’s in Northern Europe until the onset of WWI.  There was some vitality in the interwar era in this area.  It was gone entirely after WWII as anti-commerce socialism became triumphant in every European satrapy including England.  Europe has been dead to commerce and innovation ever since.  With the Islamic invasion of Europe the moribund states have become a cluster of zombies.

The third example is the brief 40 year flowering of Japan from 1950 to 1990.  Postwar Japan enjoyed the presence of the American Armed Forces and the explosive modern commercial growth that came with the weakening of the traditional 2,000 year old Japanese hierarchy.

The traditional hierarchy regained control of the society with the Real Estate bubble bust in 1991 and the end of an expanding population.  Commerce in Japan has lost its vitality without succumbing to socialism.  Simply the re-institution of a traditional society.

We have too few examples to tell us conclusively that the vitality of modern American commerce is nearing its end.  

My guess is that we are in an extended period where the vitality of American individualism is in a prolonged battle with anti-commerce Leftism that controls academia, the media and government at the national level and in the major cities. Which way this battle will move is not clear to me.  The world outside the U.S. is an anti-commerce swamp that resembles seaweed and kudzu covering everything and creeping ever outwards.  

The battle for the survival of the modern commercial world will only be fought in the United States under the umbrella of a Pax Americana.

Chamber of Commerce vs private pilot

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce recently took a political stand that I strongly reject.

The Chamber came out in defense of the right of businesses to operate robocalls to cellphones. Robocalls intrude on millions for the benefit of dozens. Bad ratio.

This reminds me of the AOPA (private pilots) position on an issue that favored private pilots in the Orange County/LA Basin. A heavy air traffic area.

I ran into trouble as a private pilot with the AOPA position because I am also an airline passenger.  I consider my safety as an airline passenger, of which there are millions,  to be significantly more important than my desires, whims or wishes as a private pilot.  Of which there are a few hundred thousands. Bad ratio.

I run into the same problem with the U.S. Chamber position on robocalls.  I consider the time in my life wasted answering robocalls on my cell phone to be much more important to me and everyone else in my cohort and family than the survival of a few tiny parasitic advertising companies.

At some point these special interest organizations should give some thought to the bad situations they get into when they have their organizational interest trump 99% of their member's interests.

End of Art

There was an article in Commentary Magazine on the subject of the End of Art.  I read it.  Never understood a word.  It was convoluted and said nothing that I could recognize as coherent. I liked the title.

I’m actually talking about the end of art of the kind that is displayed in museums, galleries, concert halls and theater.

There are exceptions, which helps explain what I mean.  One artist who is still creating art is Richard Serra.  His art is steel on a grandiose scale.  He is at the intersection of great industrial objects such as battleships, the Airbus 360 and Frank Gehry buildings.  All of them are on a continuum.  None is more ‘art’ than the other.

The same is true of the Japanese painter Aida Makota.  He is an exception.  His art converges with everything: porn, TV commercials, academic lectures, household decor, street graffiti. All of them are on a continuum.  None is more ‘art’ than the other.

The same is true for music.  This was brilliantly understood by John Cage.  I heard Cage perform in Chicago at a YMCA in 1957.  He had 3 radios on top of a closed baby grand piano.  I stayed for the entire 2 pieces he did.  The rest of the audience had left long before the end.

To Cage everything in our environment is music.  He is right.  The bird sounds and the neighboring children playing converge with the motorcycle and the 18 wheeler backing up for a turn.  

When only a few people in the 19th Century were working full time creating art and struggling to improve their skills and communicate with their cohort, we got art.  Art that deliberately influenced the way we communicate and perceive.

Now, there are no boundaries.   Everything is art.  Some good, some great and most trivial.

It rarely has to do with museums, galleries. concert halls or theaters.

Do you get my point? No distinct category that is 'art'.

Trump and Obama

I disclaim any special knowledge or competence to talk about presidential campaigns.  I only worked in one, only then in California.  I have rarely predicted the presidential vote outcome correctly.

I just wanted to observe the great similarity between the 2007-8 campaign of Barack Obama and the 2015 campaign of Donald Trump.

Both attack foreign countries.  Trump attacks Mexico and China and promises to fix both problems.  Obama attacked Canada and China and promised to fix both.  He promised to change the NAFTA treaty with Canada then sent a private envoy to Canada to say he didn’t mean it.

Both attack their fellow candidates with impunity.  Obama was especially nasty towards Hillary Clinton, Trump has been nasty to Carly Fiorina.

Both are treated as teflon royalty by the press.  For different reasons.   Obama’s extreme Lefty socialism was the same as the press’s views.  They loved him for his skin color because of their white guilt and his public values.

They are deferential to Trump because he gets so much press and makes them seem important.

That is all that I see differently than the rest of the commentariat.

Red dirt

I’ve spent a great deal of time travelling in the Third World from Guatemala to Laos to Malaysia to India to Cameroon to Niger to Afghanistan to Mali to Mexico.

Every place in the Third World has one thing in common.  The dirt on the ground is red.

I have no idea why this is true. It is true.

I want to point it out to my readers in case one of you has an explanation.

Is it a cause or effect?  Or something else?  Does the red soil keep people from believing in progress, from working regular hours, from saving and improving?  Could it be the other way around.  Do people in poor countries fail to water the land, to fertilize it, to grow plants.  Maybe they like the feel of the red dirt on their feet or like the color and texture.

I just raise the question.

Terry Gross and Obama

Are you aware of how static and bureaucratic National Public Radio is?  It never changes.  Terry Gross’s program Fresh Air is anything but fresh.  She has been on the air with the same program since she was 24 years old in 1975.  She is now 64 years old and the program has not changed in 40 years.

I noticed that Terry listens to many brilliant and thoughtful people but she never learns.  She never changes her opinions or her questions.  Time and conversation does not have any influence on her.  She has interviewed many feminist historians and she always says the feminist revolution began in 1963 with Betty Friedan. Every one corrected her and mentioned Simone de Beauvoir.  She never learns. She says the same thing every time.

I noticed the same failure with the local San Francisco NPR Michael Krasny version of Terry Gross.  Year after year, same question, never learning from the endless stream of experts who correct him on a variety of subjects.

I, of course, ascribe this to my view that primates stop learning at age 23.  Only one out of 200 people learn after age 23.

But to me the most important lesson deals with our current president, Obama.  Definitely incapable of learning.  No matter what happens in the world he never learns and never changes.  He attacks the Republicans in Congress and it hardens their resistance to him.  Increasing over 7 years.  He never changes.  The same with allies and enemies.  He attacks our allies and encourages our enemies.  The allies stopped supporting him long ago but he never modifies his behavior.  

From his first day in office he has blamed Israel for the lack of a peace treaty with the West Bank Arabs.  He has blamed Israel’s construction in the West Bank and Jerusalem for the inpass and general Arab anti-Americanism.  Despite 7 years of West Bank Arab resistance to everything he does and the Arab Spring, he never changes his mind.

Similarly with his encouragement of our enemies.  He has supported Turkey since his first day in office, calling Erdogan his 'close friend'.  When he begged the Israeli PM to apologize to Erdogan over a Turkish invasion of Israel, Erdogan ignored the apology.  Erdogan is now using American weapons to attack America’s Kurdish allies, paying no attention to Obama.  

Obama never learns and never changes his mind when reality overwhelms him.  Like Terry Gross.

Repeat Blog on Sept. 18th

I have posted a fresh blog every day for over 6,000 days.  Today's is too important to me, so I'm repeating it for one day.

The end of our world

I’ve got to admit that Obama and the Democrats pushing a vicious anti-commerce agenda, cities under union control, Europe headed for continued no-economic-growth and the anti-commerce moslem invasion are giving me a different sense of the world.

I’m seeing the 19th Century as a pax Britannia up until WWI and pax Americana post WWII.  The periods of global stability were under these two domains. Every form of anti-commerce was tried in Germany, the USSR, India and China and finally in socialized Europe.  Since then a small part of the rest of the world grew on America's coattails and these anti-commerce projects failed.

It was America, the engine of the world for the past 65 years with a great American pro commerce umbrella and a military pax, that created the growth of wealth in the world and the U.S.  U.S household income grew from 1946 at a level of $15,000 to $55,000 in the early 2000’s (constant dollars).   This occurred along with the movement of women out of the household and growth in living space as well as a level of luxury for everyone that was inconceivable in the past.

America provided the global peace with military power to protect trade expansion and commerce, while America provided the innovation in every field from medicine to telecommunications.

America has been a unique nation.  Its booming commerce and individual freedom along with an order of magnitude larger military have continued the mid 19th Century boom into the early 21st Century.

We must ask ourselves whether this is the end of a booming commercial era because Obama and the Left  have deliberately, over 8 years, abandoned our global military suzerainty, antagonized our allies and encouraged our enemies sufficiently to permanently end the Pax Americana.

Has the domestic Leftie disaster with geometric growth in government bureaucracy and an anti-commerce milieu permanently damaged America as a productive engine of the world?

I don’t know.  But I am capable of seeing my life as having occurred during an extremely brief historical episode of commercial triumph that ends soon after my own life. The triumph of anti-commerce pervades the world except for Israel that is hated by 164 UN member countries (119 voted to abolish Israel and 45 abstained).  

In the United States every major city, except San Diego is controlled by union dominated-anti-commerce Democrats.  The same anti-commerce mentality that destroyed Detroit and Baltimore.

Not much room for hope.  Only a few hundred people alive today can grasp the central role of a pro commerce idea in shaping our wonderful modern world.  This bloom of commerce was an accident.  Maybe it can be washed away.

A hundred million people are indifferent to the modern world and the remaining billions are stuck in the values of an anti-commerce world.

(I will treat the fragility of commerce in a future blog.)

End of San Francisco boom era

I think we will see the Summer of 2015 as the peak of the San Francisco Internet Boom.

San Francisco is a boom town, like the wild days of any gold rush.  Traffic is unbearable, cranes are everywhere, coffee shops are full and parking spaces are non-existent.  Unemployment is negative.  Getting workers is impossible.  Family members and retirees are recruited for every project.  Construction workers are coming into town from 2 hours away.  Rents are the highest in the nation. A one bedroom apartment, about 900 sq. ft. is $3500 a month in an ordinary neighborhood.

This boom has peaked.  How do I know?

First this boom needs to be understood in historic terms.  The first dot.com boom began in 1994 and ended in 2000.  I call it the HTML boom.  Every small business that had a business card and a handout flyer needed the equivalent online.  That was about 1.5 million projects and 100,000 jobs.   Those 1.5 million HTML projects had a beginning, middle and end.

The second growth spurt began in the late 1990’s was for all the businesses that could sell products online.  That was focused on San Francisco and the Peninsula.  Online businesses primarily use databases.  I call that spurt the Internet Database boom.  Those businesses require permanent staff to maintain the websites and IT staffs to supervise.  What began in San Francisco spread all over the country, to lower cost locations and it has now spread to the world.  The Internet Database boom is now mature and has become a permanent enduring industry.

The third boom came from the Iphone.  It is the App boom.  It began in 2008, has ridden the spurt of the Database boom and has now crested itself.  The App boom brought 100,000 app developers to San Francisco.  There isn’t much money in the app business, very few $billion dollar companies came out of it.  Their aren’t always new interesting apps, once we got past the million app mark.  

Now the second boom has leveled off, with a number of $billion Internet companies steadily growing, but none with geometric sales still ahead of them.  The third App boom has peaked and is declining.

I see no boom coming out of the Internet of Things. 

The best clue to all this is that tech IPO’s (new stock issues) are at their lowest since the Iphone was introduced 7 years ago.

What will happen to San Francisco?  Financial markets are always volatile.  The extreme height of the real estate market will probably change directions as will the rental market for residential and commercial. The current excessive overbuilding will come online and present a surplus in the next few years.

That is the same time the San Francisco $15 minimum wage will be driving 6,000 solid retailers and restaurants out of business.  It won’t look pretty.

Homeless bad language

I built a park for street people in 1979.  The park had benches, chemical toilets, grass and basketball hoops.  It was a gathering place for the downtown winos, drunks and people who lived on the streets most of the time.  

The significance for me was the emergence of the term ‘homeless’ in 1981. Two years later. The term came from New York.

A misnomer. These people were not ‘homeless’.  Many had a place to sleep, either with friends, relatives or in their own rental unit.  The terminology was wrong.  We now suffer, as we usually do from bad language.

San Francisco currently spends close to $100 million a year to provide shelter for this group of people who don’t need shelter; solely because they are called ’homeless’ by their advocates and everyone else.   

The City spends an additional $600 million in other services from hospital care to ambulance services and police time for this population in addition to faux-housing.

Street people are not homeless.  It is now and has been for 45 years an urban population that doesn’t want to work, prefers to be stoned (on any available drug) and can not accomplish the minimum requirements necessary to enter ordinary life.  Like getting somewhere on time, having a phone, being sober for two days, having a mailing address or bathing regularly.  

They don’t want the ordinary life, and with our fucked up use of the language, pretending they lack homes, we are unable to comprehend the nature and life of street people.

Politics is shortsighted

Recently Hillary presented a small part of her stilted economic plan.  In the plan she proposed a tiered form of capital gains with a high initial tax declining over several years.  She was ostensibly mimicking the few above average IQ people around her who complain that corporations don’t have long term thinking.  ‘Corporate goals are only quarterly earnings.’

I know of nothing with the short term horizon of government.  Government is always trying to institutionalize the past into rigid concrete.  That is why unions and the Democrat Party are so compatible.

The blatant issue that confronts me today and raises this issue is the government of San Francisco and many other cities where the planners see a transportation future consisting of bicycles, buses and other forms of public transportation.  The advantage of public transport is the efficiency of large numbers of people moved over a narrow space.

It is typical in these overplanned environments to reduce the number of parking garages and space to store autos.

In San Francisco, a new downtown residential building might have 200 units and less than 180 parking spaces. The building will probably have over 380 residents. That means the people buying the multi-million dollar units have to rent parking spaces at $10,000 a year nearby.

The real short term problem is that when a workable taxi system, like Uber, comes along to offer a dramatic new way to transport people without adding cars to the City, the City fights it.  The same is true for Car-to-go a system where you pick-up a nearby car, drive it and leave it at your destination.  Banned in San Francisco. Private buses in the City have been banned.  They were introduced to service people who are dressed for work and don’t want to sit next to a smelly indigent. The same is true for all the hourly and short term car rental services. Little or no accommodation in providing spaces in good locations.

Worst of all, the long haul private buses to take people to work outside the city on routes where there are no public buses and no rail lines, are being taxed and harassed. These buses allow the city to grow with internal residential population while businesses and giant facilities located outside the cramped city.

The very technologies that reduce the public need for private cars and enhance the future with fewer autos is precisely the technologies that governments and planners thwart.  

The government really has no capacity for seeing their own best future interests.

I was in the eye of the storm 2

In yesterday's blog I explained why I love America and don’t have white guilt about Jim Crow.  I did everything I could to remedy it.  This blog deals with the other blotches that are believed to be on America’s soul: militarism, patriarchy, environmental damage and puritanism?

Militarism.  I’ve travelled extensively. Consequently I see America as the protector of democracy and good people everywhere.  I’ve been all over the third world, from Laos to India to West Africa.  Most importantly I spent a year at age 19 in Israel, first on a kibbutz on the Syrian-Lebanon border then at a factory that build aircraft and repaired military planes on the border of the West bank; I worked with many Arab employees and Jews exiled from Arab lands.  

I spent over 40 years visiting Japan for months at a time.

Only someone who hasn’t travelled or has travelled and is a blind idiot could fail to see that America has been the umbrella of peace, pro commerce and hope in the world.  The American military is the greatest force for good in history.  Viet Nam was necessary in the Cold War.  The U.S. won it and the evil Democrat Party lost it.

Patriarchy has always been a shibboleth for me. The female members of my family have always been strong, productive and successful women.  Men have never been a barrier to their triumphant lives.   My paternal grandmother was an MD graduate of U.C. Berkeley and her sister was also an MD who spent her life doing research on leukemia.  My maternal grandmother’s sister started the most successful private school in New York and a century old camp for girls in Maine (still thriving).  My mother was a teacher, union leader and political power in Seattle.

The only barriers I’ve seen for women in my life have been self imposed barriers by women who believed they couldn’t do something because ‘women don’t do that’ or more recently ‘the patriarchy has kept me down’.  

The issue of environmentalism arose quickly and was dealt with quickly.  Air quality went from a Los Angeles that I never knew was surrounded by mountains in the 1960’s to very good air most days because of a few auto exhaust rules and early plant emission scrubbers.  The environmental air control rules are now insanely irrelevant, ineffective and absurd.  Water quality has improved even faster and was already excellent by the late 1970’s.

I personally was part of Point foundation that supported the founding and expansion of most of the major environmental organizations and I personally was an early and important force in creating the Trust for Public Land, the leading urban environmental organization.  I also created the foundation out of a PG&E settlement that funded nearly every environmental group in Northern California.  There are dozens of other environmental projects I started or worked on, too numerous to mention.  But nothing I ever did supported the lunacy of global warming or any environmental scan associated with it.

Lastly, the issues of sex, gender, gays, trans and everything associated with that.  This is a phenomenon much like education.  We are just as Puritanical in 2015 as we were in 1955.  There was a wonderful stretch of time from 1963 to 1983 when we overturned the oppression of puritanism and I gladly joined in actively supporting the National Sex Forum, helped put on the first Erotic ball, the first Erotic film festival, was the founding member of Maggie Rubenstein's Bisexual League and contributed to every element of the sexual revolution.  

The reality of America is that we are a Puritan culture, from the Pilgrims landing until today.  That hasn’t changed and won’t change.  It is a core part of America and our greatness. It is the reason we, more than any other people, believe in ‘progress’ and work so hard to achieve it.

I was in the eye of the storm

I have to ask myself why I feel no white guilt, no sense of white privilege.  Why do I feel America is great despite the history of slavery, racism, militarism, patriarchy, environmental damage and puritanism?

The reason is straight-forward.  I have lived a full life and confronted every issue with the full intensity of daily action.  I’ve dealt with each one head on.

In 1957 when I was at the University of Chicago, I had a few close black friends.  They helped me see many of the barriers created by Jim Crow in their lives.  I immediately offered to help.  I joined one black friend when he went to white barbershops on 63rd Ave.  He was promptly ejected by the police and arrested.  I was with him as ‘white eyes’ to keep him from being hurt and to bail him out.

In 1960, while in the Army in Virginia, with many close black NCO friends, I travelled with them and their families by car.  We could go a hundred miles in Virginia with no bathrooms or water faucets that blacks could use.  There were families in the car with kids.  I was infuriated. Outraged.  Humiliated.

Out of that anger and understanding, I joined every civil rights protest march in San Francisco, worked on dozens of civil rights projects.  Culminating in my bringing the most important and most far reaching affirmative action case (in banking) in the United States, before or after.   I later went to work for a black church for 11 years and built the first and only park designed for black street people.

There are many more things I have done, some recognized, most not. No white guilt here. I have been happy to vote against a phoney hate-filled half black Barack Obama for president twice.

Much of America has been aggressive and successful in battling racism.  I am part of that America. That is largely the Republican Party with Clarence Thomas, Condi Rice, Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell and Ben Carson.  

The Democrat party has promoted black scarecrows and race hustlers like Louis Farrakhan, Jeremiah Wright and Al Sharpton. Half of the Democrat black caucus expressed their race based Jew hate in March against the prime minister of Israel.

Unfortunately the people who never did anything positive for the black community, the Democrat party and its supporters,  created Lyndon Johnson’s ghettos,  black welfare queens, unmarried black mothers and Democrat failed cities like Detroit and Baltimore, filled with black corruption. Democrats have every reason to feel white guilt and out of guilt vote for a monstrous half-black president.

(Continued).

I lived through it

When I encounter a brilliant mind, a brilliant insight into the social forces acting on my/our lives, I am compelled to let the good people around me know about it.

That mind is Shelby Steele’s.  He is at the Hoover Institution, as he should be.  The book is Shame; How America’s Past Sins Have Polarized Our Country.

Steele repeats the litany of the 1960’s.  The American recognition of our past civil rights failings; the emergence of the hippy generations' attack on our hypocrisy and the sense of American failure.  The tumultuous era included the killing of Jack Kennedy, his brother, M.L.King Jr, urban riots and the emergence of us hippies.  He points to the environmental awakening about our pollution guilt.  The new feminist anger and explosive sexual freedom with a response that later included gays coming out of the closet.  The full scale rejection of America’s global military role with massive weekly marches.

Steele sees it as an era of historic rejection of the greatness of America.  

That view is still loudly broadcast by the Left as anti-Americanism; total disdain for America as the world’s great exceptional nation.  Everything about American greatness is rejected. We have a president who proclaims America's guilt. The core university curriculum is called ‘Old White Men’, the society of commerce and industry is derided as White privilege.

The Left sees redemption in electing a half black man who hates America, blames all ills on the evils of American history and racism.  Endless blaming of racism.  Perpetual denial of the great edifice of freedom in America by attacking it with a phony construction of women’s studies, gender studies, black studies and small group victimization cohorts.

The Left is filled with shame about the American past and the ‘white guilt’ has brought us to this polarized precipice.

Steele doesn’t take us any further.  That is where we stand today.

Paradoxes

There is a set of modern social paradoxes that apparently have been around since the 1960’s.  I’ve never seen them.

The best summary of these paradoxes is: when you do good for the society, for individuals and for your own family you will not be appreciated, nor remembered and you may generate hostility.

I feel compelled to comment on this.  I have always done what I thought was good for society, for others in my circle and for my family.  What have been the consequences over 60 years and hundreds of generous actions?

The word paradox is wrong.

First, and most importantly, doing what I believe is good and in the interests of others can be harmful.  I should suffer the opprobrium for these actions and I should learn from these mistakes.  

I worked hard to use busing and other tools to integrate and improve the San Francisco public schools. The busing sent vast droves of parents to the suburbs and left the city schools to violence and increased white prejudice against blacks.   

I deserve to have to apologize publicly and I do.

Secondly, the many projects I worked on to improve the teaching and classrooms disappeared in a few years like sand castles on the beach.  Although my own kids got the benefits of those superb educational programs. Education doesn't change....for long.

Many good projects are a complete waste and I have helped many people to understand and avoid these doomed efforts.

Third, I saw the bad consequences of my good efforts, such as helping create programs to save whales, which resulted in  promoting anti-Japanese hatred in the U.S. and U.K.  I felt compelled to organize a counter campaign.  I personally created a counter campaign that was massively effective.  My role in starting and stopping this evil eco-nonsense about whales (and dolphins) was unknown in the U.S. and U.K. but I recently learned that I am much loved in Japan and well known for my efforts.

Fourth, all genuine and original efforts to do good work for society, peers and family are inherently mixed.  The outcomes are unknown, the trajectories are unexpected and the consequences for me, the originator, are completely unpredictable.  In 1978 I organize the first massive burning of Xmas trees on the San Francisco beach with hundreds of participants.  This led directly to the first burning man at China Beach. then to Burning Man on the Black Rock desert and now a global movement.

I have been loved for what I’ve done, I have generated jealousy, animosity and open hostility.  But in general the love and affection have been worth it and my life has been overwhelmingly interesting, exciting and rewarding.

I’ve lived and lived well.  No paradox there.

The Bernie Madoff temptation

I have more sympathy for Bernie Madoff than most people.  I see what happened.

Bernie was managing money for several nonprofits that he fervently supported and believed in.  In a few years in the early 1990’s when he earned a good return for these angel organizations, they were very grateful and probably showered Bernie with appreciation and praise.

Over time two things happened.  These organizations sent their friends, other organizations and their families to enjoy the largess of Bernie’s brilliant investing genius.  

Bernie was faced with a growing number of adoring clients.

Second.  He did what many people in that situation would do.  He started paying out high yields on a regular basis.  It was apparently 10% every year, come hell or high water.

That just brought him more and more adoring clients.

It wasn’t hard to keep paying the 10%.  He was using the money coming in to make payments to all his old clients.  Who kept sending him more people.  

Bernie was the victim of a ‘Ponzi temptation’ (a term I made up).  Dishonesty came into play when he made up fictional explanations of the reasons for his success and fictional investments that created such an anomalous high yield.

What made me think of this?  A friend of mine had expected a high tax bill for last year.  When he got his tax return back from his accountant, the amount my friend owed was trivial, State and Federal.  When my friend went through the return, which was about 40 pages of computer generated sheets of numbers, he was baffled.  He sent in his trivial taxes and went about his business.

I started wondering if my friend’s accountant hadn’t pulled a Bernie Madoff.  Maybe the accountant, knowing how impossibly complex the tax laws are and knowing how few tax auditors are capable of understanding the laws,  just set his tax calculating computer to yield low tax bills for his friends.

Considering the complexity of the income taxes, state and federal, it probably wouldn’t be hard to help your friends on their taxes a little here and there.

Does that make sense?

The Roger problem with funding

I am frequently asked for advice on getting grants and getting funding. I’ve been president of one important foundation and been the sole executive on several others. I’ve created several foundations worth many $millions.  

I’ve personally never received a grant, I’m proud to say.

One of my friends, regularly seeks my advice on grants.  Everytime we talk I tell him to start his project, somewhere, anywhere.  Start in a school, a church, any non-profit, start anywhere; in a garage, in a backyard.  Grants are most likely given to something that is in existence, is happening, is alive.  Grants are rarely given to ideas that someone wants to try.  

That is a pretty simple idea.  I have been saying it since 1970 and said it most clearly as the first law of money in my Seven Laws of Money: 'do it, if you are doing the right thing money will come'.

Don’t forget the 5th and 6th laws of money.  Money is never a gift.  Expectations always go along with the money and you had better be prepared to live with those expectations.

Roger, in the title, has been calling me for 15 years, always with this great idea and often with drawings.  In the meantime an entire field has opened up, grown to significant proportions, is funded by the largest foundation on the horizon, the Bill Gates Foundation; but Roger who has always been stuck in the ‘conception’ phase is not part of the field.

Democrats create inequality

The summary of the this blog is that the Democrat Party is determined to make low income people worse off.  It doesn’t matter what the party potentates say.  The facts in this matter are unequivocal

I say this in advance.  Because if you are a true believing Democrat, the evidence I present will have no impact on your thinking.

Lets start with an area where I testify as an expert witness.  The Public Utilities Commission in California (and many other states) is mandating that utility companies install electric charging stations for electric cars in public places.  The tiny number of electric cars that have been sold have been bought by the rich and the ultra rich.  But the low income people and everyone else has to pay for the electricity for the rich.

All the federal credits and subsidies go disproportionately to the top income earners.  Of all the money subsidizing clean energy 10% goes to the bottom of the income earners and 60% goes to the top earners (top 20%). Source.

In California, the animal nuts (mostly Democrats) passed a law banning eggs on the market from hens who live in small cages.  That has doubled the price of eggs from under $3 a dozen to $6 a dosen.  That hurts the low income people the most.

Minimum wage laws in Democrat cities eliminate jobs, by the millions.  That hurts the low income people especially since they eat out at food retailers that are raising their prices as the minimum wage goes up too.

All the expensive environmental (nearly all environmentalists are Democrats) rules for cars, including smog checks, have their greatest impact on low income people’s cars. Automobile costs for cars are high for the low income people, especially high.

That includes fuel which is more expensive because of the Democrat mandated ethanol in the fuel and the special low sulphur in California gasoline.

The list goes on and on.  All the environmental mandates and tax subsidies and other restrictions on retail sales hurt the low income people the most.  

The most obvious and egregious example is the requirement that all used toys be tested for lead content.  Used toy stores run by Goodwill and St. Vincent DePaul have stopped selling toys, childrens bikes, cribs and strollers.  If that doesn’t hurt the low income people the most, what does?

If you are a Democrat, have a smidgen of decency and concern for the low income population…. admit that the Democrat party harms the low income people.  Openly, clearly and blatantly.

Color seeing miracle

A member of my family has a mild color blindness.  For his birthday he got a pair of glasses from EnChroma that allows him to see the entire spectrum.  A modern miracle of technology.

About 6% of males have this mild color blindness.  Of these, 4 out of 5 can see the full color spectrum with the EnChroma glasses.

The description of how the glasses work is not adequate for me.  The explanation given online is that the glasses block a few very narrow frequencies which ordinarily flood the ocular cones with too much of that frequency and over stimulate that part of the cone reception.  The over stimulation blocks the cones recognition of that part of the color spectrum

I will find out how they work when I meet the right person.  In the meantime, if you are that one out of 16 males who can’t see some colors, get some Enchroma glasses.

Enjoy the miracle.

 

The future of film and video (animation)

I met a bright young woman who manages an animation studio in Toronto.  What I learned surprised me.

She can produce a ½ hour animated video for $350,000 and a 26 part season for $12 million.

All I need to get her is a good script with a good description of the characters.

Today, if you are buying a single TV series of ½ hour comedies with actors, you can expect to pay over $35 million for 26 programs or 13 hour long programs.  And that is with ‘no-name’ actors.  Get ‘name’ actors and the price goes up by $5 million per ‘name’.

I began wondering why we see actors at all.  The current simple answer is that actors have identification that can bring audiences with them.  Some big budget animations have prominent actors as voices and idiosyncrasies in the animated characters.

That may be true now.  I see a different direction.  In the feature film Her, Scarlett Johansson was the voice of a computer.  She was so powerful as a voice that she got her own action film as the sole star, Lucy.   Being a ‘voice’ can make you important to the audience.  

I’ve talked to kids who tell me that the character in a pure animation, Inside Out, was so powerful that they expect to see the character again in other films and on TV.  The character was a red male: anger.

I foresee the day when characters and voices in animation can be as important to audiences as actors.  In that day, animation will become dominant.

Intolerant milk

Attention Chinese, Japanese and Jews.

You come from a population that has an early version of a gene, actually a known allele MCM6, that generates a lactase digesting enzyme in the small intestine. That enzyme digests milk and dairy products in adults.

I have good news for you.  The great and awesome commercial world is now producing milk and dairy products without lactose.  In San Francisco, I can buy milk that is lactose free in nearly all grocery stores.  In a few I can buy Breyer’s chocolate and vanilla ice cream that is lactose free  Recently I have been able to buy several brands of lactose free butter.

Check Google for your local area; hopefully you will find a few lactose free dairy products.

Up until now I have had to swallow a freeze dried pill of lactase enzyme, which helps digest dairy products for a few hours.  Otherwise the symptoms are gurgling belly, stomach gas and farts.

I expect to see these lactose free products explode in the market as more people make the connection between their low level annoying symptoms and dairy products. 

I notice, in Japan, that most people swallow a daily drink of yogurt that has lactase in it.  The product has been on the market since the 1930’s.

Why is this mild discomfort, that is so widespread in the population, finally being addressed?

Simple.  Commerce.  Commerce finds needs and satisfies them.  The rest  of the world has a ‘fuck you’ attitude.  Thank you commerce.

Global warming science is doing some good

I’ve been expecting to see a steady flow of smart students out of the sciences.  That is an expected result of the global-warming-hysteria.  It is clear to any intelligent person, who is young, that science is not a field that rewards competence and a good mind.  Global warming shows that ‘science’ is just a modern realm of theology.

That is not true of technology.  Bridges do fall down if they ignore the reality of the world.  I pointed out here before, what I learned in college from a class with Niels Bohr, that technology finds the constants in the universe and ‘science ‘ is the theology that tries to explain and connect all these constants.

The most wonderful new benefit of the global-warming-hysteria is that people already in the ‘sciences’ are applying some incredulity and intelligence to the vast wasteland of theology that permeates their own fields of study.  This study, reported in the press, found that when 100 of the most cited studies in psychology were reproduced, most had been reported incorrectly, showed much weaker results on being reproduced or showed contrary results. 'Junk'. in simple English.

We can all admit that psychology, including much of experimental psychology, is a variation on alchemy  and astrology.  That is especially true for any study done on college students, who are uniquely gullible and living in a fantasy world.

I see more and more challenges to research results reported in medicine, biology and neurology.  The fields of nutrition, political science and anthropology have always been a joke among thoughtful people.

Thanks to the 30 years of global-warming-hysteria, we are getting good young brains who are rejecting the theology of ‘science’.  

Thank you James Hansen and Al Gore.  Keep promoting your childish religion.  Technology will drown out the siren songs of 'science'.

Oblivious

I was looking at my blogs for 2004.  I was very frustrated at the time that many prominent people didn't understand the Federal deficit.  I heard intelligent people regularly say we are passing on our debts to our children and our grandchildren.

It is ten years later; I still hear the same thing and it still isn't true.

The deficit is a transfer payment, just like social security.  If the Federal revenue ($3.5 trillion) is less than the Federal expenditure ($4 trillion), this year the deficit is $.5 trillion, that is borrowed by selling U.S. bonds to pension funds, individuals and foreign governments.  About half of it is sold to our fellow Americans.  That $.5 trillion is added to the existing debt of $18 trillion.  

We started paying off that debt in 1999, but in 2000 Bill Clinton couldn’t resist spending more that year than the government received in taxes.  We were on track to pay off the Federal debt.  Economists were worried that the financial control part of the government couldn’t operate without the debt.

The real problem with the debt is the interest the government pays on the debt. The interest payment is mandatory ($.23 trillion this year).  It now consumes 6% of the total budget.  At times it has consumed far more. Roughly 15% in 1996. That reduced the amount of other budget items that could be spent.  

An especially serious restriction considering that the interest is part of the mandatory 2/3rds of the budget.

Less than ⅓ of the federal budget is under Congressional control in any one year.

So the reality of the deficit is that the interest on the debt can consume a large part of future federal expenditures and that PART can be out of the control of the Congress of the future.  Right now interest rates on bonds are very low and have been low for 5 years.  Great for us right now.  

But there could be high interest rates in the future, and that will restrict the future Congresses that our children or grandchildren might elect. A possible restriction; not a ‘great debt burden.’

Tiscornia and the secretary

I was working at Bank of America in the marketing research department which I had helped found.  

I was also the president of the Young Republican Club that had 4,000 members.  The two converged.

Here is the story, which I’ve told before:

In the early 1960s I was elected president of the San Francisco Young Republicans, a large organization held together by the desire of young newly arrived single San Francisco women to meet men and vice versa.  Elected with me was a secretary, whom I didn't know, who turned out to be a beauty.  She was charming, sweet and truly innocent.  Something I had never encountered in a 22 year old beauty.  The reason turned out to be, that she had always previously been fat. After high school and the debutante ball of that era, she started seeing a shrink to lose weight.  It worked.

She fell in love with the shrink and they had an affair.  When her parents found out they drove the shrink out of town and my secretary was left to mope in love-sick pain.  She lost a lot of weight and emerged as the swan.

We both ended up at the Bank of America.  Me in the marketing research department, she as a secretary in the legal department.  At the time, the Bank was trying to buy property in the heart of San Francisco for a new headquarters.  I knew about it and knew about the completely unwilling owner of the main block the bank wanted.  The owner was an old miser named Tiscornia. He owned much of the heart of San Francisco property and left it undeveloped.  

My gossip sources told me that he was a lecher.  I went to the Executive VP in charge of the new building and suggested he send my Young Republican secretary to take notes at the meetings with Tiscornia.  The EVP later put me on the building committee in return for my brilliant suggestion.  The brand new interest in selling his land, on the part of Tiscornia, led to a final agreement (based not on a sale of land but a 99 year lease).  

The Bank of America building was and still is a major landmark in San Francisco.  My secretary married an English count within a year. Being a young man on the committee of old bankers, I had no influence.  I objected to the dark skin of the building in a city of white buildings.