Pro Commerce

Planned Parenthood ethics

Last summer a group called Center for Medical Progress released half a dozen videos in clear color images that show three things:  

• Planned Parenthood employees interested in selling fetal tissue of aborted fetuses to a for-profit private company.
• PP employees making clear that it is a widespread practice in PP and that special tissue such as heart and brain is available.
• Video from two conferences of allied abortion providers working to create a central fetal tissue sales organization, including PP.

All the footage from these interviews was shown in edited form and also available online in the fully unedited form. A truly honest organization which was criticized by the corrupt press for using the edited versions.

None of the major media covered this story for one month and none carried it fully for three months.  The story that was finally carried was about a Texas attorney general, known for his extreme Lefty legal actions,  suing the Center for Medical Progress for using fictitious names to get the news stories.  Clearly the Texas attorney general has never seen the weekly TV show 60 Minutes.

My issue here has nothing to do with selling fetal tissue or using government  money to fund it.  Someone else can deal with that and with the issue that money is fungible and can not be separated in one organization from the multiple activities of that organization.

My issue is the ethics of selling Mary Prague’s (fictitious name) aborted fetus parts without written permission from Mary.  I don’t think it is ethical.

My argument relates to a set of court cases and federal law.  The first is that of Henrietta Lacks who died in 1951 but her cancerous cell lines were saved to perpetuity and used in cancer research decades after she died.  She never gave permission to use her tissue now known as HeLa cells.

In 2013 the National Institutes of Health, after several court cases, gave Henrietta’s family partial control over the use of the family DNA codes.

The second is federal law. If one wishes to have parts of his/her body used for research or for implants in other humans they must register on state organ donor lists.  These lists must be checked before tissue or an organ is used for any purpose, research or transplant.  

Taken together, these cases and law suggest to me that any use of Mary Prague’s body, whether removed by surgery or voluntarily expelled can not be used for any purpose without written consent from Mary.

Until that is done, Planned Parenthood and any other organization using fetal tissue is in violation of established American ethics.  Someone should sue Planned Parenthood on this issue.

Queen Esther and Xerxes

A brilliant and infuriating article has appeared recently. It is in Commentary magazine, written by one of the great minds of our times, Yoram Hazony.  It is about the lessons to learn from the holiday of Purim and the story of Queen Esther saving the Jews of ancient Persia. (Here is an accessible copy.)

First the infuriating part.  The story of Esther in the Purim story that I was told all my life was about the part of her life where she saves the Jews of the ancient Persian kingdom through her influence on the King and her destruction of the 3rd Century BCE version of Hitler.  This is actually only the first half of the story.  

I was never told the most important second half of the story of Esther because I was part of the Reform Jewish, goody-goody-peace-and-love crap movement.

In the second half of the story Esther and her appointed advisor to the King, Mordecai, create an Army to protect the Jews of Persia in each part of the empire.  They kill Hitler and his 10 sons, then hundreds of his Jew hating friends and neighbors.  Finally they go throughout Persia and kill another 75,000 people who were part of the plot to kill Jews.

I didn’t know the second important part of the story.  I didn’t know the King about whom the Esther story is told was Xerxes in Greek.  We simpletons are told about King Ahasuerus.  Nor did I know that Ahasuerus was the grandson of King Cyrus the greatest friend of the Jews in all human history.

The brilliant contribution of Yoram Hazony is to raise the point that killing our enemies wantonly was an effective antidote to Jew hatred.  

I know that if Israel wantonly killed 10,000 Gazans in any of the previous wars, Gaza would never fire another missile into Israel, and would have become a productive little Arab enclave.

That is the lesson of Israel defeating four Arab armies in 1967 and again in 1973.  Those Arabs haven’t dared attack Israel since then.  It didn’t get rid of Jew hatred.  But a serious attack that wipes out the government of Iran and Hezbollah would get rid of Jew hate in the Arab world.  Arabs and Iranians, like most primates have a large reptilian part of their brains and they only respect power.

I’ve often thought that the peace movement wouldn’t survive one suicide bomber in the midst of a peace march. Nor would Jew hate on college campuses survive a few bombings of their demonstrations.  

Yet, as part of the Jewish tradition of righteousness, Israel must always accept the pregnant and ill people of Gaza into Israeli hospitals; and always provide medical succor on the battlefield to friends and enemy alike.

Modern Jews don't know that we can do both.  Kill enemies wantonly and provide succor.

Creating the corporate social responsibility movement

A friend makes a living working for an investment group that claims to invest in socially responsible securities;  I couldn’t resist telling him that I played a critical role in starting the movement that is supporting him now.

As a board member of Point Foundation (created with Whole Earth Catalog money) in 1971,  I convened and paid for all the corporate social responsibility activists in the country to come to a gathering and planning session in Inverness CA. There were over 30 people for a long weekend. (Several got their start with Ralph Nader organizations.)  A key figure was Alice Tepper Marlin who published the main guide that evaluated corporations on their social responsibility.

That gathering, like a few others in history, was seminal in the creation of the movement.  It was a chance for all the important figures in the field to get to know each other and find ways to work together.

I also traveled to New York, as treasurer of the Glide Foundation (Glide Memorial United Methodist Church) as the first portfolio manager concerned with corporate social responsibility to talk to major foundation executives about using some of their investment portfolios to support their institutional programs. Many came close to laughing at me while I was still in their office.

I funded several of the leading Corporate Social Responsibility organizations and kept my finger on the pulse of the movement for several decades.

I also put sizable chunks of money in the first two funds in the field, Pax World Fund and Calvert Investment.  Both still exist.

The field of socially responsible investing ran into a problem. The definition of social responsibility went wild. Initially the concerns were gender and racial diversity as well as environmental responsibility. Within a few years corporations were being judged on production of war materiel, connections to the tobacco industry, then investment and connection to South Africa and the Philippines (remember Marcos). From there on the list got longer: animal testing, renewable energy, renewable resources, labeling of products, fire safety of children’s clothes, charitable giving, toxic product disposal and then overseas sweat shops.

Since no organization or group of organizations could keep track of actual corporate behavior in this wide range of issues, everyone just started faking it. Today it is just a feel good message. “We are warm and fuzzy socially responsible investors”, mostly putting their money in government bonds, a few internet companies, alternate energy companies and affordable housing REITs.

I will confess. Within two years of helping start the movement, I decided that corporations were not moral organizations and shouldn't be. Just creating jobs and serving their customers was sufficient reason to support them.  Commerce and corporations had taken the world out of starvation, physical human misery and created global vitality.  Commerce was already better than anything else known to man; we shouldn’t diddle with it.  

French critique of capitalism

Several French economists have proposed that we will be entering a post-capitalist society with the advent of open sharing on the Internet and the associated casual livelihoods  They are using Airbnb and Uber as examples.

Of course this is an outrageous farce from my viewpoint.  

The French contribution to the modern world is pathetic (considering how good their food is).  They gave us some important words and concepts in English a millennium ago and for a brief period from 1880 to 1930 France contributed to the arts and sciences, including the Pole, Marie Curie.

Aside from the absurdity of French intellectuals making a positive contribution to the world of commerce, most French thinkers have been retrograde communists for 150 years.  The one good brain left France for America in 1950. Raymond Aron.

The reality is that these buffoons can’t understand that modern commerce is a Darwinian evolutionary system that favors the survival and the behaviors of the people and companies that are the most productive.  Modern commerce wasn’t the product of any mind, certainly not a French mind.

Even worse, these people don’t understand that France today has fought a ferocious and malicious battle against Airbnb and Uber domestically.  France also fights Microsoft and Google in their Luddite French view of the world.  This is identical to the French treatment of Denis Diderot who they drove out of the country.  Diderot could only teach and publish in Holland.

The French finding an intellectual base for a post-capitalist world is really just day dreaming of a world where France mattered rather than being a farce.

Canada is so different

Those of you who haven’t noticed already, need to note that Canada is very different than the U.S..   Canada is an extractive nation thriving on mines, timber, oil and grains.  The largest manufacturing company in Canada is Magna International, which was created as a supplier to the Detroit auto manufacturing.  It is the 23rd largest company in Canada after all the extractive and finance companies.

I have identified the most important element of commerce and modernity as the absence of an hereditary elite.  A unique attribute of the U.S. in all the world.  The absence of an hereditary elite is what allows meritocracy to thrive and be motivated.

America had two great advantages in throwing off the hereditary elite in its early years.  It was settled by the ambitious people from all over the world who couldn’t overcome their local elites.  Then the vast open West afforded the same opportunity again to leave the Eastern cities with their stifling elites.

There is another element that I now see as important.  A major population of American loyalists left the U.S. after the revolutionary war. Between 60k and 75k Loyalists left the 13 states and moved to Canada.  Many of these people became the hereditary elite of Canada.  Many remain as such to this day.

I now view Canada as the anti-America where commerce didn’t thrive despite all the same initial advantages as the U.S.. The reason is the presence of an hereditary elite in Canada and the absence of it in the U.S.

A good control group to help identify the elements that created modern commerce.

Japanese population decline

My readers should know that the Japanese population has been declining for several years.  From a peak of 127 million people the number has dropped to about 126 million.

Everyone in Japan has been aware of this impending change in population for decades.  I have regularly talked to official Japan about their concerns and plans.

After several decades of trying to reverse this trend with rewards for childbearing and attempts to bring in immigrants (including 300,000 Japanese and descendants who had migrated to South America over the past century) they have given up.

The Japanese national policy is to focus on two areas.  The first is to move Japanese owned factories to other nations where the Japanese ownership can be protected and the factories can use the indigenous population as the workforce.

The second is to focus on developing robots to deliver care for the elderly population and support for the caregivers.  Japan is decades ahead of everyone else in this area.

Lastly, there is a calm commitment to inaction.

There is a widespread belief that population will stabilize and the birthrate will be adequate when the population reaches some number in the 80 million range.  At that point new children and families will have such a great value that family succession will again be  effective.  

Additionally, changes in warfare will allow a smaller Japanese military population to be highly effective.

Huey and others

I violated one of my personal policies last night.  

I refuse to read books or see films or TV shows about people I knew personally.  I want to preserve my memories accurately without media distortion.  I’ve followed this practice with the popular movie on Harvey Milk, the many books on Jim Jones and Richard Nixon.

I inadvertently was watching a documentary on the Japanese internment and the campaign to win reparations.  I was involved in that campaign and only played a marginal role at the end.  To my surprise I violated my rule because I learned from the movie that the main organizer was Rev. Lloyd Wake a wonderful friend of mine.  I knew nothing about Lloyd’s role.  Besides LLoyd was a terribly quiet, humble, gentle man about whom I could say very little other than he was quiet, humble and gentle.

I consciously broke the rule on a documentary about Huey Newton.  I watched it.  It was awful.  The timeline of events was totally wrong.  The importance of Huey and the Black Panthers was in the late 1960’s.  The film was mostly about the 1970’s and ignored the Panther's founding  years; it ignored Huey's power to organize the Black Panthers with audio tapes smuggled out of solitary confinement. The pseudo-documentary failed to understand the role of Huey's creation of the children’s food program.  Nothing about the financial support that gave Huey protection from the cops in a 10th story condo.  Funded by Max Palevsky.  

There was nothing in the film about Huey.  I spent many hours with Huey. Organizations I was part of supported many of his projects.  Huey Newton was kind, warm, soft spoken, spoke a clear, precise, powerful English (unlike most black political leaders including Obama) and was brilliant.  We talked after he got his doctorate from U.C. Santa Cruz about biology and many scientific subjects of the day.  That was the Huey I knew and those were the qualities that led him to create a powerful black organization that has shaped America in many ways.

Another friend, a good close friend, was Ed Roberts who founded and led the Disability and the Independent Living movements.  Since the media world screws up reality badly in a Lefty biased way, I had to write a correction in an obituary for Ed. Here.

Tooth brushes and cigarettes

This blog could have been called Doppelganger.

I could be running for president on the Democrat ticket except for one book I read.

Bernie is three years younger than I, went to the University of Chicago and to an Israeli kibbutz.

When I went to the U of C. I was a Marxist, was elected president of the Young Socialist Assn.  I organized and led a demonstration against changes in the College faculty Senate. Bernie followed the same path and led a demonstration as well.  He went to kibbutz Sha’ar HaAmakimm I went to kibbutz HaGoshrim.

The difference was sometime in those years before the kibbutz when I read George Orwell’s Animal Farm.  Animal Farm is a metaphoric story about how animals organize themselves in a perfect communist society. They create a hierarchy immediately. It made a strong impression on me.

I saw the perfect communism on the kibbutz.  Except that I also saw the not so visible hierarchy.  I noticed that a few of the older members were the de facto management.  In visiting their homes I noticed they had higher quality cigarettes and better toothbrushes.  They got the slightly more cushy jobs.  (The cigarettes and toothbrushes matched what I saw 50 years later in a  Japanese prison where the better behaved prisoners got better cigarettes and newer toothbrushes.)

I saw Animal Farm on the kibbutz.  Humans automatically formed a hierarchy.  That was the end of Marxism and the whole Lefty ideology for me.

I also worked in an aircraft factory as a production planner.  I could improve productivity significantly but I was blocked at every turn by the union bosses.  

I came back to the U.S. as a Republican.  Bernie came back a confirmed Socialist.  Noam Chomsky came back from his kibbutz as a Marxist (kibbutz HaZorea).

I’m blessed to this day for having read Orwell and appreciated it.

Deciding to live everyday

This may sound preposterous but in my old age I am able to look back on my life and realize I made the decision to live, every morning when I got out of bed.  

Most of the time my life was so full and the things I wanted to do during the day were so compelling and exciting that my decision to live was automatic.

As I get older and my days are filled with leisure, reading, friends, family and swimming I actually do ask myself: “Do I want to get up today?”  The alternative is to stay in bed, possibly to be sick.  Nevertheless I find myself asking myself the question and having to answer it with the movement of putting my feet on the floor and standing up.

It is now that I realize I have always asked that question and always answered with a strong affirmative.  Which is why I have lived so fully.

Poetry

I read a little poetry occasionally.   There are many poets I like ranging from Cavafy to my favorite Ted Hughes.

This blog is to complain about some recent efforts to revive the memory of disgraced Ezra Pound.  Pound was unquestionably a traitor who ranted on Italian radio during WWII about how evil America was and how it was run by the evil Jews.

It is also claimed that he was a poet.  I’ve read some of his Cantos, the Malatesta Cantos, which are not good English and certainly not good poetry.  They are confused, arcane and worst of all, in English, have no linguistic power.

I think my judgement may be shaped by the fact that I read all his political tracts about money in pamphlets I got at City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, back in 1962.  The pamphlets were the work of an absolute idiot who had no understanding of the world and was nothing but your garden variety Jew hater.  

Only such a person could use poetry to be mistaken for a competent adult.  His poetry was no more competent nor meaningful than his other understanding of the world.  A buffoon using literary cover to pass for a competent adult.

Chauncey Gardiner

I often call people and groups ‘stupid’ and ‘idiots’.  I really wish that I didn’t.  It makes me look dumb and rude.   

I feel we are missing a better word.  The word would incorporate the idea of  ‘Chauncey Gardiner’

Chauncey is a character in the movie Being There about a dimwit gardener who becomes mistaken for a wise counselor because he dresses well, speaks slowly and talks about gardening which is taken as metaphor.

People who adore Bernie Sanders and most Arab spokespeople are Chauncey Gardiners.

They are dressed like ordinary people and speak like ordinary people but they haven’t the vaguest idea what they are talking about.   Re: Sanders.  Socialism was tried and failed and killed tens of millions of innocent decent people.  People who have lived in socialist societies leave it the minute they can.  Re: Arabs.  Arabs seem to think the Jews never lived in ancient Israel, despite incredible stone and brass evidence, including Muhammad's own words that confirm it.

We need, I need, a word that everyone understands that we often deal with the Chauncey Gardiner syndrome.  People who look normal but what they say is totally ignorant ideology.

Is the time value of money a constant?

In the last blog I argued that the time value of money is real.  Is it a real number?  Could it be a constant?

I need help in thinking this out.  Is the time value of money a constant?  Is it different for every culture?  Does this mean that money under the mattress could automatically lose value?

Pretty much everything in the real world is built on a constant.  We know a few: the speed of light, pi, Planck’s, gravity, Avogadro’s, etc.

The problem of determining the time value constant for money is that risk is always added to the time value.  In banking the time value is considered the borrowing rate from the Fed. and all other interest rates are points on top.   Thus a AAA corporate bond might be ‘prime plus 2 points’  a car loan might be ‘prime plus 10 points’.

The other problem is that all currencies are national and have inflationary and deflationary components.  All money is national and exist in relation to all other money.  Even when money was gold, it was constantly subject to new gold discoveries and gold being taken out of circulation for jewelry and commodity uses.

Someday someone may be able to disentangle all these supplementary elements and find the time universal value of money.  If it exists.  My guess from looking at bond rates back to the Dutch bonds in 1650 would put the constant at something near 2.329301% per year.  That percent  would compound to 2 times the value in 30 years, 3 times in 50 years and 10 times in a century.

This possibility raises several questions for me.  Could the time value of money vary for different cultures?  It seems to me that time seems to vary in terms of everyday social interactions.  This would also mean that money is constantly losing value if it isn’t being used.  

I need my readers comments on all of this.   Please comment to help me, and everyone interested, to think about this.

Finance: good or bad?

We have an entire political party hating Wall Street.  Nothing new here.  The Democrats have hated New York and finance since Jefferson first made it his campaign issue.

The early Hebrews, and later the Christians, hated finance.  The Hebrews even invented a 50-year Jubilee when all debts are forgiven.  The Hebrews were adamant against high interest and had laws against usury which became a central plank in Christianity to this day.

Islam went further with this hatred of finance and banned interest altogether. To this day.

I can understand this ancient gut hatred.  I was a banker.  All we did was borrow money from ordinary people, pay them interest and lend the money to corporations and charge them higher interest.  Not something that made us sweat.

What I did is what all these billions of people who hate finance hate.  I invented new ways to get people to lend the banks money and new ways to get good loan users to take out loans.  I also found other ways to use money to earn interest.  I did it wearing a three piece suit and sitting comfortably behind a desk.  Never sweating.  

Hate it, go ahead and hate it with the reptile part of the brain.  Hate global finance and Jews and big business and America.  They are all the same.

I’ll tell you what you are missing.  

Start with the reality that the core of finance, money, is ‘language’.  I’m the first person to understand this (1978).  It exists in our minds, with many representations in the real world.  Language and structure only exist in our minds.  Money only exists in our minds.

Like language, there is a time value to money.  Yesterday’s newspaper is boring, a week old newspaper is at the bottom of a bird cage.  The older information is, the more it can be stored in the form of weekly magazines, quarterlies and annual editions. Then as books.  What is worth storing changes, constantly.

Money too has a time value.  Giving a political donation early in a campaign matters, when it is worth ten or twenty times what it is worth a week before the election.  The same is true for money invested in a startup.  Worth many times what the same amount will be worth the week before a public stock offering.

Making a corporate loan today when the loan yields 5.5%  when the risk of loss is .005% is not the same as the same amount loaned when the risk reaches 2% and it is time to call in the loan.

Okay, so you may understand that in our minds money is like language and both always have a time value.  Both also have room for genius.  There are playwrights, authors and poets who can make words more potent and more valuable.

The same with innovators in finance.  If I figure out a way to pay a little more interest on savings (as I did in banking), that is wonderful for commerce as a whole.  If I can figure out a way to increase loan return and/or decrease loan risk (with a loan or bond with tranches and derivatives), it is wonderful for the society as a whole.

Since all this occurs in our mind and minds, I can understand why the hoi polloi hate it.  Many people can’t understand the value of good language and clear communication.  The same issue with money and finance.

People who make use of the time value of money and find new uses, really contribute to our society.  In ways that help everyone.

I invented the international credit card.  It really helps everyone to be able to travel with a small piece of plastic that is nearly worthless when stolen, versus carrying cash or travelers cheques.

The revolution intrudes

I can’t help it.

What happened Saturday night at the Republican debates was so far out of context that it must be important and I must comment on it.

What happened was that the swing vote that preserved the rationality of our pro commerce society on the U.S. Supreme Court died.

Four of the six Republican debate candidates on TV called each other ‘liar’.  It was unambiguous, Trump even said ‘Ted Cruz is the biggest liar, bigger than Jeb Bush’.  Bush had been goading Trump for an hour.  Rubio claimed Cruz didn’t speak Spanish.  Cruz answered back in Spanish the equivalent of screw you. Four candidates for president calling each other 'liar'.

What happened?

My theory is that the two elements are related.  The death of Justice Scalia and four candidates calling each other liars.

We are in revolutionary times.  We have a president who blatantly lies everyday. The national media ignores it.   *The Islamic State has nothing to do with Islam.  *Muslims were part of the founding of America.  *The greatest threat to America is climate Armageddon.  *We have a serious problem in America with racist police killing innocent blacks. *Israel and Netanyahu are the main source of our problems in the Middle East.  *The killing of four Americans in Libya, including our ambassador, was due to an Internet video.  *There is no political corruption in the IRS. *Gun control is the only way to stop mass murders. Etc.  Everyday Americans hear this, with no rebuttal.

We are in revolutionary times because the Constitution has not given us a way to handle a black man at the head of government who terribly misleads the country in every meaning of the word 'mislead' and he has a supine political party behind him that is afraid to challenge him for racist reasons. The opposition party is barely any better.

The confluence of one man who had been somewhat effective in restraining the Democrat-Obama outrage died.

The volcano of revolution exploded and the Republican candidates just had to use the word LIAR. They had to used it liar, liar, liar.

The liar-in-chief is driving us nuts.

We are in a period where our nation is out of control, with no visible remedy.  That is what we are living through.

Hail the Coen brothers

I do blogs about movies on occasion.  Before I tell you how extraordinary the latest Coen brothers film is, you need to know a little about my taste.  My favorites, looking back, are O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Being There  and Groundhog Day.  They are light and communicate a subtle message.

The latest Coen, Hail, Caesar!, is truly unique in film.  It uses old film forms (dancing, water ballet, cowboys…) to communicate a new observation that remains subtle in its message.  Like some great books, Heart of Darkness, the viewer is seeing a film within a film.  Actually several films.

The message of the film is that the cold war of communism has been replaced by a war of faith.

Communism is explained as a scientific analysis of capitalism with the certainty of the future being foreseeable with a Hegelian dialectic. George Clooney likes it until he gets slapped by his boss.  There is a character of Herbert Marcuse in the film to explain the Marxist dialectic.  The communists are farcical.

The modern war of Islam is not brought into the film, but ‘faith’ is.  It is Christianity which is represented with priests, Jesus, ministers and a rabbi.  Our current war is with ‘faith’ and it is fairly, but humorously treated.

On top of that is added the question of the ‘meaningful life,’ a subject often touched on by the Coen boys.  Again, meaning comes from excitement and human interaction.  Being a studio head versus running an aircraft factory.

The film is fun all the way through, but it left me liking it without knowing why.  Personally I go to see Scarlett Johansson in any movie she is in.  A beautiful, intelligent, decent woman.  A rare one in Hollywood.

Losing weight

I have had a weight gain problem for the past five years.  My doctor can’t do anything about it and jokes that weight gain happens in the mid 70’s and weight losses happen in the 80’s.  “So just be patient.”

I’ve tried the Weight Watchers approach which worked for me twice over the past 15 years, but it no longer works at all.  I tried the two days a week fasting approach.  It worked for the first month and then I gained back the trivial 4 pounds.

Then after checking all the data available online, which still supports the earlier good research that showed no weight loss from any approach after three years, I had an epiphany:

The person under the greatest social pressure who has tried the hardest and has the most to gain financially from losing weight is Oprah Winfrey.  She has spent $millions to lose weight and has failed. She does ads for Weight Watchers and has stock in the firm, but she is still chubby; extra chubby.

We don’t really know how to lose weight and keep it off.  

Except maybe crack cocaine which I know works, but has some harmful side effects.

My blogs 13 years ago

I was rather stunned to look at a month of my blogs from October 2003.  I do that occasionally when I run out of blog material.

In this instance, the old material was not helpful.  Very little has changed.

San Francisco is still mean-spirited for the same reason.  It is run by the Left, the extreme Left with a strong hatred of America, commerce and personal responsibility.

A recent article in Commentary pointed out that most of the cities in America are Lefty, but they have spent so much tax money on raising government union wages and benefits that they have run out of tax money and can’t carry out grand government make-work schemes.  As a consequence the only thing they can mess up are commercial issues.  They raise the minimum wage, dictate employee work issues of vacation, sick time, parental leave and ban chain stores that reduce the cost of living for low income people. Democrats always punish the poor.

I complained in 2003 that the unique ‘positive sum’ nature of commerce is not understood or taught to the academic dupes.  It is still not understood by most Americans and the world.

I complained that movies made by extreme Hollywood Lefties with Lefty political messages didn’t do well at the box office.  Now they do worse, but Hollywood is learning slowly.  A few pro-American movies have done well.  In the meantime I’ve come to realize that primates, including humans, don’t learn in adulthood.  For us humans that is after age 23.  So Hollywood can’t be expected to change much.

Lastly I had an effect on the world, partially.  I became aware of Jamie Grifo’s work replacing fertilized cell nuclei from older women in cells with mitochondrial DNA of younger women. That was during the period when I started the campaign to label GMOs. I took action against Grifo's human experiments.

Still 13 years later, what Gifo was doing is illegal in most jurisdictions as this article explains.  

Two notes: I personally pressured the FDA to ban Grifo’s work.  Since no one else did anything to stop it, I assume the ban on this 3 parent research had much to do with me.  But grievously, 11 children in Australia and 11 in New Jersey had been born in this experiment and no one has gone back to follow up on the real humans.

Back in 2003 I had seen the end of the environmental movement.  Wrong. I was terribly wrong.  It became one of the Armageddon religions and quickly took over the world as the biggest and newest religion.  It is now so extreme that the American president claimed Climate to be the greatest world threat to America and got the leaders of the entire world to agree.

I didn’t see the deep global need for an Armageddon religion.

Looking backwards

My literate readers will recognize this blog title as the title of a book by Ralph Bellamy a notorious American socialist. He advocated the same ideas as modern socialists 150 years ago.

Maybe with Bernie Sanders doing so well running for president as a socialist on the Democrat Party ticket, Bellamy is relevant.  Bellamy fully understood the nature of socialism.  He showed that a redistribution of income would make every American able to live in the same luxury as the very richest in 1887.

That is how idealized socialism would work.  And most importantly we would be living in 1887 with outdoor toilets, no electricity, horses and bikes as our transportation, everyone living with farm animals to provide most of their food and preparing it themselves.  Life spans of 60 years, only few occupations and intense pain from countless medical nightmares. Etc.

For 50 years after Bellamy, all of Europe contributed to technology and modernity.  Only America has been making a significant contribution to modernity since 1945 when socialism conquered Europe.  The war technology and the meritocratic world of commerce in America since then has produced the modern miraculous world.

Strange to say, modern American youth are uneducated fools.  The people in Poland,  Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, who lived under socialism for 45 years chose modern commerce for their lives in 1992 when the yoke of Russia lifted off their lives.

Parliamentary mistake

I had an instructor at the University of Chicago named Herman Finer.  I’ll never forget that name. I don’t know why.

Finer taught a class in political science which to him meant teaching the superiority of a parliamentary system over an American style.  He also wrote the core text on the subject.

Somehow at that age (17) I knew he was an ideolog not a challenging intellect.  I don’t remember arguing.  But I do remember that I had already read the founding papers of the American Republic in the People Shall Judge and the Federalist Papers.

What is relevant to me here today is that the U.S. had a chance in the post WWII era to shape many governments and we always chose the parliamentary system or a version of it because the Finer arguments were dominant and the Confederate-slave Party, the Democrats, had done an effective 20 year job of denigrating America, as they are doing now.

These American Leftwingers designed or heavily influenced the Japanese government, the German, the Israeli and a dozen other emerging nations.  Worst of all, these people designed the United Nations.

In terms of stability, it is hard to compare the parliamentary with The American.  Many nations have several centuries of experience.  They both provide continuity and some restraint on popular extremism.

To me, the issue is adaptation to fundamental issues of power.  Every government has an executive arm that executes the laws of the land.  Is it responsive to changes in domestic power?

The failure to appreciate the American system is based on a failure to assign high enough value to my most  important criterion.  America has had three revolutions and has survived all three.  No other country has had these revolutions and most could not even survive one of these.

In order,

• America has survived a continual mass immigration and always been able to accommodate the newcomers; to actually gain strength from these influxes.  Only Australia has come close to dealing with this issue effectively and it is still uncomfortable with the role of an immigrant nation.  This accommodation is destroying Europe.
• When a major power fight could not be resolved inside the government, America had a Civil War and survived it.  No other country has been able to do this.
• The country made a radical and rapid shift from an agricultural to an industrial economic base and has been effective at representing the change without serious governing distress.
• Lastly America went from a traditional hereditary elite political system to the first meritocracy and has remained representative.  Most other countries find their political system still in the hands of the hereditary elite.

For me, those are strong arguments for the American system.  Especially since the constitutional founders were very aware of the need to design that element into the governmental structure.

Media are needed to tell the truth

I have felt guilty for my efforts and the efforts of my friends in the 1970’s to get blacks on the police force.  Now that the Democrat Party is running a war on the police, these hundreds of thousands of good, honorable decent black police officers are being badly mistreated.

The only way I can imagine redressing this political evil is for TV and movies to make the issue visible in dramatic story lines.

Here are some simple story lines:

• Four black officers in a police locker room.  One woman is crying.  Another explains: “Her nephew was raggin’ on her last night at a family dinner because a black kid with a gun was shot by cops.  He blamed her.  She’s just crying. Nothing we can do.”

• Two black officers talking in a patrol car: “Last night, five of us were detailed to serve a summons on a parole who is known to have been in a drive-by car. The apartment was in the MacArthur (black) district.  Those guys wanted me to be in the front.  Hell, they think that dude won’t shot me cause I’m black.  I can’t back out cause they’ll talk about me being a coward. This is fucked."
• Three black officers at coffee.  Officer #1 says: “Capt’n Gerry wants me on the service duty for the mayor, he thinks it’s good PR.  But it isn’t.  It makes me look like a servant or a house nig--r to all those angry blacks ladies protesting the police.” Officer #2 says: “I volunteered for the swat squad. With all that equipment on, nobody know who I am.”

• A black male officer leaning on a desk with one black female officer and a white female officer.  He says: “Damn.  Yesterday I’m booking this old drunk dude and a black kid on the bench yells out loud ‘Hey bro, I’m innocent, get me outa here’.  What am I supposed to say.  The guys around here are already angry about  all those black ladies and the City council attacking the police.

I can come up with dozens more.  The whole point is that the Democrat War on Police is hurting decent black officers and nobody is doing anything to right this wrong.

I don’t expect it, but a few decent black pastors could have a Sunday honoring black officers in their churches.

Don’t want to work or can’t

Our society has a terrible problem making the distinction between people who don’t want to work and those who can’t work.  

It is a regular conversation I hear so often that I no longer listen. ‘All those poor people living on the streets, we need to take care of them.’

Having dealt extensively with both populations, that statement is sheer stupidity and offensive.

What brought the subject up in a way that made me willing to write a blog about it was an article by Michael Totten.  Totten is a reporter of the highest integrity.  I have read his on the spot coverage of the Middle East.  I contributed money to a campaign to get him to Vietnam for reporting from there.  I concur with his brilliant coverage of Cuba that few others see clearly.

Now Totten has written a piece about the street people he talked to in Portland Oregon.  No surprise to me.  They wanted to be on the street.  Unless there was a $5 motel that didn’t require a deposit, a credit card or ID.

I created a park for street people on 6th and Minna in San Francisco.  I knew the people in my park.  They didn’t want to conform to social norms.  It is that simple.  They didn’t want to give up drugs or alcohol.  They certainly didn’t want to get a regular job with a schedule.  They were content with the generous food and clothing that our society gives them.

I was also a consultant to the State of California for its ‘special needs adults’.  That phrase is in quotes because the name continually changes.  They were ‘retarded’ in older definitions.  They could dress and feed themselves.  

The State Department of Social Services provided them homes in clusters of six and paid caregivers to feed and take care of them.

I was hired to developed measures of the quality of care offered from food to educational stimulus. The caregivers were largely black women and Filipino families.  I needed slightly different measures for each group. I proposed several reward systems for outstanding care.

The care I saw was warm, compassionate and loving.  With an often difficult clientele.

The point of this blog is simple: there are people who don’t want to work and those who can’t.  There are a few people who really care about this issue and these people are taking care of both populations.

The rest of our opinionated citizens are misinformed, political ideologues or just plain misanthropes.

Crime again

A few blogs back I pointed out that crime is rising rapidly in America for two main reasons.  Smart phones allow better ‘lookout’ protection for criminals and the Democrat Party war on police means less police efforts.  

I got flack about my data from a good friend.  This is the formerly private email I sent him:

I personally hate working with crime data.  For obvious reasons.

* Only murder is reported nearly 100%.  Everything else reported is a fraction of the number or magnitude of crimes.  Rape is only reported 10% of the time based on survey data.

* Proportion of crimes reported is not stable for any crime.  It varies by crime and by geography.  Rise in crime, non-homicide, is rarely noticeable in black and Latino communities and in public schools.  In New Orleans the crime reporting rate is a fraction of what it is in nearby Houston.

* The definition of crime changes.  As with the misdemeanor/felony definition that was redefined by California Democrats.  A car break-in is a misdemeanor even if the criminal does it ten times in a row. Spousal rape is a crime in some jurisdictions but not others.

* Conviction and prosecution rates are highly variable and never stable over time or geography.  Rape and assault are frequently under prosecuted because the victim changes his/her mind and refuses to pursue the case.  Even worse, most DA’s have none of the arithmetic skills needed for money crimes.

Crime is committed by a class of people that is in a limited age, education and racial group.  So it is unevenly distributed and highly dependent on the number of criminals put in prison or let out.

The last is why I'm confident that when S.F. crime is up, it is up in every other major city.  In addition I have friends in many other cities;  they spontaneously report crime when we talk. Gun shots in the neighborhood are hard to miss.

The data I used for my blog came from Heather MacDonald in the Wall Street Journal; based on phone calls to local police.  Whatever data MacDonald reported is as reliable as possible.  She is uniquely honest and accurate.

Lastly, the smartphone issue that I raised, smartphones make ‘lookouts’ more effective, is based on observation and reports from many people, including criminals. Like many other crimes, such as where drugs are stored in their vaginas, women are increasingly used as lookouts.

Crime occurs where people are absent.  Reporting crimes by all the people with smartphones, which some people expected to be a benefit of smartphones, is meaningless.  Police rarely come promptly, in time to catch crime while it occurs.

A fact to keep in mind: ex-felons are likely to commit new crimes after prison and they get caught at a 70% rate after one year and 85% after three years.  Extrapolate just a little to know how crime rate is related to prison release rates.

California has released 15,000 burglars in the past two years just for overcrowding.  Each burglar can commit several hundred burglaries a year.  Multiply the two numbers together to get a very large number.

Any criminal can commit many crimes.  This is a factor to always keep in mind.  Nearly all the highly visible graffiti in my world disappeared with one arrest.

Crime is rising in the U.S.  Prepare for it.

All those cranes

A friend just drove to San Francisco to visit me. He drove from San Jose.  He asked how it was possible to see so many construction cranes.

The answer is straightforward.    We have four revolutions going on here, in this locale.

• The global Internet brings in $billions; with Google at the top of the pyramid for earning power.  Others include Facebook and Ebay.  There are one hundred others locally and major Internet players such as Amazon and Netflix's headquartered  elsewhere with offices here.

• The  associated maintenance that is required for every global Internet operation including on going operations like Oracle and Salesforce. They are here.

• There are the actual gross revenue of the sales of smartphones and associated new products with vast revenues coming to Apple and Google locally.

• Lastly there is the world of pharmaceuticals and related biotechnology which is located in this same area. New miracle cures every month.

There are two things to understand.  One is that hundreds of $billions are pouring into this small area from the entire planet.  And will continue to do so for a long time.  When the U.S. gets a decent government and a rational corporate tax policy, even more vast amounts of money, currently kept outside the U.S., will flow back in.

Secondly, money has a multiplier effect.  For every dollar earned by a giant global corporation, many more dollars are earned as the first dollar circulates.  In economics that multiplier in the commercial market is calculated as generating 5 more dollars.  

That being the case, those cranes represent the vast secondary uses of the money coming from the four major global generators listed above.

The person who receives the dollar, spends it on nearly everything from cars, housing, food and education to travel, lawyers, adventure and everything else that requires a building.

That is the reason for all those cranes in this boom town.

Robot surgery

I have two issues of interest to me when it comes to robot surgery.  The first is the lack of good medical care that goes with socialized medicine  The second is the role of robots in our lives.

I argue that socialized medical systems under invest in equipment.  The consequence is that, with most of the world in the thrall of socialized medical systems, many people get sub-par medicine. Even worse, investment in new medicine is diminished by the medicine practiced outside the U.S.   Only the U.S. is bringing us the future lifesaving medicine and surgery.

I have shown that the procedure that saved my life, heart surgery in a cath lab, is not nearly as available outside the U.S. in the socialized medical world.  Each cath lab costs $1.5 million to $2.0.  I’m fortunate to live in America.

I now have the data on robot surgical equipment.  There are about two thousand in the U.S. and the same number elsewhere around the world.  They cost about the same as a cath lab.

To see what a surgical robot can do: there are two Youtubes to look at. The first uses the robot to peel a grape and the second one stitches the peel back on to the grape.

The robot enters the human with four tiny holes.  One hole is for the endoscope that gives the surgeon a 3D image, enlarged as much as desired.  The other three holes have tools on them controlled by the surgeons two hands and feet.  All this is done by the operator sitting at an appropriate consol.  Just like one used in a cath lab.

As for the introduction of robots in our lives.  No jobs are eliminated in this case.  New jobs and new job skills are created.  More lives are saved and more surgical procedures are possible.  New skills and new education and new maintenance functions are brought into the world.  More jobs, not less.

Locally owned

There is a big sign on the wall of one of the local grocery chains proclaiming ‘locally owned’.

The chain is privately held (Mollie Stone’s). I have no idea who owns it. The ownership is not public.  It was founded thirty years ago by two local men. If that were still the case the question of ‘local’ would be subject to the question of whether they have homes in vacation areas where they spend most of their time.  The reality is that death will bring in family members who aren’t local.  The buildings where the stores operate can certainly be owned by different people who are not local and the same is true for all sorts of equipment and facilities of the stores that are owned by banks and others.

‘Local’ is an ambiguous term, with warm and cuddly implications. Like 'organic' and 'sustainable'.

I wish McDonald’s and Target could use the phrase ‘locally owned’.  Because they are. In a very real sense.  Often the buildings are owned by local people. The local cluster of stores are owned by a franchisee.  More importantly, the stocks for these global companies are owned by more than half the local population in their retirement funds.  In a very deep sense they are locally owned, by far more locals than other businesses that call themselves locally owned.

More sophistication about business may mean less sentimentality about terms like ‘locally owned’.  Money is fungible and doesn't stay in one place.  Commerce is a positive sum world;  sales anywhere brings in money from elsewhere.

Slave mentality and integration

I played a role in several race issues that bother me now.  I’ve already apologized for my role in public school integration via busing.  It destroyed urban public schools.

I played a role in integration of the San Francisco Police Department and helped an important leader of the Black Police Officer’s Assn.  

I also put pressure on, as a big shareholder of major film and TV corporations, to integrate ads and programs.

I did a great deal to promote integration in housing, to no avail.  I was a major national player in integration of employment in corporate America and in top management.  The only area with unequivocal success. Short and long term.

Now when I read about elements of the Democrat Party's War on police and the monthly protest marches and the apologies by the insipid political classes about police defending themselves from lunatic black criminals trying to kill them, I feel terrible for all the black police officers in America.

Here are decent, competent, deeply honorable men and women who serve in police departments being maligned as ‘racist’.  When police are maligned by ignorant and malicious blacks it is the black police who are ignored, insulted and often persecuted by the evil District Attorneys and Federal investigators.

It is just plain sad.  I’m glad I helped the integration of the police.  I feel awful about the current consequences for all those wonderful public servants who bear the brunt of Black community barbarism and Democrat Party malice.

I don’t feel so bad about my efforts to integrate the media and advertising.  There are many TV shows and movies that are better because of integration. Some much better.

What disturbs me is watching the enforced, number counting, somewhat uncomfortable use of blacks in ads where they are out of place.  Black homes don’t look like suburban Stepford models; but they are put in those backgrounds for advertising.  TV shows a racially integrated America.  The reality is that there is a tiny number of mixed black-white racial families or friendship circles; nothing in proportion to those shown in ads.

In fact, the pathetic outcome of all my efforts is that in colleges, public schools and most other social environments that I see (except sports) segregation of blacks and whites is worse than ever.

That is not true of Asian white mixing.    

I ascribe the current pathetic situation to a slave mentality that remains deeply ingrained in the black community and is left after the most productive blacks have moved out of the ghettos.

The new global religion

A few blogs back I mentioned that I invite Jehovah’s Witnesses who call at the front door to come in and visit.

One thing I point out to them is that they have a major religious competitor who is way ahead of them.  The Jehovah's Witnesses are proselytizing around the world, warning that since 1914 we are in the ‘end times’ and that Armageddon is approaching.  All the signs of warfare and climate and economic chaos are signs of the approaching Armageddon. (They sound like Barack Obama and his claim that ‘Climate Armageddon is the greatest threat to America’)   

The new religious competitor, the Climate Armageddonistas just had a year end global conference with representatives from 190 countries (if one excludes small islands and land without a government, there aren’t even 100 nations on the planet).  

Climate Armageddon is the largest and fastest growing religion in history.  It is far larger than the Catholic Church which has merged into the Climate Armageddon religion.  It is larger than Islam which seems to tolerate it, but has its own Armageddon teachings.

The new religion is based on hatred of Carbon Dioxide, a hatred of modern commerce,  a daily ritual called recycling and sun worship.  Recycling seems to be the duty to put food and other biological waste in the ground.  To drive expensive electric and electric assisted autos. To pray toward the sun with large sun panels.  The ritual explicitly focuses on keeping poor people poor and thwarting the modern world in anyway possible.

The new religion is really quite ubiquitous.

The new religion has grown to its current strength based on faked data and a rejection of all more reliable satellite data.  The growth of this new religion, based on Armageddon, is only 45 years old.

An astounding growth for any religion.  

Like Christian Science before it, it claims to be scientific.  Like Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Seventh Day Adventists, we are in the ‘End Times’ now.  Time to become religious. Pentecostals are in this category too as are the Shia Muslims and Bahai..

The old stories of human bad behavior being punished by global destruction seems to be part of the reptile brain that is at the core of the human brain, the amygdala.

Taliban on campus

I have regularly observed that during a protracted war both sides adopt some of the issues that drive the other side.  During the Cold War, America in reaction to Soviet and the Chinese atheism and hatred of commerce absorbed more religion into our society and more appreciation for free markets.   We also absorbed both the atheism and anti-commerce positions in our political Left.  

In the current protracted war with Proselytic Islam the same thing is happening.  In reaction to the Arab world and much of Islam, we have welcomed gay marriage and turned much of our military fighting units into gay-feminist-transgender wimps.  

On the other hand, the Left has adopted the Proselytic Islamic Jew hate.  Most shocking of all is that the Taliban and the Islamic State have enjoyed destroying artifacts of history.  The Taliban destroyed the Great Buddha of Bamiyan.  The Islamic State merrily destroyed the ancient Greek city of Nimrud.

This complete disregard for history is now part of America on our campuses.  Academics are gleefully removing the names of historic figures from buildings, institutions and everything they can find.

Woodrow Wilson’s name is being removed from many places at Princeton where he was once president.  The Democrat Party is removing the names of presidents Jefferson and Jackson from their Party Celebrations.  The Democrats are trying to remove Alexander Hamilton, the founder of our financial system, from the $10 bill.

Most shocking of all, nearly all remnants, artifacts and memorials related to our civil war have been removed or obliterated in the Confederate areas of the United States.

This is what happens in a protracted war.