Pro Commerce

Where did communism go?

All my readers and most other people know that communism failed in the 20th Century.  What happens when a movement fails?

Three religious movements offer some useful history.  

The Seventh-day Adventists began with a prediction of the ‘Second Coming’ in 1844 in Michigan.  It didn’t happen as many people know.  The doctrine was slightly modified and the religion that replaced it began to grow.  Today the church has 20 million members scattered over the surface of the earth in every country.

The Jehovah’s Witnesses also had a leader who projected the start of Christ’s Kingdom in 1925. That failure has generated another great global religion with 20 million followers, worldwide.

The third movement began as a prediction in the early 1980’s of the end of the world due to human CO2 behavior by the end of the 21st Century.  The movement organized its first global conference in Kyoto in 1997.  By that time satellite data had been available for 20 years and showed no harmful effects from CO2.  Another predictive failure.

The movement, now called Global Warming Apocalypse has several billion believers in every nation on the planet.

The evidence suggests that nothing can create a great global religious movement as effectively as a disastrous failure.

Communism failed in its two largest nations, in the USSR and China, by 1991 about the time the new Global Warming Apocalypse began its rapid growth.

It is my contention that the failed communism of the 20th Century is the new Global Warming Apocalypse religion of the 21st Century.  The strongest proof of my thesis is that Global Warming adherents are all Lefties, people who formerly found communism attractive.

Lefties today are yesterday’s communists. Yes?

Hypocrisy at tech firms

I saw a letter posted in Huffandpuff Post from ‘tech leaders’ about their abhorrence of Donald Trump.   The headline got circulation.

It made me think about what hypocrites these idiots must be.  Any employee who carried on confidential company business on their private email account and knew that it was illegal WOULD BE FIRED on the spot.  Yet most of these disgraceful men are card carrying Lefties. Democrat Party stalwarts.

So I looked at the list of ‘tech leaders’.  I won’t apologize to the real tech leaders who are such disgraceful Lefty hypocrites, but their names are not on this ignorant misinformed letter.

There are only three people who could in the wildest definition could be considered ‘tech leaders’.

One is Pierre Omidyar who founded eBay.  Not a ‘tech leader’.  He founded the company but only ran it for two years.

The second is Jeremy Stoppelman CEO of Yelp.  This is appropriate for Stoppelman because his company, Yelp, is pure unadulterated fraud.  He belongs in the anti-Trump crowd.  If you don’t know why Yelp is a criminal enterprise, you don’t know Yelp.  Yelp has salespeople who phone small businesses and explain to them that by advertising on Yelp they have the privilege to remove bad business evaluations and move favorable ones to the top.

The third is Jimmy Wales founder of Wikipedia.  Wikipedia is a great invention.  A non-profit that is always begging for money.  It also has a Lefty bias which makes it an embarrassment.  But Wales is probably the only genuine ‘tech leader’ even though no other leader knows him personally.

Wikileaks

Considering the damage that Wikileaks has done to the Democrat Party this week, it is worthwhile looking at the Wikileaks.com website.

I find it fascinating and recommend it to everyone.

One look and you will consider Julian Assange a hero of sorts.  In the Hillary case the site has done nothing but post what the State Department has made public.  But this gives clear evidence that Hillary Clinton transacted a great deal of Department work on her private server.  She consciously broke many federal laws. Arrogantly.

And the Democrat Party leak makes it clear to any fool Democrat or otherwise, that hacking an email account is easy for anyone.

Black talk

We have an interesting divide in the U.S. these days but no proposals for solution.  

The Democrats have staked out the position that White people exist in a world of privilege and need to change.  Hillary said "I will call for white people like myself to put ourselves in the shoes of those African-American families who fear every time their children go somewhere, who have to have the talk about how to really protect themselves when they're the ones that should be expecting protection from encounters with police,"

"I think we are the ones who have to start listening to the legitimate cries that are coming from our African-American fellow citizens and we have so much more to be done and we have got to get about the business of doing it."

The Republican position is “law and order”.  Blacks need to obey the laws.  They have more trouble with police because they commit five times as much crime as anyone else.

Nobody outside the hard core Democrat Party, meaning ordinary Americans, doubts that the reason black crime is so disproportionate is partly cultural and partly the absence of two parent families.  Non-black families are increasingly facing the absence of two parent families but the anti-crime culture seems to be stronger than among blacks.

The only useful political question about the black community is whether there is a program that can mitigate the consequences of families without a father-parent.

I have no answer.  I’ve worked on incentives for blacks in the care of mentally ill people programs.  I learned that blacks can quickly overrun and game any government program. The best solution is to build in a regular 5 years automatic change in the program.

For example, we could have a program that gives all girls who don’t go to college or community college before age 21 and haven’t had a baby a large incentive such as  $20,000 a year for five years, starting at 21; the money would continue if they only have a baby within a marriage and live with the father-parent for a separate five year period.

That program would have to change the eligibility rules automatically and without forewarning every five years.

That type of program would present a real discussion of our social problems.

Easy to start a business

In an article sent by one of my wonderful readers there are charts showing the ease of starting and getting a business running. The U.S. comes out as a hard place to start and run a business.

I don’t know how these are measured but I have an important contribution to make.  

If you are starting a restaurant or a retail shop, the impediments can be great.  Especially in the union controlled cities of nearly every American city.   In communist San Francisco, a new business can take forever, depending on how well you know the bribery circuits.  A friend has spent two years trying to open her second ice cream retail shop.

For any other kind of business that is not true.  I worked with over 2,000 start up businesses over the past 45 years and most of them started as outlaws.  They didn’t get permits, they didn’t get licenses and they didn’t file the appropriate taxes.  

The nature of America is that government is local and local government is usually so incompetent that you can do whatever your want by going to a bad neighborhood where neighbors don’t bother you.  That is where nearly all new businesses get started.

Most don’t bother to get  permits, licenses, or pay taxes until they have an established market and know their business will succeed.

So the American way we deal with the horrors of our communist local urban government is to go rogue and ignore the assholes.

Muscle cramps

The Wall Street Journal told me about a new product called Hotspot for muscle cramps.

I did an earlier blog on the use of quinine by ballet dancers for immediate recovery from muscle cramps and the insanity of the FDA in banning quinine.

It turns out the new Hotspot, which is just hot juices from pepper and ginger, works directly on the nerves via a channel called the TRP transient receptor potential, in the mouth and esophagus.

The idiots at the FDA will not ban Hotspot because it is common food items and the direct channel to the nerves is presumably understood.

Of course quinine worked the same way and so would many other home remedies.

The new discovery is wonderful news to anyone who does or may suffer from muscle cramps.

It also supports those of us who abhor the intrusion of ignorant fools with the power of a government agency from sticking their stupid rules our lives.

Failure of honesty

I’m reading Deirdre McCloskey’s book on the origins of modern commerce.  She makes it very clear that openness is a critical component of modern commerce.  She talks about openness in its form as honesty and absence of corruption, the elements that keep banana republics and much of the tribal world poor and wretched.

Openness and the absence of corruption are vital to the founding and maintenance of modern commerce.

While reading this, the American Department of Justice, the President and the FBI announced that Democrat candidate for president, H. Clinton was not guilty of a Federal crime.  Despite the fact that she is totally guilty of violating many Federal laws.

This sends a message directly and indirectly to every American that some people are above the law.  That justice in America in the hands of Democrats is controlled by corrupt people.

This is a sad signal to our modern commercial society.  It is terribly harmful because it is a pair of scissors that cuts one of the fibers that holds our whole commercial society together.

It is horrible, serious and destructive.  I know that as a pro commerce advocate.

Yet I don’t know the extent or depth of the ramifications. Economic growth has slowed to a crawl under the total dishonesty of the Obama Democrats.  Will growth stop all together now?

Ocean circulation

This image of the circulation of the oceans for the entire planet is fascinating and beautiful.

Several things to note.  The isthmus of Panama was open until 12-15 million years ago and the climate of the earth was consequently very different because the Atlantic and Pacific mixed together.

The current shape of the oceans has created the Gulf Stream which is the primary determinant of the Northern Hemisphere climate.  It was fisherman from Portugal who sailed the Gulf Stream that carried the information about ocean currents that connected Europe to America via C. Columbus.  It was changes in the Gulf Stream that allowed Vikings to settle in Canada, Greenland and Iceland as well as to populate and dominate Russia, England and France.

The other important notable fact from this illustration shows the way that the Pacific El Nino, La Nina pattern has an influence on the Atlantic and the climate of the whole world.

I personally use the data that discovered this global ocean flow in the past few decades to recognize that global warming is trivial and has nothing to do with human carbon generation.

Apologies to historians

Early this year I was contacted by several historians who work for a business that does historical work for corporations.  Next year is the 50th anniversary of the founding of Mastercard.  As the founder of Mastercard, I was contacted to get my memory of the founding events in 1967.

In early Spring, I had misgivings about whether historians would be capable of recognizing my central role in founding both Mastercard and the cooperative nature of the new credit card that would make it the first global money.  I wrote about it in this blog.

It turns out my misgivings were unfounded, not because of historians in general but because of my own actions in this case.

The corporate historians sent me the first chapter of their coming book on the history of Mastercard.  They did a wonderful job of giving me due credit as the convener and founder of Mastercard.  Thanks guys.

As I read the material I found that they were heavily influenced by my own actions.  

• I have written extensively on my own role and made my writings public.  That alone wouldn’t count for much. 
• I helped several friends write similar articles that drew heavily on my written material.
• I personally interviewed some of the other founding participants and published those interviews as transcribed.
• I hired a journalist friend to interview one of the key founders.  That created extra credibility.
• Lastly I told the founding story, early in the life of Mastercard to a friend who was writing a book on marketing innovation.  It was published and fact checked by a major publisher.

All of this together gave credibility to the story as I told it.

Keep this in mind if you want something you have done to be rightly appreciated in the future.

Goodie goodie is often bad

Many Lefties think that the Left is where goodness resides.  They see the Left trying to improve people and shape society to improve humans.  They are right in some ways about Lefty politics, but people don’t like to be shaped, ask any spouse or lover who is the victim of the idea that the partner will change them for the better.  Or look at the outcome of every single Lefty society from the USSR to Venezuela.

There is a core reality about humans and human history: humans only change when rewarded for their voluntary behavior.  The greatest explosion of health, wealth and happiness in the history of the planet comes from modern commerce where each individual is rewarded for their innovation, hardwork, honesty and merit.

People do not change for the better when they are rewarded for sloth or indifference. People do not change for the better when they are rewarded as part of a group.  Rewarding a whole school or a whole class does not raise the grades or the results.  Rewarding merit is the only way to get better performance from people.

That is what people who are trying to "be good" often fail to understand.  Other people do not work hard in a union environment which is always the default policy of the Left.  People do not work harder when the product of their hard work is taken away from them.  And most of all, giving money to a beggar has never improved the outcome.

The only way other people improve the conditions of their lives and the lives of all around you is when each is rewarded for their meritorious behavior.  Not your good behavior towards them.

That is why goodie goodie behavior usually has bad outcomes.

Lefty motives

Many of my blogs treat Lefties as evil incarnate.  Sometimes I am more subdued.

This presents two problems.  First it alienates my Lefty readers.  I don’t do this intentionally, its more like throwing a strike in baseball; it is necessary but sometimes the strike ball is perfect for the batter to hit.  Then I lose a reader who might be a person I appreciate.

Second, while I am happy preaching to the choir; I need feedback from the people who go golfing instead of going to church (same metaphor).

Enough with the slightly off base metaphors.

What I want to say, is that I have many good friends and even more family members who are Lefties.  I understand their motives and I sympathize with them.

A large chunk of Lefties are just plain angry at the world.  The Left is the perfect place to channel that anger and protect the rest of us from the skunk spray.

A large chunk of the Left are people who are trying to ‘do good’.  They recycle everything assiduously because they see themselves as ‘good people’.  The eat as much ‘organic’ as they can and avoid GMO’s.  They bicycle when they can and they give cash to street people.

They are doing everything in their everyday life to confirm their self appraisal as ‘good people’.  They see the Left as the home of government programs that are aimed at helping people.

I understand their motivation.

Tomorrow’s blog is about why they have channeled their goodness self image into evil.

FERC

I can say negative things about most government regulatory bodies. This one has done some positive things.  FERC is the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission.  

Among the good things that FERC has worked on, the ones I know are the corrupt trading in oil futures by Enron, the exposure of the bad pipes at the San Onofre nuclear power plant which FERC closed and the clean bill of health FERC gave to fracking.

What I didn’t know about was their exposure in 2012 of corrupt trading practices by Barclay’s bank in the electricity market.  I learned about this because I was considered for an expert witness job on that case.

What happened is that two traders in electricity futures colluded with traders on the active electric trading desk.  The futures traders would take a position in several futures; say September for $55 per megawatt hour for a month and December for $48.  Then traders on the active trading desk would manipulate the price on the first of September and December to lose money on the actual sale of electricity but make a bundle on the futures desk.  On September first they would buy electricity for $60 and drive up the price so the futures traders would make money; and sell at $46 on December 1st so the futures traders would again make money.  

The active traders in real electricity would lose money on their accounts but the futures traders would make a lot more.  The four traders involved in this could only do this occasionally lest others see what they were doing and subvert their corruption.

FERC exposed this and penalized the traders and the bank.

I think FERC could only have succeeded with the help of a whistle-blower.  But at least they did expose it.

Pokemon Go

So far the Wall Street Journal has had an article about Pokemon Go everyday since last Friday.

The first reason is that by this time a week ago, the game had 21 million users only days after its release.  The tech writer for the Wall Street Journal, Joanna Stern,  promoted the game to readers.  Forbes and the Financial Times also did an article on the game.  A part owner of the game is Google a shareholder in Niantic which uses its earlier game Ingress as a basis for Pokemon Go locations.

The second reason for the financial community’s excitement is the immediate and dramatic increase in the stock market price of Nintendo, a distributor of the game (up 41% in two days).   Nintendo is projected to more than double its annual revenue in the first year.  Google will get value as a shareholder in Niantic and from sales at its Google Play store.

My interest in the game is because the game uses real world locations for Poke Spots and Poke Gyms where game players can go to lure their mobile phone targets.

That means retailers have a stake in using a mobilephone game to attract and sell to customers.

In the coming weeks I expect this to become the first business-game story as the battle among retailers enters the real world of attracting customers and dealing with local politics.

All of a sudden gaming enters the world of real commerce at a previously unappreciated level.

Commerce and politics

This is a continuation of yesterday’s blog.  The question in my mind is whether modern commerce can survive more Lefty government and regulatory expansion in the U.S. before it is quashed.

First, large corporations will survive the onslaught of government regulations, even being driven out of the U.S. by perverse tax policies.  But large corporations are not the source of vitality in a modern commercial world. Many modern large corporations are run by blind Lefties who will allow themselves to be killed.  Amazon, Google, Uber, Airbnb and Target are led by people who are voluntarily walking to the guillotine.

Second,  new businesses are the source of commercial vitality and they can get started in any lightly regulated location.  There will always be such places in the vastness of America.

Third, new businesses need the milieu that protects and promotes people who start businesses.  I don’t see that in the close minded, anti-commerce worlds of modern Lefty union controlled cities.

When Lefty politics dominates the minds of the people who start businesses, the kind of people who become snowflakes in college, modern commerce will not flourish.

Are there people who will escape the poisoned atmosphere of American colleges and cities?

Just looking at contemporary America, our vitality is gone.  It could be revived with

• an immigration policy that supports Indian, Asian, Israeli and other innovators
• a tax policy that does not tax the full earnings of American corporations overseas
• a monetary policy that does not promote finance over new businesses
• a deliberate effort to suppress unions and government regulation
• a taboo on intruding into the operation of business such as high minimum wages and family welfare rules enforced on business practices

None of that will happen in a Lefty political world.  So revival is out of the question if the Left prevails.

But is survival possible under the current political conditions?

Family and meritocracy

I’m struggling with the future of modern commerce.  Please feel free to help out.  Modern commerce has only arisen in a few places in its fully developed powerful form.  In Holland in the 17th Century, Britain in the 18th and 19th Century and in the U.S. in the 19th and 20th Centuries.

Modern commerce can be squashed by powerful government as it has been in Britain and Hong Kong.   Can it be squashed in the U.S. by a continued government of the Left?

The first element I am examining is the relationship of family and meritocracy.  Tribe has always been the bane of modern commerce.  It doesn’t exist in tribal countries.  Family is also a barrier as in Asia in China, Taiwan and South Korea.  Japan is an exception because meritocracy trumps family.  

America has always had weak families. As the nation moved West, families became nuclear and too small to stifle meritocracy.  

America is on the path to no families with gay parents and single invitro mothers.  The black community has almost reached the ultimate of ‘no families’.  But we don’t see modern commerce in the black community.  

I don’t know the connection between weak families and meritocracy and no families and modern commerce.  Other than the black disaster, we don’t have any data about non-families in the non-black community.

I’m not prepared to make any projections.  It may be like Mancur Olson, we have a tea cup dish with too much family prevents meritocracy and too little does the same by failing to create strong individuals.

Europe takes unfair credit

Many Jews living in Austria and Germany in 1936 said to each other ‘this can’t be happening in a country that is part of the Enlightenment’.

From my perspective, they weren’t.  I think all of Europe gets credit for the Enlightenment when it is not deserved.

I consider the Enlightenment to have two components: scientific empiricism and individual empowerment.

That means, in my humble judgement, art, literature and music are excluded.  The evolution of art was important in France and Italy.  The evolution of music was important in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Germany.  Countries I generally exclude from the Enlightenment.

I include only Britain,  Holland and parts of Scandinavia in the Enlightenment.  They were the sources of individual freedom, modern commerce and science.

We can start by looking at the most famous Enlightenment figure: Rene Descartes. Definitely French but he was banned in France.  He was published in Holland and taught in Holland. The great Enlightenment thinkers were Newton, Locke, Hume, Adam Smith, Spinoza and Bacon.  

The Frenchmen associated with Enlightenment were Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau.  Frankly they are mistakenly included.  They were part of series of thinkers that promoted communal values and government power, not individual freedom, free association and science.

The pre-eminent thinkers who present a problem for my model of the European countries that were central to the Enlightenment were Copernicus, Galileo and Kant.  These were important thinkers and Kant was truly great in any portfolio.  

I should say that Europe was not the home of Enlightenment if we exclude Britain and Holland and three great men:  Copernicus, Galileo and Kant.

Does that sound OK to anyone else?

Rich people hire their guns

I’m not going to get into the gun-no gun debate.  No one changes their minds.  Facts don’t matter, and we are in a Democrat induced national hysteria that guns are the main source of all violence in America.

What seems strange to me is that a key element in the argument has not made it into public discussion.

The whole gun issue is built on a class divide.  Many people point out that prominent politicians have secret service protection with guns.

No one seems to point out the rich people all hire guards and protection units with guns to protect them.

Money buys gun protection.  Its that simple.  But that point never gets into discussions.  Zuckerberg,  Sean Parker, Larry Page, Cameron Diaz and Charlize Theron all pay for gun carrying body guards.

Class warfare

I made this poster to go with today's blog.  Feel free to use it.  The hypocrisy of the Left leaves a foul taste in my mouth.  This has little to do with commerce but much to do with the evil rampant in American Democrat Party politics.

Suicide by cop

Don’t be surprised by goody-goody Google if you google this topic.  You are immediately told ‘you are not alone’ and are given an 800 suicide hotline.   No comparable response to ‘murder’, kill’, ‘assassinate’ or ‘buy me a gun’.

Suicide by cop is a real phenomenon.  Trouble is nothing online or googleable gives you two important facts.

First, suicide by cop, is an almost entirely American Black occurrence.  Suicide is stigmatized in the American black society.   Far more stigmatized than in any other society.   A black person is told many times that ‘blacks don’t commit suicide’.  So a suicidal black figures out that suicide by cop is considered ‘brave’ not ‘suicide’.

To understand this one needs to know a second fact:  the total of suicides and homicides is a constant.  Take a white zip code where the suicides per year are 50 and homicides are 25 for a total of 75, the same data in a black neighborhood might be 25 suicides and 50 homicides still totaling 75.  Blacks get killed rather than kill themselves.

A friend of mine, a New York government official,  knew this association and was looking at zip codes in New York.  He found one white zip code that looked like a black one.  The homicides were high and the suicides were much lower than in other white zip codes.  

My friend went to the neighborhood to find out what was going on.  He concluded from what he was told: in this neighborhood white people who want to commit suicide just walk out on the street and start yelling ‘nigga nigga’ and they very quickly get shot.

The inflation hysteria

There are many news items that create a strong reaction for me.  One, that almost drives me nuts, is the permanent and incessant claim by economists and government financial people that we need inflation.

My name is Michael Phillips.  I hope the irony of my name is recognizable by many of my readers.  The reason for the incessant desire by economists for inflation is the Phillips’ Curve. Made popular by William Phillips in the late 1950’s from his professorship at the London School of Economics.   

Phillips demonstrated from a large database that there was a close curvilinear relationship between inflation and unemployment.  When unemployment is low inflation is high and rising.  The conclusion from this correlation was that a modest inflation rate 3% (in the U.S.) corresponded with a modest unemployment rate, 4%.  The force connecting these two was presumed to be a growing economy that demanded workers and drove up inflation.

The U.S. now has a low unemployment rate, in the 4% range, but virtually no inflation.  This seems to economists and others to be atypical, wrong and harmful for economic growth.  These people, including all the central bankers on the planet, want some inflation, which they associate with growth.

The evidence against the Phillips’ Curve is that Japan has had stable employment for 25 years while having deflation.  The Japanese economy as measured by GDP doesn’t appear to be growing.

The reason for this whole confusion and the inability of economists and their peers to recognize what is really happening relates to how GDP is measured.

GDP is always deflated by a currency measurement call the GDP deflator which is the rate of inflation.  This makes sense.  If GDP appears to be growing by 5% but the inflation rate is 2% then the 5% is really made up of a distorted currency increase.  So GDP loses 2% and is publicly treated as 3%.

When the GDP growth is 0% as in Japan or 2% in the U.S. and deflation is operating on the currency, nobody thinks about adding the deflation to the GDP growth.  It’s habit, it’s tradition but mostly it’s hysteria.  Everybody believes the same thing because everyone else does.

There is nothing wrong with deflation.  It moves money to the middle class because the price of everything they buy is going down.  But the economic hysteria, over 50 years, is in love with modest inflation.  God help us.

Graves and gravestones

One of my brothers made an astute observation after visiting the cemetery of his wife’s family.

He asked me where our family graves and gravestones were.  I knew where one aunt was buried but knew that no one had ever visited it.   I knew of no others of the 20 relatives going back two generations.

Put simply, in America graves and gravestones are forgotten after one generation and lost forever after two generations.  That is what I’ve found from asking around.

This suggests that there is no contemporary reason to bury anyone’s body.

I have several genealogists in the family, but graves and gravestones don’t seem to be of interest to them.  

I would guess that death and memory are increasingly an abstract idea for Americans.

Hamilton and Hillary

Hillary is planning a fundraiser at a Broadway show of Hamilton tomorrow night.  Tickets range from $2,700 to $100,000.  The ridiculous part of this is that Alexander Hamilton would hate Hillary, the Clintons and the whole Democrat Party.

Alexander Hamilton was the father of commerce in America.  He demanded that the national government pay all the state debts from the War of Independence in order to create a national economy and a national bond market.  He created the Treasury department, the first national bank (that the Democrats destroyed), created the tax collection agency and everything else to make commerce possible in America.

Hillary and the Democrat Party have openly and consistently attacked private wealth in the U.S., passed odious laws against banking and Wall Street, fought against modern commerce with draconian labor rulings and anti-commerce regulations in every government department.  Worst of all the Democrats spent 6 years working on a trade agreement that will not yield a single dollar of greater income for the U.S. if it is ever passed.

If you haven’t read the great biography of Hamilton by Ron Chernow, do so now.  It was apparently the source for Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical.

I can only guess the sequence of events.  Miranda is a lifelong Democrat from his parents deep connection to the party.  Some dingbat on Hillary’s campaign saw the connection with Miranda, the Democrat Party and the scarcity of tickets to the musical as a chance for a fundraiser.  Being one of the hard core Democrats, none of whom knows any history, the dingbat proposed the fundraiser and no Democrats recognized that Hamilton is the real father of the Republican Party.  Nor did any of the Democrat empty heads understand that the Democrat Treasury Secretary had just spent a year trying to remove the picture of Hamilton from the $10 bill.

Nothing seems to shame the Democrat Party when it comes to modern commerce.  The Republican Party might get one hand clapping for their understanding of commerce.

Berlin and five cents

For twenty years after WWII most American Jews would not buy a German made car.  That disposition never quite left my brain.

I was driving through the former East Europe, with friends, the year the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Empire fell. We went from Budapest to East Berlin.  We stayed at an East Berlin modern hotel a few hundred yards from the former Berlin Wall right at Checkpoint Charlie.

It was evening when we checked into the hotel.  After dinner I was anxious to go for a walk in West Berlin.  East Berlin was grey and dank.  

I went to Checkpoint Charlie which had a gate for pedestrians where the constabulary was charging $1.50 in West German marks to cross into West Berlin.  I had coins for $1.45 which I gave to the guard and explained that I was a tourist and hadn’t been able to get to a bank for currency before they closed in the afternoon.  I said this in English and broken French.

The guard told me “NEIN”.   No explanation would change his mind.

At this point I concluded I was dealing with the classic German mentality that had killed millions of my people and many of my relatives.

I went back to the hotel and stayed the next two days in the hotel swimming pool and reading.  We left Germany early.

Parking ticket morality

I’ve had two parking ticket experiences that have struck me as violations of civil morality.  Parking tickets are a serious annoyance but these two went beyond those bounds.  

The first occurred in Anchorage in early summer.  I was driving a rental car and enjoying a late evening at a club with friends.  I was also enjoying the daytime sun at midnight.  The sky gets a little darker at midnight, like a half hour before sunset in my San Francisco 38th parallel home.  I came out of the club at 2PM to find an expensive parking ticket on the car.  In Anchorage during the daylight hours the parking meters run 24 hours a day.  I was offended since I never guessed that that was a rule.  The clue to the ticketing officer, that I didn't know the rules, should have been my rental car.  ‘Pissed’ is an understatement.  

It is funny now.

The second case was in Berkeley California.  I was going to a meeting in the evening. I parked the car at a meter exactly 2 minutes before the meter pay requirement expired at 6PM, and didn’t put any coins in.  When I returned I had a parking ticket, written for the 1 minute I hadn’t paid for.  That one still pisses me off.

On this issue San Francisco had done one good thing.  We now have parking cards for use in feeding meters, in lieu of coins.  I never had enough change for parking meters and always got ticketed.  I buy the parking cards $200 at a time and always put in money for more time than I need.  Never get parking tickets now.  One good thing, as I said.

Big history waste

You may not be aware that in parts of academia there is a movement called “Big History”.  

It looks at history over long time frames and examines many lines of development simultaneously like evolution, population, geology and technology.

The big name in the field is Australian, David Christian.  He gets big money from Bill Gates.

I’ve followed this field for twenty years because a friend of mine, Stuart Silverstone, was working on the subject actively more than a decade before academia paid any attention to it.

I’ve always been willing to help Stuart, as I’m always willing to help anyone with a big dream.

But about five years ago I began to realize that the whole field is nonsense and almost a deliberate effort to ignore real history.  The true big bang in all of history and evolution is the development of modern commerce in Holland in 1600 and America in 1840.  

The creation of modern commerce was such a monumental historic disruption of all of history that ignoring it is wrong.  Plain wrong.  

Modern commerce is part of big history, but it is such a central part that it we need to see history as starting with modern commerce, not the big bang.

There may be two nodal points in the history of the universe, the big bang and the start of modern commerce on the third planet from the sun.  Since the people in the SETI project looking for intelligent life in the universe don't know this, they end up wasting their time and everyone's money.

California gun laws

The governor of California just signed a batch of anti-gun laws.  No need to comment.  It is the Democrat hysteria that Obama has unleashed to avoid reality and knows no reason.  First it will have to survive the batch of anti-gun laws on this year’s California ballot, which might lose; next the U.S. Supreme Court could never support any of it if the DC-Heller case becomes precedent.

My concern deals with the consequences of laws that are held in contempt by a vast majority of citizens.  Laws must make sense for the public that is expected to follow them.

I pointed out that a 45 mph speed limit was observed by drivers on the Golden Gate bridge because they could see that two opposing lanes of traffic were dangerous.  Nobody observed the same speed limit on the S.F. Bay Bridge where the traffic was one way.  

In Connecticut a law requiring gun registration was passed and 80% of the gun owners ignore it.  We will see the same in California, for 8 million people.

This creates a population of outlaws.  This happened in the 1960’s when young people found that the anti-pot laws made no sense, especially in a society that drinks alcohol in excess.  The hippies became outlaws; sex became free and crime in the U.S. rose steadily from 1965 to 1995.  We will get that again.

The flip side of the coin was that the pot business created a great deal of underground money which generated the greatest effusion of new businesses in American history.  

So we will get an outlaw society like Mexico and Guatemala with high crime and  a new sub-culture of small businesses.

The idea of Internationality proves wrong

I’ve heard Jew haters argue that the reason the EU and many of it’s citizens are anti-Israel is because the EU is a post nationalist organization and Israel is the epitome of nationalism.

Post nationalism is Internationalism.  The EU has proven what a bad idea that is after two decades of failure.  I’m not talking about Brexit.  I’m talking about the EU which has become a beacon of Jew hate, commercial hate and anti-Americanism (which is always part of the same package).

The EU requires labeling of all GMO products which is pure anti-Americanism.  It has attacked Microsoft for 15 years for no reason.  It has attacked Google and created an absurd idea that old newspaper articles can not be used as source reference material if the information is negative about a criminal. It has attacked Apple, Netflix, Amazon and recently has a concerted campaign against Uber and Airbnb. 

Why, because the EU is anti-American and anti-commerce.  The Jew hate is expressed in the EU requirement to label Israeli products, when no other country's products require special labeling.

So the EU is the worst of the future like the USSR and Mao’s China were the worst of the future.  Anti-commerce, Anti-American and in the EU and the USSR cases, anti-Jew.  Internationalism, especially as acted out at the UN, is not the future.

Appropriation is a black problem

We are hearing the concept of ‘appropriation’ these days from the snowflakes on college campuses.  It refers to one culture using something from another culture.  It implies that the culture doing the borrowing is taking advantage of the other culture.

The press had a photo of black woman attacking a white male who had corn rows for hair calling it cultural appropriation.  I looked at the woman who was wearing a nylon jacket and immediately reacted “that woman’s African ancestors never invented nylon, she is the appropriator”.

The whole idea is idiotic.  Black people would be walking our streets in linen loincloths with animal fur jackets. Dashiki material came from India.  Blacks have contributed very little to modern commerce, certainly in the realm of clothing.

But it is cultural appropriation that is the biggest black community problem.  Black teenagers have appropriated prison clothes.  These young people are going beltless so their pants hang below their butts.

Any sensible person will cross the street to get away from three black teenagers with their pants down to their knees.  And lock their car door if such a kid is standing near their car.

Nobody crosses to the other side of the street when three black men in suits or uniforms comes the other way.  The same with a group a older black women walking towards them.

People only get out of the way when black teenagers who have appropriated prison clothes are walking in a group.

Black youth appropriation of prison clothes is a major source of anti-black response by everyone else including blacks.

Naked feet

I recently saw an article about a middle aged man who kicked off his shoes and headed for the woods where he has been living with nothing but a knife ever since.  Where he does this is relevant to his survival.  It might work somewhere near Santa Barbara, CA.  

I don’t have a link to the article because the whole issue is irrelevant to me. He wants to live without sushi, Kirin and corned beef sandwiches, that is fine with me.

What struck me were his comments on the wonderful amount of information he gets from living barefoot.

That is a truth that is often forgotten in our shoe clod world.  

I was once sitting in a park in Bangalore with a friend and noticed that men walking to work in suits often were barefooted.  We made a bet and then counted.  It turns out that half the men, all Indian, going to work in suits were barefooted.

Bare feet is such a deep part of their life, identity and humanity that it was the last thing they would be willing to give up for the Western lifestyle.

I don’t wear anything on my feet in my home.  I appreciate the amount of information my feet give me.  I have at times in my life gone barefoot for months and built up protection on my feet so I could run on irregular paths and sharp surfaces.  I do love the amount of information my feet give me.

Hippie influence

Surprising and not so surprising.

A big surprise was to see the Attorney General, a black woman, Loretta Lynch, who seems well qualified to serve that office. She announced following the Jihadi slaughter of 49 people in Orlando that ‘we need more love to combat the hate’.

What?

I’m not questioning her logic.  I just wonder where she got that meme.  That was a key thought of the New Age cohort of hippies forty years ago.

The hippie era had three main components: dope smoking hippies, New Agers and politicos.  Roughly the entire group was 25 million young people at its peak. One million were closest to the New Agers who believed in crystals, pyramids, affirmations and pure optimism.  About half-a-million were politicos and were angry at the Democrat Party for not being Lefty enough.  The rest were dope smoking hippies.  

In Arizona there are two towns not far apart.  On the hillside is Jerome filled with dope smoking hippies, mandala shops and lots of ghost catchers. Thirty miles away is Sedona, filled with crystal shops, jade jewelry and wind chimes.

Somehow Loretta Lynch picked up that New Age religious saying.

That was also the theme of the entire San Francisco Pride parade.  That is not a surprise.  The gay community will do anything, absolutely anything to deny that the Orlando massacre was an Islamic Jihad terror attack.  That Islam is very anti-gay must remain a secret.  

Since the modern gay movement had much of its origins in the sexual freedom that was a core part of the hippie movement. It is no surprise that gays picked up the New Age ‘love is the answer to everything’ meme.

Food recycling: genius

I have a good friend who is a foodie.  I actually have several friends who are foodies.  In the one case, she always asks where each element of the dinner I serve comes from.  It is usually 80% from Safeway, 10% Trader Joe's and 5% Costco.  I’m declasse and proud of it.

Safeway does many things that I consider brilliant, but one thing ranks as genius. (Safeway is owned by Cerberus, that also owns Vons and Albertsons.)

I remember the hippie days when the dump-bins around Safeway were the place to go for food.  Enormous amounts of food had to be thrown out everyday.

I remember the evolution of food banks in the late hippie era when much of the same food was donated to the food banks instead of being thrown out.

We have now entered a new era, for which Safeway deserves a genius award.  Safeway sells the food that used to be thrown out or given away back to us.

The first place I noticed this is the chicken chunks.  This is really the shredding of the roasted chickens that didn’t sell the day before.  It is delicious.  Stores that don’t sell all their roast chicken have plenty of shredded chicken the next day.  The same is true for fried chicken nuggets and turkey.

Then I noticed that there are many containers of fresh sliced fruit.  Usually perfectly ripe for immediate use.  This is all the fruit that was close to being thrown out.  It has been carefully sliced to get the ripe parts out and put into fresh fruit containers.  

Finally there are all the containers of mixed veggies that are in small chunks, often packaged with cheese or a dip.  Again, veggies that were ready to be thrown out, sold for perfectly ready luncheon snacks.

To me this ranks as a way to use food without throwing it away.  Selling it to us in a desirable form.   Simple living genius.