Pro Commerce

Married in Israel Part 2 of 3

We were being allowed to sit down in the main office with about a dozen Orthodox men standing around.  They had tentatively accepted me as a Jew after my father’s letter from some of his Orthodox rabbi friends. The oldest man was behind a desk with a paper form in front of him and an elegant Parker pen.

He would ask a question in Yiddish and several men would try to translate.  In German or French I could try to understand and reply.  We finally got to a place on the form which had a currency symbol.  I assumed the amount he wanted was 2 pruta (a few pennies) the biblical bride price based on the ring in a cow’s nose.  He and everyone around was offended.  Telling my future wife ‘no, no no!’  But he wrote it down.

So I said ‘200’. The room was quiet.  That was better but not good.  I raised to ‘2,000’ and there was a murmur of consent in the room.  Still thinking it was a bride price, I took the old man’s Parker pen and put another zero on the number.  “20,000’.  The room broke out in celebration.  All the men were up and dancing.  Someone brought in cake.  We danced for half an hour.  

I later learned that what was being filled out was the Ketubah, the divorce paper that would later be written by a scribe in beautiful Hebrew with illustrations.  The money was the divorce settlement.  My 20,000 was the highest anyone had ever seen.

After things settled down, I was led, alone, into an adjacent room.

Continued.

Never to be in politics

After spending a decade (the 1960’s) in active politics as a campaign manager, legislative analyst, presidential advance man and president of the local Young Republican (the largest one in America), as well as having several girl friends in elective office, I decided that I never wanted to hold an elective office.

So I did the one thing I thought would permanently keep me from office.  I agreed to be the subject of a book on human sexuality where I was nude (and more) and to be in several sex education videos.

It might have been a good idea at the time.  Politics and the press were fairly Puritan.  I remember a big man and good friend in the local Republican Party showing me some photos of the leading Black politician (Willie Brown) having sex with a white woman in a motel room.  He asked whether it would be possible to get the photos published.  My answer and the reality were ‘No!’.

The strange thing is that by the 1990’s in San Francisco, the cultural landscape had changed so much that my sexcapades would not have been disqualifying for public office.  Look at the president at the time, Bill Clinton to know about the national mood.  San Francisco was way ahead of that.

Married in Israel Part 1 of 3

I told this story to a friend (Carol) and she immediately demanded that I put it in a blog.  

This is a slow time of the year for everything so I will.

I had arrived in Israel in 1959 with a girl friend from college after travelling through Europe.  We spent a few months on a kibbutz, a while in Haifa and settled in Ramat Aviv, part of Tel Aviv where we both got work.  I ran the production planning department at Israel’s largest aircraft repair and construction company.

We decided to get married.  Marriage then as now was governed by the Orthodox.  The whole process took six months because the rabbi’s wanted proof that I was Jewish.  They never doubted my future wife because she wore black clothes with a long skirt, long sleeves and a head scarf.  (The real issue here comes at the end of the story.)  They couldn’t ask her any questions because women were not assumed to be religiously trained.

The rabbis wouldn’t speak Hebrew.  Only Russian, Polish, Yiddish and a little German.  I knew a tiny amount of Russian and French.  So all conversations were slow, awkward and confusing.

The building we went to was very old and Arab.  Long light green halls, blue doors and benches outside every office with many old people and rabbis sitting around.  Fluorescent bulbs.

We only went every month because I had trouble getting off work.  And it was a long bus ride.

For six months my father sent letters that I had been a Jew from birth and my mother was a Jewess.  My father was a rabbi, but Reform, so he wasn’t in their book of American rabbis.  He sent letters in Hebrew and convened a minion (10 Jews) to confirm my Jewishness.  The only thing that worked was a final letter from several listed orthodox rabbi friends of his. Saying I was a Jew.

So the two of us were finally asked to sit down and fill out the necessary papers.  

To be continued.

National observatory

A few decades ago I saw a proposal for a National Observatory of the Social Sciences.  The idea was to have a few thousand people at randomly selected locations reporting monthly on visible events in their lives and neighborhood.

Examples would be:

• Number and models of cars on one side of your block.
• Number of people pushing strollers in one hour time period.
• Number and types of houses with Christmas tree decorations on both sides of the block.
• Time of day you get up on Wednesday and go to sleep.
• Etc.

Today, with the Internet the cost would be significantly lower than originally proposed.  The staff needed to tabulate results would be small.  No postage costs.  Although observers would get some compensation.  They would also change over time.

Now is the time.  After a few years the data would already be valuable.  After decades it would be the most valuable data in existence.

A family business

I heard an ad on the radio for a window installation company.  The ‘creative’ at their ad agency had decided to make the fact that the company is a family run business with nine family members in management as the key sales point.  Ostensibly everyone in the family cares about high quality service.

The ad would never move me.  I believe in meritocracy.  Nepotism has a few problems.

Let’s begin with the most obvious.  

• No other employees will work hard or ‘give a shit’ since they have little or no chance at promotion.
• There can be no reasonable plan of succession.  It will always be the result of a family fight to the death.
• The accounting department will go to the person with the worst case of OCD not to the person with a history of honesty. Good financial analysis will not exist.
• If a customer has a problem they better hope the problem was caused by a weaker member of the family not a stronger member, or there will be no resolution.
• Mistakes will often be covered up because of internal family dynamics.

A family business is not a good idea.

I recently took advantage of a similar situation.  The father sent two men to work at my house.  They both screwed up a key pricing issue.  When I called the father for a refund, I mentioned his son’s good behavior and bad mistake.  I knew he would have had a long history of his son screwing up, whether it was true or not.  

You can’t sell me with a 'family business' sales pitch or ‘veteran owned’ either.  I’m a veteran.

Today

I have a Christmas tree in my living room created by my beloved roommate. With the smell of pine in the air.  She is gone today to visit one of her granddaughters.

So I am lying down on the couch reading.  These days I prefer articles of the sort I find in the Claremont Review of Books.  

I mix that in with two books by Jonathan Israel on Jews in the 15th Century and his third book on the Enlightenment and the responses to it.   Israel had shaped my view of early modern commerce.   He is a magnificent historian who has created a new academic world by learning old Dutch.

Reading good material is pure pleasure for me.  I take occasional breaks to nap and to cook something for myself. Usually when I am alone the food is simple, on the grill or from the microwave.

I’m going to a Hanukkah party tomorrow night. I usually play the role of head of the family, say the prayers and tell the story of the festival.

My own menorah tradition is to make a new one every year.  Nine holes in a piece of wood isn't hard.  One year it was in a squash, another year I drilled into rock.  I understand the tradition of the seven and eight armed menorahs, but a new one every year stimulates my thinking about the early guerrilla strategy of the Maccabees.

Have a merry Christmas and a happy Hanukkah.

I did a strange thing

I don’t know why I did it.  I noticed a few intelligent comments on Facebook by people writing on David Boxenhorn’s posts.  David is brilliant to begin with so his ‘friends’ are likely to be appealing.

In three cases I invited these commentators to be Facebook friends.  They accepted my invitation.

Then, I noticed in the recommended names of ‘potential friends’ that the names of these three as ‘mutual friends’ began appearing.  In each case I sent them a ‘friend request’.  That meant that the number of new people suggested with ‘mutual friends’ kept growing.

I kept sending ‘friend requests’.  Now my list of friends has over 300 new members, none of which I have met.  All of whom trace back to three very intelligent core people.

Consequence:  my Facebook page has fascinating new material.  So much that I can’t get to the bottom before an equal amount of new material has been added at the beginning.  And much of it is very interesting.  Very interesting. I had no intention of spending so much time on Facebook.

Even more unexpected.  Many of the new names and people who post are well known people who have unusually interesting things to post on Facebook.

If you want to get into this mosh pit, just ask me to ‘friend’ you.  My own comments are very different from this blog.  This blog is primarily about pro commerce.  My Facebook is just rants, often political to get something off my chest.

Saving my readers

I regularly get emails from PR people and marketing people promoting their blogsites or businesses.  They offer to write a blog for me or offer to let me use one they claim is custom made for me.

I haven’t sent any of these along to you.  First, I’m too arrogant to think you would come to this site if you wanted to read someone else’s ideas.  Second, they are seldom consistent with what I’m writing about.  Lastly, I have never read one that wasn’t tripe; well below your intelligence level.

Which leads me to think about what I do write.

I have a clear idea of how the world works.  Most people have a very diffuse and amorphous idea of how the world around them works.  Even worse, they have a borrowed a ‘popular’ view that is not connected to my experience.  My experience is fairly vast and can be seen here in a rudimentary vitae.

My views on how business works is purely empirical.  I’ve worked with over 2,000 businesses including a 1,000 small ones and start-ups.  Also some giants like Itochu the largest trading company and SAS a large airline.  I have some strong views as a result.     

Most importantly, I never lose sight of the position summarized in the blog title.  Commerce is the greatest human invention for good.  It is the source of nearly everything positive humans have accomplished.  I hope that sense pervades what I write and do.  I hope.

My 'new ideas' environment

I wonder, sometimes, where my new ideas come from.  I live in the gay community of San Francisco and most of the people I meet on a daily basis are gay.  

The gay community in this Socialist Republic of San Francisco are in a triple bubble of Lefty ideology.  They don’t listen to much since they are single issue voters.  What they hear is filtered and reinforced by the San Francisco extreme Lefty media and social milieu.  Lastly they are inside the national Lefty fantasy of the NYTimes, NPR, Hollywood and old Broadway shows.

Everyday the people around me say something preposterous, or yell it.  Their words are nonsense on a perpetual river of absurdity.

Since I have been writing blogs for over 17 years, for a current total of  more than 6,000 blogs nearly all of them different from each other, this Lefty gay milieu must be stimulating.  I am reacting to this overly outrageous world I live in.  I’m sure the people around me, many of whom are my friends, don’t recognize their contribution to pro commerce thought.

Thanks guys.

Never run out of jobs

There are many cultures that contribute to the growth and vitality of modern commerce (Israel and Japan are notable) but America is the elephant in the room. America has had two extraordinary efflorescences.  A baby boom after the Civil War and a larger one after WWII called the Hippy Revolution.

There will always be new work for humans so long as the American spirit survives. The hippies embodied much of the essence of America. They were dirty like Vikings (as opposed to Japanese), believed in  ‘tabla rasa’ inborn goodness of people.  They were optimistic but had a religion of Armageddon.  They wanted to make the world in their image and many of them were doers.

The hippies found that 20 people could live on the earnings of one person and they did. 19 got stoned, hung-out and wandered the world. They, like others, had no reason to work.  

Hippies started their own businesses to change the world and over time the few founders hired the rest as employees.  The hippies created much of the modern world from the organic food revolution to alternative fuels, to robust bicycles, to new fabrics, health, education, new music, pleasure drugs and even the personal computer. Much more of course.

The hippie efflorescence of core Americanism makes sure that a few people will always create new industries to employ many others.

Changes in retail food again

I called to my blog readers attention the brilliant way that Safeway and similar stores were packaging the ripe, almost overripe, fruits, vegetables and unsold roast chicken for sale the next day.

Now I want to call your attention to another brilliant trend.  Safeway and the other similar retailers are creating a large array of ‘side dishes’.  Dishes such as macaroni and cheese, spinach au gratin and various forms of mashed potatoes.

I’m the cook, more accurately the ‘meal preparer’ in the family.  After twenty three years of doing this I have always been at a loss about what to serve with the main course.  I look at all the vegetables at the grocery store and I see ‘work’.   Vegetables usually require work to create a second dish.  Maybe not potatoes.

Now I am happy to let the grocery prepare my second dish while I spend time grilling the main course.  The whole area of ‘second dishes’ is exploding in refrigerated and frozen categories.

Thank you modern commerce.

Paris in 1957

This is a three subject blog.  

The title refers to the French capital city located on the Seine.  The Vikings, called Normans, sailed up the Seine and conquered the main Celtic tribes about 1,000 years ago.  The Norman overlords have controlled the entire French population ever since.

The people who live in France call their capital Pari.  We don’t.  The use of our name for major cities is always a little peculiar.  We call Wien Vienna, Roma Rome and Barthelona Barcelona.  And many other Anglicizations.  I wonder why?  It serves no obvious purpose.

I want to wax sentimental as a way to point out Puritanism's broad reach.  I went to Paris in 1957 with my girlfriend.  My fondest memory was being awaken in our hotel room early in the morning to a woman bringing us a bed tray with cafe au lait and a croissant.  Wonderful, magnificent, true hospitality.  

I never saw it again on return trips to Paris.  Paris had become overrun with tourists and a stranger entering a hotel room with two naked people in bed was never again acceptable.

Japan was almost entirely populated with public baths where men and women shared the same room before the war with America.  After America won, all the baths put a wall down the middle of the room to separate the men and the women.

Lastly, we now have some good coffee and croissant in San Francisco.  The good coffee owes a great deal to the Seattle coffee explosion in the early 1990’s, which brought Alfred Peet’s great selection and blending skills to the masses.  I knew Alfred who loved tea but ‘lowered himself’ to blend coffee.

The great croissant is now here in several places.  A new paradise called Arsicault Bakery in the Richmond District and at the Hearth Cafe in the Castro.  Just butter and air; but what great air.

Samantha Power

The idea of ‘karma’ as a theory is appealing.  The religious origins of the concept is not.

In the religious concept of karma there is a very long cycle of birth and rebirth.  In that long cycle the consequences of behavior in one cycle are revisited on the ‘individual’ in a subsequent cycle.  None of that makes sense to me.  Especially in a world where the population expands or after a plague when it contracts.

However, in a modern commercial world where karma is a sign for ‘actions have consequences’ that makes sense to me.  Primarily because the world we imagine we live in is in a larger world that we can not accurately perceive.  When our actions violate the laws of the ‘real world’ we experience the consequences.  Like a blindfolded person bumping into a pole.

And because the people around us remember our actions and will often make sure that we learn the consequences.

That being the case I have a very public instance with Samantha Power.  She is a Harvard professor who wrote a book, The Problem from Hell, first published in 2002.  The book was about genocidal wars.  The one she was focused on was Yugoslavia.  Being a typical Lefty pacifist she believed that genocidal wars could be stopped by the ‘Great powers’ using small forces and heavy diplomatic pressure. 'Jawboning' a military group into submission.

Of course, fellow Harvard Lefty pacifist, Barack Obama, brought her into his National Security Team and later made her ambassador to the UN.

She tried out her little theory with a company of 600 American soldiers in the Congo.  They had no effect.

After that and several other failures, Barack Obama made her the U.S. ambassador to the UN.

In the UN she has become a notorious ‘nasty old lady’ who lectures everyone else about their bad military behavior.  'Samantha' has become an international joke.  

A cursory examination of google shows dozens of articles by responsible people ridiculing Power’s meanspirited poorly informed idiocy.

Karma.  A really stupid book leads to real global ridicule.

That is karma in the modern sense.  Write a stupid book and become the stern lecturer on your own book.  Then have the world laugh at you from every quarter and every academic corner.

Mongolian eagles

I saw a documentary called the Eagle Huntress about a young Kazak girl who became an eagle hunter.

The movie covered a desolate but exquisite landscape of the barren side of the Altai mountains.  The Kazaks in the film were tribal and lived in yurts in the summer and stone shelters in the winter.  Their clothing and housing looked Mongol to me.  I’ve never been near there.  I don’t know the tribes and can’t distinguish any of the Kazak tribes from the Mongol tribes.  Khan seems to be a common last name for nearly everyone.

All of which leads to the two themes of this blog.  First, Wikipedia is rather Puritan.  I know from much anthropological reading that the tribal Mongols are matrilineal because conception occurs at one of the 4 seasonal orgies that last four days.  You never know the father so matrilineal is the consequence.

This knowledge led me to introduce the Mongolian Ring in San Francisco.  The Mongols use a gold ring on the penis to maintain an erection for a long time.  I marketed Mongolian Rings made of narrow strips of Velcro.  Within a few years of my marketing, Mongolian Rings became popular in the gay community and still are.

I have no way of knowing whether the Kazaks in the film are sexually similar to the tribal Mongols.  The film theme is that the heroine is a girl and eagle hunting had always been male.  We are not told if the girl’s tribe is matrilineal.  Any tribal society would likely divide work skills into gender categories.  So eagle hunting being male seems a reasonable explanation for the theme of the film.

The second point from the film relates to my quest to get members for my ‘Leave Them Alone’ organization.  The film is very clear that the Kazak tribal people are happy living on the dirt with farm animals in Yurts with wood and dung fires as traditional people.  They have voluntarily incorporated into their tribal world motorcycles, pickup trucks, solar panels for light and radios.

My whole failed campaign has been to get the world to understand that tribal peoples worldwide  want to stay tribal and will accept the parts of Euro-American technology that they want.  Otherwise they want us to ‘leave them alone.’

The movie shows that point but is incapable of understanding that.

Greenies

This ad in our subway station has no future; thank goodness.  

It is an ad to sign-up for the alternative electricity company.  It is in Spanish next to the same ad in English.

Do you see three mistakes?

First, the number of Spanish speaking homeowners (renters rarely get to choose their electric source) in San Francisco is so small as to approach zero and 98% of them read English perfectly well.

Second, the Spanish speaking market is not made up of many well-to-do citizens who are willing to pay more for their electricity.  Nearly all native Spanish speakers in this City came from Central America not Mexico so the graphics are wrong aesthetically.

Lastly and most importantly, the new incoming Federal administration and Congress see the anti-commerce religion of global warming Armageddon as fantasy.  Rapidly, in the next few years, we will see many people realize that ‘alternative energy’ is a low IQ waste of time and money.

Green energy will be recognized for what it is: a Left wing post-communist religion that is only useful to people who are ‘virtue signalling’ that they are morally superior people.  Of course they aren’t, they are arrogant ill informed despicables.

Not people

The image on the right is a sidewalk billboard in the gay district of San Francisco.  It is ostensibly trying to get the providers of AIDs drugs to lower their prices.

The main banner in the ad says ‘People before profits’.  This is stupid in either of its English interpretations.  Businesses generally depend on customers (people) to generate the net revenue the business needs to survive.  That is a truism and a rather stupid subject for an ad since it is a truism.  You need people to generate net revenue or profit. So?

The other meaning is that businesses should reduce prices at the expense of reduced net revenue. That is just pure stupidity.  That may be OK for hobbies and government projects but it is not feasible to a business.  No one goes into business just to cover expenses.

My take on this ad was at first to examine the issue of ‘profit’.  Profit is a difficult bookkeeping item to pin down.

As an investor, I am interested in the net revenue after all expenses including real taxes. The technical line item I look at is EBITD.  Which stands for Earnings Before Interest Taxes and Depreciation.  

Meaning that what I am looking at relates to standard accrual bookkeeping as opposed to cash accounting.    This measure is generally preferred because both Interest and depreciation are not necessarily paid expenses, they may be built into the price of a bond or the prices of assets bought and sold.  Taxes can be related to previous or future earnings, since they carry forward and backward.  

Finding the real ‘profit’ can be difficult to define.  

In a small business it can be even more difficult.  It does not mean net revenue after the owner, manager or proprietor is paid.  The owner may be paying himself too little or too much.  I have to estimate what the CEO of a similar small company would earn in the market.  If the owner is paid much over the market price, then that amount is part of profit.  If the owner is paid less (very common situation) then the profit is lower or doesn’t exist at all.   

The same goes for many other owner’s expenses.  Sometimes a small business is very generous with the owner’s expenses.  Such as a limousine rental, luxury travel and a lavish party life.  That can be part of ‘profit’.  Deduct these 'in-kind' items from expenses to get actual profit.  

The street poster can be seen as stupid in multiple ways, but for the meandering mind it can be stimulus.

Iowa plane farmer

On a small airplane from Chicago to Des Moines I sat next to one of the major farmers in Iowa.

He taught me about the two crops that Iowa grows: corn and soybeans.  There is no irrigation, there is usually enough rain.  This gentleman grows organic crops in his thousands of acres because he sells directly to Japan and China.

He ships his crops by truck to Minneapolis and by rail to Seattle for transport by ship across the Pacific.

Out of the plane window he showed me what the two crops look like from the air.

The parts of the story that relate to current issues are that young people are leaving the farms, as they have been for two centuries, and the old farmers sell to their neighbors for cash.  The benefit is that farms have become the size of an entire section which is good for the giant harvesting machines that are used.  These giant machines are almost fully automated and they operate best while driving in one direction for a long time.  Big farms accommodate these very efficient machines. These machines plant and harvest; they plant each seed directly in the ground with its fertilizer at the beginning of the season.

The other part of the story concerns his family.  I asked about the brothers and sisters.  One brother was not too bright and was no help around the farm.  So they got him a job as a U.S. Congressman.  He had held that job for 18 years at the time of this plane ride.

It has been my experience as a legislative analyst and political activist that most people in politics are not very bright or competent.  The successful farmer’s brother fits into the narrative perfectly.  

Business ties and ethics

We have the first businessman in American history as president (yes I know about Herbert Hoover who ran a giant non-profit and Harry Truman the haberdasher).  So all the anti-business ethics that have been put in place over the past half century to keep politicians from stealing public funds are irrelevant.  And they have never worked.  The Clinton’s simply ignored the ethics rules and got rich as did every member of Congress and Barack Obama.

We have a real problem that a democracy has never had to handle.  There is no way that President Trump can divorce himself from his business.  His business is too big and too global to avoid a hundred government financial encounters a month.  Just for tax and loan protection purposes he has nearly 100 limited liability corporations in his name.   He himself could become a trust that all other trusts and corporations feed into but that would not keep him from profiting from all the myriad government dealings his businesses encounter daily.  

We Americans should just accept the overlap and enrichment that is automatic.  Trump has been a hands-on operator all his life.  His knowledge of his own business can not be divorced from their operations.  And won’t be. He will keep his finger in major business decisions and has to.

The Federal self-dealing ethics will have to be revised and basically dismissed by new laws to accommodate President Trump.  And the malicious opposition party will have to slowly acknowledge that the existing ethics laws never worked.  With the Clinton's as the bright shining example of the failure.

Got it?  A real businessman, a real man for that matter, can not be subject to ethics rules designed to keep politicians from enriching themselves. We have to learn to live with it.  Us decent people anyway.

Corps of Engineers

The Corps of Engineers seemed embroiled in a recent Lefty confrontation over a pipeline across the Missouri River.

I’ve dealt with the Corps.  Here is my story.

The San Francisco Bay is filled with debris, mostly wood from the discharge of the incoming Sacramento River and rotting docks in the Bay.  I know about it because I have been a sailor all my life and was a partner in a 30 foot sloop for decades.

While working as manager of the Glide Church, which has a large black congregation, I came up with the idea of selling the Bay debris wood as firewood and hiring young black men to do the work.

I found a usable dock and a large undeveloped lot near the black neighborhood.  I talked to the local head of the Corps of Engineers about my plan.  Since the Corps was removing wood everyday, off-loading it in the North Bay and hauling it by truck 60 miles to a dump, we could all see the benefit of dropping it on the nearby dock rented by the Glide Church.

We did it for one week.  During that week I got a close look at the wood as it was sorted into piles for drying and later chainsaw cutting.  Nearly all of it was usable as good firewood.  The project was off to a good start.  The special Corps ship, which picked up the debris, picked it up in a giant chainlink net about 15 ft by 20 ft.  It left the net on the dock around noon and picked it up the next day when it left another full net for us.

At the end of the week I was invoiced for the chainlink net for $120,000.00  Over $250,000 in today’s dollars.  I used every bit of political pull the Church and I had (plenty) and got nowhere in getting the Corps to drop the charge or to at least rent it.   I failed.

Screw the Corps and its hopeless bureaucracy.

Political opinion polls

About 15 national political opinion polls were wrong for a year.  That is about 600 erroneous polls.  The reported error based on sample size was about 4%+/-.  Most of these 15 were off by 10%.  Wrong 600 times.  Two polls were right, one was the LATimes tracking poll and the other was Rasmussen.  

As a professional survey researcher and an expert witness on the subject, I can tell you that is not possible.

Because of the stability of the poll results over time, they never waivered, I can make one factual statement: the universe these pollsters were sampling was not voters in the United States (except for two).

So what universe were all these bad polls sampling?

They were sampling the fake Universe of Americans as created in the fetid minds of the Democrat Party.  Democrats believe that people vote based on their skin color, ethnicity and genitals.

Therefore the bad polls specifically sampled the ‘correct proportion’ of blacks, hispanics and women based on the past two elections.  The two good polls sampled the Trump universe: ordinary people who voted in the past based on random sampling and self definition as party affiliated or not.  All polls of the whole country weighted the results based on the Electoral College.

The reason the bad polls were wrong is that most people do not vote their skin color or genitals.  More white women voted for Trump, despite their genitalia.  The women who were black or hispanic ignored their genitalia and voted only slightly more than 50% for Clinton.  But they had mostly voted for Bernie the White male Jew hater in the primaries against their genitals.  

Also it turns out that only first generation hispanics vote heavily Democrat.  An older hispanic or a second generation hispanic was more likely to vote for Trump.  Skin color seems to wash off with age from the Democrat perspective.

Enough.  You get the point.  Nearly all the polls were in the thrall of Democrat racist ideology so they sampled the wrong universe and got the election results terribly wrong.

The worldview of survey researchers influences the survey results.  Nearly all pollsters are Democrats.

Witches hat and dunce cap

I have long wondered about the origins of the high pointed hat that is ascribed to witches and the similar ‘dunce’ cap that seems to be in our memory with no historic association.

There appears to have been a large population that lived in what is now Kazakhstan around the great Lake Balkhash.  These people wore hats that were tall and pointed.  Men and women.  Also a very horny bunch like the modern day Mongolians. One group of mummified remains were found in Tarim Basin in far Western China.  The people in the original find seem to have been there more than 4,000 years ago.  DNA and visual identification indicate that these people were from Europe, looked and dressed like Vikings.  They even buried themselves under long wooden boats with beautiful oars.  In a desert.

Other evidence of a related group are referenced in historic literature from the Persian period of Darius I  2,500 years ago.  Darius’s army conquered a group of Saka people including their king pictured here.

The people in this area hypothetically spoke Tocharian.  The source of our modern European languages and the physical source of the Finns, Hungarians and Turks.  The Saka people could also be related to King Shakha the father of Buddhism.

Humans carry the strangest luggage in our minds.  We have witches hats and dunce caps from a people we never heard of.  I know a meaningless rhyme I learned from children in Israel that is also sung by children in Northwestern Japan.

Red Ellen

I saw a book review recently on a book about a British member of Parliament a century ago nick named Red Ellen.  I didn’t read the review.

Every red in history was a type of fool.  Before the experiments in red governance in Germany, Russia and China a red could be a thrill seeking rebel, dissenter following foolish ideas because they were anti-establishment.  Still not worth paying attention to them, because they couldn’t see that using the government to create a new anti-capitalist person was a meaningless, perverse idea.

With the advent of government tyranny in Germany, Russia then China a red was just a pathetic fool who was stuck with old ideology and couldn't adjust to reality.  Sadly my parents and many older friends fall into this category.

Humans are primates and we primates are unable to learn anything new after age 23.  Therefore reds who came of age when the reality of Stalin and Mao were evident are plain and simple fools.  People born at the end of WWII fall into that category.  Baby boomers who are reds are just plain and simple fools.  Although often malicious like Jane Fonda.  I can not give them much forgiveness because they lived in a time when alternatives were emerging like William Buckley and George Orwell.  I was able to see the foolishness of being a red after 1960 thanks to a brief time on a kibbutz and having read Animal Farm.

Someone who is a red and turned 23 after the fall of Russia and the rejection of Mao by China is a plain unadulterated fool; that is someone born after 1970.

Now I have a new category of blithering idiot fool.  Someone born after 1990 who supports red ideas, Lefty ideology,  because they could have read my works on the Internet in their teenage years or found several books such as the Rational Optimist.  

The reality of commerce as the driving force of positive humanity, the modern world and human moral evolution is now writ large for all to see.

One needn’t be a fool anymore, if one reads English.

Hawking Stephen

Most people assume because Stephen Hawking is unable to speak, is in a wheelchair and is recognized as a physicist that he is super smart.

I know that we have a ‘wounded bird’ syndrome because I worked for years with Ed Roberts and Judy Heumann founders of the disability rights community.  I learned that we make extraordinary exceptions for the disabled to the point of absurdity.  Just as a dimwit like Barack Obama can graduate from Columbia and Harvard Law (no grades there) because he claims to be black so can a disabled person like Stephen Hawking get a long way with little or no talent.

I have been validated on many occasions by statements from Hawking.  Most evident of his mental dwarfism is his hatred of Jews and Israel that he expresses on a regular basis.

Most recently he contributed a discussion to the British Guardian in which he shows his attachment to many bogus Lefty ideas ranging from Climate Armageddon to anti-Trump paranoia.

Don’t let the ‘wounded bird’ syndrome mislead you.  Stephen Hawking is a standard paranoid Jew hating kool-aide drinking Lefty.

Livionex

I have a strong recommendation for my friends and readers.  

I read somewhere that James Dyson always carries a toothgel, Livionex, when he travels.  He is an engineer whom I respect, so I decided to do an experiment with the product.

I changed my regular dental hygiene appointment from every three months to every six months.

Immediately after my appointment in June I started using a small dab of Livionex gel every night along with flossing.  

I just came back from my six month hygiene cleaning.  My hygienist, was surprised to see virtually no calculus.  Her cleaning was light, gentle and almost non-existent compared to the usual quarterly painful, bloody extensive cleaning.

The Livionex website gives an explanation of the supposed chemistry involved.  It focuses on the ionitic charges on the surface. It doesn’t make much sense to me, not knowing about the ecology of teeth.  It makes no difference.

Livionex works.  It costs $20 a tube which lasts about 5 months.  Cheap compared to hygienists or anything else in a dental office.

(Photo of my hygienist of 30 years. She is standing. )

Xmas

As the Christmas season approaches I want to remind all my Jewish readers to be understanding about this Christian holiday.  

There is nothing actually related to Christianity about this holiday, or date, which is why different sects of Christianity celebrate this holiday at different times and different ways.  The current celebration began in the U.S. just before the Civil War and was made official after the Civil War by the victorious Union Congress.  Many of the Christmas symbols are derived from Northern European pagan winter practices.

Here in America in the 20th Century we have added stories and music such as Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer created by a Jew, Robert May,  and set to music written by a Jew, Johnny Marks ( a friend of my mother’s).

Bob May borrowed the reindeer theme from Bambi, another story written by a Jew, Felix Salten, writing about Jews in pre-Nazi Germany.

The song we hear endlessly at this time of the year, White Christmas, was written by Irving Berlin another Jew.

To put it simply, Jews as well as my others have created the modern Winter celebration known as Christmas.

Merry Christmas.

Dear Colleague

Back in 2011 the Department of Education sent out a ‘Dear Colleague’ letter ordering every school subject to Title IX, meaning every school that gets Federal dollars, to create an internal program to punish every male who accidentally touches a female breast, to be drawn, quartered and kicked out of school summarily.

This is a correction for the new Trump administration:

Dear Colleague,

There is a new president who is a real male and who doesn’t like the last ‘Herr Colleague’  letter.  We are newly enforcing Title IX to mean: any accusation of ‘sexual anything’ by a female student against a male student can only be handled by that female filing charges with the local district attorney and all matters being handled by the laws of the state where the legal filing occurs.  Any educational institutional interference in these matters will be treated severely and adversely against the educational institution.  Your school.  Only real legal complaints are acceptable.

Furthermore, every institution subject to Title IX has three years from this date to determine that all departments and educational majors have faculty that does not exceed 60% of one political party persuasion.   For example, the English Department can not have a faculty with more than 61% who are registered Democrat or openly admit to being Democrat voters.  The same for Gender Studies departments.

Still furthermore, students shall have a well established and well publicized mechanism to complain to the school about anti-Jewish, anti-Israel or anti-conservative statements or actions by other students, faculty or administrators on or relating to campus activities.  These complaints shall be forwarded to box number 11-9.38 at the Department of Education for prompt action.

Thank you for your attention.

Independent California

There has been a lot of talk about a California independent state lately since the Democrats lost the recent election.  The poor losers are actually talking about a statewide initiative, without knowing how often that idea has been defeated by the electorate, how unfeasible it is legally and most importantly, as the article by the brilliant Dan Walters points out, how financially absurd it would be.

Surely, they argue, with 39 million residents and the fifth- or sixth-largest economy in the world, California could go it alone or, as some speculate, form a new nation with equally blue (or equally green) Oregon and Washington.

There’s a little irony to the speculation because those talking about secession are generally the same ones who have ridiculed those in California’s northernmost, and most conservative, counties who dream of breaking away and forming a State of Jefferson with their kindred souls in Southern Oregon.

It’s far-fetched, of course, but just for fun let’s look at how the Sovereign Nation of California might function should it revert to what it was briefly before becoming a state in 1850.

If one looks for a model, it’s Canada, a nation that’s roughly comparable to California, as well as being adjacent to the United States.

Canada has 36.3 million residents to California’s 39 million, but its $1.6 trillion economy is 38 percent smaller. Its federal budget of $317 billion is about 50 percent higher than California’s state spending, but twice as large when federal funds are excluded from California’s budget.

Therein lies one rub in becoming a nation.

The feds collect about $370 billion from California taxpayers each year, and spend $334 billion in the state – not counting the state’s proportionate share of defense and other overarching activities.

A big chunk of federal spending, both direct and indirect, in California is for medical care. In fact, Uncle Sam coughs up half of the $367.5 billion that governments and individuals spend on Californians’ health.

Our health care spending amounts to nearly $10,000 per Californian, which is quite a bit more than the $6,000 spent on each Canadian.

Were California to become a nation, it would have to shoulder that burden, including Medicare for the elderly, and also provide something to replace Social Security payments to the same group.

It might be possible were California to levy taxes to equal what the state sends to Washington – but a big unknown is military protection.

The U.S. is spending $800 billion this year on defense, including $181 billion for veterans’ pensions and other services. California’s proportionate share of that burden is 12 percent or almost $100 billion.

Would California spend $100 billion on its new military? Probably not. Canada spends only about $20 billion because it counts on the U.S. for a strategic shield. But in accepting the protection of its bigger neighbor to the south, it also cedes a great deal of policy clout to the U.S.

Would a liberal California nation be willing to forgo a strong military and rely, instead, on the protection of a United States from which it separated itself in protest – unable, like Canada, to project an independent national security policy?

None of this is going to happen, of course. The political, legal and financial impediments are immense. Would, for instance, a hostile U.S. government be willing to sign over all of its vast property holdings, from trackless deserts to dams and jewels such as Yosemite, without charging us countless billions of dollars?

Like it or not, we’re probably stuck with each other like a bickering couple that cannot afford to divorce.

Dan Walters

The ‘third world’ isn’t

Read yesterday’s blog about one of the most important human experiments in history.

Tribes we consider ‘primitive’ aren’t.  We, and I mean nearly everyone in the U.S. and Europe, believes in an hierarchy of social evolution.  At the bottom are tribes that are barefoot, hunt for much of their food and live in huts.  At the top are people who have gas, electricity, cars, paved streets, street lights, restaurants, inside running water and sidewalks.

Since I first started visiting small towns and villages in West Africa, India, Laos and Guatemala I met many people who had gone to Harvard and Oxford and came home to live in their tribal villages.  These people knew who they were and what they wanted their lives to be.

At that point, in the mid-1990’s, I founded an organization called ‘Leave Them Alone’.  The goal was to get the people and governments at the top of the imaginary ladder of social evolution to leave the people at the bottom alone.  Most people in the world don’t want 40 hour salaried jobs, dams, zoos or foam rubber mattresses.

I never got another member of my organization until last week.  The anthropologist who told me about the five tribes joined my organization.

Now two people realize that there is no ladder of social organization.  People in every condition can be content.  As always, those who aren’t can leave.  What most people want is something they can get in the world of trade such as an adding machine for their simple business, cheap pens, leather belts, tennis shoes a music player, a cheap cell phone and a mechanical oil press.

Many people in the world hate us for trying to make their lives like ours.  It is time to respect them and “Leave Them Alone’.  

Join now and be a founding member.   

5 tribes

One of the most important human experiments in history is going on now.  Indian tribes are getting vast troves of money from gambling casinos.

The issue came up because a few blogs back I brought up the fact that the homeless refuse to join our society and should be treated the way we treat our American Indians.  Put them somewhere out of sight.  

Every reservation I have visited (many) had unpainted houses with a washing machine in front, a trailer, a brand new Ford F-150 pickup, no paved roads, no sidewalks, no street lights and no gutters.

The experiment: money to tribes on reservations.

So how did five Washington State tribes deal with their new influx of money?

• One tribe built special facilities for the elderly and schools for early education and care.
• Another paid for expensive university education for all who wanted it.  Nearly all came back to the tribe; some with new blood, spouses.
• Still another bought adjacent land to increase the size of the reservation.
• One started buying businesses to create more money.
• The last one created special schools for training medical and dental semi-professionals that are badly needed on all reservations.

What else of importance?  All five tribes started suing each other over fishing rights.  None of the reservations put money into painting houses, paving roads or changing the existing residential conditions.

Reality: the natives pretty much like the way they have been living.

Wee casa

For Thanksgiving I stayed in a ‘tiny house’ on wheels in the Colorado town of Lyons.  It is a good idea for its location.  More than a dozen tiny houses rented as hotel rooms on a flood plain.  The whole town flooded three years ago. However I doubt the rising rivers give enough warning for all of tiny units to be moved to higher ground in time.

As a confirmed simple liver, I love the idea of tiny houses.  I love Japan, capital of tiny houses.

I try never to say anything negative about small businesses.  I can’t avoid it.  If I were served food that gave me food poisoning I’d mention it.  The last time that happened was before blogs, at an Italian restaurant near Harvard Square owned by Alan Dershowitz 25 years ago.

The Wee casa’s have a problem so severe, I have to mention it.  They use ‘on-demand’ heating for the water.  Which means a cup full of hot water for a shower.  No hot shower.  For me, that is the equivalent of food poisoning.

Two other problems of little consequence.  The bathroom is poorly designed.  In Japan there are tiny bathrooms, cast as one piece plastic, that are beautiful, perfectly convenient and easy to clean.  Get smart, you people who want to design tiny houses.  Buy Japanese bathrooms.

People who travel have suitcases and clothing.  There needs to be space for suitcases and places to hang up a few changes of clothes.   The tiny houses must accommodate reality.

On the other hand, the units were beautifully crafted in wood.  Cute.  Maybe too cute.