Pro Commerce

Permanent protesters

This is so much better than the homeless.  Based on the past week, we now have a permanent class of protesters.  While the homeless are the same size and mostly the same people who have been on the sidewalks for the past 35 years, big cities now have permanent protesters to pay attention to.

We actually had permanent protesters in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s.  Their issue was the Vietnam War and to some extent the draft.  They never stopped marching.   Now the permanent protesters are just protesting President Trump.  He will keep them busy for his entire term in office.

This is great.  Partly because I don’t have to drive through the protest areas of San Francisco and partly because it diverts the attention of the political idiot class to a trivial and meaningless group of toothless pitbulls.

Long live Donald Trump.

Dividing the electorate

Looking at American politics over the past several decades many political observers have speculated that the Democrat Party has a great future.  The Party has been gaining Latino supporters steadily and Latinos are a growing population.

Looking at the past decade we have seen the opposite.  The Left has lost all the state governments except the coastal bastions. This has lost it the House because Lefties have diluted their vote by living in dense urban clusters.  Since the 37 Red states each have two votes that has also lost the Left the Senate and the Electoral College.  

What do I see for the future?  Most importantly, the Lefty-Democrat strategy of dividing voters into small identity segments (gender, ethnicity and skin color) has reached its peak.  Their focus on trannies is a dead end road with the tiny numbers involved.

The black population is a solid voting block but not strong on voter turnout when the candidate isn’t black.  Stupid maybe but not supportive when the candidate isn't black.

The Latino population is still focused in the Blue states so it’s impact is lessened.  Additionally much of the Latino population are Evangelicals who are rapidly becoming Red.  And second generation Latinos are disproportionately Red-conservative. Some improvement in voter ID laws will also reduce the Latino vote.

The Republican Party has been split with the elite not voting and the rest of the Party joining the Trump party.  This just means the elites will slowly rejoin the party over some of the Conservative issues that they will not find elsewhere.  Much like the Bernie communists had to come back to the main Democrat Party.

What’s unusual in the Trump election was that he carried Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Blue collar states.  This realignment could be long term and will be an example for future Red state campaigns.  The quirky vote of Wisconsin seems to be along similar lines; anti-union people angry and voting for Trump.  And the Cubans, who have never voted with other Latinos were particularly distressed at the Lefty adoration of Castro’s Cuba and voted for Trump.   

A political realignment caused by Democrats using a dead-end strategy and some demographic trends that don't result in votes in Washington.

Can reading the NY Times shorten your life?

Sounds like a silly question.  It may not be.  I have a close friend who went from being highly energized before a fall where he hit his head to sleeping until 10 am every morning and having little energy.

His doctors and I have looked at every possible medical reason and there are none.  That is why I have hit on the idea that it is his love of the New York Times that may be the reason.

On what evidence do I base my opinion?

During the peak of the hippy world I saw a movie that had the lovable heroes killed gratuitously at the end.  I was depressed after seeing the movie, for a week.  I vowed at the time to get media out of my life, excluding non-fiction books.

I went ten years without seeing a movie, seeing a TV show, listening to radio news, reading a newspaper or anything else related to the media.  It was the hippy era and I was happy every day.  The only thing I didn’t know about were the people who died during the 10 years of my media fast.

I saw the clear connection between the media and misery.

Then again during the two peaks of the 2016 political campaign I went without media for two two week periods.  One after the Republican convention and one right before the election.  The venom, lies and hatred from the drive-by media directed at candidate Trump made me physically sick. I recovered quickly during the media fasts.

It is based on those experiences that I suggest that reading the New York Times daily will make a person sick.  Why the NYTimes?  First, it is at the core of the Lefty hate bubble.  The NYTimes is the source of most of the fake news, the lies and the daily Lefty fabrications.  Always wrapped in arcane or sophisticated language and allusions.

Secondly, the NYTimes is a big newspaper, especially on Sundays.  That supports the arrogant pretense of the paper as being a good news source and draws the reader into the angry painful bubble for more reading time.

Is the NYTimes bubble really a world of misery?  In the NYTimes the opposition it analyzes daily are the domestic ‘deplorables’ and in the world the newspaper champions the global Jew haters.

I suggest that reading the NYTimes will shorten your life and make that life more miserable than it would otherwise be. It may be the tent pole of the Lefty anger and misery.

Underlying the Trump election

Now that President Trump has used his first week in office to show that he intends to carry out all his campaign promises, I feel free to say good things about his campaign.  He is pro commerce in a way that has already saved America’s future.  We now know there is a core to America that will always support modern commerce. I lived long enough to see this.

I first became a Trump supporter a year ago in December when I heard Mark Steyn on the radio talking about his presence at a Trump rally in Burlington VT.  The rally was so big and so energized that Steyn came out astounded.  That is when I knew we had a winner on our hands.  I began my career in politics and I know how important enthusiasm is in elections.  The excitement about Trump grew everyday until the general election.

While I listen to all the crap the ignorant media and complicit Democrat Party use to explain why Trump won, I actually know the real reason and so do the tens of millions of people who voted for him.

One question tells you whether someone else understands why Donald J. Trump is our president: ‘is the media biased?’   If the answer is ‘no’, or ‘only slightly’ the respondent has no idea how our current president got here.  

Every Trump voter knows that the mainstream media, ‘the drive-by media’ is a mouthpiece for the Democrat Party.  100%.  100% biased for core Democrat Party ideology and candidates.

The idea of a pathological media that is overwhelmingly, thousands of outlets, on one side of the political spectrum is an abomination.  We have seen it for decades and it gets more monolithic and more aggressive every day.

Our reaction to this national horror is what gave us a brilliant, cunning and brave businessman as our leader.  He always fights back, he expresses his perpetual contempt for the drive-by-media and he has found a way around this tyrannical Lefty conspiracy of the ‘pseudo-Elite’ lefties.  Twitter and the Internet.

I’ve written it down now.  Does that ring true for you.

The NY stock market

I have little reason to comment on the NY stock market because I don’t know what will happen.  But I do know what has happened.

There has been a large movement into Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs) holding the NY Stock market basket of stocks.  This reliably coincides with a recent rapid increase in the NY Stock Market Average (DJIA).  

It would be hard to argue anything other than this movement reflects optimism among the broad base of investors about the future of corporate stocks in the Trump administration.  Especially if one looks at the DJIA since the election when the average was at 18K and in the 3 months of the Trump Era it has risen to 20K.

I personally have been mostly out of the NY Stock market; slowly returning with specific stocks that I see having a growing global market.  My anxiety about the dangerous repo (very short term funds) market has kept me from investing aggressively.  I will wait until changes are made in the Dodd-Frank legislation that will allow banks to return to the repo market.  With all the finance guys in cabinet positions this should happen in less than 6 months.

The repo market protects us from very abrupt changes in the money market because it allows for very short term borrowing. Borrowing for one day if necessary. We need that to avoid serious financial and price discontinuities.

The Trump stock market may be the first sign of 'rational choice' I have ever seen in a price market.

Predicting business success

We are inundated with a focus on funding businesses at their early conception stage.  There are dozens, probably more, online funding mechanisms for raising money for business concepts.  There is a television program about pitching a startup idea, the Shark Tank.

I’ve watched the TV show twice and it confirmed what I already know.  I put money into four ‘go fund me’ online offers. I’ve never seen a response from any of them even one that only promised an article from a writer who was going to Vietnam to write about it from a business perspective.

What I know from hundreds of people who have come to me with business ideas, from working with several thousand new businesses and from starting at least 50 businesses on my own… that there is no way to predict whether a business will succeed.  

New businesses are part of a Darwinian evolution.  At the early stages you are looking at a strand of DNA that has changed.  There is no way to know what that change will make in the protein it generates, what change that protein will bring about in a cell and certainly no way to know what the cellular changes will mean in survival.

The funding is the least of the issues.  I once had a certainty.  The local property tax assessor had made a change and increase to everyone’s assessment.  There was a complex way to appeal the assessment.  I ran an ad in the local newspaper for my business of teaching people how to appeal their assessment.  In many cases saving thousands of dollars.  No response.  Because it took me two weeks to get the business set up and run the ad.  The issue was no longer news.  In two weeks people had found a way to deal with the problem.  Who knew?  Maybe someone did.

I’ve already told several stories about my business ventures.  My Mongolian penis ring finally was sold by someone else in the gay community where it was a big success.

In another of my businesses, online small currency transactions,  I got attacked by Ukrainian hackers before I could design and install cyber-protection.  It was costly and diverted too much staff attention to keep me going.

The ingredients in business are too many, varied and unknown to allow for successful predictions.  The exceptions are franchises and identical businesses in new locations.

Inaugural speech

A number of people have asked me to comment on President Trump’s inaugural address.  It has a great deal to do with modern commerce in America.  Everything to do with the future of modern commerce in the world.

The picture on the right comes from my wonderful friend Ann who gestured like this while watching the Trump inaugural: “this man has balls this big.”

He began with “We, the citizens of America, are now joined in a great national effort to rebuild our country and to restore its promise for all of our people.

"Together, we will determine the course of America and the world for years to come.”

He is serious having said this every day for a year during the election campaign.  

Of course he put himself in the tradition of Andrew Jackson with his bold attack on the dias: “today we are not merely transferring power from one administration to another, or from one party to another -- but we are transferring power from Washington, D.C. and giving it back to you, the American People.”

What is true about this inaugural is that the core of America and modern commerce is the desire and ability to get things done.  We are a building, strong and determined people.  At least half of us are.

A true American, Trump, is unique in his ability to say: “America will start winning again, winning like never before.

"We will bring back our jobs. We will bring back our borders. We will bring back our wealth. And we will bring back our dreams.

"We will build new roads, and highways, and bridges, and airports, and tunnels, and railways all across our wonderful nation.”

Nothing is more American, the land of modern commerce, than the determination to dream, build and act.  The Golden Gate Bridge, 2 miles long, took less than 3 years to build in 1938.  The newly built Eastern span of the Bay Bridge is also 2 miles long and took 11 years to build in 2013.  

America has lost its dreams, perverted its competence, disappeared in a quagmire of hopeless Climate Armageddon.  We have become a nation of wimps, cowards, environmental reviews and pathetic pussys.

In his inaugural address, President Trump has called for a renewal of the America that created world prosperity and he offers our way of life as a light that will “shine as an example for everyone to follow.”

Great speech, and Donald Trump clearly wrote it himself like Lincoln at a similar time when American values were nearly lost.

Women and PC

A few days ago I wrote a blog about PC political correctness being a core part of the Feminist Movement.  The global Pink Pussy march of 95% white women which had absolutely no political or known purpose was in fact a march to reject the newly elected anti-PC administration. These feminists know in their hearts that PC has been defeated in an American election by the true Americans.

PC has met its match in the Trump movement.  Trump is a street fighter, a man who never turns the other cheek when attacked, loves women, loves good looking and sexy women and says so.  Trump has selected a cabinet of strong, aggressive, powerful men and a few women.  His chief aide, KellyAnne Conway, is a the symbol of anti-PC; strong, honest, clear spoken, bold and aggressive as hell.

I have said that PC is the feminists trying to turn the world into a 6 year old girl’s tea party.  All pretense, lies and petty lives focused on trivia.  

We now have a global movement to reject the feminist Political Correctness movement.  I look forward to the values that created America and modern commerce: meritocracy, openness (not fear of opposition and different worldviews) and real human diversity (nothing to do with ethnicity or skin color).  

We value strength, power, drive, competence, boldness and candor.  We hope to never see Political Correctness again.

Rolling Stone revenge

A few days ago I was phoned by a writer in New York who is doing a book on Jann Wenner and the Rolling Stone.  He had found a quote from me projecting the rapid growth of the music industry in the early 1970’s in San Francisco.  His editor wanted to know more about me.

I got to tell a story of revenge 50 years after the fact.

I was well known in San Francisco for many things including being a hippie banker.  Jann Wenner had just started the successful Rolling Stone  bi-weekly magazine and wanted to have lunch with me.

We had a nice lunch near the bank on Washington Street, on the bank’s expense account.  Jann was not a hippie, and had no hippie values, he was a ski bum.

Jann wanted to borrow money from my bank to buy out his Rolling Stone co-founder Ralph Gleason.  Ralph was very important and the leader of the local music scene, vital for the magazine.  The loan was for a small amount, which is what Wenner proposed to use to buy out Gleason.  I knew the magazine was worth four times what Wenner was offering, or double what Gleason’s share should be.  I told Wenner the amount was an ethical problem and the bank wasn’t interested.

The lunch was in the Fall of 1968.  I learned from the New York writer that Gleason turned the offer down and made changes in the magazine editing staff.  However, when he was dying a few years later he sold out to Wenner for a small amount.

In 1974 Random House published my book, The Seven Laws of Money (co-author Salli Rasberry) which received hundreds of rave reviews and sold tens of thousands of copies.  But there was one negative review from the Rolling Stone, a nasty one at that.  Jann Wenner had not forgotten my refusal to loan him money to cheat his partner.

Telling that story is my belated contribution to the world’s knowledge of Jann Wenner.  Wenner is already the poster boy for terrible journalism.  He published a phony rape story about the University of Virginia and lost a subsequent lawsuit.

Museum of business technology

It won’t surprise you to know that there is a museum of business technology.  It has a website that doesn’t say where the museum is.  It is in Wilmington, Del.  There is also a youtube with a tour led by the museum's founder.

If I were stuck in Wilmington I would definitely visit the museum.  It appears to be a collection of technology from retail and offices over the past 250 years. An impressive museum.

I understand the motivation for such a museum.  I have a few slide rules, a 95 key electric calculator from the 1950’s and the first hand-held Texas Instrument computer.  I also have a few early Radio Shack portable computers…. somewhere.

I love the museum and the execution.  I’m glad someone has collected this display of human ingenuity.

What it has to do with business history is a different matter.  You could move the entire collection and make the contents available to an entire city in Gambia or Chiang Mai,  and you wouldn’t get anything.  No new businesses, no semblance of modern commerce. Technology is the byproduct of human needs and desires.  Not the source.

Modern commerce is the result of the items listed in the headline of this blog: meritocracy, openness and diversity.  All attributes of human interaction.  All the sources of modern commerce in the very few parts of the world where it thrives.

My apologies to America

In 1971, I did something that has reverberated across America to this day.

I apologize for any consequences that have led to the presidency of Barack Obama, the most vile, deplorable, meanspirited, anti-American president to ever hold that office.  And for the behavior of the majority of the black caucus, a group of horrible blacks most of whom are a disgrace to American blacks and all Americans.

In the Spring of 1971, I was asked to leave the Bank of California.  I was a vice-president, the youngest in America.  I pointed out that I couldn’t be fired, but I wanted to leave because the Vice Chair disliked me.  With good reason.  I was given a generous severance package, a months use of the executive dining room and goldstar recommendations.

What started the commotion was my reputation in the bank as a social activist.  The one black in the audit department knew I had been a friend of the leading black civil rights organizer in Chicago when I was at the University of Chicago.  He came to me to describe his discomfort when every auditor in his department was upset.  Five bank (four white, one black) auditors had gone to lunch at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles where the Bank was a member.  After lunch they worked for the afternoon and met at the Club to play basketball.  The black auditor was not admitted.  “Blacks only admitted for lunch’ they were told.   

The head of the audit department did nothing when all the white auditors complained.  That left the black fellow feeling uncomfortable.  At his request,  I told him I would write a letter to the CEO of the Bank.  The letter was mild suggesting that a personnel issue had arisen in the Auditing Department that might warrant some review.  The mild letter was later reprinted in the San Francisco Examiner and it was indeed mild.

The problem was that the CEO was out of town and the letter went to the Vice Chair who was also the Chairman of the Jonathan Club.  He asked my boss to fire me.

Among dozens of job offers including some bank presidencies I took the job of Treasurer and Manager of Glide Memorial Church, the main activist church in the country.   I told the board, that hired me, I would be suing the Bank of California over minority discrimination issues.  They said ‘great’.

After going to every government discrimination agency and a few famous legal firms and being completely ignored, I found Robert Gnaizda who was starting a new Public Advocates firm.  He said he would take the case because I had all the discrimination data in computer print-outs but he said I had to find the people who would be the actual plaintiffs. A woman and a black.  He found the Latino plaintiff.

I took every black and every woman who worked at Bank of California headquarters to lunch, showed them the blatant wage discrimination data in their job.  Every woman said ‘I’m sure my boss will fix that soon’.  Every black said ‘man, you are a fool, if I join your case I will be fired.’  

The blacks were right.  Except for our good luck. The Federal Judge we drew was the only one of a dozen who would protect the plaintiffs.

It took me three months to find the female plaintiff who had worked for one of the bank’s branches and four months to find the black plaintiff who had been a banker in Texas but was turned away at the Bank of California personnel office because they weren’t hiring near Christmas.

The Bank of California settled the case.  The main condition was that I wouldn’t be paid a penny nor required to be rehired.  A big fund was set up for all women and minorities to use for supplemental education and training.  Middle management was given targets for employment in five years such as 15% blacks.  Top management was given targets as well for women and minorities that were very high, especially since there were zero at the time.

We won the case in settlement. Public Advocates demanded that every other major bank in the U.S. and every major Savings & Loan including finance companies like Fireman’s Fund Insurance sign the same agreement or face suit. Nearly all did.   The most successful suit in American history as a class action against discrimination on behalf of women and minorities.

The lawyer who won the case, Robert Gnaizda, and I have been friends ever since, having coffee and coke every week for 45 years.

To this day banking and finance are the most integrated industries in America.

I created this suit single handedly and the impact on America is my contribution to racial and sexual integration in American business.

Now you can go back and read my apology in the second paragraph.

PC and new business startups

Today is the end of a terrible anti-business era.

I still have to ask whether the Politically Correct crudescence that has overwhelmed and damaged all of academia and the entire Left, has damaged new business startups.

We know that new business startups have come to a virtual standstill in the past decade and there were multiple reasons.  Was one of them political correctness?

Political correctness is the feminization of everything and reduction of all human interactions to the level of a 6 year old group of girls at a pretend tea party.  

It is important to say that  many women have not been destroyed by feminism.  Many are still real women, don’t hate men and don’t live in the pretend world of the 6 year olds' tea party.  

Those women still start businesses and still have values that respect power, strength, ambition, skill, meritocracy and honesty.  

Political correctness is inherently anti-commerce.  Right off the bat it is based on denying sexual differences that are real: dishonesty.  By emphasizing unreal elements of race and ethnicity it generates ideological blindness and works against meritocracy.

Business thrives on clear thinking, meritocracy, openness and real diversity.  The antithesis of political correctness. 

In summary, the childishness of political correctness, the dishonesty and the ideological blindness of political correctness are harmful to commerce.  It is therefore logical to reason that political correctness is harmful to business startups.

Proving a negative is difficult, but reason takes us very close to explaining how political correctness weighs heavily against new business startups.  

Family

A few blogs back I wrote about the problems of dealing with a family owned and operated business.  Nepotism is not really a good business quality.

At that time I decided to write about how a family works.  I would estimate that less than half of Americans are part of anything resembling a ‘family’.    

Unfortunately making up my mind to write about family hasn’t been helpful to me.  I am nearly 4 score years old, have siblings and children and grandchildren.  The family gets together every Thanksgiving.  Family is mostly focused on grandchildren and the lineal bloodlines that extend to those grandchildren.  Altogether there are 22 family members who come to Thanksgiving wherever it is held.

Every year I consider it a miracle that we get together.  I have no idea what holds a family together.  I know it is important to the grandchildren to be part of a family.  And I know that I am happy to be part of a family.  On occasion my siblings and all our children are together; although college is breaking up the older part of ‘children and grandchildren’ categories.

I am always delighted to see how happy, calm and cooperative everyone is.  But I have no idea how a family works.  I know that everyone consciously avoids divisive topics and succeeds at that.  That no one complains about anything, like food, like someone else’s behavior.  There are no cliques and no conspiracies.

But I’ll be damned if I know why a family works.

Credit card surcharge

My regular readers know that I am the father of the modern credit card.  On this 50th anniversary of MasterCard there will be a book out on the history and my role in it.  

The issue comes up because a legal case on the issue of credit card merchant fees went before the U.S. Supreme Court last week.   

The issue before the court concerns a New York law that  allows discounts for using cash in lieu of a credit card but bans surcharges.  The case treats the NY law as a violation of free speech.

The issue is irrelevant from the perspective of the credit card business.  Back when we started in 1967 all the merchant agreements banned discounts or surcharges for a ten year period.  We borrowed the language from the existing charge cards.  The issue for us was to make sure that merchants did not penalize credit card usage during the roll-out period when credit cards were hardly used and not understood.

After ten years, the multi-purpose bank issued credit card was widely understood and widely used.  The legal restriction was no longer relevant.  However, the card issuing companies went to the trouble to write state laws banning discounts and surcharges.  I was long gone from that business.

It is rather stupid for a merchant to discourage credit card usage in order to save $.25 on each sale, the usual minimum fee for a card usage.  I did plenty of retail surveys which were often used to sell merchants on the value of the card.  The results showed that people who used a credit card bought an average of 10% more merchandise.  

Today, only fools and Chinese small grocers try to discourage credit card use.  The issue disappeared a long time ago.

Matt and Shelley's video

I have two friends who are the main producers of a global TV network on the subject of China. China Uncensored.  Part of the New Tang Dynasty Network.  

The organization has a newspaper as well (Epoch Times).  Both focus on China from the point of view of Falun Gong.  Falun Gong has been banned in China.  Banned, and its members tortured,  because it has religious overtones and China has had bad experience with national religious movements in the past two centuries.

One of the latest abominations that Barack Obama created with his personal cowardice was to give China many Islands in the South China Sea including the Spratlys and the Scarborough Shoal. These are small coral outcroppings thousands of miles from China.  So China is building military bases on the outcroppings.

My brave friends went on a Philippine fishing boat two days into the open ocean to see how the Chinese are protecting their new military bases that are in Philippine National waters.

Don’t expect any action.  There is none.

Josh's data

My friend Josh and I have spent much time working with climate data over several years.  

All of our math has been public on my blog sites.

Josh just happened to look at the San Francisco rainfall going back to 1849 and sent me the chart with a long-term average and some rolling averages. (Click on it to increase the size) San Francisco rainfall has no local anomalies to effect it; just millions of square miles of the Pacific Ocean.  

If Josh found anything to suggest global warming in the data, he would have called it to our attention.

I have seen the same data for the same period for snow fall in the Sierra and for air temperature for Salt Lake City.   No global warming. 

None of this compares to the 65 years of reliable global data I have presented in many blogs.  

But it is a sad reminder that global warming is a religious hysteria of global proportions.

Foreign government interference

Last week was a period of media and political insanity about foreign government interference in the American electoral process.  

I can’t help pointing out that Barack Obama openly interfered in the Israeli election against the incumbent whom he hates, Bibi Netanyahu.  He used State Department money for his interference. He did it again in the British Brexit election where he threatened to punish England if it left the EU.

I don’t know how much interference in American elections has occurred in the past.  Hillary Clinton had some of her money managers collect Chinese donations in 2008 and she got vast contributions from Arab governments to her Clinton Foundation as well as Russian contributions.

In both the Obama and Clinton cases the world was openly invited to participate in our elections.  They probably did.  

Foreign intrusion in American elections doesn’t bother me.  The accusations against Russia are pathetic and could not have influenced American elections in any way.  Money doesn’t bother me either because Hillary followed my rule that money is irrelevant.  She and her party spent ten times what Trump and the Republicans spent and lost badly.  Deservedly for their core dishonesty.

What bothers me and is a reason Obama should be in prison.  Using American taxpayer money to influence the Israeli election is totally offensive.  Doing this around the world is a sure way to denigrate the idea of democracy, open elections and breed contempt for America.  Three things that were part of Obama and the Democrat Party’s objectives.  Legal action against the offenders should be undertaken.  Laws should be on the books to automatically invoke impeachment.

The harm has been done.  Slow mending is in order with major bipartisan commissions and independent research commissioned.  Other nations should be given a platform to testify against American behavior.

That is just a start.  Foreign governments should have standing to sue Americans and American organizations for this type of meddling when Americans do it to their countries.  The penalties should be enormous.  

Israel should get one hundred times what the State Department spent as a penalty for interfering in her elections.

China and tariffs

There is a reality about tariffs that few people know.  The United States and every other country has hundreds, even thousands of tariffs and trade barriers that are in place and well defended by powerful political interests.  

The great value of the WTO was that it created a mechanism for any country or group of countries to protest specific offensive trade barriers and gave the complainant's a vehicle for retaliating.

Sometimes there is no single complainant.  The U.S. has horrifically high barriers to sugar and sugar is grown around the world.  No specific country has enough reason to fight the battle.  

Canada and the U.S. have similar dairy barriers but neither is willing to fight.  The list of barriers outside of products is even more extreme and apply to investments, financial instruments, royalties and finances.  Copyright and intellectual protections is an even bigger quagmire.

So when there is talk about trade wars and trade fights, note these are only ‘talks’.  There is infinite room to negotiate between nations.

There is an entirely separate matter that is closely tied to the issue of trade and tariffs.  I have always accepted the spoon fed line I got in economics that freer trade is desirable.  The argument is always based on David Ricardo. Pure theory, no reality.

I’ve read the NAFTA agreement but didn’t waste my time on the TPP.  NAFTA had so many detailed rules about labor issues, environmental restrictions and health-medical exceptions that it was impossible to know what the effects were.

In the most outrageous section, there was to be a special highway between Canada and Mexico for direct trade.  But the Teamster’s Union made sure that such a freetrade highway never came into existence.  For twenty years they blocked all Mexican trucks, as ‘unsafe’, even though all the trucks were new American trucks.

So, looking at the current vastly overblown discussion of trade, keep in mind it is all a battle of special interests screwing each other, with little benefit for ordinary consumers.

Twitter

There are several books and a long stream of online explanations for marketing on Twitter.  I’ve never seen Twitter as an above average ad or marketing promotion tool.

I do know people who have a following on Twitter and they regularly talk about issues related to their business.  That is much like a blog that does the same thing.  It is a way to maintain a regular marketing contact with your prospects, clients and customers.  That use of Twitter is wonderful but doesn't provide much revenue.  Unlike Google which connects buyers with sellers when the buyer is interested in the product or service. Or it can do that on occasion.

Twitter is a company is serious stock market trouble.  The stock price today (TWTR) is the same as it was a year ago, roughly $17 a share. It has been below $15 and as high as $25.  But it doesn’t have much ad revenue, just over $2 billion and no earnings.

The management has not figured out how to increase ad revenue nor how to reduce costs to come in line with revenue.

What Twitter has become is a voice for our new president to talk directly to Americans who want to hear what he has to say.  I read his tweets everyday and love the fun, folksy style.  Then I read some of the media to find out how his simple words have been distorted.  That is the new American political game.

It is probably Twitter that has defeated the Democrat media machine and given the American people a mechanism to hear from a non-Democrat in honesty and candor rather than in mealy mouth neo-republican-democrat gobbledy-gook.

Thank you commerce for saving democracy just at the point where it was about to be destroyed by the anti-commerce Left.

Poverty

I don’t write or talk much about this subject, poverty,  I’m probably too moral a person.  I tend to see a person’s life as the consequence of a series of decisions.    I have always recommended simple living which is living on few resources but enjoying the benefits of making desirable choices about your time everyday and living fully.

Nevertheless I do know many people who live in the countryside in circumspect conditions.  I’ve also built a park for street people so I know urban people who live fulltime on the street.

There are three points in life that seem to me important and have serious consequences.  If you want to be poor and always struggle you know what to do: avoid schooling, spend some time in prison and be a mother of a child who doesn’t have a father around.

The three important pivotable points deal with (1) educational choices somewhere in the mid-teens. Completing some educational award stage, graduating, is a requirement for the remaining parts of our society that continues to provide jobs and careers.  This remains a fairly straight and stable track to avoid poverty.  Boring to me, but not to most people.

The second comes a little later when adult criminality becomes a choice.  Criminal choices are fairly simple.  The people who get caught are the ones who are conscious of their choice to be criminal or who say to themselves ‘I can lose control in this situation and it won’t come back to bite me.’  Usually this is a group of people, friends who make this choice together.

The last one is a choice everyone makes intentionally.  The relationship to family.

A woman raising a child by herself has chosen one of the worst possible alternatives.  Finding a partner and having child is a difficult but usually feasible decision.  But the critical part of this decision is being part of a family.  One consciously includes parents, grandparents and siblings.  Exclusion had generally negative consequences.  The same is true for choosing a partner.  The implication for family are built in.  Even gay men can choose to be part of a family with nieces and nephews.   

Old age without a family or close friends is a unique form of poverty that hits me starkly and with fear.  It is the consequence of critical decisions and those should be conscious decisions.

Has the counter-revolution ended?

Today I talked to a 44 year old who didn’t know what the Whole Earth Catalog was.  He knew that Kevin Kelly had something to do with it.  He is a well educated Harvard and computer geek.

I look at the past half century as a period of revolution and counter-revolution.  The revolution was the hippies who rejected everything that their parents stood for.  The hippies believed each person born is a tabla rasa, free to grow up loving, kind and generous.  That the social milieu shaped the beings of our time.  The hippies refused to work at regular salaried jobs, used every drug to alter the mind they could find and enjoyed free sex with no condoms.  The entire milieu of the hippy world has been recorded by me in many blogs.  My main role was to support their love of small business.  Hippies believed that innovative small business was a key way to change the world.  They were right. Small hippie businesses created the modern world.

The hippie revolution began sometime in the mid-1960’s and closed in the mid-1980’s.  The counter revolution probably began in the late 1970’s and continued until the mid 2015’s.

The counter-revolution was found in the growth of an elite Marxist, feminist, anti-male academia, union controlled urban world of more government and more hatred of commerce and Jews.

Has the counter-revolution burned itself out?

We are living to see the people of America rise-up first as the Tea Party then as the Trump Party and regain control of the political levers.  Now we get to see if America can regain control of our country in the name of modern commerce.

I was lucky to travel in hippie days

From the late 1950’s to the early 1990’s I traveled the world.   I went to the USSR in the early 1980’s and got to see the Soviet disaster up close.  The same is true for Cuba in the late 1990’s.  I got to Eastern Europe, The Czech Republic, Slovenia and Hungary as the Iron Curtain was falling.  I was in South Korea before it started to grow economically and in Malaysia before Islam started on its global path of domination.  I was in Singapore when it was still a British outpost.  In Kabul when there were only dirt streets.

The point I’m making is that I spent long periods in parts of Europe that today are cesspools of Arab immigration and national centers of Jew hate.  I would not spend one of my dollars on those backward looking neo-nazis swamps.  

The world has changed dramatically in such a short time.  In the late 1970’s and early 1980’s I was the darling of the European ‘new business movement’ from Western England, to Amsterdam to Lyon to the whole country of Sweden.  I was asked to give speeches, talk at universities and organize workshops in how to build a small business network.  Everyone seemed to understand the need for new small businesses to grow the economy and I was the man to look to.

I was treated as royalty.  Introduced to all the government movers and shakers, the business consultants and I was entertained in elegance.

Today, I would be forced to insult everyone.  Why do you hate Jews?  How can an intelligent person like you support Hamas and Arab hatred?  How can you separate your views from those of the Third Reich?  Why is your government so blind to the pervasive self destruction and hatred of commerce that I now see everywhere?

Travelling in Europe would be pretty awful for me now.

When the governrnment sues you

This blog is not about the obvious power of the government to screw up the lives of individuals.  That is obvious and criminal.  That is the reason I consider the politicizing of the IRS to be the highest crime ever committed in America.  Committed and approved by the most evil president to ever hold American office.  Obama the arrogant.

What I want my readers to know about is the power of the Justice Department to diddle with anti-trust action.

The D of J diddled with Microsoft for ten years over the combining of a browser with a basic office platform.  The EU has continued the diddling and has added other major U.S. tech giants to the list of companies being diddled.

It would all seem to be a nuisance as I imply with the silly word ‘diddle’.  These big companies supposedly just set aside a few tens of millions of dollars for their  legal departments to deal with the government. And go on with their business.

But that is not what happens.  The threat of government is so great with such horrific consequences that are possible, that management begins to focus a disproportionate amount of attention on the government legal case.  Management doesn’t just leave it to the legal department, it becomes part of every senior level meeting.  It becomes part of the regular SEC filing.  It becomes part of every planning issue.

New products and improvements are considered in the light of the government legal actions.

When a corporation is under pressure from a government agency about anti-trust the entire focus of top management is diverted to that issue.  Growth and innovation slow down, often stopping altogether.

I sell the stock in a company when I see that it is mired in anti-trust.  Because innovation will soon stop.  Focus becomes lobbiests, legal thinking and management risks.

The government power to diddle is the power to destroy great companies.  

While the EU represents a tiny and pathetic market, it still has some influence.  The EU exerts its power in anti-trust simply because Europeans are static minded Luddities with no vision and no future.  This is their only contact with real power.  Other than attacking Jews, their main occupation.

Why deflation?

Economists seem to blithely go about their lives on the assumption that we are living in a period of very low inflation in the U.S.

We aren’t.  Take out healthcare, housing and education from the cost of living indicator and we have been in a deflationary period for roughly 25 years.  Just like the Japanese.    These three components of our living costs are rising because they are domestically produced and not subject to international competition.  One word: unions.  

That tells us why we really have deflation.  We are part of the world where we get the benefit of lower cost and more efficient production from the entire planet.  Not just China; India, Vietnam and Indonesia are low cost producers.  Their labor force is not ‘cheaper’, these workers are well paid.  They just don’t have to pay high property taxes for union controlled city governments, outrageous income, sales and luxury taxes, eat out at expensive restaurants three nights a week, pay babysitters $1,200 a week for their child and their dog.  

American wages are not high, they are outrageous compared to the ordinary world where families still exist, where food is local and unions do not run everyone’s life.

What does the reality of deflation mean to real humans?  The world around us is getting easier to live in, unless you have to deal with any of the three union forced inflators.  Life is actually getting cheaper and easier.   Enjoy it.

The invisible swamp around us

A billion years before humans began carrying fire around with them to gain a dominant evolutionary position, the planet was inhabited by single cell and eukaryotic cell life.  This life (and viruses) inhabited every niche on the planet.  They still do and they are relatively invisible to humans as they have been for five centuries though we have the technology to see some of them.

They live in and on us by the trillions.  Since I had a severe cold for the past week, I am conscious that we have not fully accommodated to this miasma of trillions of creatures.

I have been somewhat aware of some of this world for many decades.  The mother of my children did research in a lab that studied sprue.  Sprue was a malabsorption problem of the small intestine and made digestion of vitamin D difficult.   Sprue is now called celiac sprue and every Lefty and every hysteric claims to be allergic to gluten, the germ cell that aggravates celiac sprue.

The lab was constantly taking cell samples from the intestinal tract and growing them in petri dishes.  The doctor who ran the lab had a saying about the entire intestinal tract that ‘it was replenished everyday ( because it housed so many pathogens) from your ruby red lips to your veritable anus.’   

I never forgot that.  I also remembered it when I recently recommended a tooth gel, Livionex, to stop dental plaque.

So I had some inkling of the invisible swamp we live in.

What most fascinates me is that we, biologists, have no idea how evolution occurs in this vast swamp.  No idea.  The entire world is alive and living happily invisible to use except for our rare use of micro-technology.  

And these preposterous people who are called ‘scientists’ are telling us with certainty how the atmosphere and climate work.

Vinyl records

I have a giant vinyl record collection at home for two reasons.  I have a 1938 Wurlitzer Jukebox which plays them, and a great deal of the best Jazz was recorded on vinyl.  I also find that playing old records on the jukebox is the most authentic sound because the speaker is a heavy magnet about 30” in diameter, which is what the records were mixed for.  Second, albums of vinyl are very cheap.  Or they were a dozen years ago when I was buying.

In the 1990’s and 2000’s I heard a great deal of jazz original vinyl in Tokyo.  Many jazz bars had vinyl playing with speakers that were bigger than me and exquisite amplifiers with vacuum tubes (made in Russia).  The reason given was that the wave modulation was a warmer sound than digital.

To my surprise, a friend who does solo blues guitar performances year round in the San Francisco Bay Area, told me he gets paid by the sales of his vinyls.  What?  Yes.  Musicians these days are selling vinyls not CDs at their performances.

So I looked at Target to see what kind of vinyl players they are selling.  A whole page of record players from $50 to $900.

So, vinyl is back.  The fellow who used to fix my Wurlitzer died a few years ago.  When will a new repair man emerge?

How institutions change

Some institutions change and others don’t.  Government institutions including most American agencies, education and others like agriculture and foreign service never change.  They are malignant cancers.

Some institutions like language, media, technology and modern commercial corporations are in constant flux and evolution.  That is why modern commerce is beneficial for humans.  It is evolutionary like biology.  One exception has been militaries.  They change because it is clear when they have been defeated. Making room for new development.

So for our own survival how can we thwart or slow down the malignant government agencies?  I know that in education, where I toiled for dozens of years, no change is possible.  As alternatives, such as online courses, need to be established in parallel and the better students will take some of the smorgasbord within arms reach.

What are the mechanisms that have been tried on standard government agencies?  Freeze hiring.  This does nothing except the entrenched bureaucrats get more power.   Cut the budget.  That is the same as freezing hiring.  The bureaucrats pay themselves more.

My most useful suggestion recently has been to move the agency to an undesirable location.  Move the IRS and EPA to Detroit.  The advantage of that is that some departments can be left un-reopened.  But mostly half or more of the old bureaucrats won't move to the new location.  They will quit or take early retirement.  New vitality and new direction might be possible.

When Jerry Brown returned for a second run as governor of California he 100% abolished the state urban renewal department that has harassed him as mayor of Oakland.  It has been six years and the agency is still gone.  The former employees were all hired by their government local friends but without the statewide network they have been harmless.

I hope President Trump tries my idea and we will see if malignant government agencies can be changed.

 

Advertising and cigarettes

This year is the 50th anniversary of the anti-smoking advertising campaign.  My oldest daughter was born in that period and now she had children old enough to produce grandchildren.  Three generations have been exposed to the 'smoking will kill you' advertising.

Initially the percent of smokers in the U.S. dropped precipitously to about 20%.  The drop was most significant among blacks and women.  By 1975 the percentage of smokers stopped declining and has remained the same for 40 years.

Still the anti-smokers have poured billions into the advertising business with no effect.  Three new generations have ignored the advertising.  Anti-smoking prudes are not a group of people who learn.  There is also a group of media owners who want government dollars.

What is interesting is that tobacco is coming back.  Hipsters are smoking pipes.  Despite the anti-cigarette prudes putting advertising money and legal campaigns into attacking the vaping of nicotine, young people, and even me, are finding that vaping a 24% mixture of nicotine has more impact that a burning cigarette.  It delivers a gentle ‘high’ with no smoke in the lungs.

Vapers know that vaping isn’t likely to be harmful and that the government and the anti-smoking prudes have no evidence of harm on which to base their witch hunt.

As usual there are parts of the public that can think for themselves and view the government as a malicious institution.  As noted in the recent election.

Advertising over 50 years doesn't work.  A government without data has no clout.

Jerusalem

I was in Israel in 1959.  Occasionally I would take a bus to Jerusalem.  The road up the mountains had many burned out armored vehicles along the side. Reminders of the recent War of Independence. A few of these burned out reminders are still along the highway to Jerusalem.

Once I got to Jerusalem and began walking I was confronted with another striking reality.  This was a high desert town.  Hot, dry, with virtually no trees and no amenities like water fountains.  No stores or retail.

I walked to the Old City which was surrounded by barbed wire.  Jews were not allowed in or even near it.  My feelings about that where somewhere between ‘Who the fuck do you stupid Arabs think you are to keep us out of our city?’ and a question ‘When will we take this back? It is ours?”  I still have the same gut feelings about the Temple Mount.

I was back in Jerusalem in 1992 when the City was lush with trees and amenities.  Something Israelis are good at.  Plenty of coffee shops and restaurants.  My visit to the old city was wonderous.  It is magnificent and is our home.

I still felt Jerusalem was a religious city.  It lacked depth in shopping and tourist facilities.

My next visit that changed my mind was around 2010 when the gorgeous Mamilla Mall was open.  This mall lead directly into the Jaffa Gate of the Old City.  It is elegant with the original stone buildings of the Mamilla district.  Jerusalem is now a real modern commercial city along with all the other parts.

You can imagine how I feel about the United Nations and UNESCO saying officially that Jerusalem, especially the Old City, is Arab Muslim.  Just more provocation to take back the Temple Mount from those buffoons.

Feminism is PC and PC is feminism

I was asked to look at the future one day last week.  I foresee a powerful America, Japan and Israel; the countries that have the skills and environment for innovation.  I foresee the distance between these first three countries and the rest of the world growing. Then I said something that alarmed me and alarmed everyone else even more.  They demanded we change the subject.

I foresee PC, politically correctness, getting stronger and weakening the United States.  Because PC is a feminist movement that is getting stronger not weaker.  Children are already being raised in schools where PC is the dominant world.  We hear about it and see it in colleges because they occasionally ban a conservative speaker.  But K-12 is strongly anti-male. Overly active boys are given Ritalin to override their male power.  Boys are badgered to let girls speak and win games.  Competition that has been a male bonding ritual for millennia is banned.

Picture a group of girls sitting around a table playing English 'tea'.  That is the feminist model.  Boys have nothing to do with it.  

In colleges we see ‘safe spaces’ ‘micro aggressions’ ‘white male privilege’ and ‘rape is always the males fault’.  This is the feminization of our society.  

In Trump’s America women carry pistols and know how to use them.  In Hillary’s America women cry when they lose the presidency and morbidly hate everything about guns and ammunition.

In Trump’s America successful men and women are admired and encouraged to create more innovation.  In Hillary-Obama’s America ‘you didn’t make that business’ ‘income inequality’ is the second greatest problem.  Al Gore’s global warming is the first problem and is officially the main enemy of the American military.

Women can use male bathrooms and vice versa is a big issue.  

Women demand equality in the work environment.  But when a couple bad guys come into a room to make trouble it is still the men who have to greet them with force.

The feminization of America will destroy us.  I’ve spent time in Sweden which is a purely feminist society.  The men are wimps and the women don’t complain about Muslims raping them.   

Hasn’t anyone seen this overall picture before?  Feminization is PC and it will destroy the vitality of America.

Married in Israel Part 3 of 3

The smaller room was empty.  So the rabbi had me pull down my pants to see if I was circumcised.   The word had not reached this group that nearly all male Americans of that era were circumcised.  

So we were allowed to fill out more papers and pay for a few stamps.  We were nearly finished and ready to run out the door.  The last question on the form was the name of the rabbi who would perform the marriage.  Since we had never expected to get this far, that day, I hadn’t given any thought to finding a rabbi.  

I decided to try for the most common name in Hebrew.  I said our rabbi was Moses Abramovich.  

We rushed to the nearest phone booth and found two rabbi Moses Abramoviches in the Tel Aviv directory.  The second one said he would be glad to perform the wedding.  He would have to provide the food because that year was a sabbatical year and we couldn’t eat food from a Jewish farm.

The wedding date arrived and we brought all our friends and neighbors.  The rabbi also had his minion (10 orthodox men).  So I paid them off and thanked them for coming,

The two great ironies in this story are that when my wife and I got divorced fourteen years later, the alimony was very close to the original divorce settlement.  And my wife was a the daughter of an Irish Roman Catholic family.

This never seemed to bother anyone.  My children have been comfortable as Jews.  About 45 years after the wedding my ex-wife got her mitochondrial DNA tested by the National Geographic.

She had all four alleles for an Ashkenazi woman.