Pro Commerce

Suffering

The world has radically changed.  Suffering was a major part of human life for all of human history. Today it is a minor factor.

The amount of suffering individual humans experience has so dramatically changed that the magnitude can not be imagined nor the importance ignored. This has occurred in less than one century in much of the West.

In most of the world, two centuries ago, half of all children died before age 5 and one out of three women died in childbirth.  That meant death was common in almost every family. Children who survived commonly had two legs of different length and distorted feet. Everyone had painful teeth most of the time for most of their lives. 

Nearly everyone had smallpox, scarlet fever, diphtheria, chicken pox,mumps and measles all of which left facial scars and many children died.  Tuberculosis left many crippled and most who got it dead. The same with polio.

A wide range of injuries meant death; animal bites meant death from rabies, most serious cuts and gashes meant death from infection and sepsis.

Outside the agriculturally abundant United States, famine was the norm every five years along with war. 

Suffering from illness, disease and a variety of infirmities and pain was the norm of human life.

Most of this is gone.

What does this mean for humanity?  

• First we don’t notice the absence of suffering so we find trivial problems in our lives and magnify them. Many find their problems on soap opera TV.
• The role of religion, which was used to ameliorate suffering, has been drastically diminished.
• The Iron Curtain ended in 1991, the human-caused global apocalypse began with the Kyoto Protocols in 1992.  Armageddon replaced fear of nuclear bombs and physical suffering.

Restaurants in the Future

It is fairly obvious now that we have a new standard in restaurant service.

From now on most restaurants will use a QR reader for the menu. It will take longer for the very high end restaurants to use this tool.

Why?

The QR menu is a profitable innovative mechanism. 

I’ve consulted many restaurants beginning with one in 1960s San Francisco, Victoria Station, that was made up of railroad cars.  It became a successful global chain with 100 stores, following my guidance for the opening of the first one.  I told them to open with a wall-to-wall crowd of young people for the entire first month and to be very generous with drinks. 

That advice was the basis for great success. The three owners two decades later lost a bundle when trying to open and run a high- end eatery on the top floor of a Hollywood venue.  They didn’t understand that new market and never sought my advice.

I was also the father of Greens restaurant at Ft. Mason in San Francisco, which was the first high-end vegetarian restaurant in the U.S. Still full with over 180 seats nearly 40 years later.

A QR reader menu offers the following benefits:

• When the kitchen runs out of ingredients for a dish it can immediately be taken off the menu. Much less waste in meal planning for the kitchen which usually over orders.
• Many menus are expensive to produce; not true for a website which can be changed at will.
• The website can offer high quality and appetizing color photos of dishes, not possible or too expensive with printed menus. Videos are also possible.
• New and seasonal dishes can be added to the menu quickly and inexpensively.
• Price changes can be immediate.
• Vast background information can be available through the menu for select customers.
• In some cases ordering is possible without the use of as many wait staff. 
• The same or a similar menu can be used for pick-up ordering and delivery.

Those are just a few of the profitable reasons that QR menus are here to stay.

Mask Study

One good mask study has been done.

I am a court-certified expert on survey research and design.  Somehow a good study of using masks to prevent Covid-19 was done last year but I didn’t hear about it.  ‘Somehow.’ Not really. We have a totally dishonest media and government infrastructure that openly and consciously lies.

I read the Claremont Review of Books. In the latest issue, Summer 2021, there is an article by Jeffrey H. Anderson that tells about a Danish study by 22 medical people of two randomized samples done for two months last year; one group wore masks while the other didn’t.  The sample size was 8,000 people, enough to detect any fraction of a percent difference in the number of cases that got Covid-19.  There was no significant difference in the two groups.

Meaning, the 120 nanometer virus circulates freely in the air with little or no regard to a face mask.

Conflating East and West

I’m reading Julian Baggini’s How the World Thinks. He compares our Western philosophy that is Greek based with Indian, Chinese and Japanese versions of similar thought. East and West seem incompatible.

The Indian, Chinese and Japanese thought is based on the existence of another realm that is ineffable.  The Western approach accepts only experience that is mutually agreeable to reasoning.  These seem irreconcilable.

I am a person, firmly grounded in Western thinking as a Jew.  I am also a practicing Zennie.

I have found a reconciliation that is satisfactory to me.  I have been sitting zazen daily for decades and sat without interruption for weeks in sesshins; I am comfortable with the non-mind, non-linguistic world of the ineffable. There is an immediacy to the world that I experience. I live in the present.

I owe it to the late Rabbi Alan Lew for the reconciliation he taught .  The basic Jewish prayer is the Barucha. Alan taught me to read this as Blessed are thou the sound that fills the universe. Transliterated from Hebrew as: Baruch Atah Adonai, Eloheinu Melech Haolam.

He didn’t need to explain the other great daily prayer, the Shema. Hear o Israel, the sound that fills the universe is One.

So we Jews have a way to treat God as an agreed upon reality.  The 3k cosmic background radiation, a remnant of the Big Bang that pervades the universe is God.   

It is interesting that one of the people who found the 3k background radiation was Arno Penzias (co-founded with Robert Wilson) whose grandfather was a rabbi and whose daughter is a rabbi. Arno escaped from Hitler’s Germany on the Kindertransport.

When my mind is blank in zazen I hear the sound of the universe, it pervades me and is ineffable.  East and West in one place, one person.

1957

I am reading Niall Ferguson’s Doom.  I have learned three surprising things so far. Wars, revolutions and major social changes were shaped by plagues and pandemics.  I need to keep a list of pandemic dates handy to understand a force long ignored in teaching history.  Many murderous pogroms of Jews were a Christian response to plagues and pandemics.

Second, the end of the Cold War was in large part due to the incompetence and maleficent's of the USSR’s administrative apparatus. That gives me hope because most of the agencies of the government in the U.S. are totally incompetent.

Third and most important, the reason for the title of this blog, in 1957 I lived through a flu pandemic nearly identical to the current Covid 19, but there was no national hysteria about social distancing, empty schools, face masks and the whole tyrannical apparatus we globally experienced last year.

I, like most intelligent people, do not trust any news medium or agency of government.  What I do trust are data on murders and deaths because it is hard to hide a large number of dead bodies or create them ex nihilo. Therefore I looked at the 1957 flu pandemic in terms of excess deaths for the years 1957 and 1958 compared to the years before and after.  We had 20% more deaths in those years than the years before and after.

While we yielded to a totalitarian health regime in 2020, the excess deaths over the previous year was 18%.  One epidemic, 1957,  was virtually unnoticed; the latest one, with many reliable treatments, was a major social devastation.

I Don’t Make Frivolous Charges

In a recent blog I said that the field of psychology, which is built on data from experiments on 17-year old college students doing tests on supercilious questions, is not science.  The methodology is nonsense.

To build a science on data about human psychology, the approach would have to be very different.  I have done such research and will elucidate here the correct way to do it.

I created a model of such proper scientific research in the mid-1980s.  I invited 12 people I knew, but who didn’t know each other, to my house.  When they came in I had them put on a large number label and asked them not to say anything to anyone else.  When they were all seated around my living room I had them fill out a page that had all the combinations of numbers 1-2, 1-3 etc and rate them as more alike or less alike. Then I had them go to a table with refreshments and before leaving the living room I had them put on a new label A to L . When they returned I asked each to give a short description of themself and then had them all fill out a new page with A-B, A-C etc rated the same way, more alike or less alike.  

The data was tabulated and analyzed on an mdscal program. The results are multidimensional lines.

The same approach can be used in five cities using random subjects. Boston, New York, Atlanta, Fresno and San Francisco.

Participants can be shown instruments such as the Rorschach test and follow-up with questions to test the theoretical dimensions reflected in the prior tests.

This would be the beginning of a scientific basis for psychological data gathering.  No presumptions.  Most negligible preconception bias conceivable.