Pro Commerce

Third World

“San Francisco has definitely become third-world.”  The problem with saying that is that 93% of the people who live here have no idea what the third world is.

San Francisco has 850,000 residents.  Of this 50,000 came here after living in a third-world country (Mexico, Guatemala, Vietnam, Philippines, India etc.) Possibly 5,000 San Franciscans have visited a third-world country (not just a coastal resort in Mexico.)

I’ve spent weeks and months in all parts of India, West Africa, including Senegal, Mali and Cameroon.  I’ve also spent weeks in Cuba, Guatemala, Laos, Malaysia and many other genuine third-world countries.

I know what the term ‘third-world' means.  

It means I regularly see human waste on the sidewalks including poop and vomit (and discarded IV needles.)  Every corner smells like pee. When shabbily dressed people walk into Peet’s coffee shop, the smell drives me out.  Graffiti is everywhere.  People on the street stop to beg if I am eating outside. Small temporary squalid living quarters are regularly popping up on the sidewalk. Beggars are lying around on sidewalks nearly everywhere that there is sidewalk traffic. Streets are rarely repaired and driving around San Francisco is like driving on an unpaved mountain road.  Deranged people are screaming and yelling in shopping areas. 

That is San Francisco today; it is not the City I have lived in for most of my life.  It is city life I see in third-world countries. The situation here gets worse every year.

The Long-Term Problem

Five of America’s long-term patterns have converged to do terminal damage.

First, America was founded by Puritans and their progeny have been a dominant force in shaping American values. They are strongest in the Northeast, home of the major colleges and media institutions.  The Puritan value system has many elements that include 

• hostility to the idea that someone else is having fun, 
• The idea that luxury is selfish and 
• that everyone must work and is willing to work.

Second, deeply held Marxist beliefs came to America with European immigrants, especially Ukrainian and Polish Jews. Beginning with the Wobblies, and later the Communists, they became a powerful political force in government that Sen. Joe McCarthy attempted to stop. McCarthy was destroyed for his efforts.  Marxism only went underground because of the aggressive militarism of the USSR. Marxism always dominated academia in the post-WWII era.  The American Left fell in love with Fidel Castro until he became anti-American.  It resurfaced vigorously after the fall of the USSR in 1991. (I am a Jew)

Third, the post-WWII era saw a rise of the meritocratic officer class into major industries and brought about the consequent 1960 decline of America’s hereditary elite that formerly controlled American industry.  The vacuum left by the fall of the hereditary elite, in every urban area and in government, was replaced by the second strongest remaining organized force: unions with their anti-meritocratic values.

Four, Africans from tribal cultures were brought to America as slaves and a large proportion of that population have remained as the bottom social class even after the end of slavery. All other immigrant populations rose in the social hierarchy with hard work, meritocracy and assimilation to surpass the African-American population, by-passing the bottom class.  Asian, Latino, Irish, Italian, and Indian populations successfully assimilated. The success of other ethnic groups made the failure of African-Americans even more conspicuous.

Fifth, the anti-establishment 1960 hippies became champions of defiance and openly enjoyed drugs and living on city streets. (I was a hippie leader.)

Consequence: beginning in 1975 a former hobo population, imitating the hippies, began living on urban streets and using drugs openly. The former hobo population, over the past 45 years, has grown to a visible size and is disproportionately African-American. The street population is still a fraction of one percent of American adults.

This visible street population has been seen in the traditions of American culture as ordinary people with mental health and drug problems who suffered inordinate hardship. This is a Puritan view that is simply false.  The street population in America and elsewhere are simply people who don’t want to work and don’t want to participate in conventional society.  I know this as a fact having created the first and only park for street people in 1978.  I knew many hundreds of people who used my park.

A high proportion of street people are black males. The Lefty mind has seen this population of blacks living and begging on the streets as the result of institutional racism and white supremacy.   In a society where meritocracy and American global dominance has created thousands of billionaires, the disparity is seen as a case of American inequity.

Put it all together and half of America now believes in the ‘wokie’ ideology of 

• Systemic American racism
• White supremacy
• Gross income inequity in American society
• The social harm of meritocracy in the absence of union values.

I see no remediation on the horizon. I see nothing to alleviate this strong convergence of forces that will destroy America.

The South Won the Civil War

There has been recent discussion in literary circles about the change in public attitudes toward General Robert E. Lee.  Statues of Lee have been removed in many parts of the South along with the names of streets of many of his generals. This is a big change from the elevation of Lee and the Confederacy to a high status as the ‘Lost Cause.’

Who am I to comment on this issue? Done, I am not an historian and I have made no special study of the Civil War.

I am a unique individual who applied my own intelligence to the facts and debate about the Civil War and came to conclusions very different from my fellow Americans.  In the middle of 1962 I tried to get major figures in the Republican Party to call for a celebration of the Centenary of the Emancipation Declaration for the Fall when President Lincoln wrote it and for January 1st 1963, the 100th anniversary of its implementation.

At the time I was a functionary in the Republican Party, having worked on local San Francisco campaigns and for Richard Nixon’s campaign for California Governor.

Again in 2012 I called on National leaders and Congress to declare a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Declaration. This time as an expert legal witness for three Black civil rights organizations. I got two prominent black clergy on the West Coast to sign letters of support.

At neither time did I get any support from any other people in my campaign. A giant ‘nothing.’

Before my first appeal for a celebration I had come to my own conclusions about the Civil War. First, the South was much richer than the North with its vast exports before the War. Second, General Lee and General Jackson were above average generals but  Lee’s other generals were petty and mediocre. General McClellan was a bumbling Union leader.  Third, the North became a mighty industrial force because of the supply demands of the Civil War, especially the need for railroads.  

I also concluded that the South had won the war because nearly all Americans believed in the honor and dignity of the Confederacy as tumpeted by the ‘Lost Cause’ storyline and the movie Gone With the Wind.  Most Americans accepted the exaggerated storyline about ‘scalawags’ and ‘carpetbaggers.’  None of it was good history.

This is a good place to point out that in many wars the military losers were effectively the winners.  WWI is a good example. The Allies forced a peace treaty on the Axis powers but the Axis came back to physically destroy France and Great Britain and tens of millions of civilians.

The Israelis in 1947 won their own state militarily but still have no peace after 70 years with the Palestinian hostility and three unrelenting neighboring countries. 

The U.S. won the Vietnam War militarily and had a peace treaty in 1973 but lost the peace a year later because of American domestic opposition.

Other wars in Iraq, Korea, Afghanistan and the Cold War with the USSR have no military peace decades later. The same is true for the war between India and Pakistan.

Military victories in the past 175 years have had questionable outcomes.  

Two Japanese Documentaries Part 2

This is continued from the last blog.  It is about the second Japanese documentary film that dealt with dolphin killing at Taiji, Japan.

In the mid-1970s I heard from a friend that there were rumors of an annual Japanese dolphin slaughter. I have gone to Japan every year since 1970 so I added the source of rumor to my travel plans.  I easily found Japanese who told me where the dolphin hunting was being done.  I took a few trains to the small fishing village in the Southern end of a peninsula on the main Island of Honshu not far from Kyoto. I spent a few days in Taiji and was invited to a town dinner festival.  Everyone in town was there including a dozen children running wild.

I talked to men at the fishing coop and visited the dolphin memorial statue.  I was generously entertained by several families and had a wonderful time.

I saw the harbor where six hundred dolphins were killed annually after being herded into a cove and saw photos of the slaughter.

Having seen the racial prejudice of Americans toward the Japanese in the anti-whaling movement and personally being offended by the arrogance of one culture attacking the eating habits of another culture, I was particularly worried how Americans would react to news about the dolphin killing. Americans love dolphins even more than whales.

I met with a few Japanese governmental officials and explained how important it was to keep stories about the Taiji dolphin harvest from being covered in Japanese media. They understood and concurred.

When I returned to San Francisco I wrote an article about the Taiji dolphin harvest.  I consciously pulled at the heart strings of my fellow environmentalists by describing the close-knit fishing cooperative and the religious ceremonies dedicated to the souls of the dead dolphins.  I wrote about the ancient ritual of a traditional people.

The leading environmental weekly spread my article, with photos, on the whole two middle pages.  

It appears that this article was widely read and forestalled American outrage over the dolphin harvest for the next thirty years.  That was the subject of the Japanese documentary.

By the year 2003, a new generation of American environmentalists arrived and made the Taiji dolphin hunt a popular subject of outrage including a film that won an Oscar.

Two Japanese Documentaries Part 1

Two Japanese documentary filmmakers emailed me while I was in Tokyo in the early 2000s. I met with them at my favorite coffee shop in Shibuya where there are some private rooms upstairs for business meetings.  I was interviewed for one film for my role in stopping the American anti-whaling movement.  The other was my role in postponing the American anti-Japanese campaign against Japanese dolphin killing. Both filmmakers had discovered my role from Japanese sources.

There are two blogs, one on each documentary. 

This first on whales. (an earlier blog is here)

It all began in my role on the board of Point Foundation, the foundation based on the revenue from the Last Whole Earth Catalog. A fellow board member encouraged me to grant funds to Joan McIntryre, an anti-whaling activist. She lived in Bolinas, North of San Francisco. She named her organization Project Jonah.  

Two years later I met her in Japan and was surprised to find she disliked Japanese people.  I can find no record of her since then.  I heard she married a native Polynesian around that time after writing a successful anti-whaling book.

That meeting with Joan in Japan  led to a conversation at a party in San Francisco with a Harvard biologist. I asked her about the issue of whaling populations.  She made a quote I’ll never forget.  ‘If there were any problems with the endangered data my Jewish friends at Harvard would have known about it.’

I’m a Jew and a statistician. So I took the challenge.  I spent a few days in the library and made several discoveries.  There are about 38 species of whales of which four were declared endangered by the International Whaling Commission. One of the endangered species was the Sei whale, primarily hunted by Inuit and Canadian native tribes. None were hunted by whaling countries. Many of the remaining species had female populations over 500,000.

I then wrote an article for the Co-Evolution Quarterly, a leading environmental magazine, titled “The Anti-Whaling Movement is Racist Against Japanese.”  I argued that several Scandinavian nations and the USSR were whaling nations but completely ignored by the anti-whaling movement. There were no pickets at the Bolshoi Ballet.

A few months later, I pointed out the article to my friend Jerry Brown who is an environmentalist and was then governor of California. He called a meeting in his office with all the leading environmentalists and asked them if my article was accurate.  If it was, he told them to call off their campaign.  

That was pretty much the end of the American anti-whaling movement. 

My role in that was the subject of the Japanese documentary a quarter-century later.

Wolfram’s ‘Start of the Universe’

I was just brought up to date on Stephen Wolfram’s project to find the key to the universe which he released online last year.  He used many of the simplest math statements to generate entire universes with hundreds of thousands of outcomes.

The problem has become one of knowing which one is the closest to the universe we live in.

I dealt with a similar problem in biology.  I’m not in Wolfram’s league; a man who understood Reimann tensors by age 13 is unique, and one who didn’t find enough stimulus at the Institute for Advanced Study in his early 20s is ahistoric.

My insight comes from visiting Dr. Donald A Glaser’s lab in the late 1970s at U.C. Berkeley. Dr. Glaser had laid out 1 million separate agar cells on a flat table with a moveable arm overhead that could visit and interact with every cell, quite fast.  In each cell he placed a single bacterium.  He then, in the case I saw, placed a drop of liquid on each bacterium and let it grow. He then photographed the resulting growth and ran the 1 million images to find clusters of common variance. 

Dr. Glaser was applying the urine from thirty Stanford basketball team members where the mild illnesses of a dozen were known.  The photos found the precise clusters of the cells where liquid from the specific dozen had been applied and Glaser knew from the shape of the bacteria which shape was connected to each illness.  He could therefore predict the same future illnesses if they were reintroduced into the cell machine.

I thought it was brilliant.  The NIH had given him a $5 million grant to build and test the machine but ended the grant after he wrote his final report.

In discussing this success/failure with my close friend Dr. Peter Sherrill, Peter explained a long verbal apocrypha in science that: making accurate predictions was not of interest to science if the mechanism was not understood. That was the case with Dr. Glaser’s machine.

It seems to me that that is the problem with Wolfram’s hundreds of thousands of automata created universes.  He can’t predict which one must be the correct universe.  

If he could take four objects from our universe, say neon, pi, a gamma ray and the 2.7K radiation and use those to predict the existence of radioactive decay I believe he would prove that one of his automata was the basis of the universe.  

And most thinkers would agree.