Pro Commerce

In the New Revolution, Teach Commerce

The revolution in higher education is coming.  There will soon be several new and very high quality universities that will protect and appreciate Jews.  It will be important to teach the realities of commerce.

There is no such thing as ‘capitalism.’ There is only ‘commerce.’ ‘Capitalism’ is a term that comes from Karl Marx who had an erroneous theory of labor as the source of prices.  Simply, the cost of goods sold is equal to the labor input to the goods and services plus a payment for capital, plus whatever the ruling class can force on to the top of the cost.  That explains virtually nothing in commerce, which is why the labor theory of capital was never taught anywhere in economics.  It doesn’t explain rent, the prices of land nor anything else. The market prices of commodities vary continually as do the price of equities. No relation to labor.  

‘Commerce’ on the other hand is not a homogeneous entity.  It has three separate components. Trade, Clientry, and Industry.  

Trade is usually a single proprietor often with hired workers.  The trader buys goods and marks up the price for sale based on the various costs, the volume of sales expected and the amount of lending needed to make the sales happen, plus a markup to keep the business running over time. A flower shop or a small bakery are good examples.  The French and the Overseas Chinese are masters of ‘trade.’ There are flower shops and bakeries anywhere there are French.  There are stalls or storefronts with single categories of goods wherever there are Overseas Chinese.

Clientry is the form of commerce that is designed to provide goods or services for the lifetime of the buyer.  A barber or dentist are good examples.  The price of the good or service is based on the market price and the level of skill of the seller. Clientry is based on a lifetime of service as the horizon for pricing. Surprisingly banking is a clientric business, with the intention of the seller or lender to maintain a long-term relationship with the customer, but bankers seldom have the sense of devotion to the customer found among lawyers and architects.

Industry is the type of business designed to maximize economies of scale. It is found wherever multiple stores, or large capital investments are operating.  Every chain business is designed to benefit from economies of scale as are all the entities we call industry; railroads, steel companies, airlines and McDonald’s.

Commerce thrives in societies that value markets, societies that restrain the power of government, and societies that are open to individual initiative.  

Government bans are a great restraint on the nature and quality of business.  Government’s absolute bans on silver restoration, cleaning solvents, and metal plating are a tiny example of the tens of thousands of businesses that are foreclosed by unreasonable and disproportionate government restrictions.

Commerce is 98.3% cooperative. The very nature of commerce is that hundreds, thousands, and sometimes, millions of people cooperate with each other daily. They cooperate within businesses, between businesses as suppliers, and as renters, advisors and colleagues.  

Yet the popular image of competition is the paramount mode of thinking about business. Commerce is cooperation on the grandest scale known to humans.

Lastly, commerce thrives where diversity of opinion, diversity of experience, and diversity of values are allowed to work together.  Merit is the milieu for commerce that creates vigor and innovation.

Someday more people will understand commerce and the world will be a better place.

We Vibrate

Humans vibrate.  There appears to be two types of vibration.

One is the vibration that is the speed at which one lives one’s life.

I know this from the large number of women I have dated and spent intimate time with.  This type of vibration is very subtle but very real. If it were measured on a scale around 10 as the mean of a bell curve, most people one can live with are 9’s and 11’s if one is a 10.

I found I could spend only a weekend with 8’s and 12’s. Otherwise we were not comfortable together. I did take a long trip with one woman who was a 12 but we had to spend much time apart.  She eventually married a karate teacher.

I know one woman who is a 13 or 14.  I can’t even walk with her; she moves too fast in everything she does.

There is another kind of vibration which is just the constant motion of one’s own body.  This is visible in people who can’t sit still, people whose legs vibrate and they can’t restrain themselves. It is visible in children who can’t be still and children who hop, skip, and jump all the time.

I can detect this kind of vibration when I sit intentionally motionless early in the morning before the sounds of the City begin to vibrate me.  I sit in a Zen style meditation with my legs crossed on top of a pillow. After sitting awhile, I no longer vibrate very much and have no desire to move.  I am also aware of the vibration of others.

Two types of human vibration, about which I know very little and about which I see little or no cognizance by other people.

What I KNOW and Most Don’t

Why don’t we have flying cars or jet packs?

What was the surface temperature of the earth in 1950?

Why did inflation begin on 1/20/21?

What single man created the modern world?

Did the Dutch army ever completely defeat Britain?

 

Why don’t we have flying cars or jet packs?

Anyone who can watch a butterfly or look at a tree with leaves can see that the air moving around us has many very small cells of moving air going in different directions.  That is what tumbles a jet pack or a flying car, upside down.

 

What was the surface temperature of the earth in 1950?

It was 57.1 F.  The same as it is today.  I got that number from radiosonde.  A reliable site of global balloon measurements taken every month by nations all around the world.  This reliable global surface temperature measurement was online with detailed data until I published it with commentary in 2016.  Then it disappeared and you can’t find it. Nor can you find many of my discussions of it, on my blogs over many years. 

 

Why did inflation begin on 1/20/21?

Because on that date the new president, Biden, canceled all fracking on public land by Presidential Order. The price of oil went from $40 a barrel to $90 a barrel immediately.  Oil moves everything on the planet by truck, train, ship and air. It is in the price of everything.  As in 1973 and 1979 the price of oil determined the subsequent inflation.  I wrote about it here.

 

What single man created the modern world?

John D. Rockefeller who started with oil drilling and refining oil into kerosene in 1865, ended up by the 1890s producing 90% of the world’s oil.  He created refining and distribution methods to minimize the cost of oil and to make it the driving energy that created the modern world.

 

Did the Dutch army ever completely defeat Britain?

Yes, in November 1688. The Dutch army landed 20,000 soldiers and horses in Devon, off of 60,000 ships, and marched in fifteen days to London, defeating King James II’s army.  Surrounding central London, the Army demanded the installation of the Dutch ruler and his wife as King William and Queen Mary as the royal family of England, Ireland and Scotland.  The Parliament agreed. The Brits call that Dutch victory the Glorious Revolution.

Our Constitution Fails on Factions

The issue of factions is discussed by James Madison in Federalist Papers 10.  It will take you ten minutes to read.  Worth every minute. Madison covers this critical issue completely and brilliantly. He presented the issue early in the Constitutional Convention and it shaped the form of our government.

There is no way to summarize what Madison says; he is as concise as I could be.  Factions are groups of people whose interest is homogeneous but contrary to the interests of the nation’s survival if they become the majority.  Madison considers a religious faction as a great potential danger but sees how commonly religious factions splinter.

Today we have three religions agglomerated and very stable.  (1) The human-caused global warming apocalypse is religious and forty years old.  I was among the founders who recognized it as becoming a religion.  (2) The Marxist class warfare turned into racial and sexual oppression is neo-religious; (One hundred seventy years old.)  (3) The union value of anti-merit is not religious but deeply held, nearly religious, (Over four hundred years old.)  All together, these three form modern wokism, a gigantic faction in control of hundreds of American institutions, and important agencies. Not the majority of Americans but nearly.

So how has Madison’s designed Constitution fared in this giant faction era?  I think very poorly.  This gigantic faction of hostility to commerce to individual liberty to the First Amendment and to merit has survived in America. It has grown rapidly over the last twenty years.

The first Constitutional failure was in having Congressional elections every two years.  This was intended to keep factions from growing rapidly by refreshing the legislature.   The woke faction has grown from the election of 2006 to today; nine elections. In the election of 2016 several government agencies spied on a Presidential candidate during the campaign period, led by the woke faction. 

The two legislatures have not had either the ability to recognize the faction’s control of a vast number of government agencies and no ability to control the gigantic government if they recognized the faction control. A total failure of the Constitution.

By the 2020 general election one of the two political parties, the one representing the hostile faction, fraudulently intervened in the voting process in several states to elect the faction’s candidate for president.  No Constitutional recourse existed. During the previous two centuries since the Constitution was installed, there were many states controlled by corrupt local bosses and the only Constitutional protection of elections was the large number of states and the post-Constitution Electoral College.

The only Constitutional protection that has existed to protect the majority from a malicious and aggressive faction has been the Supreme Court, which has slowly intervened in several hostile faction actions.  It has not been able to stop the corrupt legal warfare waged in courts below the Federal level.

Just as the Constitution failed to avoid a civil war in 1860, where a faction favoring human slavery grew to massive size in a geographic area, captured one political party and seceded. Today the Constitution seems less able to cope.  The Constitution did not anticipate a political party aligned with one faction, a national government  with millions of employees aligned with the faction and the public conversation (media) controlled by the faction.

The only structural suggestion I have ever made is for a lottery legislature.  This would weaken the political parties but would not stop the take over of the government agencies, academia or the mass media. 

We are in a Luddite Era

The reason I can see what is happening in society is because I have a class analysis.  I call it Social Thought but it is not far from standard class analysis.  

The academic world had transformed class analysis from a Marxist version to a racist one over the past 35 years because there was no working class in America and no hereditary upper class either.  

So what is happening is that we have a large group of wokies running our universities, government, media, many major corporations and our educational system.  To them the oppressors are whites, Jews, Indians, police, corporations, and Asians. The oppressed are blacks, Arabs, Spanish and Portuguese speakers, native Americans, heavy drug users, and criminals.

What is interesting to me, is the synthesis of the religion of Human-Caused Global Warming Apocalypse with the Marxist Oppressive Racism. We call this combination ‘Woke.’

To this has been added Jew Hate, the most ancient and enduring human persuasion.

What I realized is that these three groups of hysterics all fit together.  People inside this hysteria want the world, the modern world, to stop. To stop right now.  

This is Luddism, the same old imagery of throwing a wooden boot into the giant programmed weaving machine.

What pulled it all together for me was the recent public addition of Jew Hate.  

The hereditary elites of America, England, Europe, Russia, and many other nations have always harbored a strong Jew Hate.  The reason is clear to me now.  The hereditary elites have always, always wanted to stop social change because it is a threat to their domination and status.  Jews, for thousands of years, have been a primary source of social change and innovation.

Jews from day one have believed in education, they have known mathematics, they have been readers, writers, and traders. If there had been Nobel Prizes in 500 CE, the majority would have gone to Jews.

These all fit together.  Stop the world today.  Believe in Armageddon that is human- caused, be strongly opposed to meritocracy because it drives innovation and blame all horrors on Jews.

Commerce and Technology

I am amazed by Abu Dhabi and Dubai. 

I know about these two because a relative of mine and her family live in one of them. These are modern cities with every fully developed aspect of commerce and technology.  How is this possible, when the leaders are first generation, live in tents, desert Arabs?

The answer is that both commerce and technology developed very slowly over 400 years, starting in Holland, but now both can be bought on the open market.  Anyone, anywhere can buy a high-powered computer, a jet plane, a modern hospital and a nuclear reactor.  The highest technology is on the market, including synchrotrons and Nvidia chips. 

What surprised me is the realization that commerce, too, can be bought as it is in Abu Dhabi and Dubai where banks, stock markets, courts, insurance companies, university graduate departments, medicines, tall building architecture, urban planners, communications industries, manufacturing and even research laboratories have been acquired on the open market.

That means that commerce and technology are very similar or may be the same.  

What they both have in common is that innovation in technology can only thrive where individuals have great autonomy and innovation in commerce can only flourish where there is no hereditary ruling class or a very weak one.

Celebrity-hood: Ignore It or Fight Back

America created the celebrity sometime around the first World War.  There was Edison, Ford, Lindbergh, Einstein and Rockefeller, Carnegie, Chaplin and many more.  

Just from looking at that list you can see that some were treated as positive and some as negative.

I want to make a simple point.  If you are treated as negative you have only two choices: ignore it all or fight back. If you are treated as positive, just sit back and enjoy it.

This is of current concern because  two celebrities have been treated as negative, Trump and Musk and they have chosen to fight back at the hatred fired at them.  

This is a problem because Trump is a great business builder and an even greater man as the first businessman to occupy the presidency. He will be remembered as the man who made Jerusalem the Capitol of Israel after 2,300 years; as the first president to recognize that government regulation was the greatest harm the American government can do.

Musk is the greatest engineer-businessman in an entire century.  

Such nasty treatment of both men is flat-out immoral and historically a sign of sub-human behavior by a large part of the public.

Many people have ignored celebrity-hood and been badly treated for the rest of their lives.  Two classic examples are John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.  Three recent examples are prescient Richard Nixon, a truly great and visionary president.  Woody Allen, a historically important filmmaker was treated miserably and Senator Joe McCarthy who foresaw the problem of embedded Communists long before the majority of Americans, many of whom have never seen it.  

Just from looking at history, the choice of what to do when cast as a negative celebrity, the best choice is to attack your enemies, including the very powerful newspaper and TV media. 

Finding the Truth in 2024

At our recent Thanksgiving dinner I asked two family members what they think of Wikipedia.  One ‘loves it so much’ he sends money monthly. The other considers it ‘a truly reliable source.’

I personally approach Wikipedia with caution.  If an entry can be slanted in a Lefty direction it will be.  I am an expert witness in American courts in nine subject areas and have been cross- examined many times in my life as a legal witness. Much of the time where I know a subject because I have taught it at the university level or because I worked in the field for many years, Wikipedia is wrong.  In the dozen times I’ve made a correction with appropriate references, my correction disappears the next day.

The subject of this blog is the disappearance of reliable sources today.  The best thinker on this subject was Marshall McLuhan, his book was The Medium is the Message.  The medium of our time is the Internet.  The Internet is the reason 'authoritative source’ has disappeared. And has been gone for nearly two decades.

There never was a ‘truth’ other than in a syllogism. We have always relied on authoritative sources ranging from leading academics, to the New York Times, or scientific consensus, or expert opinion and maybe a professional or governmental authority.

I don’t need to recount the downfall of all these authorities. 

Any statement based on authority will lead to an Internet lookup which will give a variety of answers and many credible videos.

Virtually anything of importance that is treated as authoritative by one part of American society will be doubted or disputed by a large different part of our society. Thanks to the Internet and Internet video.

Thus, our society is deeply divided on many important issues. There are no commonly agreed authoritative ideas, issues, or values today.

What does that mean?

I would guess that we are returning to a tribal society where we only trust our own tribe.  Our tribe is our authority. And vice versa.

The fascinating genius of America has been that our assimilation has been so effective that tribal allegiance has virtually disappeared.  This in turn has allowed commerce to thrive.  The consequence of tribal return will be direct harm to modern commerce.  

Imagine going to work where people of different tribes can’t get along.  Much like China where Wongs only work with Wongs and Gees only work, bank, and rent from Gees. 

The Problem of Public Transportation

I’ve stopped riding most public transportation.  

The reason I’ve stopped riding most public transportation in San Francisco is that the street people ride it often and their smell, in an enclosed space, can be unbearable to me.  I find many people have the same reaction as I.

Since I don’t expect the street people problem to be solved in the foreseeable future and I certainly don’t expect the smelly people on public transport problem to be resolved in the foreseeable future; I have a solution.

The law can ban unduly smelly people from entering public transport.  The problem with this solution is that leaving the decision of who smells too bad can not be left up to the vagaries of individual noses.

The solution is to use a meter at the entry point to buses and other transport.  The image of just such a meter is on the right.  This meter detects and measures ammonia. Ammonia is the main ingredient in the foul smell of all human beings.

I was unable to measure a sufficient large sample of foul-smelling people to get a reliable number to publish here.  

We have determined a reliable number for the alcohol breath test for drivers to measure drunkenness.  The same approach can be used for foul smelling street people.

Not Tokyo First

A friend took a tour of Japan with a prestigious tour company and the first stop, for a few days, was Tokyo.  I screamed in disbelief.  

I spent the first ten years studying Japan by visiting Kyoto. In the following three decades, I took all new friends with me to a small beach town for the first three or four days to acclimate to Japan.  Tokyo is probably the most complex modern city in the world and it is overwhelming. The streets are laid out based on rice paddy paths and old daimyo estates. It has 40 million residents.  Kyoto is wide boulevards laid out on a north/south grid and much slower. 

Japan was the first stop on a global trip where I first became aware of culture at age 33.  I was well educated and knew about culture from reading Benedict, Mead, Bateson, Boaz, Sapir, Whorf, Levi-Strauss, Geertz, Malinowski and others.  But I didn’t know what culture is.

I would guess Americans who know what culture is are less than one in a thousand.  A higher percentage are probably found in Europe.

Culture is the totality of a people’s life. People are a group that speak the same language and live most of their early life together.  Our perception of the world is created and that creation is done by the group of people who surround us and have a common experience.

At 33, I realized what culture was and decided to study it for the rest of my life.  I chose Japan as the object of my study because I liked the food, it was clean and I was comfortable in Japan. I could have chosen Switzerland but it was too similar to my own culture, making it more difficult.

Over the past 50 years I have gone to Japan for a month or more, every year, and visited most of the country.  Now I just sit in one high pedestrian traffic place for hours and watch life go by and lead as simple a life, the rest of the day, as I can.  I have about 25 close friends whom I have watched and visited annually for many decades. My friends range from a man who was homeless for a decade in a large Tokyo park to a woman who helped shape Japanese fashion and was recognized for her life’s work by the Emperor, last year.

To give you a taste of culture: When the Japanese look at a rainbow they see two colors of blue; we, as indicated by a rainbow flag, see one.  We have a Federal law that commercially sold hot tubs can not heat water to more than 104 degrees. A Japanese adult would consider any bath below 108 degrees as lukewarm.

Reconsidering Social Thought

In my early 40s I came to realize the nature of human thought.  Thanks to Mary Douglas for her book How Institutions Think. I created a half-hour national public radio interview program on that subject called Social Thought. The program ran for nine years and remains on the Internet.

Human beings organize their thoughts and lives hierarchically. The three overarching ideas that descend step by step to our everyday lives begin with God, power and money. 

For most of my life, the past 85 years, Americans believed in God among 60% of the population and the balance were 20% each for power and money as the driving forces.

Today we have woke. Woke is derived from an overarching belief in power.  My guess is that God has dropped to 45% in the U.S. and power has grown to 35% with money still at 20% of the population. Some people confuse power and money but nearly all depend much more on one than the other.

The dominant woke thinkers are derived from Michel Foucault and include Jurgen Habermas and Theodore Adorno. In America the influences include Herbert Marcuse. The core thesis is that power drives the world of humans.

When power is viewed as the dominant force in society the sub categories used for explanation of the world can easily include colonialism, white power, and the associated anti-black racism. Thrown into wokism are also anti-male views, anti-meritocracy and lately Jew hate.

Wokism is not going away. Marxism is right on its tail as a core explanatory thesis. God is not coming back.

Wall Street Journal Friday 11/14/2023

Get this issue of the Wall Street Journal right away. Four articles that will shape your mind.

How a Philosophy Split Silicon Valley by McMillan and Seetharaman explains the split in Open AI that was caused by a core difference in the view of human beings.  The people who kicked out Sam Altman believe in the philosophy of Jurgen Habermas. A follower of Adorno and Marx. Believers in the potential to improve human beings by rational critical methods. A very wrong view of humanity.

A book review by Adrian Woolfson of Philip Ball's More Than a Box of Chocolates. Ball argues that the current view of DNA that sets out to improve the human genome is based on a model of DNA as a machine or a computer. A very wrong model.

Why the Jewish Way of Living Matters by Leon R. Kass one of my favorite thinkers who opposes tampering with the human genome. He explains why Israel is the moral center of the modern world and it is Jewish values that created America and the best of our contemporary world.

Lastly, the editorial Nikki Haley's Medicare Advantage. Reports on a study that finds Medicare Advantage costs less than Medicare and has better health outcomes. The Democrats are trying to destroy Medicare Advantage.

I personally value Isaiah Berlin's view in The Crooked Timber of Humanity.

Geology Signs We Need

For years I’ve wanted to post two geological signs.  I’m too old now.  So this blog is the best I can do.

1. The first would be on Highway 1 that goes between Daly City and Pacifica.  The sign going West would say “Leaving the North American Plate entering the Pacific Plate.” The reverse side would say the opposite: “Leaving the Pacific Plate entering the North American Plate.”

 If there were a way to do it, the sign would also say “ The North American Plate is Moving South 6 feet per Century.”  The reverse sign would say “The Pacific Plate is Moving North 6 feet per Century.”

From the vantage point of the sign a person looking North would see the San Andreas Fault that created Lake Merced in San Francisco and looking South would see Lake San Andreas created by the same fault.

2.The second geological sign would be on a striated outcropping on O'Shaughnessy Drive along the West side of Glen Canyon Park in San Francisco. The Drive starts at Portola  and ends at Bosworth Street.

The sign would say “The Top Striata of rock was created on the Ocean Floor 400 million years ago. Raised up to the surface by the subduction of the Pacific Plate plunging under the North American Plate.  All the Striata below the Top Layer are older than 400 million years.”

 I hope this can be done sometime in my remaining years.

Epitaph for American Style Democracy

Is it my job to write this epitaph?  It looks like it.

My basic thesis is very simple.  There are two core human value systems:

1. Envy of social distance.
2. Creative human imagination.

Humans form tribes for food and other aspects of survival.  For the tribe to grow it implements a social system.  There are several social systems. The most common is a simple hierarchy with merit as its operating principle.

Most such hierarchies fail rather quickly, meaning decades or at most a century, as biological reproduction, throughout the hierarchy, replaces the meritocracy with mediocrity. The low- born meritocrats lead the revolutions.

Three forms of hierarchy have solved this problem.  The Chinese, the Japanese and the Jews.

The Chinese instituted an imperial examination to find and reward the meritocrats. This system has been in place for 1,500 years and results in an occasional century of social stability with the interruption of a periodic revolution. 

The Japanese system, on the other hand, promotes meritocracy by marriage and adoption of the meritorious members into the higher ranks of the hierarchy. It keeps an Imperial family that remains outside the power structure as a moderating force.  The Japanese social system has lasted 1,500 years with only two interruptions.

The Chinese and Japanese social hierarchies with promotion of meritocrats have solved the human problem number one, the envy of social distance.

The Jews formed a distinct social class, the Levites, the temple keepers, who were separate from the main body of the tribe. Among the Levites, meritocracy was based solely on intellectual merit, without power. The Levites moderated the rest of the society.  Jews were always a minority of outsiders living in enclaves of larger bodies.  They survived 2,000 years without any revolutions but with endless murder of the tribal members by their neighbors.

Problem number two was solved by accident on the American continent with the Louisiana Purchase giving the Coastal Europeans, with a weak social hierarchy to begin with, a vast stretch of land to be settled far outside the reach of the Coastal social hierarchy.  In that vast open land with great mobility, the Europeans established a new society with a nearly non-existent social hierarchy, local governance, for over 150 years. 

Out of that historic accident, unrestrained individualism emerged, creating the first explosion of modern commerce.  Humans, when left to develop on their own, develop a system of commerce mixed with technological insight that creates a radically productive society. 

That incredible productivity creates a prosperous middle class that provides a form of social stability. For a short time.  One century, apparently.

Then it fails, as it has in the only two countries where it has occurred. The United States and Israel.  In both cases human envy, without a social hierarchy to repress it, rises up to destroy the society. 

This is too much to write on a tombstone, and very sad for me, but the world looks this way at this time.

Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier

I’ve spent my life trying to understand hysteria and made little progress.  That means it is at least four dimensional or greater.  I’ve solved some very difficult three dimensional social problems.  See here.

This title ‘Lyin Dog Faced Pony Soldier’ is something that president Joe Biden says often in public and has absolutely no meaning.  (1) It is a subject of hysteria because it is uniquely a sign of mental impairment in the president that is not mentioned either in ordinary public conversation, in the vast global media, nor in political fencing.  (2) Just as an unplanned large crowd is part of hysteria, just as tens of thousands turning out the night Dan White (a political San Francisco murderer) was given a judicial slap on the wrist for killing the mayor and the popular gay supervisor, the absence of any discussion anywhere, the silence, about this Biden mental synapse is also hysterical.

(3) Hysteria can be a consensus of opinion that is so strong people act on it.  That applies to the trans-American belief in the 1980s that child kidnapping was common, in the hundreds of thousands a year, so common that most Americans in urban areas kept their children home when not in school. A radical change from the decades before. Behavior that remained in the decades afterward. In fact the number of kidnapped children never changed as measured by national data. (Slightly over 100 per year in the U.S)

I conceive the hysteria space as multi-dimensional; inside the hysterical part is the human brain or mind and connected to a vast number of similar people (I can’t define similar but it can be over 1 billion).  The hysterical space has dimensional components that have multiparts which can be thought of as rooms,  (A) One part that provides instant communication to the entire space or any subset. This can be a crowd or a herd, the common conception of a mass behavior. 

(B) Another part can be a view, a perspective, a vision, an idea.  Think of it as a room. Everyone in the room, all the brains and minds in there, share this same perspective.

(C) Another space is like an anechoic chamber.  No signals pass from one person to another.  That is like the silence about Joe Biden’s spoken nonsense.

(D) Still another space is a core belief that is the ground for a whole set of worldviews.  Think of these core rooms where everyone in it thinks money is a driving motive for all people. Another room where everyone thinks power is the driving motive for all people.  These are core-view rooms. Part of the multidimensional hysterical structure.

Because this hysteria is a multidimensional space, individuals can be in multiple rooms at the same time with different assortments of other people.

Now as I begin to recognize hysteria, I see that many elements resemble what I have taught as social thought.  Social thought recognizes overarching ideas as the coherent structures of institutions.  In some ways this is analogous to the rooms or dimensions of hysteria.

The difference being that hysteria is much more pervasive in life while social thought is bounded by institutional perimeters.  People who are part of a university can be part of many institutions simultaneously other than the university and can move to another institution easily. While people who are inside the hysteria that has them believing they were sexually abused by their step father can not change their opinion readily.

How will the multidimensional nature of hysteria be measured and validated?  I have no idea. We live in a universe where most of the forces are invisible but over time they are slowly being detected.  This is another one. 

Why We Are Divided

What had to be gone first, what was in place already and what was new that brought this division about?

Over fifteen million Americans served in the military in WWII.  College graduates usually became officers.  It was a source of civil behavior and meritocracy.  The rest of society accepted civility as a military necessity.

When the war was over the civility that had been needed and created after the end of the American Civil War with civic groups, dissolved. Membership in the Masons, Odd Fellows, Kiwanis, Lions, scouts and others shrank to insignificance.

More importantly, the meritocratic military officers entered the labor force and rose to the top ranks of the fifty major corporations; they formed hundreds more corporations and displaced the source of power for the American hereditary elite. By 1960 the hereditary elite was so disrupted and displaced that it no longer published the Black Book of membership (actually red) and the debutante balls sponsored by local hereditary elites were replaced with non-profit sponsors.  

America entered a period of rapid corporate expansion, globalization and technological innovation.

The absence of the hereditary elite left the second most powerful institution in control in urban areas: labor unions. Labor unions came quickly to control the politics of every metropolitan area to this day.  Unions are seniority-oriented, very rule based and are deeply anti-meritocratic.

Two other lesser institutions gained power and prominence after the fall of the hereditary elite and civic organizations.  Academia which had been Marxist for most of the 20th century took over the intellectual world and the media. 

Prison values took over fashion in pants to the knees and rap which uniquely had performers being murdered wantonly. Big bands and rock groups had never been homicidal.

All of this allowed a long simmering division in America to become visible and important as populations moved; white families left bused school cities for the suburbs and young Lefties moved to urban centers after college.

Then came the most powerful force to hit the vulnerable United States and Israel, the new social media on the Internet.  The self-fulfilling mirror.

The extraordinary impact of the Internet is not obvious.  The Internet and social media allowed individuals to expand their personal and political worldview to prominence and full blown significance.  Millions of people who played little or no role in prior civic life or politics all of a sudden had a vehicle to publish and voice their opinions in a semi public way and find allies to align with.

Voila, we had a divided America and a similar Israel where hatred could be expressed openly and civil behavior was drastically diminished.

A whole new phenomenon where individuals expanded their opinion persona and found sympathizers among strangers.

Welcome to divided America. Welcome to angry Americans.

 

Let Me Try

One of my longtime readers objected to a statement a few blogs back where I called the Democrat Party the ‘party of hate.’  I apologized for using such intemperate language, and explained what drove me to it. 
There is no excuse. My explanation was that it is my reaction to the rising and very dangerous Jew Hate in my beloved country, America. And that Jew Hate has found a comfortable home among Democrats, journalists, academics and other lefties.

I am now in Tokyo, where I see none of the recriminations and political venom that is out of control in America.  Maybe I can think about the reasons for this period of terrible anguish at home.  Anguish that is tearing families apart.

It is very worthwhile mentioning, as I did in the last blog, that I’m reading Bibi’s autobiography.  A brilliant book where the subject is his brother, Joni, who was murdered leading the first great airplane terrorist recovery, Entebbe, and then the subject shifts to his wife Sara.  An autobiography in reflection.  I might try it myself.

The whole point of bringing up Bibi is that the Israeli press and the Labor Left hate Bibi with the same malice and venom of the American press and the Democrat Party towards decent honest Republicans.  

I personally knew Richard Nixon, I knew several cabinet members of Ronald Reagan’s.  So I felt personally the endless mindless attacks on them.  And now for seven years I’ve watched with absolute horror the outrageous lies, hatred and constitutionally illegal villainy poured on Donald Trump and his family.  So where does this daily national bile come from?

While the toxic spleen may have boiled over for Bibi and Trump, it has been with us for half a century. The Left hated Nixon and Senator McCarthy from 1950.  It has only grown since then.

Unlike Jew hate, there is no social opprobrium.  Lefties feel free to pour out their acrimony with little or no restraint in public.  They are even self-righteous on many occasions.

What is it and why has it metastasized?

Two disappearances are central to what has happened.  

• The Army and the draft that went with it.  I was in the Army. We all got along even in peacetime and we accommodated each other despite wild differences in social class, politics and background.
• Civic organizations evaporated. We lost the Odd Fellows, the Lions, the Masonic Order, Kiwanis and a dozen others. These organizations created civility.  The Army satisfied the civility role and may have been the reason for their disappearance.

Religions promptly split along political lines in the 1960s.  Reform Jews, Methodists, Presbyterians, Unitarians on the left and Baptists and Evangelicals on the conservative side.

• Unions took over nearly every city as I’ve explained before with the collapse of the hereditary elite and union values of anti-meritocracy triumphed in the public square.
• Prison values took over the fashion world.
• Importantly the long-standing Marxist suzerainty of academia took over the intellectual world and the media. 
• Finally the Internet plays a role but not for the popular reason that it gives individuals a public outlet. The Internet gave each participant a place to vent and curate their political views among allies and potential converts.

There you have it.  

Six institutional forces that divided America with a venom that we have not seen since the 1850s Democrat-Republican divide.

Japan never got the divisions because it never lost its hereditary elite.  Israel got the divisive illness  because it had a monstrously powerful labor and socialist overlord. 

I’ve got it. I think I’ve got it. I will summarize in the next blog.

Nearly Everyone Fails to Understand

I never see anyone mention the most significant revolution in our society that is a central cause of the major changes in the past half-century.

The hereditary elite of America fell apart in the 1960’s.

The cause

The cause was the rise of the officer class in the military in WWII.  The U.S. military, which had for nearly a century gotten its officers from Southern military schools, was faced with a massive draft and expansion of the services into the millions. To meet the demand for officers the decision was made to make every college graduate an officer.  Only a dozen colleges were for the hereditary elite, so the thousands of other college graduates became a new meritocratic class.

When the new meritocratic leaders from the officer class left the Army, they moved swiftly into the upper ranks of modern commerce.  Some moved up the corporate ladder of the 100 largest companies and many others started new businesses that became important.

The few who climbed the corporate ladder replaced the hereditary elite and destroyed the main source of jobs and income for the hereditary elite class.  Without the jobs and money the elite provided for their own, the elite fell apart beginning in 1960; it was almost gone by the 1970’s.  By 1961 the institution was so weak it could no longer publish the New York Social Register.  (See photo.) The Debutante Balls were no longer sponsored by the local elites.

The image on the right is the last NY Social Register published by the elite’s own members. Its contents are interesting. Each person’s home address(es) and phone(s) are listed with the schools they went to and all the private clubs they belong to. Only people listed could buy the register.  When traveling the country they usually visited each other.

I personally saw the elite collapse as a Vice President of one of the West Coast’s elite banks.  I was told to join a club. (Most clubs still didn’t accept Jews.) Clubs really mattered. The Bank President’s son came to me to ask if it was possible for him to marry his Asian girlfriend (not possible until 1970.)

The consequence

To understand the consequences of the lost hereditary elite, their role as the top social institution must be recognized. 

The elite's members were at the top of all American institutions including print and electronic media, the courts and the law, the military, the civic organizations (IOOF, Lions, Elks, Masons) and even the major Protestant religions.  The civic organizations were hit first in the 1950’s and were ghosts by 1960. The major Protestant religions were hit next (Unitarians, Presbyterians, Methodists, and Episcopals) and were empty pews by 1965.  Catholics and Jews were never allowed membership in the hereditary elite, so they didn’t suffer the same fate.

The second largest and most powerful institution in America was the labor unions.  Being almost entirely urban, they replaced the hereditary elite and took over nearly every city in America.  The correct name for the public face of the unions is ‘the Democrat Party.’ By 1975, every city with over half a million people in America, was under total control by the local unions; union leaders have run cities to this day.

The third largest institution in America turns out to be ex-felons. The reason ex-felons are important is that they comprise between 7 to 10 million persons, more than half black and they influence young black males.  Men become felons before age 20 and prison comprises the bulk of their life experience. Prison life is homogeneous, the most homogeneous experience outside the military.

Prison experience impacts fashion: pants below the butt. It impacts woke values: ‘blacks are systemically oppressed’ and ‘police target blacks’ are prison views of the world.  Music since the early 1990s has had a great deal of rap, the sounds of prison life.

I haven’t included the impact of the dissolution of the hereditary elite on education and academia.  The elite was never in power outside of the elite schools; Marxism was a main force from before WWII. The ideology was re-invigorated from 1970 onward by Michel Foucualt and Herbert Marcuse.

The Longest Boom

I was actually trained as an economist but the U.C. Berkeley econ department was so Marxist that I was saved from the misery of becoming a PhD econ professor.  My special interests were the definition of capital and business cycles aka Wesley Mitchell.

In earlier blog posts I’ve pointed out that the current inflation was caused by the Biden suppression of American oil production on his first day in office.  The current inflation (and the one in the 1970s) had nothing to do with deficit spending, the classic economic theory to explain inflation.

Since the beginning of the Biden inflation the Federal Reserve has been trying to fight it using the classic econ model of raising the core interest rate.  In theory raising the interest rate is intended to suppress capital investment (return on investment is supposed to be tied to base interest return) which will lead to a recession.  Since this is a wrong analysis it isn’t working.

In fact we have had the longest economic expansion in the history of the world, fourteen years.

The reason for this is not understood by anyone in economics.  The cause is simple.  America is the recipient of much of the computer and Internet revenues of the whole planet.  The cell phone networks, the computers, and everything related to them create money that pours into the American economy.  This money is of such great magnitude that it swamps the ebbs and flows of the traditional American economy.

The longest previous economic expansion was from 1991 to 2001, ten years.  That long expansion was due to the end of the Cold War and the transfer of capital spending from military to civilian investments.

The current expansion is from 2009 to the present, fourteen years so far.  Don’t pay attention to the dip in 2020 due to the economic freeze of the Covid interruption.  It had nothing to do with economic forces; it was a government-induced suppression of business.

We get to watch the longest economic expansion and see how incredible it is.

City of Anarchy

There is no leading anarchist theorist that I can refer to.  I know many of the anarchist writers, a few of whom wrote in the post-Civil War period.  Anarchy theory has always assumed that small groups of people, size of the groups is seldom specified, will self-organize and that a government structure, whether kingship or democracy will not be needed.

The most salient attribute of an anarchist society is the absence of a police or military.

Most public functions in an anarchist society are locally self-organized like fire brigades, water supplies, roads and sewers.  Some anarchist models have private enterprise organizations and others are more kibbutz-like.

No anarchist has seen anything like what we have today.  An entire city with all the traditional city services and functions but no functional government.  San Francisco, a leader in most other areas, is now the first truly anarchist city on a scale of 800,000 people.

The city government doesn’t work.  Taxes are collected and salaries to 33,000 city employees are paid as are the pensions of retired employees.  But virtually no one works. Streets are rarely repaired, a few fire stations, very few, respond to fire calls but there are three times as many fire personnel as are needed. Most importantly the police, which operate at one-third of the standard street patrol staffing level, seldom carry out police functions because the police know that the courts and District Attorney will not prosecute most arrests. A small proportion of crimes are reported, and they only result in filing a paper on an internet form.

Pretty amazing.  Crime is up, especially minor crimes. Anarchy works fairly well.  Few people complain.  Crime is a nuisance that results in complaining but most people live with it.

In a large established prosperous city where most life is established and functioning, anarchy works.

(Footnote to the photo: I created and promoted the first 'painted ladies' postcard for my Third World Tours.)

Capitalism, AntiSemitism

Two words you won’t find me using.

Capitalism is part of the Marxist analysis of economics with capitalism as opposed to socialism and communism.  A meaningless economic category.  Russia may have a backward economy and China may have a command economy but both use capital in vast amounts and the capital is controlled by many different entities. 

Marx used a labor theory of value which is irrelevant and totally disparaged.  It is useless in explaining rents, prices of most goods including art, financial markets and most everything else.

Marx’s economic analysis is also wrong because he saw the world in Charles Dickens' terms based on the free labor that was sweeping into urban areas as newly efficient agriculture freed up workers. Workers who then moved into the new wage labor market in the early 1800s.  The rudiments of the modern economic world. The early stages of an economic system that didn’t last very long.

The basic flaw in Marxist analysis is that capital is found everywhere in the modern commercial world. Regardless of the type of economy.  For example, the U.S. government, including the military and national parks has more dollars of capital than all the top hundred global corporations put together, but the U.S. is called ‘capitalist’ by Marxists.

Capitalism is a meaningless term.  I use modern commerce. Which I further divide into trade (flower shops), industry (Lowes) and clientry (personal services like lawyer).

I don’t use anti-Semitism either.  Semitism is a sweet innocent word that comes from linguistics referring to a whole cluster of languages including Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac, Ugaritic and Ethiopian. A nice sweet word.  

Anti-Semites on the other hand murdered millions of my cousins painfully, barbarically, children, old people and anyone who was vaguely Jewish. Anti-Semites still want to murder Jews.  All Jews.  There is nothing nice or sweet for people who want to see me and my fellow Jews dead.  People who, to the last one, want the only home of us Jews, Israel, destroyed. 

Anti-Semites should be called what they are: Jew haters.  That is what I call them and that is what they deserve to be called.  Black, prominent or British upper class; they are haters and don’t deserve to live peacefully in a decent society.  Elijah Mohammed, Kanye West and Brian Eno are not decent people.

Jew haters certainly don’t deserve to be referred to with a trite anodyne term for a language group. They are not anti-Semites, they are Jew haters.

Deep Truth About Commerce

The modern world exists for one reason, one reason alone; modern commerce.  On the surface one sees technology as the vehicle for the miracles in the modern world, the movement of half the population on the planet out of poverty, short life-spans and away from hunger.  

Simple proof that technology is not the prime mover:  you don’t see the broad use and acceptance of technology in the parts of the world that don’t have modern commerce, areas such as most of Africa, large parts of Indonesia and vast tracts of the Middle East and the Steppes.

Modern commerce is the primary source of technology in everyday life. Russia and India are  good examples where the military makes extensive use of the latest technology but very little of it trickles down to the vast Russian or Indian population.

The same is true when you compare a small rural Iowa town with technology overflowing in every household to a small similar town on the same longitude in Puebla, Mexico, or continuing on the same latitude to the other side of the planet to Mysore in India or Astana in Kazakhstan.  Maybe 5% of the technology in a farm village that in Iowa is found in every home can be found in even a dozen homes in Puebla, Mysore or Astana. Widespread existence of modern commerce is the difference between an abundance of technology in every home and a technological desert.

Technology is a common element in the lives of people who live in the world of modern commerce.  But technology is only found in areas where modern commerce thrives. 

The two real benefits of modern commerce, the two greatest daily benefits are pervasive cooperation and an infinite array of livelihoods. 

 Pervasive Cooperation not competition.

For people whose eyes and minds are closed, modern commerce is a competitive system. For people whose eyes and minds are open, modern commerce is more than 95% cooperation every minute and every hour of the day. 

Yes, Boeing competes with Airbus, Peet’s competes with Starbucks and Taco Bell competes with McDonald’s.  But the same airline can buy both planes and a consumer can go to any coffee shop or any fast food outlet minutes apart.  That is the  strange idea of market competition from the consumer point of view.  Competition in the market means multiple businesses are clamoring to make you happy.  Acting as if they were potential lovers, going after you;  the word competition doesn’t make much sense. Lovers pursuing you, is more like it. Market competition is more accurately a love fest.

For people whose eyes are open we see employees working together, every minute of the day, supporting each other, having birthday and anniversary parties at work, being extra kind to customers and suppliers.  We see suppliers doing everything they can to help their customers with the best possible service, the latest technology, advice on best practices and useful trade information. Everywhere we look in modern commerce we see cooperation and mutual help. 

That is the incredible beauty of modern commerce.  There is no tribal rivalry.  It is the opposite of  many Chinese stores where you see fellow clan members treating family much better than other customers.  In Southeast Asia, you see Malaysians and Indonesian merchants being cold or rude to Chinese customers.  In tribal societies entire families work in the same business. In contrast, in a Los Angeles Peet’s coffee shop you’ll find a barista who is Shia Muslim, a Bahai, a Jew, a Baptist and three atheists working together effectively for years, on every shift. Helping each other. That is modern commerce versus all other economic systems.

An infinite array of livelihoods

One of the greatest benefits of modern commerce is most often overlooked.  One can find work in a very wide variety of livelihoods.  Before the turn of the 20th century, the variety of occupations was limited.  There were several types of farm workers, several types of day laborers, ministers, medical workers, lawyers, teachers and public officials.

As the government grew in the 20th century,  the need to classify occupations increased and the first Occupational Codes were published.  In 1938 the first classification of occupations  had 4 digits, for a possible 10,000 occupations with only a few hundred occupations listed.  By 1958 the list had 5 digits for a possible 100,000 occupations with less than 1,000 actual occupations individually itemized.  By the 1970s the Occupation Code list fell out of use in most of the United States, except for tax authorities,  because there were so many ambiguous multi-functional occupations and so many people who had broad occupational responsibilities that a simple occupational number was meaningless.

Today, people working for large corporations are hired with a specific occupational title but the responsibilities are diverse, complex and variable; especially where managerial responsibility is included.

A young person entering the job market has a nearly limitless choice of livelihoods and a mature worker can virtually define their own occupation.  This is a miracle of the modern commercial world. Almost limitless variety of available livelihoods,

Adam Smith, more than 250 years ago, championed the commercial marketplace where the miracle of individual greed was supreme as opposed to individual generosity.  Smith pointed out that the baker would not get up every day at 2 in the morning, for most of his life, to bake bread out of the kindness-of-his-heart, but he would out of personal income earning desires.

That was a very limited but persuasive argument for the open commercial market.  Today, with modern commerce ascendant in much of the world, we know that there are two more powerful arguments for the open market: a daily world where a wide variety of people can work cooperatively together and a world where a myriad, nearly infinite, number of skills and talents can be appreciated and rewarded.

Modern commerce has created a  miracle never seen before in human history.

Me Alone, Why? Part 1

I think I am alone in understanding the creation of the modern world. 

Many people have done a good job in looking at the elements and the significance of separate historic developments. I include Niall Ferguson, Jonathan Israel and Matt Ridley among those who have done the best job.  There are many others who have contributed to our understanding.   Many have seen the central importance of empirical thinking, reading, writing and the legal underlay; and many have seen the significance of the sequence of innovation from wind power, water power, steam power to oil power.

But I seem to be unique in seeing the stifling impact of hereditary elites.  Only in the right circumstances of a diverse urban population with strong social networks, laws and a culture of tolerating innovation can the absence of an hereditary elite allow modern commerce to thrive.  

We didn’t get modern commerce in China which had all the other scientific, intellectual, urban, and diversity ingredients but also had the stifling hereditary ruling elite.  Nor did we get it in the culturally homogeneous Arab, Indian or Latin societies with weak elites.  Tribes had to be largely dissolved, as well, as in Britain, France and Northern Europe.

Modern commerce grew first in the British Empire where the hereditary elite and primogenitor were disrupted in overseas dominions and most importantly in the United States of America where diverse immigration was extensive, and the wide open ‘West’ made it possible for the younger sons to escape the thwarting influence of the elite East coast families. 

Hereditary elites stifle all innovation to preserve their power.  Only in Japan was the hereditary elite able to absorb innovative individuals without totally stifling it; but there was a lack of cultural diversity needed to create modern commerce.

Why am I unique in seeing the whole picture? There are definitely many people smarter than I.

For me to understand my own functions I have had to discover several general human attributes.

The three most important attributes we homos have are (1) adulthood, (2) culture and (3) brain limitations.

I stumbled on the first, ‘adulthood’ entirely by accident.  My girlfriend had an affair with Lyall Watson a few years after we broke up. She introduced him to me. He told me about the 100th monkey story and I interpreted it to mean that only in the juvenile stage of animal development is learning possible. For humans, I calculated that the juvenile stage ends before age 23. New original learning and genuinely new thinking does not occur in most humans after age 23.  From a cursory survey of my friends, I guess that exceptions occur in about 1 out of 300 cases.  

In my case I became part of the 1 in 300 because I went to Israel at age 19, lived on a kibbutz and had my entire worldview totally overthrown by that experience.  The juvenile door for learning remained open.

(2) Culture is another fortuitous experience.  At age 32, I took a trip around the world as my own prerequisite to joining the board of Point Foundation. Dick Baker Roshi, who had spent 3 years living in Japan, did a little to prepare me.  When I got there I only saw the Japanese as small Americans who worked harder than Americans and did many things a little differently.  But it was different enough for me to begin to see what culture was. (‘Culture’ as anthropologists see it.) I resolved to pick a culture and study it.  I picked Japan as a comfortable place to study; I liked Japanese food, cleanliness and its long isolated history. I visited Japan every year for the next 50 years, staying from one month to  three months.  I traveled the country and became involved in business, politics and the arts.

Lastly, (3) brain limitations.  I have long thought about the human brain capacity.  Kinsey said that he started teaching knowing the names of 30,000 moth species.  Each time he learned a new student's name he forgot one moth species.  That started me thinking about the brain.  The largest functioning word memory is about 100,000 words.  I concluded that the human brain, in computer terms, can only contain a few million bytes of information, much of it compressed for fairly fast retrieval. 

I concluded that most of our intelligence resides in the many knowledgeable friends we have. We store knowledge and information with each other.   I have had many brilliant and diverse friends which has been my source for a broad worldview. 

I Understand the Rejection of the Modern World

I was sitting with my first cousin and her Arab husband, smoking his hand rolled cigarettes and drinking his Turkish coffee while watching two of his grandchildren running around having raucous fun.

He lamented life in the US. without a big family and the wonderful feeling of being surrounded by family members all the time. When he visits his Arab family back home he always stays for a month and enjoys giant family meals with dozens of cousins and dancing and singing nearly every night.

Family life and tribal membership is something that we Westerners don’t understand.

I’ve traveled the world and found that a big family and being part of a tribe is the greatest feeling of comfort that can be found among several billions of people.  I’ve heard this from an Oxford educated Indian in New Delhi, from a Harvard educated woman in Mali, in Guatemala and dozens of other times.

I tried to start a global organization in 1992 to help Western people understand that our efforts to modernize most of the world is not appreciated or welcomed.  I failed miserably. Couldn’t find even a few Western people who agreed with me.

I had an Egyptian immigrant explain to me the day after the 9/11 twin towers slaughter that it was done to tell Americans to stop destroying traditional societies.

Almost no one understands the following fortuitous sources of the Modern World that non-moderns find so distressing.  

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Humans are not as smart as many animals. But humans can communicate by voice over a large range of subjects.  This facility may only have existed for a few tens of thousands of years but it allowed for extensive social organizing.  Humans learned to write and read only a few millennia ago and only in places like China, Babylon, Greece, Japan, Egypt, Persia, India, Israel and a few other places. Many of these places developed schools to transmit the written material.

All the societies that had writing and reading also had hereditary elites that suppressed innovation.  The exception was the Jews.

In 100 BCE the Roman Army attacked and dispersed the Jews, who had writing and reading. The dispersed Jews then developed small surviving clusters of Jews centered around a rabbi who created schools to debate their inherited writing. The debate focused on the writing in order for it to conform to reality. (The records of the debates are called Talmud.) These hundreds of clusters of Jews had teachers as leaders not an hereditary elite.

This dispersed but connected society was the first worldwide network of readers and debaters. They stayed in touch with each other.

By 1500 the Spanish and Portuguese dispersed the Jews again. Many went to Holland, the first neo-democracy in the modern world with a very egalitarian population; at the same time that book printing expanded in Europe and the Catholic Church order of Jesuits started studying Hebrew and the Talmud.

This European locale was the source of science and empirical study. It was the core of modernity.  It challenged mysticism, tribalism, miracles and alchemy.

The final touchstone of the Modern World was the creation of the United States of America, with its vast open West, diverse immigrant population and a weak hereditary elite.  All the ingredients that created the modern world after the Civil War.

People who hate their lives and the modern world, often blame the Jews.  Which is historically accurate. The Roman Army and the Spanish Inquisition deserve some credit too.

Moral Problem Has New Consideration

The moral problem of concern to me has been ‘Who has moral responsibility for human-caused atrocities?’

The great slaughters of Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao Tse Tung and Joe Biden can be focused on the leader or on the people they led.  That has always been a moral problem.  

Joe Biden is on this list because of the tens of millions of people who starved to death and will soon starve to death in Africa, Latin America, Central America and Southeast Asia; just as Stalin and Mao were responsible for millions who starved.  Death by starvation is hard to photograph and measure.

A partial resolution has been to force the German people to pay restitution of sorts, for 70 years, to some of the Jewish survivors of the Shoah and to Jews in Israel.   Poland, whose people were complicit, have not paid restitution.

I am immediately focused on the moral issue with Joe Biden because the British Government is trying to combat out-of-control inflation with domestic policies. Yet Britain’s inflation is a global phenomenon caused by Joe Biden.  Biden as U.S. president personally signed orders that created a drastic cut in American oil/gas production (see an earlier blog).  The resulting global inflation is causing death and starvation by millions in poor countries everywhere. 

Is it morally appropriate to judge Joe Biden for the resulting misery and death?

The new reality of the problem is that Joe Biden is a senile, incompetent and corrupt person.  He is a wooden puppet who acts on behalf of others around him including members of his party and the people who voted for him.  He is only technically the leader. But he leads a very powerful and totally under control government.

Where is the moral culpability in the current atrocity?

Eureka! Two of Two

An expansion of my previous blog.

Humans are not much smarter than other animals.  Me included.  Even in several hundred millennia, we have only created the modern world in the last quarter of a millennium.  Humans must cooperate to create anything and must accumulate knowledge.  Many institutions keep that from happening.

The ‘we’ of this modern creation is primarily one nation.   One nation out of nearly 200 in the U.N.  Only 25 of those 200 nations can create a bicycle without importing parts of it. One nation has created 90% of the technology of the modern world.  Israel is the second creator and only recently and Japan is the third.

So how did this happen?  That has been my lifetime quest for an answer.

The cargo cult piece of the puzzle was recent.   Humans seem to want to imitate the abundance of modern commerce.  In the Polynesians and Melanesians which saw the incredible wealth of the Japanese and American militaries that were brought with planes and airdropped came incomparable abundance.   The natives tried to reproduce the airplanes, radios and everything they saw out of bamboo and jungle products, expecting the goods to be delivered to them in abundance again.

Most of the humans on the planet have tried to do what the Polynesians and Melanesians did; they copied the behavior they saw and in most cases they imported the components of the modern world that they wanted.  The Bedouin tribes in Abu Dhabi and Dubai had oil/gas to buy and import a simulacrum of the entire modern world made of steel and concrete instead of jungle materials.

Now, my other question has been ‘What made the modern world possible?’  More accurately, what kept other humans from creating the modern commerce that created the modern world?  The question really is what institutions kept cooperation from happening?

That is what is in my Eureka email.  First empirical knowledge has to be accumulated.  Otherwise each separate human is pretty useless. 

We Jews gave that to the world with writing, debate about the empirical world and multi-generational education.  

Second, cooperation with a very large group of diverse people was needed.  That was what modern commerce allows.  The employees of my morning coffee shop are from every nationality, every religion and every other human distinction.

How did we get modern commerce?  That is what I outlined in my blog.  The tribe had to be destroyed, the hereditary elite had to be destroyed and empiricism had to be elevated to its central role in human knowledge systems.

Eureka! One of Two

I have put the last two pieces together in the puzzle.  

The puzzle is how an animal as limited as humans can build such a beautiful and complex society as we have today. The two pieces I have just found are ‘cargo cult’ and ‘empiricism.’  Other parts of the puzzle I have found during my life and can be found in my eleven books and my blogs.

Let’s begin with the ‘cargo cult.’

I have been baffled by the existence of Dubai and Abu Dhabi. How can a Bedouin tribe build a modern functioning city?  The answer is a cargo cult with oil/gas, steel and concrete instead of bamboo.

‘Empiricism’ comes from Yoram Hazony, who figured out that what created the modern dichotomy between Jefferson and Hamilton was that the former was a platonist and the latter was an empiricist.  That is the missing piece in the evolution of the modern world.

The modern world was created by modern commerce,  I have spent my life trying to understand how this highly improbable system came about.  Now I know.

First came the Jews who focused an entire tribe on the idea of a unitary god.  That created a coherent group who had to debate and understand how the world around us could have been created by a single entity. The Jews mastered writing and debate which elevated empirical wisdom and recording of that wisdom along with education to create an historic chain of learning.  We Jews have been the social lubricant of empiricism throughout history.

Second came the European Catholic Church which slowly, over a millennium, enforced the idea and institution of a marriage that demanded the isolated and efficient nuclear family.  Tribes could not create the global world of colonialism.

Third came Columbus, Kepler and Galileo, who used empiricism to begin the discovery of the world around them.  Immediately following these great technologists was the Dutch Republic, the first home of Protestantism and modern global commerce. 

Fourth were the pioneers of the empirical world, mostly in England after the Dutch invaded it.  Newton, Adam Smith, Priestly and James Watt.

Fifth was the creation of the modern commercial national structure by Hamilton and Franklin.

Sixth were the Colonial world, the Masonic Order and the Great American West that allowed for the destruction of the hereditary elite and the freedom of the other siblings to emerge.

Seventh, the discovery of Bessemer steel and oil, the key physical ingredients of the modern world.

Eighth was World War II, which caused the collapse of the American hereditary elite in 1960 that in turn made the spread of the modern innovative corporation and meritocracy a global reality.

Now I have it.  That is the modern world.  Just add the cargo cult and we see how the world of modern commerce became established.  Totally fortuitous.

The world of Modern Commerce, the world that I discovered, has allowed countless individual small-minded humans to cooperate and share their small units of knowledge to create magnificent technology and complex institutions.

Let us hope, that my greatest fear, that the world of Plato, Descartes, Jefferson, Kant, Marx and the Wokies will not destroy what we have accidentally created.

Ridiculous, Absurd

What could be more absurd or ridiculous than to give advice on aging?

I have never paid attention to people giving advice on aging.  Why should you?

To get to 100 years old, your heart must beat 3 billion times.  That is a lot, more than any living human can understand or explain.  Thinking someone knows how to get to 3 billion heartbeats is absurd.

My advice is about making old age comfortable.  In my early thirties I learned how to practice zazen, which is sitting meditation with an empty mind.  I have continued to do this practice ever since, daily (weekdays) for a half an hour.  Now in my old age I can sit comfortably doing nothing for hours or days on end, comfortably.  

That is a very helpful practice when your energy is low and nearly all your close friends are dead.  I’m glad I can do it.  I have led a very energetic life; now is the time for serenity.

I am not advocating for any specific form of meditation nor for any of the ideas, like enlightenment, that presumably are attendant.  Most rewards for meditation, such as enlightenment, seem overrated.  But being serene in old age is a great payoff.

Proof About False Econ Theory on Inflation

A few weeks ago I wrote a blog saying that econ theory was wrong about money supply being the reason for our current inflation. The real cause is the dramatic increase in the price of oil/gas the foundation of our economy.  Just as was true in 1973.

I've thought about a proof of my position.  Japan in 1995 began a period of deflation that has continued until the present. Deflation.  During that entire time the Central Bank of Japan has been printing money. Japan for the entire time, 27 years, has had the highest debt to GDP ratio of any industrial nation.  Currently the dept is 200% of GDP.  That is proof.

 

The Medium is the Message

That is the title of the first chapter of a prominent book in 1964 by Marshall McLuhan.  The meaning, outside the book, has been widely discussed.  To me it means that the social uses and forms of communication of many media is different from anything in its content.  Light bulbs,  automobiles, TV, books, etc are the media and the message they convey has to do with their impact on the culture in which they are operated.  Usually promoting some elements that were already present.

I have two media to discuss.  One is the Internet, the other is blockchain.

The Internet is a global network of connected electronic nods that transmit sound, text and images in a nearly infinite array of forms. Presently the images are nearly all 2-dimensional. The material is nearly all stored for rapid recall.

The ‘message’ of the Internet is that society will use this medium to reflect its existing social fabric.  Five qualities of the social fabric are promoted by the Internet.

1. There is always a structure to grass roots communication such that some people whose opinions are representative of large groups, become visible as informal leaders. So we get Internet opinion leaders. More obvious and more common than outside the Internet.
2. Our society and many other societies have a large array of ‘factions’ (Madison’s word) which become more visible as they are able to organize with a good peer-to-peer communication system. The Internet is therefore fractious.
3. Many people behave badly when they are anonymous.  Which is true of criminals in general and is true for a larger part of society than just the criminal class. Lots of nastiness from anonymous people on the Internet,
4. Wire-limited communication misses the conviviality and gentleness of actual live person-to-person communication. The Internet provokes interpersonal hostility and fighting.
5. People with political opinions that favor top-down changes to society (the Left and some other religious people) are intolerant of differing opinions and try to enforce censorship on disagreement. 

Blockchain refers to one sub-Internet quality, a medium in itself;  the ability to send copies of digitized material to multiple geographic locations at one time and have the material available for referenced review quickly.

For simplification I picture this as a fax machine that sends copies to several locations where the faxes are time-stamped and numbered in order for easy retrieval. 

This medium is suited to all legal and bureaucratic functions. The ease of retrieval will allow much greater access to the realm of laws and regulations, possibly reducing the role of lawyers and encouraging paralegals.  It may also reduce the onerous nature of laws and bureaucratic regulation. A great new policy objective established by President Trump.  It could play a political commentator role like I.F. Stone played in the 1950s and 60s.  There could be many I.F. Stones of many persuasions.

I.F Stone was “a liberal, politically outspoken reporter from the American left wing, Stone often had to work in ideologically hostile environments (military, diplomatic, business) where information was controlled, making verifiability the essence of his journalism, corroborated by facts in the public domain, which the reader could verify. About his style of work as an investigative journalist, Stone said:

I made no claims to 'inside stuff'. I tried to give information which could be documented, so [that] the reader could check it for himself ... Reporters tend to be absorbed by the bureaucracies they cover; they take on the habits, attitudes, and even accents of the military or the diplomatic corps. Should a reporter resist the pressure, there are many ways to get rid of him. ... But a reporter covering the whole capital on his own — particularly if he is his own employer — is immune from these [political] pressures.

“The journalistic professionalism and integrity of I. F. Stone derived from his intellectual willingness to scour and devour public documents, to bury himself in The Congressional Record, to study the transcripts of obscure congressional committee hearings, debates and reports. He prospected for news nuggets — published as boxed paragraphs in his weekly newsletter — such as contradictions in the line of official policy, examples of bureaucratic mendacity and political obscurantism. Stone especially sought evidence of the U.S. government's legalistic incursions against the civil liberties and the civil and political rights of American citizens.”  (Source en.wikipedia)

The earliest widespread use of blockchain has been for bitcoin, a currency.  Currency can be any medium that is popularly accepted (cowry shells and cigarettes.)  The widespread use of blockchain as a currency has occurred because conventional currency is controlled by governments and governments are not universally popular.  Bitcoin’s future use is dependent on its continued level of popularity.  Which in turn is dependent on the size and locale of its users.

Wokeism Escaped From Prison

The butt-showing male pants came out of prison, as did the angry-at-women-and-the-world, rap.  The same is true for wokeism. 

I personally have never been a prison inmate, I only spent a few hours in jail after a political demonstration and visited at a recidivist prison near Tokyo. I had many acquaintances in the Prisoners Union.

It is pretty clear that many popular values come out of the black experience in American prisons including wokeism.  

• Wokies believe in systemic racism. They only mean anti-black racism.  In a society where blacks are 12% of the population they are more than 50% of the male prison population.  Prisoners, just looking around their daily life come to the systemic racism conclusion.
• White supremacy has the same origins.  There are plenty of black prison guards but the system is usually run by whites. So is the judicial system.
• Wokies are angry at economic differences. Hatred of economic success, is bred in prison where communalism is the way of life.  In prison nearly everything from food, to clothing, to bedding to TV and showers are nearly all the same.  Every little difference is a source of friction. As the seminal work, Animal Farm, makes clear: “some are more equal than others.” Hatred of the rich is normal for prisoners and ex-prisoners.
• Wokies are hostile to merit.  In prison only power and gangs have meaning.  Merit is meaningless and irrelevant.
• Wokies are miserable people and deeply believe in the human-caused global warming eschatology.  Prison is an unhappy life for many people who are generally angry at the world that has incarcerated them. This attitude spills out of prison to wokies.
• Prison generates a strong belief that the police are openly hostile to blacks.

Wokeism has escaped from prison, brought to the world by the black male underclass via the modern Left.