Pro Commerce

I’m an Economist, the Rest Aren’t

After three years at U.C. Berkeley graduate school of economics I should have been given a PhD, in 1964, but the pro-Castro faculty made that an impossibility.

Let us begin. Capital is not factories, planes, buildings, or anything else physical.  Capital is all accurate knowledge.  After the War, Germany and Japan rebuilt and promptly returned to their former GDP levels.  Simple knowledge of where everything went and how it worked was the capital. 

Many things are called ‘capital.’ Like ‘market cap.’  But the words capital are meaningless; some capital can buy a cereal box full of cocaine and other capital can buy 100 car operating railroad. Money is the language of commerce. 

I explained capital in 1964 in my PhD thesis sent to the American Economic Assoc. Journal and returned to me for a revision to 40 pages because the journal wouldn’t publish anything that was 60 pages long. I didn’t bother.

The Fed was important, for decades, in regulating the American money supply. That stopped sometime in the 1990’s when U.S.debt went from $4 trillion to $10 trillion while the global debt went from $50 trillion to $100 trillion. The global debt tripled over the next fifteen years. 

The Fed diddling at the margins of American debt while the money sloshing around the world reached significantly large numbers meant the Fed became unimportant.

We have had three oil induced inflations. 1974, 1979, and 2021.  Nothing to do with anything but the price of oil.  When the price of oil rises dramatically which it did in 1974 because the Arab oil countries were punishing the U.S for the military actions of Israel, and in 19
79 because of the American war against Iran and in 2021 because senile President Biden attacked the American oil extraction industry by executive order, every core industry faced higher operational costs.  Especially transportation industries. Higher costs, transmitted throughout the economy, is the definition of inflation.

America is the center of global commerce. It is gigantic. Every other country is forced to invest in America because it is so big and so productive. The American stock markets contain $60 trillion of public corporation capital. Nearly all of that is in the eighty five percent that is in the top 500 public corporations.  The U.S. is 45 percent of the global financial market.

Only two countries in the world are truly and consistently productive: The U.S. and Israel. Nearly all technical and business invention comes from these two countries.  The reasons are straight forward. Their cultures and societies reward innovation. New ideas are disruptive. In these two countries the government and the social elite are not able to discourage innovation.

There are three kinds of commerce. Trade, Clientry and Industry.  

• Trade is the most common and the origin of most commerce.  The trader buys products and marks up the price to cover the costs of his/her business with enough additional to pay operating costs and stay in business. A flower shop or baker is an example of trade.
• Clientry is a business designed to cater to the customer for a lifetime. A lawyer, dentist, and a banker are examples of clientry.
• Industry is what Adam Smith recognized. It is a form of commerce that reduces market prices by the use of specialization and economies of scale.  Companies that are industrial provide only a small part of employment but the majority of economic output.
• Businesses that have an owner but no employees plus those with less than ten employees comprise nearly all businesses in the United States, over 95% of all businesses. The remainder, 5%, those with 11 or more employees produce more than half the GDP of the country.

In recent years, the incredible dominance of American electronic technology in the global market has generated such a large inflow of wealth that the U.S. has had the longest period in history without a recession.

Three Key Concepts to a Better Life

Three Key Concepts to a Better Life

1. Positive sum outcomes occur in nearly all human actions.
2. Cooperation is the mode of modern commerce.
3. The American model of government is an improvement over all others.

Every day of my life I have had to deal with people who fail to understand these three fundamental principles of reality.

Every child starts out saying ‘mine’ and adults have to teach sharing because the world doesn’t work for anyone if there is no sharing. Multiple children can share a single toy but when they don’t share only one is happy and that is not real happiness; it is power over others.

Most games are zero sum. Only one winner.  But in the real world, with technology and commerce, there are multiple winners.  When three people make bread there is more than three times as much as when one person makes bread.  Specialization allows for non-zero (positive) sum output.  So does technology.  The 90 car freight train can pull thousands of tons more of anything per worker than a single tractor trailer truck.

Many young people rant against ‘capitalism.’  All societies have capital; the idea that some are based on capital that is owned by the state is an historical error of language and politics. Socialism has been tried in the biggest country, the country with the largest population, an island country, a country with the greatest resources and every other element and always fails. The word should be commerce not capitalism. Every society has it, and some are better run than others.

All societies have commerce. The ownership of capital is seldom any different among them. The ones that promote commerce the most are the ones with the greatest wealth and the greatest ethnic and social diversity, like the U.S. and Israel.

Commerce thrives with cooperation, not competition. In any business, including some with a million employees, the employees work together, the businesses work in cooperation with their suppliers, landlords, banks, neighbors and broader communities.  Commerce is 99% cooperative and only competitive in 1% of all transactions. That is reality. 

America has generated thousands of homeless on the streets since 1978 and the number of billionaires has increased from a dozen to 750 in the same period.  There is no possible connection. One billionaire could not be created with all (by confiscating) the lifetime production of a hundred thousand homeless people living on the street.

Two giants, Standard Oil and AT&T, were broken up by the government and two decades later they were back to the original voluntarily, because it was so much more efficient.

The American model of government is seldom appreciated. But it is the longest stable government on the planet.  While America created the Japanese government and the UN, the model its creators used was the English parliament with the parliament selecting the government.  The UN doesn’t work.

In the American model there is a local plebiscite for the executive office and two legislative bodies.  The high court is chosen by a combination of both.  In Israel the judiciary selects itself and has failed to maintain its popular survival.

The reason for the great success of the American form of government has been its weakness: with power divided against itself and among the states. Liberty and individual freedom has been able to thrive with a weaker and more inefficient government.  Few people in the world appreciate this, especially immigrants who hope for a good president, not for a weaker government.  The U.S. survived for four years with no president (Biden).

Yet these three aspects of reality mean nothing to the wokie leftist ranting about the evils of America and capitalism.

Measuring Global Temperatures

There are two serious problems in measuring global temperatures.

1. The first is that an average is usually meant to be based on a ‘normal distribution.’  But any temperature measure of the earth’s surface is not a normal distribution. Therefore the measures of mean, skew and variance are off the mark.

The Earth’s total surface is roughly 200 million square miles.  Of this 14 million square miles is the ice of Antarctica and the Arctic, which is always at 32 degrees Fahrenheit. That means 7% of the Earth is the same minimum temperature. Not a normal distribution.  Ice does not go below freezing temperature.

The land mass not covered in ice is 40 million square miles. That is 20% with widely fluctuating temperature.  The remaining 73% is ocean which cannot freeze, setting a lower temperature boundary of 32 degrees.  Definitely not a normal distribution for the surface of the planet.

I’ve swum at the equator so the upper temperature of the ocean is below 80 degrees.  The ocean is always within a 50 degree range.  Again, not a normal distribution. The average ocean temperature for the globe is 61 degrees Fahrenheit. Which is close to the midpoint of 80 plus 32 which is 56 degrees. 

My calculation of the global surface temperature based on satellites and balloons is 57 degrees, which has been steady since 1950.

2. The second problem in measuring the surface temperature of the earth is also that it is not a ‘normal’ distribution.  The bottom temperature that can be measured is very sticky around 32 degrees Fahrenheit.  On the 20% that is land mass the temperature can rise to any number or drop to any number, but the remaining 80% of the Earth is bounded on the bottom by the 32 degrees.  That is a very bottom truncated distribution.

This means that the global average can rise faster than it can fall. Making the surface temperature more sensitive to the volcano rises than to any factors that will lower it.

Summary: because the global temperature is not normal, because it is truncated at the bottom 32 degrees Fahrenheit, global temperature can rise faster than it can fall, it will have erratic measurements over time. Global surface temperature will rise rapidly for volcano events such as Pinatubo in 1991 but fall slowly thereafter.  The potential for overstating a global temperature rise is significant but largely a statistical anomaly.

Unions Seriously Harm

One important lesson from the Palisades fire is that rich people or people who form their own fire district can hire a private fire fighting company.  A real estate developer in Palisades did just that and saved his entire shopping mall.

Now that everyone knows that urban entities like Los Angeles County and the California State government are incompetent at the most fundamental government functions, private companies will take on the relevant work.  Rich people and rich populations will hire them in the future.  Equity be damned.

How does that one example matter so much? 
We will now see hundreds of private firefighting businesses created to be alternatives to the politically controlled standard municipal fire departments and water supplies. People who can afford private government functions will no longer tolerate low quality public service to them.

The same has been increasingly true in education.  Parents have always paid for parochial schools in hopes of getting better or safer education for their children and they have paid for private schools in hopes of better education.  Homeschooling is an alternative for those who can’t afford private schools.  The public schools are controlled, nearly everywhere, by unions which make good education impossible with firing provisions and promotions that are irrational.

Most people don’t know how unions have seriously harmed fire and police departments.  Fire departments are three times too large.  They were never cut back when the causes of home fires were reduced due to safer bedding, the decline in smoking and better home-building electric and gas codes.  Making public fire departments far too expensive.

Put two and two together: unions in schools, fire departments, police and other government services and their control of urban governments have made urban government services inadequate and incompetent.  

People with money will create their own private government services.

Ann Landers and Israel

Longtime readers know my view of my own Judaism.  We Jews are the chosen people. Chosen to help humankind be ‘better.’  Jews are hated because they have been able to read, write, and do math for 3,000 years and virtually nobody else can or could.  They have also been good at commerce, globally. And yes, those skills have included most Jewish women.

Israel’s role today is to continue the roles Jews have played in society for millennia.  To improve medicine, technology, food and day to day life. Israel is the moral leader in its military behavior and in countless social issues.  Menachim Begin was the true founder of the country, a moral giant.  Bibi Netanyahu is one of the greatest men in human history, an incomparable leader for all time.

So what does this have to do with Ann Landers?  Ann’s real name was Esther Lederer and her sister (Dear Abby) was Esther Phillips.  Both Jews which is the point of this blog.

I started reading Ann’s column when she started in the Chicago Sun Times and I started at the University of Chicago in Fall 1955. 

The total readership of Ann and Abby reached two thirds of the adult population of America for several decades.  The advice they gave concerned all aspects of daily moral life. To put it simply, America’s moral life for an important part of the 20th century came from two Jewish women.  That, to me, is the work of the ‘chosen people.’

Another Jewish moral advisor was Ruth Westheimer, Dr. Ruth. She was a powerful moral teacher to Americans for two decades, reaching audiences nearly as large as Dear Ann and Dear Abby at times. Her focus had more sexuality in it.

The demand of ‘the chosen people’ is to be moral leaders for all time.  Not an enviable burden.

I Was There

I was there at the beginning of the Beatnik movement, the hippie movement, and the Whole Earth Catalog.

The Beats were mostly in New York and San Francisco.  I went to the U. of Chicago, in the geographic middle, in August of 1955 and was in the male dormitories in 1957 for six months. For reasons I still don’t understand, I was a widely known radical organizer with a sweatshirt, blue jeans, disheveled hair and a full beard. The Beats were visible in the youth population of the time.  As they traveled from Coast to Coast they stopped in Chicago at the University where I got them dorm rooms to stay in.  I knew about a dozen of the Beats at the time.  An article in Time magazine in 1959 said I was one of the Beats.

When I returned to San Francisco in 1960 to go to grad school at U.C. Berkeley in economics, my wife, Helen, and I lived in San Francisco on Broadway a few blocks from North Beach. The Beat scene was centered around City Lights bookstore owned by Lawrence Ferlinghetti. There were five other Beat businesses.  The most important was a small restaurant at approximately 575 Pacific Ave. that had a monk’s bowl of rice and meat and some veggies. Across the street at the Columbus Tower was a street level window with a few seats that had a chrome Italian espresso machine, the first I ever had in the U.S. In the next block North on Columbus was a second-hand bookstore, a bar on what is now Jack Kerouac Alley and City Lights. In the next block of Grant across Broadway was The Saloon where heavy beatnik drinkers hung out.

In 1963 Salli Rasberry arrived with her boyfriend. They went immediately to North Beach where the Beats had created a jazz and comedy scene. Raz, whom I didn’t meet for seven years,  moved to Masonic Boulevard in the Haight-Ashbury. Jazz was the overlap of the two youth cultures. Both smoked pot. The Beats had speed which was sold to students and truckers.  Raz and her bunch, later called hippies, soon got LSD from the gang around Stanford that got it from psych researchers.

The Beats were a little older than Raz and her bunch; most were in their mid to late 20’s.  The Beats wore d ark clothes and had long hair.  Their view of the world was summarized perfectly in Ginsberg’s poem, Howl. Grim, rejectionist and hopeless.

Raz and her crowd were also rejectionist about the stultifying society around us, but they were ecstatic, joyful, optimistic, and full of color and vitality. Their clothes were rainbow-exciting, their music loud and wild. They intended to change everything.  Starting with food, sex, and living arrangements.

North Beach was the primary overlap of Beats and hippies.  On a personal basis they met at a house off Kings Mountain on the road over the top, from Palo Alto to Pescadero.  It was a fairly large primitive house just a mile west of SkyLonda coffee shop. That was where Hippies, the Rainbow Bus, Kesey, the Beats, and the outlaw gang of Hell's Angels bikers hung out.  I went there twice with Portola Institute (the core of the Whole Earth Catalog) friends to hang out.

I was well known in the hippie crowd as the banker at Bank of America from 1964 to 1966 and later as VP of the Bank of California who invited all the hippie movers and shakers to a Japanese lunch on Fridays from 1967 to 1970. When the first Trips festival was organized by the Beats and Stewart Brand in January 1966 at the Longshoreman's Hall, Stewart asked me to handle the ticket sales and money collection at the door.

I collected the money for an hour, but the whole scene was too exciting and too many of my friends were there, so I asked the one person I trusted, Bill Graham, to take over the door for me.

I finally met Rasberry officially in Spring 1971 at the Demise Party of the Whole Earth Catalog. We had met many times but that night we sat on a bale of hay talking from 3 am till sunrise at 7am and became lifelong friends.

This is a good place to point out to the historians of the future that the political Left never was connected to the hippie movement.  Hippies joined all the parades of the anti-Vietnam era for the dancing and music.  I know because I knew the Lefty organizers.  I started the Graduate Student Union at U.C. Berkeley and Mario Savio was my Treasurer in 1963. He became famous in 1964.  

Tom Hayden used my living room in San Francisco to try and organize the East Coast media to cover a hippie be-in in Golden Gate Park.  I was opposed to any official publicity and stopped it.

Abbie Hoffman was a colleague who helped me put on a fundraiser for some forgotten cause but he pulled out when stoned and paranoid. I handled the gate myself and returned the money to anyone who wanted it.

 

Where the Ultra Rich Came From

The ultra-rich, our billionaires, are in for a great deal of antagonism.  However, only a few hundred people know where they came from and no one seems to have written about it.

I see two sources, and a combination of the two.  

A). One came from the genius of Harold Geneen, who became President of International Telephone and Telegraph Company in 1959. He proceeded to create and run the first genuine ‘conglomerate.’  Within a decade he had bought 350 companies in 80 countries.  He had experience as a runner at the NY Stock Exchange and as an accountant.  Geneen created the corporation market. Corporations are now bought and sold like cars and shoes.

After Geneen showed it could be done, corporations became marketable objects.  Geneen managed his acquisition by standardized financial statements and careful top- level supervision.

After Geneen showed it could be done, corporations became market objects just like any other good on the market. Buying and selling corporations and making improvements in the operations became a source of riches for anyone who was good at it. 

Three lines of development extended from Geneen’s invention.

1.  First, corporate takeovers. The best known name in this field is Carl Icahn. Icahn began in the early 1980’s. In a corporate takeover, a shareholder buys enough stock and gets enough votes to take over a company and change top management.  With improved share value the company is sold by the takeover shareholder.
2.  The consulting firm, Bain, founded in 1971, found many other corporations that could be improved but refused to make the profitable changes Bain suggested. Bain then had Mitt Romney and Orit Gadiesh form a company in 1991, Bain Capital, for the purpose of buying corporations and making managerial improvements and then selling the corporations.
3. The third line of development was the creation of special purpose funds to imitate Bain Capital and raise funds in the stock market. The largest three, called private equity, are BlackRock, Apollo, and KKR. With combined assets worth $2 trillion.

As can be seen in the examples above, the stock market has been an important source of capital to realize the net gains in corporate value as the corporations improve operating performance.

B.) The stock market has been a more direct source of gain for the dozen or so entrepreneurs who created giant companies de novo. The unique source of stock market wealth has been the special stock holding status of founders.  

The lawyers in Silicon Valley who created the corporate structure of many of the extraordinarily successful high-tech companies, made sure the founders and the early investors got an extraordinary proportion of the wealth generated by the stock in these companies.  This modality is the source of many of the extraordinary fortunes of the top founding entrepreneurs.

The Democrat Party is Gone

The Democrat Party was gone, officially, in 2020 when it could not field a single viable candidate.  

Of course people still vote the way their parents did.  It can go on for a few years as it did with the Whigs.

There were three Democrat Party pseudo candidates: Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders.  Harris got less than 5% in national polls.  Five percent is the minimum that can be measured with survey research.  Biden had run for president several times before and the party leaders had kicked him out as a known idiot, exposed plagiarist, and crook. Sanders was not and had never been a Democrat. He said, every day of his life, he was a Socialist.

Faced with this choice the party leaders chose Biden as their candidate and Harris as their VP. They then used the dying party machines in Michigan and Pennsylvania and the political naivete of Trump in Georgia to win for Biden-Harris.

The Democrats, under Biden, then proceeded to finish off the Democrat Party for good. 

The Democrat Party proceeded, for the first time in American history, to bring half a dozen legal cases against the opposing party with a real and popular candidate. 

The Democrats elected no candidate in the 2024 primaries.

Over the nine years that Trump was on the political scene, the national media changed.  From 75% of the major media trusted by Democrat Party voters to less than 55%. From 35% trusted by Republicans to 15%.  A whole new media and audience grew up among voters in America.

The many outrages against Trump and the Republicans were only necessary because the Democrats had nothing else to offer, no viable issues or candidates. 

I won’t list the dozen outrages initiated by the Democrat Party because a Democrat reading the list wouldn't believe that the list represents the first time such an array of nonsense has ever been used in American politics. It happened because the Democrat Party is finished.  Historically finished.

Sometime in the next four years, a new party will replace the Democrats.

Better Economics

I earned a PhD in economics at UC Berkeley but never got the degree because: I lacked the two languages required at the time, the entire department was in love with Fidel Castro while I was on the campaign staff of Richard Nixon and I had my doubts about many parts of the economics teachings.  

I left Berkeley and over the next six months I wrote my doctoral thesis on why economic theory was wrong about ‘capital.’  I wrote a 60 page thesis that ‘capital is really just plain knowledge applied to a specific instance.  I used Robinson Crusoe as the model.  I submitted my paper to the leading journal, the American Economic Review, where it was accepted for publication.  The editor wanted the paper reduced to 40 pages.  Being arrogant, I never did the editing.  My view of ‘capital’ has become the norm in the succeeding 60 years.

Now I’m ready to correct what else is wrong with economics.

First, the core terminology of economics is wrong. Communism, Socialism, and Capitalism are meaningless empty words. The world operates on commerce. There are three forms of commerce: Trade, Industry and Clientry. 

Most of the tribal world is involved in trade.  Each trading unit aims to make a single sale with enough margin in the sale price over the original object purchase price to cover the trader’s operating costs until the next object purchase and sale can occur. Sometimes there is credit involved and sometimes there is a three-way exchange.  The largest companies in the world, such as Mitsubishi and Sumitomo Trading use three-way trades and credit.

Industry is a complex hierarchical structure of workers whose goal is to maximize output and minimize costs. Minimizing costs is usually done by operating at scales that economize the operational expenses. Entire nations and societies can be organized to allow as many businesses as possible to operate at efficient scales.  Transportation, information, and communication can be optimized for an industrial society.

Lastly, there is clientry.  An interstitial form of commerce where businesses are organized to satisfy a small number of customers with highly personalized services for long periods of time.  These include lawyers, designers, dentists, and banks.

Capital, as I explained in my 1964 paper on the subject, is highly specific knowledge often embedded in some material form.  Small boats coming into the San Francisco Bay have fathometers to measure the water depth along with maps and tide tables.  All of those are capital that has replaced strings and sounding.  But capital still remains in the form of pilot boats and human bay pilots for large ships where navigation still requires complex and changing human knowledge.

Since John D. Rockefeller created a business in the 1880’s turning crude oil into gasoline, and gasoline and its derivatives have been the prime medium that underlies modern commerce.  Since OPEC and the oil producing members throttled the oil production of its members in 1973 the price of oil is demonstrably the foundation of inflation.  Standard economic teaching associates U.S. excess of government spending over tax revenue as the source of inflation.  This may be true in some cases as post WWI in Germany and in many South American banana republics, and in the 1800's due to gold discoveries but oil price is the modern source of inflation.

Interest rates may be the long term cost of capital in individual investment cases but the interest rate set by national banks can’t be.  Many countries in the 1990s and 2000s have had zero or minus national interest rates and Japan had a decade-long deflation. Neither resulted in infinite or massive investment.  Interest rate, for investment purposes, seems to be set by banks and investors in an international market place.

There is no capitalism, there is only commerce.

Capital is knowledge in some physical form.

Oil is the basis of modern society and the rise in the price of oil is inflation.

National interest rate is not the time value of long term investments.

Power vs God, the Wokie View

About fifty years ago I did a small survey and found that there were four categories of primary universal action as viewed by Americans. About 50% of adults viewed some (1) sort of god as the prime mover, 20% saw (2) power as the prime mover, 25% saw (3) money as the prime mover and 5% had other categories.  

Under God I found many people who viewed science as the prime mover, what historically was called the clockmaker version of prime mover or math as the scientific universal structure.

Now 50 years later the ratio has gone to 45% some sort of god, while 25% now see power as the prime mover.  Many of these people are ‘wokies’ and have some ‘colonialism’ as the model of primary universal action. The philosophic model for this group, even if they don’t know it, is Michel Foucault. Marxism is the meta model of money as prime mover.

These categories seem to remain fairly stable over long periods of time. The (4) ‘other’ category is not growing.

In the other category are many Asian and traditional versions of multiple prime movers. The Greek and Roman pantheon are multiple movers. So is the Indian universe. The Chinese Dao and Confucious are multiple prime movers as are the Japanese Buddhism and Shinto.  

In the modern world anthropology sees different cultures as having many different societal multiple prime movers.

I personally see humans as driven by a wide variety of ideas, metaphors, stories and images as prime movers of our species.

I don’t see much change in the future.  These categories appear stable over long periods of time.  The ‘wokies’ will be with us indefinitely. The wokies who see colonization as a prime force may add the Chinese in Tibet and Xinjiang (Uyghurs); and Moslems in much of Africa to their current hate list (Columbus, America and Israel.)

Google and Me

I understood Google more than a decade before it existed.  Better than it understands itself today.

In 1986 I published a book titled Marketing Without Advertising, based on a course I taught for eight years in my Noren Small Business Institute. It became the third largest selling marketing book in English over the next two decades and sold a 6th edition.

In Chapter One I disparage advertising and promote LISTing, which is what Google is. Google didn’t arrive for more than ten years.  Advertising doesn’t work except for tourists and very young people who lack networks to recommend products and services.  The research on advertising is vast and accurate. As my co-author, Raspberry, used to say: ‘Advertising is poop on the sidewalk that you almost step on.’

Today the internet provides some customer recommendations and warnings which is a modest help but seldom reliable.  Even Amazon is not honest in its recommendations. Listings include all forms of notice about the location and nature of the business.  It includes college alumni lists of current locations, telephone books, almost any reference that a potential customer will use to find the type of business or service he/she is looking for. That is precisely what Google is.  Google is a listing not advertising. It is at least 100 times more powerful than advertising.

When I first saw it used by my clients it was very powerful and effective. I knew then that Google would be far more important than advertising. It was destined to consume 80% of all global advertising.  I bought stock in Google immediately and my shares increased by more than ten times.  Thank you Google.

Envy of the Rich is the Core of the American Left

I have to tell you that I neither have envy for the rich, including the really rich, nor do I think they have political power.   The core thinking of the Left is the idea that the distance between the rich and poor is unjust.  

I have personally never had that view.  Early on it was for one reason; later in my life I added another reason.

The first reason I don’t envy the rich is that I made choices in my life to make me as free and powerful as any human.  So I never had any reason to envy the rich or the very rich.  I became a simple liver, meaning I learned to live on the minimum expense, so that I could provide for all my desires with little effort.  I am also an American surrounded by boundless abundance.

I had salaried jobs until I was 30 but I was always my own boss and used my time to accomplish whatever were my own goals and fantasies.  I can see that someone who thinks of earning money for stability and market rewards can envy those who appear to have no worries about stability and market rewards, nea ‘the rich.’ A fulltime job can be the shackles that create envy. An IRA, pension or a mortgage can create envy of the ‘rich.’

I had that stability and access to nearly all market rewards with simple living. I even wrote a book called Simple Living; Investments for Old Age for those who worry about stability in later life.

I have one child and one grandchild who have adopted my views of life and gather unto themselves all the skills and attributes that make them free and functional in the world. That includes having many friends, because your friends are your true wealth.

Has it worked?  Absolutely. 

I have traveled the world, lived in Japan and Israel when I wanted to, known hundreds, maybe thousands of important and influential people, accomplished major world-changing feats including creating the first worldwide currency, Mastercard, and woke up every day free to fulfill every wish and desire and be wildly joyous.  Never envying anyone.

The second discovery: political power does not come from being rich. Not at all. I learned this from being in politics for much of my life.  Many rich people try to buy political influence.  Nearly all fail.  Many have run for political office spending vast fortunes and gotten nowhere.  The only people who wield political power and political influence are those who deeply know politics.  Having money is irrelevant; I am serious.  For money objectives there are monied counter-objectives.  Knowing and understanding how politics works is the ultimate tool to influence politics. Willie Brown, who was poor as a young man and is a simple liver as an old man, has molded political power in California and nationally at a level few others have ever achieved or conceived.   Willie used money but it was not his own money.

Bill Gates’ global foundation is a farce.  It has accomplished nothing in any domain with Croesus levels of spending.  I know because I traveled the world examining Foreign Do Good Investments and found the ratio of good projects to harmful projects to be 1 to 30.  Free market practices did orders of magnitude more good than aid grants. And a fraction of the harm.

Summary

Envy of the rich comes from two sources.  People who don’t know how to live free with the abundance around them.  The fallacious belief that wealth is somehow connected to power. Political power is political understanding.

One caveat.  I would love to have my own private jet for travel. There is a little envy about that.  I’ve been a private pilot since my early 20's so I know that the time involved in flying any plane is great and requires a paid pilot. I now pay for business class and fly on the commercial 30-50 seat planes when I can.

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.