Pro Commerce

Japanese Think Tank

I’ve worked for several think tanks around the world.  American, French, Dutch, and Swedish but the most unique and interesting was the one in Japan where I was a partner.  It was called Dynax and there were only two of us principals.  

For the first few years, in the early 1990’s, we had a translator since neither Takakawa san nor I spoke the other’s language well. After three years we found we understood each other, he speaking English poorly and me speaking Japanese equally poorly, but slowly we understood each other, perfectly.

The three most interesting jobs we worked on were for a giant department store chain and a coalition of three giant companies including the Sumitomo Group.

The chain wanted research on the tastes of 14-16 year-old girls.  We started with in person research at youth concerts but quickly gave that up.  What we settled on was ‘Aunt Suki’ a sign-up program for high school girls in the Tokyo area.  A subject sheet was mailed to the girls each week for them to call in on Monday and Wednesday to share their opinions with Aunt Suki on some specific subject, such as lipstick, bras, shoes or hairdos. Then on Tuesday and Thursday they would call in to get a summary of Aunt Suki’s opinions on the previous day’s calls.  The client got a monthly summary.

The second research, in the mid-1990s, predicted what was going to happen when computers and communication got so good that most workers could do most of their work at home. We did a few test runs in Yokohama with a few giant company departments.  We had our own version of Zoom.  We saw that all the low-level workers were fairly comfortable for three to four days at home.  Most mid-level workers worked a few days at home, a few days in a satellite office and one day at headquarters.  Management needed to be at the head office most of the time.

The third project was the most interesting, for the same group of giant company clients. 

There was concern among management that many experts and outsiders were used throughout their companies but management felt their expertise was not fully utilized.

We developed a methodology for deeper understanding of classroom talks. 

Each student had a handful of 3x5 cards.  As they listened to the talk the students made simple notes.  At the end, with the guest speaker gone, the class walked to the board at the front and put their notes on a large branching tree of the speaker's subject. They were summarizing the talk with their notes, showing the history of what they heard on the board.

Greater attention, accuracy and understanding were the outcome.  Over months and with different groups practicing the technique, the process got better and better.

Jewish Community Organizations Fail

San Francisco State University is in a financial crisis.  The number of students applying and entering has dropped significantly in this century but the school has been unable to demand more money from the State or to cut expenses sufficiently.

I blame the Jews. I’m being facetious.  Not Jews but the Jewish community organizations.

In the mid 1990s I got many reports that anti-Jewish activity on the SFSU campus was rampant.  I went out to take a look. Jew hate was everywhere. Murals, posters and notice boards.  I was told by my friends on the faculty that all Jews on the faculty were leaving because the general environment was so anti-Jew.

One of my trips out to the campus was to help a faculty member who was trying to get Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat, recognized for his efforts to save Jews in WWII by getting them to Japan. No interest on this campus.

I reported this campus Jew hate widely and broadly to the Jewish community organizations and the Jewish press.  

None paid attention because the major Jewish organizations were left-wing. The anti-Jew sentiment was all coming from black and Arab lefty organizations.

Now Jew hate has exploded on college campuses and once again the lefty Jewish Community organizations are dragging their collective feet because the Jew hate comes from the Left.San Francisco State University has had a particularly precipitous decline in enrollment for two decades.  Jews, as individuals, don’t go there as students or as faculty.

I am ashamed to admit it but my worthless BA degree is from a year spent at SFSU 60+ years ago.

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.)

Spontaneous Commerce

When Airbnb was first started in San Francisco, I had three friends who immediately got into the business.

Does that mean anything to you?

One was a game developer, no surprise.  He bought three condos and rented them out. 

The second was a salaryman who bought five houses in New Orleans with the intention of moving there to rent them out. 

The third was a psychotherapist who rented out her city apartment for $5,000 a month and stayed at her country farmhouse.

The interesting thing about this event was that two of these emerging entrepreneurs were not the kind of person one expects to start a business.  It says to me that America is a land of millions of potential entrepreneurs who will start a business if they are given the slightest genuine opportunity. This is truly America. Commerce is deeply American.

The first and third were almost immediately put out of business by the rules San Francisco put in place to make Airbnb unworkable. The first friend soon moved to Los Angeles.  The second was soon put out of business by the city government of New Orleans that made Airbnb unworkable.

The CEO of Airbnb is Brian Chesky.  He and his founding partner were both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. Neither one had any idea of how politics works. Both immediately conceded to the laws and regulations that the San Francisco government put in place.  Terrible laws that destroyed two-thirds of all the operating BnB rentals in operation.  The anti-business regulations were copied everywhere Airbnb went. The same horrible regulations nearly destroyed similar vacation rental businesses that had been operating for decades, worldwide.

Three lessons from this: 

1. Americans are deeply disposed to starting businesses; no matter who they are. Its American.
2. Government with trivial and irrelevant regulations is the greatest destroyer of business on the planet.

Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber, didn’t start his business until he got a Statewide license to run a limousine business which served as a short-term protection against the politically connected and ferocious taxi cab bastards.

    3. Political skills are vital to innovation in business.  Otherwise governments will destroy you.

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.

Jew Hate in America

I’ve lived with Jew hate for several parts of my life.

I was in an El Paso elementary school from 1946 to 1949.  The Mexican kids would follow me home from school and throw rocks at me whenever the Dominican traveling priests came to Juarez to denounce Jews.  Fortunately I was a fast runner.  

The Roman Catholic hatred of Jews abated when Pope John XXIII called Vatican Council II.  The current Pope Francis has brought it back.

My closest friend in 1953-55 was David Stern, in Seattle, whose mother was national president of the American Jewish Committee. That AJC, at that time, was anti-Israel because the members wanted to assimilate and they believed Israel, as a Jewish state, would make assimilation difficult. My father, a reform rabbi, had been in Israel in the pre-State days helping on the Dead Sea scrolls and loved Israel.

I had no personal difficulty with Jew hate, other than the Mexicans, ever again.

I knew about the hereditary-class Jew hate, but it had no effect on me. It brushed up against me in 1967 when I became a bank officer and then the youngest Vice President in American banking at the Bank of California.  The Bank was the home of the hereditary class in 1960s banking but hadn’t always been because my paternal family were proud customers, and board members in the 1870’s to 1900. The bank expected me to join one of the elite private clubs in San Francisco.  The bank didn’t know that a Phillips could be a Jew. Jews were excluded from the top clubs until 1970.  Jews had been forced, sixty years earlier, to take over the Bohemian Club and start the Concordia Club.  I could have joined the University Club where I used the squash courts but never bothered to join.

All my life Spain has hated Jews, the same country that drove my patrilineal ancestors to Holland four hundred years ago, still hates Israel and prizes ham as its top meat.  Ireland has hated Jews and Israel.  The hatred of Jews began when Germany became a belligerent in 1938 and the Irish love the rantings of Hitler to this day. 

I dealt with Jew hate in the mid 1990’s when blacks at San Francisco State University were openly expressing it painting Jew hate murals and attacking Jews on the faculty.  Nearly all of whom left within five years.  Jew hate on campus has never abated.  Largely from blacks thanks to the Black Muslims.  Arabs have since found a home at S.F. State.

I haven’t had to deal with media Jew hate since I stopped reading the NewYork Times in the early 1970s.

A whole new self-hatred of Jews began in the late 1990s’ with the Anti-Defamation League when Lefty Jew hate was beginning and the ADL could only see the non-existent Jew hate in the politics of the Conservative leaders.  The ADL is a bastion of Jew hate to this day, along with the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

Real home grown American Jew hate exploded sometime in the late 2010’s.  My son calls it “Leftyism on Steroids.”  Which it is.

Spontaneous Commerce

When Airbnb was first started in San Francisco, I had three friends who immediately got into the business.

Does that mean anything to you?

One was a game developer, no surprise.  He bought three condos and rented them out. 

The second was a salaryman who bought five houses in New Orleans with the intention of moving there to rent them out.  

The third was a psychotherapist who rented out her city apartment for $5,000 a month and stayed at her country farmhouse.

The interesting thing about this event was that two of these emerging entrepreneurs were not the kind of person one expects to start a business.  It says to me that America is a land of millions of potential entrepreneurs who will start a business if they are given the slightest genuine opportunity. This is truly America. Commerce is deeply American.

The first and third were almost immediately put out of business by the rules San Francisco put in place to make Airbnb unworkable. The first soon moved to Los Angeles.  The second was soon put out of business by the city government of New Orleans that made Airbnb unworkable.

The CEO of Airbnb is Brian Chesky.  He and his founding partner were both graduates of the Rhode Island School of Design. Neither one had any idea of how politics works. Both immediately conceded to the laws and regulations that the San Francisco government put in place.  Terrible laws that destroyed two-thirds of all the operating BnB rentals in operation.  The anti-business regulations were copied everywhere Airbnb went. The same horrible regulations nearly destroyed similar vacation rental businesses that had been operating for decades, worldwide.

Three lessons from this: 

1. Americans are deeply disposed to starting businesses; no matter who they are. Its American.
2. Government with trivial and irrelevant regulations is the greatest destroyer of business on the planet.

Travis Kalanick, the founder and CEO of Uber, didn’t start his business until he got a Statewide license to run a limousine business which served as a short-term protection against the politically connected and ferocious taxi cab bastards.

    3.Political skills are vital to innovation in business.  Otherwise governments will destroy you.

One Man Is Now What Matters

You should know this name by now: Robby Starbuck.

One person with the power of the modern social media, the visual media, and the right idea can now have new political power never before imagined.

Robby Starbuck, understands America’s core values, primarily because his parents escaped from Cuba.  He realized that the ‘woke movement’ to replace the business value of merit with ‘Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion’ ‘DEI’ is a very unAmerican idea.  

Merit is a core value of America that has slowly surfaced over the 250 years of our history.  Merit has been at war with America's union values of seniority and equality. The triumph of merit over union values emerged at the end of the 1950s as the modern world of commerce triumphed over the domestic hereditary elite (see many earlier blogs). 

Robby saw the situation. He realized that many corporate Leviathans were suffocating their employees with DEI in house re-education programs; corporations whose customers abhor the woke ideas of DEI.

Robby, with a Hollywood background in film and a list of over 70 music videos, has made Internet videos showing the DEI programs at Tractor Supply, John Deere, Harley-Davidson, Jack Daniel's and put these videos on social media where they were picked up and viewed in the millions. Each of the companies promptly publicly announced the end of their DEI programs.  My favorite result were two videos, one showing an empty Harley-Davidson repair station at the greatest motorcycle rally in Sturgis, S.D. and another with a motorcyclist shooting his Harley to death.

The true power of one man with the right idea, the video graphic skills, and modern social media, is that giant Lowe’s and behemoth Ford both backed down and ended their DEI with just the threat that Robby was making a video of their compulsory DEI programs. That is the incredible power of one man.

It just tickles my fancy that the greatest farce in American media, the New York Times says Robby’s “Attacks aren’t working” while the Wall Street Journal calls him a “One man power house destroying DEI.”

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.

Civil War Problem

I agree with many people that we have the right emotional conditions for a civil war.

Personally, there are many times in the past 5 years I would have gone out with a rifle and pistol to shoot the ‘woke’ media and government people.

Elon Musk and others are right; we have been ripe for a civil war for many years.

I didn’t go out and shoot people because I could never find the right person or place to shoot that would start the civil war.

The actual American Civil War had a geographic point of origin.

“The war began on April 12, 1861, when the Confederacy bombarded Fort Sumter in South Carolina.” 

The public attitudes were geographically divided into many Northern and nearly all Southern states.  No such distinct geographic division exists today between the ‘woke’ and the anti-woke. Even the core of cities versus the rest of the nation is a poor division of ‘woke’ and anti-woke.

At one time I was tempted to call on my fellow patriots to meet at the newest federal government building on Mission St. in San Francisco and begin shooting anyone who went in or out.  But that would have killed many of my own compatriots.  It wouldn’t have worked.

The new civil war can not begin until most people on each side are geographically separated.

Who Can You Trust?

The Internet has changed our world in the most fundamental fashion.  We no longer have trust in any of the large cacophony of information that we receive. The most authoritative sources are widely distrusted.  My son calls this the ‘collapse of narrative.’

How can you trust anything when contradictory information is just a click away and virtually every institution has offered unreliable information at some recent moment?   You can’t.

I want to offer my own approach.  You have to have yours too.

First off, I trust no information I get.  I even doubt some of the things I see with my own eyes in the solid world around me.  What appears solid may not be; what appears safe may not be like trying to run across one side of a freeway with few cars on it.  I have no trust in any government source, or news media or professional association. Any argument by authority is almost always rejected; such as ‘scientists find,’ or ‘the Dental Association says.’

So how do I get a sense that any particular information is reliable? 

I trust some people because they either can-not make false statements or are leery of making statements that they are not certain of.  In the first group are nearly all Japanese, 120 million of them. They can obfuscate but they can not lie.

Who Can You Trust?

I trust data where I can see the original source, where it has not been modified, where I know the collection methodology and where I can do the calculations myself, such as the average, the variance and the sequence over time.  I have been a statistician since I taught it in university.

The same applies to all documents.  I learned at the U. of Chicago to always read the original document or to be leery if it is not available.

I trust some people who are public figures or writers if they have been totally reliable over long periods of time.

We have now reached the end of my trusted sources.  Sadly, it is a new world with a complete absence of authority, anywhere.  

Neither Wikipedia nor Google search is authoritative. In both I’ve seen pieces that were factually very wrong based on my personal experience.  In the case of Wikipedia I’ve corrected major errors and included reliable reference sources only to see my corrections disappear a day or two later.

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.

PEOPLES Temple and Jim Jones

Most people in the world don’t know that Jim Jones, of the famous ‘Drink the Kool-Aid’ and Guyana mass suicide of over 900 people, was a communist.

I knew Jim Jones, personally, and interacted with him over the years he was in San Francisco. I heard one or two of his sermons.  Jim Jones was a Marxist. He was 100% a Marxist and he preached 100% pure communism.  He had a visceral hatred of ‘capitalism’ and he made that clear in every sermon. He also channeled the beauty of communist equality and fairness of government support.

Jim Jones’ community heard him lecture every week about the evils of capitalism and the beauty of communism.  His congregation was communist.  And disproportionately older black women.

Now the big fact:  When Jones, Reverend Jones, decided to move his congregation out of the United States he wrote to people in the USSR (Russia) and the Soviet Embassy in Washington and requested asylum for his congregation and himself in the Soviet Union.  

They turned him down.

So then he chose the jungles of Guyana as the new model home for his congregation. He promised a communist paradise.

Jonestown should be remembered as one of the many communist failures.

Does America Always Lose the War?

We may have a very distorted view of our own history.  Do we always lose our wars?

Independence

Start with our War of Independence. Did we win? Britain gave up. Really France won. The Treaty of Paris 1783 makes it clear.  France as the winner was given Senegal and Tobago by Britain.  The Colonies agreed to leave the Crown but share access to the Mississippi with Britain and accepted convivial conditions of trade with Britain. The American Colonies didn’t WIN.  They got partial independence with their co-victor, France. 

How can you lose a war of independence? You can’t. France won and the colonies took advantage of it.

Twenty years later Britain reminded the Colonies that they gained independence but never defeated the British military.

1812

America lost the War of 1812 decisively. Total loss. Britain with only one war to fight won overwhelmingly. Britain destroyed whatever they wanted to destroy.

Civil War

Did the Union Army win the Civil War? In deed only --The Confederacy signed a peace treaty. Lincoln’s priority—shared by Grant—was “to bind up the nation’s wounds” and unite the country together again as a functioning democracy under the Constitution.  Lincoln’s plan for reconstruction of the South and help for the blacks didn’t get very far.  

Lincoln was assassinated days after the peace treaty, by a Confederate supporter. Vice President Andrew Jackson, a Democrat supporter of slavery, became president and did little to carry out the reconstruction plans.  

Reconstruction only began two years later when Grant became president.  The ostensible losing side, the Confederate states resisted Reconstruction and it was defeated within twelve years, totally. From 1877 forward, blacks lost their economic and political rights and the whites from the Confederacy regained nearly all their rights and power. 

Seventy years later blacks were still being lynched by the KKK, couldn’t buy homes in white neighborhoods and were rarely employed in white businesses. The Southern Wing of the Democrat Party by 1965 had been in power for thirty-five years.  

One hundred years after the end of the Civil War, there was no victory celebration. None. Because the Union didn’t win.

Spain

There were battles in the late 19th century with Spain but no real battles over the four months of active Cuban hostility.  The U.S. gained control of Cuba, Guam, and the Philippines by paying Spain $20 million.  Nothing resembling a victory occurred from a nearly non existent Spanish military. 

WWI

World War I saw America enter the War late, the American president demanded a peaceful settlement at the end of the war.  The war ended because of influenza. 

The influenza hurt the German side the most because the German soldiers had to ride in trains back to their homeland for food and treatment, while the French went home on weekends during the war.  The Germans agreed to the American proposed peace treaty, but the French and British dictated the actual terms without regard to the Americans.  President Wilson had many strokes as the Treaty of Versailles was being worked on and was unable to have any influence on the outcome.

WWII

World War II was an absolute military victory for the Allied troops.  But the final outcome was determined by the Yalta Conference in February 1945. By the previous Fall president Roosevelt was medically weak, could not stand and by April of 1945 he died.  At Yalta, the USSR designated the meeting place, and the USSR demanded control of all of Eastern Europe.  Roosevelt conceded and asked for democrat rule of the area the USSR controlled.  Didn’t happen. Berlin was divided in half and the USSR demanded that the Allied half be divided among France, Britain and the U.S.  The USSR also took all of Siberia and Mongolia in return for a promise to send troops to fight Japan.  The USSR never did help.

The American military victory in WWII led to the United Nations. A seventy year failure for the U.S. The United Nations are united 150 to 1 against the U.S. most of the time.

Korea

The war in Korea was a settlement with an armistice much to the favor of North Korea, which is still a belligerent.

Vietnam

The Vietnam War was militarily won by the U.S. and then completely abdicated by the U.S. Democrat Congress which refused to help the South Koreans as the U.S. promised in the peace treaty. U.S. lost entirely.

Iraq and Afghanistan

Iraq and Afghanistan.  Not much to say. The first Iraq war was a complete loss, Saddam Hussein remained in power. The second dragged on for more than twenty years with no end, no cessation of hostilities.  Afghanistan was another complete loss.

America often wins the major battles but loses the war. 

And now the losers of Afghanistan, the Biden Democrats, are advising Israel to lose its war against the Gazan terrorist government.

For the Record

When Republicans controlled the Presidency and Congress we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the end of the Civil War.

I tried to get the nation to celebrate the 100th and 150th anniversary of the Civil War and the 14th Amendment but nothing happened because Democrats controlled both the Presidency and Congress.  Sorry folks I contacted Black leaders (many of whom I knew personally) and the D.C. government; no response. 

Its a fact.

This image is the 50th Anniversary parade with veterans of both sides of the Civil War.

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.

The Real Nakba and Colonialism

Somehow the world needs a good lesson in Middle Eastern history.  Palestinians and a million other misinformed people think that when the newly founded state of Israel was forced to fight off five well-established and well-armed Arab enemy nations, that the Arabs living in the new state of Israel were driven out.

Absolutely false.  The resident Arabs were told to leave by the ruling Muslims and the attacking Arab nations. About half left both the new Israel and the United Nations created Palestine.   A small number left out of fear of local terrorism which at the time was decades old.  The new State of Israel always permitted them to return.  This Arab exodus is referred to as the Nakba.

The real Nakba occurred over the next decade.

More than twice as many Jews, close to 850,000, were driven out of Arab lands with their possessions and wealth confiscated.  Most were settled in Israel with no compensation or support from any Arabs or international bodies.

The comparable misinformation about the history of the region has to do with settlement and the absurd term ‘colonialism.’  One hundred fifty years ago when Jews first began the modern settlement in Israel, there were about equal numbers of Jews and Arabs in the small area that became Palestine, under the rule of the Turkish Empire. The Jews had been there since Roman times. The Arabs had been wandering desert tribes with temporary settlements in the area. The Jews lived in small ancient towns. The Arabs were wandering tribal traders attracted to the area by the Jews creation of new jobs.

Jews had been settled in the entire Middle East for millenia.  Jews had well-established communities  in Persia, especially in Isfahan, and were long settled in Babylon the center of the Middle East, eight hundred years before Mohammed was born in the 6th century.  Islam is recent.  Jews are very ancient.

None of this is contested by decent people who have access to myriad documents and artifacts from the area.

What Destroyed California and San Francisco?

Term limits and small districts.

I’ve watched California go from a Republican state to a super-majority Democrat one. I was close to politics all that time.  I finally figured out what happened.

I watched the change in the legislatures as Assemblyman Jesse Unruh took over the Democrat Party from 1961.  In those days I was an Assembly Legislative Analyst running the campaign of a San Francisco Assemblyman.  Unruh took contributions from all the lobbyists and used the money to elect loyal Democrat legislators.  He was later succeeded by Willie Brown who used the same formula to govern the State.  Labor money became the backbone of state campaign finance and there was a direct pipeline from union state employees to the Democrat Party. The system became stronger and embedded over time.

Term limits were introduced statewide in the late 90s and in San Francisco for the second time in 2000.

First we got a deep well of funding for the Democrat aspirants, then we got a ladder to a life in politics.

The term limits meant that winning the first step on the ladder offered a series of steps up the ladder as the term-limit law created all the steps on the ladder upward.  In San Francisco that meant the first step was a trivial spot on the school board or the City College Board. Then a spot on the Board of Supervisors, then a position in the Assembly followed by a seat in the Senate followed by election to one of the many Statewide offices.  

That is what we have today. A home grown political machine.  The tiny districts just make it easier for a political nobody to get their first step in office.  Tiny districts are often controlled by one or two fictional neighborhood clubs.

Don’t Do What You Love

There has been a recent flurry of articles on the subject ‘Don’t do what you love.’  This is pretty much in response to an unattributed popular phrase ‘Follow your passion’ or its earlier version ‘Do what you love and the money will follow.’

As the father of this idea, I feel compelled to comment.  I introduced this idea to the world in my 1974 book The Seven Laws of Money.  The first law is ‘Do it. Money will follow if you’re doing the right thing.’

I wrote this theme in response to all the people who were coming to me soliciting help in raising money for their project.  Mostly hippies. It was the right response to the subject at the time.  Most of the thousands of projects I saw needed to be tried in the real world to know if there was a market. Simple, clear advice.

It promptly morphed into the ‘Do what you love and the money will follow.’ Which is a mystical statement that I couldn’t support. That morphed into Nike’s ‘Just do it.’   A very American sentiment.

Frankly, as advice for the corporate world it is nonsense.  Most people enjoy their work, because of its sociability and its challenges, but doing it as a passion is probably rare. For owners and top managers the business world is hard and stressful.  That is a reality.

If you are just starting out in the world and are a highly competent person, I would always encourage you to do what you love, but be prepared to do it for a long time without much monetary reward.

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.

Another Jewish Divide

The Jewish Nation has divided many times in the past.  Part of it has always become the mainstream after a few centuries. It is happening today with a vengeance.

One of the first major divisions were the Pharisees and the Sadducees. This occurred shortly after the Maccabees won the war celebrated on Hanukkah, about 160 BCE.  It appears that the Pharisees became the mainstream as rabbinic practices were being developed, in the absence of a Temple, and the beginnings of the Talmud were underway.  The Sadducees chose a different path, rejecting the Talmud and the other written interpretations of the earlier oral books of the Torah.  Other revolting groups at the time included the Essenes and the Zealots. The Essenes practiced celibacy and died out promptly.  The Zealots still survive in tiny numbers.

The Sadducee views rejecting the Talmud tradition re-occurred with vigor in the Middle East as ‘Karaites.’  The Karaite movement grew rapidly in the 10th century and was a major movement in Judaism for seven centuries and still exists today.

The next big schism in Judaism occurred in response to Sabbatai Zevi.  Zevi saw himself and was acclaimed by others as the Messiah.  An historical wave of messianism swept the global Jewish community in 1665 until, Zevi renounced Judaism under pressure from the Turks and converted to Islam.  In response the global rabbinate distanced itself from messianic religion and distanced itself from esoteric practices for the next two centuries.

At various times Jews have been pressured by authorities to convert to Christianity and Islam.  The ones who pretended to convert often practiced Judaism covertly but were no longer accepted in the mainstream of Jewish life. A group of these so-called ‘conversos’ is still found near Sante Fe, New Mexico.

In the period of Israel’s creation, 1930-58, parts of Judaism, outside of Israel, distanced itself from the supporters of Israel but that disappeared around 1960.

Recently open hostility to Israel was adopted by the mainstream Democrat Party. Again a Jewish schism has arisen. The Reform Jews who are Democrats, along with some in the Conservative movement Democrats, are separating from mainstream Jews and Israel.  

Leading Democrats have a long history of Jew hate and anti-Israel views.  The State Department was strongly opposed to the creation of Israel. President Carter was strongly anti-Jew and wrote a book explaining his views.  The greatest hatred of Jews was found in President Obama as testified to by the Israeli ambassador, Michael Oren, and carried over directly to the administration of Joe Biden and Biden’s Senate speaker, Charles Schumer.

The schism is here, we get to live it.

Democrats Don’t Understand America

This blog will be hard for many readers to accept.  The Democrat Party as a whole does not understand the unique political nature of America.  

The best evidence is from the constitution of Japan which was created by the American State Department staff after WWII who were all Democrats.  It is modeled on the British system where the parliament (‘the Diet’ in Japan) elects the prime minister who is in charge of the executive branch of government.  In the U.S. Constitution, the head of the executive branch is elected by the entire American population. The same failure of Democrats to use the American system of government is found in the creation of the German post war government but Americans were not the only people involved.

When I was a student at the University of Chicago in the mid-1950s the authoritative text on government was by Herman Finer. The best government he recommended was the British parliament. Finer was an East European Jew; as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, Jews who came to America never appreciated the American system of government; they favored socialism and other Lefty ideas. Finer’s book on government was nearly the universal college text at the time.

The American system of government is unique because it was created de novo by a small group of very brilliant men who searched the global history of government for their ideas of governance.  The American system of a separate executive evolved from there. 

The evolution first included the creation of political parties, then the unification of the election of the president and vice president and finally the widespread use of state primary elections.

To see that the Democrat Party still doesn’t understand the uniqueness of the American system of governance, there are many pieces of current evidence.  

The Democrat Party has always had their electoral conventions controlled by big-city party bosses. When the city-boss system died out it was replaced by Superdelegates who can overrule the other ordinary convention delegates.  Very much outside the idea of American republican democracy.  

This latter development is why I refuse to call the Democrat Party the Democratic Party. It isn’t democratic.

The Democrat Party proceeded to step outside the American governmental idea with the office of President Nixon. Nixon was investigated by Congress for his spying on the opposition party.  What Nixon did had been the norm for both political parties for generations. Even before the threat of a Nixon impeachment the U.S. Senate forced Nixon’s Vice-President (Spiro Agnew) to resign and selected a likable, defeatable member of the House as his Vice-President (Gerald Ford.)  A new case of Congressional meddling in the Executive. A first in nearly 200 years.

In the past decade the Democrat Party has again stepped outside the American political norm. Aggressively. I will only mention a few of the outrages.  

In the 2016 election the Democrat Party claimed that Trump won because of Russian election interference.  A novel claim in American politics and proceeded for 4 years to promote this unsubstantiated issue.  In fact the Democrat Party used two secret Executive Branch agencies to carry out illegal espionage on the Republicans.

Then when Trump held the presidency, the House, under Democrat rule proceeded to impeach the president twice. Twice the Senate refused to support the impeachment. The second time, the President's time in office was finished, a situation not envisioned in the Constitution.  An unconscionable first time in American history.

After President Trump was defeated for his second term, the Democrats proceeded to bring a string of legal actions against him.  This act of legal warfare is unprecedented in the 233-year history of America. It will permanently discourage wealthy people and business people from seeking the Presidency.

The Democrat party had its New York office holders impose a bail fee that violated the Eighth Amendment which prohibits excessive bail. The New York bail was greater than the total U.S. Gross National Product when the 8th Amendment was passed in 1791.

The Democrat Party had the leading opposition candidate removed from the ballot in three primary states. Promptly ruled unconstitutional by the Supreme Court.

There are many more examples.  It is clear the Democrat Party doesn’t understand America, our Constitution, nor our moral foundations.

I Only Made Phone Calls

Two things its hard to give me credit for: tilapia and Kite Hill.

I’ll start with tilapia, a rather bland tasting small fish.  We have it in the U.S. because of me.  But what I did was to use my phone and my networks which are not visible to the world.  Here is how it happened.

Tilapia

I had a few clients in the Central Valley of California who were professional entomologists, advisors to farmers on pest control.  In general they favored alternatives to commercial pesticides.

One of them phoned me to ask if I knew of a way to control mosquitoes in rice fields?  It was a problem for his clients in the Sacramento Valley.  The fields in that area are flooded for rice cultivation by several large rivers. Rice grown in this area is one third of all the rice grown in the U.S. There are cities and towns in the area where mosquitoes are a problem during rice flooding periods.

I phoned my friend Katsu in Japan who was the head of the organic farmers in Japan and a close friend.  I put him on the board of a Third World aid group in Washington D.C. where I had influence and made a few phone calls to get him the presidency of the world organic farmers group.

Katsu told me Japanese organic farmers used a fish called tilapia, in English, to live in the rice fields and eat the mosquitoes and their larva.  

I phoned my friend the entomologist and told him and within two years all the rice growers were growing tilapia and selling them on the commercial market.

No one saw me make those two phone calls.  If you like tilapia, 'you're welcome.'

Kite Hill

The large park area next to my house in San Francisco is called Kite Hill.   In this case it was more than two phone calls that created this park.  

A neighbor called me, Felicia Ortiz, to say she wanted to create some vest-pocket parks in open lots in San Francisco.  The term ‘vest-pocket parks’ apparently came from a friend of mine Bonnie Ora Sherk. An environmental artist.

I told Mrs. Ortiz that I would help her if she was willing to be chair of a group to create the parks and the first park would be on the large open area near both of us that I had gotten down-zoned to single family homes a few years earlier.  She said ‘yes.’

I then phoned three political friends of mine.  I asked one to create a political action group to design and commission vest-pocket parks, with Mrs. Ortiz as chairperson.  The second one I asked to create a bond issue for the next election for $12 million to create vest-pocket parks. The third one I called to ask him to raise $50,000 for the bond issue and to buy the appropriate media.

We won easily and bought the land for the park.  The Park and Recreation Department takes care of our park.

Just phone calls and my network of friends.  I take credit but the evidence for my role is not visible.

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. 

Hippy Successes and Failures

One of the hippy successes was the Whole Earth Catalog. It was a masterpiece of a new form of encyclopedia and was the first version of the future Google.

I’ve written about many of the hippy successes and of the great social changes that hippies invented.  They include the modern universal bicycle, hang gliders and their offshoots, comfortable beds and countless artifacts that are too numerous to mention here.

The greatest impacts were in the extraordinary expansion of the American urban diet and cooking methods, the vast expansion of unusual religious orders and related thinking as well as the love of flowers and craft skills.  While not discussed openly, a wide range of psycho-active drugs gained widespread acceptance. Non-religious simple living and right livelihood gained ground as did homeschooling.

But what were the failures?  

The greatest hippy failure was their inability to promote the optimism that engulfed the hippy world view.  The hippies were joyous; the modern American world is grim and depressing.

The hippies loved hitchhiking. It couldn’t succeed because there is a small criminal underclass that can never be ignored. 

The biggest failure was in finding new social organizations.  Americans just can not live comfortably together in groups.  Communes, group houses and every form of communal living failed.  Many pairing and mating structures failed as well, whether it was open marriage or any of the various forms of polyamory.   

Hippies never indulged in politics even though the press confused them with the anti-war Left.  The worst hippy legacy is the modern street people who have destroyed San Francisco and a few other cities. Hippies made living on the street and in publicly visible areas a tolerable behavior that the future social outsiders, hobos, made a serious public nightmare.

The hippies founded environmentalism but focused heavily on the population explosion which later changed into human caused global warming eschatology.  The hippy fear of nuclear power made the situation worse.

All in all, it is too early to make historic judgments about the hippy era.  And I was too much of a central figure to also be involved in the historic evaluation.

Simple Livers

Harold Geneen, Coco Chanel, Peter Sellers, Tennessee Williams, Oscar Wilde, and Cole Porter lived in hotels for many years of their lives.  Harold Geneen, the CEO of International Telephone and Telegraph in the 1960s and 70s lived in many hotels and kept a complete set of clothes in each one.

I wrote a book called Simple Living Investments in 1979.  It still sells. The theme was Simple Living for non-religious or spiritual reasons. My strongest arguments for simple living were that owned objects clutter the mind and life is freer with many more ways to live if one has a simple daily practice.  

At one point I had less than 100 objects in my van and lived as a house sitter.  That is much harder to do with a spouse and children.  It makes a conventional lifestyle more difficult. But I made the point that having or accumulating money was not in conflict as long as it wasn’t used to buy objects like houses and cars that divert attention to maintenance and worrying.

I’m a pilot and a sailor.  But I never owned a plane or a sailboat. For fifty years I was an active pilot with a single-engine plane that I used as a member of a flying club and sailed as a partner in a 30-foot sloop where I paid the moorage fee and paid for repairs resulting from racing.

I was always impressed with creative people who lived in hotels for the simplicity of daily living that that made possible. 

Many prominent mathematicians seem to live with virtually no possessions, just living on friends' couches and thinking about math. There is Elon Musk who seems to own no houses but lives with friends and on the airplanes where he spends much of his time.

The subject comes up because of my friend Alex who is handsome and very bright but lives in a modest apartment with very little furniture.  Alex has plenty of money.  Many women rapidly stop dating him after they see his modest apartment.

Why Employment Law Worked

My biggest and most famous lawsuit was about employment discrimination against women and minorities; it was an immediate societal success.  I have since figured out why it succeeded. 

The case was brought in 1971 by Bob Gnaida of the law firm Public Advocates against the Bank of California.  We won and the decision demanded an aggressive program with supporting money to promote women and minorities into management at all levels, promptly.  I brought the suit after leaving the Bank of California as a Vice President. I took with me all the incriminating internal evidence.

The major banks in America signed consent decrees to the settlement and banking quickly became the most integrated industry in America.

I tried to establish similar anti-discrimination lawsuits in housing and private clubs.

In housing I carried out many ventures with my wife in trying to rent apartments in upper income neighborhoods where we were followed by black couples (friends) who tried to rent the same apartments on the same day.  They never could rent the same apartments that we could. We had overwhelming evidence of discrimination against blacks but were never able to put together a lawsuit.  No law firm and no government agency would take the many cases offered.

Unlike the banking case where I had overwhelming computer printout payroll evidence, as was true throughout banking, in the case of housing, there were countless acceptable semi-legal reasons given by landlords for their preference for white renters.

In the case of private clubs Congress amended the anti-discrimination laws to exclude private clubs with less than 200 members and included only club lunches because the rest of the private club world didn’t directly seem to involve business issues.

New York Jews Are Responsible

I’ve spent time around the world with influential people. One thing is clear and very important: They get their news from the New York Times.  Journalists, around the world, also get their news from the N.Y. Times.

The two things in the headline to this blog that need explaining: ‘Jews’ and ‘Responsible.’

Jews.  The New York Times has been on its last legs, financially, for nearly a decade. Even the most recent online readership recovery due to puzzles and games has not relieved the financial finale.  What would destroy the New York Times, in a week, would be if most New York Jews canceled their subscriptions.

Responsible.  The greatest surprise to me and nearly everyone else was the October 8th discovery that much of the world and nearly all of American academia hates Israel. 

The U.N. has always reflected this global hatred of Israel with little consequence (except for the recent UNRWA troops in Hamas.)  The United States has always stopped the U.N. calumny.  Except for Obama’s last minute expression of vitriol.

The New York Times has been consistently an Israel hater and a Jew hater.  The Jew hatred has been evident since the 1930’s when Arthur O. Sulzberger was the publisher and tried to pass for an Episcopalian. Arthur O. denied the Holocaust and was strongly anti-Israel before and after its founding.  This has continued with A.O. Sulzberger, Jr.  It can’t be missed by accident. Every Israel based reporter has written false and defamatory articles for the Times.  Every article about American Jewry, for decades, has been malicious, such as the recent coverage of Haredi education.  

New York Jews just march on as if it didn’t matter. 

But it does.  The New York Times has been the fertile soil for global Israel hatred. New York Jews could have stopped it.