Pro Commerce

The Future of a Random Legislature

In 1978 I wrote an article proposing that legislative bodies be created by random selection like juries.  My friend ‘Chick’ Callenbach then offered to write a book with me on the subject.  It was called A Citizen Legislature. Published in 1981, it became part of every political science course on the planet. The original model was a Greek legislature called the Boule. Then in the late 1980s it almost became a reality when the proposal nearly became law in British Columbia, losing by only one vote.

Now America is nearly at the point of a civil war, I can see that a random legislature will become a viable choice in the discussions in the near future to resolve our close call with the precipice of democratic failure.

Would a random legislature resolve our current problem?  

That is a separate question.  My prediction that the random legislature will become a subject of discussion is an answer to a different question.  ‘Would it resolve the divergence of the American Republic?’ is not the same question.

The answer depends on my analysis of the current problem.  If my analysis is correct it would resolve our current nightmare.  

My diagnosis is that our current schism is caused by the rise to power of labor unions and labor union values.  Labor unions emerged as the only coherent power after the ruling hereditary elite dissolved in the 1960-65 period. The evidence of this thesis is the  emergence of ‘wokism’ in the U.S and Israel at the same time. And the total union control of the California body politic where unions are the strongest in the country.

With a random legislature, labor unions would not dominate the selected bodies.  There would be union members, of course, but they would be less than 7% of the citizens and would have very little direct influence.

There you have it.  My solution and my analysis.

Global News Reading Failure

I have a wide circle of friends in Japan and I read several English language Japanese newspapers.  I also have friends in many other countries and follow the press in four of them..

Each country has its own political spectrum.  The American spectrum is from Hate Trump to Love Trump.  Almost everyone in the world thinks America is predominantly on the Hate Trump side of the spectrum, if they have any opinion about American politics.  Russian and Chinese citizens do not hold this view.

Of course, in reality, American politics is divided four ways.  Half of adult citizens don’t vote. Among the remaining half the percentage is 25% love Trump 10% are in the middle and 15% hate Trump.

Why does the world have such an incorrect Hate Trump view of American politics?

Because the American newspaper that shapes global opinion is the New York Times.  Most of the world has no idea, and I can say this for certainty about Japan, that the New York Times is 100% in the Hate Trump column and has been for a decade. The New York Times also hates Israel and has for 45 years. It has hated Jews for 80 years. 

 The New York Times is the spokes medium for the ‘Woke’ world.  Most of the world doesn’t take the Times seriously for two of its three main Woke theses.  The readers of the world do not think there are more than two genders and they doubt that America has a systemic hostility based on race.  From reading the Times articles about the multiple black elected officials the readers would guess that blacks hold more elective offices in America than are found on the entire continent of Africa.  A quick search of Google would confirm that view.  

The NYTimes view that has global concurrence is the human caused global climate Armageddon.  This is not held by Chinese, Russian, Indian or African populations.

Is this NYTimes global opinion monopoly likely to change?  Only if it is replaced by some global Chinese medium or some new trusted Internet medium.  Both are unlikely.

Fixing San Francisco

Now I’m ready to fix San Francisco.  A Japanese friend is arriving with her family and because I can’t handle guests right now I didn’t invite them to stay with me. But then I looked up the hotel they chose.  I told them to cancel the hotel and stay with me.

The hotel they found is the BEI Wyndham that rates itself a 4 star.  In fact it is at most a 1- star in a civic center neighborhood with a large and drug addled homeless population like most of downtown San Francisco. Dangerous. It also adds a $30 resort fee for each day and never mentions the fee. No resort features, not even night stands or a desk in the room. No good restaurants within five blocks. 

My mind immediately went to Sodom and Gomorrah which God destroyed because the citizens mistreated visitors.  San Francisco is Sodom and Gomorrah for sure.

So how do we fix San Francisco?

1. We find a leader of the Asian Community and have them select a new mayor and a group of supervisors.  The Asian Community has already organized a special election to replace a communist district attorney and an idiot school board. They won easily.
2. We vote on a ballot initiative to put 5 city-wide supervisors on the 9 member Board of Supervisors. The current board is elected by district and has been since 1978.  We have a bunch of totally incompetent people that never have the City as a whole as a concern.

All of this will take about five years.  Once the quiescent city leaders see that this is a path to decency they will support it.  

The negative is that the City will have a well-run government.  The weak governments of the past 175 years has meant San Francisco has been one of the most creative and vital cities in the world and most recently created the Beatniks, the Hippies and the Gay community. That global source of innovation may be lost.  

The alternative is Sodom and Gomorrah, which I can no longer countenance.

Reply to Letter From Alex

Alex, is a good friend of mine who lives in Canada. He sent me an article from the NYTtimes on the Japanese stock market. Many people send me Times articles knowing I can’t read the paper because it’s Jew hate is so deeply offensive. 

After my recent month in Tokyo I bought a Japanese ETF that reflects the whole Japanese market.  

Some mistakes in the Times article.  Tourism has not returned from China, which is the largest source of all tourism and tourist spending. That will be a great infusion when it comes.  Mostly affects department stores and hotels.

Warren Buffett bragging on the Japanese stock market is right about Japan and wrong about the trading companies he bought stock in; which is something he can't understand. The biggest trading company was my client. Trading companies can never return a net on sales much over 2-3%. But they will grow with international trade.

The China boogie man will disappear with a Trump reelection.  China is not being aggressive, we are.

Japan is strong, healthy and solving the stagnant population issue.  All good signs.  They are not nuts about 'woke' in any way.  More women are coming into the labor market; working lives are getting longer and the Japanese are not stupid about CO2 and oil.  

A well-educated, honest, hard-working population is always a good bet.  None of the rampant American crime, Trump derangement syndrome, or divisive 'woke' culture.  The Japanese are happy, optimistic and enjoying the best of modernity.  The Covid did not hit them seriously; they are inherently clean, willing to wear masks (still 90% are masking in public) and still on good trading terms with India, China, Russia and most of the Middle East.

YoMama

Do you know ‘the dozens’?

In the mid 1950s, as an undergrad at the U. of Chicago,  I had two black friends. One rich one poor. The rich one was the son of a taxi cab company owner who taught me about ‘the dozens’ and the other was an anti-racism activist who was supported by the students at Roosevelt College.

The rich one told me about a common black practice of men facing off against each other, before an audience, to master trading insults.  Most started with ‘Yo mama.’.  

One was “Yo mama is so fat when huggin’ her you have to take a piece of chalk in your hand to mark where you began.” He told me many of these.  The dozens seem to have come from Ghana.

One ‘Yo mama’ had become a jazz classic ascribed to Hoagy Carmichael, Huggin and Chalkin.

He also told me about cursing contests.  The object was to curse as long as possible without repeating.  The one I remember was ‘You ain’t nothing but a lying dillydapper, your heart pumps shit and you breathe through your asshole….. 

I later learned that my grandfather Henry J. Phillips had been a famous cursor in San Francisco Union Square in the period after WWI. He had once cursed for 30 minutes without repeating.  He had a dental office on Union Square.

The poor friend took me with him to a white barbershop on 63rd where he asked for a haircut.  The barber called the police.  It was my job to be present to keep the police from beating up my friend on the way to the police car and to bail him out.  The knowledge that this fellow was a friend of mine led to the most successful and important employment discrimination lawsuit in American history. Described in two blogs. Here and here.

Understanding America

I look at my fellow Jews who are Lefty and very close to being self-hating Jews.  Their love of the Democrat party is shocking now that it is obvious that the Left wants Jews dead.  Academia hates Jews as does the NYTimes and the other mainstream media.  Hollywood and the power elite want us dead and want the Palestinians to wipe us out.

As Ruth Wisse points out, the vast European Jewish immigration beginning in 1885 are Lefties and have been The Left since they arrived.  These people never understood where they landed nor did they try.  They lived firmly in the ignorant socialist communist world that they came from. No one ever tried to help them open their eyes and see where they had landed.

The 20th century passed these sad settlers by.  It wasn’t an American Constitutional Republic that elected Hitler and followed Stalin in the slaughter of Jewish children and their feeble protectors.  It was a strong central government that continued the pogroms of Europe.

America had two things that Jews failed to appreciate.  A government deliberately designed to be weak and grass roots. A Constitution that deliberately created a divided government run by a multitude of weak states.  And a set of Amendments designed to protect individuals and minorities.  

That is all anyone needs to know to understand and appreciate America.  Since the Jews have arrived, most of them have been part of the political movement to thwart these historic Constitutional powers.  Jews were fanatic supporters of FDR in his desire to erase Supreme Court power, to weaken state governments and the ceaseless drive of the Democrats to shackle industry, support unions and control every aspect of American life.  

America did have an hereditary elite that was anti-Jew, but Jews never noticed when, uniquely on the planet, the hereditary elite disappeared in America at the end of the 1950s.  Jews still haven’t noticed.

America did not have laws regulating Jews’ clothing or the businesses Jews could enter.  It did restrict Jews from Harvard and the elite schools but that was not like Europe where they were vastly circumscribed in every domain. 

Now the big question.  Why didn’t Jews realize that America was the great haven for them?  Jews who came before 1885 did see this and they saw that the hereditary elites were weak outside New England.  They moved everywhere else in America as my great-grandfather did.  But the mass later arrivals never left New York, never left socialism, communism and labor unions.  To this day, they have been cloistered Ghetto Jews who never left the Lefty ghetto of New York.

I Was Wrong

A few blogs back I attributed a large part of the current employment dump in high-tech to widespread understanding, from Elon Musk’s example, that more than half of tech employees are a waste.  I was wrong.  Musk found a commercial truth but his fellow tech managers are not smart enough to appreciate his discovery.

What is going on, and has been for half a year, is the consequence of the most ignorant idiotic government foreign action I’ve ever seen.  The Biden government directed American companies to stop doing business in Russia.  Many complied.  Far too many.  The U.S. government has no such power and even one company could have held up such a directive in courts for many years.

So now those American tech giants who pulled out of Russia have been slaughtered.  Microsoft, Adobe, Salesforce and a dozen others.  

Every business man on the planet looked at the American high-tech obsequiousness to a senile president and said ‘Am I going to buy high-tech software from a company that will not service me in the future if the American government is hostile to my government?’  The answer from any intelligent businessman anywhere in the world was ‘Hell no’.  Screw American high-tech, I’ll find a company somewhere else.

The American Democrat administration didn’t just do this stupid thing.  It banned Russia from using the global banking system SWIFT controlled by the U.S. which makes the dollar the universal planetary currency.

Now, the 100 nations on the planet, who are anti-American, are looking for ways to make the Yuan a major trading currency.  They will succeed and it will raise interest rates in the U.S., reduce American exports dramatically and cause a recession.  Maybe a long one. Good going, you Democrat anti-commerce idiots.

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.

Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Good Side

It is readily apparent that America without oil and gas energy will be forced to reduce its living standards.  I ignore the race and gender wars provoked by the ‘woke’ and the absurd anti-merit elements of the woke agenda because Americans will survive the turmoil of the first two and will never accept the anti-merit propositions.

America will not grow. America will learn to live at a zero growth rate. Simple living will be a pervasive choice.

I have long supported the simple living life model and wrote a book Simple Living Investments for Old Age. Of course I had simple living as a voluntary choice, not as a failure of the economic system.

From my vantage point, a simple living America will be more relaxed, will have many more small businesses, be far happier and we will have more artistic people.  America’s vigor will be channeled into new creative outlets.  The Briarpatch was a vital and exciting world.  Part of the hippy domain that I would be happy to relive.

The benefits for the world would be magnificent. One-third of the world lives in a tribal environment and that part does not want modern commerce.  They are happy with tribal life and don’t want the ever plundering modern encroachment on their lives.  That part of the world has already enjoyed the better food supplies and the improved health of the past half century.  Tribal peoples, the world over will be happy to live their tribal lives.

Looking Disaster in the Eye: The Bad Side

There are many ways to put this but the simplest and clearest for all my readers who have never left the U.S, for those who probably never will and for the few who will leave the U.S. but will not visit the two thirds of the world that is never seen by tourists: what Americans are doing to ourselves and what Americans want other humans to do to themselves is unacceptable.

We want the two thirds of the world that is poor, without cars and without a surfeit of food to suffer. We want them to live with what they have now or to live with less.  

That is what ‘woke America’ and ‘woke Europe’  is asking of the world.  ‘You poor people of the world are to live without oil, natural gas and live in societies that disdain merit.  Whatever you have now you should have less of it.’  

Don’t worry too much about us Americans.  We are already rich and live with an abundant surplus of everything.  

Despite what the ‘woke Americans’ say about the barriers to women and blacks in America, the 200 American women billionaires own more money than all the people in the poorest 50 countries in the world earn in a year and the 10 wealthiest black Americans own more than all the people in Liberia earn in a year.

 

Joel Kotkin Again

Kotkin has again come through with the most brilliant and clear statement about our current state of world affairs.

The Ukraine has made three new world alliances visible.

Here is the final sentence in his dire but vital prediction:

“Until the West wakes up from its self-referential slumbers, the tide of history may turn out less friendly to Ukraine’s loyal friends than to those who either abet aggression or maintain a steady indifference.”

City of Anarchy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Israel Today

No one who follows this blog will fail to know that I am a strong supporter of Israel and consider Bibi one of the greatest leaders in all of Jewish history.  World history for that matter.

I lived in Israel in 1958-9 when Israel was a Kibbutz socialist heaven.  It was the heaven American Lefty-Jews still romanticize. 

Bibi has been a leader who changed Israel into the most successful nation driven by modern commerce and the most successful innovative nation on the planet.

The 60% of American Jews who vote Democrat and long for the lost socialist nation of Israel, are drifting away from support of Israel. The proportion of such Democrat Jews is growing.

First to understand why this drift is happening it helps to read Israeli news.

Sarah Rinder (Mosaic 1/23/2023) has found a way to demonstrate the distance that separates these American Jews from Israel.  Here is some contemporary popular Israeli music.  Compare it to American pop music and rap.

This music references the horror of living with Arabs who kill your fellow Israelis every day, every month and every year. Here is what Rinder says about the music and the singer:

“It raises the question of whether Ben-Ari’s biblicism and Jewish allusions are charming embellishments or so central to his work that they cannot be disentangled from it. But merely to ask this question is to acknowledge that Israeli society’s shared cultural touchstones appear to be growing more and more Jewish, and traditional lines between the secular and religious populations are fading, particularly in the realms of music and art.”

Unless and until Israel can move the Gaza and West Bank Arabs out of Israel, the division between Israel and American Lefty-Reform Jews will continue to grow.

My own naive solution to the Israeli-Arab problem is to pay some Arab nations to take the West Bank and Gaza Arabs who are ready to leave (those between 13 and 25 years old).   We could start with an offer of $1 billion to take 4,000 of these Arabs.  Plenty of Arab countries are corrupt enough to want the money.  

Once the process begins, most members of the U.S. Congress and most European nations will see this as a solution and it should catch on.

I Think I’ve Got It

The question that has been bothering me is: ’Why could I buy a big house in San Francisco on one salary in 1964 at age 26 and my kids couldn’t at the same age and my grandkids certainly can’t?’

In the simplest case the wife of one kid came from a working class large family where getting a college degree was sold as a way to succeed. The degree was necessary for the license in her field but her earnings have never come close to covering the interest on the college loan even after 23 years.  There is no insight needed in that case.  College loans have drastically altered lives.

College tuition has risen at a far greater rate than other costs for 50 years; due both to the lack of international competition, and the total absence of any institutional efficiency.  Out of control college costs are the result of government subsidy and regulation.

Our whole society has faced the same problem, not just the population in the bottom seven out of ten deciles. Aside from the college loan issue there are two reasons for the decline in living resources in 50 years. 

First the genuine explosive growth of the economy has occurred after 1960 when the hereditary elite class was replaced with meritocracy.  

The elite class had previously maintained a strong control over the excessive and restrictive  functions of government.

Second, American style democracy got out of control once the restraint of the elite was displaced by union power. Unions, in every urban area, replaced the elites in America in the 1960s.  Union power is the triumph of medieval values where seniority and wage equality triumph over merit and all other modern-commercial values including hard work, personal initiative and innovation.

American style democracy turns out to be a failure in times of rapid commercial economic growth when it is combined with union government control. Suggested originally by Milton Friedman.

I saw the transition when I worked in the California legislature as a campaign manager and legislative aide in 1964. Legislators were always atypical people.  Not too bright, very tribal in their values which gave immense power to the Democrat Party. They are small-minded people determined to get re-elected by passing as many laws, often frivolous and impactful on daily life, as possible. I saw Jesse Unruh use union money and the Democrat Party to take personal control of the California government.  He later handed it off to Willie Brown.

For the past sixty years legislators have passed 500 bills annually on the state level and the same numbers on the federal level.  This has made the successful functioning of commerce nearly impossible.  

It has promoted large business over small business because economies of scale can cover the costs of dealing with overwhelming government bureaucracy.

I have worked as a consultant with a vast number and array of businesses.  I have watched their productivity stifled every day in every way by incredible and obsessive control of commerce by out-of-control government.

The extraordinary power of modern commerce to produce wealth for everyone has been negated, totally, by 60 years of ponderous growth of government regulation.

That is why my grandchildren may have technological miracles in their lives without the ability to buy a house on one person’s income.

Solution

There is a solution that I don’t expect to see in my lifetime: sortition. My book A Citizen Legislature in 1985 (with Chick Callenbach) explains how randomly selected people can serve a three-year term in a legislature and provide a truly democratic governance.  Such citizens would never increase the number of laws that would constrain them.

Uncle Dick and Carol

Dick was married to my father’s sister. Carol was a San Francisco supervisor.

Uncle Dick had his own advertising agency and hired me to work when I was in college.  It lasted a week. One job he gave me was to write radio copy for a Japanese restaurant.  Part of the copy I wrote was “Savor the cloying aroma of the succulent sukiyaki.”  Dick fired me for that sentence and he was right.  Dick didn’t live long enough to read my best selling book, 25 years later, Marketing Without Advertising. (Co-author was Salli Rasberry.)

Fifteen years after I was fired, Dick and I were still on good terms.  By then I was a well known hippie business leader and Dick was tight with the San Francisco police crowd.  I ran into him at Sansome and Bush around lunch.  Dan White had recently murdered Mayor George Moscone and Harvey Milk, both friends of mine.  Dick asked what punishment I thought White would get and I said ‘The electric chair.’  Dick said “No,” the deal had already been worked out by the DA. Joe Freitas and White’s defense lawyer, Doug Schmidt, agreed to an 8 year sentence.  Dick probably got the insight from his friend Doug Schmidt. The sentence turned out to be 7 years and White got out after 5 years. (photo George Moscone)

The trial was in late May. I was dating Carol at the time, One of six women I was dating then. Carol was a supervisor.  She had gone to the University of Chicago, which we had in common, she was very bright and lots of fun.  As a supervisor Carol carried a pistol on her all the time, on the right front of her belt. Sexy from my point of view. She drove a pick-up truck and usually wore pants with a belt.

We had a date the day before the Dan White trial started and I told her what Dick had told me.  She immediately told DA Frietas and the judge she wanted to testify.  Which she did.  

She testified that on his way out of City Hall, after killing Harvey, he went into Carol’s office to kill her. She hid under her desk.  Like most people, even with a gun in her waist, she hid and he left.

Frietas lost his reelection later that year.

I’ve never told that story in print.  Most of it can not be found anywhere else.

On my blogs I’ve told what Margo St. James told me. She repeated what Dan White’s two close police buddies told her.  They had coffee near City Hall with Dan before he went to crawl in a window in the basement of City Hall. He came by to talk to them after the murders and told them what he had done. He asked what he ‘should do next.’  They told him to go to the nearby St. Mary's Cathedral and confess to a priest and then call their friendly police detective.  (photo Harvey Milk)

The context, that we all knew at the time, was that the police were furious at the Mayor for appointing Charlie Gain as police chief. Gain was a reformer and an outsider in a very inbred police force. To keep from being murdered by other cops,  he never carried a gun and had all press conferences in front of a U.S. flag, a California flag and the San Francisco Flag.

You now know more of this specific history than anyone else alive.  There is one more silent piece no one knows.  On the night before Mayor Moscone was shot, my close friend Bob Gnaizda visited him to make sure he didn’t reappoint Dan White to the Board of Supervisors because the legal court order to integrate blacks into the hierarchy of the police department still had to be voted on by the Board and White was sure to vote against it. Bob told me about that visit only two years ago, shortly before he died.

Big Inflation Ahead

The current annualized inflation of 8% is going to continue to rise.

I identified the Biden-caused oil/gas price rise as the primary cause of the current global inflation which will undergird about eight years of inflation as the consequences play out in steel, cement and fertilizer. The price rise will work its way through the economy with a ratchet effect in wages.

Now we see the Phillips curve kick in.  The Phillips curve isn’t me, it was William Phillips who showed a statistical correlation between rising labor scarcity and rising inflation.

We currently have a very historically low unemployment rate which is labor scarcity.  This will begin kicking in to the inflation scenario.  The labor scarcity is due to three primary factors.  

• The first and most important is that many workers dropped out of the labor force during Covid-19 when they decided that the service industry was too precarious and sought training and opportunities in other fields.  
• The second was a sheer drop out of the labor force with the realization that the American work standard is too intense for comfort and easier living was a reasonable goal. 
• Third is the close income competition created by government largess that means middle-income workers saw that non-workers were earning nearly as much and decided to join the non-workers on the dole.

Inflation will be increasing.

Victor Davis Hanson

Brilliant paper on America's decline by Victor Davis Hanson.

Seizing Private Property Internationally

Maybe I’m a little sensitive in some way that most people aren’t.

When the U.S. orders a local government of a foreign country to seize a Russian oligarich’s yacht or jet it doesn’t seem right to me.

When our country was founded, we created a navy to protect American ships in the Mediterranean that were being captured by pirates.  Now we are the pirates.

In the case of the capture of jet planes the legal excuse is our existing military export laws.  The plane was built a decade ago and re-sold several times.

I have no idea, nor do I care, about the legal basis for this crude behavior.  It seems to violate every core idea of the international maritime laws and laws of air space.

It seems reckless.  Russia has already denied entry to a list of U.S. government officials in retaliation.  Russia and her allies could do much more harm.

I find it hard to imagine that any American who owns a ship, a yacht, an airplane or a piece of property that could be confiscated by a foreign country will go to sleep in comfort tonight.

Am I the only person who thinks that this sort of behavior on an international scale is contrary to core American ideals? The potential revenge consequences of this policy are incredibly stupid.

Boudin, the School Board and Me

So much ignorance in the reporting of two San Francisco recall elections locally and nationally.  I just had to write this blog quickly. This home of Nancy Pelosi has had two successful recalls in three months and all the media I see gets it completely wrong.

Why me? What is my special insight?

More than five years ago I figured out that only a modest part of San Francisco was crazy woke, but that part of the electorate was most active, aggressive and was well organized because of the strong local unions and the most powerful Democrat Party West of the Mississippi.

The local San Francisco Democrat Party elects more statewide offices with its small population than Los Angeles with a population six times greater. Six times greater and one third the elected statewide offices.

Up until 1965, San Francisco had Republican mayors, state representatives and members of Congress.  That hasn’t been true since then, since the end of the hereditary elite that I have written about in earlier blogs.  

Three of the great leaders of the Democrat Party were San Franciscans and built the local party into the Statewide mega-machine.  Pat Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Willie Brown.  The other great power was Jesse Unruh from Southern California.

What I figured out, with 45 years in local politics, was that a major part of the San Francisco electorate was Asian with conservative pro-police and pro-business values.  The Chinese had been co-opted into a strong voting group in the Democrat Party by Rose Pak who used the Democrat corruption to decisively help her voters.

The Chinese of Rose Pak along with a large Filipino group, Vietnamese and other South Asian settlers in San Francisco constituted a large near majority. This large population had common values:  they believed in the value of education, they supported the police and they were all part of the small business working population.

My idea was to start running city propositions that supported the police.  Based on these propositions I would raise money for this new pan-Asian group, find and reward the good community organizers and build a new conservative political machine.

I had to get the support of the police union leaders.  I tried for two years and failed.  I even went to the only honest politician in San Francisco, Quentin Kopp, who wouldn’t help me at the time because of his ties to the Democrat Party machine.

Those efforts five years ago are how I know why San Francisco was able to organize two recall elections and voted to recall three School Board members and a District Attorney.  

The Asian voting community was appalled by the School Board that had ruined the schools, with the student population dropping from 85,000 students in 1970 when I was involved to 43,000 today.  Many students moved to private schools and many white families moved to suburban schools. The number of classrooms and teachers remained the same and the administration expanded. The key mover in the recall was the School Boards elimination of the historic college prep high school (Lowell) because it had become 75% Asian.

The Asian community also voted to recall the openly communist District Attorney because he failed to stop the 10-fold increase in auto break-ins which affected nearly every Asian family in the City.  He allowed the open public robbery of every small retail business and the consequent closing of many chain stores that served the Asian community. He was also openly at war with the local police.

THAT is the story of the San Francisco recall elections.

Great Harm to America’s Future

That thud you heard while driving was the sound of having hit and driven over the American Golden Goose.

American industry has been getting a greater share of our GDP every year from overseas sales. That was our Golden Goose.  The incredible wealth of the San Francisco Bay Area is from the vast penetration of American tech all over the world and the resulting revenues from the Internet, phone apps and software.

Why we lose.

Just think for a moment of being a business person in some midsize country in Southeast Asia, the Middle-East or Latin America.

Let’s be an ad agency in Jakarta, a retail mall in Turkey or a floral distributor in Peru.  You want a new business program for your office computers and a good graphics program.  You want to find a retail food shop for your mall and you want to rent to a retail shop in the space next door.  You need an internationally respected audit firm.

Until Spring of 2022 the choice was easy. 

Then many U.S. woke companies abandoned their businesses in Russia: Microsoft, Adobe, McDonalds, Starbucks and Deloitte. Totally abandoned, no service no updates; abandoned.

Now you have to be concerned that your country’s government might fall on the wrong side of U.S. foreign policy like Russia did. Other countries in the world have relied on American companies but so far have not been treated as badly as Russia, except for China, Iran, India, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela.

From now on you will go to an Indian or Chinese firm first.  Both India and China will soon be offering direct competition for all big American tech firms.  For international retail brands you will go to Brazilian or South Korean companies.  For auditing you will find a Singaporian firm.

Say goodbye to American business growth overseas.  America has killed or seriously wounded its great commercial global future.

America had a great monopolistic advantage after WWII, especially in airlines and communications. The advantage lasted 75 years.  It has been thrown away, by a shortsighted government.

One Giant Apology From Me

The brilliant Ruth Wisse wants me to apologize, so I do.  I apologize for my whole family past and present; I apologize to all Americans who love America.

Ruth points out in several articles that a large swath of Jewish immigrants, beginning around 1890, came to the United States with fervent communist ideas.  That is understandable since they came from tyrannical worlds and could see no other political solution to their miserable pogrom-dominated lives.  The problem is that this tidal wave of immigration to New York grew to the millions; concentrated in a new world ghetto, this cluster of Jews never learned why America was a better alternative to communism.  They never really assimilated to their new political paradise.

This cluster of communist Jews, living in America, millions of people, never learned how attached to a horrible outmoded ideology they were.  In the 1930’s they were a dominant group in the American Communist Party and its thousands of colluding front organizations.  After WWII they remained aligned with communism and the Left.  Even as the murders of Soviet Jews became public they never denounced communism.  Even as the murderous rampages of Stalin and the Gulag become public knowledge, American Jews never publicly recanted their alliance with ultimate evil.

To this day American Jews are predominantly Lefties, unapologetically still in the same evil tradition.  The prototypical left-wing Jew is Bernie Sanders.

My mother and father were extreme Lefties.  My father became a rabbi to evangelize for Left Liberalism.  Even though his family were Californians from the 1850s and certainly were Republicans ( one of the second generation, my grandfather’s generation, was named Abraham Lincoln Phillips). My grandfather named my father Wendell after the great Boston abolitionist. 

My father became a Lefty at the U. of California and joined my mother’s New York communist clan in his 20’s.  He was so Left that I joked with him that he believed Adlai Stevenson (Democrat candidate for President twice) was more important than Moses.  

My mother’s family were the heirs to a Prussian sect of Judaism, Ethical Culture, that was a Leftist coven.  Her brother Fred Hart was an actual Marxist.  Fred made money in the stock market and was the sustaining donor of the National Guardian, a Russian communist front in the 1950s, later to become a Chinese Communist front in the 1960s. History has no record and no way of knowing that Fred provided all the Guardian’s sustaining funds from 1952 to 1972.  

My mother and her brother were the first American tourists to visit China in the mid 1960s, thanks to Fred’s vital role at the Guardian.  In that period I asked my mother why she wasn’t disturbed by the nightmares of Stalin, the Gulags and Mao. Her reply was the same as Lefties today: “Real communism has never been tried.”  

How deep was this communism?  I asked my close friend Ruth Kadish, in the mid 1990s, part of the Jewish Lefty clan, whether she had changed her mind about the guilt of Julius Rosenberg the Soviet atomic spy once the KGB files were made public.  “No, you can’t trust the anti-Soviet crowd,” she replied.

I abandoned my Lefty family tradition at age 20, having learned about the American genius from reading the Federalist Papers, Democracy in America, Animal Farm and living on an Israeli Marxist kibbutz.

It is now time for me to apologize for the terrible Lefty hogwash and blind ideology that my family, a part of the disgraceful pattern of American Jewry, have spread in this great American land.  I apologize to all Americans who love and appreciate America for my family's guilt.

Stupid and Lucky

I know the history of San Francisco because I started the first unlicensed bus tours of the City in 1972 (Third World Tours). I had to develop the spiel for the tours and train the bus drivers.  So I know that San Francisco has a long history of extremist, stupid, legislation that has often resulted in positive outcomes; lucky.  

Because the City has long had 500 appointed commissioners, nothing really gets done. The number of police officers was limited by charter to 1,500; meaning the police never even tried to be effective.  There are dozens of more legislative stupidities which is why the beatniks then the hippies settled here and why my Briarpatch had over 600 members of new small hippie businesses in San Francisco.So what is the latest legislative stupidity?  Right here: this sign is on the door of an empty restaurant and the empty grocery next door.

Our brilliant Board of Supervisors, all woke, are taxing empty retail businesses for being empty.

I can’t tell you how stupid this is.  Any business person will tell you this will not lead to any more retail rentals, it will lead to more retail rental space converted to residential and office space; the lucky outcome is different..

With more than a million square feet of retail rental space empty now because the of Covid lockdown and the perpetual homelessness destroyed retail business, much of that space will be sublet for a $1 a month to artists, dancers, yoga teachers, short term-schools and temporary office space for people who are tired of working from home.  The For Lease signs will still be up, maybe not on the store fronts but online.

That is great for the thousands of people who will get short-term nearly free space and for all the pedestrians who will now see life in the retail spaces.

Stupid new taxes will lead to the lucky outcome of more street life.

Stop Calling Political People ‘Dimwits'

That is what friends and family keep telling me. 

However, the new California political party Common Sense supports my position. The founders of Common Sense are known by me to be the anti-dimwit politicians of the last 50 years.

There are two reasons I call the political world ‘dimwit.’  First is my personal experience over a lifetime. The second is my own sense of hypocrisy.

Those who know me and those who are familiar with my blog know that I believe humans and other simians stop learning when they reach adulthood.  For humans that is roughly age 23. Only one out of 300 persons I have met in my lifetime were able to develop new ideas and new worldviews after age 23.  The rest of the people I know and knew were only able to use the worldviews they had at that age to respond to the world.  That is my core definition of ‘dimwit.’ Viewing the world based on early life experience without the additional input of adulthood generally makes one 'dimwitted.’

The single most important experience that has colored my worldview in adulthood came when I was in my mid 20s, just at the beginning of adulthood.  I was a campaign manager for a San Francisco Republican assemblyman.  My technical position, for payroll purposes, was as a legislative assistant.  That meant I spent time in Sacramento dealing with legislators and their staff.  In the entire Assembly and Senate of 120 elected officials in 1964 there were only about 4 or 5 that I considered as intellectually above average. The rest were ‘dimwits.’ The 97% became elected officials because they were egocentric, arrogant, weird people.  

Over the next decades I worked in politics on a regular basis and I knew hundreds more elected politicians.  The ratio of 2-3% who were not dimwitted and self-serving never changed.  

Now a small group of the people I knew and observed close-up, who are not ‘dimwits,’  have joined together to form a new party, the California Common Sense Party.  They have been moved to form a new party based on their own experiences that resemble mine.

This is all by way of saying that a few of these hundreds of politicians are nice people and some are decent human beings.  I even dated a few elected women. The two qualities of being nice and being politicians are not totally incompatible.  

People like former governor Jerry Brown are the exceptions.  Jerry is smart, the son of a standard politician, and he has learned to camouflage himself and pass for an ordinary politician.

Seeing this tragic fact of American democracy led me to propose that elected legislators be replaced by a random selection of ordinary people, the Greek style of selection called ‘sortition.’  I wrote a book called A Citizen Legislature at the end of the 1970’s.  (My co-author was Chick Callenbach.)

One great mind on the political scene, William F. Buckley Jr, once said that the first 2,000 names in the Boston telephone book could do a better job of governing than any group of Harvard officials. Concurring with this, decades later, was Norman Podhoretz.

My second reason for this view of pervasive politician dimwittedness is my sense of hypocrisy.  How can we see the Congress of 2018 spend two years impeaching President Trump on the claim that his election in 2016 was based on fraud brought on by Russian election interference, then denying any possibility of Biden election corruption by a new Congress in 2021 and 2022?  That is hypocrisy.  I see the same hypocrisy daily on the political scene.  Gross hypocrisy equals dimwittedness.

Should my readers wonder how ‘dimwitted’ people can raise money and perennially get reelected? The answer is that political people operate in a separate tribal system.  Most of America is based on a merit system of independent ordinary people. The political system is not; it is tribal.  

The Kennedy family seems to thrive over generations, as does the Bush family.  Political machines are tribal in San Francisco, New York, Chicago and most other cities.  Nancy Pelosi’s power comes from the money connections created by her father, Thomas D’Alessandro, a powerful politician and former mayor of Baltimore.

I do not apologize for calling politicians ‘dimwits.’ To fix the problem we need to randomly select our governing class from among ordinary citizens.

Merit vs Woke

In the first battle of merit vs woke, merit won. That was the real battle described in the last blog, the recall of the San Francisco School Board members.  

The School Board was 100% woke; changing the names of 44 schools such as Lincoln and Washington because the historic figures were not woke.  The Board wanted to paint over an historic mural of George Washington’s life.  The school finances were a total mess because of anti-merit incompetence of the board members. Lastly, the Board wanted to turn the century-old college prep school into an ordinary high school because the proportion of Asians was too high. 

The electorate of San Francisco voted unambiguously to recall the Board.  San Francisco is a heavily Democrat city with a union-run Party machine.  But Asian Americans are a meritocratic citizenry and they made their voices heard clearly with 3/4ths of the voters rejecting the wokie School Board.

This may be the beginning of the end for the woke media and the Democrat establishment.  America is one of the unique nations on the earth that is meritocratic.  In a direct confrontation between the wokies who are tribal, racist, elitist with union values on the School Board versus the American values shown in the recall, American values won.

San Francisco School Board Recall

I did nothing in the School Board recall election in San Francisco last week.  But I dealt with the same issue in 1961.

The two most powerful political groups in San Francisco, today, are the Chinese Americans who were organized in the 1980s by the late Rose Pak; they elected the mayor before the current mayor. And the Lowell High School Alumni.

Lowell was an issue for both groups in this election. The recalled School Board members destroyed Lowell as a college prep school which had existed for over a century. 

I helped organize the Lowell Alumni in 1961 when a new Lowell building was constructed and the appointed school board chose to eliminate it as a college prep school.  I say “I;” my role was to help Ruth Kadish, the most powerful person in the public school system(photo on the right).  Two years later she made me president of her powerful SCOPE, Service Committee on Public Education. 

We had no trouble in 1961, getting the alumni to write tens of thousands of letters to the School Board and the mayor, George Christopher.  The alumni are both powerful and made up of dozens of prominent citizens.  Today the alumni are heavily Asian Americans.  The school is over 50% Asian and has been for half a century.

One addendum; the Lefty press mentions the $2 million raised for the recall as 'shocking.'  That is a trivial number for people who are not innumerate.  For a billionaire, of which there are many in San Francisco, a $1 million political donation is the same as a $1.00 donation to a person with $1,000 in his pocket.

American Tyranny Started Long Ago

I am most recently disturbed by new regulations that require Venmo and Zelle to report to the IRS all transactions over $600 and require my crypto bank to report all transactions over $10,000.  

I am an ordinary American citizen who has never been to prison, never been convicted of a crime, served in the Army and paid over a million dollars in taxes (property, sales, income, excise and many other kinds of taxes.)  So what right does the U.S. government have to observe ordinary activities of my daily life? None. The ‘tyrannical’ bastards.

Tyranny is here in America. Tyranny is the best descriptor, it is generally defined as:

• Identification of Enemies/Scape goats as a Unifying Lefty Cause The Left is rallied into a frenzy over Trump and Trump supporters.
• Controlled Mass Media Sometimes the media is indirectly controlled by government, sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship is very common.
• Religion and Government are Intertwined
  The common religion of Green Eschatology is used as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious green rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the green religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.
• Corporate Power is Protected
  The Wall Street, media and business aristocracy of this nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.
• Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
  The Left almost always is governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon for national agencies to be used for personal power. 
• Fraudulent Elections
  Sometimes elections in places like Detroit and Chicago are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Some local Lefty governments typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

American tyranny started for me in the early 1960’s when DDT was a banned chemical. Universally banned.  I found hair lice on a partner and tried to buy 10% DDT powder.  Banned. It was the most effective treatment for hair lice. Today every public school in America has a hair lice problem because of this over wrought ban.  Mosquito-borne diseases in Africa continue out of control after 60 years because of the ban. Bans don’t need to be total.

Then lead was universally banned.  It was banned from paint and the most effective hull paint for boats that worked against barnacles was included in the ban. Bans don’t need to be total.

By the end of the 20th century the most effective anti-cramp pills used by millions of dancers was banned.  Then in the early 21st century an acid reduction pill for indigestion was banned with millions of users after decades of use.  

The FDIC, a government agency created to insure banks and to keep banks stable, banned banks from opening bank accounts for businesses that were stigmatized. That included marijuana businesses, companies lending money to blacks (pay-day lenders), firearms companies and a dozen others.

There seems to be no end to the government bans on personal living arrangements.  We were forbidden to buy incandescent light bulbs (2007.)  The government banned moth balls we used to protect our wool sweaters.  Banned natural gas hook-ups to all new homes in California eliminating gas stoves, gas furnaces for homes, gas hot water heaters and gas clothes dryers.  

People working for private U.S. corporations were to be fired unless they got mandatory vaccinations. On this outrage, the U.S. Supreme Court intervened to stop enforcement.

When we get a better word, I will use it. Until then, ‘American Tyranny’ is in full force.

Third World

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

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

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

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

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

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

The South Won the Civil War

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Japanese Documentaries Part 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Two Japanese Documentaries Part 1

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

There are two blogs, one on each documentary. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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