Category: Political

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.