Category: Political

“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.

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.  

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 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.

In 1971 Federal Judge Robert F. Peckham directed a settlement between Bank of California and a class of women and minorities that agreed to six of the top 18 bank members of management being women and 6 be black and other minorities within five years with funds set aside for special training.  

The agreement was signed by other major California banks, Savings and Loans, Fireman’s Fund Insurance Co. and several major New York banks. The agreement was supervised by the Federal Court of Northern California.

How did this class action lawsuit come about?  The suit was put together by Michael Phillips ( me), a former Vice President of the Bank of California and brought by Robert Gnaizda, a lead attorney with Public Advocates.

The origin of the case goes back to a visit from a black bank loan examiner to Mr. Phillips office in San Francisco. The bank employee had lunch with several other loan examiners at the Jonathan Club in Los Angeles while they were working as a team in downtown Los Angeles. They agreed to get together after work for basketball at the Club where the bank was a member. When the group arrived they were told the courts were not available. When the white loan officers returned without the black officer they were told that blacks were only allowed in the Jonathan Club for lunch.

Upon returning to the San Francisco loan examiners headquarters the group told their manager about the discrimination they had faced.  After a week with no action by the department manager, the white officers complained openly.  The embarrassed black officer felt compelled to do something. He went to Mr. Phillips to describe the situation.  Mr. Phillips had been known as a pro-black activist at the U. of Chicago and had friends in common with the black employee who was from Chicago.

Mr. Phillips wrote a brief polite note to the bank President calling attention to the disgruntlement in the Loan Examiner’s department.  The bank President was on vacation. The note went to the bank Executive Vice President, John Schutt, who was acting Bank president at the time.  Mr. Schutt was coincidentally president of the Jonathan Club.  He ordered that Mr. Phillips be fired.

Mr. Phillips, as a vice president, could not be fired. But he agreed to a generous severance package and left after a month.  

Mr. Phillips, after months of searching, found Mr. Gnaizda at the newly opened office of Public Advocates.  Mr. Phillips also found suitable class action plaintiffs and with his detailed insider knowledge of the bank prepared a case for employment discrimination,. which was brought to Northern California Federal Court.  The facts of discrimination were overwhelming and the case was promptly settled.  (Photo of Gnaizda on right)

The Bank was angry that the case had been brought and had enjoyed favorable publicity for the plaintiffs.  The Bank agreed to the extraordinary employment settlement on the condition that Mr. Phillips received no compensation.  Phillips agreed.

The Bank of California class action settlement and the many other financial co-signers of the suit made this the biggest primary case in employment discrimination law in the United States.

Nothing says more about San Francisco than this photo.  A residential apartment building in our Castro neighborhood has converted five garage spaces at ground level into small apartments.

First, San Francisco has such an aversion to automobiles that new buildings, and old ones in this case, are not required to have parking spaces for tenants.  The hostility to cars is in the local Planning Department DNA.  The building is three blocks from the local underground.  A recent building with 90 units was put on the market with million dollar apartments and zero parking spaces. Bicycles, scooters and electric skateboards are the preferred modes of transport.  Leaving old people to use Uber.  

Second, rental space is at a premium.  I haven’t seen the inside of these garages since they had cars.  They are about 200 square feet, which would rent as studios for $1,500 a month unfurnished with modest kitchen and bathroom. The only windows are the ones you see in front.

Right now San Francisco is still a techie hub with new arrivals renting beds in buildings that are converted for them with a common bathroom, kitchen and a common computer workstation room. The techies all expect to become billionaires.

Ranked Choice voting is where each ballot position allows individual voters multiple choices of candidates, usually up to five.

There is nothing ‘democratic’ about this method.  It means that in situations where a secondary candidate is running in opposition to the most popular candidate, in a close race, the opposition will win.  Nothing ‘democratic’ in that.  People who vote for the losers get five votes more than people who vote for the winner.

In four cases I’ve witnessed the opposition candidate has won in the ranked choice run-off.  Two elections in San Francisco,  the loser won; in one an outright unqualified communist won for District Attorney, in Oakland an incompetent boob won for mayor against a qualified candidate and in New York a ding bat won the Mayor’s race but the election board simply ignored the ranked choice tabulation and gave it to the largest vote getter.

The technically correct vote counting is done by starting the way a democratic race usually is counted. The candidates are arrayed from the candidate getting the most votes down to the candidate getting the least votes. 

Then ranked choice comes into play. The candidate at the bottom of the array is struck off and the people who voted for him/her get another four votes.  The loser’s voters' votes go to the other candidates they voted for.  The same is done with the votes of the people who voted for the other losers. They get four more votes.  In Oakland there were 14 rounds of votes reallocated.

When any candidate in the array gets over 50% of the total votes he/she is declared the winner.

As you can see, the most popular candidate only gets the one vote of his voters.  The losers' supporters all get four more votes.  That is why a candidate who is running as an outsider/opposition can get his/her supporters voting four times.  Giving the outsider/opposition a good chance to cross the 50% finish line first.

I’ve run four winning major political campaigns, regular- style voting, and taught campaign management to large groups of other campaign managers.

This is how I would win a ranked choice campaign.

First identify the candidates who are clearly running in opposition. Secondly identify the candidates who will clearly be at the bottom of the ticket but friendly.  Even solicit friends to run in this category of definite losers. Get four certain losers if you can.

In your campaign run with yourself as the top choice and suggest four losers as your preferred running mates. Change the order of your four losers in different campaign media.  Your object is to get your own voters to be on the list of votes among the losing candidates.

Summary:  Run your campaign with an array of four suggested allies so your supporters get extra four votes when the loser's votes are tabulated.  Make sure to change the order of the four names so as to keep them among the clear losers.  That way your own supporters will get up to four more votes and one of them will always be for you.

What am I referring to? The New York Times and the entire American establishment media.

There is already a place in Hell called the NYTimes Gallery based on the Jew-phobic owners, the Sulzbergers’, complete unwillingness to publish voluminous and accurate data about the Holocaust while it was happening.

Now the NYTimes and the entire American Democrat establishment media failed to report an August 23 vote of contempt for President Joe Biden by the British Parliament.

If you are an historian writing about American history this was an act of great importance in the 400 years of British-American relations.  You could not find it mentioned in the farcical ‘newspaper of record’ (the NYTimes) nor any other major American Democrat media.

This was not a light matter. President Joe Biden told the Brits that he would protect allied personnel during the American troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.  It was a lie and warranted a vote of contempt.

The strain on American and all allied relations will not be forgotten for decades but the event that caused it was never reported to the American public in a way that the incompetence of the American elected leader could be understood or addressed.

I am old and have lived a long, enjoyable and wonderful life.  In my declining years I have lived to see much of America become a third-world shit hole governed and ruled by an incompetent malicious swarm of anti-American fools.

The rise of the Wokies is somewhat of a surprise.  They now have millions of ordinary Americans as followers yet their positions are down right stupid. How could a person of ordinary intelligence consider America a country of extensive racism when Satya Nardella is CEO of Microsoft, Arvind Krisna is CEO of IBM and Sundar Pichai is CEO of Google? All dark skinned and  born in India.

Or the self-announced racist oppression of millionaire blacks like Oprah Winfrey, LeBron James and Meghan Markle.

It is in small part due to the wokie control of the New York media establishment and American academia, but the largest part is due to the wokie control of the major social media, Facebook and YouTube.  The wokies have eliminated all forms of rebuttal to the wokie stupidity with their cancel culture.  

It is no exaggeration to say that the intelligent voices in the anti-wokie world are far more intelligent than the leading wokie advocates.  The wokies have no equivalent to Thomas Sowell, Victor Davis Hansen, Niall Ferguson, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Glenn Loury or Shelby Steele. 

We anti-wokies need to stop the wokie censorship and we will win every argument, every discussion and every academic inquiry. We will put an end to wokie stupidity and hysteria.

How to do that is my next subject of intense thought.

The whole ‘wokie movement’ is just angry unhappy people without any substantive thought holding them together.  They see that most poor people and homeless are black and they can’t  admit to themselves that it has to do with out of control black criminality, lack of education and dysfunctional families.  They see great income disparities and they are envious;  they blame our society, despite the same pattern which exists all over the world.

The genuine problems of our society are monumental; they were created by the Left. Therefore the Left can not see them.  

• We have an out of control government bureaucracy, a severe problem that is now recognized by half of America as ‘the deep state.’  This horrible, malicious enterprise was created by 90 years of Democrat control of government.
• Some key agencies of the government are totally incompetent verging on criminal: the FBI, the CIA, the Department of Justice, Homeland Security and the IRS.
• Our schools at all levels are inferior by global standards. Unions fight to keep them substandard.
• The government and schools are, at all levels, a handmaiden of unions that abhor meritocracy. Meritocracy IS AMERICA. No ifs, ands or buts.

These are real, deep and intractable problems throughout 21st Century America.  The Left can not acknowledge these horrors because they are the creation of the Left. The Left can only raise a trivial and ignorant platform of answers: ‘wokieism.’  Blame America itself for the Left’s 90 year reign of human tragedy and the creation of an historic calamity.