Category: Political

Aside from anthropologists, virtually no one knows what ‘culture’ is.  I didn’t know, after a decade of global travel, until I was in my 30s, what ‘culture’ is. 

‘Culture’ is the entire world that surrounds each person, including language, posture, worldview and all the implements of daily life.  Like a fish to the body of water it inhabits, we are each so immersed in our culture we don’t know it exists. Each culture is bounded by language, sometimes geography and usually by kinship. Some people, like myself, followers of Sapir-Whorf believe that different cultures are so different from each other that genuine mutual understanding is not possible (The Sapir-Whorf thesis has been written out of textbook anthropology.)  When we deal with a different culture we can only see the parts of the other culture that are part of our own.  

I’ve spent fifty years visiting and traveling in Japan, and every year I find some new Japanese behavior that I had never seen before.  It is unique to their culture and invisible to me.  For example when the Japanese see a rainbow they see two different core blues and have different names for each.  We don’t see them. Look at a ‘rainbow’ flag. One stripe is blue, not two. 

The concept of ‘cultural appropriation’ is somewhere between ignorant and absurd.  A girl in Boston putting Japanese fabric over herself has nothing to do with a Japanese kimono which takes a Japanese a half hour each day to put on and another half hour to care for including stitching together and taking apart, sometimes daily.

Dealing with non-Americans (or the many subsets of American in the U.S.) is always a troublesome area because nearly no one knows what culture is and how intractable cultural differences are.  My best example of this is native Americans.  Five tribes in Washington own casinos and have significant wealth as a result.  Not one of these tribes uses their money the way standard American culture proscribes.  None of the tribes have paved streets, street lights for night time, they still have washing machines and motorcycles on the front porch or front yard. Definitely nothing resembling suburbs. A few tribes spend their money getting medical training for tribal members, others spend their money on their own retirement facilities.  

One of the most stunning cultural blindnesses is the presence of street people (‘homeless’) in the U.S. and their absence in Japan.  In Japan there are homeless people, people who don’t want to be part of the society; many who couldn’t be if they wanted to. They live in secluded parts of the big parks with water and bathrooms but out of sight of everyone.  In the U.S. and other Puritan countries we allow the homeless to mingle with us, daily, because we view them as temporarily out-of-sorts; all are considered potentially productive members of society who are victims of some abuse, childhood abuse, medical troubles or addiction. Just given the right help, support and inducements, they will be productive members of society.  That is the Puritanical view; the Christian Protestant deep cultural view we live in. That deeply felt belief is part of our culture.  Irrational and wrong, but not subject to examination or debate.

There are many similar deeply felt worldviews that are part of our culture in addition to words, images, conceptions that are not subject to examination or even comprehension.

In all my thousands of blogs, when I use the term ‘culture’ that is what I mean.

In the previous blog post I introduced Boku Haram, a Northern Nigerian rebel group that wants to stop modernization.  I explained that their pleas represent the desires of a billion tribal people around the world.

In this blog I want to connect the goals of Boku Haram to the ‘Wokie Movement’ in the United States.

‘Boku Haram’ is Pidgin for ‘Books evil.’  A rejection of modernization by tribal people. 

How is that closely related to the ‘Wokie Movement?’  Let's begin with the Wokie view of education.  

My granddaughter in the Los Angeles public school system has been taught about the Human Caused Global Apocalypse since kindergarten. It is taught as unquestionable scientific truth.  Now the whole California education system mandates teaching 

• the systemic racism of the U.S., 
• the oppression of all non-white people and women by white males, 
• the absence of gender or intelligence as a genetic component and, most recently, 
• the view that arithmetic is a white social construct with calculations and theorems that are negotiable fabrications.  

Flowing from this anti-modern education, the major California universities and state colleges no longer use educational achievement tests as a measure of educational proficiency.

The Wokie Movement further demands that the large differential in wealth and income in most of the world be dramatically reduced because the presumed meritocracy that created income and wealth differentials is the result of oppressive white supremacy.  Nothing could be more tribal than this Wokie view.  Tribal peoples the world over prohibit major differences in wealth except for the single local tribal leader. 

Tribal societies create cohesion within tribes by emphasizing the deep familial bonds and the dangers outside the tribe.  The Wokie Movement emphasizes racial, gender and ethnic differences to strengthen tribal cohesion and hatred of outside white male supremacy. The combination is a source of group cohesion.  Hatred of police is a particular danger at the top of the list of tribal victimologies.

The phrase ‘Boku Haram’ is Pidgin English that is being used in the Northern part of Nigeria to self-describe a guerrilla movement organized to stop the modernization of the area.  Boku is ‘book’ and Haram is ‘unkosher,’ really ‘not Halal.’  The area involved in Northern Nigeria was the Bornu Empire between Mali and Cameroon.  I’ve been to both sides of the area, but never in it.

Don’t bother reading the Internet about the subject.  Wrong as usual.  The Bornu area had for centuries been influenced by the Muslim Berber traders along the Sahel border, but being illiterate, the locals considered a one inch square torn out of a Quran as an Islamic talisman.  They have little idea what Islam is.  The Boku Haram only claimed to be Muslim after getting money and arms from ISIS.  

The main tribe in the area is Kanuri, but there are dozens of languages and many trading tribes that pass through the area constantly.  

In 1962 I was hired to read all the books and manuscripts on Africa pre-1850 and record the economic activity.  My research is the core data for the subsequent economic histories of Africa. Based on that, I can say the Fulani tribe passes through the Bornu area regularly and has for centuries.

Interestingly, the Boku Haram are notorious for kidnapping entire schools of young girls. This is discussed below about the innocence of girls.

The widespread African objection to modernization is stigmatized with the word ‘corruption.’  The same word is used globally by tribal people referring to modernization. Which is the subject of this blog.

Unless you’ve spent years travelling in tribal areas of the world, you would be surprised to learn that most of the tribal world, about one billion people, use the term ‘corruption’  to describe the modernization they hold in contempt.  The modern world is disfavored when compared to their tribal world. Just look at the way Arab Palestinians live or native American tribal people live and you will understand that they don’t want modernization. They usually reject it with the term ‘corruption.’  It corrupts their tribal way of life.

I tried to form a global organization, in the 1990s, to educate the world that most tribal peoples don’t want modernization and want to be left alone.  Tribal people like trucks, buses and some of our artifacts that they can buy in local open markets like pens, jewelry, t-shirts, music playing devices and some medicines.  But the rest of our way of life is alien.  While so many people are tribal and anti-modernization, I couldn’t find enough fellow modern people to create any organization at all.  I just wanted the modernizers of the world to know that tribal people don’t want to be modernized.

We moderns do something very strange that we don’t see ourselves. We protect our young girls from knowing the actual way bribery and illegal political payments function in our world.  I know that I never explained it to my two daughters, but I let my son learn it on his own. The police hassled him because he was an early skateboarder. The Boku Haram try to save young school girls from the education system. In both cases we want girls to remain innocent.

Of course there are many things women know about our society that men don’t.   

The shielding of women from the reality of bribery and illegal political payments explains the near 100% of single women who vote for the Democrats.  The Democrats pretend to be self- righteous and innocent. Of course modern bribery is not a single party issue.  All elected officials get rich on modest salaries. But single women seem to be much more blind to the Lefty nonsense than their counterparts who are married and don’t vote Democrat.

What is the modern issue of bribery and illegal payments in politics?  It is not a single thing, nor is it the same everywhere.  When I returned to San Francisco, coming home from the University of Chicago, my car was stopped by a traffic policeman. I did what I learned to do in Chicago., I put a $20 bill in my wallet as I handed it to him.  He handed it back and said, ‘We don’t do that here.’  

In San Francisco your property taxes are related to the amount of bribery you pay to the tax authorities, your business permit is totally dependent on who you hire to get your permits and permits for repairs or construction are tied to what group does the work. Chinese-Americans do the electrical work; I even saw a permit delivered to the door for a Chinese electrical contractor I was using. Irish do carpentry and construction, Mexicans do roofing and ‘other’ Asians do plumbing.  Pick the wrong group and a permit can take months or years. 

I know Joe Donahoe who virtually lives at City Hall and represents the building trades.  Joe is the ‘bagman’ who makes permitting quick for his clients.

I was in politics in the 1960s when Nixon was defeated for President by Kennedy.  We people in Republican politics all knew that Kennedy’s team wouldn’t have won except for ballot fraud in Chicago that intentionally overrode downstate voting and the same was true in Texas for upstate voting. That was why Johnson, the Senator from Texas, was selected as Kennedy’s VP that election.

Nixon knew that the voting fraud could not be publicly exposed and reverse the election so he let the issue pass.  Trump in 2020 was naive about the issue.  

During Reconstruction the North ignored all the Southern state presidential votes because anti-black corruption was endemic. 

Our language has examples of voting fraud by big city machines and political autocrats. That was the job of New York’s Tammany Hall, of Chicago’s Daley Machine, Lousiana’s Earl Long, California’s Jesse Unruh and dozens of others before them.

Keeping women ignorant of how our society works is really a reflection of the patrilineal political world. (Except for Nancy Pelosi who learned about bribery from her father.) What is surprising is that it is never truly understood nor discussed by ordinary men or women.

Why is this particular innocence of value to society?

I am reminded of a story told to me by my close friend Margo St. James, founder of the hookers union Coyote.  When Margo first arrived in San Francisco, a true naif, a country girl from the most northwestern city in America, Bellingham, Washington, she started a house cleaning business.  One or more of her cleaning girls must have turned a trick and Margo was arrested as a ‘prostitute.’  In her trial before a judge she exclaimed she had never had sex for money and she didn’t know any ‘johns.’  The judge ruled she was a prostitute because no ordinary woman would know the term ‘john.’

Is that the kind of innocence we are trying to provide to girls?  

As usual I found material online that is far from complete and I need to add my own experience to the collection. The material I found on Ron Boise the sculptor was here and here.

In late 1963 I bought five sculptures I saw in a North Beach gallery. The Vorpal Gallery (from “the Vorpal Blade went snicker snack” Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky) was owned by Muldoon Elder.  We became close friends and remained so for many decades.  

The five sculptures were one foot high on a wooden base. They were on my mantle at three different homes.  My children grew up with them.  I finally sold them back to Muldoon in the late 1980s for a little more than I paid for them.   Interestingly, at the many parties I had at my homes, the women visitors liked the sculptures and a few men were offended.

In early 1964 the San Francisco police raided Muldoon’s gallery and seized much of the Ron Boise sculpture as obscene. The trial was a few months later. 

My first function was to talk Muldoon out of hiring the lawyer he asked to represent him, Fay Stender, a political radical who would have generated opposition just for her role in the case.  I got him to use Marshall Kause at the ACLU who brought in the trial lawyer who won the case, Ephraim Margolin.  Ephraim became a lifelong friend of mine.

For three months I ran a campaign of coffee clutches and neighborhood talks among San Francisco wealthy art patrons, because I believed, at the time, that public sentiment would influence the jury outcome.

The trial had several significant features: 

• The judge allowed Ephraim to bring in Boise‘s larger sculptures and place them around the room. One was of Harry Truman whose arm and hand pointed at the jury. 
• Another was to bring me in, as a Republican banker in a three-piece suit to testify that I bought the Boise sculpture as fine art for my home. 
• The last was my suggestion to have the director of the Legion of Art museum testify, then demand he explain the ten-foot high bodily entwined sculpture by Rodin in front of the museum that was clearly sexual.  A year after the trial he removed the heavy marble Rodin, never to be seen again.

While the jury came back with a unanimous verdict in Ron’s favor, our own poll of the jurors revealed that one woman, from a small town in Texas, was the sole hold out for six hours.

Muldoon is known widely as the gallery owner who was the main seller of M.C. Escher prints in the U.S.  His business grew rapidly with a gallery in New York and Southern California. Escher, who lived in Holland was very restrictive in his sale of prints.  Muldoon solved that problem by enlisting every good-looking woman he could entice to fly to Holland to buy as many prints as Escher would sell.  Muldoon sent a long string of women to Holland to build a very large collection for retail sale.

There are two kinds of money in politics. One is the kind of money spent on expensive law firms in Washington DC that is directed at lobbying.  The other is money spent on campaigning. The former generally works and the latter doesn’t.

My closest life-long friend, Bobby G. believed that the moneyed class has disproportionate power in politics. He changed his mind the year before he died.  I finally convinced him he was wrong, thanks to Tom Steyer and Mike Bloomberg.

Steyer and Bloomberg spent $2 billion in the past couple of years and got exactly nothing from their vast expenditures. Nothing. Not even 1% of any vote. 

As a good researcher, I always included the name Joe Bowler in every political poll I did. Joe always got between 5 and 10% of the votes in any poll.  Joe was my placebo on every list of candidates. Joe, an imaginary candidate, far out performed Steyer and Bloomberg and their billions of dollars.  Before Steyer and Bloomberg there were countless other candidates who far outspent their opponents and still lost badly. That kind of campaign money is not persuasive to voters, maybe counter-productive.

This is not to say that money spent on lobbying isn’t effective.  It often is.  You can get favorable legislation and influential candidates for only $10s of millions with the right D.C. law firms.  The California wine industry and the American milk industry prove this point. As I’ve explained in earlier blogs, D.C. law firms hire popular retired members of Congress who can walk onto the floor of Congress and persuade their former colleagues on many issues.  These deep insiders know and understand the real nature of politics.

Google and Amazon spend hundreds of millions of dollars on campaigns and get very little.  They spend tens of millions on lobbying and get a great deal.

The question I am answering is: ‘How did we get to a stage where one-third of Americans believe in more government, more even distribution of income and wealth; and every large city in the U.S. run by unions?’

I am able to trace the change back to the mid-1960’s when mainstream religions (Catholic, Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist and Episcopal) became Leftwing advocates.  Their role as champions of America and as rungs on the social-climbing ladder had disappeared. They tried to appeal to the urban immigrant neo-communists and failed because the new base was anti-theist like post war Europe.  The core pro-Americans joined the Baptist, Evangelical and Fundamentalist churches where community was the dominant chord.

Three major changes can be dated to this period. The demise of the the hereditary elite.  The purification of the Democrat Party. The decline in the relative importance of industry in America.

The underlying ground of 21st Century America began during the 1850's. It was the vast immigration of neo-communists from Europe and Eastern Europe (that includes socialists, anarchists, syndicalists, wobblies and the myriad other similar political pathologies). Together they were todays neo-communists.

These immigrants brought the European neo-communist model from Italy, Greece, the Jewish Pale of Settlement in Western Russia and from Prussia.  These people were urban settlers in the U.S. and, over the next century, gained control of the world of academic teaching, as well as the movies, theatre, arts and the intellectual milieu. In the 20th century they came to control nearly all of education and the mass media.

Understanding that the ground of the United States in urban, coastal immigrant areas was neo-communist allows us to understand the question of why this group rose to importance after the 1960’s. They didn't emerge.  They were already in place when other forces disappeared.

The hereditary elite of America was in control of the United States until the late 1950’s.  By 1970 the hereditary elites were weak and unimportant. Replaced by the long underlying ground of neo-communists.

What happened?  America had an hereditary elite from its founding.  Americans escaped its oppressive power by moving West for most of our history.  The elite controlled industry and provided jobs and income to its members via this industrial control.

The end came with World War II where officer status was given to college graduates, a population that was no longer hereditary elite, and to meritocracy in the form of field promotions and the highly technical needs of the military.

By the mid 1950’s the WWII veterans, with meritocratic skills, became the managers of industry and displaced the hereditary elite, destroying the elites ability to give jobs to their own and finance their class.

That absence of hereditary power and dominance also left local political control to the only remaining organized entity in urban areas, the unions. Unions have controlled all urban areas since then with police unions, fire unions and education unions as their power base.

Simultaneously the dominant Democrat Party expelled its racist wing, the Dixiecrats, leaving itself open to slow emerging control of membership by the unassimilated European neo-communists.  By the end of the Cold War, 1992, the anti-communists were also removed from the Democrat Party or died like Scoop Jackson, leaving it entirely to the European immigrant neo-communists.

Concurrent with these postwar changes the dominance of industrial firms in commerce was replaced with non-industrial, technical and service firms. The top firms in 1955 were GM, Exxon, U.S. Steel, GE, and Dupont.

By 1970 the top included IBM. ITT and AT&T.

By the 1990’s top corporations were in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. They became wealthy locales with neo-communists in the movie, theatre, Arts, TV and academia. Over the last half century the media became the major spokespeople for neo-communist America as well as for the guilty nouveau riche of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.

The modern political world is:

• the century long creation of our unassimilated European immigrants who brought neo-communism to coastal urban areas all over the country. They never assimilated. They found work in the non-industrial sectors.
• WWII had consequences that significantly replaced the hereditary elite with meritocratic commercial forces in the post war era.
• A replacement of industrial America after the 1980's with the neo-communist dominated non-industrial, technical, service world of commerce.  
• And changes in the Democrat Party that first purified itself of the Dixiecrats and then the anti-communist wing, leaving itself open to seizure by the neo-communist zealots.

I first became a Trump supporter when I learned from Mark Steyn that Trump had filled a large auditorium in New Hampshire in January 2016.

I had run political campaigns for a decade in the ‘60s and ‘70s I I never saw that kind of enthusiasm. By March I told all my friends in Tokyo to expect a Trump victory. They all reminded me of that this year 2017 because no one else ever warned them.

So, I have had an open mind about Trump and politics ever since then.

After his first year I want to weigh in on something new.  Many people are saying that his first year of astounding accomplishments make him one of the greatest president in our history.

I will go further, based on the rockstar reception he is getting from screaming mature women these days: he may be one of the greatest people in American history since the founding fathers. (As important as Hamilton, Washington and Madison.)

Who else has had the impact on America that Trump has had?  Some inventors like Edison and the Wright Brothers?  Some businessmen like Rockefeller, Ford, J.C. Penney, A.P.Sloan, A.P. Giannini, Thomas Watson or Sandy Weill?

Of course Trump has many years to be President and many years to be in public life.  Rising stars in politics like Jesse Ventura and Arnold Schwarzenegger have gone on to political ignominy.  

That serves as a caution for me.

It is time for me to think seriously about the conditions that could stop the modern world.

Only the United States and Israel have broadly meritocratic societies.  Japan is the only close second.  So the modern world can't arise from anywhere else.

One thing is obvious to me: pharmaceutical and medical appliance businesses are the source of all important medical and surgical advances.  All significant improvements have come from these commercial sources with the exception of Emergency Room and Trauma tools which came from the military.

Sure big  pharmaceutical companies buy up small ones where the innovation occurs.  But that is obviously because the cost of FDA approval is so high that only big companies can afford to get products to market.

If the U.S. had a government health system that stifled these companies, the radical century long improvements in health would come to a stand still.  The evidence is overwhelming, no socialist country produces any innovation in medicine or surgery.  The few innovations that occur do so because the U.S. market exists.

Innovation require several ground conditions.  The first is meritocracy.  The second is optimism.  The two are intricately related. Hereditary class societies don’t have optimism.  Look around the world.  Optimism is virtually non-existent outside the U.S. and Israel.

What about Europe?  Europe is 'decorating'.  Europe is stuck in 1914 but it is not so evident because Europeans spend all their time decorating their world to make it look contemporary.  They finally got central heating, toilets, running hot water and kitchens that make their world look like they are in 2014. It is a giant 'Potemkin' society.

The 8 years of Democrats and Obama showed that a strong socialist government squashes optimism and consequently market innovation.  The hippie revolution which gave us Apple and the tech world we are in today was pure optimism and I haven’t seen anything like it since the early 1960’s.

Could the hippie revolution occur again or could it occur in a similar form.  This is a good place to point out that the first hippie revolution followed the American Civil War with a baby boom that stretched from 1866 to 1930.  The technological innovation in that period was just as great as the one from 1946 to 2010.  (The telephone was patented in 1885 followed by the gasoline engine, radio and the airplane.)

I can not see the future to know if more wars like the Civil War and WWII will occur and influence a large non-hereditary-elite country like the U.S.  Nor can I tell if the kind of rebellion that elected President Trump will persist in the U.S.  

President Trump understands how he stands astride the great eco-Leftie-Luddite effort to quash the modern world.  Here is what he said in Poland In July of this year: “Finally, on both sides of the Atlantic, our citizens are confronted by yet another danger — one firmly within our control. This danger is invisible to some but familiar to the Poles: the steady creep of government bureaucracy that drains the vitality and wealth of the people. The West became great not because of paperwork and regulations but because people were allowed to chase their dreams and pursue their destinies.”

That is a man who understands where he stands in history.  Will there be enough Americans to support this wisdom into the future and be able to act politically with enough influence to win majority support?  

I honestly don’t know.

Politics can be fun, sometimes.

The City government of San Francisco was cutting the budget a few years ago to make more room for union pension payments.  The cost of maintaining trees on public sidewalks stood out as a visible target.  About $30 million in salaries to trim and care for street trees, became the target.  So the City passed a law that all trees on the sidewalks were to be cared for by the property owners nearest the sidewalks.

The City then proceeded to mark with white paint spots and lines all sidewalks that were cracked because of the tree roots. The bureaucrats then sent notices to the property owners to fix the sidewalks and maintain the trees.  

One close friend who was long since retired and in her 90s got the notices from the City and found she had to pay $15,000 for a new sidewalk. She was pissed.  There were thousands like her.  After about 5 years of this abuse of citizens, the citizens put a measure on the ballot to make the city responsible for all sidewalk trees.  It passed overwhelmingly.

The photo on the right is a piece of art  making fun of the former City white spots, gone wild.  Art as protest.

The second photo is a rock outside a Japanese restaurant.  When it was first put there, a few months ago, it was a  beautiful addition to the neighborhood. .Then dogs and street people began peeing on it and the bottom had to be painted to facilitate cleaning.  

Most recently it has been tagged on the unpainted top part.

I consider ‘tagging’ to be anti-art  It is designed to make the object it is on ugly.  Like new buses and new subway cars.  Taggers are the people who want the world to be ugly.  I know it is hard to believe that there are such people but it is hard to believe that we have over 1.5 million people in prison for killing, robbing and raping their fellow humans.

There are people called graffitists who paint images on public places.  Some are good, some aren’t.  I don’t put them in the same category as ‘taggers’.  Taggers are like dog owners who seem internally content to leave their dog’s poop where the dog left it.  

I read a fascinating article that I think my readers would like to know about. It is by William Voegeli, in the Claremont Review of Books, Jan. 31, 2017 “The Democratic Party’s Identity Crisis”.

It is not free but the reason it was so powerful can be seen in my understanding of what Voegeli says.

He is examining the future of the Democrat Party.  Unlike the standard demographic argument that more Latino immigrants will fill the Democrats with a permanent majority, Voegeli argues that the very nature of victim coalition building is self defeating.

There are three fundamental problems with a political strategy of building coalitions of victims.

The first and most serious problem is that there is no hope.  Whatever is promised to the victims to mitigate their anger and resentment can’t work.  If it could work it would move the voters out of the victim class into the overlord class and out of the Democrat Party.  Denigrating clusters of people as victims is self defeating because the victims depend on anger and revenge as motivations.  It is hard, if not impossible to build coalitions of angry people.  For example, creating the Black Lives Matter victim organization which focuses its hatred on police and whites will inherently alienate the minority police, their family and friends as well as the people they work with, other emergency personnel and the blacks who appreciate the need for police in their neighborhood.

Second, once in power the Party must continue to support the divisiveness and mutual hostility that created the victim groups in the first place.  It is not possible to govern effectively without unity and cooperation.  Which is why the Obama Democrat Party never accomplished anything positive and rent the social fabric every day while destroying the state and local Democrat Party at every level.  The Democrat support of the environmentalist meant attacking coal that lost the Party voters in West Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky and Pennsylvania.  The same happened with blocking the Keystone pipeline and the Dakota Access pipeline.  That alienated many union construction workers, people in the oil industry and ultimately the blue collar workers in vital swing states like Michigan and Ohio.

Lastly, to quote Voegeli who notes the people who are the supposed overlords creating the misery of the victims are called deplorables “denigrating people until they vote for you lacks a certain strategic plausibility.”  

Put simply: creating a political process that divides people into victim classes creates misery for which government is not a useful repair tool.  The Democrat Party has no ideological future.