Los Angeles Fires 2025

So far I know three people who have lost their houses in the Pacific Palisades fire.  I also know people in Mandeville Canyon, Altadena and Calabasas who have not lost their houses so far.

Image by Midjourney

Surfair: The Free Market is Here For the Rich

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For the first time in years, a web page actually gave me an ad that I *intentionally* clicked on, www.surfair.com, and boy am I impressed.

All you can fly in CA from private airports for one monthly fee. Let the poor suffer, the free market is here for the rich to see that they are not inconvenienced. If I had the money I would certainly do this. The poor deserve to suffer, they are scum, that is why they are poor.

www.surfair.com

Dangerous Toys Beneficial For the Education of Youth

I want to bring to your attention a threat that is inherent in the emphasis on “safe toys for children” and in the related campaign against so-called violent computer games. I contend that not only do these games provide useful real and simulated experience of the world as it is, but other countries may be way ahead of us in educating their children with dangerous toys thus leading to a threatening and ever-widening "dangerous toys" gap.

What a child learns when they are young stays with them for the rest of their lives. Therefore it is up to us, as mature and experienced parents of these innocent biped mammals to see to it that their education contains the elements that they will need for a healthy and rewarding life, if you call this living.

What are these elements of a proper education? Well certainly there is learning to read and write, learning certain social skills such as not spitting in public, learning to keep themselves relatively clean and tidy, not to chew with their mouth open, that sort of thing. Some would include in this some pillars of a basic education such as the classics of western civilization (Homer, Isaac Newton, Bulwer-Lytton, Blavatsky) and the basics of managing hedge funds and real estate development. Perhaps not all classes of society really need the latter skills and education should be tailored for the different classes. For example, the rich may have to learn how to manage hedge funds but the poor how to avoid getting bitten by rats or how to find discarded but not completely decayed food to eat so that they do not starve to death, etc.

But all of us, rich or poor, can certainly benefit from knowing that the world is, as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it, “a dangerous place”. It is a world filled with things that can drop on you and smash you flat, or people who will shoot you for a dollar, or people who think that they are entitled to distort the political system to get their way, or people who have beliefs that are dangerous to our beliefs. All of these things and more are true. So what benefit is it to educate our children to think that they do not exist? What is the point of waiting until they are adults, or nearly so, to let them in on the secret that they can easily kill themselves and others with that car or that gun? Or to keep from them the knowledge that there are rich and poor in America and that the poor have very little chance of having a decent life or receiving justice? Why keep from them the knowledge that as screwed up as this country is, they should have a look around with their own eyes and see how other countries are doing, some much better and many far worse. Or that people and nations and political groups lie every day both to the public and to themselves, often with tragic or disastrous results.

And that is what the campaign to eliminate dangerous and disturbing toys has set out to do. To hide these brutal facts from our young children out of the misguided notion that being sheltered helps them. Sure it may avoid a few hundred or thousand injuries or deaths, but at what cost? The cost is that our children do not have the first hand experience that they need to understand the world as it is.

Look at how far ahead of us the children of Afghanistan and Iraq are.  In America, misguided parents are horrified that “war toys” are produced and sold. But in Afghanistan, pretty much every boy gets their hands on an AK-47 by the time they are 10 years old and they are not toys. In America, our children do not know what an ammo dump looks like, let alone how to behave around one. But every kid in Afghanistan does. And how many American's have a relative or neighbor who is an internationally wanted terrorist? Precious few, I think.  By the time a boy turns 15 in Afghanistan, he has probably had many years experience smuggling opium over the border and killed at least one enemy of his tribe.   This experience so early in life is priceless.   

We shoot our selves in the foot, so to speak, to think that this pretense of a safe world that we construct for our children helps them or us. It just leads to shock and dismay when our privileged and self-entitled narcissist child has to face the real world. The shock may lead to total collapse and psychological disintegration. That is where this ill-considered policy leads.

But by no means does that mean that we have to start selling war toys to our children. There are other ways to get the ideas across that are more in the areas of industry and manufacturing than in warfare. My favorite is a toy my older brother had and which I loved. It was made in the very early 1960s by Mattel and it was called VAC-U-FORM.

VAC-U-FORM gave a child the ability to create vacuum molded plastic parts at will. It consisted of a very hot heating element, a vacuum pump, a contraption to press things together, sheets of thin plastic as material, and various molds to use as templates. Think of it as a 3D printer ahead of its time.

The smell of the melting plastic issuing obviously dangerous and probably cancer-causing chemicals was the joy of every teenage boy. One could easily damage oneself on the hot heating element, or on the melted plastic before it cooled. Or with exacto blades to chop out the manufactured parts. There were so many ways that a child could get themselves sent to the hospital with an irate and hysterical parent accompanying them.

Now that is the kind of toy that won the cold war. That is the kind of toy that bred tough and realistic Americans who were capable of manufacturing and surviving in this dangerous world. Its a toy that would send parents of today screaming in rage at the borderline-insane cavalier attitude of the toy designers towards safety or the lack thereof, not realizing that these toy designers were just trying to make America that much stronger.

I hope that America will come to its senses and return to these educational toys before it is too late. I could imagine a line of toy drones being used to find and disarm neighborhood land mines, for example. Or toy drones used to find insurgents hiding in the neighborhood during a play guerrilla attack. What fun that would be!

The future has so much promise if we just embrace it.

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Here is a video from the 1960s showing the VAC-U-FORM at work

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCvgvWiZNe8

The Wikipedia page on the VAC-U-FORM

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vac-u-form

Malaysian Airlines 370, CNN and Worker's RIghts

Although we do not know what happened to Malaysia Airlines 370 beyond the certainty that it is a tragedy, we must remember that every cloud has a silver lining and vice versa. The pings may fade away, but an important principle of employee / employer relations has been reaffirmed. Now Americans, and indeed the citizens of the world, can sleep at night in comfort knowing that not a shred of dignity or security is going to be allowed the worker in our global society.

I happened to be staying at a friends' house when flight 370 went missing and the next morning we watched CNN (while getting the kids off to school, yikes, trauma flashback!) when they were first using a flight simulator of a 777 in Canada to demonstrate various ideas about how to navigate a 777 and what is involved in turning off a transponder. There was a pleasant looking CNN reporter and a very young, casually dressed technician, Mitchell Casado, to demonstrate the system and act as our pilot. Mr. Casado was very informed on his topic, well spoken, and presentable. I did notice that he dressed casually (but neatly) and that worked for me. His dress would not have been out of place in any Silicon Valley business except perhaps in the most formal of circumstances, such as a funeral.

Well it didn't work for the big boss. Apparently the owner of Ufly, the company that owns the simulator, received at least two letters from old women who complained that the demo guy was giving all Canadians a bad name. So he fired Casado's ass. Out the door, mother fucker, and dont come back.

Why this is important is as follows.

Government has worked hand-in-hand with business over the last two decades or so to destroy any semblance of workers' rights. The only people with rights are and always must be the owner of the company who has the complete ability to do whatever they want with the worker for any reason. “At Will” are the operative words here. In a downturn economy with 20% or more unemployment and underemployment, with a huge number of people on food stamps, you dont want to be left out in the cold. So you had better toe the line in all ways and all times and with every bit of your energy and will or that could be you out on the street.

By reducing the employee slave to a state of fear and anxiety the proper social roles are maintained.

Our congratulations to Ufly and all Canadians for making this important point about the rights of the worker. They have no rights, whatsoever, termination can be arbitrary and unjust and that is the way it has to be to maintain the sanctity of the free enterprise system that has done so much for the rich in our two countries.

The source for the picture and the news of Casado's just and necessary termination is here.

Proper Social Conventions When Someone Insults You to Your Face

Warning: this post uses nasty and derogatory terms about ethnic groups as part of describing an event that happened to me this week in Beverly Hills.

Do you recall the first time someone slandered you to your face based on your sex, or color or ethnic group? Perhaps if you are black, it would be when someone used the "N" word?  Or if you are a woman, that you could not possibly be a scientist? Or sorry, as a Jew there is really no point in your applying for membership?   Or that you were a "fucking mick" or whatever?

Its a wonderful experience and I recommend it for everyone.  It builds character and moral fiber and also lets one evaluate one's response to a potentially confrontational social situation.   What is the right response to being insulted to your face?  Sarcasm?   A witty remark?   My own approach to this situation is to make a sharp comment about their mother and invite them to join me the next day on the field of honor.   Shall we say "pistols at dawn"?   But that is just me.

For those of my white friends who have never had this experience, I know of one very good rendition of it in film: and it is an oddly powerful soliloquy from the beginning of that little-known cold war comedy, The President's Analyst (1967).    In the movie, CIA agent Godfrey Cambridge is evaluating whether the character played by James Coburn is suitable for becoming the psychiatrist for the President of the United States.   So, Cambridge lies on the couch in Dr. Schaeffer's office and tells him the story of how as a young boy he did not know what the word "n*gger" meant and how he found out.   Its really a remarkable scene and not what one expects from a light-hearted comedy.

I believe that one's response to a vicious and/or ignorant insult should take into consideration the other person's circumstances.   What was their family life like, or their education?   Maybe society is at fault and we are not giving the individual enough slack?  What if the insulting piece of garbage we are interacting with has the misfortune of being stupid, pretty and rich?  What then?

We who come from what was formerly the middle class in this country  can not really relate to the hardships of growing up rich. The agonies of whether or not to fuck the non-gender specific musician friend, the issue of what to wear to the opening in Berlin, the problems of dealing with your dreadful little brother!   "Daddy! Preston got an airplane for his birthday and I only got a new car!  Its not fair!" Yes even these life-destroying traumatic events can occur to our rich and self-entitled elite causing them lifelong psychological damage.

You should keep these extenuating circumstances in mind as I relate this story.

I am sitting in one of my many doctor's offices this week in Beverly Hills when an attractive woman of perhaps 30 or so comes in, incensed with anger.  The name of the doctor she was going to see for the first time was not in the directory downstairs!   And when she tried to confirm her appointment she left voicemail about 1/2 hour ago and no one called her back!   In fact, the doctor had not gotten her message and gone out on an errand and they were trying to reach her.  Oh my God, that is so unprofessional she said.   She was confused and flustered, and being young and overdressed, she sat uneasily on the couch and typed madly at her latest model iPhone.

As I am talking to her, trying to calm her down a bit by telling her that these events are not about her, they are always disorganized a bit at this office.  Its part of their charm, I say.  As I am saying this, I just happen to notice that she is displaying a rather elegant, rather large watch.   Back in the old days, we would call this a more masculine watch, but of course that is not at all what we would call it today.  Something about that watch seemed familiar, and it finally occurred to me that it was very similar to the $15,000 watch that my friend Ed from England was fond of.    Now in fact I am not sure if this was really a $10,000 watch or a $20,000 one, they come in different models of course.  What a nice watch, I said.  Oh, is it, she replied?  Its something my mother gave me.  

The watch in question was in gold and seemed to be similar to this very expensive Rolex

Then I happened to notice that on her other hand she had several rings but one of them was obviously an heirloom of some sort.  It was clearly an antique ring that probably could benefit from a good polish of the setting.   These things are hard to judge if one is not an expert and can examine it under a loop, but my impression was that we were in the multiples of 10s here (10 thousands of course).   Just a guess.

This specimen is in the $35,000 range but does not accurately portray the ring in question which had a more elaborate array of diamonds around it.

So I decided to try flattery.  Noticing that she was very adept at typing at that little virtual keyboard, I told her so.  She replied with a sneer: "Its a generational thing" and went back to typing.

Thanks, babe, I really appreciate it. Old Granddad here knows the people who invented the technology you so stupidly claim as your own and in my humble opinion you should probably go fuck yourself.   But I didn't say that.    I stared at her in disbelief while I tried to think of something funny to say, and she ignored me.

Oh it must be such a burden to be rich!

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For a list of watches priced between $10,000 and $20,000 see here.