When people are in denial, they invent alternative explanations for the things that they are in denial about. These explanations sometimes sound like utter madness. A lot of people in the United States are in complete denial about global warming. However, there are even more people who say that they accept that global warming is going on, but they deny that it has anything to do with burning fossil fuels. So, what is their explanation for why there have been so many devastating hurricanes in Florida and other states on the Gulf of Mexico over the past few years? Here are the theories that  I hear most often in the news and on social media websites from people who are in denial about global warming.

1. It’s the fault of the meteorologists. Judging from the comments on Facebook and ‘X’,  it seems that a lot of people believe that meteorologists can control the weather, not just predict and report it. Over the past month, meteorologists across the U.S. have received thousands of messages demanding that they stop creating hurricanes or directing them to Florida. American meteorologists have also received hundreds of death threats. Some TV stations have hired security guards to protect their meteorologists. Washington, DC-based meteorologist Matthew Cappucci said he has received hundreds of messages from people accusing him of changing the weather to create hurricanes with space lasers. Veteran Alabama meteorologist James Spann said he has faced a “barrage of threats.” Katie Nickolaou, a Michigan-based meteorologist, who has also received numerous death threats, wrote on ‘X’ earlier this week: “Murdering meteorologists won’t stop hurricanes.” (This reminds me of a Simpsons episode in which Springfield narrowly avoids being destroyed by a comet. As soon as the danger has passed, Moe the bartender says: “Let’s go burn down the observatory so this’ll never happen again.” The episode ends with an angry mob heading for the observatory.)

You may find this hard to believe, but a significant number of people in the United States believe that meteorologists study meteors, or that they are supposed to be studying meteors, and that they are out of their field when they study the weather. As a result, some colleges have taken the word ‘meteorology’ out of the names of their meteorology departments. Florida State University has changed the name of its “Meteorology Department” to the “Department of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences.”

2. If we ignore it, it will go away. In May, Governor Ron DeSantis signed a new Florida law banning the term ‘global warming’ in official state documents. The wide-ranging new law makes a number of changes in Florida’s energy policy. The law gives preferential treatment to natural gas over solar and wind energy. It bans offshore wind energy, even though there are no wind farms now or being planned for Florida’s coast. The bill deletes the phrase ‘climate change’ from state documents. The law orders state agencies to stop buying products that are advertised as ‘climate friendly’. The bill also gets rid of a requirement that state-purchased vehicles should be ‘fuel efficient’. DeSantis said in a post of ‘X’ that: “Florida rejects the designs of the left to weaken our energy grid, pursue a radical climate agenda, and promote foreign adversaries.” DeSantis said that the new law would protect the state from “green zealots.”

3. Nuke ’em! There’s the theory that the Air Force can break up hurricanes before they hit the U.S. with nuclear bombs; however, the ‘anti-nukers’ won’t let them do it. Donald Trump proposed dropping nuclear bombs into hurricanes several times while he was president. During one hurricane briefing at the White House, Trump said, “Why don’t we nuke them? They start forming off the coast of Africa, as they’re moving across the Atlantic, we drop a bomb inside the eye of the hurricane, and it disrupts it. Why can’t we do that?” The idea of breaking up hurricanes by dropping atomic bombs into them is not a new idea. It has been around ever since the Eisenhower administration, but scientists agreed that not only would nuking hurricanes not break them up, but even worse, it would make the rain falling from them radioactive. The myth that the Federal government could break up hurricanes with nuclear weapons is so persistent that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the U.S. government agency that predicts changes in weather and the oceans, published an online fact sheet under the heading “Tropical Cyclone Myths Page.” NOAA says: “Apart from the fact that this (nuking a hurricane) might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the trade winds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.”

4. Jewish space lasers. Some major social media influencers are claiming that sinister forces are creating and directing hurricanes towards Republican states in order to get liberal Democrats elected. Congresswoman Majorie Taylor Greene said after Hurricane Milton: “Yes. They can control the weather. It’s ridiculous to lie and say it can’t be done.” Greene didn’t say who ‘they’ are. Her post and its reposts about this on ‘X’ have been viewed over 40 million times. Marjorie Taylor Greene also claimed that a Jewish-financed laser in outer space started one of California’s worst forest fires in 2018.  Most people have forgotten about the Jewish space laser theory, but Marjorie Taylor Greene has not. In April of this year, Greene introduced an amendment to a foreign aid bill to divert some of the money from Israel to developing U.S. military space lasers aimed at the U.S.-Mexican border.

It is easy to laugh at conspiracy theories like these, but they aren’t jokes. If people believe that global warming is a hoax, then they will vote for politicians who share that view, or at least claim that they do. Donald Trump says that if he is elected president, he will end the $7,500 tax credit for buying an EV (electric vehicle). His running mate J.D. Vance says that Trump will replace the $7,500 EV tax credit with a $7,500 tax credit for buying a fossil fuel-powered car instead. At MAGA rallies, there is enthusiastic approval for Vance’s proposal.

I know somebody who believes that the Air Force has a secret base in Alaska where they have a machine that controls the weather. He believes, as do many others, that a government agent can type in a coded message or turn some dials and knobs on this weather machine and create hurricanes, tornadoes, blizzards, floods, or droughts wherever they want them. Now – what are the odds that someone who believes that is going to vote for politicians who are committed to saving the Earth from global warming?

All my leases ban smoking. When I first started renting apartments, my leases didn’t say anything about smoking. I used to think that landlords who banned smoking were just trying to impose their personal feelings or religious views on their tenants, but an incident happened in 1985 that completely changed my opinion about this.

I had a tenant who rented a small cottage from me. He smoked a pack of cigarettes every day. There are 20 cigarettes in a pack. It’s not unusual for someone to smoke 20 cigarettes a day. I’ve known people who smoked more than that. Although this guy was a tenant of mine for many years, I don’t think he ever opened a window, at least I never saw an open window when I visited him. In 1985, he moved out. It was only after he was gone, and the cottage was empty, that I realized that this guy’s smoking was going to cost me money, a lot of money. 

The Walls. First, the walls were brown. The brown color on the walls got darker as it went up the walls and onto the ceiling. That is because cigarette smoke rises. As I looked around at the walls of the cottage, I thought: “If this is what the walls look like, then what do this guy’s lungs look like?” Also, the walls were sticky. If you touched the walls, you had to wash your hands afterwards because this sticky stuff didn’t just wipe off. It was like getting maple syrup on your fingers. I had a painter scrub the walls with TSP (trisodium phosphate), but that was only partially effective in removing the cigarette smoke stains. Then the painter painted the entire cottage. Initially, it looked fine, but a few days after the paint dried, the tar and nicotine stains bled through the new paint, so I had to have the painter return and paint the cottage again, this time with wall sealer. When the wall sealer dried, the painter returned and painted the apartment yet again. That meant that I had to pay a painter to wash the walls with TSP and then paint this cottage 3 times. AS you can imagine, that cost me a lot of money. If you ever have to do a job like this yourself, I recommend ‘Kilz 2’. It’s a very effective stain sealer. It smells awful, but it really works in sealing in nicotine stains.

The Carpets. Then came the carpet. I had the carpets shampooed, but that didn’t work. The smell was unaffected by the shampooing. I had to have the carpets and the pads under them taken to the dump. Unfortunately, the cigarette tars and nicotine had gone through the carpet and the pad and into the concrete underneath. So then I had my painter return and paint the concrete slab with sealer. Then, I had new carpets and pads installed. That was another big expense.

The Cabinets. Everything in the cottage smelled of cigarette smoke. The tar permeated the oak kitchen and bathroom cabinets. I thought I was going to have to replace them, but fortunately, I found a cleaner who specialized in “tobacco smoke remediation.” The job took her a whole day. She was expensive, but whatever she did, it worked. I didn’t have to replace the cabinets. However, I did have to replace all the venetian blinds.

Naturally, while all this work was going on, I couldn’t rent this cottage. All together, I lost 2 month’s rent. When I added up all my expenses, the tobacco remediation cost me over a year’s rent. After this was over, I started putting ‘no smoking’ clauses in all my ads and leases. I ban smoking, not because I want to impose my morality on other people, but because smoking is just too damned expensive – for me!

Below are some photos of apartments that were occupied by long-term cigarette smokers. Look at the photos of the exteriors of these apartment houses. In 2 photos, you can see the window shades of a smoker compared to the window shades of a non-smoker. In another photo, you can see a furnace filter from a smoker’s apartment and the filter from a non-smoker. The landlord replaced all the furnace filters at the same time. Compare the light bulb from a smoker’s bathroom vs. a non-smoker.

SMOKING IN THE GOOD OLD DAYS.

People used to smoke a lot more than they do today. Even adjusted for inflation, cigarettes used to be cheap. I can recall when cigarettes cost 25 cents a pack. All states had minimum age requirements to buy cigarettes, but those laws were unenforceable. Kids could buy cigarettes from vending machines, and cigarette vending machines were everywhere. The only place where cigarette smoke really bothered me was on airplanes. It didn’t matter where you sat on an airplane in those days. The smoke was everywhere. Stewardesses used to walk up and down the aisles giving away little packages of free cigarettes to passengers. People could also smoke cigars and pipes on airplanes. Every arm rest had an ashtray built into it. By the end of a flight, I was squinting, my eyes were itchy, and my throat hurt. Some people chain smoked all day. It wasn’t unusual for cigarette smokers to smoke 2 or even 3 packs a day. That’s 40 to 60 cigarettes. John Wayne famously smoked 100 cigarettes a day. My father was 1 of 5 siblings. My Aunt Bessie was only 1 of the 5 who didn’t smoke at all. Aunt Bessie was the first born of the 5, but she outlived all the others, most of whom died of cancer. There’s a lesson in that.

CAN YOU BUY A STAR? 

No. It is hard for me to believe that tens of thousands of people fall for this scam, but every year, just before Christmas, lots of companies buy ‘deeds’ or naming rights to stars. These companies advertise on TV just before Valentine’s Day as well. Even though Christmas is several months away, I’ve already seen ads on TV from companies selling stars. Their ads claim that naming a star for your spouse or sweetheart is an ideal romantic gift, and naming a star for a dead relative is the best way to honor that person; however, you can’t own a star or name a star. No one can. You can find many companies in this business by typing ‘buy a star’ on Google Search. They use terms like ‘official star registry’ and ‘international stellar registry’ to make them sound official. What you get for your money is a certificate that looks like an official document that says that you own a star or that a star now has your name on it; however, no one will recognize that certificate except you. This is a scam. Only the International Astronomical Union (IAU) can name stars, and the IAU does not sell stars or star naming rights.

THE MOON MAN.

If you were living in Berkeley in the 1970s, you probably remember Barry McArdle, the ‘Moon Man.’ He appeared daily at the entrance to U.C. Berkeley dressed in a silver space suit. He made a nice living selling land on the moon. For $19.95, he would sell you a certificate saying that you owned an acre on the moon. He gave a discount for bulk purchases. The California Department of Real Estate tried to shut him down, pointing out that he did not have a real estate salesman’s license and that he did not own the moon; however, McArdle found a legal loophole that befuddled the government prosecutors. The United Nations had a treaty that said that no government owned the moon or any portion of it. The United States signed that treaty. McArdle pointed out that while the treaty said that no government could own the moon, it said nothing about individuals owning the moon or pieces of it. Ardle frequently took in over $400 a day selling lunar acreage at Sproul Plaza. That’s well over $1,000 a day in today’s money. Ultimately, he sold over 100,000 acres on the moon.

WHAT IS FAT-FREE HALF & HALF?

Almost every supermarket sells fat-free half & half. Despite what the label says, there is no such thing as fat-free half & half. By definition, half & half is half milk and half cream; therefore, fat-free half & half is a misnomer. It isn’t half any one one thing and half of something else. Fat-free half & half is just thickened skim milk. Most brands of fat-free half & half are thickened with carrageenan. Carrageenan is a highly processed extract of seaweed.  Carrageenan has no nutritional value. It is banned in Europe because of its association with a number of diseases, including cancer. Fat-free half & half is not a diet food, although the name of the product may give you that impression. All major brands of fat-free half & half contain sugar and/or corn syrup and a variety of preservatives. Fat-free half & half will not improve your health or help you lose weight. In coffee, it tastes like skim milk.

NO! The president of the United States can be born anywhere in the world. There is a widely believed myth that there is a provision somewhere in the Constitution that says that the president must be born in the United States. This myth has been around for a very long time. I have seen it mentioned in movies made in the 1930s. If anyone knows the origin of this myth, let me know. Donald Trump did not invent the birther myth, but it made Donald Trump the head of a national political movement.

The Constitution says that the president must be a ‘natural born citizen’, but the Constitution does not define ‘natural born citizen’. The Supreme Court has never defined ‘natural born citizen’, but legal scholars seem to agree that it does not mean the same thing as ‘born in the United States’. 

OTHER PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES. 

There have been lots of presidential candidates who were born outside the United States. None of them was ever elected president, so the Supreme Court has never had to define the term ‘natural born citizen.’

Ted Cruz was born in Canada. Ted Cruz ran against Donald Trump in 2016 for the Republican nomination. Although Donald Trump frequently mentioned the fact that Cruz was born in Canada during the campaign and during the candidate debates, Trump never claimed that it disqualified Cruz from being president.

John McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. There’s more about him below.

Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate for president in 1964. At the time, some people questioned whether Goldwater was a ‘natural born citizen.’ Barry Goldwater was born in Arizona in 1910, but Arizona didn’t become a state until 1912. That meant that Barry Goldwater was not born in the United States.

George Romney ran for president in 1968, but GOP voters gave the nomination to Richard Nixon. After Watergate, many Republicans regretted that they didn’t give the nomination to Romney instead. George Romney was the father of Mitt Romney. George Romney was a very interesting person. He was born in Chihuahua, Mexico where his parents and grandparents lived.

George Romney became nationally famous as the man who saved American Motors, a relatively small auto manufacturer that was going bankrupt when he took over the company. Romney discontinued its smaller brands, including Nash and Hudson, and focused on the Rambler. Romney made the Rambler one of the best-selling and most profitable cars in the U.S. by adding some innovative features that consumers liked. 

Air Conditioning. One of the features that Romney offered Rambler buyers was air conditioning. Air conditioning could come with the car or be added later at any Rambler dealer for $395. This was the lowest price any car company charged for air conditioning. Prior to the 1950s, air conditioning was usually only available in luxury cars like Cadillac and Lincoln. Most cars sold in the U.S. didn’t have air conditioning or offer it as an add-on. Romney felt that middle-class car buyers would want air conditioning in a car if it was available at a reasonable price, and he was right. Sales and profits skyrocketed. The stock of American Motors went from $7 a share to $90 during the Romney years, making George Romney millions on his stock options. It also made the company’s workers millions because Romney had instituted a profit-sharing plan when he took over management of the company. 

George Romney grew up in Los Angeles and Salt Lake City. I wonder if that affected his feeling that there was a bigger market for air conditioning in cars than the leaders of the Big 3 automakers imagined. Have you ever been in Los Angeles or Salt Lake City in late summer – and in a car without air conditioning? Yuck! Based on his success at American Motors, Romney was elected governor of Michigan. I met George Romney at a banquet at the Oakland Hilton when he was Secretary of HUD (Housing and Urban Development). During his speech, Romney mentioned that he was “born in old Mexico”. He never tried to hide the fact that he was born in Mexico when he ran for president, but I don’t recall anyone claiming that he couldn’t be president because of that.

Birth Certificates. It is also a myth that the president has to have a birth certificate showing that he was born in the United States. George Washington did not have a birth certificate. Neither did Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, or William McKinley. In fact, no 18th or 19th Century U.S. president had a birth certificate. The idea of issuing a certificate when a baby is born did not become a common practice in the United States until the 20th Century. None of the people who wrote the U.S. Constitution had birth certificates.

Personally, I believe and have always believed that racism was the underlying force behind the birther movement. Barack Obama was born in the United States, and nobody has ever produced any evidence to the contrary. Barack Obama had a birth certificate, which he made public, and the announcement of his birth appeared in Honolulu’s 2 daily newspapers at the time of his birth. In 2008, Barack Obama ran against John McCain for president. Ironically, McCain was not born in the United States. McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone, which was never part of the United States. The canal zone was on land that the United States recognized as being part of the country of Panama. The U.S. leased the canal zone from Panama, and when the lease expired, the U.S. returned the canal zone to Panama. John McCain never claimed that he was born in the United States, but he was white, rich, and had a British name. So – if racism was not the force between the birther movement, then what was it?

BEFORE SEPHORA, THERE WAS WHITE LEAD FACE CREAM.

If you were an aristocrat in 1700, and the king invited you to court, and you wanted to make a good impression, you would come with your face covered with white lead face cream and rouge on your cheeks. (See pictures below.) You may have seen movies or paintings in which European aristocrats looked like this. How did this bizarre look become a fashion trend? It was started by Queen Elizabeth 1. She had smallpox which left her face badly scarred. She painted her face with white lead to hide the smallpox scars. She also began wearing wigs as her red hair turned gray to create what Elizabeth called ‘the mask of youth.’ This look became a fashion trend all over Europe among the aristocracy, and it continued for over 200 years. Many of these aristocrats, including Elizabeth, eventually died from lead poisoning.

Why did they do it? It wasn’t because they didn’t know that lead is poisonous. People have known that lead is toxic since ancient times. Even so, rich people in Rome drank water from lead pipes in their homes and drank wine from lead goblets, and many of them died from lead poisoning. Lead was a common ingredient in cosmetics in the United States until it was banned by the Food, Drug, and Cosmetic Act of 1938. An exception was made for hair dye, where lead continued to be used until 2023, when lead in hair products was finally banned by the FDA. If you have old hair dye, ‘Grecian Formula’, or other hair coloring products in your home, you should check to see if there is lead in them before using them. 2023 was just last year! If in doubt, dump them!

Arsenic. Beginning in the 19th Century, governments in Europe began banning the sale of lead face cream, so manufacturers started looking for an alternative product they could sell. They came up with arsenic skin cream. Arsenic skin cream removes blemishes, lightens dark spots, and shrinks wrinkles. It actually does work, but like lead face cream, the arsenic is absorbed into the skin and will eventually kill the user. Arsenic skin cream was sold everywhere in the United States. Below is an ad from the 1906 Sears Roebuck catalog promoting their brand of arsenic beauty wafers. When Teddy Roosevelt created the FDA, one of the first products they banned was arsenic skin cream. I wonder what is in cosmetics today that people will discover is toxic 10 or 20 years from now.

Food processors are very good at using words to make their products sound healthier than they really are. They know that people will pay more money for healthier products. For example, when a food processor says that a product is ‘naturally flavored’, they know that consumers will pay more for it because ‘naturally flavored’ sounds healthier than ‘artificially flavored.’

But – natural flavors are not natural. Both natural and artificial flavors are made in laboratories. So – what is the difference between them? ​Natural flavors come from natural sources; however, natural flavors ​often do not always come from the implied source. For example, ‘natural coconut extract’ does not come from coconuts.​ It is made from other plants, plants that smell like coconut after​ processing. Natural flavor​s often come from sources that you would never suspect. For example, ‘natural strawberry flavor’ is often made from castoreum, a yellowish secretion extracted from beaver urine. Beavers produce castoreum to scent-mark their territory. Yes, beaver urine is a ‘natural product’, but would ​people buy ‘naturally flavored strawberry ice cream’ if ​they knew that the ‘natural flavor’ was made from beaver urine?​ They aren’t required to put that on the label, and nobody does.

Is There Beaver Urine in Your Strawberry Ice Cream?​ ​Read the ingredients label. If the label lists ‘natural flavor’, you should be suspicious. Here is what it says on the ingredients label on Haagen Dazs strawberry ice cream: “Cream, skim milk, strawberries, cane sugar, egg yolks.” ​Notice that there’s no ‘natural flavor’ in it. Haagen Dazs isn’t the only brand of ice cream made from real strawberries.

Prior to 1906, food processors were not required to list ingredients on their product labels. Then Teddy Roosevelt got Congress to pass the Pure Food and Drug Act. Within 2 years, half the sausage makers in the U.S. went out of business. When consumers found out what was really in their hot dogs, nobody would buy them.

What is Artificial Strawberry Flavor Made From? According to the answer I got from a company that makes artificial strawberry extract, it is made from “Ethyl methylphenylglycidate which is made by condensing acetophenone and the ethyl ester of monochloroacetic acid.” I have no idea what any of that means.

Is Castoreum Kosher? I was once at a commercial food show at Moscone Center in San Francisco. There was a booth there from ‘OU’, a kosher certifying organization. The men working in the booth all looked like Orthodox rabbis. I asked one of them if he knew what castoreum is and whether it is kosher. He said he did kn​ow what castoreum ​is and said: “You cannot make kosher food from something that came out of a beaver’s rear end.” ​I remember that he gave me a stern look​ as he said that.

WORST APPLICANT EVER.

What Do You Do With the Money? Every once in a while, I get an application from somebody who doesn’t understand the concept of rent. These people are invariably ‘trust fund babies’, people who were born with a lot of inherited wealth. They often grow up knowing few working class people aside from their household servants. They are often sadly unprepared to leave home and live in the real world. Now, not all people with great inherited wealth are like this. Some are. some aren’t.

Many years ago, I got an application for a house I owned in Oakland from a woman named Amanda. Amanda was an incoming student at U.C. Berkeley. She was intelligent, well dressed, pretty, and polite. After Amanda filled out a rental application form, I asked Amanda if she had any questions. She said: “Yes. I’ve never rented a house before.” Amanda told me that her family had a money manager, and that he “usually takes care of things like this.” Then she said: “Now, I want to be sure I understand this. If I rent this house, then I’ll have to give you $1,200 a month. Is that right?” I said: “Yes.” Amanda thought about that and then said: “And what do you do with the money?” I shrugged my shoulders and said: “I spend it.” Amanda smiled and said: “No, seriously. What do you do with the money?” I repeated: “I spend it.” The smile vanished from Amanda’s face when she realized that I was serious. It was replaced by a look of disbelief. She said: “You can’t do that!” At this point, I knew I was dealing with someone who had grown up with too much money. I had received applications from people like Amanda before, so I knew what to say. I said: “Amanda, paying rent isn’t like putting money into your bank account.  When you give me a rent check, it becomes my money, and I can spend it any way I like.” Amanda wasn’t stupid, but nobody had explained Capitalism to her before.  Amanda thought that paying rent was like putting money into a savings account – her savings account. She thought that when a tenant moves out of an apartment, the landlord returns all the rent he received. (I am sure that tenants everywhere would be very happy if rent actually worked that way, but of course, it doesn’t.) The next day, Amanda called me on the phone to tell me that she was withdrawing her rental application. I was expecting that, and I wasn’t sorry. Tenants like Amanda are always troublesome for landlords.

A few months later, I ran into Amanda at a bookstore in downtown Berkeley. We had a very nice conversation. Amanda told me that after she withdrew her application with me, she called her father and told him what happened. Her father assumed that Amanda understood the concept of rent, and when he realized that she didn’t, he decided that he better get involved in finding Amanda a place to live. So he came to Berkeley and purchased a house on Le Conte Avenue, 2 blocks from campus, for Amanda to live in. Amanda told me that she was now living in the house, rent-free until she graduates. Amanda said: “You know Mark, this is much nicer than renting!” Well, I couldn’t argue with that! I did wonder if Amanda was aware of the fact that not all of the parents of U.C. Berkeley students have the financial wherewithal to buy houses for their children. Amanda’s father paid over $500,000 for the house. Today, that house would probably sell for over $2 million, so he has done well for himself if he still owns it. Amanda was not unique. There are other Cal students who live in houses near campus that their parents bought for them to live in. There are realtors in Berkeley who specialize in selling houses to people like Amanda’s father.

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If you are taking a trip, don’t announce your travel plans on social media websites. There are professional house burglars who look for such announcements, and they have computer programs to help them find them. It is much safer to discuss your trip after you return home. I have written about this several times before, but I keep seeing travel announcements from people I know on internet sites, websites that anyone can access. It is equally dangerous to post photos that you take as you travel. If a burglar sees a Facebook post with a photo that you just took of the Eiffel Tower, then he knows you are not at home. – unless, of course, if you live in Paris. Curb your enthusiasm to tell people about your trip or show them the photos you took until you get back home and mention the fact that you are back home in your post.

A CITY OF RICH AND POOR.

When I came to Berkeley in 1972, most of the houses in this city were owned and occupied by middle-class working people. My neighbor on one side of my house was a mailman and his family. My neighbor on the other side was a man who owned his own taxicab. People like that can’t buy houses in Berkeley anymore. Berkeley has reverted from a working-class city to a place more like medieval Europe, where the land was owned by rich people, and most of the rest of the population were tenants. Today, if you own a house in Berkeley, you’re probably a millionaire, at least on paper. The average house in Berkeley sells for over a million dollars, and the big new buildings popping up all over town are all apartments. None of them are condos. The people living in them will never be able to move up to a bigger, better house because they will never have any equity. Whatever increase in value the building has will go to the real estate investment trusts and rich individuals who own them.

HOME OWNERSHIP IS BECOMING MORE ELUSIVE EVERYWHERE IN THE U.S.

This isn’t just going on in Berkeley and other California coastal cities. The ability of working people to buy a home, a first home, has been gradually slipping away for over 60 years. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1960, the average house in the United States sold for $11,900 while the median family income was $5,600. In other words, the price-to-income ratio was about 2 to 1. However, in 2020, 60 years later, the average house in America sold for $240,000 and the average family income was $69,000, a ratio of 3.5 to 1. This didn’t happen all at once. The home affordability ratio has been getting worse for Americans every year for over 60 years. In 1960, 68 out of every 100 American families could afford to buy a house. Today, it’s just 43 out of 100.

THE PAIN OF THE WORKING CLASS.

I believe the rise of political extremism in America today is the result of the economic pain of the working-class.  Young adults are more deeply in debt than their parents were at their age – and they know it. They have more student and personal debt than their parents, and their odds of ever owning their own home get less likely every year – and they know it. A lot of Americans are economically desperate, which explains the rise of demagogues, politicians who demonize unpopular minorities and offer quick and easy solutions to complex problems. Beware! History tells us that desperate people turn to desperate solutions, and that usually doesn’t work out well for that society or the world around them.

PAYING FOR COLLEGE.

Besides home ownership, the ability of working-class Americans to pay for college is also slipping away. When I went to college in the 1960s, it was possible for college students to work their way through college, but I don’t hear undergraduate students using that expression anymore – ‘working my way through college.’ The cost of going to college and student debt have both been rising faster than inflation since the 1960s.. In just the past 15 years, student debt in the U.S. has tripled.

Chocolate Chip Cookies. I went to the University of Maryland. I knew a girl in my dorm complex who paid for her college education by making chocolate chip cookies. She made them in her dorm in a convection oven. She left the door and window of her room open when she was baking cookies, and she had a fan that blew the aroma of the chocolate chip cookies up and down the hall. It was diabolical! Students lined up outside her room to buy cookies every night. She told me that she made enough money selling cookies to pay for her college education.

Sandwiches. I did something similar. I paid for college by making and selling sandwiches in my dorm at night. From 7PM to 9PM, I sold cold cut subs in my dorm’s common room. That is how I paid for education. It was possible to pay for college back then doing things like this, but what about now? Could a college student today pay for college, including rent, food, and books by selling cookies or subs?

DON’T PAY FOR GOOGLE STORAGE.

Are you paying Google for storage space? Google gives you 15GB of free storage space. If you have had a Gmail account for a long time, you may have been getting messages from them that you are almost out of storage space and that if you want more storage space, you will have to pay them monthly for it. Most people really don’t need more than 15GB of storage space. If you are running out of Google storage space, it is probably because you are storing a lot of email attachments and other stuff that you neither need nor want. Here’s an easy way to get rid of unwanted email attachments, which for most people is the main problem.This is actually very easy to do, and you’ll save money too!

1.  First, do this job on your desktop computer, not your cell phone or iPad. You will have an easier time viewing and managing the information.

2.  Open your Gmail account.

3.  To see all the emails that have attachments, go to the ‘search mail’ bar at the top of the page and type “has:attachment”. Don’t include my quotation makers. You will see a list of all your emails that they are storing that have attachments.

4.  The older an email, the less likely it is that you will want to save either the email or the attachment. 

5.  To see emails with attachments that are over a year old first, go to the box marked “Any time” and click “Older than a year.”

6.  To see your very oldest emails with attachments first, click “advanced search” after you have done Step #5 above.

7.  Go to the line “change the date” and change the year to one closer to when you opened your Gmail account.

Don’t try to delete all your unwanted emails with attachments at once. Google could be storing hundreds or even thousands of unwanted attachments for you. But if you delete 10 or 20 of them at a time, eventually the notice from Google that you are running out of free storage space will disappear.

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You may have heard stories in the news about the property insurance crisis in Florida, where insurance has become very expensive and very hard to get, but things are becoming just as bad here in California. State Farm and Allstate have stopped issuing new property insurance policies in California, and Farmers has capped the number of new policies they will sell here. These 3 companie​s provide 40% of all the property insurance in California. Many ​other insurance companies have also left the California market.

The main reasons for this are that that insurance payouts for wildfire losses have skyrocketed along with repair and reconstruction costs. Plus, the insurance industry considers California an overregulated and unfriendly place to do business. The state legislature should be taking action to keep insurance companies here in California, but they are doing just the opposite. The legislature is ​getting ready to vote on a ​bill (AB2216) requiring landlords to accept pets and prohibiting landlords from asking any questions about an applicant’s pet prior to approving the application. An insurance company may not care if they see a couple of 20-pound dachshunds in an apartment house they insure, but what do you think will do if they see pit bulls or 100-pound rottweilers there?

SECURITY DEPOSITS.

As I said in my February newsletter, the California legislature recently passed a new law limiting the amount of security deposits in large apartment rentals. The maximum security deposit used to be 2 month’s rent. It is now 1 month’s rent. The insurance industry considers this another unfriendly law. After all, the less money a landlord has to cover the cost of damages done by a tenant, the more likely he will be to file a claim with his insurance company if he has a loss. How this new law might affect the insurance industry was never taken into consideration during the debate over this law. By itself, this law isn’t going to drive insurance companies out of the state, but the cumulative effect of lots of laws like this make California look like an increasingly risky and expensive place for insurance companies to do business.

HOW TO REDUCE YOUR RISK OF GETTING YOUR INSURANCE CANCELLED.

If your insurance company is leaving the state, there is nothing you can do about that; however, there is a lot you can do to reduce the chance that you will get a non-renewal letter on your home or rental property. That’s by making your property look less risky to an insurance company. Keep in mind that in addition to personal inspectors, insurance companies now also use drones to look over the properties they insure.

1.    Replace your roof as soon as possible if the roof is coming to the end of its useful life. A worn-out roof may not be visible from the street, but it is the first thing that a drone sees. An insurance company views a worn-out roof as evidence of general neglect of the property.

2.    Keep your roof, gutters, and yards free of debris.

3.    Make sure the trees and bushes on your property are well maintained. Cut back tree branches that overhang your building or that are dead.

4.    Don’t use yards, walkways​, stairs, or porches for storage.

5.    Keep your decks and railings in good condition. If you have to replace a ground-level wood deck, replace it with concrete pavers.

6.    There should be no junk outside the building.

7.    Look over your property regularly. The main risk property insurance companies are looking for in California are fire risks. Insurance companies don’t like to see vegetation right up against a building they insure. Try to keep vegetation at least 5 feet away from the building. Fill this area with gravel or concrete, not grass or tree bark.

​WORST APPLICANT EVER.

It Was Police Brutality! This story illustrates why I want to be able to question applicant​s about their pets. I used to own a house near the Rockridge BART station. Once, when it was up for rent, I got a phone call from a man who said: “I saw your listing. It says you’ll allow a dog.” I said: “Yes. That’s right.” He said: “What about 2 dogs?” I said: “No. I’m only allowing 1 dog.” He said: “OK” and hung up. A few days later, this same guy called back and said: “Is your house on Canning Street still available?” I said: “Yes, it is still available, but didn’t you call me a few days ago, and didn’t you tell me that you have 2 dogs? I’m still only allowing 1 dog.” He said: “Yeah, we did speak a few days ago, and I had 2 dogs then, but I’ve only got 1 dog now.” I was suspicious. I asked: “What happened to your other dog?” He said: “A cop shot him.” I said: “A policeman shot your dog? Why?” He said: “It was police brutality. It was so sad. He was the gentlest dog I ever had.” I asked: “What happened?”  He said: “My dog was playing with the mailman, and the neighbors called the cops. Then the cops came out and shot my dog. It was police brutality.” I didn’t like the sound of that explanation. His story raised several questions in my mind:

1. What does this guy mean by “playing with the mailman?” That sounded scary to me.

2. If the mailman and this dog were really just playing, why did the neighbors call the police? People don’t call the police just because they see somebody playing with a dog, and the police won’t come out if that’s​ all that’s going on.
3. If this was the gentlest dog this guy ever owned, what is his other dog like?

WHY DO DOGS GET ONE FREE BITE?

If you have never heard of the ‘one free bite’ rule before, you might assume that I made up this story. It sounds completely preposterous. However, I don’t make up these stories.

In 16 states, a dog has a legal right to bite you ​- once. That means that in a ‘one free bite’ state​, you cannot sue a person if his dog bites you once, no matter how much damage ​the bite does. In a ‘one free bite’ state, if somebody’s dog bites a finger off your hand in just one bite, you cannot sue the owner for your loss or even your medical bills; however, you can sue the dog’s owner if the dog ​bites off your finger on ​a second bite. The ‘one free bite’ rule is a 16th century English legal principle that was adopted by British colonies all over the world. It is still the rule of law in many states. I grew up in Maryland, which is a ‘one free bite’ state. In Maryland, you cannot sue a dog’s owner if the dog only bites you once unless you can prove that the dog’s owner had foreknowledge that his dog was dangerous. The first bite is ‘on the house’. The ‘one free bite’ rule is not one of those silly old laws that is still on the books but that nobody enforces. No. The ‘one free bite’ rule is still enforced in the courts of Maryland, New York, Virginia, Texas, and many other states. (Sounds unbelievable, doesn’t it?)

California. Dogs do not get ‘one free bite’ here in California. California is a strict liability state, which means that a dog’s owner can be sued for all injuries inflicted on another person by his dog. If a dog bites you here in California, judges and juries usually don’t care how many bites the dog took. They are only interested in how much damage the dog did in determining damages.

The subject of dog bite liability comes up all the time at landlord conventions. Personally, I think that the ‘one free bite’ rule should be abolished – everywhere and immediately. This archaic, medieval legal concept runs contrary to modern thinking about personal responsibility.

‘Snake oil’ is defined as something that is sold as medicine but that is medically useless. In other words, it’s a medical scam. In 1906, Congress passed the Pure Food and Drug Act, which created the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA. At that time, the majority of the medicine sold in the United States was not only useless; much of it was toxic. Within 2 years of its creation, the FDA forced hundreds of worthless drugs off the market. Last month, I mentioned this in ‘The Good Old Days’, or what life was really like in America in 1906.

However, snake oil is now back, and big time! In 1994, Congress passed the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act. This law specifically exempted supplements from FDA scrutiny. As a result, pills and capsules that are labeled ‘supplements’ by their manufacturers can make vague and preposterous claims about their products without FDA testing or approval.

MEMORY PILLS. Among the best-selling and most profitable supplements of dubious medical value are memory pills. The TV commercials for memory pills rely mainly on personal testimonials by users. Many high school and college students buy memory pills and take them just before exams, but most buyers of memory pills are old people. A recent survey found that 25% of Americans over the age of 50 take memory pills. That’s an astonishing number! There is just one problem with memory pills – there is no evidence that any of them work.

A lot of people who take memory pills assume that they must work or else the FDA wouldn’t allow them to be sold, but the FDA can’t take them off the market. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act prohibits the FDA from requiring that the makers of ‘supplements’ like memory pills back up their claims with evidence. As long as the manufacturers of memory pills call them ‘supplements’ and don’t claim that their product cures or treats a specific disease, like Alzheimer’s, there is nothing the FDA can do.

PREVAGEN. There are many brands of memory pills on the market, but Prevagen is the big name in the business. I know people who take Prevagen every day. I asked one of these people how he knows that Prevagen is improving his memory. He told me that he trusts Prevagen because it is made from something found in jellyfish. I have seen Prevagen ads on TV. Maybe you have too. They are on all the time. In their commercials, these ads frequently mention that Prevagen is made from something originally found in jellyfish. O.K. – well, so what?

ABOUT JELLYFISH. Jellyfish can be fascinating to watch. If you want to see them, click here to view the live-cam at the Monterey Aquarium jellyfish tank. Jellyfish Live Cam. However, as you watch these jellyfish, ask yourself: “Do jellyfish look smart?” and “Is there anything here that indicates that jellyfish have good memories – or any memory at all?” Below is a picture of the back label of a Prevagen box.

According to a recent article in Forbes: “There are still no peer-reviewed, independent, clinical studies available to support the health claims made by the makers of Prevagen regarding the product’s efficacy. The company’s website and other marketing materials state that Prevagen results are clinically proven, but the clinical research cited was performed by parent company Quincy Bioscience, which raises concerns about conflicts of interest.”

ABOUT SUPPLEMENTS. Americans spend billions of dollars every year on medically useless ‘supplements.’ Sometimes I wander through the supplement section of the Whole Foods store near my house and look at the labels on these products. Most of the labels imply that these pills do something, but they don’t clearly state what that something is. When they do make a specific claim as to what the pills do, it is usually something that should make all but the most gullible buyers suspicious, like ‘age reversing’ pills and creams. There’s a lot of those in the supplement section.

WAS ALEXANDER HAMILTON BLACK? WAS ALEXANDER HAMILTON JEWISH?

The musical ‘Hamilton’ has renewed interest in one of the most important Founding Fathers of the United States. It has also renewed the myth that Hamilton was black. This myth goes back to Hamilton’s time itself. Alexander Hamilton knew that people were speculating about this because people were saying so in the newspapers of the time. These people seemed to have some convincing evidence.

The majority of the people living on the island of Nevis, where Alexander was born and grew up, were black slaves.

Alexander Hamilton’s parents weren’t married, and Alexander wasn’t baptized. Baptism was a standard practice at the time on British-controlled Caribbean islands at the time. If Alexander Hamilton’s parents were white, why wasn’t he baptized?

Alexander Hamilton did not attend the public schools on Nevis. Nevis had public schools run by the Church of England, but Alexander could not attend them. Instead, Alexander went to a private school on Nevis even though his parents didn’t have a lot of money. 

There was also a story going around in Alexander Hamilton’s time that he was secretly Jewish. The people who believed this had some evidence too.

The school Alexander Hamilton attended on Nevis was run by a Jewish woman. Most of the students at this school were Sephardic Jews.

Alexander Hamilton could read Hebrew. He sometimes translated Bible passages to his children into Hebrew. Years after Alexander Hamilton’s death, his son wrote that his father taught him how to recite the Ten Commandments in Hebrew.

While he was George Washington’s aide-de-camp, Hamilton based his plan to finance the American Revolution on European Jewish banking principles.

Alexander Hamilton was only one of the Founding Fathers willing to represent Jews in court in New York. Hamilton was a famous lawyer and had several Jewish clients.

I decided to do a little research on this. My conclusion is that Alexander Hamilton was neither black nor Jewish. Here’s why.

Alexander Hamilton’s parents weren’t married, but he knew who his father was, and so do we. His father was not one of the slaves on Nevis. His father was named James Hamilton. He was the son of a Scottish laird, or lord. There is a record of his birth in Scotland.

We also know why Alexander Hamilton’s parents didn’t marry. They couldn’t.  Alexander Hamilton’s mother Rachel was already married, although she hadn’t seen her husband Johann in years. She was told that her husband had died, she had no proof of it. If she had married James Hamilton and later Johann popped up alive, she could have been charged with bigamy. In those days, bigamy was punishable by flogging and then life imprisonment. James Hamilton and Rachel had to be very discreet and secretive about their relationship.

The reason that Alexander Hamilton wasn’t baptized is very simple. In those days, the Church of England did not allow black or ‘illegitimate’ white children to be baptized in their churches, and they didn’t allow them to attend their schools. This also explains why Alexander went to a Jewish school. Alexander Hamilton’s parents recognized that he was a very smart child and wanted him to get a good education. The Jewish school Alexander attended is probably where he learned Hebrew. He spoke several languages.

Alexander Hamilton studied Jewish banking practices because it was his job to get George Washington money to pay and feed his soldiers, and conventional banking practices weren’t going to work. Congress had no money, no treasury, no ability to tax, and they had a lot of debts.

I don’t know why lawyers in New York would not take Jewish clients, but because Alexander Hamilton had gone to school with Jewish children, he may have felt differently about Jews than most other lawyers in New York at the time.

Alexander Hamilton always said that he was a Christian. He appears to have developed strong religious views in the youth and never strayed from them. His dying wish was that he receive final communion at Trinity Church (Anglican) in New York City.

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In every generation, a lot of young people believe that they were born at a bad time in history or at least not as good a time as when their grandparents were their age. A lot of people become depressed thinking about it. I think this happens for 2 reasons. First, their grandparents and other old people always talk that way. When people get old, they tend to remember the time when they were young as ‘the good old days’, whether those days were actually good or not. But what old people are really nostalgic for is not the time of their youth, but their youth itself. That happens in every generation. Second, books, movies, and TV shows set bygone times, more often than not, idealize those times. Yes, young people today do have things to worry about that people didn’t worry about 100 years ago, like nuclear bombs. That is something to worry about, but every generation has things to worry about. In the 14th Century, the Black Death killed 2/3 of the population of Europe. No one knew what caused it. It would go away for a while and then it would return with a vengeance. That was something for people to worry about, wasn’t it?

The truth is that, more often than not, the ‘good old days’ were never really as good as people imagine. When I started giving my ‘Good Old Days’ lecture to junior high school students in 2006, ​so I picked 1906, 100 years earlier, for comparison. Now, think about big-budget movies that you have seen that were set in that period, 1900 to 1910. Don’t most of these movies have happy endings and depict a wonderful time to live, movies like ‘Meet Me in St. Louis’, ‘Hello Dolly’, ‘Peter Pan’, ‘The Ghost and Mrs. Muir’, ‘Gigi’, to name a few. However, life was not really that beautiful and carefree in1906. 

If you know teenagers who think that your grandparents or their great grandparents grew up in happier times, show them this article. This article is my cure for teenage nostalgia for ‘the good old days.’

Life expectancy: In 1906, the average American lived to age 45. Today, it’s 80. Incredibly, we have added 35 years to life expectancy.

Disease: The 3 leading causes of death in 1906 were pneumonia, influenza, and tuberculosis. Epidemics of contagious diseases killed millions of people every year. During the Spanish Flu epidemic of 1919, 10,000 Americans a week died from the flu. Morticians ran out of coffins. Thousands of corpses were just wrapped in bed sheets and buried in hastily dug mass graves and then covered with dirt with bulldozers.

Medical Care: 90% of all physicians in the U.S. had no college education. Most doctors attended for-profit medical schools that were unregulated and unlicensed. People feared going to hospitals, which were breeding grounds for disease. A person’s odds of recovering from nearly any disease were much greater at home than in a hospital.

Medicine: Prescription drugs were much cheaper than they are today, but most drugs were medically worthless ‘snake oil’.  Far more people were killed by toxic medicines than were cured of their diseases. 75% of all cough syrup sold in the U.S. contained opium or cocaine. No prescription was needed. It was legal to sell narcotics to children. Coca Cola, which was advertised as a headache cure and ‘brain tonic’, contained cocaine, which is how the product got its name.

Gangs: Street gangs are nothing new. All major U.S. cities had gangs in 1906. New York City had the largest and most violent gangs.​ Criminal gangs like the Dead Rabbits, the Plug Uglies, and the Bowery Boys had hundreds of members. These gangs made money by burglary, armed robbery, extortion, kidnapping, protection rackets, and many other crimes. They frequently had gun battles in the streets over territorial disputes.

Cleaning: Washing and ironing clothes was extremely time consuming. Most housewives spent 1 or 2 full days every week doing laundry. Working men normally changed their shirts a week. Pants were washed even less frequently. Most coats were never washed. Only 14% of all U.S. homes had a bathtub. Heating the water for a bath could take an hour or more. Once the tub was filled, every member of a family would bathe in the same bath water, one after another. Most hotel rooms had no bathrooms or bathtubs.

Children: Poor working women commonly gave infants and young children laudanum before going to work. Laudanum is a mixture of alcohol, opium, and morphine. It was an alternative to daycare, which poor women could not afford. Laudanum kept their kids doped up until mother got home. Boys as young as 6 years of age worked in coal mines for 8¢ an hour. Girls worked in textile mills, which were just as dangerous. ‘Mill girls’ often died by the age of 18 from brown lung disease, caused by breathing cotton lint. The boys died of black lung disease from breathing in coal dust. Employed children typically worked 10 to 12 hours a day, 6 days a week. There were no child labor laws, workman compensation, compulsory education laws, or occupational safety laws. Children who were injured or crippled on the job were simply fired.

Education: 10% of all Americans were completely illiterate. 20% of Americans could read a little, but not well enough to read a newspaper. Only 6% of all Americans graduated high school. Public school teachers were allowed to beat children with their hands, sticks, and paddles. It was quite common for school teachers to beat at least one child every day. In most places, children had to buy their textbooks. If they couldn’t afford to buy textbooks, then they didn’t have textbooks.

Food: There were no federal food inspectors, and food processors were not required to list ingredients on package labels. New York City had its own food inspectors, and this is what found in a 1901 study: 90% of the milk sold in New York City was watered down, 50% of all bread contained sawdust, and 90% of all sausages contained animal parts unfit for human consumption. Most meat markets did not have ice or refrigerators. In hot weather, raw meat went bad quickly. 1/4 of the raw beef and pork sold in New York City was rancid or contained maggots. Virtually all canned food contained lead from soldered joints. Food coloring contained lead, arsenic, and mercury. Not surprisingly, food poisoning was one of the 10 leading causes of death in the U.S.

Cars: There were 8,000 cars in the entire U.S. Only very rich people owned cars. The average car sold for $5,000. That was 2-years salary for a skilled worker. The maximum speed limit in big cities was 10 miles an hour. Safety glass had not yet been invented, and cars did not have seat belts. Even minor accidents at 10 miles an hour could be fatal.

Horse Manure: Outside of cities, most houses had at least 1 horse. An average horse weighs 1,000 pounds and produces ​30 pounds of manure a day, or ​over 5 tons a year. If there was a boy in the house, it was his job to take care of the horse. That included feeding, watering, and grooming the horse; and disposing of the horse manure. This was usually done by composting the manure or shoveling it onto a manure wagon and carting it away.​

The Horse Manure Crisis. As the population of American cities grew in the 19th Century, many of them developed a ‘horse manure crisis’, as it was known. In 1900, horses deposited 3 million pounds of horse manure on the streets of New York City every day. You can imagine what this smelled like on a hot, humid day. Here is a short PBS video about this crisis: New York City Horse Manure Crisis.

Electricity​ & Telephones: Only 2% of all homes in the U.S. had electricity. Nobody had refrigerators or air conditioners. If your parents were wealthy, they might have a telephone, but children were not allowed to use it. Only 1 house in 12 had a telephone. Telephone calls were very expensive. A 3-minute phone call from San Francisco to New York cost $10.00, more than a week’s salary for an average worker.

Would you still like to have lived in ‘The Good Old Days’?                

The answer is No! The idea that the president of the United States has to be born in the United States is the most widely believed and most often repeated political myth in the U.S. I have heard this myth all my life. I don’t know how or where it began.

The president of the United States can be born anywhere. There are only 3 Constitutional requirements for being president of the United States:

1. The president must be at least 35 years of age.

2. The president must have lived in the United States for at least 14 years.

3. The president must be a natural born citizen. A natural born citizen is not the same thing as being born in the United States.

There have been many presidential candidates who were not born in the United States. 

In 2016, Ted Cruz ran for president. Ted Cruz was born in Canada. 

In 2008, John McCain was the Republican candidate for president. He was born in the Panama Canal Zone. The Panama Canal Zone was never part of the United States and was not a U.S. territory. It was on land the U.S. leased from Panama and which was returned to Panama when the lease expired.

In 1968, George Romney, the father of Mitt Romney, ran for president. He was born in Mexico. His parents left Mexico during the Mexican Revolution in 1910 and moved to Los Angeles, where George Romney’s classmates derisively called him ‘Mex.’

There have been many other presidential candidates who were not born in the United States.

In 1964, Barry Goldwater was the Republican candidate for president. There were people at the time who questioned whether Goldwater was eligible to be president because he was born in Arizona Territory in 1909, 3 years before Arizona became a state.

The Birther Movement. In 2008, Donald Trump publicly doubted that Barack Obama was eligible to be president, siding with conspiracy theorists that Obama was born in a foreign country. This wasn’t the first time that birthers claimed that a president was born in a foreign country. It has happened several times before. There have been several presidents and presidential candidates who were accused of being ineligible to be president. The issue has come up again this year. Donald Trump has raised questions as to whether either Nikki Haley or Kamala Harris are natural born U.S. citizens and therefore eligible to be president.

Chester A. Arthur. In 1880, Chester A. Arthur was elected vice president of the United States. When president James Garfield was assassinated, Chester A. Arthur became president. His political enemies claimed that Arthur was ineligible to be president. They claimed that he was born in Canada. Chester A. Arthur’s father was born in Ireland. He was a British subject at the time of Arthur’s birth, so by the laws of that time, if proof had been found that Chester A. Arthur was born in Canada, he would not have been eligible to be president. However, no one ever found any such proof. Chester Arthur was born in Vermont, very close to the Canadian border, but he had no documentary evidence, like a birth certificate, to prove that he was born in the United States. None of our 18th and 19th Century presidents had birth certificates. Issuing a birth certificate when a baby is born didn’t become a common practice until the 20th Century.

THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE.

The movie ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ (the 1936 version) was on TV a few weeks ago. It is on TV fairly often. It is a very well-made movie with a big-name cast, but it’s a hard movie for me to watch. That isn’t because this movie is wildly historically inaccurate, which it is, but because of the terrible things that were done to the horses in making this movie. In the cavalry charge at the end of the movie, a lot of horses were trip-wired. That was a common Hollywood practice at the time. It was done to simulate horses being shot in battle. Usually, no more than 1 or 2 horses were trip-wired in a movie, but in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, 125 horses were trip-wired. 25 of those horses were killed outright or had to be shot later due to the severity of their injuries.

Errol Flynn, the star of the movie, was an avid horseman. He was so infuriated by the number of horses killed and injured in the movie and by the indifference of the director, Michael Curtiz, that he physically assaulted Curtiz and had to be pulled away by crewmembers. Although Errol Flynn made many more movies directed by Michael Curtiz, the 2 men never spoke to each other again. Those movies include: ‘The Adventures of Robin Hood’, ‘The Sea Hawk’, ‘The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex’, ‘Santa Fe Trail’, ‘Virginia City’, and several other movies.

When the public found out what happened to the horses in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, it created a worldwide outrage. There was pressure on the California state government to regulate the treatment of animals in movies, but the state legislature was unwilling to do anything that was opposed by the film industry. However, within a few months of the release of ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the British Parliament passed the ‘Cinematograph Films Animals Act’ in 1937. This law banned showing movies in Britain or anywhere within the British Empire that were: “directed in such a way as to involve the cruel infliction of pain on any animal.” This is still the law in Britain. At that time, Britain was Hollywood’s most important and profitable foreign market. The British Empire and Commonwealth covered 25% of the Earth’s population. Plus, several other countries passed laws modeled after the British law. As a result, Hollywood had to make major changes in the way they made movies with animals, including allowing people from the American Humane Association to observe the filming of scenes with animals in them. You may have seen a line at the end of a movie that says: “American Humane certifies that no animals were harmed in making this movie.” That can be traced back to ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade.’

WORST APPLICANT EVER. Ding! Ding! Ding!

Many years ago, I was showing a house for rent when a woman came to look the place over. She walked through the house while I stayed in the kitchen and sat at the table. After she entered the first bedroom, I heard a little bell ring three times: ‘ding, ding, ding,’ followed by a minute of silence. Then she walked into the other bedroom, and the same thing happened again, ‘ding, ding, ding’, followed by a minute of silence. She continued walking through the house, ringing the bell in every room. When she returned to the kitchen, I asked her why she was ringing a bell. By that point, I was dying of curiosity. She said: “I’m checking out your house’s vibrations.” I told her that I didn’t know what that meant. She said that before she could fill out an application form, she needed to know if the previous tenants had left ‘negative energy’ behind. She said that she had a bad feeling in one of the bedrooms but that her tests were inconclusive, so my house needed a ‘vibration analysis’ by a ‘clairvoyant minister’ from the Berkeley Psychic Institute. She told me that this analysis would cost me $300. When I told her that I would not pay for a ‘vibration analysis’, she got angry and said: “Oh, you’re just like all the other landlords.” I assumed that meant that she had seen other houses for rent, and that the landlords there also refused to pay for a ‘vibration analysis.’ She walked out in a huff, and I never saw her again. People like this were common in Berkeley in the 1970s, but I never get prospective applicants like this anymore. I am not sure why that is. I think maybe it’s because Berkeley used to be a cheap place to live in those days, but that was a long time ago, and people like this can’t afford to live here anymore.

California has a new security deposit law. Up until now, a landlord in California could charge a security deposit equal to 2 month’s rent if an apartment was unfurnished or 3 month’s rent if an apartment was furnished. Under the new law, the maximum deposit is 1 month’s rent, whether the apartment is furnished or unfurnished. The purpose of this law is to make it easier for people with limited financial resources to rent an apartment by reducing the amount of money required to get a lease, but this law may well do just the opposite. This may turn out to be an example of the Cobra Effect. I had a professor in college who talked a lot about that subject a lot.The Cobra Effect refers to a law or government policy that makes a problem worse that it was intended to solve. It is very common.

The Cobra Effect. In the 19th Century, when India was under British rule, the government became concerned about the high number of cobras in the Delhi metropolitan area. In an effort to reduce the cobra population, the British government offered a bounty for dead cobras. Anyone turning in a dead cobra received a cash reward. Initially, the program appeared to be a success. Large numbers of dead cobras were turned in. That should have reduced the cobra population, but the number of reported deaths from cobra bites wasn’t going down. It was rising. That puzzled the British authorities. They finally figured out that enterprising people were breeding cobras in captivity in order to get the reward. When the British government became aware of the fact that they were being hoodwinked, they scrapped the program. That made the snakes being bred for sale to the British worthless, so the cobra breeders turned their snakes loose in the wild. In the end, there were a lot more cobras in the area than before the government tried to eradicate them. That’s called the Cobra Effect. A lot of economists have written about this.

The Great Chinese Famine. One of the most devastating examples of the Cobra Effect was the Great Chinese Famine of the early 1960s. That happened when a program designed to increase food production resulted in 30 to 50 million people dying of starvation. In 1957, Mao Tse Tung claimed that rice and wheat yields were low because sparrows were eating too much grain.  Sparrows were declared “animals of Capitalism”, and the government began a nationwide ‘Smash Sparrows’ campaign. People were required to kill sparrows and were assigned quotas of how many dead sparrows they had to turn in at government offices every week. If people exceeded their quotas, they received rewards. If they failed to meet their quotas, they were punished. Tens of millions of sparrows were killed, and by 1960, sparrows had become virtually extinct in China. However, the disappearance of sparrows meant that locusts were able to breed unchecked because their principal predators, the sparrows, were gone. Billions of locusts descended on China and devastated the country.  Incredibly, a locust can eat its own body weight in food every day. Grain production plummeted. Once the government realized its mistake, they imported 250,000 sparrows from the Soviet Union to restore the natural balance. Eventually that ended the famine. Below is a picture of a Chinese school poster from 1959 showing a boy with a slingshot killing a sparrow. The girl is holding a string of dead sparrows. The slogan at the bottom of the poster says: “Everybody Comes to Beat the Sparrows.” After 1962, bedbugs replaced sparrows on school posters in China as an ‘animal of Capitalism.’ Here is one of the many videos on YouTube about Mao’s war on sparrows: The War on Sparrows.

SECURITY DEPOSITS.

But – what does all this talk about cobras and sparrows have to do with security deposits? California’s new security deposit law is intended to make it easier for people with limited financial resources to rent an apartment; however, this law creates a financial incentive for landlords to do just the opposite.

Under the old law, an applicant for an apartment in California might have to come up with 3 month’s rent in order to get an apartment, the first month’s rent plus 2 month’s security deposit. So, if an apartment is $3,000 a month (which is what a 1-bedroom apartment typically rents for in one of the new apartment houses in Berkeley), an applicant might need to give the building manager $9,000 to get a lease.  What percentage of people in our society have $9,000? 50% of all Americans have less than $1,000 in savings. 33% have no savings at all. So, what’s the problem with lowering security deposits from 2 month’s rent to 1 month’s rent? 

First, you need to answer the question: “Why do landlords want security deposits?” The reason that landlords want security deposits is so that they won’t lose money if a tenant moves out with unpaid rent or with expensive damages to the apartment. The less money that a landlord is holding in the security deposit, the more risk the landlord is taking by renting an apartment to someone who is living from paycheck to paycheck and has little or no savings. This new law creates a strong incentive for landlords to only rent apartments to people with high credit scores and serious money in the bank. That is the opposite of this law’s intention. The mentality behind this law is that if something is bad for landlords, it is good for tenants. I have never been able to convince people who think that way that they are wrong, and that the world doesn’t work that way.

OAKLAND’S GUN BUYBACK PROGRAM. Here’s another example of the Cobra Effect, one closer to home. In 2008, the Oakland police department ran a gun buyback program called ‘One Less Gun’. The purpose was to reduce the number of guns in Oakland, but the result was the opposite. Under the ‘One Less Gun’ program, anyone could turn in a gun and walk away with $250 cash with no questions asked and no I.D. required. On the opening day of the program, the first people in line were gun dealers. Some came with 50 guns in the trunks of their cars. Most of these guns were in poor condition, and many were inoperable. The gun dealers used the money they got from the police to buy more and better guns. Some nursing home operators also turned in large numbers of guns, guns taken from their residents. That also cost the Oakland police department a lot of money, even though elderly residents in nursing homes aren’t the kind of people who are likely to use guns to commit crimes. Many sketchy characters turned in defective guns and got money from the police which they used to buy new guns. So many guns were turned in that the police department quickly ran out of money and had to issue I.O.U.s., leaving the police department with a debt of $170,000. Oakland never ran a gun buyback program again. Several other big cities have run gun buyback programs with similar results.

BLOWING UP A DEAD WHALE. Perhaps the funniest example of the Cobra Effect was the attempted disposal of a dead whale by the Oregon Highway Department by blowing it up. (It was funny, but not if you were there.) This was a big news story when it happened. In November 1970, a dead 40-foot whale washed up on a beach in Oregon. It had been so long since a dead whale had washed up on a beach in northern Oregon that nobody could remember how to get rid of one. The Highway Department decided the best way to dispose of the whale was to blow it up. They planted 20 cases of dynamite under the whale. They figured that would blow the whale into small particles which scavengers would dispose of. A biologist told the highway officials that the normal way of disposing of a dead whale was to have a tugboat drag it out to sea at high tide, where sharks and other large predators dispose of dead whales all the time, but her advice was ignored. Large numbers of people from the area came to see the explosion. When the explosion went off, the spectators cheered for a few seconds, but they then ran in panic when large chunks of rotting dead whale flesh rained down on them and their cars. The authorities had greatly underestimated the blast zone and what was a safe distance from it for the spectators. And, even after the explosion, the bulk of the dead whale was still intact and on the beach. Watch this video to see what happened: Blowing Up a Dead Whale. Like the other examples of the Cobra Effect above, blowing up the whale dramatically increased the cost of disposing of the whale.

KELLOGG’S SPOONS. When Kellogg ordered 30,000 promotional spoons, the manufacturer asked them what they wanted imprinted on the spoons. Kellogg replied: “Just the Kellogg logo.” The photo below shows what they got.