Pro Commerce

Between a man and a woman

When are we going to see the legal challenge to the anti-gay marriage laws in the domain of definition?

I mean there is no biological nor socially stable definition of gender. We now have tens of thousands of post-op transsexuals, in both directions. There can be no legal definition of gender.

When are the courts going to start ruling on that issue?

Karl & Michael

You can win most arguments among well-educated people by invoking the name of Karl Popper. Popper published Conjectures and Refutations in 1963. Since then Popper’s definition of scientific has been unassailable. Karl Popper argued that the definition of a scientific theory was that it was falsifiable either because it could not explain centrally important data or because its predictions were wrong. If a theory couldn’t be falsified it was something else, not science.

The theory of creationism has been falsified many times, there it no need to treat it as science. The theory of intelligent design is not falsifiable so it isn’t science either.

I wondered and then answered my own question: why don't the majority of scientists on the planet  get together and denounce false theories that pose as science, and use  Popper as the reference point?  The reason is that most of the scientists in the world hold ideas and theories that are not scientific.

Michael Crichton gives the two best examples in his latest book State of Fear. In the afterward, Crichton points out that the scientists of the world were in agreement on the theory of eugenics for forty years. Eugenics postulated that mixed races were degenerate and that some races were superior to others. With the liberation of Auschwitz, and the visible consequences of eugenic theory, the multitude of scientists who supported eugenics disappeared and erased their past.

Eugenics was a theory that was not susceptible to falsification.

The problem today, as governments all over the world pressure the U.S. to comply with the Kyoto Accords, is that the theory on which Kyoto is constructed, global warming, is not a scientific theory. Global warming is not a falsifiable theory.

Data shows that CO2 in the atmosphere has risen due to human activity.

That is falsifiable data, but the data doesn’t connect to any predictions about greenhouse gases or global warming.

All of the computer-generated predictions based on CO2 and global warming, since 1990, have been falsified but the theory won’t go away. Massive amounts of contrary evidence about core material in global warming theory have been accumulated, but this falsification of the theory doesn’t shake the religious fanaticism of global warming advocates.

The supporters of global warming did change the name of their theory to an even more un-falsifiable theory, global climate change.  (Crichton doesn't mention this act of chicanery in his book.)

To understand the religious nature of global warming theory, one needs to read a few reviews of the Crichton book.  Venom is the only word to describe the anger the book has evoked among eco-fundamentalists. One reviewer says the book “is politically, narratively and all but grammatically incorrect.” Another (New York Times) says “The novel itself reads like a shrill, preposterous right-wing answer to this year's shrill, preposterous but campily entertaining global warming disaster movie ''The Day After Tomorrow.''

I think you’ll love the book unless you are leaning toward eco-fundamentalism and anxiously awaiting the coming armagedon.

Republican dream

The New York Times today was being coy. They talk about two men dropping out of the race for Chair of the Democratic National Committee. They say Howard Dean has 250 endorsements out of 430 total votes.

The headline should be: Dean shoo in. The following quotes are in the article:

Fowler, who ran John Kerry's Michigan campaign, said late Friday that ``today it became clear that Howard Dean has the votes to become Democratic chairman.''

`The race is essentially over,'' said Richardson, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association. ``He's won fair and square.''

Goodbye Bruce Brugmann

Bruce Brugmann and his wife are the largest shareholders in the SF Bay Guardian, a Marxist weekly, that has been around for 40 years flogging Lefty Fundamentalist hate and attacking the PG&E monopoly.

The SF Bay Guardian is in its last days. If they owe you money, collect it now. First, the Onion is coming to San Francisco, in a few months, to take advertising away from the Bay Guardian, just as the S.F. Weekly and the daily S.F. Examiner have been doing for several years. All four are free papers, based on ad revenue.

The death knell of the Bay Guardian is described in the S.F. Weekly. The facts come out because of a lawsuit filed by the Guardian against the Weekly.

Two years ago, Brugmann bought a building to house his newspaper; he paid $4.7 million for the building. Formerly the Guardian rented space at $200,000 per year. With the new building, the rent equivalent payment is $600,000. Brugmann can’t afford his new building. He is cutting his ad rates to stay in business and basing his suit against the Weekly on the claim that the Weekly is undercutting ad rates.  (Which is probably not illegal.) The Weekly has affidavits from advertisers showing the Guardian offering rates that are well below the printing costs of the Guardian and much lower than the Weekly’s ad rates.

Before we say goodbye to Bruce Brugmann, I want history to remember that Brugmann was a disgrace as a journalist. Brugmann had one overriding lifetime obsession: attacking PG&E, our local utility.

PG&E operated in San Francisco on a contract with the City. Turns out that the contract expired a few years ago, after 50 years. PG&E and the City worked out a secret agreement for another 50-year monopoly. The agreement only had to be visible for two weeks, between the first and second vote of the S.F. Board of Supervisors. During those two weeks, when Brugmann learned of the new 50-year monopoly agreement, the Guardian was unable to call any attention to what was going on. The new monopoly contract was signed with virtually no opposition.

Brugmann, who had obsessed about this issue for thirty years, at that point, had never bothered to check the terms of the City-PG&E contract to know that it was about to expire. Bad research? No --- incompetence.

(Disclosure: Henry Dakin is a longtime friend of mine and a shareholder in the Guardian.)

Computer humor

The LA Times today is running an expose of Ameriquest, a major sub prime lender, who’s CEO is a major donor to politics, Governor Arnold and President Bush. The CEO is Roland Arnall, who is clearly the object of an LA Times barbeque party.

I couldn’t help but look at the bottom of my Google search page where I found the first of the adword sponsors for the subject “sub prime” which happens to be Ameriquest.

Social thought

Leon Kass is chair of The President's Council on Bioethics. His Council published a report of, what must be a bureaucratic first, readings from literature on the subject of being human.

The publication is not so surprising when you hear that Professor Kass is from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought. Kass is doing what comes naturally --- thinking ahead. He knows that a clear, original and powerful syllabus of important readings is what shapes the future of intellectual thought.

Kass knows this because modern intellectual thought, so called neo-conservatism, is a direct out growth of the material in the curriculum of the Committee on Social Though.

Not all my readers know that I created and produced a public radio program for nine years called Social Thought. Nearly two dozen transcripts of my half hour interviews are online. Someday hundreds of the Social Thought audio interviews themselves will be online. (The cost of putting them online and having a server with high enough bandwidth is not justified by any projected revenue at this time.)

The difference between the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought and my radio program is nearly forty years. When the Chicago Committee was created by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler in the late 1940’s the understanding was that the ideas and structure of Western Civilization were built on the foundations of Plato and Aristotle. The Committee was a graduate curriculum that focused on understanding these Greek philosophers.

By the late 1980s, when I started my public radio program, Social Thought had broadened to the recognition that all institutions, not just Western Civilization, but markets, language, education, media and history were all based on ideas, metaphors and concepts.

Extrapolating from the length of time it took for the Committee on Social Thought to shape the intellectual world (30 or more years) I can only hope I live until the 2020s when my work on the subject will begin to shape intellectual thought.

Three items connected

The three following entries seem to me to be connected:

Before the last election I said I expected a significant shift in Jewish and Black votes to Bush. The election outcomes that were reported by the press showed only small movements in the direction of Bush by those two groups.

The problem is that the measures of modest ethnic change came from exit polling results. I think big changes occurred.

There were two big problems with the exit polling. One, the polling was conducted by the woman who runs the LA Times political polls --- she has a long history of Lefty bias and bad results, where her polls don’t match the election outcome. Second, the public results of the exit polling didn’t mention that they were heavily sampled in the eleven key “battle zone” states and don’t reflect the main centers of Jewish and Black voters. The state that was an exception, Florida, is where the exit polls showed Bush losing, when he actually won the state by 7%. The exit-polling sample in Florida was clearly a bad sample.

So I predict that, any day now, we will see precinct analysis that shows a large shift in Jewish and Black voting toward Bush actually occurred.

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There is great optimism these days that the death of Adolph Arafat has opened the way to a peaceful settlement of the Arab-Israeli borders. I don’t think so. I think we will see a long period of negotiation and a return to Palestinian murders of Israeli civilians. Then the wall will be completed in a hurry.

My evidence is the reaction to the Israeli release of 900 prisoners --- the Palestinians said it was “not enough.” This is a continuation of Arafat talk.

Democracy works. The Palestinians have elected people who represent their views. Those views are simple: kill all Jews, or drive them into the Mediterranean. The decent Palestinians long ago left the country.

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In the United States, more than half of eligible voters don’t vote. This is good; this is a key element of a true democracy. The people, who don’t vote, come out to vote when they think things have gotten so bad that the incumbents must be removed. That is what happened in California. Non-voters are the rational reserve in a democracy.

Texas analogy

When John Kerry, the man who campaigned on “wrong war, wrong place, wrong time,” immediately started telling the U.S. what to do after the successful Iraqi election, I wondered what analogy would fit the circumstances.

The only analogy that came to mind was a man who said humans couldn’t fly wanted to tell the Wright brothers how to design their airplane wings.

That is not a powerful analogy. We need something from Texas, about pigs, donkeys or politicians to use against Kerry, Pelosi and the others who were completely wrong in the past and want us to listen to their current wisdom.

The Chinese

I mention human genetic engineering in the next blog. The main response I get to this issue is “What difference does it make, the Chinese are going to engineer people no matter what we do."

The fact is that it won’t be the Chinese in China, it is already the Chinese government in Singapore that has created and funded the labs to do everything possible in the human genetic engineering realm with no restrictions.

My response is simple. Of course we will see humans genetically engineered. That will only raise the issue to the central point in the dialog of this century where it belongs --- this century is about several issues, a major one is human genetic engineering. We humans are not going to let any group, anywhere, change the nature of our species without having a serious, ferocious and protracted debate.

The Senate

The Senate is what matters these days because it is democratically elected, whereas the House is a gerrymandered morgue.

I want to say two things about contemporary politics and the Senate. The Senate may be a deliberative body, but it is not made up of people who know very much outside of politics. On the issue that I know well, human genetic engineering, there are less than half a dozen Senators who know much, or even as much as I know. I “know” enough biology on this subject to be able to talk to biologists in the field, like the difference between germ line cells and other cells including those at the totipotent stage.

The Senate defers to the knowledgeable senators on the subjects they know and then everyone else frames the overall issues in political terms. The debate on human genetic engineering was understood by a few and the rest of the Senate transformed the subject into pro- and anti-abortion; a subject to which it has little connection.

The chance to pass meaningful legislation on human genetic engineering is in the hands of one man, Leon Kass of the University of Chicago, who led the commission on the subject. He set out to herd a group of angry cats and got them to agree on a wide range of elements in the issue. If he can hold his coalition together on the main points and write that into legislation, we’ll get a good bill. Unfortunately there isn’t much political will on the matter.

The opposite seems to be the case with Social Security and private investment accounts. The Senate on this issue, has less than half a dozen members who understand the technical matters involved. The rest of the Senate will act along party lines. The politics in this matter are hot, there is plenty of political will.

My only observation is that no one, I mean no one, under thirty five that I have ever met, believes that they will receive the money they are paying into Social Security. I’ve talked to people with bachelor degrees in economics who believe Social Security has no future, people who understand that it is a transfer tax.

This means one thing to me. The stronger the Democratic Party opposition to S.S. private accounts, the more young people will shift to the Republican Party. There is an age divide on this issue where one side (people under 35) are 100% opposed to the current Social Security system.

Obituary

I’m comfortable when a priest gives extreme unction to a dead catholic and conducts the funeral. So who should write the obituary of the Left after 120 years of life?

I’m comfortable with the words of a marxist scholar, Andrei Markovits, writing in the Winter issue of Dissent. Markovits puts the peak of lefty thought at 1917 and the peak of influence in 1947. He traces the gradual decline and fragmentation of the left from 1947 to the recent death last year.

Markovits writes from a European perspective, as a scholar in the German Studies Department at the U. of Michigan.

America had a significant influence on the decline of the Left, beginning with the civil rights movement. The civil rights movement was opposed by most labor unions; labor and the proletariat had been longtime central tent-poles of the left. Then came the woman’s movement and gay liberation into a Lefty world that had been almost entirely male. The USSR in Eastern Europe, China and Pol Pot in Southeast Asia didn’t help the Left.

I recommend Markovits’ obituary. The final days of the Left have been very unpleasant: heavily focused on anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.

On a lighter side, the last page editorial of the latest New Republic has contributing editor T.A. Frank going to an International Socialist Organization gathering in D.C. on inaugural day. He goes to the meeting as a liberal and comes out of the meeting as a Republican. He wants someone to drop a bunker-buster on Arundhati Roy for her position supporting the Iraqi resistance in spite of their cutting off heads on TV. You’ll enjoy the article.

Stroller heaven

You might not guess the neighborhood in San Francisco with the most babies and little kids.

The picture on the right is 24^th and Douglass with thirteen strollers on a Monday afternoon.

I have no idea why this neighborhood (24th Street) has so many young kids. Some friends say this is a lesbian neighborhood and lesbians are following the mommy track. It may be.

Will any of these white kids go to public school? This neighborhood fought Starbucks (where all the moms currently hang out), fought cell phone antenna’s and drove the only organic grocery out of business by supporting a union.