Joyce Appleby: Liberalism and Republicanism in the Historical Imagination
Niall Ferguson: The House of Rothschild: Money's Prophets, 1798-1848
Jonathan Israel: The Dutch Republic: Its Rise, Greatness, and Fall 1477-1806
Jerry Z. Muller: The Mind and the Market : Capitalism in Modern European Thought
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Stop signs are a good measure of the incompetence of government. The following letter was written in San Francisco (by me) in 1997. Stop signs proliferate with no restraint. No one has ever followed up on my letter.
I gathered the data which showed that the number of stop signs kept increasing for forty years without reason or logic. Sounds like the way government usually does things.
My motto has been: most of our current problems are the result of past legislation.
There have been a flurry of articles recently (this is just one) calling attention to the rising anti-Semitism in England. I’m just keeping you posted. The current British anti-Semitism grows out of the merging of the new Lefty Jew hate with the traditional upper-class anti-Semitism.
A year and a half ago I pointed out that England has the greatest emigration of Jews of any European country both in numbers and percentage. Most are going to Canada, Australia and the U.S. France also has a growing emigration of Jews, largely to Israel.
What you didn’t hear about the recent rejection of an Arab take-over of U.S. ports was that this response to an Arab investment in the U.S. is a new policy.
The policy arises from poor prior decision making by the current U.S. Administration. What happened is that several Arab countries, particularly Saudi Arabia, have been allowed to join the WTO with the promise that they would end their boycott of Israeli products. The Arabs have lied. Of course Arabs and Arab nations lie all the time and call it “negotiation,” “compromise” and a few other euphemisms.
The problem is that the WTO...
I may not have raised this question on my blog before. Are Arab men overwhelmingly gay?
In 1971 I was in Kabul and spent time with a friend who was head of the Asia Foundation. My friend, who was gay, was headquartered in Afghanistan handling all the Foundation grants in all of Arabia.
I asked my friend how he....
Three issues collide. One is that a friend sent me to the web page for a movie Why War? Typical Lefty Fundamentalist religion. One piece of pious nonsense in the film is the use of President Eisenhower’s farewell address to suggest that Eisenhower supported the film’s Marxist thesis that profit is the main motive for war. Eisenhower was president during the first eight years of the Cold War build-up and was justifiably warning against a number of problems a democracy could have during a cold war…and we had those problems, including a massive anti-war movement. Eisenhower never warned about any propensity to go to war for profit.
Eisenhower was a general who..
There is a large population of Russian immigrants in San Francisco. I just can’t help noticing what a happy bunch of people the Russian immigrants are.
What probably makes them noticeable is that I was in tRussia when it was the USSR and I never met such a morose group of humans; I was in Leningrad and Moscow. The Russians also stand out from contemporary San Franciscans who are generally grim.
The Russians seem to be happy, nay, ecstatic that they are living in a country where they can earn as much as they want and buy anything their heart desires.
Welcome Russian immigrants.
How long before we get a good play about Tom Fox?
There is plenty of material to work with. Fox wrote a blog from Iraq. Fox held traditional pacifist views and expressed them clearly.
Tom Fox was reportedly tortured to death after being held hostage for several months.
The statements out of the mouth of a mature pacifist, who left children behind, while he is being tortured to death is a subject that would draw me to the theater. I rarely go to live theater because I find nearly all live theater to be melodrama, only slightly better than afternoon TV. I’ll make an exception and go to the Tom Fox play, if a good playwright, like Tennessee Williams, exists who can see and communicate the astounding, powerful, important, deep and historic importance of this drama.
How do you portray a pacificist being tortured while he says: “God you chose me to do your work and now you have forsaken me.”
I have often talked to waiters and waitresses in idle conversation at coffee shops. I also have friends who are wait-people. The question I ask that often gets a great response is “What do you do when a customer asks your advice on the best menu choice and after you give a careful and honest answer, they choose something else?”
The answer that I often get: “Before I bring them the dish, I spit on their plate.”
I know that this is...
The kid is raised by religious fundamentalists in a home thirty miles outside of Boise and has always been home schooled with no TV available. So what does the kid know about the modern world?
My stunning but useful experience has been that...
My Toyota turn signal got stuck returning to its neutral position and made a sound that is the same as the stall warning indicator on the Piper Archers that I fly. What a shock.
To understand why this was a shock first requires an understanding of why an airplane falls out of the sky. When the wings are not moving fast enough relative to the air they are passing through, the plane falls. Fast enough relates to the size of the wings, the angle the wings are moving through the air (picture your hand outside a car window at 60 mph) and the weight of the plane. On most single engine planes, before the plane is about to fall out of the air you hear a signal called the stall warning indicator.
The word stall is wrong. An engine on a car can stall and the car stands still or glides to a stop. An airplane can stall with the engine running smoothly but the plane will drop out of the air. For an airplane the word should be fall not stall. Fall is what happens when the plane stalls.
So when my car turn signal made the same sound as I would hear in an airplane when I was about to fall, created panic. In a plane I know what to do (accelerate by increasing power, pushing the nose down or both) in the car there is nothing comparable to do. I did what I had to do…convince myself that the sound was the same but the meaning of the sound wasn’t.
A series of national grocery store buy-outs has meant that several grocery chain stores in San Francisco are no longer profitable to keep open (Cala and Bell). They were probably kept open for a future sale in order to inflate gross revenue. Now a few neighborhoods will be without full service grocery stores. Several neighborhoods will have none within a reasonable distance.
San Francisco’s dominant religion (Lefty Fundamentalism) has led the city to post signs at all the entry points to the City saying: no chain stores in this City. San Francisco’s religion is far more intrusive in local politics, education and business than the Mormon Church is in Salt Lake City, or Orthodox Judaism is in Jerusalem.
So neighborhoods like Noe Valley and the Haight that have strict no-chain store policies have now lost their full service grocery stores and sure as hell won’t get any grocer to open a full service grocery store in such a hostile religious environment. It would be like wearing a Jewish star in Ramallah.
I call that religious self-immolation.
Isn’t it embarrassing to have a national organization, that presumes to speak for you, say something incredibly stupid? 
I don’t belong to such a group, having quit any group that does that. But if I had a profession it would be harder to quit. Doctors groups, scientific groups, nursing groups, Nobel Prize winners, the Screen Actors and other Hollywood groups, the Presbyterians, and Episcopalians do it too.
The Reform Jewish national organization is the most prominent group I know of whose stupid national statements are publicly rejected by other Jewish groups.
Why don’t more people belong to groups solely for the purpose of rejecting the public declarations of the group that presumes to speak in their name?
This is by way of saying that if I were a lawyer I would have spoken out against the law school group that brought the mostly frivolous lawsuit to the U.S. Supreme Court (blog below this one). It is also an announcement that I am working to form a counter force to the senile and corrupt AARP.
I read the Supreme Court case brought by a group of law schools claiming that their 1st Amendment rights were jeopardized by the Solomon Amendment that required military recruiters on campuses to be treated equally with other job recruiters.
The press hasn’t pointed out the significance of this decision, so I will. First, in oral argument, the court laughed at the law schools’ case. Then in the actual decision the justices were equally rude and told the law school plaintiffs that nothing keeps the law school from putting up a sign near the Army recruiting table saying ‘this Law School hates the military.’ Enough with the legal nonsense.
This case was important for three separate reasons:
First, Chief Justice Roberts was able to get an 8-0 decision which is evidence to me that he will be the strongest chief justice in the past 100 years, more so than Chief Justice Warren. Remember, Alito wasn’t even on the court for the 8-0 vote.
Second, the case was used by the Court to point out that Congressional powers go far beyond the individual law that the law schools contested. The Court said that Congress has the power to raise an Army and a Navy any way it wants. Any way it wants. I don’t think the law schools wanted to hear that bit of news. If I were Rummey I would ask Congress to draft all Law School Deans, regardless of age, for emergency legal duty in Iraq.
Third, the Court used this case to state that this Court will be the most liberal court on the issues of the First Amendment in the history of the Supreme Court. The Court proudly referred to prayer in school cases, flag burning cases and a variety of free speech precedents, gratuitously.
The meaning and value of work has changed over the past half century.
My father was in awe of workers, of the blue collar kind. I was taught to never get in the way of a worker who was carrying bricks or lumber or even a salesperson bringing a box of shoes out of the storage area. The worker and his work were sacrosanct. That view was widely held when I was growing up. It had been a view widely held for the previous 80 years during the rapid expansion of industrial commerce. The photo on the right is of an heroic statue honoring the "mechanic."
I can understand...
Last week was a confirming week for me.
* The leading conservative full professor at Harvard, Harvey Mansfield, said in the Saturday (3-4) Wall Street Journal that out going president Larry Summers was kicked out for being a coward and backing down on his statement about biology and woman. He didn’t add my point that for a Jew to be a schlemiel in the upper-crust latent-anti-Semitic environment of Harvard is fatal.
* There were two articles, one in Salon and one in the Economist kissing the rebuilding of New Orleans goodbye. Their analysis is different than mine, but the same conclusion. Interesting point is that whatever parts of New Orleans were vital would have been rebuilt by now, driven by commercial vitality, as was the case in Kobe, San Francisco and Chicago after disasters.
* Nicolas Sarkozy is quoted by Chris Caldwell as standing for the following principles: "First, the primacy of work; second, the need to compensate personal merit and effort; third, respect for the rules, and for authority; fourth, the belief that democracy does not mean weakness; fifth, values; sixth, . . . I'm persuaded that, before sharing, you have to create wealth. I don't like egalitarianism."
Doesn’t that sound like me? I make some version of all those points three or four times a week. I am delighted that the French are being exposed to deep philosophic thought: the primacy of commerce and the values of commerce.
* Tony Blair has changed his views on global warming: "I would say probably I'm changing my thinking about this in the past two or three years. I think if we are going to get action on this, we have got to start from the brutal honesty about the politics of how we deal with it. The truth is no country is going to cut its growth or consumption substantially in the light of a long-term environmental problem."
I only read about Blair’s change recently. He is no longer the darling of the enviros. I also love the recent (today’s 3-6 Wall Street Journal letters) public attacks on the UN enviro panel for the statements of its disgraceful chair and its refusal to take seriously expert criticism of its CO2 input data. The global warming enviros are on the run.
Yesterday was the 12th annual urban iditarod in
San Francisco. The race, with roughly
1,000 people pushing and pulling shopping carts and structures about the size
of shopping carts, began at the Powell and Market cable-car-turnaround and crossed
the City. (The original Alaskan Iditarod starts today.)
The original plan called for several pub stops along the
way, but the crowd was too big. It was
a straight race across town. The end
was to be in the Golden Gate National Recreation Area on a lawn at Fort Mason,
but a demand for insurance fees and cleanup deposits required a mid-course
correction. The ability to change in
the face the of the scythe-carrying-bureaucractic-reaper is the definition of urban
gorilla.
The party ended up in the courtyard of the Cannery with an outdoor bar available and several adjacent indoor bars. As you can see it was a happy party. In the background in the upper right photo are the Doggie Diner heads…always the royal guests of the urban future.
I’m actually serious about the urban future. Businesses and families have been driven out
of San Francisco by the unproductive and grim faced trust-funders, bureaucrats,
union pawns, academics, brain dead politicos and assorted lazies. As more of the City becomes a wasteland, it
simultaneously becomes a playground for us urban gorillas.
I foresee the day when San Francisco is divided between the shoppers with their times to shop and the gorillas with our times to play. Overlap time, too, for mutual amusement.
I waited until the movie Flightplan was in DVD. I waited largely because I was honoring the protestations of flight crews that the movie made them villains.
Damn those #$%% airline personnel unions.
First of all, the movie was a top flight action film. Now I recommend it to people who like action films. Don't miss it.
Second, movies are...
Anna Nichole Smith has had her case taken up by the U.S. Supreme Court.
For me this raises two issues. First, as I get older it becomes clearer to me that older men can do inexplicable things like falling madly in love with a woman their granddaughter's age. That is the substance of what brought the Anna case to the high court… her aged husband Howard Marshall, madly in love with her, gave her a lot of his money and promised more; after he died his son contested the promise. Howard was 87 and Anna 25 when they started getting together.
I have talked to many friends and get a wide variety of explanations. Some women point out that women can behave the same way. Many people offer the view that finding someone to take care of you is a reason for such erratic behavior. My two cents is that security is not the issue, getting attention is not the issue, validating masculinity is not the issue… to me, the prospect of sensual pleasure and the intoxicating access to human vitality are worth giving up half of everything when death is around the corner.
You can send me...
The blog immediately below is based on the three main streams that I have found useful in contemporary thought. The three are relativism (of the Rorty, Fish variety), social thought (of the Mary Douglas variety) and amoral commerce (my own realm.)
*Relativism makes it clear that no ideology including science is universal, we all stand on top of dozens of institutions (language, era, education, geography..) that determine our world view.
*Social Thought determines that all institutions are structured around tent-pole ideas, metaphors and concepts (example: the marketplace is structured around the “invisible hand”).
*Amoral commerce is the view that major human-shaping institutions are amoral including commerce, technology and compassion.
In applying these categories....
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