Pro Commerce

Senators: take away their vote

It is hard getting old because most of our social support infra-structure slowly degrades.

We have a group of national figures who are not only destroying the social usefulness of older people they are also trying to destroy the very organizations and institutions that gave these national figures prominence in the first place.

Start with number one villain: Jimmy Carter (the first president with a boy’s name).  Jimmy did and is still doing his part to make sure that retired presidents are viewed as incompetent, disgraceful and no help to the country.  Jimmy has left the country to give speeches against the twice-elected sitting President and our Congressionally-supported foreign policy.  Just to prove that a former president can be non-compus- mentis, the sitting president attended the funeral of a national black figure (Coretta King) and Jimmy boy used the occasion to again attack the president, this time to his face.  Jimmy boy is the former president who also invited our National Idiot (Michael Moore) to sit with him at the Democratic National Convention.

Next in line to disgrace the office of president, the former candidate for president, Al Gore. Gore went to Saudi Arabia to denounce American Foreign policy.  That makes a retired President and a retired Vice-President who was also a Democratic Party candidate for president as destruction derby queens.  Going overseas to voice criticism is minor treason. Definitely "giving aid and comfort" to the global terrorist movement.

Then there was the retired Secret Service agent who confirmed to a journalist that he had observed President Kennedy having sex in the White House swimming pool several times with women who weren’t his wife.  That made sure the Secret Service could never again be trusted by any future president or vice-president.  Since top officials can’t trust the Secret Service anymore, they now act out of range of the Secret Service and put themselves in unnecessary danger.  Thanks to a retiree.

Most recently, six retired generals (Maj Gen Charles H Swannack Jr, Maj Gen John Riggs, Maj Gen John Batiste, Gen Anthony Zinni, Lt Gen Gregory Newbold, Maj Gen Paul Eaton)  attacked the Secretary of Defense.  Zinni is the most recent retiree and the most prominent. 

The general’s act of minor treachery significantly degrades the status of the American military and retirees.  From now on every military planning operation will automatically exclude officers who are within a few years of retirement for fear that after retirement (which is often at age 45) the retirees will publicly attack the military and military campaigns. 

Is there a pattern here?  Isn’t it time that some one or some organization spoke out about retirees becoming public vehicles of social destruction?

Maybe this is time to introduce disenfranchisement.  Maybe a majority vote of the Senate, for minor acts of treason, should be sufficient to take away an individual’s right to vote.  The Senate is the logical institution to do this under the Constitution and it certainly has the power.

Senators: take away the right to vote of  public figures who carry out acts of minor treason.

Jim Jones

There are two movies coming out about Jonestown.  Both are probably way off the mark.

Yes, I knew Jim Jones…fairly well.

When Jim first arrived in San Francisco, he did what most black ministers do, pay a visit to the black leaders.  Cecil Williams, at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, was a main black leader at the time and I was the manager of Glide.

Cecil was put off by the three gorilla body guards that Jim had with him and offered to have me teach Jim’s staff the proper way to use body guards (First rule: don’t be obvious.)  I taught them and I also offered my services to help set up the bookkeeping and financial system for Jim’s church.  “No way” replied Jim … a clue to the future.

Jim got to know every....

Socially responsible investing

A friend asked my opinion on Socially Responsible Investing.  My reply: its fine as long as you realize that you do it for your own self-focused moral reasons and don’t have foolish notions that socially responsible investment has any impact on the world.  It doesn’t and can’t.  Every dollar you don’t invest in something will get investment from elsewhere.

I played a key role in starting the Socially Responsible Investment movement.  In 1971 I organized the first conference on the subject in Inverness (California).  Later I funded the key organizations in the movement.  I was the first corporate-foundation treasurer (I was at Glide in S.F.) to make Socially Responsible Investments and to personally visit all the main foundations in New York to encourage them to do the same.

I soon came to realize that the idea was pretty much a farce.  There are few if any pure companies on any issue.  Issues keep changing (from hiring minorities, to protecting rabbits, to napalm, to whale oil, to South Africa, et cetera). 

In addition to the issue de jure problem, investments are fungible.  When I sell a stock some else will buy it. As the New York foundation people so rudely told me: ‘if you don’t like a stock don’t buy it.’

Light water

Many of you probably already know about the Hungarian craze for light water.  Just in case you don’t here it is:

Deuterium, the molecule of hydrogen with two neutrons and one proton occurs naturally in water at the rate of 150 parts per million.  The concentration differs depending on geography.  Water is more depleted of deuterium in lakes than in the ocean, more depleted at the poles and at higher altitudes, meaning it is lighter.  Since some people living high in mountainous regions appear to live much longer than sea level lifespan, credit is given to light water.

You can buy your own light water and drink as much of it as you want.  It is available here and here for roughly $8  per gram.  The water on the market is 3 parts per million of deuterium.  Feel free to mix it to any proportion with tap water that you can afford.  You are supposed to live longer if you drink it at 40 parts per million.

End of the line

Another partial book review.  This is on Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma.  I put the book down  on page 116.

I loved Pollan’s first book The Botany of Desire and found his second book Second Nature to be boring.  So, as you’ll see with this review, Pollan is on a straight downhill trajectory.  I won’t read any more of his books.

In Omnivore’s first section Pollan tries to do for corn what he did for apples and marijuana in his first book: to show us how these plants have guided us into helping the plant take over the world. 

Hybrid corn has definitely taken over the world.  Corn, and its ally soy bean, have created such great surpluses that the price of corn keeps falling every year; related food, such as chicken, beef and pork, are so abundant as a consequence that the retail price never stops falling.  Now we are trying to use up the remaining surplus corn in our automobiles and trucks as ethanol.  Pollan does a good job of explaining why corn sugar has replaced all other commercial sugars in the U.S. since the mid-1970s.  I wrote about the Coke battle on this issue earlier.

Pollan is a great writer and fun to read.  The trouble is that he hates corporations so much that his whole schtick sounds like Michael Moore with brains.  Reading Pollan is like talking to an interesting old man who farts, belches and smells like a homeless bum.  Pollan is so politically offensive and inane that his book becomes an unreadable stinker.  Too much food production, by Pollan's account, is a capitalist created disaster.

(Yes, the photo at the left is skiing on corn.)

Theory tested

So how does a business theory get tested?

Several years ago I recommended that Boeing and the airlines be broken up.  Boeing should be broken into manufacturing and service.  Airlines should be broken into customer service and airline operations.

These proposals grow out of my observation, in Commerce, that there are three categories of business: trade, industry and clientry.  Trade optimizes every sale, industry aims to reduce cost and increase efficiency and clientry aims to develop long term relations with clients. 

The industrial side of a business requires a different form of management than the clientric side.  That is why the two forms of business should be separate and why Boeing and the airlines should be split apart, for their own and everyone‘s benefit.

Yesterday’s Wall Street Journal had a front page article about Air Canada which has been broken into its component parts.  It turns out that running the airline has a return on capital under 5% while the customer relations passenger and freight systems have a return on capital of roughly 20%.  These two parts are very different forms of business and should not be managed the same way, per my earlier observation.

This is the first solid evidence that my model matches the real world of commerce.

Charles Antell lied

If you’ve been following the Charles Antell story in this blog you have been eagerly awaiting the results of the mass spectroscopy test from SiDMap in Los Angeles.

I paid to have a small sample of Charles Antell Formula #9 hair pomade chemically analyzed. (The sample came from Ed Griffin, a blog reader.) I heard the first TV infomercials in 1953 for this miraculous hair product that would guarantee to keep me from going bald. Now 53 years later, there is good evidence that it worked.

The TV infomercial said the product was mostly lanolin. So I had the mass spec comparison made with pure commercial lanolin. You can enlarge the results of the mass spec images by clicking. The top image is Charles Antell and the bottom is commercial lanolin.

The top image has two main lines; one at 6.3 which is a 16 carbon saturated fatty acid palmitate, the second peak is 8.6 an 18 carbon saturated fatty stearic acid. Together these are an animal fat: lard. Charles Antell lied about the ingredients of his miracle pomade. He was apparently put out of business for false advertising in 1954 by the State of Utah.

Another point to note: the lanolin is not a natural product. The control sample of lanolin came from NOW Foods Herbal Remedies and claims to be 100% organic from sheep's  wool.  From the mass spec lines it is obviously made from carefully measured separate ingredients. Organic nonsense.

Dangerous religion?

I saw the Ashes and Snow exhibit at the Boardwalk in Santa Monica.

The building is impressive; made out of 152 shipping containers.  I used a shipping container back in the late 1970s to make a tea house out in the Candlestick Park parking lot.

The Santa Monica building is designed to give a sense of awe.  It does, especially with the dark interior and the 50 foot high soaring canvas ceiling.  The awe is designed to create a religious experience about environmentalism.

The whole project appears to be financed by a rich government, like Qatar.  The photographs cost over $5 million and the videos probably the same.  The artist claims that the absurdly romantic images were all created without technical enhancements.  I don’t believe a word of his nonsense.  It could have been done with Adobe Photoshop and no one would have known.  I’ve never seen landscapes or waterscapes that resemble his, so Photoshop is a perfectly good explanation of why not.  There are no indications where the geography is, if it exists.

The animals were chosen to give a romantic image: elephants, whales and large hawk-like birds.  No slobbering camels, sharks, vultures or cockroaches.

There were thousands of people crowded in to see the exhibit.  The awe and the romantic environmentalism were a farce for me.  It was just as religious and pious as Leni Riefenstahl’s Nazi movie Triumph of the Will.

Is the Ashes and Snow exhibit as dangerous as similar romanticism was in Nazism? 

If other elements in our society conspire to create economic disaster and social disintegration then I nominate this environmental theology as one of the first horrors to watch out for.  The fact that the exhibit is at the beach in Santa Monica is appropriate to associate it with Nazism.  Santa Monica bans smoking on their vast open beaches.  (A future blog will describe Jim Jones and his religion that went crazy.)

Modular house

I got to see the first modular house built in Santa Monica. 

The modules are made from 4 inch square steel tubes. Mounted on the tubes are exterior wall materials on the outside, plumbing and electric in the walls with insulation and  plywood walls inside ready for further finishing.  The structure is expansive and beautiful. 

Getting the inspectors to sign-off is a problem since they’ve never done it before. Modular houses are the norm in Japan. 

Modular housing has made sense for fifty years but unions have made them impossible in most countries.  Japan has weak unions and no cheap labor so factory production is necessary; it has been highly refined.

The modular home in Santa Monica is fun (for those of us who love welding) but not cheap and definitely not the wave of the future.

Click to enlarge photos.

Debt free

Did someone send junk email to the Australians? “Pay off your debts.”

Australia paid off its national debt this weekend. I have no idea what this means and no one else does either. This is a first among modern industrial nations.

Bonded indebtedness has been a source of national economic growth and vitality for three hundred years because it was a sign that a government was stable and could raise taxes from a reliable tax base.  That era is past. What does indebtedness mean today?

Every central banker is looking at what happens to Australian economic growth in the next five years.

English flexibility

I love the complexity of English that this billboard indicates. I’m glad this is my native language and I was raised with it, otherwise I would read this billboard as announcing that their product is a dirty fighter who breaks the rules. Or I might think it was a mistaken spelling that should read “We fight dirt.”

However, while we don’t speak it this way, English is so flexible that we know the billboard is saying: their product thwarts dirty engines. An adverb/adjective has been used as a objective noun.

The Japanese make jokes like this all the time.

Inventors

There is a TV program that is a copy of American Idol based on American inventors. The program has a panel of three judges who evaluate the inventor’s proposals and often prototypes.

For me this program is emotional terror. First, I don’t see most inventions as stupid and worthy of ridicule and humiliation because I respect inventors. Inventors are people with a vision of how the world could be different and better and they are willing to do something about it. Ridiculing them is mean-spirited and vicious.

Second, anyone who thinks they can tell which invention will succeed has had no experience in the business world.  I have worked with thousands of businesses and hundreds were based on inventions or modifications of existing businesses.  I could never tell what would succeed and what would fail.  Virtually nothing did fail, so long as the business person learned from and accommodated the market.

Let me offer some examples of my clients who would have been ridiculed by the TV judges. 

Two women opened a store on Union Street in San Francisco in the early 1970s to sell cosmetics that were “more organic” by their definition, meaning more fruit and herbal scents; they used good simple graphics.  Minor modification of no consequence? Their store, designs, products and name were bought by an English company that is today’s Body Shop. (A global company.)

There were two surfers who started silk screening t-shirts with complex environmental images for the Sierra Club crowd, as well as political statements.  This was in the mid-1970s, at a time when t-shirts only had sports teams and city names on them.  I remember thinking to myself,  “Will this ever catch on? People only have room in their closets to buy one or two t-shirts.” (Thirty years later the message t-shirt business is still expanding.)

What about the guys, in the late 1970s, who took old bike frames and put fat tires on them?  They used the weird bikes to ride on fire trails on Mt. Tamalpais -- an obvious dead-end business.  Yet, they changed the entire bicycle industry with their invention: the mountain bike.

I repeat: I have sheer contempt for the TV program about American Inventors. This is Hollywood pursuing its steady output of trite bad taste and infantile perspective on the world.

University direction?

Has there been a change in the status of the University in the past fifty years?

My personal metric says “yes.” And the change in status has been negative. Decidedly so.

What might be going on?

First, there has been the radical shift....

Oil and oligopoly

The fact that the price of gasoline is nearly the same in adjacent gas stations and varies by regions so that some retail stations near oil refineries have higher prices than stations distant from the refineries suggests an oligopoly, doesn’t it? 

The answer is "no!"  The consistency of price suggests that gasoline is a commodity.  The price of #1 wheat and #2 corn is the same everywhere, which reflects the fact that wheat and corn are commodities.  If there were a retail gasoline oligopoly you would see the same gas station names that we had fifteen years ago: Texaco, Union, Mobil, Citgo and Exxon… but they are all long gone.  Gasoline is a commodity and gas retailing is a precarious business.

The regional variation in price is a reflection of demand differences.  Transportation costs for gasoline are negligible but the price variation correlates exactly with the income level of the region.  Demand is the determinant of regional pricing.

The connection between the price of retail gasoline and wholesale barrel of oil is parallel but not very close. The intervening factor is refining which is a narrow bottleneck, with a limited number of plants, with modest profits, horrific capital requirements, intense government regulation and a genuine nimby problem.

Mind and mother

Is your mind and worldview more like your mother’s or your father’s?

I have pondered this question for a long time and have concluded that my father influenced many of my ideas as have other people in my life but the structure of my mind is closer to my mother’s.

The reason for this would appear to be, not unique in my case, because our mind is a reflection of our language and language comes disproportionately from the one parent or guardian who spent the most time with us in the first two years. 

I have the benefit of having had a Mexican speaking nanny who spoke very little English (I know a few Mexican swear words obviously aimed at a child), I had a father who was working very hard during my infancy.  So only my mother was around to teach me my language.  It is easy to pinpoint her.  She also had a distinct way of viewing the world that I can reconstruct.

If most of us got our worldview with our language from our parents then most of us probably got it from our mothers.  The consequence is that we live predominantly in an intellectual matriarchy.  Our minds probably follow closely our mitochondrial DNA. 

I find that a strange position.  Since we don’t have much knowledge or measurement of what the mind is, we have eons of future time to learn more about this fascinating proposition.

Moral self-righteousness

I first heard it from a TV character Old Christine who is an extreme Lefty and claimed, after being accused, that she ‘couldn’t possibly be a racist because I drive a Prius.’

What she was saying was that she is always PC in everything.  What the audience heard was that she was morally self-righteous and had achieved such heights of properness with her Prius that she could do no wrong in any other area.

I expect to see and hear a lot more moral equivalence.  ‘I called the INS on my maid after she broke a lamp, I like long showers and occasionally throw beer bottles out the car window… I’d better buy a Prius.

Progress report

Its been awhile since I reported on the progress of the chemical analysis of the Charles Antell Formula #9.

While in Los Angeles last weekend I found a friend of the family who does retail mass spectroscopy. For a few hundred dollars he will compare the 53 year old Charles Antell sample to a sample of pure lanolin.  The difference will be the secret in the Charles Antell that has kept me from going bald, like the rest of my male relatives.

More later.

Its been awhile since I reported on the progress of the chemical analysis of the Charles Antell Formula #9.

While in Los Angeles last weekend I found a friend of the family who does retail mass spectroscopy. For a few hundred dollars he will compare the 53 year old Charles Antell sample to a sample of pure lanolin.  The difference will be the secret in the Charles Antell that has kept me from going bald, like the rest of my male relatives.

More later.

Disenfranchising in democracy

In an earlier blog I suggested disenfranchising people who take a job with tenure or other equivalents of lifetime employment.  My reason was that these people take themselves out of the  vicissitudes of mainstream life that the rest of us live with.

The radical part of the disenfranchising notion may be the hardest for people to grasp and may be the reason I got no comments on this radical proposal.

For several centuries democracy has been about enfranchisement.  In the 1860s, in America, many lives were lost over this issue.

The time has come to reverse this process.  We are watching experiments in democracy that are failing.  At this moment the Palestinians have used democracy to vote in an anti-democratic party.  The Iranians did that several decades ago and we all suffer. 

Before we can disenfranchise parties we have to disenfranchise voters.  Hamas would not have come to power if voters had been required to renounce violence and open display of weapons.

The examples are just beginning to emerge on the world scene, it is time for America to be a leader in this movement. 

Should citizens be refused the vote because they opt out of the vicissitudes of life?  That has historically been the reason for denying the franchise. It is the reason we deny the vote to citizens under 18 and people in prison (The argument that the vote is taken away from felons as punishment fails because it is trivial compared to incarceration).

Joe Btfsplk

Joe was a character in an earlier generation comic strip: Lil Abner. 

Joe had a dark cloud that followed him around.

I rode on Bart, our local excuse for a subway system, next to an attractive woman.  Everything she told me about her life was a calamity.  I was going to the airport and she was going to visit her boy friend in jail.  The bus from Bart to the jail had a very limited schedule and the last bus would get her to the jail just before visiting hours were over.

We both had to make one change of trains and there were two alternative stops to do it.  Since she had been to the jail previously, I trusted her statement that the second stop was better.

You guessed it.  The second stop meant changing tracks over 100 yards, the first would have been just getting off, walking 10 feet across the platform and getting on.  She couldn't possibly make the last bus and I had to carry my bag an unnecessarily long trip in a hurry.

I suspect Joe Btfsplk is a real human prototype.  Most of my life has been blessed. Some very dull people who always associate with friends who are similarly blessed seem to do well.  Then there are people like the woman on Bart.

Look back two years

In a blog written nearly two years ago I suggested that Marwan Barghouti was an Israeli intelligence operation.  Now, with his likely release it is beginning to look like I read international intelligent data pretty well.

Secular Catholicism

Some of my readers are getting tired of my using the term Lefty Fundamentalist.  So I’m going to consider an alternative with the same theological underpinnings: secular Catholicism.  The theology is nearly the same as I gave for Lefty Fundamentalism in an earlier blog:

1. Equality of income has been a human ideal. It should continue to be.
2. Global commerce is exploitive of workers and the environment.
3. People would not be poor if...

Fight back

What company gives more money to the retarded community and hires more retarded workers than any other?  What company’s past earning were given in the tens of $millions to National Public Radio… many times the magnitude of any other private contributions?

Now what company is hated by the Left community, is blamed for destroying farming in France and has books and movies attacking it for making Americans fat? 

Same company: McDonald’s.

I could give a....

NOPA

NOPA is the name of a new restaurant on Divisadero and Hayes.  NOPA refers to North of the Panhandle.  This is good food, California comfort and a great setting. There is an electric atmosphere.   It was opened Tuesday night by my friend Laurence Jossel who already has three Chow restaurants in the top 100 Chronicle list.  This will be his fourth success.

Pee in private

One of the Starbucks I go to, Laurel Village, mentioned the problem they have with someone who messes up their bathroom.  Several other coffee shops I go to, including the Peets on Market, have solved the problem in different ways, depending on their floor plan, layout, neighborhood and volume of usage. I always clean up a bathroom when I’m finished, if it isn’t an impossible mess to start with.

Anyway, the Starbucks with a problem left me thinking about the issue of privacy and the use of photos or video cam to figure out who messes up their bathroom. 

To start with, my view on privacy is fairly....

Bubbles?

Andrew Laperriere, in the recent Weekly Standard, argued that we are in a housing bubble.  He also refers to the recent dot.com “bubble.”  I dispute both.

Start backwards with the so called dot.com “bubble.”  There wasn’t one.  The NASDAQ went up dramatically for a year and lost ground for a year to return to the same level two years previously.  That is not a bubble.  Moreover the stock market measures that are published were reflecting an underlying economic reality which itself had disappeared.  That is the point I want to make about the potential so called housing bubble.

The dot.com stock rise was due....

Gayla Rosenfeld

At any one time I have over a hundred clients with about ten active ones.  I mention Galya, who is a client, because she has taught me one thing about business and reminded me of another about art.

One, because she creates one-of-a-kind wearable art.  In the 70s and 80s there were dozens of retail outlets for wearable art in the U.S., now, I find, there are only two or three such retail outlets. The market has  changed significantly.

The greatest designer of wearable art, in those days, was Kaisek Wong also a friend and client.

Two, she reminds me that great art is defined by the power to change perception.  The two images of Galya’s metallic headscarf on this page come from a piece now owned by the Museum of Modern Art in New York.  In a time of Islam and Muslim head scarfs, this image is powerful art.

Judas

The recent publication of the Gospel of Judas by the National Geographic Society should not be taken lightly.  It is of earth shaking importance in the world of Christian theology.  Not because Judas' acts were blamed on the Jews nor because the whole Passion story served as a key source of anti-Semitism and was encouraged by the Catholic Church and many other Christian churches for two thousand years …. (and all those churches have the blood of the Holocaust on their hands.)

No, because the story of Judas acting on his own...

.exe scam

It is rather sad that you need to know a great deal about computer programming to operate a home PC safely.  Imagine what a kitchen would be like if you could get electrocuted for not fully understanding electrical theory.

The latest scam is one that will probably be very hard for most people to deal with.  You get an email that says you are being sued.  You can settle for $500 or go to court and possibly lose more.  The subject of the suit is in the attachment.

Everyone knows that they shouldn’t open an attachment but this one seems important and risky to ignore.

The scam is that the attachment is an .exe file.  That means the file can open directly into the programming operation of the computer.  Your computer automatically executes an .exe file once you put it in the computer.  Exe is short for execute.  Your computer can then find your valuable information, name lists and anything else including lurking to watch your key strokes and send everything off to another computer to screw you.

While we’re at it, don’t open a .dll file either.  A .dll file is a source file for an .exe file and can bring the computer to a dead stand still if it has an endless loop in it.

Burning man

I hope my readers know what Burning Man is. (There is a book on Burning Man.) I bring it up because next month, Sunday May 7th, we get to have the S.F. Running with the Bulls.  It will be a Burning Man/Urban Gorilla type event.

When I start something, I usually design it lose enough to evolve in any direction.  Case in point:

The historian of Burning Man, a co-founder, John Law, has written the history but not yet published it.  I was interviewed extensively.

The first few years of Burning Man was on a beach in San Francisco in January, before it got too big and had to be moved to a more isolated beach.  John did the neon lighting on The Man when it was first moved from the Great Highway to the entry to the Golden Gate and for a few years after it went to Nevada.

My connection?

(This is a comment on the blog above.)
In the mid-1970s I was living with Carole Rae an artist who felt something should be done with all the Christmas trees that were thrown out on the streets of San Francisco after Christmas.  So I rented a large van, filled it with 40 trees, phoned all of our friends for a Saturday night bonfire on the beach at the Great Highway.  About 50 people came to the first one, more to the one we held in the second year and still more to the third year.  After that, burning Christmas trees became a tradition in San Francisco with dozens, then hundreds of people, who now fill the beach in the first weekends of January with small Christmas tree bonfire parties.

I did two things to create that incipient vital institution that later became Burning Man.  First, I didn't pick an event date until the morning of the event. That made sure the wind was subdued for safety reasons. Secondly, I made sure the bonfire was as big as humans could make it.  Both elements made the event fun for the kind of spontaneous people I knew it would attract.

The image of a bonfire on the San Francisco beach built with Christmas trees was new to me.  However, I had seen bonfires in Kyoto the previous August, part of the Obon rituals, so I knew the emotional power of a bonfire.

What the Run with the Bulls evolves into is unknowable as were the beach fires. 

A little off point diversion.  Isn't it curious that bonfires have been connected to Obon for several thousand years in Japan but our etymological dictionaries try to connect bonfires to cemetery bone fires in Europe.  A bone fire could never have been a bonfire, bones hardly burn.  Etymologists just have a bias against the migration of words from anywhere but Europe, as I see it.

Arrogance

If you haven't heard, San Francisco has been under a rain cloud for a month and it will probably be staying here for awhile longer.

Many people, in their infinite wisdom attribute this to global warming but the proximate cause, the cause that correlates best with Pacific Coastal weather, with the jet stream dipping to the South, is the El Niño, La Niña current. 

The reason for titling this blog “arrogance” is because weather scientists and nearly all other scientists seems confident in predicting weather patterns over a fifty year period (global warming), in spite of the fact that oceans play a major role in weather and nobody, but nobody, has the slightest idea what causes the powerful hemispheric temperature changes called el Niño and La Niña.