Pro Commerce

Boom and gloom

Two Yahoo news headlines and the appropriate stories that follow: AP poll: Americans optimistic for 2007" and "Poll: Americans see gloom, doom in 2007."

Both stories were sent out by the AP about the same AP survey of 1,000 Americans interviewed by phone.  It is not a case of a glass half full and a glass half empty.  It is a case of a full glass versus an empty glass.

I would guess that the second story was written for the NY Times and the LA Times.  So which paper was the first press release written for?

Data #21

Global oil production: Saudi Arabia and Russia are matched at 7.7 million barrels a day.  The big surprise is that the U.S. is the third largest producer at 5.7 million barrels a day.

Global natural gas production: Russia at 22 trillion cubic feet followed by the U.S. at 19 trillion.  No other country even comes close. Canada, number three, is only 6 trillion.

American energy consumption: Very stable. While population has increased 28% since 1980, energy consumption has only increased 25% for a net reduction in per-capita energy use. Moreover, petroleum use has grown the least in that time 15% while nuclear (300%) and coal (50%), both domestic, have grown the most.

We consume 100 trillion BTUs and produce 70 trillion.  A thirty percent reduction would make us energy independent.  We don't need a full 30% reduction because Canada, Norway, Mexico and a few other countries are reliable energy suppliers.

I'm going to do my part to get off oil.  I'm saving money to buy a plug-in-Toyota Prius, probably available in three years.  Based on my driving habits, that will take me off oil altogether.  (pp584,585 & 592)

Unrecovered memory

A few weeks ago Dr. Laura, the straight shooting afternoon radio personality, made a strong statement that "recovered memory" was a sham and an absurd outrage.  I like Dr. Laura for her candor and I love her for her strong stand on this issue.

No one can forget years of physical abuse and no one has come up with a mental mechanism to explain how such abuse could be forgotten.

But America was in an hysterical state from the beginning of the 1980s to the end of the 1990s in which 99.9% of Americans believed memories of serious and extensive abuse could be "recovered" in a therapeutic setting.  In 1997 a college student reported that she had falsely said she was sexually abused as a child because every other woman in her dorm at a prestigious Eastern college had a story of being sexually abused.

This is the subject that got me interested in the issue of hysteria.  In 1986, Catherine Campbell, a lawyer and close friend told me about the trials in Fresno and around the country based on "recovered memory" and satanic rituals being carried out on pre-school children.  The evidence didn't exist, but juries were sending dozens of people to prison on hearsay and allegations by children and recovered memory experts.  I looked into it and into the other hysterical claim of the time that hundreds of thousands of children were being abducted.

I wrote the first article on the hysteria in the Whole Earth Review of 1986.  I got no response to the article or from anyone I talked to or from anyone other than the victims who could see the hysteria.  By 1986, over 1,000 people were enmeshed in the web of court trials but all of America was united in believing in recovered memory, satanic child abuse and massive child abductions. The second article, after mine, on the hysteria didn't come until 1990, in a Tennessee newspaper, followed by two in the Village Voice by Debbie Nathan titled "The Ritual Sex Abuse Hoax".

The beginning of the end of the hysteria was recorded by two more prestigious articles in the New York Review of Books by Berkeley professor of literature Frederick C. Crews in 1993 and 1994.

The hysteria still lingers in 2006, I would guess 20% of Americans still believe it.  Thank you Dr. Laura for your strong stand.

Data #20

What does the number of women getting doctorates in the US in mathematics tell you?  In the last data year (2003) there were 994 PhD's granted in mathematics. Only 27% were women.   It doesn't tell me anything. Especially in the context that women have an even lower percentage in computer sciences (20%) and engineering (17%). What I notice is there are no feminist screamers trying to get the president of Harvard fired because he talks about the reasons for the low degree rates in computer sciences and engineering.

Nor does anyone give a damn that women get more PhD's in Psychology (65%) which has three times as many doctorates as math.

It is interesting that more foreigners come to get PhDs in the U.S. in engineering (60%) than any other field.  Only computer science comes close with 50% and math with 48%. 

To bad we don't grant immediate green cards to foreigners getting advanced degrees in the U.S. That is a more important issue in terms of commerce and intelligent policy than the ratio of women in the field of math. (pp536)

No hippy politicos

In my Hippy History blog I omitted a discussion of a common misconception.  The misconception is that the anti-Vietnam War protest movement was a hippy movement.  It wasn't and history proves that it wasn't.

The political movement that occurred at the time of the hippies had its own independent origins in the traditional socialist, communist, lefty world.  The major organizing force was the Free Speech Movement and the "fuck" speech movement first visible at UC Berkeley. I was at UC Berkeley and I was the founder of the Graduate Student Union of the early 1960s.  Mario Savio, later the leader of the Free Speech campaign, was my treasurer.  There were no hippies around.

By the time the political movement of the era had attracted the baby boomers entering college and University, the movement was focused on the anti-Vietnam anti-draft issue.  At no time were the organizers or leaders hippies.  They smoked dope and participated in the hippie scene, the men sought sex from the hippie women, but they didn't engage in the hippy world.

When the first anti-Vietnam War protest marches began, hippies gladly joined in.  What created the nearly geometric growth of the anti-war protest parades and demonstrations was the presence of the hippies who brought along vital elements for the marches: hippy music, naked breasts, plenty of marijuana and a celebratory mood.  I went to many major marches and they all fit this description.  Hippies came for the fun.  Hippies were about fun. After five years of marches the crowds in the San Francisco Bay Area had grown to nearly 300,000.

History has shown that my observation is accurate.  The politicos of the 1960s were separate from the hippies.  The hippies went to anti-war demonstrations for the fun and party atmosphere.

When Operation Iraqi Freedom came along in 2003 the traditional anti-war coalition repeated its old patterns and organized anti-war marches with rallies at the end of the march.  The first anti-Iraqi war march in the San Francisco Bay Area attracted nearly 50,000 people.  After that the number declined until three years later, the Spring anti-war march attracted 2,000 people. The second Iraqi war was just as unpopular as the Vietnam War, based on public opinion data.  The rapid decline in the  number of marchers and protesters from 2003 to 2006 in contrast to the growth from 1966 to 1973 is explained by one fact.  The first rally in 2003 had no hippy music, had very little in the way of drugs, the speeches were filled with hate, venom, anti-Americanism, anti-Semitism and the whole event was angry.

Hippies stayed away from the 2003-2006 anti-Iraqi war marches in droves, even though there are still hundreds of thousands of hippies in the S.F. Bay Area. The size of the anti-Iraq marches has dwindled steadily, the absence of hippies is evident. No fun, no hippies.

More hippy success

One great hippy contribution to America and the world, that I missed in an earlier blog about hippy contributions: mainstreaming the disability community that had previously been locked in dark back rooms.

The history is straightforward.  Ed Roberts, a wonderful close friend of mine, founded the Center for Independent Living in Berkeley in the late 1960s on the energy, optimism and encouragement of the hippy movement.  The Center became the Centers and by the time Jerry Brown became Governor of California in 1974 Ed was appointed Director of the Department of Rehabilitation. Ed had already started the World Institute on Disability (a client of mine) and was the world leader in every aspect of the disability movement.

Ed changed the disability budget of California from 80% for the blind/deaf to 80% for the wheelchair disabled and he did it with the support of the blind/deaf clientele.  National patterns followed California.

I have written a biographical comment on Ed, and now I want to add that it was the hippy milieu that provided Ed the support, often the staff and protesters that brought disability to the front row place it has held in America since the late 1970s.

Bellies full

The day after Christmas is a good time to reflect on a conversation I had that may have been repeated in many parts of America and the world. 

I found myself saying that George W. Bush may become one of the great presidents in American history, something that Bill Clinton seems to have been alluding to when he said he was jealous that Bush had 9/11 happen on his watch.

My conversational antagonists immediately hit me with "George Bush has divided the country..."   Yes, and that is one of the signs that he will be remembered as a great president.  One of the greatest presidents divided the country into North and Confederate and then divided the North into Union and Copperhead.  The Copperheads were Northern Democrats who hated Lincoln and did everything possible to sabotage the war effort.  A leading Copperhead newspaper was the New York Tribune, just as is true today with the New York Times.
The Copperheads got stronger every day until General Sherman captured Atlanta and the North started to support the war.

The same thing happened to President Franklin Roosevelt.  The country was against him, the Cooperheads were called America Firsters, the people who objected to war against Germany, especially since it was Japan that attacked the U.S. (hear an echo of Afghanistan but not Iraq?).  The American public did not support the war in Europe until the first major victories in France in 1944.

Being a devisive president is a sign of a strong clear policy with strong Copperhead opposition.  The term Copperhead comes from the description of kosher in Leviticus, the snake is called the lowliest creature because it crawls on its belly.  People in 1863 knew that a copperhead was a snake and they knew Leviticus.

I am reminded of Copperheads by several book reviews of Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln's Opponents in the North by Jennifer Weber.

Sarbox and IPOs

Both of those words may be new to many of my readers.  Sarbox is the insider's term for the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation that has been the talk of the corporate world for three or four years.  Sarbox requires corporations to attest to the validity of their public audits with serious penalties connected to erroneous or unreliable reporting. This accounts for two visible trends.  Thousands of large corporations keep restating their financial statements, often going back many years.  Far fewer new corporations are being listed on the American stock exchanges than on London, Tokyo, or Hong Kong.

An IPO is an Initial Public Offering of stock.  This is how start-ups make millions for their founders when the rare IPO succeeds.  The connection of IPOs to Sarbox is that we have virtually killed the domestic IPO market. Sarbox is costly and onerous for a start-up to comply with.  So IPOs are flourishing in London and Tokyo.

Consequences: other countries will get their own version of Sarbox as soon as the sleazy corporations have moved and found haven outside the U.S.  More start-ups will wait to IPO until they are big enough to afford a Sarbox compliance, more will sell out to big companies and more will take the interim step of getting funding from start-up funds.  None of which is either particularly good or bad.

Good evidence

I argue that the good and the competent Palestinians have left the country long ago.  The remaining people are the bottom of the barrel. Some of my blog readers find this hard to believe.

Here is the AP story about the trivial number of Christmas tourists visiting Bethlehem. Bethlehem is in the  Arab West Bank.

The Palestinians interviewed about the reason for the empty stores are completely unable to blame their own Hamas terrorist government or the perpetual suicide murderers that they encourage.  That is proof to me that the people left in the West Bank are the bottom of the human barrel.

Good proof.

Cry baby, cry

The defeated Republican Senator from Montana, Conrad Burns, complains about the way Senate campaign funds were spent on his campaign.

Too bad, former Senator Burns. I work with the man who did the polling for your Democratic opponent and he says you lost because you were widely perceived as corrupt. Nothing else mattered as much as your corruption. 

I've worked on polling in dozens of campaigns and it is a rule that most candidates never accept the negative survey information that is found. I only remember one candidate who accepted the negative responses. (The one candidate who listened to the negatives was Joe Alioto when he ran for Mayor of San Franciso and won. He heard the negatives and said "they don't even know me, but I understand how they can get those opinions.") 

Certainly this former Senator from Montana didn't listen to the negative polling data.

Wild Salmon

I did a taste test the other day comparing wild salmon and fish farm salmon.

If I were a Lefty or Enviro-nazi I would have found the wild salmon tasted infinitely better. But I'm not and it didn't.

The fish farm salmon had a distinctly better taste.  The wild salmon had the taste of "fear."  Yes, the taste of fear.

Fear has a taste, which is why cats play with mice for hours before they bite their heads off. 

Those wonderful tasting fish farm salmon grew up in comfort, ease and luxury...like Kobe Beef.  The wild salomon spent their lives in fear and terror waiting for predators to eat them at any moment...slashing them apart, ripping their guts out.

Do your own taste test.  See if you can taste fear.

Ali speaks out

In case you didn't read Ali Hirsi in the LA Times, it is a must read. Islamic hate of Jews is not a minor anomaly.

The discussion at my most recent Hannukah dinner was about the rapid explosion of anti-Semitism and its spread to the U.S. A few people are beginning to notice it.  I suspect that Lefty Jews will be the last to understand and the first to be punished for their blindness; especially with the NYTimes and Doonesbury as their information sources. 

Jew hate is a Lefty American thing, listen to the vitriolic clamor of the Lefty hero Jimmy Carter.  Jews will only be protected in the U.S. by the Christian Zionists and probably the hard core supporters of George W. Bush.

Oil and inheritance

We all seem to understand that a large inheritance is guaranteed to destroy an heir; it is a curse. This is now discussed in psychological circles as the Paris Hilton Syndrome (I personally love Paris and her wild spirit.)

I suspect the same syndrome should be applied to nations that are built on oil that they sell to others.

I can only make my argument about the curse on oil with examples: the entire Arabian world of Wahabism, Iran which was once a great empire, Russia that has returned to its worst roots, Nigeria that is in serious decay, Mexico, stalled in economic "nowhere land" and Venezuela an emerging socialist tyranny.  The only example which doesn't fit...yet: Norway.

I think we will have to wait on Norway as an example.  I see signs of growing anti-Semitism there and that is a serious sign of social decay.

Convergence

Two important articles. One by Daniel Pipes, the leading expert on the contemporary Middle East, a brave man and brother of the world’s leading expert on the old Soviet Union. The other by Gidi Grinstein, a brilliant policy think tank expert in Israel.

Pipes makes it clear, for the umpteenth time that radical Islam is determined to wipe out the West and is growing while we appease our enemies and hold hands with their supporters on every front. Grinstein shows that the Islamic enemy is not only growing but is  learning to cooperate. Hamas, Hizbullah and Al Qaeda are working together with the nation-states of Syria, Iran, Egypt and Saudi Arabia.

If you want to be frightened read both these articles. (The amazing convergence photo with Che and Nasrullah is from the Wall Street Journal)

Good war, bad war

I’ve noticed that there is a good war and a bad war. The good war is Afghanistan where we had once attacked an al Qaeda camp and where Osama Bin Laden was known to live. Afghanistan had the Taliban who punished women, destroyed Buddhist statues and made everyone study in Madrassas.  The U.S. was joined by all of Europe and NATO in our good war there. There are only two cities and the total population is 30 million mostly in the countryside.

  The bad war is Iraq. Saddam Hussein had been in power for 25 years, had started a war with Iran, invaded Kuwait, been building major weapons including nuclear and chemical weapons systems for most of the 25 years, had gassed thousands of his own people, had buried tens of thousands of his political opponents, alive, and run torture chambers all over the country. Iraq had fired missiles into Israel without provocation, paid Palestinian martyrs and shipped arms to the PLO. A dozen countries joined us in Iraq including Japan; but countries that had been in corrupt oil deals with Iraq, France and Russia, did not join us. There are seven major cities in Iraq and 26 million people, mostly urban.

  Afghanistan is the good war and Iraq is the bad war. Both wars started at the same time and both wars are currently at the same stage of development: unstable, with an elected government and a steady stream of suicide bombers in the urban areas.

Do you understand why the Left makes such a major distinction between the two wars and can’t understand that the progress or lack of progress is identical?

Societies learn

The point of this blog is to examine the question of whether and how societies learn. I’ve pointed out in an earlier blog that America learned from the Vietnam War that it is immoral to mistreat soldiers who are willing to give their lives for their country.

  What do societies learn and how fast.

  Many societies have learned the main lesson of the 20^th Century: powerful centralized nation-states are bad for everyone in every way. The exemplars were Germany, Italy, the Soviet Union, China, Cuba, Vietnam, North Korea, Burma and Cambodia. All slave environments where citizens were (are) not allowed to leave except as dead bodies.

Most of Latin America never learned the key lesson of the 20th Century. Is it because Latin America played a very minor role in the world of the last century. With Cuba on its doorstep, how can Latin Americans choose slavery and be so slow to learn?

The lesson of the 21^st Century is the corollary to the lesson of the 20^th Century: tribes, weak societies, even those tribes existing within nation-states, can be perpetually dangerous and threatening to global stability.

The exemplars are the IRA, Hizbulla, Al Qaeda, Hamas and the Palestinians, the Tamil Tigers, Wahabis and the Islamic Brotherhood.

The poor Israeli’s have learned that the Palestinians, Hizbullah and their tribal Islamic Brothers are just as awful, Hell-bent on murderous behavior as their 20^th Century nation-state predecessors.

Few Diaspora Jews have learned either the lesson of the 20^th or 21^st Century in spite of their peers being the most horrid victims of both. Why are Diaspora Jews so slow to learn?

People and dogs

My wonderful friend Susan G in Tel Aviv sent me a video. In the video, a Lebanese woman explains the incredibly kind, thoughtful, loving care her mother got in an Israeli hospital. It will move you to tears.

The reality behind the video is that 80% of Israeli’s are extraordinarily kind, generous and morally outstanding people. The type of treatment the Lebanese woman’s mother got is the norm a thousand times a day.

On the other hand roughly 10% of the Lebanese meet those criteria of kindness and generosity and 5% of Palestinians do.

My point in this blog deals with the 20% of Lebanese....

Godaddy.com fraud

What is the role of commerce to government when it comes to fraud?

A good example is godaddy.com and Yahoo.com. This is how the fraud works. You search for a domain name on Yahoo.com. You find that it is available but you don’t take it immediately. If the name sounds like it could be a business (as opposed to a personal name) you will find a week later that the domain you were searching for is for sale at godaddy.com. Not only has godaddy.com stolen the name you were interested in, but godaddy.com runs an auction site to auction off the name you were interested in, if you won’t buy it directly from them.

Godaddy.com and Yahoo.com are running a fraud.

Should the government protect consumers from fraud? Of course! Commerce is not a moral system, never was never will be. It is up to the society in which commerce operates to apply its moral system to commerce. Our society has, over roughly 150 years of experimentation, concluded that caveat emptor (buyer beware) doesn’t work. Consumers spend more when they know that they are safe from fraud. So the government, in order to promote commerce in our particular moral environment, defines and punishes fraud.

By prosecuting fraud, the government also reduces murder and violence. If I bothered to find godaddy.com or I happen to drive past Yahoo.com headquarters, I would see that both companies pay the price for trying to cheat me.

Equity and additions

I was the manager of Glide United Methodist Memorial Foundation portfolio for eleven years 1971-1982. The portfolio was worth several million dollars and for ten years I generated a total return greater than 20% per year.  The last year I managed the portfolio the return was only 10%.  During that time and since, innumerable people have asked me for investment help and advice and I have steadfastly refused...for a simple reason.  There was no such thing as advice to buy without advice sometime later on to sell.  I couldn't even know who I had told to buy and certainly would never pick up the phone and try to call everyone to tell them I was selling. I would have to either manage a portfolio or stay far away from the whole matter.  I did the latter.

The Wall Street Journal on Saturday Dec. 2nd solved the whole 30 year problem for me.  There is a strategy for ordinary people to invest in equity, hold on to the portfolio, add to it over time and get all the benefits of the best equity investments. The strategy is to buy index ETFs , exchange traded index funds, in a diverse set of markets.  Keep buying the same portfolio package each time you can afford to buy more.  You will see your portfolio outperform nearly everyone, over a decade...over several decades. 

My balanced portfolio that doesn't need attention would be 45% U.S. Stock 45% international stock and 10% bonds. The 45% U.S. equity would be Dow Jones Total Index (IYY), the 45% international would be three stocks 15% Japan (EWJ), 15% non-Japan Asia (EPP), and 15% Europe (IEV).  Lastly for bonds I would get a portfolio of U.S. treasuries that are inflation adjusted (TIPS). (The letters in parens are the stock market symbols)

You can buy this portfolio online with any account that will give you an annual tax statement.  The costs are minimal.  I will buy this portfolio on Jan. 2 and report on its progress.

Ask me for investment advice again in 10 years and my answer should not have changed. (To calculate your portfolia additions see a more recent blog. Recalculate proportions if any one index is five points different.)

Paternalism

Paternalism is being subject to a Darwinian type of force.  I don’t subscribe to Social Darwinism but there is an interesting related phenomenon that is emerging.

Paternalistic societies are dying out.  Nearly all tribal societies are under pressure as their languages disappear and their members move to cities to be absorbed in the larger society.  Similarly large scale paternalistic societies based on communism and totalitarianism are being defeated in warfare and are converting to non-paternalistic models.  Cuba and North Korea are the last vestige of the classic communist model of paternalism and their people would all leave if they could, just as was true of the USSR, North Vietnam  and Mao’s China.  The Confederate South in the U.S. was a paternalistic society and lost the Civil War to a distinctly non-paternalistic North.

The reason for the failure of paternalism is the same reason for most biological “fittingest” failures: they are less functional in their environmental niche than their competitors.  A paternal society just can’t provide the volume and quantity of food that a non-paternalistic society can offer nor can it provide a reasonable amount of other social amenities that the modern world generates. 

This is probably a model of how agricultural and early medical technology moved around the world.  People saw that their neighbors had the food and health resources that they didn’t and in most cases, with or without warfare, they adopted their neighbors’ technology.  The technology that is conquering the world today is industrial commerce along with its large package of social values.

Hannukah prayer

Tonight is the first night of Hannukah.  Time to light the first of eight candles.

Here is my non god-centered translation of the Hannukah blessing:

Baruch ata adonai, eloheinu, melekh ha'olam asher kidishanu b'mitz'votav v'tzivanu l'had'lik neir shel Hannukah.

We revere the magnificence of our universe, the goodness of the laws that guide our lives and the opportunity to light the Hannukah candles.

Selfish religion

If you think the Lefty Fundamentalist religion is about caring for other people and sympathy for the less fortunate you are wrong.  Read the works of Arthur C. Brooks, particularly look at his article “Charitable Explanation”. 

Based on good survey research work, Lefty Fundamentalists, defined by me as believing in redistributing income, give one fifth as much money to charity as people who oppose redistribution.  Got that, Lefty Fundamentalists give twenty cents for every dollar that normal charitable Americans give.

That makes Lefty Fundamentalists selfish people who don’t give to charity, keep their money for themselves but believe everyone else should be taxed to pay for social programs for the poor.

That is really sick, but confirms my lifetime of experience. 

The one modest exception to this finding is Jews, who through 70 generations have been taught to be charitable.  In the last five generations many of these Jews have substituted Lefty Fundamentalism for Jewism, but they still have the lingering charitable training.

More inconvenient truth

A recent UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change press release said that methane from cattle releases 18% of total greenhouse gases, significantly more than automobiles and other mobile transport worldwide.

The most effective way to reduce methane emmissions from cattle, a way to get reductions of up to 75%, is to add molasses to the cattle feed. See the evidence below if you want to.  I know, I worked on cattle-molasses projects in India that were paid for with CO2 trade credits.

When is Al Gore going to make a movie about the inconvenient truth that more cattle need to be fed molasses?

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"Methane emissions per unit product may be reduced by 25 to 75 percent due to substantial increases in animal production efficiency, depending on animal management practices. In particular, applying molasses/urea multinutrient blocks (MNBs) and bypass protein techniques in tropical areas with chronic feed constraints can produce emissions reductions per unit product near the high end of the range." Source: UNFAO

Income inequality

You can see this Wall Street Journal article for a week. I wrote a data piece that shows that income inequality has been stable for a decade.

Turns out I'm way wrong.  Read the article. Those unfortunate rich people are less distant from the middle class every year.  The middle class is catching up and despite the gloom and doom hysteria of the Left, income inequality in the U.S. is decreasing.

The reasons are straight forward.  Income inequality appeared to be growing slightly because a change in the maximum income tax rates led more top earners to report income of any kind and to report it as Schedule C business income particularly.  Much more income reported on tax returns because of a change in tax laws.

The reason inequality is actually going down is because the real total income (the divisor in this equation) has been rising but is not reported in tax returns. More people are selling houses that are sheltered from all taxes when the gains are worth $250k to $500k every two years, and the proportion of people receiving social security, also non taxable, has been rising rapidly.

The poor Lefty hysterics, the world just isn't falling apart fast enough for them.

Take away the vote

It is really painful for me to listen to the many people who complain about the low voter turnout and who vigorously discuss the many paternalistic ways to get more people to vote.

What a waste of my time.  I’ve pointed out before and will repeat it here: the way to get people to vote is to take the right to vote away from a small part of the population.  Make the act of voting valuable.

My nomination for the three categories of people who will lose their vote are: people who inherit a large amount of money (say, a million dollars or more), who take a job with life-time job security or who are former presidents who leave the country to attack the U.S. when it is at war*. 
 
The first two categories of vote removal would be justified on the basis that these people are completely out of touch with the realities of life.  The third is justified because it is spelled out in the U.S. Constitution. Vote removal of these first two categories, inheritance and lifetime employment, would eliminate  90,000 San Francisco voters and turn San Francisco into a 50% Republican town. 

*Former President Jimmy Carter committed treason according to the U. S. Constitution when he went to Europe on several visits to attack American policy during the War in Iraq.  "Article III, Section 3 - Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Robot company

We had a juke box moved and the jukebox man moved the heavy box with a battery assisted dolly that could climb and descend stairs.

I look forward to the day when there are dozens of machines to help ordinary citizens move heavy objects.

In Tokyo, where there are many heavy coin operated machines in subway stations that are only accessible by stone stairs, it is common to see stair climbing dollies. I look forward to seeing many robots for carrying and moving heavy objects.  A few motor cycle sized acid storage batteries can operate under heavy load for a full day.  When will we have dollies that can be linked together at the ends of a heavy object, travel over modestly rough terrain, and be guided from a short distance?

I want a company to specialize in this field and develop an extensive range of products.  Chances are it will be the company that currently makes the Japanese stair climbing dollies.

Moral question

I’m still struggling with the moral issue of using pigs in Islamic suicide cases. Presumably suicide killers won't go to Islamic Paradise if they are eaten by a pig.

I created the composite on the right and almost anyone could do a better job. The original Iraq image from Google images is on the left along with the pigs..

The tactical question is whether the circulation of the image on the right would deter suicide killers or encourage them.

The moral question is whether the Islamic outrage over the use of pigs on the battlefield would be considered more grotesque than the suicide killers themselves. It wouldn't be an outrage in my mind but I'm not a mullah.

My only point of  reference on this issue is the coming holiday of Hanukah, which includes, for Jews 2000 years later, the memory that Emperor Antiochus IV sacrificed pigs on the alter in the Holy Second Temple. That single act provoked the Maccabeen War that the Jews won.

Honor

It is not a very interesting conversation if we just discuss and complain about the fact that honor has disappeared.  What is interesting is to ask why.

I have observed that honor rapidly disappeared with the advent of the women’s movement.  My son has made the more important point that honor disappeared with the end of class in America.  Both events that doomed honor occurred at the same time, the early 1960s.

The two, class and the women's movement, are connected to honor because honor is about protecting the weak, including the presumed weaker sex.  The women's movement attacked the premise that women needed protection (while hypocritically refusing to press for a military draft of women). The disappearance of class was the more powerful of the two; honor was a code of behavior that identified fellow members of the upper class; no longer an elite class in America, no longer a need for a class signifier.  The absence of class also retracted the paternalistic elements that were part of class, the elite's responsibility for the protection of the lower classes.

The most powerful proof of the disappearance of  class and evidence that honor was class based is the observation that honor is still with us but only in the military, the single remaining institution with a class, the officer class. 

One of the reasons for keeping woman off the front lines of battle is that men act with honor to protect fellow women soldiers and more soldiers die as a consequence.  Check the story of a woman officer, Rhonda Cornum, who was in a helicopter that came under fire in the Persian Gulf War and all the male soldiers piled on top of her to protect her (unfortunately the fire was coming from under the helicopter).

Farewell to honor.  One more nail in the coffin of the special qualities of the Confederacy, Southern honor.

Neanderthal

Neanderthal lived concurrently with our homo sapien ancestors in Europe and the Middle East for at least 15,000 years.

We know from a tiny amount of Neanderthal DNA that Neanderthal went extinct and that there was no effective interbreeding with our ancestors.  Neanderthal looked very much like us but had a larger brain and was probably lighter skinned.

Why did Neanderthal go extinct?

I have the answer based on looking at my fellow San Franciscans, 85%.....

Pop culture

Two items from pop culture, of little consequence.  First, if you like the TV program Cold Case with Kathryn Morris (photo on the right) you should know that it was taken lock, stock and barrel from the earlier Canadian version Cold Squad that ran for 100 programs starring Julie Stewart (photo on the left).

Second, don't waste your time on the movie For Your Consideration by Christopher Guest.  Its Guest's worst movie for one reason: solipsism. Staring at your navel, or in this case, telling a story about how Hollywood works, is boring to 99.7% of the world that doesn't make movies.

The movie has one redeeming element.  It proves what I said in an earlier blog. I said that the book The Devil Wears Prada had to be made non-Jewish when Hollywood made it into a film.  The change is necessary to help self-hating Jews in Hollywood believe they are people with universal values...which they aren't. 

In For Your Consideration the story is about a movie called Home for Purim.  By the end of the film, the movie within a movie has been changed to Home for Thanksgiving.

New addition to Purim

This blog was provoked by an article about the extent of rising anti-Semitism in Europe as described by British Labor MP Dennis MacShane - a close ally of British Prime Minister Tony Blair and co-author of a hard-hitting report on the rise of anti-Semitism across Europe. Nothing about the this awful problem makes it into the American press and especially not into the New York Times.

Purim is the Jewish festival that celebrates the saving of the Jews in Persia by Queen Esther.  The intended murderer of the Jews in Persia was Haman.  A special device is used to make a foul noise when the name Haman is mentioned in the Purim Celebration.

I propose that a small section be added to the Purim Celebration to make additional use of the foul noise maker.  In recent days arose a family that had once been Jews.  The family became one of the most powerful in the world of news-makers.  The names of the three family members who were most hostile to the Jews of their day were all called Arthur Sulzberger. Shake the noise maker at the sound of the name Arthur Sulzberger.  The first Arthur (Arthur Hays Sulzberger) controlled the New York Times during the entire Holocaust and never mentioned the slaughter in his newspaper, though he was told about it many times by authoritative sources with eye witness accounts. Then, more than half a century later, when an even larger campaign against the Jews was embraced by much of the monotheistic world and by the first world-scale organization, the next two Arthur Sulzbergers (Arthur Ochs Sulzberger and Arthur Ochs Sulzberger Jr.) turned a blind eye.  Use the foul noise maker.