Pro Commerce

Last day

Today is the last day to get a discount subscription to the online magazine American.com.  I don't know how much you'll save, but this is a good time to look at the articles and writers.  Very impressive. I signed up.

Road Jack doll

One of the businesses I was going to start was to make a doll called the Road Jack.  I made a few models to put on my desk in the early 1970s.  Many people passed my desk, but no one showed any interest in the doll.  I didn't make any efforts to market the doll.  Here it is for anyone to make and market.

In case the doll doesn't make sense here is the explanation.  This is a doll you hand to someone when you want to get rid of them.  You say "Hit the Road Jack and don't you come back no more, no more, no more, no more."

Reminds me

This reminds me of two other Democrats.

It reminds me of John Kerry and Bill Clinton.

Tax the luxury leisure class

One of the core Lefty political positions is the idea of taxing the rich.  By that the Left means tax high income people at a higher rate than everyone else.

The emotion behind this "tax the rich" position seems to be that equality is a desirable human outcome.  Envy is also an emotion driving this political position. The "logic" for this position is that the rich live a more luxurious life than everyone else and therefore benefit more from the economy. They should be taxed appropriately.

My response to this is that household pets are the greatest beneficiaries of luxury and they should be taxed at the same rate as the rich.  Dogs, cats and other pets in America get free housing, grooming, food and abundant medical care in most cases.  Household pets are the recipients of the top level of luxury in our society. Few are required to work.

Household pets should be issued tax ID numbers and should be taxed at the highest income tax rate.  The tax should be calculated on the imputed value of the housing, food and grooming that the pets receive. The pet "guardians" should file and pay the taxes.

A simple policy argument would also point out that dogs are increasingly becoming a social cost with their "guardians" demands for off-leash parks and dog running areas.

Why not? 

P.S. Any household pet that does productive work and has expenses associated with maintenance should be allowed to deduct those expenses on their taxes as in the case of dogs for the disabled and police dogs.

Democrats' IQ

I haven't found anyone writing about this subject and I was reluctant to write about it until I solved a problem.

What people don't write about and discuss is that the average IQ of Democrats is lower than the IQ of Independents, Non-Voters and definitely lower than Republicans. Yes, categorically.

Here is the data on education which is highly correlated with IQ:

                                Not HS Grad              College Grad & Post-grad
% of Democrats            32%                           15%
% of Independents       22%                           18%
% of Republicans          19%                           23%

Here is the data on people who earn incomes over $75,000 which is also highly correlated to IQ:

                        Income under $75,000        over $75,000
% of Democrats            74%                             26%
% of Independents        72%                             28%
% of Republicans           57%                             43%

Those are the facts.  Many studies have been done on non-voters level of income and education; non-voters match independents exactly. 

To recapitulate: The Republican average IQ is higher than non-voters and independents and all three are higher than the Democratic average IQ.

I was reluctant to publish this data because I couldn't figure out a way to substantiate it by survey research since it is well nigh impossible to test adults for IQ.  I figured out how to do it.

Proposed IQ/political affiliation test: take a fairly stable city (low population turnover) with a representative population, such as Fresno, California. Go back to the Elementary Schools IQ tests of the early 1980s and then track down the students and look at their current party registration.  The whole project could be done without any one person knowing the actual connection of the IQs and the final party affiliation.  One person keeps the key to the school data secret but passes on the names and addresses to the person who leads a team to find the people and determine their party registration. A final person puts the names into categories without identifying the categories and gives the material to the first person to match the original IQ data with the categories without ever revealing the secret name/IQ data.

Such a survey could cost upwards of several hundred thousand dollars, but it can be done and I am sure it will substantiate my claim in this blog that Republicans are the political cohort that has the highest average IQ.

San Francisco residential real estate

I'm not surprised that residential real estate prices and rental rates keep climbing in San Francisco when there is a slump in much of the rest of the country. There are several anomalies at work here, but none explain the phenomenon.

I wish I could pin it on the City payroll which is gigantic.  The City payroll last year was over $2 billion, employing over 27,000 workers.  That is $75,000 per worker (including taxes and benefits).  There are almost 3,000 workers and politicians earning over $100,000 on the payroll. For every City worker who lives outside of San Francisco there is Federal or State worker who lives in San Francisco, so the number, 27,000 is a good indicator of the impact of the City payroll on the City.

San Francisco has the highest number of city employees per capita of any American city.

The City has a high gay population by all data estimates.  I estimate the gay and lesbian population at 100,000, Gary Binder a local survey researcher puts it at 80,000.  That offers a large number of well educated workers who can combine both their incomes for rent or home purchases. (The 2000 Census, found self-described gay couples to number a little over 10,000 for San Francisco.)

The City also has rent control. There are 650,000 people living in San Francisco, they form 340,000 households.  Of these, 130,000 (40%) live by themselves, 200,000 (30% of the units) live with one other person (100,000 units), the remaining, 100,000 householders live 3 or more together (in the remaining 80,000 units).

There are 310,000 housing units in San Francisco. Two thirds of all units are rented. Three-quarters (75%) are rent controlled. That leaves 155,000 residential housing units that are not rent controlled; 110,000 of these are houses.  The 155,000 are exactly half of all residential units.

Less than 20,000 rental units come on the market each year.  About 5,000 homes come on the market.

The City also has a very large population of high paid biotech researchers and an even higher population of trust funders who can afford to live here. I can't figure the number in the trust funder category.

Democracy victory party

I am planning a Democracy Victory Party next month.  I had an End of the Population Explosion Party in 1993 when I first read about and published the world demographic data showing that the population explosion was over.  My report was based on my comparison of UN data between 1980 and 1990. I was among the first humans to notice the spectacular change and to understand the reason (the revolution in sanitation and healthcare had played-out after a century.)

Now is the time to celebrate the victory of democracy in the past fifteen years.  With the fall of the Soviet Union five countries have become democracies.  Poland, Latvia, Hungary, The Czech Republic, and East Germany. (One could also argue that Finland is now out of the Soviet domain.) Five countries have become fully functioning multi-party democracies: Taiwan, South Korea, Mexico, Japan and Chile.

That is certainly reason to celebrate, it is a positive change in the lives of hundreds of millions of humans.

Arab engineering

Arabs have been complaining, some calling for a jihad, about a bridge that Israel is building on Israeli land to the Temple Mount to replace the Mugrabi steps that collapsed.  If you want to know the lies and fabrications the Arabs, nearly all Arabs and Moslems, have created about the Temple Mount check this article in Haaretz.

My point is the simple and superficial one dealing with the Arab/Muslim claim that the engineering of the new bridge is faulty.

Who can believe an Arab national about engineering?  No Arab nation produces any recognizable industrial or mechanical product...not even a simple bicycle. Most Arab mullahs probably don't even know that Arab engineers exist and wouldn't know who to phone.  (Of course Arabs get engineering degrees and do respectable work outside of Arab countries.)

Israeli engineering, on the other hand, produces rockets, satellites, computers, tanks and every other known mechanical device.

Enough said about the engineering controversy. Believe the Israelis not the Arab/Muslims.

Global climate patterns

The following are my references that give me a data base of global climate patterns.

In the chart above, the bottom graph shows oscillations in global climate over the past million years, based on an Antarctic ice core sample called Vostok that measured 750,000 years.

The first four graphs, above, show orbital oscillations of the planet earth as it circles the sun.  The length of each cycle is identified under the type of orbital change labeled on the right hand side: for example, the obliqueness of the earth orbit results in a 41,000 year cycle.  The cycles referred to in "Solar Forcing" have to do with differential heating of the earth related to the greater water volume in the Southern Hemisphere and the greater land mass in the Northern.

Using the first four charts, an exact equation predicts the fifth chart of actual earth climate changes. Our climate on earth is dictated directly by our orbit around the sun.  Our orbit is an exact and unchanging reality of physics and planetary dynamics.

Recent climate changes...

Bottled water

A number of restaurants in San Francisco and the Bay Area, the hotsy-totsy ones, are now telling people that they don't serve bottled water (except CO2 infused bubbly water), they only serve filtered tap water for environmental reasons.

Most innovations like this spread to the provinces...the rest of the U.S. This one makes sense.

What doesn't make sense is why so many people in the industrial world have created a multi-billion dollar bottled water industry, to ship millions of gallons of water in plastic containers, millions of miles.  It has never made sense to me, and it is a horrid waste of money and resources.

The good thing is that it wasn't started by the Hippies.  It was started by early Yuppies as an emblem of their upward striving; their ambition, their sense of vigor, health and their active lives. Bottled water is a $2 version of the BMW.  But it spread to everyone.  The only explanation I can think of is that germ theory has turned into germ hysteria. What was once a personal mental illness found societal appreciation.

Brita filters

Brita water filter containers use activated carbon just like most camping and travel water filters. 

Brita has a nice business of selling new filters to people who believe the nonsense that the Brita filters need to be changed every three months.

You only need two Brita filters.  While one is being used for three months, the other can be washed, upside down, in hot water (as hot as coffee water) and left to dry.  That is what campers and travellers do, that is all you need to do.

I think highly of the simple Brita filter system.  I have done double blind tests on Brita water and San Francisco tap water and there is a small but noticeable improvement in taste.

New Dred Scott

On April 2nd, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled by 5 to 4 in Mass. vs EPA that CO2 is an air pollutant.

Is this case as egregiously wrong and historically misanthropic as the Dred Scott case of 1856? 

The Dred Scott case found that Scott had been born a slave and nothing he could do would protect him from being a slave, neither moving to a state where slavery was illegal nor offering to buy his freedom from his owner. The Dred Scott case has been a blemish on the Supreme Court ever since and helped fuel the Civil War.

In the Mass. vs EPA case the Court found that "the Clean Air Act, ... requires that the EPA “shall by regulation prescribe . . . standards applicable to the emission of any air pollutant from any class . . . of new motor vehicles . . . which in [the EPA Administrator’s] judgment cause[s], or contribute[s] to, air pollution . . . reasonably . . . anticipated to endanger public health or welfare,” 42 U. S. C. §7521(a)(1). The Act defines “air pollutant” to include “any air pollution agent . . . , including any physical, chemical . . . substance . . . emitted into . . . the ambient air.” 

The Court then goes on to make the following historically ridiculous statement "The harms associated with climate change are serious and well recognized. The Government’s own objective assessment of the relevant science and a strong consensus among qualified experts indicate that global warming threatens, inter alia, a precipitate rise in sea levels, severe and irreversible changes to natural ecosystems, a significant reduction in winter snow pack with direct and important economic consequences, and increases in the spread of disease and the ferocity of weather events."

If this were the whole matter the Supreme Court would be eligible for a modern award as the new Dred Scott  Court.

However, I read the case and that is not the problem.  The problem is the incompetence of the EPA and Justice Department lawyers.

Here is what the Courts says in its findings: "According to petitioners’ uncontested affidavits, global sea levels rose between 10 and 20 centimeters over the 20th century as a result of global warming and have already begun to swallow Massachusetts’ coastal land. Remediation costs alone, moreover, could reach hundreds of millions of dollars. Given EPA’s failure to dispute the existence of a causal connection between man-made greenhouse gas emissions and global warming, ...." doesn't convince the Court.

Our only hope is that within the next five years (while there is a chance to change the ruling) some group with more intelligent lawyers presents a case to the Supreme Court to show them that the last global warming period ended ten years ago and was never caused by human commerical activity.

Marrying non-Jews

A personal discussion at Seder, earlier this month, has led me to the strange, but reliable, observation that the decline in the number of Jews in America is tied directly to politics.  I have mentioned the personal matter that my father was a rabbi for whom Judaism and Left-wing-liberalism were synonymous.  My father's views represent the views of more than half the self-defined "Jews" in America. 

There is little doubt about why the number of Jews in America is declining. All Jewish organizations credit the fall in the number of Jews to the 50% of Jews, every year, who marry a non-Jew and the subsequent assimilation.

So why are Jews marrying non-Jews?  The better question is why some Jews feel compelled to marry other Jews?

I believe there are two reasons Jews marry Jews.  One is that Jews who are surrounded by Jews choose a Jewish spouse for probabilistic reasons.  This is true in Israel and was true in the European shtetl and in the European ghettos.

The other reason is that those Jews who marry other Jews do so for "traditional" religious beliefs.  "Traditional" has always meant that a practicing Jew marries another practicing Jew or that the non-Jew, in the marriage, agrees to serious-long-term study that leads to conversion and life as a practicing Jew.

Now back to the Jews for whom Judaism and Left-wing-liberalism are synonymous. On the issue of marriage, the two issues are mutually exclusive. "Traditional" Judaism is based on a long standing requirement for marriage between Jews. Left-wing-liberalism on the other-hand has a core belief that each person is free to marry whomever they wish. I'm not exaggerating, that is without doubt, without question, a core value of Left-wing-liberalism.

The two positions are mutually exclusive. Traditional Judaism says Jews marry Jews, the Left says marry anyone you wish.

Therefore, when Judaism becomes a branch of Left-wing-liberalism, Jews in a society where the majority of members are non-Jews, will result in out-marriage and assimilation. Period. Logical.

Nicola and Julius

The names in my title refer to at Nicola Sacco and Julius Rosenberg.  Both these names are tied to notorious trials, that the Left for four-score-years has used as perfect examples of American injustice.  American injustice, the Left has argued, is based on American intolerance of the Left.

Nothing I write will change any mature adult's mind, but hopefully someone under 25 years of age will read this.

More than seventy-five years after the Sacco-Vanzetti trial, a reliable piece of evidence, that was completely unknown came to light, firmly establishing the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti. Both of the sources of the revelation had good reason to keep the information secret. One was their trial lawyer (Fred Moore), the other was a famous author who wrote a best selling book about their innocence (Upton Sinclair).

More than forty years after the Julius and Ethyl Rosenberg trial, fresh, reliable and previously secret evidence of Julius' conclusive guilt as a Soviet spy came to light.  Again the sources of the revelations had good reason to keep the information secret. One was the Soviet spy agency (KGB) the other was the American decryption agency that had decrypted (Venona papers) the Soviet spy telegrams about Julius.

Now we know conclusively that Sacco, Vanzetti and the Julius Rosenberg were guilty of murder and treason for Left-wing politically motivated reasons.

The point of both these revelations is that the core Lefty evidence of American injustice is false.  Worse than that, the Left is not capable of honesty, acknowledgement of error or historic apology.  

If you doubt what I say, read the Wikipedia entries on both these cases.  While the evidence of guilt is beyond doubt, fresh and convincing to any open-minded person, the Left has found countless reasons for doubting and even attacking these well substantiated additions to historical fact. You can read the pathetic, disingenuous and disgusting explanations the Left has come up with to redeem their martyrs in the Wikipedia entries for these two cases. (Nicola, Julius)

Kidney transplant morals

I'm a notorious realist and want to comment on the issue of transplants of kidneys and parts of our livers.  I apologize in advance and want my readers to know that I am not mean-spirited and have spent all my life in the generous, helping-others world.

The issue arises, not with after death organ donations, it comes up when dealing with living donations. I can spare one kidney and parts of my liver. Many wonderful people donate these organs to the general public...to strangers. Thank you.

My point is that this, for me, is not like blood donation. Making a blood donation involves virtually no risk to me and the blood recipient doesn't have to change his or her lifestyle to make good use of my donated blood.

I believe, and I have confirmed in discussions with many medical people in the transplant field, that 9 out of 10 people who get a transplant of any organ, are unlikely to change their lifestyle to protect their new organ.

That is it.  That is my whole point.  I am personally reluctant to take the risks I will experience in making an organ donation to a stranger when that stranger is less than 1 out of 10 times, likely to change his or her life in a way that will respectfully appreciate my kindness and protect my donated organ.

Important update

I'm in the middle of reading Andrew Roberts' brilliant A History of the English-Speaking Peoples Since 1900.  This book is very effective at arguing that the Left has been the source of nearly every tragedy of the 20th Century and citing the endless Lefty efforts to destroy democracy and freedom by domestic subversion.

Get the book and read it with me.  It is right now coming under full tank and helicopter assault from the Left with every form of lie, deceit, innuendo and malice at their disposal. The attack is launched in the latest New Republic. ("Bush's imperial historian. White Man for the Job" by Johann Hari )

(I have included Roberts' rebuttal to Hari in the next section.  It is otherwise only available to subscribers but this is too important for my readers to miss)

Puritanism run amok?

I think the American public, especially the Left, has gone nuts on the subject of Abu Ghraib prison torture.

I don't think anything of the sort happened.  I'm not a Puritan.  I've looked at dozens of photos and what I see are two different categories of acts: good interrogation and humor.

One act I see in the photos is a contrived set of images designed by interrogators to terrify the prisoners for interrogation purposes (photo on the right).   There was a set of photos taken by prison interrogators intended to be shown to prisoners under interrogation. The prisoners are afraid of dogs, especially large German Shepards, and they are afraid of electric wires attached to their testicles, a common Arab-Turk-Saddam Hussein form of torture. They are also puritans of an unique Arab kind.  The majority of Arab men prefer sex with other men, especially boys.  But they know that homosexuality is a death penalty offense so they dread having a photo of themselves naked with other men.  Photos of these three subjects are what we know as the torture photos at Abu Ghraib.

The photo on the right is clearly posed.  The subject, possibly an American, is standing on a fragile box and the wires are 18 gauge, not enough to carry much of a shock, certainly not to two outstretched arms.

The other act I see are ordinary Americans having fun pretending to torture prisoners.  There can be no other explanation of the photo on the left where the two American guards are smiling for the camera with turquoise poly gloves on.  This was intended as a laugh.

The use of prisoners for a trivial joke photo was an abuse of power.  But that is all it was.

But, being the Puritans we Americans are, we took the whole thing seriously and had a national hissy-fit over it.

French Grandeur

  Joshua Muravchik criticizes the French notion of Grandeur with the statement: "The foreign policy of no other Western state is driven by such narcissism."

I beg to differ, Joshua.  I believe that Grandeur is the vital cohesive concept that holds the French people together.

Let us begin with the French people two thousand years ago when their leader, Vercingetorix, tried to fend off a small Roman army of Julius Caesar's.  Twice, given a month in a fortified town, Vercingetorix tried to round-up, from an entire country, enough of his fellow Frenchmen to help him fend off Caesar.  Both times, the French were unable to cooperate sufficiently to protect their country. They were a band of individuals with no cohesion.

The same was true into the 20th Century.  Few people know that in late May and early June of 1917, faced with the Germans in trenches across from their lines and flanked on the North by the British Army, the French Army mutinied for lack of command and cohesion. The mutiny was kept secret and fortunately the Germans didn't take advantage of it. The French offered no resistance in WWII, having focused all their government fears on Britain.

Earlier, during the French Revolution, the French carried the banner of "liberte, egalite, fraternite".  Look at the order of those words. Those are the words of a people ferocious as individuals, barely able to work together. Two thousand years of individualism.

These are a people, admired primarily by Americans, Irish, Egyptians and Francophone Africans and few others. These are a people who have driven out of the country some of their greatest thinkers from Voltaire to Raymond Aaron.

I believe they need a high, mighty, even haughty vision to hold them together.  That vision is Grandeur.  I don't begrudge them that hopeful, cohesive term.

New valley

What must it have felt like for early explorers to have discovered a beautiful, bountiful new valley?

For me, that is a metaphor of my journey into the land of commerce that produced my book Commerce.

I arrived alone at the mountain top overlooking this spectacular horizon. The path I took is a path that no one had trod before. What was my path to this vista?

Prior to my working career I had a a Classical college education based on the Great Books.  I had travelled in Europe and lived for a short time on a Kibbutz.  On the kibbutz, a truly communist enterprise, I learned that communism doesn't work.

I began my working career as a banker who, after eight years, became a hippy.  My banker training and a book about money made me the "go to guy" for the hundreds of new businesses that the hippies were creating in the early 1970s. 

With that background, I consulted with nearly 2,000 businesses, certainly more businesses than any other consultant had ever worked with before or since.  The businesses included a few giants (Itochu the Japanese $100 billion trading company, SAS the Scandinavian airline) dozens of moderate sized companies on three continents and many hundreds of tiny operations.

I wrote four books about business based on my experience (Honest Business, Marketing Without Advertising, Running a One Person Business and Gods of Commerce), which helped me formalize my thinking on the subject of commerce.

Finally, I synthesized what I had learned in the book Commerce.  Having discovered the exquisite and vast new land that stretched to the horizon, I wrote about and started a blog on the subject.

So far, few people have visited my valley and no one has ever talked to me about it.  I don't expect others to find the path to this new valley by the same route I took. My experience can not be transformed into a map, in keeping with the metaphor of a new valley. 

I have decide to simply publish a description of the new terrain.  The new terrain seems in many ways like the terrain we know, trees, flowers, mountains, fields, rivers and clouds... but it is a genuine new and undiscovered terrain.  It is now on the Web, free for all.  Homestead it to your hearts content.

Will the housing price boom last?

What do these cities, ranked in order, have in common?

1. San Francisco, CA
2. Oakland, CA
3. Seattle-Bellevue-Everett, WA
4. Fort Lauderdale, FL
5. Austin-San Marcos, TX
6. New York, NY
7. Los Angeles-Long Beach, CA
8. Albuquerque, NM
9. Atlanta, GA
10. Jersey City, NJ

This is a rough list of the most expensive residential cities in America. It is also a list from the 2000 Census of the cities with the densest gay populations.  Does the earning power of gay couples have anything to do with residential prices?

It would be hard to argue against that proposition.

Tampa Florida

Is it possible to review a city?  The citizens of that city are unlikely to care about reviews of their city; especially when not much can be done to fix it.  Possibly, city planners in the future might view a current commentary on a city as 'instructional'.

The worst problem of Tampa is that the core downtown buildings were influenced by Bauhaus and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. Each building takes up most of a square city block.  There are virtually no street level stores, coffee shops or windows for shopping. The sidewalks are for ghosts and people going to and from work.  To compensate for the absence of a downtown, the City has put up dozens of signs pointing to the University of Tampa, City Hall and Harbor Shops. The Harbor shops are in a mini-mall with Hooters as the anchor store. There is a river which is ignored from a city planning point of view. The rest of the city is a flat residential grid. There is a real mall near the airport with Newman's, Nordstrom's and Dillards. The airport building is beautiful and functional. No need to leave the airport.

In short, Tampa is not a city and probably can never be one.

Dead or alive

For several decades I have heard the statement that there are more people alive today than there have "ever been on earth".  That turns out to be population-gloom-and-doom nonsense

I did the calculation roughly in my mind a few times and ignored the population-Armageddonites. I figured a couple hundred million global population was on the earth when I wrote a piece about the first millennium year 1000.    I should have done the calculation for total past human population on paper, it would have been easy to know the correct numbers. 

The facts are completely the opposite of the popular urban legend.  The number of people alive today is a small fraction of all the people who ever lived (6% at most). It always will be. Check the calculations that Carl Haub did.

GDDW

GDDW stands for Gay Democrats' Death Wish.  I have been raising this issue for over a decade and no one, no one who can be Googled at least, recognizes the problem.  I last raised the issue in July of 2006.

The problem is that genetic engineering, as it progresses, will not be focused on reducing genetic defects it will be focused on three highly marketable traits: gender, skin color and gayness.

First, we already know, that a large part of the population wants to control the gender of their child. Not much argument about that. Look at the ads telling you how to affect the conception of a child's gender. The search for the gender gene is focused on the Y-chromosome, so it won't be long before we find it (it is not one gene of course, it is multiple genes).

Second, if you look at the research articles in the genetic engineering journals you will find more articles on melanin (skin color) than any other single subject.  It should not be surprising that skin color is widely accepted as genetic and that the majority of the American population generally does not want the skin color of their offspring to be non-white (maybe tan, but not non-white).

Third, I argue fervently, that the majority of non-gay parents do not want their offspring to be gay. These parents will rush to pour money into such anti-gay-gene research if they are shown the slightest possibility that it will work.

I have recently read an article in the St. Petersberg Florida newspaper that makes this point very clearly. Americans don't want a gay child. There is not a lot of genetic research on this subject because only a few researchers believe that being gay is genetic.  The ones who do believe it are probably doing as much research as they can get away with.

How does this connect to the Gay Democrats Death Wish?  I find no websites or even articles and blogs concerned with stopping genetic engineering related to gay genes.  The only place where a battle about genetic engineering in general has occurred is in Congress where the Senate has blocked Federal research on embryonic stem cells.  The blocking (restricting research to a few limited embryonic cell lines) has been entirely along party lines. Republicans for blocking, Democrats for funding. For California that means Diane Feinstein and Barbara Boxer along with every other Democrat keeps voting to fund broad based Federal research on embryonic stem cells.

What do embryonic stem cells have to do with genetic engineering of humans?  The embryo is where genetic changes would have to be done if any genetic changes are to occur.  The gay gene (if there is anything of that sort) will have to be removed from the embryonic stem cells. Then the embryo will have to be implanted and grown in a womb to delivery.

No American legislator has even proposed banning the implantation of a genetically engineered embryo into a womb. ( I worked with the Japanese bureaucrat who introduced and got passed just such a law banning implantation of a genetically engineered cell in a womb in the Japanese Diet in the late 1990s).

Got it?  When some researcher goes to the press to suggest that he or she can genetically remove a gene for gayness, private money will pour in by the billions of dollars.  To carry out the anti-gay-gene program, the researcher will have to use the research on embryonic stem cells that has already been done, whether that research is Federal, State or private.  The Democrats, as an entire party, are voting to fund and stimulate more embryonic stem cell research at Federal and State levels. 

If you want to slow down (it can't be stopped) the massive railroad engine racing to manipulate human embryonic stem cells, you should be voting Republican, right now.  This battle is overwhelmingly along party lines.

I repeat, when human genetic engineering begins to blossom, the third target, after gender choice and skin color will be the elimination of gays.  The Republican party is the only ally the Gay Community has on this subject.

Global warming hysterics

This is a note to the Global Warming hysterics: Mars has warmed up .65 degrees C in twenty five years while the earth has warmed up .50 degrees C in the same period.

Mars has virtually no atmosphere and is 50 million miles further from the sun.  Mars is 50% further from the sun than earth meaning it gets one quarter the amount of solar radiation.

Please explain how humans' immoral behavior is causing this problem. The numbers are backward.

Anti-Liberal again

The photo on the right shows an entire wall of organic produce in a WalMart store in the backwoods of central Florida.

If I had told a Liberal anywhere in the English speaking world a century ago that a humble little store started in Bentonville Arkansas would someday be delivering the least expensive fresh produce on the planet to every poor person in America.....AND...that the store would be encouraging farmers to use the healthiest farming practices known a century later to produce that food, that Liberal would consider the story to be a description of a miracle.

Now if I added that people who, in 2007, call themselves "progressives" and "Lefties" consider that store and its progeny to be the ultimate Evil and the healthy food that the store provides for the poor, to be a plot to destroy the ability of farmers to deliver the same food to rich people (at Whole Foods)...what would a Liberal say? 

You're damn right...the "progressives" and "Lefties" would be called anti-Liberals; in the language of 1907 they would be called brain damaged-mad-men.

Irish less honest today?

The Jerusalem Post carried a story about the current efforts of Irish state funded artists (Aosdana) to boycott Israel.

Contemporary Irish seem to lack the honesty of the turn-of-the-century Irish who organized a boycott of all Jewish businesses in Limerick in 1904 and by the end of the year had driven all 400 Jews out of the country.

Back then when the movement was sponsored by a Catholic priest Father John Creagh and Sinn Fein, the Irish were more honest about their hatred of Jews.

John Cage

A classic music lover, Peter Gutmann, was asked by the Wall Street Journal to name his favorite piece of modern music in the 20th Century.  Gutmann argued for John Cage's 4'33".  The reason for Gutmann's choice is here.

I heard John Cage perform 4'33" in 1957.  I happened to be staying at a downtown Chicago YMCA. (I had been suspended from college for two weeks.)  I went into an auditorium that was posted as the site for a piano performance by a name I didn't know. There was a piano with four radios on top.  John Cage came in, announced his "Landscape piece," adjusted the four radios and we listened to four radios at the same time with different Chicago stations broadcasting for about 20 minutes. Cage sat at the piano for the whole time. We, the audience, were five men sitting on folding chairs.

We were only one by the end of the twenty minutes.  I alone listened when John Cage announced his "Next piece: 4'33"" and he again sat down on the piano bench and set a clock in front of himself.  He watched it for four and a half minutes.  I sat for the duration of the four and a half minutes. There was one other piece he performed that evening that I don't remember, but I stayed for it too.

I don't remember if I applauded or not at the end.

EU-USA

I am beginning to think that what the Europeans are calling the Islamicization of Europe may turn out to be the Americanization of Europe.

This is certainly a radical thought. 

I read and hear a great deal of concern, fear and anxiety about the rapid Islamicization of Europe because of the growing Islamic immigrant population.  The usual concern is the difficulty of assimilating Muslims into the mainstream of Europe. 

Europe considers itself secular but the reality is that nine countries are nominally Catholic (Spain, Italy, France, Belgium, Poland, Austria, Ireland ....), England is officially Anglican; Norway, Sweden and Denmark are Lutheran, and Holland is Protestant Reform. Germany is both Luthern and Catholic. Most have the national religion taught in public schools.

The nine Catholic countries ran true to their deepest roots when Pope John Paul II negotiated the release of 13 Palestinian terrorists in Bethleham and said they could go to Italy.  Berlusconi told the Pope to "go to Hell" so the Pope forced the other Catholic countries in Europe to accept the  Palestinian terrorists.

The problem these European countries face is that they really are not religiously open. Look at how most of them treat Jews. When they begin to be religiously open and seriously free countries, they will be emulating America.

Sorry all you European folks, and you lovers of Europe; much as Europeans wallow in their anti-American mud, our much celebrated religious diversity is what makes it so easy for Muslims in D.C., Detroit, New York and L.A. to assimilate in America.

American paranoia

I am reading Andrew Roberts' A History of the English Speaking Peoples since 1900.  Expect to read my comments as I go along.

My first comment is that the main opposition to everything necessary and positive that happened in the 20th Century was from the Left.  When Roberts is offering a reasonable explanation for any historic event, he has to argue against the Left.  For example, the Left has propounded the thesis that WWI was unnecessary and unwarranted from the English perspective. As opposed to WWI having saved England from destruction. Gross Lefty nonsense of course, as Roberts explains, since the Kaiser and the German High Command had spent ten years preparing for WWI, building a navy to destroy the British fleet, and did much to provoke the conditions in Sarejevo.  The Left never saw any problems with Hitler until he attacked Stalin.  The Left has excused and usually supported every force and campaign that set out to destroy the English Speaking Peoples' international Liberal creation.

My point in this blog is that the Left has been an incoherent enemy of the English Speaking Peoples' great commercial, technological, Democratic and Liberal venture for 150 years...and still is.  The reason that this incoherent entity, the Left, is able to coagulate around a constantly changing new series of events in history is that the Left is bound together by a common thread. 

The common thread that holds the Left together is paranoia.  (Check my writing on the catechism of Lefty Fundamentalism.)The great edifice of the English Speaking Peoples has been a belief in and support for meritocracy.  There can be no intelligent or logical argument against meritocracy, but there can be an emotional appeal based on "keep things the way they were...tradition", which is inherent in Communism, Nazism and Islamic Fundamentalism. 

Meritocracy can also be opposed based on the emotion of paranoia.  A society is unable to reward merit when some dark, horrible, lurking secret, unseen force and powers oppose the chance for individual merit to thrive. That is pure paranoia.

Just listen to a Lefty explain why someone is poor, unwilling to work and or commits crimes. "They were oppressed by poverty, class, misfortune or deliberate exploitation."  That is the definition of paranoia.  The great deep source of Leftism is paranoia.

The driving force of Lefty ideology is the emotion of paranoia...this is the Lefts' source of cohesion and why Lefties find it so easy to recognize each other. "Is Bush the worst monster in American history?...I hate Bush...Good, then we can be friends."

Enviro beef

I don't believe the rise in global temperature between 1980 and 1996 was due to human activity, but I wish to point out to those who do believe in the whole "Global Warming" religion, that you shouldn't eat beef or drink cows' milk.  No beef, no cows' milk...got it?

The reason is simple, cows and similar ruminants produce methane, a green house gas, in the course of their digestion. This methane production can be alleviated when cows are fed molasses but the eater of beef and drinker of cows' milk has no way to know, at this juncture, that the cows were fed molasses.

So, eat pork and chicken.  I would also stay away from fish because fish, in their food chain, eat algae which convert CO2 into oxygen.

While we are at it....you enviro's should let us commercial folk extend the runways at San Francisco and Oakland airports because we could do that by filling in the Bay and covering up "precious wetlands."  Wetlands are another major source of methane, along with cows.

I hope you anti-CO2 folks can get your lives in order.

My gut

My gut tells me it is time for Americans to rise-up and march on Congress. Congress doesn't understand this country.  When six million people arrive in D.C. in the middle of May with the theme of "Americans do not cut and run" we would get the change in direction we need for this country.

The Democratic Congress has gotten the wrong message from the 2006 election.  Much of the East Coast did vote against the Iraq war, but the rest of the country that elected Democrats did so for traditional "anti-corruption" and "time for a change" reasons.

Congress has made this mistake before. Congress in 1917 passed on to the States the 18th Amendment (Prohibition) based on the argument made by the Suffrage movement that women would vote out every Congressman who didn't support Prohibition.  The Woman's Suffrage Amendment (19th) was expected to pass at any moment in 1917 but didn't get passed until 1920.  The women (including Elizabeth Cady Stanton) who frightened Congress were wrong.  Women didn't start voting differently from men until the 1980s.