Pro Commerce

Biofuel cars and smell

First, the neighborhood, as I was driving home from coffee, smelled like fish the kind of foul smell you find in a dirty fish & chips restaurant. I couldn't figure out why.

Turns out, the car in front of me was an old Mercedes that said the car was running on biofuel.

Next, going downtown, I smelled the odor of rancid fries in the air over a two block stretch.  This time it was another Mercedes running on biofuel. Proud biofuel signs in the window and the license plate.

I hope that this smelly eco-solution doesn't expand.  If it does I hope the biofuels smell more like truffle oil or lavender than like a Chinatown kitchen grease.

The Pride parade

I went to the Pride parade to see the Dykes on Bykes.  I'm a biker. Here are two photos.  They are really having fun.  In both, they have left Market Street and are headed for 7th Street South of Market which had been kept open for parking the many hundreds of motorcycles.

The parade was fun.  I only watched a tiny part of it.  I loved the 100 balloon people who make balloons into weird objects, the way circus clowns do.  I loved the half dozen teams of adult cheerleaders.  Fun and joy can be formal institutions...like the gay love of musical theater.

The parade ends at Civic Center with the biggest open street fair I have ever seen. Every imaginable business has a booth. Three cheers for commerce.

The entire Pride event is fun, raucous and much loved by the million people involved. To what do we owe this incredible gift?

I had to remember two things that explain why we have such a great event as the Pride parade: creativity and perversity.  Creativity, as we Americans understand it, is a flowering of individual personality.  It is self-expression. Creativity thrives where governance is weak and social control is light.  Suburbs and Dallas are not centers of creativity and flowering individual expression because the government is effective and 'society' joins together to expect people to behave 'properly'.

The San Francisco police are consciously ineffective, they don't hassle naked middle-class party goers and they don't waste time tracking down gang murderers either.

Many attempts at social control are perverse.  Thank-god.  The military hated San Francisco for its sexual license and its communist politics so, in 1946, the military discharged all the gay men with dishonorable discharges in  San Francisco.  A first step toward the Pride parade.
 
Lizzie Glide, in 1932, gave all her deceased husband's oil money from Kern County, to start a Southern Methodist church in the worst neighborhood to be the 'light of Jesus unto the sinners'. By 1965, Glide church with Reverend Ted McIlvenna as a community organizer became the center of gay organizing and Glide did the sexual training for all the doctors, medical professionals  and ministers in America. (Phylis, in photo above, worked for Ted at Glide.)

I love perversity.  The idiots at the SF School Board and the S.F. voters have eliminate High School ROTC.  Who knows the perverse outcome.  San Francisco is likely to be the home to the first professional guerilla mercenary training school 20 years from now. Expect them, with weapons, to be marching in the Pride parade too.

Michelle's Princeton thesis

At the beginning of the Obama campaign, Mrs' Obama's Princeton undergraduate thesis was put off-limits by Princeton.  Stupid thing to do because, with the Internet, it was bound to become public knowledge.

Putting the thesis off-limits has led to efforts to demonize it.  However, you can read the Internet published thesis yourself.  Go to part 3 page 51 where the summary begins. 

This thesis is the work of a very smart competent and honest sociology undergraduate.  There is nothing scurrilous, ideological nor racist about it. 

It is good academic work and it shows that Mrs Obama has the ability to think clearly and change her mind when confronted with empirical data (the thesis is based on a survey of Princeton black alumni).

The potential Obama damage

If Obama is doing any racial good for the country, it is only from now through the Democratic Convention and into the Fall campaign.

Why? Think about the post election scenario:

If Obama loses we will have many explanations but racism will be the blame. The Left can never accept failure for any reason other than identity politics and associated white male oppression. For a country where anti-black racism has declined for forty years, no further progress will be possible once Obama loses and the Left elevates racism to new heights.

If Obama wins, it will be worse.  It will be just like the Presidency of John Kennedy.  Kennedy was hated with incredible vitriol by the majority of Americans, regardless of the fantasy that post assassination media have created.

J.F.K was far to the Left of the American voting public.  Obama is just as much a Lefty radical as was Kennedy and he will evoke the same hatred of his politics that Americans always have for Lefty politics.  Maybe even worse because Obama is now further to the Left of America than Kennedy was to the Left of America in his day.

The hatred will be directed at Obama's politics but hatred gets ugly (the way Bush derangement syndrome does) and it will often be expressed in the form of racism.

That is my prediction. Unfortunate but more than just an idle projection of past politics.

Jewish movement to pro-commerce

 I see a long term consequence of the steady shift of Jews from 12% voting for pro-commerce political candidates in the 1990's to more than 35% voting that way in the coming 2008 November elections. 

Already, Jews under 35 years of age vote 50% for pro-commerce candidates (nearly all of whom are Republicans). As the older Jewish population (think Miami) dies off, the percentage will move rapidly toward a dominant Jewish vote that will be pro-commerce.

This is important and will have a big impact on the intellectual life of America.  Jews do (here I agree with many anti-Semites) have an important, disproportionate, influence on academia, law, science, the arts and American intellectual life. 

First we got the neo-cons, a majority of whom are Jews, slowly we will get the broader spectrum of other influentials.  I think this small but important group of up and coming people will help America to become greater and more vigorous.

Perfect Democratic candidate?

Has anyone pointed out that the Democrats may have picked their dream candidate?

Barack Obama is the perfect image of an effete academic.  He is like Adlai Stevenson and Michael Dukakis rolled into one.

Obama is more of an appeasement-end-the-war candidate than George McGovern. 

Obama is awkward on his feet in debate just as Hubert Humphrey was.  Obama's economic and Middle Eastern policies have a close resemblance to Jimmy Carter's (think meeting with Syria's Assad and being hostile to Israel).

Could Barack Obama be the perfect Democratic candidate?

Plaque at Craigs List

We need a plaque on the building where craigslist.com got started (and still operates). See photo on the right.

Craigslist has had a very dramatic global effect on newspapers.  It has replaced most want ads. 

Want ads have been the most profitable operation of newspapers for 180 years.  Craigslist, working out of this tiny geographic spot on the globe, in San Francisco, using the Internet, has dealt a fatal blow to an aged industry.

A tiny business office, dealt a David's slingshot blow to a global industry Goliath.

I suggest the plaque say just what I have said in this blog. 

Will we have 24-7 management?

I may be wrong, but I don't see management in the world of business acceding to the reality of global 24-7 commerce.

I know that management on a Navy aircraft carrier operates with 24-7 built into its design.  When the commander of a carrier leaves his control post, the full 100% decision making power immediately shifts to the second in command. That is true for all positions.

Moreover, up and down the ranks, everyone on the carrier is empowered to stop the take-offs and landings on the deck if the individual sees a danger.  Both elements, hand-offs and low level emergency powers, are vital to 24-7 operations.

The devolution of power to every person including the lowest person on the hierarchy is part of 24-7 management because some decisions, major decisions, must be made so quickly that they can not move up the chain of command.

I don't see either of these practices or the associated management structures in place in any of the commercial enterprises I deal with.  When will we have it?

Ice as metaphor

 If ice didn't expand at 32 degrees there would be a very different form of life on earth. 

Water expands, under normal pressure, when it freezes into a solid as it becomes ice. If water didn't expand at this critical point, ice would be heavier than water and would sink.  Ice would be at the bottom of lakes and oceans and we would live in a world where only the surface of oceans and lakes would be water.  Water would probably be very cold and most life would have to exist at close to the freezing temperature of water. If life could exist at all.

How much of our lives have the perverse twist that water does of expanding at the critical point where it changes form?

I would like to suggest that ice is an important metaphor about life.  From my experience, when humans make major changes in their life, at critical points, it is usually for the better.  Modern human societies generally respond positively to people who take bold steps in the way they live, work, interact, create, move, explore and behave.

That has certainly been true for me, in the modern world of commerce.  I think ice may be a good metaphor to ponder. When you make a major change, make it a bold one.

Quicken fraud

I have used Quicken for my home and business accounting for nearly 15 years.  While using Quicken 2003 version in April, the goddamn program refused to reconcile the files I had downloaded from my bank and my credit card accounts.  Quicken told me I had to update my version for $40.

I tried several other programming approaches including an open source accounting packages.  Nothing made it possible to use my previous records.

If the original founders of double entry bookkeeping, six hundred years ago, had been able to stop accounting in its tracks after three years of usage, like Quicken does, we would not have accounting or modern commerce.

I see no reason an accounting package shouldn't last a lifetime.  I see Quicken's behavior as fraud.  Quicken is a product owned by Intuit (INTU) a $10 billion company. Intuit is a dishonest scurrilous criminally fraudulent company.

If Quicken and Intuit weren't a fraud, their programs would have fail dates on the outside of the box and on the opening page of the program. 

Next year, when I can start at the beginning of the year making entries, I will be using an open source program.  Don't buy Quicken, don't use Intuit products.

Racial healing

Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama is not a healer of racial differences.  In many ways Obama is aggravating the problem of racial differences in America.

Survey data shows that the greatest antagonism between ethnic groups in America is not white antagonism toward blacks, Jews, Latinos or Asians but the antagonism of blacks toward all other groups.

While there is serious antagonism of Latinos and Asians (particularly Chinese and Koreans) toward blacks, the black hostility towards Latinos and Asians is as great or greater.  Looking at the age and income democraphics, as Latinos and Asian succeed in assimilating their antagonism towards blacks declines.

No such data supports a similar pattern among blacks because blacks are very slow to assimilate and move to non-black neighborhoods.

This is the real problem of race in America. 

Obama doesn't help it for three reasons.  One, he is an old line labor Democrat hack who regularly attacks foreign workers and NAFTA.  All minorities, Latino and Asian, know that Obama's policy ideology is pure racism at its worst. Blame Chinese workers, Indian call centers, and Mexican factories for American labor problems and you are both blind, manipulative and bigoted.

Two, Obama belonged to Trinity Church that promotes racial hated and he never, never for one moment, suggested that that particular part of Trinity is an abomination.  He has never attacked Trinity or Farrahkan for their racism.  Nor has he said publicly that Trinity and Farrahkan are far outside the norms of black church life.

Lastly, as Christopher Hitchens has pointed out, Obama's campaign champions the idea that he would be the first black president and always allows his supporters to call Obama opponents racists.  That is a racist dichotomy if anyone ever saw one.

Obama is not a healer.

Online photos

I seem to be on the email lists for the scurrilous anti-Obama material (please keep sending them to me). 

The photo on the right is his family on his paternal side.  This is supposed to scare some people. Obama is not a Muslim, has never been one, and isn't one by heredity.

Frankly, I find the males and the young women very attractive, more so than Barack.

Barack's half-brother, Abongo, was interviewed by the Jerusalem Post, which I read, and he sounds intelligent and thoughtful.

Texting is Hebrew

The headline of this blog is pretty much the full blog.  Hebrew is written mostly without vowels, just as texting on thumb operated cell phones is mostly vowel-less.

Reading Hebrew means putting in your own mental vowels and paying close attention to context to know the verbal word that corresponds to the written word.

Hebrew, like texting needs a few vowels. It has "a" and uses several pseudo characters as vowels, such as "y", "i",  and "v".

Were the early writers of Hebrew uniquely seeing the future with cell phones?

Absolutely not.  There are many early languages that have alphabets that are short on vowels...the reason is obvious.  Just as with cell phones, when the context is known, the multiplicity of words, formed with the same consonants, is not a problem requiring a solution.

Bush's greatness

George W.Bush does two things that will endear him to Americans of the future and many others in the world.  Schools, streets and public facilities will be named after President George W. Bush for centuries to come.

First, he doesn't watch television news and he gets all his media news from his daily briefing reports. This is the choice of a man who knows his role as President is to be a leader not an ego manic who must be loved by the public and respond to transient public mood shifts.

Second, he never rebuts and seldom responds to attacks on him or his positions. These attacks are frequent, rude, dishonest and relentless.  When an attack by an opponent harms the standing of the United States, as was the case when both Democrat candidates for president publicly threatened the NAFTA treaty, Bush got the Mexican President and the Canadian Prime Minister to join him in vigorously supporting NAFTA.  He never rebutted the two harmful villains.

Both these behaviors have made sure that our 43rd president will be regarded as a president of great dignity.  Dignity is not following public whims and never stooping to the level of your opponents.  Dignity is a winning behavior trait when the cacophonous voices of history converge to make long term positive judgments.

Crooked black man stereotype

I spent more than a decade as treasurer of a black Methodist church. With a black minister and dozens of black staffers I knew I had one important job: make sure the church was never seen messing around with money.....no misuse of donor's money, member's money or grant money. Stay clean as a whistle. Stay above reproach.

I knew and most mature adults know that there is a stereotype that blacks can't be trusted around money. Think Congressman William Jefferson with $90k in his freezer.

The stereotype is not wrong. Stereotypes are a human mechanism for clustering observations. There is a stereotype that chickens are stupid, that they will stand in the rain until they die. Of course there are smart chickens, but they are not the majority. If you raise chickens you will be wise to use the stereotype.

 Blacks and financial corruption is a stereotype and a very strong one in America. At my church job I had the power to stop the endless approaches, many very cunning, that I was offered by black staffers seeking to practice fraud. The stereotype is real.

 Yesterday, Obama, who lied about the issue eight months ago, broke a 30 year tradition of setting campaign limits on the presidential race. McCain is a genuine leader in campaign finance reform and now stands in stark contrast to the phony "change candidate".

What I can't believe is that Obama's staff can't see or appreciate the importance of this stereotype. Obama, taking unlimited money is walking into a self made stereotype disaster.

Watch.  Investigators will now treat Obama as a stereotypical black man who's financial history will be thoroughly scoured and possibly found to include plenty of misuse and abuse of money.

Best conspiracy theory

If you are a conspiracy theorist I would like to point something out to you.  If you are a Jew concerned about anti-Semitism, I'd like to point out the same material to you.

It is very hard to come up with a good conspiracy theory unless you ascribe the conspiracy to intelligent and competent people who can work together with a common goal.  A good conspiracy theory needs the conspirators to have these three elements: intelligence, competence and to be cooperative in a common venture.

For the far out loony people that means aliens are the conspirators.  For most everyone else, relatively sensible people with a paranoid bent that means the conspirators must be the Elders of Zion...the Jews.  No other group can meet those three criteria.  The growth and success of Israel proves that Jews have those qualities.

During WWII it was possible for the Allies to see Germans and Japanese as having the qualities of conspirators because the Axis powers had all three qualities. After the war Germany and Japan lost the third criteria, a common conspiratorial objective.

Arabs and other third world people have a great deal of respect for the intelligence and competence of Americans based on the American technology that they see.

So Arabs and other third world people can often see their conspiracies as driven by Americans, particularly the global arm of America the CIA.

You can see that some of these slightly brighter Arab and other third world conspiracy promoters can put America and Jews together to get what we often see...the CIA-Mossad conspiracy.  If you respect American technology and Israeli military prowess, that marriage looks viable.

There you have it.  Intelligence itself promotes anti-Semitism among conspiracy promoters.  The smarter they are the more they know that The Elders of Zion is the best possible group of conspirators that the paranoid mind can find.

America turned optimistic

It is not just the current McDonald's commercials that indicate America has turned optimistic.  I feel the optimism in the air.

I expect the Republican Convention to be a rollicking affair of great excitement.  I expect the focus of attention to be our victory in Iraq and the appropriate celebration of American pride.

But the date of the emotional turn around in America is today...based on my feeling of what is happening around me in the emotional body of America.

Inadvertent....no

In a room in the Contemporary Jewish Museum there is a sculptural 6 foot tall replica of the horn antenna that Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson used when they found the sound of creation, in 1964; the 2 degree Kelvin background microwave radiation that pervades the universe.

The description on the wall calls the Penzias-Wilson discovery "inadvertent".  I started talking to the wall description, out-loud, because this is a Jewish museum, the visitors should have the right to speak out about serious errors.

Penzias and Wilson built the horn antenna at the Bell Labs in New Jersey with the intent of listening for microwave radiation from various galaxies and nebula.  They worked for two years to reduce the circuit noise they were finding.  They even put their circuits in liquid nitrogen to get the circuit molecules down to zero degrees.  Still there were microwaves from 360 degrees of sky, but it wasn't in the circuit or the equipment.  "Inadvertent" after two years of examining every possible alternative....no way. 

The sound of creation was the only remaining conclusion Penzias and Wilson could come to after meticulous work, brilliant research and endless  theoretical calculations.

Jewseum

The title Jewseum doesn't have a pleasant ring to it.  But that is what some of my friends are calling the new Contemporary Jewish Museum.

The wonderful NYTimes event reviewer Ed Rothstein gave the Museum a negative review.  He felt that neither the architecture nor the contents showed any meaningful identity for or definition of the purpose of the museum. Rothstein recognized that the San Francisco Jewish community is one of the most assimilated in America. 

It certainly is.  My great-grandfather came here in 1852 and the family has been here continuously since then. Jews have played a major role in the business, culture, politics and charities of the City for 150 years.

I've been to the museum and I have much stronger and clearer opinions than Rothstein.  The architecture is fine but only communicates that an expensive-dramatic architect was hired.  Jews in San Francisco have money is the message.

The only thing in the museum that is related to the name Jewish was me and another man arguing out-loud with the descriptions on the wall.  That is Jewish.  We recognized each other as kindred souls and our partners exchanged mutual sympathy for being with a man who argues out-loud with a note on a wall. (See tomorrow's blog to see what I was arguing out-loud about.)

I can see this museum as one of three.  One that could be in Kaifeng, the former Chinese capitol where a small Jewish community lived for 900 years and finally died out when they couldn't read Hebrew by 1850.  The several hundred remnants of the community are still circumcised.

The second museum exists, it is in Berlin where all the German-Jews were tortured and killed by Germans, and that is a good reason to have aJewseum.

San Francisco is the third place for a Jewseum where a prosperous Jewish population disappeared through assimilation.  The assimilation was nearly complete by 1955 when the San Francisco Jewish community was almost totally supportive of the American Jewish Committee a group opposed at the time to the state of Israel.  The AJC argued that Jews were part of a religion, Judaism, and had no connection to Israel.

As far as I can tell, the bulk of the Jews in San Francisco have little or no connection to Israel, the Reform and Conservative congregations consider Judaism to be a religious branch of the Democratic Party. They are no more than vestigial Jews.  These are Jews of the past, Jews of the Diaspora which is over.

The Jewish people have been a nation from a very early date.  Moses created a priestly group, the Cohens, who were in every one of the 12 tribes, they were a part of the Hebrew nation not the tribes. When Ruth the Moabite married King David's father she married into the nation, not a single tribe. The Jews, like a few other peoples (Rom and Tibetan) have been a nation without a country.  The Jews have been without a country of their own for over 2,000 years.  Now they are a nation with a country.

The unfortunate Jews of San Francisco, who built this Jewseum monument to themselves, sadly don't understand that the Jewish nation now has a country and that country is the core of present and future Jewish life.

Israel doesn't exist in this pathetic museum because the museum is about the death of the assimilated Jews of San Francisco.

Left lesson to learn

 I frequently rage against the Left for its failure to acknowledge and appreciate reliable data that proves the entire Lefty worldview to be wrong. Well a big pile of data just washed up on the front door of every Lefty who isn't blind and deaf.

Keith Marsden wrote an article in the June 16th (2008) Wall Street Journal titled New Evidence on Government and Growth.

Marsden took two clusters of nations: one he labeled 'littler government' based on their government expenditures as a percent of GNP.  He took Australia, Canada, Estonia, Hong Kong, Ireland, South Korea, Latvia, Singapore, the Slovak Republic and the U.S.  For the 'bigger government' cluster he took Austria, Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden and the United Kingdom.

These two clusters look like a fair choice to me.  There are no ringers and some of my favorites are in both groups.

Marsden looked back at twenty years of data.  Both groups showed a decline in the GNP proportion of government expenditures between the first and second decades.  The bigger government group had a smaller decline in the proportion of GNP to government expenditures.

Then Marsden looks at every classic measure of change: wages, income equality, crime, health, economic growth, unemployment, exports, discretionary income, consumption, care for the poor and employment growth.  In every case, the cluster of nations in the 'littler government' outperformed the cluster of 'bigger governments'.

That is the data, that is the reality, those are the facts of human social life and one of the most important lessons of the last century.  Isn't there anyway that lefties can learn?

Gay marriage

You haven't heard much from me about gay marriage.  The reason is simple.  I haven't read or heard any good arguments one way or the other. Nothing challenging to think about, just trite political jousts and feints.

That has changed.

Bookwormroom, a great blogger, started the discussion off with a summary of the standard arguments against gay marriage. The comments on her blog brought out the argument that convinced me. 

The argument happened to be made by Scott Phillips (my son).  Scott argued in a comment on the Bookwormroom blog that when society stopped applying social sanctions to child rearing by a single parent (it was often the consequence of wars; in the U.S. it was WWII) and took no steps to require or support marriage for child rearing. The state essentially abandoned the connection between marriage and child rearing.  With no state created connection between child rearing and marriage, marriage has become hollow. 

Who marries whom can not be a concern of the state as a consequence of the state's previous inaction.

Jews and blacks

Back when blacks were Negroes, the ones that made it into college found that their only friends were Jews. I lived in that era.

When the anti-white anti-Semitic Black Muslims came along, that pattern of Jew-Negro friendship slowly disappeared. Roughly in the mid-1960s.

It is generally surmised that Jews of my era befriended Negroes because Jews had an outcast sensibility that helped them identify with the Negro underdogs.

I suspect another phenomenon. I would like to suggest that one of the qualities that Jews have, that prepares them for success in the commercial and technical world is a strong personal identity. Many more Jews know who they are than comparable non-Jews.

The consequence of knowing who you are, is that you can associate with other people you like, without regard to social pressure deciding for you who to associate with.

That is my explanation of the Jew-Negro association that was only destroyed by a perceived change in Negro (by then called Black) attitudes.

I chose my Negro friends because they were particularly interesting not out of guilt or sympathy.

Houses are as conservative as education

I worked in education hoping to generate improvements starting in the early 1960s and going through the mid-1970s. I saw many excellent and successful programs, but I never saw one that spread widely among schools systems.

Education seems impervious to change.

I recently observed the same resistance to change in residential housing.

Back in the late 1970s I worked on and wrote about the first envelop house that was built by Tom Smith at Lake Tahoe. The house had an envelope of air that circulated around inside it from the basement through the roof rafters. It was entirely self-sufficient in heating and cooling.

Tom went on to build nearly a hundred similar houses in Westchester County New York. To this day, that energy efficient style is still a rarity written up in architectural and environmental magazines as a new innovation.

Residential housing and education are both equally impervious to change.

Care to suggest why?

My offspring

 I was president of Point Foundation. Point was started by Stewart Brand with the royalties from the printing of the Last Whole Earth Catalog.

The object of the foundation was to find and invent new forms of charitable giving that would be more productive and more useful than the pathetic world of charity that Stewart, and everyone else on the board of Point, knew to be a universal problem.

We tried every form of giving we could imagine. One was to make unsolicited grants to individuals of $25,000 with no strings or conditions attached. We selected our grantees carefully.

Many were failures and a few were successes. After evaluation we concluded that the successes would have been successes even without our grants.

Our unsolicited-no-conditions grants to individuals was copied a decade later by the MacArthur Foundation. The grants, popularly called 'genius awards' are rather strange, as we learned from our own experiments.

Only two of my friends have ever gotten a MacArthur, both were well deserved. But of the hundreds of people I've known or interviewed only 2 got a MacArthur.

Out of the 500+ MacArthur Awards, I suspect that the 2 I know indicate that the methodology is corrupt, in addition to being useless.

My experience suggests the MacArthur's are irrelevant. Anyone know otherwise?

Bet on American Puritianism

I'm betting on Puritanism.  I know of nothing that is deeper, more significant nor more persistent than American Puritanism.  It raises its head every time in every circumstance where it is possible.

So what is the relevance of American Puritanism to this year's election.

Puritanism is the underlying, driving force in opposition to smoking.  The anti-smoking sentiment is ferocious.  If you doubt me, ask any smoker.

The political benefit that Obama derives from being known as a smoker among blue color workers, who are the bulk of our smokers, will be negligible. They won't vote for a fellow smoker.  Having talked to them, I can say without hesitation that they feel no solidarity with other smokers, they just express guilt and frustration at their own inability to stop smoking.

I know, I love tobacco and will join a group of smokers cowering outside a building, if I have a cigarette with me. I love cigars too.  However, because I am an athlete who doesn't like the effect of smoke on my lungs, I only smoke on the rarest of occasions, outdoors at a coffee shop or with the one or two friends who smoke on their back porch. I sympathize with smokers and have spent a great deal of time talking with them.

I also know the approbation of anti-smokers.  I don't think that the vast number of anti-smokers in America, who look upon smokers as "pathetic moral weaklings" will ever let a smoker in the White House. 

"A smoke free White House" will be the sub-text of this election.

The future is old

The first Star Wars film introduced a new concept: the starship flown by Hans Solo was a clunky old space freighter. Something old , junky, in the future.

The Hans Solo starship was a stylistic idea that generated grunge and shaped many notions of the future.

I have a connection to that first seminal space ship. When I opened the Briarpatch office for the first time in June 1974, a number of small hippy business people came by for advice.

One fellow came to the office (on Pier 40) and asked me to come down to his car; which I did. The car was a 1940s Buick. The fellow opened the trunk which was lined in black velvet. Filling up nearly all the trunk was a masterpiece created by a hippy on amphetamines.. a precise and infinitely detailed construction of a model space craft that the whole world would later know as the Hans Solo spaceship.

My business advice was simple, and correct. I told the fellow to keep driving South to the corner of Sunset and Vine in Hollywood and open the trunk.

He did.

A strong rebuke

I was at party talking to a very good looking female Harvard biology post-doc in the mid-1970s at a time when I was leading a movement to keep Japan from being demonized for their research whaling.

I knew the data. There were more than 200,000 adult Grey whales and fewer than 2,000 were being killed by the Japanese research ships.

I asked the good looking biologist her opinion about several whaling issues and then told her what I knew and my sources.

She adamantly told me I was wrong, the anti-whaling movement was inherently and morally right and then she added the coupe de gras: 'If what you say were true I would have heard it from my Jewish friends at Harvard first.'

Bush's permanent change

 

I think there is good reason to believe that the first truly close relationship between Israel and the U.S. which is entirely the personal creation of President G.W. Bush is of significant international historic importance.

Why?

First, Israeli's now know that Americans of every population segment are allies of Israel.

Nearly every American can say four things of great relevance to the American-Israel alliance:

* Israel is the only democracy in the middle-East.

* Israel is a modern country with equality for women, freedom of religion and safety for gays.

* Israel is a loyal friend of the U.S. and has American values found in few other places in the world.

* The Palestinians are whiners, liars and teach their children to be terrorists. Arabs hate America and Israel.

I see no reason why this alliance shouldn't last forty or more years. Most of those four items are deeply ingrained and would be hard to change.

Heads up, the sky may be falling

I have to give you a heads up about a couple of articles.  One by William Livingstone and Matthew Penn of the National Solar Observatory shows a straight line of decreasing sun spots and consequent serious global cooling over the next decade. Another by David Archibald shows how Solar Cycles may be getting longer with the same consequence.

I have to thank reader Dr. Glenn Cordua for sending me to these articles. Thank you.

The first observations by Livingston and Penn only go back 15 years and that should be sufficient caution to the reader.  Satellite readings of our upper atmosphere only go back 30 years and they have never shown signs of global warming.

James E. Hansen of NASA, the chicken little of global warming has demonstrated that any alarm created by a straight line projection can make you famous.  I hope the global cooling researchers don't imitate the pathetic Hansen

Mood of the country

Right now the vast majority of America wants to celebrate, but we can't.  It is like the end of the Cold War.  We were quite happy but afraid to celebrate because we didn't want to anger the defeated Russians.

Today, we have the Clintons who are hated by half the country with another 30% who strongly dislike them.  But the Clintons, who appear to be dead, are a hydra-headed snake that no one is ever sure is dead.

North Korea and Japan

The average Japanese on the street has no love for Israel and a little love for the Palestinians.  The Japanese are exposed to the same news bias that their journalists get from anti-Semitic Europe.

I get great pleasure watching the faces of Japanese when I point out to them the similarity of their position to that of the Israelis. 

North Korea kidnaps Japanese from the Japanese beaches, fires rockets over Japan, has developed nuclear arms and tests long range rockets in the Sea of Japan.  North Korea hates Japan and Japan is blameless with no reciprocal hostility.  The exact same statements can be made about Israel.  Israel is blameless and the Palestinians are filled with inexplicable hate.