Pro Commerce

Bush looks better every day

Twitter: Can any other elected official be so ignorant of history?

This is a reference only for WSJ paid online subscribers. Tom Fleming, today, answers Nancy Pelosi's accusation the G.W. Bush is the worst president.  Nancy will never live down that vicious act of cowardice; (cowardice because President Bush was known to never rebut his abusers) it will tarnish her name for generations. Fleming points out how little the Democratic Speaker of the House knows.

Fleming points to John Adams complete abdication of responsibility twice while president. He cites Jefferson's aggressive protectionism that led to decades of economic depression, his neglect of the navy which led to countless British attacks and ignominies and his final abdication of office.  Fleming ignores Jefferson's destruction of national banking which led to 140 years of financial chaos.

Fleming cites Madison's laid back behavior while Britain burned Washington D.C. He mentions Woodrow Wilson's anti-Irish pique and segregation of the federal government.  Hell, he doesn't mention that Wilson fired over 5,000 black government employees, wiping out 40 years of racial progress. Wilson also got 144,000 men killed in France for a war he believed would end before American troops got to Europe.

Fleming reminds us of Harding's dalliance with Nan Britton in the Oval Office while his cabinet became a seat of corruption.  He also points out FDR's bad mouthing business that may have created the 1937-38 re-depression. Finally he cites Jimmy Carter's four years of stagflation as a terrible economic nightmare while Carter blamed Americans for its 'crisis of spirit'.

I might add John Tyler's many direct efforts to support the Confederate cause and provoke the Civil War.  I'll also add Jimmy Carter's anti-Semitism that created long term Gaza, Egypt-Israeli problems and Carter's total defeat and humiliation by Iran that created a generation of Middle Eastern attacks on America.

Newspapers and numbers

Twitter: Newspaper brain rot identified.

We San Franciscans get to watch the slow death of our local daily newspaper. The San Francisco Chronicle just paid a designer more than $100,000 for a new typography and layout and it is having no positive effect.  The paper keeps losing readers, advertising and gross revenue.

One thing that newspaper designers overlook is numbers.  Most newspapers, the NY Times and the S.F. Chronicle have a 150 year old hatred of numbers.  These papers will not publish a number if they can avoid it.  Most would not publish page numbers if they could get away with it.

Yet numbers are what the modern adult reader, Internet user wants.  Proof.  USA Today, the Wall Street Journal  and the SF/DC Examiners are the only daily newspapers that are genuinely growing and all of them are heavy on numbers, charts and tables. 

Shouldn't that send a message to the old farts who run newspapers?

Ordinary monopoly

Economic theory has had a theory of natural monopoly for nearly two centuries.  Natural monopolies in the economic model are utilities where it is too expensive to have two gas lines to a house or two electric lines. There are many examples ranging from railroads to fire departments.

In 1984 in a book I self published called Transaction Based Economics, based on my experiences in the Briarpatch Network, I identified an 'ordinary' monopoly where the service was so good no other comparable service was needed.  My example was a local Briarpatch publication called Common Ground that had a listing of all the local new age and hippy related courses, classes and services.  Common Ground was so good it became an ordinary monopoly.

Google is an ordinary monopoly and so was Microsoft (when it captured the business market with reliable software and open access). Craigslist is an ordinary monopoly. Amazon is pretty close to being one, so are Adobe, Intuit and Oracle. The same is true of WalMart, CostCo and TraderJoes. 

When a business is so good, so innovative that customers are comfortable, an ordinary monopoly arises. There is no strong reason to go anywhere else.  After awhile it can actually be difficult to leave because the monopoly develops some economies of scale, in costs, in service and in quality.

In the case of Google, Google is good because it pays attention to what its customers search for and improves everyone's search.  There is no reason to go elsewhere.

Any ordinary monopoly can fail to keep up with its technology and customer desires and it will fail; it will invite genuine competition.

Woody Allen syndrome

I have answered the most difficult question about Jews.  What is the source of anti-Semitism?  The answer is the presence of an hereditary elite class. Hereditary elite classes use anti-Semitism to distract attention from their own overlord position. Jews are the perfect scapegoat.  Successful and tiny in numbers.

The second most difficult question about Jews is "Why have Jews been voting so overwhelmingly Democratic for more than 70 years in America?" This I can answer.

The question arises because Nixon and Reagan were friends of Israel and George W. Bush was the greatest friend of Israel and the Jews in 2000 years, the greatest friend since King Cyrus the Persian.

On the other-hand, Jimmy Carter openly hates Jews and Bill Clinton, intimate friend of Adolph Arafat, went to Jerusalem at the peak of Palestinian Jew slaughter, called Intifada II, and told Israelis to be patient. 

Answer to the Jew voting question: Jews for more than a thousand years in Europe have been defenseless rabbits slaughtered at the whim of their neighbors.  The only possible survival response has been cowardice and willingness to pay ransom.  I repeat the word 'cowardice'. One thousand years of cowardice.

An example of a stereotypical Jew coward is Woody Allen.  A defenseless, ball-less, pathetic, schlemiel (Yiddish for loser). Woody Allen cowardice comes with stooped shoulders, a step-'n-fetch-it walk, and a 'laugh at poor me', demeanor. 

Jews have been cowards and most American Jews remain cowards, like Woody Allen.  The overwhelming majority vote for Democrats, the cowardly party that deserted the South Vietnamese after Nixon, the Republican, had brought victory in the Vietnam war. The same Democrats who tried to do the same thing to the Iraqi people, lose the war, after President Bush had liberated them.

Of course, the cowardly Jews are the same people who settled Israel from 1850 to 1960.  Only persistent humiliation, bombing by their Arab neighbors, ceaseless murder by surrounding Arab countries for a century, unending war against Israel by vast Arab populations, boycotts, Arab hatred and vituperation.....only this persistent abuse has turned the cowardly Jews in Israel into a minority. The remaining cowardly Jews in Israel are protected by the brave Israelis, all of whom have served in the Israeli Army, and who have left 1,000 years of cowardice behind.

Most American Jews have no idea what Israeli's think about American Jewish cowardice.  It is much like native Africans think about American blacks (their view: 'most American blacks still act and think like slaves').

Interesting explanation

My favorite economist, Greg Mankiw led me to an alternative explanation of the 2007-2009 financial collapse. This explanation is in Wired magazine by Felix Salmon.  Salmon says that financial quants started using a measure of joint risk called a Gaussian copula that had an inherent flaw when applied to real world assets.  The measure of risk was based on a comparison of two instruments, say two bonds, based on the market performance of their two respective CDS (Credit Default Swap) prices. The history of CDSs was too short to be useful.

I've thought this over and I don't buy it. It is true but it isn't causative. It means many risk instruments seemed much safer than they really were and many investors would have been hurt by a falling housing market.  But the explanation is not systemic.  It is the equivalent of every bond rating house being wrong in their evaluation...many people get hurt but the system would contain it.

We've had a systemic global financial collapse.

Obama being tested

I personally believe the open Jew-hate of Dubai as shown in the treatment of Shachar Pe'er (no visa for world tennis match) and Bar Refaeli (all magazines with her on the cover were pulled) was a test of Obama's fealty to the global 4th Reich.  George Bush would have made one call to Dubai to stop such evil behavior, or Dubai would never have done it in the first place.

If this was a test, Obama has failed his first human decency test and shown his support for the global 4th Reich.

Two announcements today

* The San Francisco Chronicle said it needed to cut $50 million, sell the paper or close.  Hearst has already made the same announcement in Seattle with a 60 day notice. Considering that there are only 275 newsroom employees left, no cut in employment will be sufficient.  That makes June 1 the funeral date.

I've pointed out the many failures of the Chronicle and other urban newspapers that is killing them.  One thing that I haven't mentioned is that the horrible Lefty political bias is destroying the central city traditional newspapers.  If the S.F. Chronicle only needed readers in San Francisco, being Lefty would be fine.  But the Chronicle at its peak had 150k San Francisco weekday readers plus 375k Bay Area suburban readers. Now there are less than 100k in San Francisco and 230k outside S.F.  Suburban readers are overwhelmingly conservative, even in the S.F. Bay Area.

That loss of readers can be explained by one issue alone, the departure of middle of the road suburban readers who are sick of Lefty ideology.  The suburbanites now have the S.F. Examine to read, Fox to watch and plenty of sites on the Internet.  Lefty politics is a direct cause of readership evaporation.

* On the same subject, today the New Republic excoriates the mainstream media for generating public disgust with MSN's dishonest reporting, political bias and simple incompetence.

Of course the New Republic has the worst record of anyone.  Lies and fraud from Scott Beauchamp reporting from Iraq and worse yet, a cover-up by editor Franklin Foer.

Superman needs phone booths

Superman used to change out of his Clark Kent identity into his Superman costume in a phone booth.  There haven't been any full size phone booths for several decades.

Where is Superman changing his clothes these days? 

I want to suggest some answers.

* Porta-potties, many of which have been melted down in San Francisco lately.

* Starbucks johns...the only public toilets in most American downtowns.

* Metropolis has saved the old phone booths but with no phones in them.

* He has a big yoga mat he unrolls and hides behind.

* The Clark Kent costume burns up when Superman flies. The suits came from Goodwill anyway.

Gay Salt Lake City

 

I've gotten some clues recently that the number of gay males moving to Salt Lake City is growing.  Two returning friends report going to two warehouses, one with two floors, filled with young gay men dancing.

People in Salt Lake say that the number has been growing steadily for a long time and some say it is just more locals coming out of the closet.

Whatever the truth, this is good. A city with hordes of young gay men is a city with vitality, creativity and up-beat attitudes. This is good long term news for Salt Lake City and property values in Salt Lake.

Consequences

The poobahs in Europe at talking about creating an international set of protocols for financial organizations.  Now is the time to tell the European poobahs that they are going to suffer the consequences of their endless support of the United Nations.  No new international institutions should be created until we have one that isn't part of the 4th Reich (The UN is a global mouthpiece for Hitler's anti-Jew values).

No international body can be trusted. The UN is a horrible example of how wrong the international community can be when it is organized.  The second Israeli woman is banned from Dubai (actually the magazine with her picture on the cover) and there is not a peep from anyone anywhere.  Certainly not in Europe, certainly not from the UN, fount of Jew hate, sponsor of Dubai I and II (I mean Durban I and II).

Time to create John McCain's Coalition of Democracies.  Time to point out to President Obama that George Bush would not have let Dubai get away with such blatant racism.

Segway 1:

This is the first instance where we will see that Obama may have no balls.  He certainly didn't have the balls to comment on Eric Holder's gutless accusations about whites being cowards. For pure personal cowardice and unwillingness to fight for their country,  the black community that owes much of its civil rights to the U.S. Army has been anti-Army for a decade. The black community has a leadership made up of genuine cowards; black leaders never defend the honest blacks and the great blacks among them (Condi Rice, Gen. Powell, Justice Thomas, Bill Cosby or Thomas Sowell). 

Segway 2:

I see two similar patterns emerging.  Calls for more UN type 4th Reich organizations.  People helping the black community (as the Jews did for forty years of civil rights support) and watching the black leaders piss on them.

HB-1 visas

See the previous blog.  Our Congress in its infinite foolishness is doing nothing to increase the number of HB1 visas and has put some serious restrictions on HB1 visas for firms receiving TARP bank bailout funds. A provision in the Stimulus bill.

If you don't know what HB1 is you're fortunate. HB1 is the main visa a few 100k foreign skilled workers use to work in the U.S. We need millions of skilled foreign workers, not because of low wages they don't get them (they just don't squander their earnings like Americans), but because they have talent and work hard.

Besides, our work force is over 115 million and at the most we could barely get 1 million foreign skilled workers. One million is less than 1% of the work force, for all those Congressional ideologues who have their brains floating in a backed-up union toilet and can't do the math.

Nationalize banks?

Ridiculous.  What definition of nationalize don't we know?

The U.S. government already owns the majority shares of Citibank and Bank of America. That is called nationalization by any definition.  Former Sec'ty Treasurer Paulsen took non-voting preferred stock, in November, for 9% of the bank capital.  Every other shareholder bailed out so the U.S. is now the majority shareholder.  We can convert to voting shares any day we want; or we can give management orders without converting. 

Now for the second half of the Phillips plan: guarantee all deposits of any size and guarantee all loans and lines of credit unless the underlying assets decline.  The banks will come back to life and have $6 trillion in deposits in two months.

Unrelated: I recommend the following sites: New product trends in Japan, always fun. My own site where you can buy Pro Commerce caps and coffee cups. Get with it.  My own site for generating expert witness work. Tell a lawyer.  A great site by my son who is a prominent martial arts teacher. The sounds of Antarctica by a great composer, Cheryl Leonard.

What would generate commerce?

 It appears to me that the American economy, despite the Obama and Democratic histrionics, will be growing by mid-Summer.  The total downturn will not have actually happened, neither 2008 nor 2009 will show a GDP below zero. Unemployment will remain high because the productivity of the past ten years means it will take much longer to re-employ the out-of-work force that is living in the wrong part of the country and has the wrong skills.  The U.S. will pull the rest of the world out of their genuine economic downturns.

The hypothetical question I ask in this blog is: What would generate commerce? I ask it because Congress passed a completely futile stimulus package. So what could the government do to actually stimulate commerce if it ever really needed to.  (I've written separately what was really needed to prevent a financial meltdown: guarantee all bank deposits and prohibit termination of loans unless the underlying asset has declined in value.)

Only two things that I can think of that would stimulate commerce: bring in more hard working entrepreneurial people....and bring in more hard working entrepreneurial people.

*That means first expanding the number of HB1 visas to 1.2 million up from 0.2 million along with a simple process for becoming citizens.

*Second, giving every non-American student getting a graduate degree in the U.S. a green card and a short series of steps to citizenship.

Anyone who ever looked at a phone book of the most productive research lab in America, the Bell Labs, would see that nearly every name was a foreign name.  When we have closed American borders we have 150 million adults available for the work force, few of them exceptional.  When we have open borders we have 2,000 million adults available for our work force with tens of thousands of them exceptional.

Old non-profits never die

The NAACP is trying to stay alive despite the fact that it has been a failure for more than half a century. It is now taking on some unmeasurable objective in a foreign land, Darfur, and in propaganda-land, Global Warming.... this will not save a failed organization.

The NAACP takes credit for the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education school integration case. Untrue.  The case was brought by the separate NAACP Legal Defense Committee founded by the late Justice Thurgood Marshall.  To know how separate the two organizations are: the NAACP sued the NAACP Legal Defense for the use of its name and lost.

The NAACP had a fraud running for two years at its top ranks and was never able to clean up the mess: Ben Chavis President.

The failed NAACP brings to mind the March of Dimes.  Despite raising tens of millions of dollars for polio, the March of Dimes played no role, zero, in the discovery of the Salk vaccine against polio.  After polio was eliminated, the great fund raising skills of the March of Dimes merely marched on to raise money for birth defects, Darfur and global warming.  I'm kidding about the last two.

Arcana

In the blog immediately below I refer to necrophilia, sexual arousal from dead bodies.

Just for my own record, I want to include the following link which is an interview with Karen Greenlee, a real necrophiliac, who was tried in a Sacramento civil court. Karen is proud of who she is and what her sex life is about. You are fore-warned.

In the linked interview, Karen doesn't mention the arcane fact that nearly one-third of dead males have an erection nor the two reasons given for dead male erections (1) a body blood distribution issue, the article names it 'angel lust',  (2) wikipedia focuses on strange forms of death as the cause. 

Karen would like the final newsreel footage in the film Waltz with Bashir discussed below.  I hated it.

I give it an N rating?

An N rating is for necrophilia.  The film is Waltz with Bashir and necrophilia refers to sexual arousal from dead bodies. The movie is nearly all animation except for the gratuitous addition of dead bodies from color newsreel footage at the end.  The footage is awful, I wish I hadn't seen it.  It deserves an N rating and a warning on the theater marquis. If you don't like close-ups of dead bodies avoid this movie.

Whether the film is anti-Israel is hard to determine.  I saw it with a famous Israeli dramatist.  We all came away wondering who could understand it.  The European anti-Semites who financed it would see it as anti-Jew. Anyone who doesn't know who the Christian Phalangists were will find it anti-Israel.  The rest of us just wonder what the film was about.

Opposite of Pro Commerce

In an earlier blog I found a research paper done at Yale Law School that contrasted one group of outcomes in a survey as pro commerce and the other anti- group as egalitarian-communitarian.

While the distinction may have been valid in the particular study, to me the opposite of pro-commerce is not egalitarian or communitarian. One can have egalitarian values and feelings about a wide range of subjects and still be comfortable with the astronomic inequalities in wealth that are produced by commerce.

For example, one can feel that each of one's children and grandchildren should be treated as equally as possible and definitely believe that everyone is equally entitled to emergency health care, education, fire protection, access to travel, free speech, trial by jury, fair trial and much more and still be pro commerce.

Similarly with communitarian values.  One can feel intense comfort when surrounded by loving, caring committed friends and allies...even the same people over a lifetime, and still be pro commerce. A person can want to retire among longtime friends or sympathetic professional peers, one can be intensely involved with their sports team, community or specialized cohort and still be pro commerce.

To me, the anti-thesis of pro commerce is wishful thinking.  Wishful thinking is my polite term for ideology.  People who look at the world and believe it would be better with a revolution, with a return to some older society are doing wishful thinking.

Nothing in the history of human beings has created what commerce has created thus far.  Commerce has vastly extended our lifespan, reduced infant mortality and death at child birth, but more importantly it has create hundreds of thousands of jobs, occupations, professions and life paths to take advantage of the diversity of human beings.  Commerce is the first and only human institution to reward meritocracy as broadly as possible in the population. 

Commerce is bringing into existence the pragmatic messianic age.  To seek some other world is wishful thinking.

Ontogenesis of personality

Don't bother to look it up.  Ontogeny refers to the growth of an infant from a single fertilized cell.

I wouldn't write about this, a subject I covered in my self published Mental Snacks in 1987, but two people at morning coffee the other day mentioned the same experience that provoked my first writing on the subject.

I, and my two friends, had the experience of being awaken during the deepest part of our nighttime sleep to answer a phone (my case was my father calling from India without knowing the time in San Francisco).  In all three cases we found ourselves struggling to wake up, the metaphor we agreed upon was of climbing a ladder, with the top of the ladder being the place where we could talk coherently.

This just suggests to me that everyday we recreate our personality.  That coming out of a deep sleep with no notice is when we have no personality, not even our language.  We wake up each day slowly enough to allow ourselves to recreate our personality.  The daily recreation of our personality would be ontogenesis...that is where my title word comes from.

My best reasoned argument to support this thesis is that all meditation practices have their adherents wake up early and start meditation immediately.  It is this first meditation, I submit, that enables meditation to change personality and behavior to some extent.

Do you think we recreate our personality every day when we wake up? Do you connect this to the difference between people who have trouble waking up and people who wake-up with vigor?

Which of us is stupid?

I'm seriously worried about a trade war.  We'll know by the end of April if Congress and President Obama have started a trade war or not.

Congress passed the Stimulus 1 bill with a Buy American clause in it and the enlargement of the key criterion from (1) only buy foreign if it costs 7% less to the new (2) only buy foreign if it costs 26% less. Then, under extreme pressure the Congress modified the Buy American clause to say that no buying actions can contravene existing international trade agreements.  That added clause, the President and Secretary of State, are telling every other nation, makes this a safe bit of legislation.

Not really.  The overriding international trade agreement is the WTO which takes six years to settle any dispute.  Other countries, particularly two democracies, Japan and Canada, our largest trading partners, might not feel comfortable with the modifying clause and the risk of correcting a protectionist act six years late.  If either or both countries respond with protectionist measures we are all headed for disaster.  I'm keeping my eyes open on this.

Back to the stupid part.  Who does Congress believe is stupid when they write this Buy American bit and claim to defang it with a modifying clause.  Do they think union members, representing 3% of the American workforce that makes products are stupid enough to ignore the modifying clause? Do they think the rest of us who know that protectionism will create a global depression are stupid enough to think it is safe to put language like that in a major piece of legislation?

Who does Congress think is stupid?

Decrease the features

It is very hard for technical businesses of every sort to understand a simple rule: simpler is better.

Technology businesses are founded by technophiles who love more technical features.

I make my point with three examples. 

First is the ASUS eee the product that created the new field of netbooks.  The ASUS entered the market with no hard drive, little memory and the simplest possible Linux software designed to connect to the web and not much else.  It was a small screen. Last year, the second year on the market, netbooks sold over 10 million products.

The second smashing hit has been the Flip video camera.  It just makes an hour long video of medium resolution, fits in your pocket, connects directly to a computer USB port and has nothing else.

Lastly, the car that cracked the imported car market, the late 1950s VW had only one round dashboard panel with nothing else on it but the speedometer, the simplest possible car in every way.

I could mention many more including the Ipod and the original Swatches.

More 4th Reich

As I never tire of pointing out, we are living in the 4th Reich.  The values of Hitler and his Nazi party are triumphant. Nazi values are the official views of the U.N. and nearly every nation of the world.

In this case, an Israeli is banned from a world tennis tournament for being Jewish (it wouldn't have happened to an Arab Israeli). The tennis association joins every other sports group in saying implicitly: 'blacks can't be discriminated against but Jews are officially OK to ban.'

The nature of hysteria is that people can never see their hysterical position for what it is.  We are living in the 4th Reich, we are all living in the 4th Reich.

Political heritage

On the rare occasion when I have to point out to people that we got rid of our hereditary upper class in 1960, the perennial response is 'what about the Bush family?'

An hereditary upper class did certainly include the Bushes but has nothing to do with their political success.  Name recognition counts and so does political skill which can be passed on to children. 

The American hereditary upper class never included people like California Governor Pat Brown and his offspring, N.Y. Governor Mario Cuomo and his offspring, the Daleys in Chicago and certainly not the Kennedy family which made its money in liquor smuggling. Cities and states all over the country have successful family names recurring in electoral politics, almost none from the old hereditary elite.

I think there are two reasons for political inheritance.  One is name recognition, but the other, I think is more important. If one elected official is considered honest or at least competent, then the family gets the broad brush of honesty and competence. Offspring get elected from the broad brush.

Law of large numbers

I doubt many people lose sleep over statistics.  But I did.  I keep wondering why the Law of Large Numbers is. The LLN says that the average weight of a series of samples bags of pebbles taken from a beach is a more accurate measure of the the weight of all the individual pebbles on the beach than one large bag of pebbles.

I know the formula and I know the proof, but something has never gone from my rational sphere to my gut, even after 50 years as a statistician.

Everyone who teaches math says you can't prove a geometric theorem, like all angles of a triangle total 180 degrees, by cutting out  and measuring triangles.  People would laugh if you did.  But that is geometry and that theorem is really a syllogism based on the definition of triangle and the definition of degrees.

The law of large numbers is the real world.  So I did the equivalent of cutting out triangles.  I made a list of 100 numbers from a random number table, the average of my list is 46.9. I did an average of every ten numbers on the list. The average of those ten averages is 46.9.  The theoretical average for a column of random two digit numbers is 50.  The LLN doesn't show anything in my test.  Now my gut still has to depend on my rational sphere.

(A reader, Gene, below found an error in my calculations, right away. It is now corrected. Thanks Gene.)

Check out the fascinating and highly relevant comments below.

What does tyranny feel like?

If you ever wondered what tyranny feels like, there is an expensive movie for you to see.

Every great tyrant from Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Fidel, Ho Chi Minh to Kim Jong Il has tried to work the national ideology into every fabric of education in subtle and not so subtle ways.  Ideology is always intertwined deeply in every lesson.

Today the heirs to this tradition are still at work, of course using the apocalyptic environmental visions of fear to promote their version of social-conformist-tyranny.

The movie is Under the Sea 3D which I saw in IMAX. The seats in San Francisco cost $16 and the film is 40 minutes short.  The flora and fauna are fascinating and beautiful.  The incessant message is that human CO2 emission is killing the flora we see on the screen, including the coral reefs, and driving the fauna to extinction.

Sit through this piece of pervert ideology and know what living under a tyrant feels like, except the tyrants listed above had driven their societies to abject poverty and had no money or talent to make a visually powerful piece of propaganda like this film.

P.S. Don't miss the comment by Susan below.

More low Tides

I have pointed out in an earlier blog that the Tides Foundation of San Francisco is a swamp of financial corruption and its easy for anyone interested to see the evidence.

Tides has a large building in the Presidio.

This article, from last year, documents one of the reasons that Tides is so financially obtuse.  The CEO of Tides, Drummond Pike, was the secret person who bailed out one of the corrupt founders of ACORN President Obama's mentor organization. The bailout was three-quarters of a million dollars, definitely not Pike's personal money.

The facts are overwhelming, the corruption and cover-up by the politically correct crowd that is incestuously connected to Tides continues unabated.  One of San Francisco's largest granting organizations (mostly channels money) and always far to the PC Left...a disgrace.

Torture details

I wrote a blog about the use of music for torture.  A month later, Terry Teachout , one of my heroes, covers the same subject in the Wall Street Journal (pg. w12 2/14)

Terry speculates on why music can be such a source of pain.  He argues that it can totally expand to all of space and all of time, particularly loud music.  Terry finds what is believed to be a list of the music that is used for torture.  I can appreciate why AC/DC, Aerosmith, Eminem, Dr. Dre, the theme from Barney the TV character and the Sesame Street theme can drive you nuts, but there are many more on the list I don't know.

I still argue that the Hippies pioneered music that is good for torture.  The reason is that creating music while on a mind altering drug creates music that can alter the mind.

Dalai is not a doll.

I wish the Dalai Lama had a great deal more influence on the world.

I'm not a supporter of the pink-cotton-candy version of Tibetan Buddhism that swirls around me.  I like asking these pink-cotton-candy religious (they call themselves spiritual) seekers if they know the Dalai Lama's opinion about George W. Bush.  They don't.  The two have been friends, close friends for many years.  As it says here. (This startling Bush-Dalai Lama friendship point is ignored in the NYTimes article cited below.)

The second and most important point the Dalai Lama makes is that pacifism doesn't work against terrorists. He says that counter-terrorist actions must be taken. I personally don't think pacifism has ever worked nor can it work, but the Dalai Lama adds his voice to the argument.

The sandbox view that everyone is basically nice and will respond to niceness nicely is a perverted view of humans.  The Dalai Lama's point is that terrorism is a worldview that does not include a non-terrorist vision.  The New York Times (a fount of evil) in reporting this subject never explains what the Dalai Lama says.

The traditional Buddhist view on being peaceful, Ahimsa, is based on a great principle: do no harm.  Pacifism is a perversion of this principle which abjures self-defense, rejects the use of violence in defense of others and often promotes suicide on behalf of self-righteousness.  The Dalai Lama is merely following the logic of Ahimsa.

Footnote about the two great exemplars of pacifism: Gandhi and ML King Jr. Both used non-violence  (not pacifism) to badger a morally upright society.  Gandhi told the British during WWII that unless they gave India independence after the war he would take India into WWII on the side of the Nazis and the Axis. 

MLKing Jr. used black soldiers in military garb in the front-lines of all his marches to remind Americans outside the South that America owed blacks full citizenship based on their military sacrifice.  An appeal to American's moral uprightness.

Did George Bush stop global warming?

I looked at the global warming data and noticed that the global temperature was low last year, 2008. Indeed, the global temperature was much lower than when George Bush took office in 2001.

Here are the annual numbers:

2001 -.41F 
2002 -.46
2003 -.47
2004 -.45
2005 -.48
2006 -.42
2007 -.40
2008 -.33

The temperature, .41F, is four tenths of a degree Fahrenheit above the average of the past 150 years based on thousands of measurements of air temperature all over the globe at ground or ocean level. The peak temperature was 1998.

Isn't is strange that the Left that so firmly believes in Global Warming could never believe that George Bush was so effective in protecting the world from it. Thank you President Bush. 

Just say no

One of my granddaughters schools sent home a CD with music and words to support the school's anti-drug campaign.  The granddaughter is 11 and found the trite message embarrassing.

Much better to be honest and play this Bach cantata from the mid 1730's Austria. My granddaughter can play the violin very well. Bach only wrote the score. Here is an explanation of the words.

The cantata is about a daughter who has an addiction problem and a father who can't convince the daughter to give up her addiction.  The father finally hits on the answer. He refuses to get her a husband until she abjures the drug.  She agrees.  She resolves the drug problem by privately telling future husbands that allowing her addiction after marriage is a condition of marriage.

The answer to trying drugs at any age is not fear, intimidation or any other stupidity.  The only approach that can work with intelligent competent kids is to help them understand they can say yes and no to virtually any situation.  Yes or no to sex, yes or no to sports, yes or no to secrets, yes or no to lies....etc.  The ability to say no, and the way to do it is the core of being a wise human at any age.

Proselytizing is a bad idea

I have had bad experiences with proselytizing.  Not the bad experience of religious people knocking on my door.  I love to argue with them and they are always polite.

I mean proselytizing for my own causes.  I have had three bad experiences with trying to push others to accept my ideas.

The first was a grant I made in 1971 to promote inexpensive abortions.  It was a grant to support promotion of a small device called the Carmen cannula for performing D & C's, early term abortions.  I supported a project that could provide an early term abortion for $25.00 to the public. 

Consequence: another group of women came to me for a similar grant, which I made.  They turned out to be frauds. They became better organized, ten times more aggressive and created a much bigger organization to fight abortions and pornography. 

The second was a grant and years of active support of Margo St. James' Coyote an organization dedicated to decriminalizing prostitution. Coyote was headquartered in San Francisco and was very well known worldwide.

Consequence: the opposition to Coyote, which came 15 years later, was so strong that San Francisco became the first city to punish the clients of street prostitutes and has continued to expand the anti-prostitution theme for more than a decade.

The third example was a course, I thought was important, in how to gain control of your money.  The course, which I taught, was designed so the students could gain personal power, in three months, and achieve their life goals through effective money management.

Consequence: two women in the class used their new found skills to promptly find and marry rich men who would support them.  I really don't like the idea of me helping women to catch men and manipulate them for their money.

No more proselytizing for me.

Great granddaughter of slaves

I haven't seen any mention of the fact that a great granddaughter of slaves is now living in the White House. That is only three generations removed. Is it too obvious to write about?  It is not to be found in a search of Google news.

Marian Robinson, Michelle Obama's mother, who is now living with her daughter and granddaughters in the White House, had 8 great grandparents living during the Civil War.  The likelihood that one or more were slaves is near certainty. 

That seems to me to be important.  Mrs. Robinson deserves privacy but the close connection of a White House resident to former slaves is a public point.