Pro Commerce

Meet people

My father loved to be with interesting people, including young people.  He did two things to make that possible.

One, he loved the young people traveling the globe in the late 1960s and 1970s.  So he bought an island near Singapore, in Malaysia, on the South China Sea.  The island was not expensive and the bamboo-thatch house he had built was even cheaper.  The daily supply of fresh fish bought from the fisherman on their way to the market was a spectacular bonus.  The temperature of the the water, air and rain was all the same.  About 80F at the equator.

When the young travelers of the world, whom he had met on his travels, got wind of his island paradise they flocked.  He had, roughly 90 visitors a year with plenty of room for them to sleep outside. 

When he finally left the island for reasons of infirmity, he came to San Francisco, where he bought a pick-up truck.  He knew, and he was right, young people want to know some one who has a pick-up truck and will lend it to them.

Just a tip for all of you who want friends fast and easy.  A pick-up truck that can be borrowed.

In praise of Ruth

I jokingly suggested to friends that Ruth Benedict's famous book the Chrysanthemum and the Sword was improperly named, it should have been the Cherry Blossom and the Dove.  What I was trying to say was that the Japanese people have a religion based on worship of the cherry blossom and that they are, almost tragically, a pacifist nation, since WWII.

All of which led me to reread Benedict's book.  Ruth Benedict wrote this book starting in 1944, during WWII, commissioned by the U.S. military to answer the question of how the Japanese would behave after their defeat in the war.  She was the greatest anthropologist of her age, but she had never visited Japan, nor had any other anthropologist (one exception was John Embree who had lived in a small Japanese village for less than a year several decades earlier).  Benedict relied on books, films, interviews with Japanese Americans and with Japanese prisoners of war.

I have visited Japan nearly every year for more than 37 years.  I had read Benedict early in my visits.

It is after 37 years that I can both appreciate her brilliant work and the discipline of anthropology.  Though I have read a few rotten anthropology books (Bestor on the Tsukiji fish market was really bad) anthropology is a powerful tool for understanding culture.  Benedict learned in a few short years, with nothing more than her experience and methodology what I have carefully observed and confirmed in many decades of careful intimate study.  She got both the grand picture right and the details right down to the attitude of mothers toward childhood masturbation (approved).

I recommend Ruth Benedict to any and all anthropologists, any and all people interested in Japan and any and all people who wish to understand the world. Japan is still the second largest economy and no other country is even close.

Who are the Neanderthals?

My blog readers know that I feel pretty much alone in my devotion to the cause of pro commerce.  Most of you also know that I struggle to understand the various opposing positions on this subject ranging from the strong and common anti-commerce position to general indifference.

I finally found a parallel to my own semi-isolated state of mind. 

Charles Darwin, knew as early as 1838 that evolution of species was caused by the interaction of random genetic variation and species destruction. The entire natural world around us, including us, has been created by the forces only Darwin discovered and understood.  Darwin went twenty years before writing down his material and died still another twenty years later without much appreciation for the brilliant globe shaking discovery (two evolutionary forces) he had made.

I feel the same way.  Commerce, man's unrecognized, unappreciated common creation has built the astounding modern world we live in. Yet the few forces that shaped this marvelous world are not understood nor comprehended.  Possibly, this mental darkness will outlive me.

Thinking about the comparison of evolution by random change and survival selection to the development of commerce by diversity, openness and meritocracy has helped me see one point.

Homo sapiens sapiens has outlived our close relative Neanderthal by only three dozen millennia.  We have no idea why, nor what characteristics gave us a survival advantage. 

I would like to suggest that Neanderthal had a mind much like a hedgehog and focused on the few things he knew.  On the other hand, a few of our ancestors had minds more like foxes and knew many things.  We are the same species as Neanderthal so there is good reason to assume our horny ancestors did inter-breed.

As I see it, the ideological Lefties that dominate our contemporary world are most like Neanderthals...everything they know is deduced from their hedgehog ideology of: income redistribution is necessary, big corporations are bad and poor people are only poor because they don't have money. They may have an excess of Neanderthal genes.

The Left has the same future as Neanderthals, most likely. It may take centuries but they will be bred out of future populations.

Tomorrow's news

Today's news in the S.F. Business Times should be headlines in tomorrows newspapers.  Whole Foods was scheduled to fill a large empty retail spot at Golden Gate Park where Haight Street terminates on its Western end.  The lot has been dead for years at a very important, high traffic spot. Opposite one of McDonald's top stores.

The property owner/developer announced the deal was off, after a year of fighting to get permits.  The developer, Mark Brennan, said the City fees could reach $6 million for the development, which is too high.  So San Francisco, with unfathomably high wage requirements, has fees that are onerous too.

Nobody has talked to Whole Foods, but they have had a rough year for earnings so maybe they aren't in a hurry to expand.

Our City fathers have finally presented the golden goose on a silver platter, dead, for all to see.  

Last year they killed Home Depot, this year it is Whole Foods.

We have another

We have another great supporter and long-time advocate of commerce: Evan Osborne, economist, Wright State in Dayton.

Dr. Osborne sent me his book The Rise of the Anti-Corporate Movement (just recently released in paperback). I recommend it highly.

Dr. Osborne notices a phenomenon that I hadn't seen, the anti-corporate movement is growing.  It has been growing, measurably, since 1987 when the first Pew study found 27% 'completely agreed' with the statement 'too much power is concentrated in the hands of a few big companies'. Today 40% respond to that question with complete agreement.  For Democrats the percentage who take that position is even higher, nearly double.

Osborne locates this rise of the anti-corporate movement in the fall of communism in Russia and China. The complete loss of the main ideology led to the consequent consolidation of diverse anti-commercial views into a unified neo-paranoid hostility toward large and global corporations. I agree with his explanation.

The book does a wonderful job of explicating the issues in the movement, showing the extent of the movement and rebutting the (mostly cretinous) positions.

My own statement of the fallacy of the anti-corporate paranoia is in my blog which points out that only 11 of the 1960 American corporations in the top 100 Global companies (nearly all of the top 100 were American in 1960) are still there. Since mid 2008, that number has dropped below 9.  Big global corporations are fragile hot-house flowers not tyrannical monsters.

To get a sense of Dr. Osborne's views one exemplary excerpt from the beginning of a piece I found on his home page is here.

Government for commerce

My hero, who answered the question 'what is the best government for commerce?' is the late Mancur Olson.

He argued, persuasively to me, that government was like a saucer with a deep cup holding spot in the middle and a gentle upward flange on the outside.  The deep spot represented governments that are too strong and will seize successful businesses to give to friends, family and members of the ruling class.  The outer upper-ward flange is anarchy where the rule of law is too weak and property rights are not protected.

The United States has a government, more accurately a melange of governments, that are on the flat part of the saucer, not too strong and not too weak. Remember, the Jim Crow state governments in the South kept commerce stifled for nearly 100 years after the Civil War.

There can be many other forms of government that are good for commerce.  Our government was pretty much an accident of Holland creating Manhattan, The Dutch invading England, the religious wars driving a dissident commercial class out of England and letting the whole new American colonies stew in relative isolation for 300 years. 

There can be other forms of government that would be good for commerce, not too weak, not too strong....they just haven't arrived yet.

Indonesia

If you care about politics in Indonesia, here is a Japanese foreign policy expert's view of the recent parliamentary election, the data and the coming presidential election.  Japan is the big brother to Indonesia in global real politic.

It may be the mind

As one of the few living advocates for commerce, I regularly think about why I am in such a lonely state.

Part of the problem is that only a tiny part of the global population takes a direct role in the industrial commercial world.  There may be half a million profitable corporations in the world of six billion adults; there are fewer than hundred million profitable non-corporate businesses. With all of their employees, landlords, spouses and suppliers the commercial part of the world must be under 15% of the adult population. (Number of businesses in the U.S.)

All in all, the part of the world that is truly involved in business, owners, managers, employees is probably under 10% and my guess is a tiny fraction of those people appreciate the positive impact of their own business activities on the world.  Conservatively we can say that, more than 9/10ths of the world is outside the mind of business.

 Which gets to the point I want to make both about those in the mind of commerce and those outside.

I think there is such a thing as a mind of commerce.  I think it is cultural.  A tiny fraction of the world population is good at commerce.  You can list them yourself: Japanese, Overseas Chinese, South Coast Chinese, Christian and Maronite Lebanese (formerly Phoenicians), Gujarati Indians, some West Coast African tribes (Fulani), some Jews, a good portion of Scots, Americans, Danes and Dutch.  Their culture predisposes parts of these populations to the commercial mind. 

The remaining 5.5 billion adults in the world are part of cultures that don't have the commercial mind and usually don't want it. Virtually all the people who don't have commercial minds are either anti-commerce or indifferent to commerce.

So what are the characteristics of the commercial mind?  That is very complicated, nevertheless we'll get to that discussion in future blogs.  You can comment now if you wish.

Singapore culture

Singapore is a fascinating place.  I always found it interesting for three days at a time.  The food is global, largely Chinese and spectacular.  The city and everything in it is clean and highly functional.

The one thing everyone I know says about Singapore is that it is culturally dead.  I'm not sure what we mean by that, since Singapore invites every theater, art, music and other performance group to visit.  It probably refers to the lack of indigenous aesthetes.

The reason for the absence of indigenous aesthetes is that Singapore is a trading center. It is an island with no natural resources or agriculture. It has virtually no industry.  It is so much a trading center that the imports and exports are far greater than the GDP which is obviously the residual of the net exports.

To me, as you can see from the title of this blog, pro commerce, particularly industrial commerce is based on diversity and meritocracy. What we call art-culture is the by-product of diversity and meritocracy. Singapore is nearly all Chinese, not diverse like most entrepots.  Without the specialization that goes with industry, and the necessary meritocracy neither get much weight in Singapore.  I think meritocracy is necessary for attracting interesting and artistic people.  To put it another way.  Just because someone is your brother or your cousin doesn't mean they create interesting art.

Industrial commerce requires diversity and meritocracy to thrive.  So does art-culture.

God and 5a6 6ath

If you believe that God intervenes in human lives you will probably find that my partner (not Jewish) must have violated some serious Christian commandment one recent Sunday morning. A Sunday just like today.

We had a Sunday brunch scheduled for 11am with several casseroles and muffins to cook in the oven.  We went to turn on the oven at 10am and the oven control panel read: 5a6 6ath and nothing would turn on.  No combination of pushing buttons had any effect.

After nearly a half hour of reading all the instructions and talking to Sears (it was still under warranty) I finally got a techie would knew what was going on.  'The range is in the Sabbath mode, he said.  The right combination of buttons (accidentally I'm sure) were pushed and the stove is off for 24 hours.' 

The way to remedy the problem was power off for ten minutes and pushing two buttons for five seconds.  Do you have a Sabbath mode you don't know about?

Catholic wall

The trouble with Google maps is that it can raise serious questions that Pope Benedict XVI wouldn't like to answer.

While in the West Bank, last week, the Pope referred to the wall that protects the lives of Israelis from murderous Palestinians as a "symbol of stalemate" in Israeli-Palestinian relations. He didn't describe it  accurately as protection for innocent life, as I have just described it.

Your highness, how would you describe the wall that surrounds the Vatican, as readily visible to anyone who can use Google maps (Vatican, Rome, Italy)?  Is your wall a symbol of the stalemate between Roman Catholicism and the rest of the World?

Important lesson

Israel has learned an important lesson.  Moderate bombing every day does not interest the world's hate-Israel press.  Israel has been bombing Gaza at will since the end of the full force attack in Dec.-January.  The world press hasn't noticed.

Fun to watch again

This is a repeat blog from December 2008 that got taken off for some unknown reason.  It is just as relevant, even more so, now that California voters told the Legislature and Governor to go to he11:

I pointed out in an earlier blog that the California Democrats have created a monster scale financial train wreck.

The California Democratic Party machine is a 100% subsidiary of the major California labor unions. The unions have voted themselves nearly 90% of the California budget.  Now the union created expenditures far exceed the potential tax revenues and the Democrats can't vote to reduce them.  The Republicans are united in refusing to let them raise taxes. I'm so proud of the Republicans and admire their brilliant strategy in this.

Yesterday the Democrats came up with a way to pretend to lower the gasoline tax which is restricted to highway related functions, and increase all other taxes that go into the general fund. The Democrats call the transaction 'neutral' so it doesn't fall under the Constitutional voting requirements for a tax increase. The Governor will veto it...but the intent is what is fun to watch.

Watch the Democratic legislators squirm.  They need to be replaced by any rational electorate.  California will replace them if the issue is big enough and framed properly.

I'm proud

You will be surprised to read what inaction I am proud of but you won't be surprised at my reason.

The California Legislature has been in a deadlock since July over the current 08-09 budget.  The Senate has 40 members and needs 27 votes to pass a budget, the 15 Republicans can stop passage of the budget. The Assembly has 80 member and needs  54 to pass.  There are 29 Republicans in the Assembly who can stop a budget bill.

The budget consists of $126 billion in expenses and $100 billion in revenue.

The Republicans in both houses have been unified in refusing to pass any budget that requires a tax increase. The Republicans have not proposed an alternative.  I am very proud of the Republican legislators.  If they remain unified the State will come to a dead stand still in March, possibly sooner.

I was a legislative analyst early in my career, working in Sacramento.  We had a non-partisan legislature at the time.  Soon afterwards the legislature became part of a statewide Democratic Party machine created by Jesse Unruh. It has remained part of the Democratic Party machine ever since 1964.

The entire budget debacle has been created by the Democrats in conjunction with the California unions.  More than 55% of the budget is paid to education union members. Why should the Republicans antagonize anyone by proposing areas to cut the budget...they didn't bring the pigs to the trough in the first place.

In the 1950's California always ranked #1 in education from K to 12 and at the University level.  Today, K-12 in California ranks somewhere between Louisiana and Mississippi.  Today California Colleges and Universities teach one common curriculum: Lefty socialism.

Since the Democrats created the teats on the hog of the state budget it is obviously their job to cut off the milk supply.  They will have no choice in a few months. California has one of the highest unemployment rates in the U.S. and has been especially hard hit by sub-prime mortgages.

How Congress works

For five years I lobbied Congress to get more money for a project I was affiliated with.  I never succeeded.

Aaron Wildavsky wrote a book on how Congress does its budgeting.  The book originally sold for over $100 a copy and Aaron made a great deal of money because 4,000 lobbyists and 2,000 members of Congress and their staff bought the book. No one understands the budgetary process.

What I learned, while lobbying, is that there are 13 different budgets presented annually by the Executive to Congress.  Most never get passed, they get a continuing resolution which means the departments in that part of the budget continue spending what they got the previous year, sometimes with a modest inflationary increase.

That is why all the war budgets, Iraq (both wars) and Afganistan get separate budgets, and approvals, every year. They would never be funded if they were part of the standard 13 budgets.

I have no idea how many actual total budgets with all 13 components have been passed with genuine modifications in the past 20 years, but I'll bet the number is close to zero.

This also helps you understand pork-barrel set-asides.  They are necessary exceptions, bribery, to get any parts of the budget passed.

Japan and missiles

I was in Tokyo when the North Koreans first claimed to test a nuclear device and I was in Tokyo when they fired an intercontinental missile across Japan in early April this year.

The national Japanese TV news shows had roughly ten minutes coverage about the imminent event and the modest military preparations.  When it happened there was about 15 minutes of news reporting and no discussion.  No experts, no questions, nothing.

An in-law who lives on the Northern Japan Sea in a small town closer to North Korea says his town had a siren go off and their TV news discussed the event more extensively.  Nearly 40% of Japanese live in the Tokyo area so my experience is more like the Japanese norm.

What the Japanese actually saw on the news is irrelevant to the issue.

If Fidel Castro, a similarly monstrous communist tyrant who starves and enslaves his own people, had tested a nuclear weapon and fired a missile over the United States, the U.S. would not tolerate it for five minutes. Remember half a century ago when Castro just put missiles on his island, but didn't test them.

Why the difference between North Korea and Cuba?  The Japanese people are genuinely pacifist, 98% of them.  They do what pacifists do.  They ignore danger, ostrich style.  Their government knows its people and does nothing to oppose the pacifist position.  The Japanese government could never openly ask for American protection until they are actually attacked by North Korea.

Now you know something about the world that few people know.

MIT Phd's fail test

I have several MIT Phd friends who have been career scientists at renowned research labs.  If my experience with them is any example, a PhD from MIT can mean a career of mediocrity; follow the crowd never examine original data.

Here are the questions they couldn't get right:

1) What is the single criterion for a successful scientific theory?

2) Who first proposed this criterion?

3) How much more heat can a column of ocean water store (roughly .5 miles deep) compared to an identically sized column of air reaching to space.  Order of magnitude estimate is acceptable.

4) Does the global warming thesis meet the criterion of question #1?

Answers are in the first comment below.

We are not humble

Modest, yes.

I cringe every time the current President of the United States goes on a road trip to tell the world that the United States is now humble, that we will listen to them and consider both enemy and ally advice. You can see a list of his statements here.

I would cringe if I didn't believe that President G.W. Bush was one of the greatest U.S. presidents and that Obama is acting out the worst form of vengeful self-serving political behavior on a world stage, when he criticizes the past president. 

I cringe primarily because the characterization of the U.S. as humble is linguistically wrong and sociologically ignorant.  We are not humble we are modest.  There is a big difference that this affirmative action president and his cohorts don't understand.

Humble has the qualities of: meek, submissive and lowly.  None of these characterize the U.S. We are more likely to fight back, resist and confront our enemies than any other people on earth. We will also fight for other people's rights like no other people on earth.  Humble, schmuble. Obama you are using the wrong word!

Modest is the right word. We Americans are unpretentious, never arrogant, we never claim credit for our towering achievements in freedom, democracy, personal creativity, compassion and commercial vitality.  In five words: we are great but plain.

We have intervened in other people's wars to save more humans than ever existed before 1900, we have sacrificed more of our citizens on behalf of others than any nation in history, we have destroyed imperial empires to free people everywhere on the planet and never demanded colonial rights, every year in every disaster we give more aid and support than the rest of the world put together.  We are modest about it.

Americans are modest not humble.  Learn English you leftwing Neanderthals and stop embarrassing the decent people who are the overwhelming, but modest, people of America.

Smokin' gun

 If you expect the president to be photographed smoking a cigarette you are unlikely to be right.  He smokes but he won't be photographed doing it.

I thought that was the mistake in this photo. You can see the cigarette and the wiff of smoke.  But careful examination shows that he is pressing his cheek which a smoker wouldn't be doing.  The illusion is caused by the sculptured head in the background. This is the classic negative image. (click to enlarge)

Ask the ocean

In the blog below I mentioned two questions I had about global climate.  One concerned the data from satellite measurements and the other concerned ARGO (ocean buoy measurements).

My blog below includes the satellite data which shows clearly that we had a global surface temperature decline during the period that NOAA, Hansen and other researchers present data for a global surface temperature rise.

Now I find in the recent blog of the same scientist, Anthony Watts, that the data from ARGO has been published and analyized. ARGO measures the active 3,000 buoys out of 5,000 floating in the entire world's oceans that sink and bob to make countless measurements and then transmit them to a satellite collection system.

The issue from ARGO global ocean measurement deals with simple physics.  If the global atmosphere is warming then the surface of the oceans (top few thousand feet) must be absorbing some heat in order to keep the air on the surface warmer.

No chart is needed on this one. Measuring the amount of heat in the top of the ocean over the most recent six years (ocean temperature doesn't change very fast or easily) the data shows that ocean heat declined not increased.  The global atmosphere can not be in a long term warming phase if the ocean is losing heat.

It is time for James Hansen, Al Gore, the UN's IPCC and the global media to do the honorable thing: commit seppuku.

Screwing with us

Thanks to a brilliant reader of this blog, I was directed by his comment to an award winning science blog written by Anthony Watts.

Guess what?  Watts answers one global temperature question of mine.  What has satellite data been showing us about the temperature of the earth's surface?  Here is the chart on the right.  The satellite data shows a cooling since the satellite went up more than 25 years ago.

Our national weather service, NOAA, has removed this data from the global temperature data they publish because it doesn't fit their ideology. 

It is time for an elected official to find out about the scale of this U.S. government deception. An elected official anywhere in the world (Russia, Denmark, Greece) should call for an investigation.

My second question concerns the 5,000 ARGO buoys in all the worlds' oceans.  What is ARGO showing about ocean temperature? Probably something the ideologues don't like either.

P.S. Great commencement address on energy and climate by the CEO who really knows.

Litigious in 1830

I was reading David S. Reynolds' Waking Giant America', about the 1830s.

The point I want to make to my readers is that we think we have too much litigation in our society today.

Reynolds points out that the people in America, from the establishment of a court system have been very litigious.

Why? 

It is my view that an egalitarian democracy, (or any other egalitarian society if such were possible) would be fundamentally litigious because people with equal rights and equal powers are inherently different enough to be unable to recognize other people's views, values and goals in many situations.  They don't understand why others behave the way they do. They sue.

In a society that is not egalitarian, the more powerful will use his power to subdue the inferior. Visibly or invisibly. With or without good reasons.

Dangerous global farce?

Every month I check the global temperature.  You can too here.

It disturbs me to read about all the people in the world and especially all the political people who have plans to make the poor poorer and everyone worse off with their costly remedies for 'global warming'.

Check the data.  The cool team just passed the hot team. 

(1) There was ten years of warming from 1988 to 1998.
(2) There has been steady temperature with some decline for the past ten years.

(1) For the three year base period starting 1987 to 1989 the world was warmer ( 0.2 degrees Celsius) than 1940 the average year global temperature for the entire 20th Century.  Then, by 1998, the global temperature climbed to a peak of (0.5 degrees Celsius) above 1940. From August of 1997 to the end of 1998 the global temperature remained at that level.  That ten years, from 1988 to 1998, was the global warming period that led James Hansen to call for global apocalyptic hysteria. 

(2) Since January of 1999 the global temperature has never exceeded the 1998 level and for most of the ten years 1999-2009 it has been lower (0.4 average for ten years).

So the political warming horse won the first race and the cool horse won the second race. Why do the politicians and their sycophants in the global media deny the existence of the second horse?

Bay to Breakers race

I went to the 2009 Bay to Breakers Race yesterday and watched from Heartbreak Hill (Hayes Street-Alamo Park).

The only interesting point about this for my readers is that I have not been to the Bay to Breakers for over 35 years and I notice the difference. 

I ran in the race from the late 60's when the number of runners and watchers was in the 20,000-30,000 range.  I ran leisurely most of the time with a group of friends; several times I carried one of my 2 year old children on my shoulders.  In those days we ran in tennis shoes.  Running shoes of the Nike type were not invented.  They were invented by one of our crowd from the SRI weekly runners gang. Running strollers were not imagined.  Safe strollers with multiple small wheels were years off, to be invented in Japan with an Italian brand name.

The Bay to Breakers grew in the early 1970s, in excitement, vitality and imagination with the advent of the large hippie crowds.  I saw the running (and walking) group reach 40,000, naked, costumed and pushing floats.

Yesterday, by my fairly reliable count, there were close to 90,000 people on the street (a seven mile long parade which half the people finished) over a three hour period with 20,000 watchers.  It was one gigantic crowd from all over the Bay Area, and parts beyond, young, healthy, laughing, singing, dancing and nearly all dressed in outrageous costumes. Parts of the crowd were still wandering the streets of San Francisco at 9PM in costume and scanty clothing (the fog was coming in).

It is this level of vitality, fun and imagination that generates the kind of thriving business we have in San Francisco and proximity.  These are the creators and workers in our commercial paradise. 

There is a lesson here too.  One hell of a lot of people, over nearly half a century, want to have fun with their friends in a fun loving crowd, outdoors, healthy, a little defiant (naked people, lots of beer and blocking cars everywhere) and free.  Long live the Bay to Breakers!

Why not flying cars?

Flying cars have been announced in popular science and technology magazines for 70 years.  So have jet-back-packs to fly individuals. Why hasn't technology achieved this great and colorful goal?

There are two answers to this question.  First is that an airplane is all about gaining lift from the design of its body shape and controlling the airplane in three dimensions.  Airplanes do not have any extraneous objects on their surface nor are they too short or too long for the purpose of flying.  The design object that can fly and be controlled effectively is wildly irrelevant to the squat motorized piece of material that carries people on the 2 dimensional road surface.  Everything that makes an object airworthy is irrelevant to a car.

The second issue is equally important.  At speeds under 60 miles an hour, of any moving object, even one foot off the ground the multiple shear layers of air, moving in different directions, will destabilize virtually any object, whether the object is a person with a jet-back-pack or even a vertical lift-off 5 ton jet.

Air shear, that is wind going different directions within a few feet of each layer is a phenomenon most people never notice.  But it is real and it makes flying a jet-back-pack like running on a surface covered with marbles.  The technology to accomplish this was built into several V/STOL aircraft, generally designated Harriers.  A few are in service, most have a high accident rate and all have terribly complex electronics designed to cope with the dangerous volatility of air shear at low speeds.

Most auto-planes could never maneuver in this air shear danger zone... which is why we land small planes at 50-60 mph.

Obama and Terry Schiavo

Do you remember Terry Schiavo?  A dead Florida woman on organ support, after a long legal battle finally ended up having the designated person 'pull the plug.'  Congress voted against pulling the plug with only Republicans voting.  Congress had no power in the matter it was all for a few days of political theater.

Obama, like most presidents before him has been doing plenty of political theater for his Moveon.org Lefty supporters.  He announced he would close Guantanamo (he won't), he announced a review of military policy on gays (nothing will happen), he promised to punish Bush staff on torture...but he has already failed, he announced government funding for government performed abortions (always has been done under the table) and to put money in embryo stem cell research which has been going on in a few cell lines all along and is now less important than other stem cell research.... moreover the NIH has set funding guidelines that ban human cloning which was the real debate all along.

Obama is doing theater just like the Republican Congress on Terry Schiavo.  I seriously doubt there are enough dumb people in either party to make theater worth the effort.  But politicians never reject a possible hope, or a cost-free action.

Disappointed in a book

In George Bush's first year in office he got a briefing on the issue of stem cell research primarily from Leon Kass.  President Bush came to the right conclusion and gave a brilliant speech on the subject.  No group of humans has the right, on their own, to modify the human germ cell and create an experimental child, and certainly not to introduce a deliberate change in the human genome.

President Bush supported Kass in creating a commission to further examine the ethics of the subject which he did. Nearly a year later the commission released a book called Being Human, 625 pages.  It sold out in the first government printing office edition in weeks.  It was finally reprinted in late 2004 and I got a copy.

I haven't read it since then.  I picked it up recently.  I love the history of the book.  Deal with ethics by taking chapters, poems and writings from many great writers and thinkers and publish them as a syllabus.

I read the book and I was disappointed.  Reading alone isn't productive on this subject.  Ethics are inter-human and require a discussion.  I'm sure the commission had fun discussing these issues, but reading a syllabus doesn't work.

Boom town

 I know I am living inside a commercial bubble.  I said the bottom of the recession was in mid-February, that the recession really never happened in San Francisco and the Peninsula and it never happened in Tokyo.

Now I'm going further.  San Francisco and the Peninsula are in an economic boom.

During the dot.com boom the two most obvious symptoms were the horrendous increase in traffic and the price of used women's sweaters which reached $130.

I haven't checked used women's sweaters but let me tell you, traffic is horrendous again.  In San Francisco and on the Peninsula.  Boom time.

Teen angst

There is nothing in the world like the embarrassment a teenager feels when she is doing something that would appear to be degrading to her friends. I made this video of a girl displaying the height of embarrassment. She is in the middle. This is a painful feeling. Teen years can really hurt.

Jesuits failing?

There are plenty of comments around the news world about Pope Benedict XVI's continuation of 'Jews have no right to defend themselves' position. He says the protective wall is wrong. I have little to add.  This is not inherently a Papal issue, it is a European issue. I have said time and again that European's consider it their birthright to enjoy Jew-killing, watching it or participating in it, as much as they enjoy soccer. Its a European birthright.

What I don't hear is the brilliant Jesuit theologians commenting on the reason the spokespeople for the Roman Catholic God are so verbal and outspoken on behalf of the Muslim terrorists against Jews while at the same they are completely silent about Roman Catholic terrorists killing innocent non-Catholics.  Completely silent.

Ireland signed a peace treaty with Britain in 1922.  Since that date, for more than 80 years, Northern Irish Roman Catholics have been killing non-Catholics using terrorism....in Belfast.

During that entire 80 years, during the reign of seven popes (two Pius's, one John, one Paul, two John Pauls and one Benedict) not one Pope has said a single word against Irish Roman Catholic terrorism.  Terrorists over whom they presumably have some influence.  Silent when they could help in Britain ....loud and incendiary when it can kill Jews.

Time to fight ecology

Time to fight back at the people who are trying to run our lives.  We must hurt what is valuable to the environmentalists without costing ourselves more money or being obnoxiously wasteful.

What have the environmentalists done to us so far?

Toxified our breathing (CO2 is officially a greenhouse gas), raised our utility bills with subsidies to wind and solar power generators, increased the price of milk (the ethanol fantasy that drove up the price of corn then the dairymen got a permanent Congressional price increase in milk), put unappealing restrictions on our autos, made sure we can't expand our airports to meet rising demand, banned smoking on the beach, banned good reading lights, banned important DDT products (causing more malaria among African youth), they have driven gas stations out of cities, left countless empty lots in poor neighborhoods (gasoline in the ground), banned plastic in countless forms and conveniences, banned oil production in most of the U.S., ended most forms of hunting, prohibited eating horse meat, tried to kill hundreds of plant species (many are useful and some beautiful) that weren't in the U.S. in 1492.....the list is endless.

What can we do?  Add to the following list: throw all compostables in the trash (unless you use compost), use Styrofoam wherever possible, use plastic to your hearts content use it when you don't need it, buy incandescent light bulbs, eat farm raised fish and also eat so called 'endangered' fish, avoid the 'organic' and 'green' label, buy food from every part of the planet as the desire moves you, put anything you want in the sewer, save the seeds you eat (the more exotic the better) and scatter them wherever you want to, demand a refund any time you pay for a service or performance that contains hidden enviro-pc messages, tear the pages out of airline magazines featuring green or enviro-pc propaganda
.......add to this list.

It is time we started getting revenge on the PC enviro-nuts....and enjoyed ourselves in the process.

If my parents were alive

My father and mother were both Lefty Liberals.  I can understand why. There was really no alternative powerful idea during their life.  They were idealists in the 1930's and Left-wing Liberalism made sense to them. During their lives they were both in the thrall of the ACLU, believing it 'defends free speech', they believed the propaganda such as 'the-Rosenbergs-were-innocent', 'communism isn't bad', 'the Nation magazine is reliable', 'Sacco and Vanzetti were framed' and 'I.F. Stone is an honest muckraker'.

All of these things were completely false. The ACLU helped put innocent Americans of Japanese descent in internment camps.  The Venona crypto-translations of USSR telegrams make clear that Julius Rosenberg was guilty of nuclear spying for the USSR and his brother, near death, said "so was Ethyl". Sacco and Vanzetti's lawyer said in a post-mortem letter they admitted their own guilt. The Nation magazine was a front for the U.S. Communist Party and I.F. Stone always tried to find spy data to give to the USSR according to KGB files later opened.  

I became a banker and Liberal Republican in my early adult years but never questioned my parents beliefs.  My question is 'would my parents have changed their views had they seen the Venona papers or any other of the dozens of post Cold War documents that overturned 70 years of lies?'

I have a friend my parents age, with the same views that they held, who told me: everything that contradicts her lifelong Lefty views is phony.