Pro Commerce

I can't sit still

This is the press release I sent to the media yesterday about today's action:

Press Release

Re: Member sues California Academy of Sciences over global warming

Contact: Michael Phillips........

Date of Court hearing: Tuesday June 30 at 1:30

Location of Court: San Francisco Superior Court (Small Claims) Dept. 506 5th Floor, 400 McAllister St.

The California Academy of Sciences is being sued by a member of the museum for not using science in the global warming exhibit. 

The member is Michael Phillips a business consultant, author and expert witness on business and environmental issues.  Mr. Phillips is quoted as saying:

"Children get the wrong idea of science when they see the Global Warming exhibit.  They are told that each child must personally change their lifestyle, eat vegetarian and ride bicycles when they get older,  to keep the effects of humans from over heating the planet, raising the oceans and killing baby polar bears. (I'm not kidding)

"The whole exhibit, taking up a large part of the main floor, is based on a 20 year old theory, from Jim Hansen, and doesn't present any conflicting scientific evidence."

"One wall map shows a large northern polar island that is all ice. The map shows no name for the island. In the real world the island is named Greenland; the island got its Green name in 900 AD because the global temperature was high enough at the time for Greenland to grow wheat, rye, barley and trees.

"Most children will be interested in science when it is based on careful analysis of data, serious arguments, open discussions and testing of theories against new technologies.  That is not true of the California Academy of Science exhibit. In the case of the Human caused Global Warming theory the new technologies to test against are satellite data and vast ocean measurements.  None of the new technology data is offered at the Global Warming exhibit because it contradicts the Hansen theory."

Mr. Phillips wants his $159 family membership returned and an apology for presenting an inadequate pseudo-scientific display on the main display floor.
----------------------------------------------
The outcome:

Judge orders case dismissed with prejudice against the California Academy of Sciences. Academy refunds my membership money and will do the same for any other member who objects to the absence of scientific data in the global warming exhibit.

 First article in the S.F. Examiner. TV coverage on S.F.  KTVU Channel 2.

Autobahn not here

Thanks to the (Democrat-union caused) California State budget debacle, many Californians know they can drive as fast as they want.  The Highway Patrol officers are sitting in their offices and in coffee shops discussing ways to avoid being laid off and ways to get on disability.

So I joined the crowd driving at 80+ miles per hour.  What I found, while driving faster than usual on one of our newest freeways is that American freeways are technically pathetic. 

I was driving the same Japanese car I drove on the autobahn from Berlin to Vienna a few years ago.  I went over 115 mph on the autobahn.  At that speed in California I would have flown off the road at the many poorly banked turns and would have flipped over at many of the poorly maintained surface obstructions.

I've done a few blogs on America's distorted, contorted, incompetent and hodge-podge construction engineering and associated environmental absurdities.  This is just one more example.

My calculations on natural gas and solar

Please help me, I can't believe my results. Natural gas is an order of magnitude cheaper that solar voltaic.

I want to compare solar voltaic cost per kilowatt hour to natural gas per kilowatt hour.  Here is my data page and the sources.

Since solar panels generate electricity when the sun is shining and cost almost nothing after the panels are installed, the kilowatt per hour cost is based only on amortizing the cost of the installed panels over their lifetime.  Or for a solar array concentrating the power in the desert it is the same on a larger scale, plus maintenance and delivery to the grid.

For natural gas it is the price the utility pays on the open market for millions of BTUs of gas delivered through existing gas pipe lines to existing generators to existing power lines.

The best I can find is that solar voltaic costs roughly $.25 per kilowatt hour based on the amortized life of the system. Sometime in the future it could cost $.17 per kilowatt hour if technology creates significant cost reductions. 

Natural gas now costs, from most utilities, under $.08 per kilowatt hour and that is based on an earlier market price of natural gas at $12.00 per mmbtu.  That seems to be a mark-up over the most efficient generating system of 100%.  So at current low $3.50 mmbtu natural gas market prices, with the same utility mark-up, that should be $.024 per kilowatt hour.

Summary: currently solar voltaic costs ten times natural gas per kilowatt hour and considering the best future technology for solar voltaic it might be as low as 7 times as much.  With the natural gas reserves of the world expanding at astounding rates (see my earlier blog) solar voltaic is never going to get close to natural gas in price. Never!

Confederate gentleman

I am sorry to say it but I believe that we have a tragic president.

He is like a confederate gentleman after the Civil War who believes that his cause was morally right and will someday be appreciated for its decency and noble vision.

The Civil War is to the Confederacy what the 20th Century is to post-communist Lefty views. In both eras, the Confederates and the Lefties failed to recognize that they were defeated militarily and morally.

When President Obama praises the peaceful intentions of Arab Islam, he is joining the ranks of the 4th Reich, just as the Confederate gentleman was joining the ranks of pro-slavery advocates when he defended the great honor of Southern womanhood.

When President Obama and his State Department pressure Israel to bow to his moral certainty about his Middle Eastern program, he is like the Jim Crow South that rejected the introduction of public schools for both whites and former slaves that the Northern government (called carpet-baggers) offered the squalid, uneducated Southern society. Like the Arab Islamic middle east which wants to stay the way it is, the South also wanted to keep its citizens uneducated. Supporting Arabs over Israel is supporting the slave side of the modern battle.

When the President champions socialized medicine, he is deliberately suppressing the most productive medical system on the planet, just as the post-Civil War southern gentleman created Jim Crow laws to suppress the rise of a commercial and industrial society below the Mason-Dixon line

.... and when the President offers an outstretched hand to Cuba and other communist tyrants, he supports the whole cause of human slavery in those societies where citizens and their offspring are never allowed to chose their own lives or leave the country.

I see President Obama as a tragic cross between Woodrow Wilson, Princeton president from the Democratic anti-black South, and Jimmy Carter, an Annapolis graduate, coward and former Governor of the most Confederate Southern state, Georgia.

Don't count on Economic 101 part 3

It is common in my circle of friends to say that many of our problems and failed government policies arise from inadequate economics education.

I say 'nonsense.'   Nobody who is teaching standard economics is teaching the kind of lessons that are relevant to the issues of what helps commerce thrive and what hurts commerce.

Take three examples: (1) Chains vs local stores (covered earlier), (2) big companies bad effects (covered earlier) and (3) raising local business taxes. In all three cases, studying economics gives you unreasonable or wrong answers.

(3) Raising local business taxes is generally seen by economics as neutral. It is taught as a matter of creating a new business cost that is passed on to the consumer. This is usually false and worse over time. It can be true only if neither the customers nor the businesses can leave the locale. 

As San Francisco has demonstrated, over a 50 year period, this is always false.

 (a) Every single important business (more than 25 large companies) that originated in San Francisco over 1.5 centuries have moved first their production operation out of the city and then moved their white collar staff out of the city. This has always been due to local taxes that are relatively higher than the new locations. Given time, even giant companies are mobile. 

(b) New businesses that can start somewhere else, where relative taxes are lower, do so.  Over 90 new biotech start-ups that have been generated by research labs in San Francisco, in the past 20 years, have started outside the city of San Francisco.

(c) Many businesses find that customers will drive outside the city of San Francisco (were business taxes are lower) to businesses that are created on the city border for lower prices.  Some business near the border on the San Francisco side fail promptly, such as the Stonestown Mall (now in bankruptcy) that couldn't compete with new malls in adjacent (a few 100 meters away) Daly City.

(d) All businesses that are part of a supply chain outside the locale will move because their customers can buy outside the local high tax area.  600 production shops in clothing immediately left San Francisco after a new health tax and minimum wage law were put in place.

Higher local taxes can always drive away business, some in the short run, all in the long run.

I like it

I have no earthly reason to tell my readers about a product except that I occasionally come across one that I particularly like.  In my book Marketing Without Advertising (see adjacent blog), I point out that it is people who both (1) love your product and (2) know something about the product qualities that create a good recommendation and generate a real and durable market.

In this case I am recommending a French press that you combine coffee and hot water and force the water through a paper filter. It is called an Aeropress.  I use it for espressos but you can add hot water and have an Americano. 

Mine came from my son (see his blog site, he is reporting on his trip to investigate the history of martial arts in Taiwan).  I gave one to my daughter and her husband in Seattle who are fanatics about coffee. 

I don't deal with coffee or wine like the aficionados but I have been having daily morning espresso at North Beach and Castro District cafes since 1978.

Idiot headlines

Most of my readers live far away from San Francisco and California and don't care that either of these political entities have to slash their bloated budgets.

But those of us who live in such budget cutting regions are treated to endless headlines of imminent social catastrophe:  "Poison control centers to be closed", "Starving children programs slashed","Senior protection to be eliminated", "Orphans and bedridden to be thrown out", "Fire fighting to end soon" .......and so forth.

I call these idiot headlines because they are created by American politicians who assume voters are idiots.  It is identical to Iranian mullahs and Arab leaders who always say that public unrest is caused by America, Israel and the CIA.

Reality not allowed. Don't expect to read headlines in a budget slashing period that could be sensible such as: "First class flying by bureaucrats to be restricted", "20 administrative coordinators and liaison specialists may lose jobs", "agricultural audit teams may lose one or two members",  "county fairs to close one hour earlier".

Don't count on Economics 101 part 2

It is common in my circle of friends to say that many of our problems and failed government policies arise from inadequate economics education.

I say 'nonsense.'   Nobody who is teaching standard economics is teaching the kind of lessons that are relevant to the issues of what helps commerce thrive and what hurts commerce.

Take three examples: (1) Chains vs local stores (covered earlier), (2) big companies bad effects and (3) raising local business taxes. In all three cases, studying economics gives you unreasonable or wrong answers.

(2) Economics teaching about big business focuses on the benefits of economies of scale and the problems of monopoly. An irrelevant combination.The prevailing Lefty mime is that big business is bad per se. The Lefty mime is not challenged by Econ 101.

The reality is that big business has brought many benefits to the world and America.  Overwhelming benefits.

(a) big business brings technological standardization which is necessary for large scale services such as air traffic, telecommunications, standardized health conventions for travelers, common accounting practices that make investments possible and a dozen other items.  Tell the economics students to go live in a world without these benefits of big businesses.

(b) As pointed out in an earlier blog, big companies are not monopolistic and powerful they fail at an astoundingly high rate.  Big companies are fragile and the most important reason they fail so fast and often is the radical impact of changing technology.  The whole concept of monopoly, except where supported and protected by government, is an outmoded irrelevant idea.

It happened before

I can't keep quiet while Iranians risk their lives for democracy.  There is plenty we Americans can do.  One act would be to use a TV satellite to broadcast back to the Iranians the images, blogs and other Internet news we are getting from within Iran.

The most obvious observation about the current situation is that those of us who get our news from the Internet know from dozens of reliable sources that the Iranian government is raining terror on the citizenry.  Murder, slaughter. The rest of the world has to depend on the mainstream media that, in its demand for getting news from its own employees (hiding in their offices), is completely unreliable.

The issue of reliable news is the problem several men had in the 1940s trying to get the American national media to call attention to the Holocaust.  No media would report the Holocaust because they had no employees on site who could confirm the information.*

1944 is too similar to today.  The standards of reliable news for the mainstream media means that the media is completely unreliable at the time it is needed most.

A perverse twist on the Middle East is that many salaried trusted Arab journalists have been dishonest, corrupt and fabricated stories and videos which were treated as reliable by the mainstream media.  Having salaried employees is in fact not a guarantee of reliability.

Fortunately, the Internet is letting a major part of every society know the terror that is unfolding. 

*Reference Hillel Kook. Rapoport. Here is another .  Lastly there is wikipedia.

Don't count on economics 101

It is common in my circle of friends to say that many of our problems and failed government policies arise from inadequate economics education.

I say 'nonsense.'   Nobody who is teaching standard economics is teaching the kind of lessons that are relevant to the issues of what helps commerce thrive and what hurts commerce.

Take three examples: (1) Chains vs local stores, (2) Big companies bad effects and (3) Raising local business taxes. In all three cases, studying economics gives you unreasonable or wrong answers.

(1) What economics says about chains vs. local stores is wrong. Economics classes teach that chains can buy goods and services for less because of economies of scale and consequently undercut local store prices.

This is true about buying but wrong about the effect on smaller competitors as I've pointed out in an earlier blog.

(a) The arrival of Starbucks in San Francisco increased the number and quality (early hours) of local coffee shops dramatically.  The new chain arrival brings innovation to the marketplace which attracts new customers.

(b) In many cases, the new chain is directed at a market that has never been adequately served (an example is Target with low priced products for lower middleclass homes) and the new chain brings many new local stores servicing the new market. Without the new chain, low income people suffer higher prices than in areas where the chain operates.

(c) Chains often bring massive new product selections (Home Depot and Lowes) that expands the market (for home repairs), that gives local stores an advantage of geographic convenience for the expanding local market.

Points  (2) and (3) are in future blogs.
It is not more Economics 101 teaching that we need, it is more pro commerce understanding.

Personal coffee

A common question I get is 'Why hasn't tea been a success like coffee?'  My answer is the same as I gave to a conference of tea business people: (1) Tea is priced in hopelessly obscure ways.  Coffee is by the pound and the quarter pound: simple. (2) Coffee is a powerful stimulant and tea is more on the sedative side. Americans, now and far into the future, are going to love stimulants. (3) Coffee rode the recent wave of increased working hours and high productivity.

 

At the Tea conference, after giving my standard and very popular marketing talk, I answered the question you see above, with the response I have given above.  From that moment on, I was persona-non-grata at the conference.  People usually crowd around me asking questions.  Only one or two people did. I really wasn't very popular with that candid answer.

 Now what is the future of coffee?  My brother reports a shop in Ketchum, Idaho where you taste an array of coffees, find the blend and roast you like and the shop gives you a number to use in ordering Your Blend online. 

Dunhill tobacco in New york used to do that with pipe tobacco.  I had my own blend in those days (and I had cigars too).  My storage locker on 5th Avenue was just next to Jack Kennedy's.

Back to the subject. Coffee.  If anyone can find a way to duplicate the coffee tasting and personal blending that the store in Ketchum uses, and do it all online, it should catch on.

Images of wind turbulence

Roughly a month ago I wrote a blog on why we don't have flying cars or jet packs for our backs.

The core reason for both is air turbulence that occurs near the ground (and higher up) and results in complete differences of wind direction at intervals as small as a foot apart.

I finally took the time to go down to the tall flag pole that the San Francisco Exploratorium put up near Aquatic Park that demonstrates this truth.  I made a very short video on a windy day that shows the extent and severity of horizontal wind shear. The wind vanes are about 12 inches apart.
 

Multi-generational slavery

I can see from the reply to my blog about the nations that discovered multi-generational slavery that many well educated people actually don't know about this.

Slavery has existed throughout recorded history and certainly for some time before writing.  Slavery was a humane alternative to killing your enemies in warfare, and in many instances it was socially productive.  Of course many peoples made rotten slaves so it was imperative to kill them when they were caught.

Until roughly 1610, most slaves who had children could expect their children to be freed or to escape.  So we didn't have much multi-generational slavery.  What changed in the early 17th Century was the discovery of skin color.

 There are two pieces of evidence of this recognition of skin color that I am aware of.  First is the archaeology of Jamestown.  In the early years of Jamestown all slaves slept in the same house as the owners, they lived and ate together.  Within a few decades separate houses were built for the African slaves who no longer ate with the English owners or the white servants in the main house.  Skin color had been recognized.

Every century for eight hundred years, the Jews of Europe, Spain and Baghdad had sent a few emissaries to visit the Jews of Ethiopia and maintain contact.  In the early 17th Century, for the first time the emissaries reported that the Ethiopians had dark skin.

It was the common popular recognition of dark skin color that made it possible for Africans with dark skin to be kept as slaves for multi-generations.  Escape for a black slave was nearly impossible. The few free blacks, in America, always dressed elegantly and carried papers to prove they were not runaway slaves, simply based on their skin color. 

The modern version of white multi-generational slavery was first noticed by me in this blog, when I realized that the inhabitants of all communist countries have been multi-generational slaves because they can never leave their countries nor choose how to lead their lives.

We are really an accident

The combination of 50 separate states under one national Constitution is truly an accident that is great for commerce but could never have happened anywhere else or under any other circumstances.

We are an exceptional nation but entirely an accident.  Our Constitution is the only real constitution in the world.  It was self imposed at a time when the notion of a constitution to limit government was in vogue. That vogue passed away.  No other people ever chose to protect or entangle themselves with such a constitution. And a Bill of Rights.

Yet for us, the Constitution has created a text centered people, just like the Diaspora Jews.  The Jews had the text center of the Torah, the sacred words forever to be debated and reinterpreted.  For 2,000 years the Jews have been without a government, a disconnected but coherent people studying a sacred text from the past and living in the present under a wide range of circumstances always re-interpreting the sacred text. 

The same is true for Americans. Our sacred Constitution holds us together despite having a weak, and at times incompetent, central government, trying to cope with 13-50 separate state governments.

Our separate states slowly conferred power on the central government, but never very much.  To this day we have a weak central government compared to most other industrial governments.  Look at the 2008 financial crisis and the fact that we still have no rational plan to remedy that pathetic national incompetence. We probably never will remedy our incompetence.  Remember that the 1913 Federal Reserve didn't have teeth until the 1950s. It is still ineffective and completely failed our financial structure in 2008.

Had this American socio-political experiment occurred anywhere else, but safely sequestered across two large oceans, the neighboring countries would have taken advantage and swooped in for control.  This would have destroyed America many times as the states and the national government squabbled (1812, 1846, 1863, 1898, 1916, 1939, 1953, 1963, 1973).

Truly an accident but a fortuitous one for those of us who love commerce.

Presidential libraries and you

A friend of mine and I have been throwing out old files and records.  Thinking about his files, since I know the many lifetime feats he will be remembered for in history, I was able to apply the same principles to myself. I'm throwing out a lot of files.

There is are two simple principles I have been forced to confront based on my extensive historical biographical reading: (1) Your are remembered for only a few major contributions and (2) No matter how much data you leave behind, everyone will still be speculating on the sources of your personality and identity.

Some of the great writers and prolific correspondents are not better appreciated because of their massive records, such as John Adams, Dewitt Clinton or John Hancock.  Conversely some of the greats such as Alexander Hamilton, General Grant and Abraham Lincoln left modest personal correspondence, that historians squabble over incessantly. In these cases we know who they were and why they were great.

The other examples to support my two rules are numerous.

The same goes for Presidential libraries.  Harry Truman, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan will be considered great men for a long time without regard to what is in the presidential libraries.

Conversely, Lyndon Johnson will be seen as a political hack, Bill Clinton will always be seen as a weak egotistical man and Billy Carter's brother Jimmy, as an anti-Semitic, Evangelical nut case and a pathetic coward.

Feel free to throw out all files and records except for those that bear on some of the intricacies of your two or three major contributions.

Forget everything that explains who and why you are.  No one will get it right or everyone will.

Natural gas era

I wrote this blog a week ago, before the trip I'm currently on to Seattle.  Yesterday's Wall Street Journal changed the whole circumstance.  The public now knows about our gas reserves.  Here is the small article: 

The amount of natural gas available for production in the U.S. has soared 58% in the past four years, driven by a drilling boom and the discovery of huge new gas fields in Texas, Louisiana and Pennsylvania, a new study says.

The report, due to be released Thursday by the nonprofit Potential Gas Committee, concludes that the U.S. has 2,074 trillion cubic feet of natural gas still in the ground, or nearly a century's worth of production at current rates. That's a 35.4% jump over the committee's previous estimate, in 2007, of 1,532 trillion cubic feet, the biggest increase in the committee's 44-year history.

999 people out of 1,000 didn't know about the natural gas finds that open a new era, (aside from the few more who read yesterday's news).

There have been massive new discoveries of natural gas in the United States and Canada in the past year, particularly due to new extraction from shale technologies.  The discoveries have been so massive that the price of natural gas has fallen in one year from $13.7 Mcf to $3.51.  Part of that price decline is also a decline in global demand.

I could not find the single Web source to show the magnitude of the expansion in the natural gas reserves in the U.S. before yesterday. I am still unable to read the core data on estimates of reserves, since the field is arbitrarily arcane. But I am getting many reports from friends in the fuel industry and in the related utility industry who expect the U.S. experience to be projected to Canada and the world.

What does this mean?  Since a new car can be put on the market using natural gas for the same price as a new petroleum burning car, the U.S. can make a rapid shift to 50% natural gas in autos and electric energy, with just domestic natural gas, in as little as four years. It means:

(1) With just existing market forces (forget the government and subsidies) and expanding natural gas reserves, we are in for an era when the oil producers in the Middle East will be significantly diminished in power.  We Americans can go back to driving big SUVs and loving it.

(2) When foreign car companies offer the natural gas option, for big cars, the new tiny gasoline cars made by Government Motors will be scrap.

(3) We are entering a new era of long term low energy prices.  The Lefties and PC Enviros will have to find something else to be unhappy about. Some other contagious paranoia.

I don't carry coins

What is evidence of a significant trend? 

So far I have not carried change for about four years.  Now when I mention it, here in the Greater San Francisco Bay Area, I have found several other men who say they are doing the same thing.  I will have to check this out with other people in my coming travels around the U.S.

I am able to go without coins for two reasons.  First, nearly 100% of my daily expenses are on my charge card. Second the rare exceptions, where I use cash and get change, are so infrequent I can't remember what they are, but when I get change I feel comfortable leaving the nickels and dimes on the counter, throwing the pennies away and putting the quarters in a small dish for use on the local buses.  Other people say they throw the whole lot in a jar and collect on it every few years at a coin counting concession machine.

Is this a trend yet?

New Zealand joins the world

I have several attentive blog readers who often make comments and occasionally refer to my blog on their intellectually rich blogs.  They are in New Zealand. Thank you guys.

What I wonder is whether the advent of the Internet has brought a bunch of intelligent people, in distant lands, into the global intellectual dialog.  I think so and I think we should all be grateful.

Its hard to censor the Internet

The uprising in Tehran is good evidence that you can't censor the Internet. 

A government can shut down Youtube, Facebook and many other sites but that immediately communicates the reality of the censorship and the weakness of the government. 

The publishers of the New York Times can ignore a story and its readers are unlikely to know. Shutting down an Internet service is visible censorship.

However, access to email, cell phones and online images can't be stopped.

(1) The Internet is a new source of freedom that neither Iran nor China can stop and

(2) The cowardice of all the Western leaders to assail Iranian repression, is a reality that can not be ignored. 

Nuclear bombs in Iran, even before deployment, have already been effective against the President of the U.S. and all of Europe.

Michael Pollan moment

I had a Michael Pollan moment the other day while reading the ingredients on a package.  Michael Pollan, for those living on another planet, is the goody-goody food nut who tells adoring NPR audiences to eat only what your grandmother ate and only buy it if the farmer brought it to market, bicycling and carrying it on her back.

I had bought a package of Parmesan cheese shreds a few days earlier and sprinkled it on my Chilean grown cauliflower (give me veggies with good mileage under their belt).  It is sold at Safeway (give me really big chain stores) as a veggie topping.  I often put Parmesan on my veggies for flavor and texture.

The package said in the ingredients box that the cheese shreds were made from soy beans with Parmesan flavoring.  It tasted great. Really!

I enjoyed my lunch even more knowing that I was offending some elitist NPR food snobs, while supporting a Chilean farmer, hundreds of businessmen and some laboratory geniuses who are inventing delicious new flavorings and new uses for soy beans.

P.S. George Washington Carver invented three hundred new uses for peanuts. (But he was black so Pollan fans might eat some of his laboratory offerings.)

Regulation that works

If you have a bicycle or motorcycle helmet you can look on the back, outside, and see the DOT logo.

For those who don't understand that we can have a commercial society with rules of law and not have intrusive, expensive government, this DOT logo is a good lesson.

Helmets are sold with a DOT label only if they meet DOT published safety standards.  Those standards are rigorous and reasonable, like requiring motorcycle helmets to survive a spike falling from 8 feet in the air.

If you are in the market and sell a helmet with a DOT label, that helmet must meet DOT published standards or you are liable to suit.  Suit not by DOT but by commercial competitors who are rewarded by law in courts for bringing successful law suits.

That is a government regulator system that works without intrusive, incompetent or expensive government.  I had a helmet client who spent plenty of money testing competitor helmets.  Below standard helmets would have meant the end of business for any of the competitors or my client.

Murdock the new savior

I consider Rupert Murdoch to be one of the most brilliant and effective humans alive. He is far greater than any Nobel Prize winner and far more important in history. Not only has he created several entirely new media for the planet (satellite TV, Fox TV, the new Wall Street Journal and a fresh political vision for all) but now he brings his Jerusalem Post to New York.

Why is this an historic event? Because it is a solution to two serious but hopeless problems.

These are two closely related problems. One is that the New York Times is enthusiastically anti-Jew and anti-Israel in a city that is the capital of American Jewry. The Times will not go away; its New York readers are addicted to it because they and their parents read it all their lives.

Second, New York Jews are nearly 90% supporters of Israel but they get their news from the Jew hating New York Times; so 70% of them vote and live from a Jew hating New York Times perspective.

Having a hand-held moderate Israeli newspaper for the pro-Israel Jews of New York is the most effective way to remedy both of these problems.  This solution is much more strategic, intelligent and cheaper than trying to financially starve the NYTimes by expanding other local NY newspapers.

Clean & Green

Clean and Green are passing fads just like socially responsible investments were in the 70s and 80s.

Since I watched the socially responsible investment fad come and go (I helped start it, which I regret slightly), I can see when investment fads are in their vibrant heyday.

Clean refers to absence of pollution emissions, mostly green house gases from every type of industry or facility or transportation that burns coal or petroleum. Clean includes high priced wind and solar energy production and distribution but excludes nuclear power. This fad is highly dependent on Congressional belief in the human caused global warming hysteria. Congress provides subsidies for clean. The clean fad is slightly dependent on public belief in the global warming hysteria, but real clean investments are not optimal because it is easy to fool the public with PR stunts on the subject of 'clean'.

Clean is a subset of the Green fad.  Green includes agricultural output and by-products as well as restraint on other pollutants including sewage, recycled waste and hazardous materials.

Green is based on a pseudo-hippie/elitist view that the world around us is largely toxic because of technology and industrial commerce.  This belief rests on the assumption that humans thrive best in a pre-industrial state of the world called 'nature'.

As the hippies die off this fad is unsustainable because it is highly romantic and has no pragmatic validity.

Kvetching

Jews who go to to synagogue regularly know that a portion of the Torah is read every week and the entire Torah is read every year. Members of the congregation read, as they have for 2,000 years. Each weeks' reading is called a parashat.  This week's parashat is about the travails of Moses trying to lead the Hebrews in the desert before they got ready to invade their promised home, Canaan.

I consider the parallels between the Hebrew nation and America to be stunning (we treat our Founding documents the same way the Hebrews did, we both came to the promised land to escape tyranny and class warfare.).  I am particularly struck with this portion that talks about how the Hebrews are endlessly complaining about their food choices (kvetching) that Moses has given them.  Americans are always complaining about our government too, but we are proud of our nation (except for the Lefties). The two points made in this portion of the Torah are one that the greatest moral leader in history, Moses, is too close to God and too distant from the people.  The second is that the leader needs to work through a council of representative leaders (70).

I buy these two points. Great leaders are listening to another voice and the people can't hear it (great: G.W. Bush; cravers of adoration with no moral center: Bill and Barack).  The solution to public disgruntlement is fresh democracy with a good selection process.  I favor random selection of legislators, but in the meantime we need to weaken party power at the state level.

The real function of the weekly Torah readings is to create people who think.  In some cases it works.

Stiff upper lip

I regularly read reports from England that trumpet (1) the trade union and academic hatred of Israel (2) the incessant problem of local councils accommodating to Moslems and (3) the never ending demands by immigrant Moslems for more Sharia rights.

England has a long history of driving out their own citizens; the U.S., Canada, Australia and New Zealand are the beneficiaries.  Similarly, over the past twenty years half the Jews in England have left.  England has created autonomous political zones in Wales and Scotland to get rid of those pesky semi-citizens.

Why is England so willing to let its citizens leave or live separately?  It is almost the opposite of the communist tyrannies that won't let their subjects leave.

I think I have the answer.

The British upper class would rather maintain their Lordly status and have servants than have a country without the hereditary upper class and servants.  They are so intent on bringing in immigrants to be their servants and to fill all the menial jobs in England, that they don't care who is driven out.

How else do you explain it?

Shoe removal

Passing through security at Tokyo's Narita airport there is no requirement to take off your shoes (several friends pointed this out to me).

This is a wonderful case of the war on terror in conflict with cultural norms. The Japanese always take off their shoes in their home, or when they walk on tatami (straw mats), but never in public where others walk with shoes (they don't like going barefoot at the beach and often don't).

Consequently, the Japanese must feel very uncomfortable taking off their shoes at the airports of the world and walking on the unclean ground at airport metal detectors.  At least at home in Japan they don't have to.

Of course Japan has had no problem with foreign terrorists (only the domestic one AUM Shinrikyo) or shoe bombs on Japanese airlines.

Goode family

Last month I finally had enough of the enviro-pcs intruding on my life.  I put down my foot and said it is time to fight back.  I listed a few ideas of how to fight back and I am looking for more.

Lo and behold, there is a new TV series that started a few weeks ago.  It is called 'The Goode Family' and it is a very funny animated series by Michael Judge who did Beavis and Butt-Head and the long running King of the Hill.

The Goode family are perfect enviro-pcs and that is in itself very funny. One of the funniest scenes to me is when Helen the mom visits Whole Foods with daughter Bliss.  There is a wall of apples starting at $2.99 for organic going up to $8.99 for organic/shade grown/farm coop/local.... on the wall is a lighted sign with good on the left and bad on the right.  Wild salmon and farmed salmon keep changing places every few seconds an absurdity I wrote about a few years ago.

I simply want to make the point that, if Michael Judge got the idea for this series and executed it, he must have started two years ago.

That tells me America is already laughing at the absurdity of the enviro-pcs and may soon be ready to fight back.  A comic TV series usually comes after a shift in public attitudes is already underway.

Always the same immorality

I'm talking about the National Geographic magazine and particularly the June issue that has a standard hate piece on Israel.

The piece is ostensibly about the fate of Christian Arabs in Israel and the West Bank.  Christian Arab populations are dropping fast in all Arab countries (which President Obama never mentioned), many Muslims don't like Christians. Arab Christian populations are rising only in Israel (which is never mentioned).  The National Geographic article finds Arabs in the West Bank who blame Israel for the decline in Christian Arab populations and looks for no other explanation.

I'll explain it.  The Christian Arabs who are willing to be quoted by National Geographic are lying because only a lie is acceptable for them to survive in an Arab country.  The National Geographic publishes lies because Arab nations will only accept a lie on this subject from journalists if the publisher ever expects to have reporters return to an Arab country.

Israel, on the other hand, assumes that facts will be obvious to any one with a 3 digit IQ...and doesn't bother to rebut a magazine or journalist that few people respect for honesty in the first place.

My use of 'always' in the title to this blog relates to 40 years of experience with National Geographic.  Back in the days of film, the Geographic would send a photographer on a shoot with all the equipment and a large box of film.  All had to be returned at the end of the shoot, film undeveloped.  The photographer would see his photos for the first time on publication, and see the text that went with it for the first time too.

On one shoot that I went on, which was about longhorn sheep in Idaho, the whole print story and photos were backward and claimed problems with the sheep in their winter quarters when the problems were all with summer quarter farming practices. All wrong and infuriating to the environmentalist photographer and writer.

On another about democracy on the island of Palau, there was outright fraud.  The article talked about the bad treatment of natives and showed a native hut (none of which existed any longer).  The hut was actually photographed at an outdoor museum.  The problems of natives were about one group mistreating another, which was never explained.

National Geographic, phony, fraudulent and immoral.  Has been, is, and always will be.

DNA and Darwin

I find it interesting that the best accepted definition of a good theory is that it is falsifiable.

There is a weaker alternative definition of a good theory: 'does new technology support the theory?'

The reason this alternative is viable is evident in two technologies that developed long after Darwin had died.

*First, as genetic engineering has allowed many cross-species gene segments to be spliced it is evident that the concept of species is very strong and confirms the survival/destruction model of species evolution.  Moreover, the vast 'failed' genetic variations that remain on each individuals DNA confirms the power of the random variation component of Darwinian evolution.

*Second, and most important, DNA analysis has shown that the clades developed to show evolutionary pathways have been closely matched in the evolutionary paths constructed from DNA.

We have post Darwinian support from new technologies that came a century after Darwin.

Of course, I have to mention that new technologies (satellites and ocean buoys) contradict the Hansen theory of human caused global warming.

Animal rights

If you know an animal rights advocate or supporter you might enjoy asking their opinion about a Palestinian attack on Israel from Gaza using horses as weapons.

Is it really alright to use horses in a modern battle zone as long as you are a Palestinian?  I'm sure the answer is "yes". Animal rights people seem to have a Lefty worldview most of the time.

You can see the remains of one of the dead horses in the video at the website above.  The bodies of the terrorists are removed, but the dead horses are left to rot.

Don't forget the sequence of life that the terrorists have used.  First blonde young men without mustaches, then blonde young women with short skirts, then young women in full chadoor, then young boys 12-14, then mentally retard boys, now horses.  Maybe we'll be seeing some 35 year old men, maybe a camel, and ultimately a mullah?  They could have started with blacks and Asians if they had any.

Slavery

I find the descendants of slaves rather muddled on a fairly simple issue. 

Descendants of slaves and many Neanderthal Lefties fail to understand the nature of slavery. 

The odious slavery of American history (obviously not just American) had three components: (1) the individual had his work and and the main components of his life determined for him by others, (2) the individual could not readily escape his situation, and (3) his children faced the same life prospects that he did.

If you can understand these three conditions that define slavery you surely will have no trouble finding the same way to define life under communism in the USSR (Iron curtain), Mao's China, Castro's Cuba today, North Korea today or the former Soviet East Europe.  Each of these definitions fit life in these communist countries perfectly: Slavery. Virtually no one could or can leave these 'socialist paradises', and if they did or do, their families were and are punished. 

Tyrant Danny Ortega and tyrant Hugo Chavez are trying to create modern slave states in Nicaragua and Venezuela.  So who is supporting these people? Descendants of slaves like Danny Glover and many members of the Hollywood Left as I pointed out in the second sentence .