Pro Commerce

Organic seedless grapes

Organic seedless grapes, isn't that an oxymoron?

I became a part of the organic movement twice.  The first time in the early 1970's when (1) a few growers joined the Briarpatch (the first small business network). (2) many small groceries joined and (3) a group of farm pest advisers became my clients.  I ended up giving them all business advice and even giving lectures at their conventions. 

I was involved again in the early 1990s when I started the campaign to label genetically engineered food.  I quickly found that my efforts should be directed to getting the USDA to define 'organic' to exclude genetically engineered food... so my labeling campaign would not be needed.  I did and we won.

Hence, I feel particularly qualified to comment on organic seedless grapes.  The term 'organic' is a preposterous notion and the USDA only accepted the industry definition because we were so politically strong.  Our definition, of necessity, focused on growing conditions, what is used as fertilizers, what is used to control pests and of course the exclusion of genetically engineered foods.  We needed a definition that the USDA could use in the field.

But the USDA definition of organic was inherently off base.  We never included the millennia years old Japanese fertilizer tradition of human waste, because Mexicans use of it and created a horrible health hazard. We didn't require the use of horse pulled harrows, or double digging, or free scatter planting of seeds which many early organic farmers treated as essential.

We did our best to define the undefinable notion of organic, but at the time we never even discussed the use of seedless fruits.

Let me just say it here and now.:  If you constantly have to grow a new batch of seeds that can not reproduce themselves... that sure as hell ain't organic.  Is the mule something 'natural and organic?'  How about everything else that can't reproduce?

Of course such a definition would make the complaint about Monsanto selling farmers patented seeds meaningless. It would mean that hybrid varieties of many food plants (all patented) all of which are up to 10 times more productive than non-hybrids unavailable to 'organic' farmers and put them out of business.

Thank one political party

This chart shows marginal tax rates in the U.S. for a century.  Marginal tax rate refers to the proportion of taxes that the average person pays from the last dollar they earn.

Don't even look closely.  The data is obvious. 

One party, in control of both houses of Congress from 1932 to 1980 created the entire increase in tax rates.  The other party, starting in 1980, with the ascent of Ronald Reagan to the presidency, stopped the rise in taxes including the Social Security tax.

The table was put together by Robert Barro and Charles Redlick.

Jimmy boy

I have one friend who takes offense whenever I point out that Jimmy Carter is an open, vigorous, hard-driving jew hater.

Here is an article by one of his friends of thirty years who says the Jimmy boy is worse than a jew hater, this friend of Jimmys says that Jimmy was bribed to take his jew hate position but loved the money so much that it corrupted his soul and he went from intellectual jew hater to deep-gut jew hater.

It is important to know who Jimmy Boy's closest friends are these days... most are jew haters: Mary Robinson, Desmond Tutu, Shiekh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahayan, Kofi Annan, Richard Branson and Peter Gabriel.

Politics 101-1

I spent a decade early in my life in politics, politics of all sorts: campaign, legislative and administrative.  I am not skilled at the arts of politics but I am capable of understanding some of the basic concepts. Most of these are widely agreed to but seldom published.

First politics is: the art of putting together coalitions as large as possible by reconciling differences in power. The best political outcome is that competing powers are balanced against each other.

This is one blog as part of a series that I call Politics 101.  This is part 1. 

By the balls.  The object of any good politician is to get as many as possible of his peers and opponents by the balls. What does that mean? In politics everyone can be an ally one day and an enemy the next.

When you have someone by the balls it means you have

(1) information about that person that will be damaging to them if you are forced to release the information.  The information can be of any sort; sexual, financial, historical, corruption or plain deceit.

(2) You have secondary information that will damage your opponents ability to raise money, repay obligations, carry out commitments or publicly defend one of his allies.

(3) You have the power to grant your opponent some favor or reward that he desperately wants (for himself, his family or his supporters).

What you find in the political realm is that each political operative has his balls being held by dozens of other people.  Such a political person is simply unable to move decisively in any direction, take a clear cut stand or be outspoken on any political issue.

One of the most skilled politicians in American history was Willie Brown, former Speaker of the California Assembly and Mayor of San Francisco.  He had everyone by the balls.  The publicly acceptable phrase is 'he knows where all the bodies were buried'.  He also knew how to raise money to help his preferred political supporters.  He often created imaginary attacks on business (claiming California would tax all resident corporations on their global revenue) to get the corporations to make political contributions to Willie's campaign fund.

San Francisco Jew hate spreading

I saw another man wearing a kaffiyah at the movies (Metreon) last night.  My son reports having seen five in San Francisco.

I loudly told the man that his scarf was a terrorist sign.  He hurriedly walked away.  If everyone else had the guts to speak out, like I did, this incipient public Jew hate would stop.

Two points: first, the only way to stop this slow movement to a new Holocaust is to confront the neo-nazis immediately when they think they can publicly get away with a style issue.  These are modern Brown Shirts... that was a style in pre-Nazi Germany too.

Second, if you think wearing a kaffiyah in San Francisco is not a public sign of Jew-hate think again.  The kaffiyah has only one meaning. It says "no Jews now or ever in the West Bank or Gaza, Judenfrei.".  Adolph Arafat always wore the Palestinian Kaffiyah and he and the PLO refused to ever recognize Israel. The Palestinian Authority has never recognized Israel because it is a Jewish State. Jews...got it? Jew hate, nothing else.

The photo is Palestinian youth wearing kaffiyah over their faces trying to start a war on the Temple Mount this week. What is it about Arabs that leads them to take guns and rockets into mosques and use mosques as battle stations?

Can spirituality and secular be reconciled?

That blog headline is nonsense. It is a teaser for a more concrete discussion.

The reason the blog headline is nonsense is that spirituality is an empty term; it doesn't mean anything.  It is a vague reference to something or other separate from the tangible data world.  Secular is a similarly vague term with little or no content; it is a contra-religious term that includes everything that is not religious. 

Explication is what these words lack. They can't be explicated.  Explication means to define a word in such a way that it can be distinguished from other words and can be connected to an exact concept.

What I actually think can be reconciled are two explicable words: Grace and rational thought. 

Grace is the state of mind where the perceived universe is not separate from the individual.  In the grace state there is no inter-mediation between the human mind and the world of perception. "Be here now" as Ram Dass used to say.

Rational thought is the core of the Enlightenment. It is the systematic analysis of data that allows the data to be re-analyzed, tested empirically and publicly subject to scrutiny and discussion.

The reason I believe that grace and rational thought can be reconciled is that there is a category of human intellect that connects the two: social thought.  Social thought is based on the empirical evidence that the human mind in its unformed state is a blank slate (state of grace...infancy).  The culture that encompasses that particular individual mind is an enormous construct of institutions (language and parenthood included) that can be subject to fruitful analysis... rational thought.

We go from birth and a state of grace to a developed mind inside the bounds of our culture.  That culture is inherently susceptible to understanding by rational thought via the tools of social thought.

Of course we can achieve a state of grace right now... and heaven only knows when we will make a dent in our understanding of the culture we live in.

Originality on the Left

Generally the Left is working with an ideology that is 150 years old so it is hard to come up with any new ideas.  All Lefty ideas are traditionally based on stifling or harming commerce.  Since the only way that the weak and disadvantaged have of improving their lot is commerce, that usually means that the Left hurts the weak and disadvantaged the most.  I've made this point many times with many examples.

The San Francisco Board of Supervisors have come up with two original ideas neither of which hurts commerce and only one of which hurts the weak and disadvantaged.

Idea number one: illegal immigrants under 18 years old, who are arrested for crimes can not be reported to the Immigration Service until after they have been convicted of a felony.  This does no harm to commerce...three cheers.  Of course it means that the weak and disadvantaged who live in the same neighborhoods as the illegal underage immigrants become victims of more crimes as these jr. felons spend more time in San Francisco roaming the streets looking for victims.

Idea number two: cats in San Francisco can not be de-clawed.  Again, no harm to commerce.  The weak and disadvantage are not particularly owners of cats and are therefore not especially hurt by this ordinance.  If the ordinance passes it will be harder than ever for everyone to get an apartment with a cat as a pet.  Claws can do a great deal of damage to an apartment, regardless of how careful the cat owner is.

The U.S. Consitution is clear

Unbelievable, there are three members of Congress who have read the U.S. Constitution. (See their very polite letter.)

The U.S. Constitution in the first Article says:

"And no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince or foreign state."

Obama had better get Congressional approval to go pick up his Norwegian Nobel and put the money in trust.

Is the land green because it belongs to the Jewish people?

If you have been to Israel you know one stunning fact that non-visitors can't know and are unlikely to believe.  Israel is green .... lush, bright green.  The West Bank and Gaza are red clay, dusty. rocky and largely barren. 

All visitors remark on this stunning difference.  Most visiting Christians, who call Israel the Holy Land, attribute the difference to God's promise to Israel.

  Whether you believe God gave Israel to the Jews, whether you believe in Exodus and subsequent chapters of the bible, is irrelevant.  Just looking at what the Jews have done in 70 years to what the Arabs have done to the same landscape in 700 years, you'll will know that there is no comparison. 

 So who does the land belong to?  The people:

(a) who shed their blood for it,
(b) the people who bought it,
(c) the people who made it fruitful,
(d) the people who have occupied it for 3,000 years
(e) all of the above

If you chose (e) you are a supporter of Israel. Know history.  You know that only Israeli's fit all four criteria.

Detective TV shows now managerial

My earliest memories of a TV detective are of Perry Mason, a show filmed in San Francisco.

Perry Mason used standard police work with no computers and blatant lies to get into private homes (no warrants from a judge)  'I'm from the phone company to check your phone' is how they got inside homes. 

Mason and staff pretended to use finger prints but that was also a lie.  Real finger print collections at the time were only available on cards. In San Francisco, in 1958, the finger print file had less than 5,000 cards,only people who had been arrested and finger printed.  That didn't change until 1983 when finger print files on computers were introduced.

Perry Mason had one sidekick and an office staff; they got along well.  Mason gave the orders.  Mason solved cases by getting the guilty party to confess on the witness stand.

Today, there are nearly a dozen detective stories on primetime TV (NCIS, NCIS-LA, CSI, CSI-M, CSI-NY, Bones, Numbers, Lie to me, Mentalist...etc).  

The one thing that identifies all these detective stories is that 90% of the action takes place as drama (and melodrama) between the staffers, staffers and management, and inter-personally between staffers.

That, folks, means that modern television detective stories are really about management.  Why? 

Because 90% of all working Americans spend most of their life in a managerial environment.  Managerial as opposed to industrial, farming or sales.

Back when Americans worked in an industrial production environment the main stories were about rugged cowboys surviving lonely hardship.  Jane Tompkins in West of Everything explores that subject.

Liz

We have a new Republican presidential candidate on the horizon.  Liz Cheney has created a new group called Keep America Safe.  Liz is running for president. She has three things going for her.

1.) In past elections the division between male and female voters has been growing.  White males have reached 80% voting for the Republican candidate and all males have exceeded 60%. If a woman Republican candidate can get woman to split close to 50-50 she will win the presidency easily.

2.) It is harder to image a future without an attack on America than to imagine a future with an attack.  Being head of Keep America Safe as an advocate of an America safe from attack is a winning position.

3.) Liz has all of John McCain's fine campaign managers working with her. Michael Goldfarb, a Weekly Standard blogger, is an adviser, Liz's executive director is McCain war room chief Aaron Harison and the two are joined by Justin Germany, the McCain aide who produced a campaign video titled, “The One,” which mocked Obama as a messianic figure.

Run Liz run.  Your most difficult competitor will be Sarah Palin in the primaries.

Roller Derby is back

Tonight it was at Fort Mason in San Francisco.  Flat track. The crowd of 2,500 is very young, no blacks even though the two teams were from Richmond and Oakland, many Latinos and Filipinos. Equal men and women. A few motorcycles and leather jackets. A few hippy beards.  Mostly young (average age 22) enthusiastic, non-Burning Man, definitely not the chi-chi San Francisco crowd.

This is the crowd that goes to the movies in Daly City with the whole family and eats at the Cheesecake Factory on a hot date. Food was pulled pork sandwiches and lumpias. Drinks were local beer brewers and shots. 

I loved the crowd, the energy and the top flight amateur athletes.

Photos of San Francisco

Every month I take guests flying with me over the Bay Area.  Yesterday I took two professional photographers.  One of them, Dennis, posted these photos last night.

Depressed?

Some of my friends are depressed by the brilliant 'America has chosen decline' by Charles Krauthammer. I agree with Krauthammer on every point.  The current ascent of Neanderthal Lefty domestic policies is sad and our apologistic foreign policy is horrible behavior for a great nation.  Our rejection of America's friends is morally vile and our glad-handing support of tyrants will be humiliating for decades. 

 I make only two points:

(1) we have recovered from global disaster before. 

This great country survived three horrible global humiliations of the past forty years: the Democratic Congress's failure to support South Vietnam in 1974 and the subsequent victory of the North, the abomination of Jimmy-Boy Carter's failing totally as president and finally Bill's crooked penis that escaped his pants in the oval office.

(2) we have offered the world three examples that will vibrate in every human heart for centuries to come: our constitutional Republic with individual freedom as its platform most recently copied by the British for their Supreme Court, our abolition of hereditary class in 1960 and our conscientious promotion of commerce as the source of human freedom (the neo-cons and my own pro commerce movement).

These great trends of history can be slowed by the exigencies of a financial collapse that brought Neanderthals to power but they can hardly stand athwart history for long.

Only recently out of the famine mode

I admit to three or four years in Weight Watchers.  I've mentioned it several times over the years.  I have achieved what WW calls Lifetime status, meaning you reached your weight goal and stayed at that level for 3 months; after that you get to go to weigh-ins and meetings free.  I learned how to control my weight by changing my daily diet and controlling caloric intake.

 With all the traveling I do and the eating out for entertainment and business, I regained some of the weight and learned that controlling my weight at home was the only lesson that I had previously learned.

Now I'm learning more about weight control.  Free food offerings, 'Michael you must have seconds I know you love it' and potluck meals are almost impossible for me to resist.

I'd like to speculate.  Homo has evolved over a long period with endless famine and feast.  Only in the past two hundred years, with the advent of industrial commerce has the famine-feast horror abated...and only in regions with fully functioning industrial commerce. Three cheers for pro commerce.

My thesis is that we have an incredibly deep and important social manifesto that requires us to share our food and to gracefully accept food from others. I am finding it hard to overcome this super-ego roaring in my ears: 'Share your food..accept food from others graciously.'

Slime people who disagree with you.

When three White House spokespeople went on the air in the past week to tell the 1,000 employees of Fox News that they didn't work for a news organization I wondered about the sanity of the leadership of the White House.

Has the White House ever heard the political admonition: 'Never pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel'. (Attributed to an Indiana Republican Congressman in the early 1970s)

The updated admonition would be 'Don't attack anyone who has a larger audience than all the mainstream newspapers combined.'  As Fox news continues to grow from the White House attacks on it, and mainstream newspapers continue to shrink... the admonition gains greater significance.

The best comment I heard on this subject was the point that with the White House attacking the one out of five TV news organizations that isn't supporting the Obama messianism is an insult to the other four TV news organizations for their lapdog behavior.

I am personally offended by the childish behavior of the White House and the President.  This president is more divisive than any previous inhabitant of the White House in half a century.

Restaurants and businesses with no name on the door

I am the author (with co-author Beautiful Rasberry) of a book called Marketing Without Advertising.  While the book is aimed at discounting traditional forms of advertising (newspaper ads, radio, TV and billboards) the book does make the point that business should do everything to help the customer easily find the business.

So when a business (walk-in off-the-street clients) has no name on the outside, what can I say?

Great marketing!

First it means that customers love the business so much that they come back and bring their friends.  Second, the only customers are people who came because of a personal recommendation...the very best kind of customers.  Third, customers all have a sense that they are personally special because they know about the business.

If you thrive with no name on the door, or just an address, you are a master of Marketing Without Advertising.

War monger in chief

My blog is Pro Commerce so you should have no doubts on where I stand on people who are anti-commerce.  We have a president in office who is anti-commerce and much worse: President Obama is a war monger.  He declared a trade war on China last month with tariffs on Chinese tires. 

It became a war this week when China retaliated by imposing identical tariffs on nylon from the U.S.

If you think a trade war is minor, you need to know history*.  A trade war is the middle step in a series of escalations to a bombing war.  It is the step where you cut off your own finger to show you are willing to shed your own people's blood in preparation for the big war.  Our finger happens to be tens of thousands of people who will lose their jobs in the nylon and related industries because of this tariff.

President Barack Obama: war monger in chief.

* PS. The Great depression was made worse by America starting a trade war with Europe and Japan joined the Axis in WWII and bombed Pearl Harbor because of a trade war started by America.

Hiring.. too many or just enough interviews

Many companies in the high tech world are known for their arduous, protracted, laborious and unpleasant hiring practices.  Google, Microsoft and Apple can have a prospective employee interview as many as twenty potential peers. 

Is that too many?     

I think it is too many because it doesn't work in the short run or the long run.

In the short run the goal is to screen out potentially disruptive, lazy, disingenuous, malingering and technically unqualified applicants. Twenty interviews doesn't work.

The effective way to do this is to have a series of long interviews with top prospects.  A breakfast interview, a lunch interview and a dinner interview.  4-6 hours with one or two qualified interviewers can do all the complex and subtle screening much more effectively than a group.  Some snooping around among friends at the prospects previous employers is sometimes possible and obviously effective.

In the short run, many good applicants won't tolerate this endless interviewing waste of their time. Often really good applicants will have taken another job before the end of the interview process and the interminable waiting.  Meaning the long interviewing process only weeds out top tier employees.

In the short run the goal that is achieved is to select applicants who will comfortably fit into the group they will be working with.  In my opinion this is shear stupidity.  A good team, in business, always has a wide perspective that comes from ethnic, personality and intellectual diversity.  Careful screening makes a good team of robots but nothing else.

Fortunately, because employees move about the company over time, this initial screening stupidity gets mitigated by all the differences within the company.

The face of evil

When you know what every single Israeli knows and you see the Goldstone Report on Gaza and the UN Human Rights Commission in action you know that the 4th Reich, genuine evil, is lose in the world today. 

This is what every Israeli and every decent human being knows or should know.  Good deeds are being punished today by Arabs, the UN and all the allies of evil.

Col Richard Kemp, a British army veteran of 30 years, told the UNHRC he had served with NATO and U.N. missions, commanded troops in Northern Ireland and the Balkans, participated in the Gulf War, and “spent considerable time in Iraq since the 2003 invasion.”
 
“Based on my knowledge and experience, I can say this: During Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli Defense Forces did more to safeguard the rights of civilians in a combat zone than any other army in the history of warfare,” he said.
 
“Israel did so while facing an enemy that deliberately positioned its military capability behind the human shield of the civilian population.”
 
In his brief presentation, Kemp said that Hamas was “expert at driving the media agenda” and “adept at staging and distorting incidents.”
 
He listed some of the steps taken by the IDF, including dropping warning leaflets in targeted areas; aborting missions that could have taken out Hamas military capability, to prevent civilian casualties; and allowing humanitarian aid into Gaza during the conflict.
 
“Despite all of this, of course innocent civilians were killed. War is chaos and full of mistakes. There have been mistakes by the British, American and other forces in Afghanistan and in Iraq, many of which can be put down to human error. But mistakes are not war crimes,” Kemp said.
 
“More than anything, the civilian casualties were a consequence of Hamas’ way of fighting. Hamas deliberately tried to sacrifice their own civilians.”

Stalin crazy with nukes

In discussions about nuclear weapons in the hands of pathological leaders and pathological governments it is worth remembering that Joseph Stalin's USSR had nuclear weapons and still does.  Joseph Stalin was a mental case by any definition, considering the number of people he murdered and his willingness to give nuclear missiles to Fidel Castro.

It would be hard to make direct comparisons between Ahmadinejad and the Iranian government and Stalin; even harder to make comparisons with Kim Jong Il.

What we need to know is what kept Stalin from using his weapons.  He didn't believe in MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction, the American doctrine), and he apparently intended to use nuclear weapons in Europe if the U.S. used them first. So what influenced Stalin?

Is there any way to have good information on the issue of choosing suicide for a leader or a government when the entire population can disappear.

One thing we do know now is that the Hamas had moved all its top leader's families to Cairo and may well have been preparing for a mass suicide.  Where else is this true?

Letterman could cost CBS $100 million

Most sexual harassment lawsuits have to be filed very close to the time they happen (short statute of limitations) in order to have standing in court.

However the first thing the current Democratic Congress, the 111th, did in their first day in office was to introduce the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act. The President signed it nine days later.  The Lilly Ledbetter Act extends all statute of limitations regarding pay and discrimination until after the last pay check the employee receives.

David Letterman is a standard Lefty Democrat with a particular hatred of Sarah Palin so it is only true justice that the Lilly Ledbetter Act is likely to make life miserable for him.

Letterman won't be sued by the women he had sex with, he'll be sued by the many men and women who now have reason to believe their promotions or lack of promotion were due to Letterman's underpants preferences.  California Courts have found that employees left out of sexual relations have standing to sue.  New York higher courts haven't dealt with this yet.

For David Letterman, the statute of limitations hasn't started yet.

HR free zone

For those of us outside of the corporate environment, HR is the old 'personnel department', now called Human Resources.

There is a movement that I am just hearing about. When I hear something, out in this tiny corner of the world, that may be evidence of a growing trend. 

HR free zone means a place within the corporation, a room, a hall, a doorway, where employees can be together and violate Federal Laws about personnel that the HR department is supposed to enforce.

Employees, in the HR free zone, can swear, they can use deprecating allusions (bitch, Dick) and outlandish descriptions, they can be insulting using sex, gender, race, religion or nationality.  They can tell jokes about any and all these subjects and fellow staffers, or political potentates. A true HR free zone.

It sure sounds like Americans are waking up to what it means to be an American and how sterile we have made our work environments. 

The HR free zone is sort of Roller Derby for white collar workers.

Incredible Chia event

One of the most wonderful things about having a President who has an afro and is the leader of a population where 90% don't have an afro, is that virtually nobody knows:

- what is a joke,

- what is a parody,

- what is an insult

- what is an act of ethnic bigotry

- what is a respectful honor

- what is pure racism

- or what the hell to do when confronted with a test of all this rolled into one perplexing situation.

If you haven't seen this TV commercial made by a San Francisco firm, you've got to see it now.

At this point Walgreens drug stores have refused to sell the ChiaObama and CVS is selling it, but there have been no other reactions. The issue is too complex for the body politic to process.

The commercial has been rolled out first in the liberal cities of San Francisco and Chicago. Great twist. 

I just love the physical quality of this irony.  Insult and adoration combined in one object.

Doing good -- please don't

It is always hard for me to remember that most Lefty Liberals are trying to do good. The Lefty impulse is usually to do good. However most good turns out to have very negative consequences. Which is the core problem with Lefty policies.

The best example I have of the do-gooder act that had horrible consequences is the elimination of DDT.  It later proved to be a false theory of DDT harming pelican eggs, so the DDT ban did no good.  The bad was the elimination of the only powerful medical treatment for lice, bed bugs and similar gerridae. The horror was the elimination of the best mosquito treatment and the subsequent spread of malaria which to date has killed tens of millions of Africans.

The entire neo-conservative movement grew out of the post-do-good experience.  The neo-conservatives were former liberal intellectuals who examined the Democrat's Great Society program and found nearly every part was ineffective or a total failure.

The neo-Conservative movement is probably the most powerful indigenous American intellectual movement.  While we have generated an indigenous pragmatic philosophic movement and a Transcendental poetic/psychological movement... neither have had the global weight and consequence of the neo-Conservative movement.

Nearly everywhere in the world, when nations seek a new path to escape famine, to develop national sanitation and health and to create vigorous economic growth they look straight to the ideas of America's neo-Conservative movement.

Summary: Do-gooders are usually ineffective, often do great harm and some of the people who have studied do-good projects became the core of the globally successful neo-conservative movement.

Scientific magazine meets the Hobbit

Back in 2004 a group of scientists who had discovered, in 2003, a group of dwarf-like skeletons, including a skull that resembled a human, on an Indonesian Island (Flores). They submitted their findings to Nature magazine.  The scientists weren't agreed on the actual species of the fossil bones but the stunning fact was that this species had survived until 18,000 years ago. Modern times.

Nature magazine demanded that the species be called Homo Floresiensis.  The leading scientists of our era, who had nothing to do with the discovery, were certain that anything that lived into modern times and looked human must be homo.  The scientists who found the species didn't agree.

To the finders of Homo Floresiensis the best name was Hobbit. 

The press has recently been excited about Ardi... Ardipithecus ramidus which is a skeleton that is 2 million years older than Lucy, Australopithecus. While these are both hominids they are not homo.

The Hobbit has been the subject of intense and serious debate.  Several things for my readers to know:  The Hobbit species is probably not homo, more likely Australopithecus that left Africa long before our first ancestor Homo Erectus.  There are plenty of bones to study but the Indonesians (especially Teuko Jacob) made a mess of them (some deteriorated others broken) in a one and half year period.  Be careful who gets important bones.

Lastly, we don't even have a half decent story of our roots.  The bones we have are the accidents of time and survival.  We will look like fools in the future for our certainty combined with our ignorance.  (Sounds like standard human behavior, doesn't it?)

Oh I forgot.  The Hobbit used fire, and the Hobbit's ancestors going back 95,000 years also used fire.

Do rich Whole Foodies eat more nutritious food?

 The core answer is this paragraph from the most reliable study done to date (University of Iowa):

"Corn grain analyses for protein, oil and starch exhibited significant differences only for protein content, with the conventional corn having a higher content. Greater concentrations could have been due to the relative deficiency of nitrogen in the organic plots....Soybean grain analysis demonstrated no significant differences between conventional and organic systems, with average protein approximately 39%...."

Protein is a key nutrient in food; non-organic corn has more than organic corn.

No reliable studies have been done on other nutrients in organic food versus non-organic.  You can look at every container in the super market on this issue and you will find no difference.

The logic of raising teacher pay

How did the idea that raising teacher's salaries would improve education become a norm in our society?  A norm that is NEVER challenged.

If such a thesis were true then we would get better medical care by paying more to doctors, hospitals and nurses.  We would get better American autos by paying union auto workers, auto management and auto top executives more money. We would get better mail delivery, better electricians, carpenters, politicians and judges by paying them more.

If you know that nothing in the previous paragraph is true then how did we get the universal notion about raising teachers pay?

If facts mattered in this issue we would have to look at the private K-12 Kamehameha Schools in Honolulu the sole recipient of funds from the $10 billion Bishop Estate Trust.

The student teacher ratio is 13 to 1 and teachers are among the best paid in all of America.  High School grade averages are not supportive of high teacher pay based on outside testing. The GPA of Kamehameha is 2.8 on a 4.0 = A scale. 

The high school drop out rate, even at these private schools with 100% scholarships is 10%; with 20% who have not completed 12 years of school.  College graduation rates are 1/3rd of other Hawaiian schools for Kamehameha alumni.

Pay teachers more?  Look at the data first.

These are funny

The economy is so bad that CEOs are now playing miniature golf.

The economy is so bad if the bank returns your check marked “Insufficient Funds,” you call them and ask if they meant you or them.

The economy is so bad Hot Wheels stocks are trading higher than GM.

The economy is so bad a truckload of Americans was caught sneaking into Mexico.

The economy is so bad Dick Cheney took his stockbroker hunting.

---------------------------

Funny yes.  However, the GNP probably didn't shrink in the past year.  Unemployment is high because the new economy is different and more productive than the old U.S. economy and the Congressional stimulus was probably harmful to employment.

Jewish liberalism

At several points in Exodus, Moses gets angry at the Israelites, they were being foolish and blind.  I understand how Moses felt.

American Jews have done one of the most disgusting immoral acts imaginable in history.  Just like the Israelities in the desert.

American Jews appear to have voted more than 3 to 1 Democrat for president in 2008, having voted more than 2 to 1 for a Democrat over George W. Bush four years earlier. 

This is a moral outrage when you know that President George W. Bush was the greatest friend the Jews have ever had in 2,500 years of history (probably greater than King Cyrus). Bush did everything possible to help Israel and did it by overriding the advice of the entire State Department and nearly the entire foreign policy establishment and certainly the vast extended family of European Jew haters.

This issue, this blatant Jewish ingratitude, is so shocking to open minded thinkers that it generated an entire book by Norman Podhoretz (Why are Jews Liberals?) and is the subject of a brilliant dialogue in Commentary magazine.  I urge you to read the dialogue. 

The issue is so important and so widely discussed that the New York Times, in its classic 70 year long Jew hatred, had to commission a hit piece by the Lefty flack Leon Wieseltier (a brilliant man who will sell his soul almost any day [think about his complicity in the Foer/Scott Thomas fraud]).

I personally know that Podoretz is right that Jewish Liberalism is itself a religion, quite distant from Jewish tradition.  My father became a rabbi and was a practicing rabbi entirely on the belief that his job was to promote the values and ideology of Franklin Roosevelt, the American's for Democratic Action and the Nation magazine. While he loved the creation of Israel, he had to overlook his feelings on that issue because his Reform congregations were always indifferent or hostile to Israel.

There is one shocking piece in the Commentary dialogues by Michael Medved who argues that Reform Jews have only a core Jewish identity based on anti-Christianism.  He has a powerful argument that means a long term intractable Reform position.

There is a wisp of optimism in the Commentary dialog about the future of Aemrican Jewry by Jonathan Sarna and Jeff Jacoby, but not much.

Mind changing

I've wondered what would change my idea about the American president. 

I also wondered what would change the Japanese public's attitude toward self-defense.

I would make a 180 degree change in my opinion of the American President if he sent a squadron of bombers from Iraq and simultaneously from Afghanistan to fly very low over Tehran and drop leaflets that say

'We can bomb you any time, your government is illegal and your government is threatening neighboring nations.'

I believe the 98% Japanese pacifist attitude would change if the Army and Navy created entire female military units. 

Females are especially strong and can be very powerful in Japanese society.  I think the idea of women leading a military unit would change Japanese minds about self defense.

The issue of mind changing has to do with the human need to resolve conflict.  In marketing research it is called cognitive dissonance theory.  When two experiences or values are in conflict the mind finds a neutral mixture of both ideas is the best resolution.

There is a great deal of empirical evidence to support cognitive dissonance theory.

So called 'buyer's remorse' comes from cognitive dissonance theory.