Pro Commerce

Are they stupid? No.

 Peggy Noonan in today's Wall Street Journal said: "Why does the federal government do this? Because so many within it are stupid and unimaginative and don't trust the American people. Which of course the American people have noticed."

Three things. 

* I try to never call people in the government 'stupid'.  Peggy is so angry she can't restrain herself.  I don't blame her for feeling that way, I often feel the same way, but I know it is wrong, because these are a cross-section of Americans who only do stupid things because their institutions are flawed. 

* Second, I am glad Peggy has noticed that we are at a revolutionary point.  I said it clearly in this earlier blog.

* Third, the only way to make our government work is to have a really representative legislature, made up of randomly selected citizens.  All other solutions are pathetic short term failures. But unfortunately we won't see the real solution in my lifetime... too hard to understand.

Financial irony

All us business people are following the PIGS crisis (Portugal, Italy, Greece and Spain).   It is Mediterranean justice that is destroying the EU.  The EU already had enough problems with Muslim immigrants, GDP basket cases from social welfare burdens and a 'vacation-or-a-strike is a full time right' worker mentality.

 Just to give you a sense of proportion.  The Greek GDP is about $350 billion, about 2% of the U.S., and the Greek government revenue is $140 billion, with about 40% of the population directly or indirectly on the government payroll.

Just the threat of government spending cut backs created chaos in Greece.  Nothing like really cutting government spending by 40% which is required to bring the budget into balance if the EU and International Monetary Fund step in to give Greece three years to cut government spending. A 40% cut back, even over three years, would be the end of government in Greece.  There is no way out.  Maybe it is possible to kick the PIGS out of the EU, I doubt it.  Watch the Euro fall back below $1.00.

The whole show is a farce and the rest of the PIGS are lined up to expand the disaster.  All this was caused by the U.S. financial crisis which has brought every weak government to its knees. The U.S. Congress has no idea how to avoid this debacle in the future (see my earlier blogs (1) and (2) for a solution).

 There are two ironies here: first George Soros is betting against the Euro along with many others.  I hate to see Soros, who advocates exactly the same government expansion in the U.S., make a lot of money betting against his own ideas in Europe.  Second, the very members of Congress who want to regulate short selling are the same members who have political ideas that are identical to the governments in the PIGS countries.  

Short selling and derivatives (which grandstanding ignorant members of Congress oppose) is what told the world about the Greek problem and helped intelligent investors avoid loosing more retiree's money.  Short selling and derivatives are betting that something the public believes in is wrong.

Patents on genes

At the end of March, U.S. District Judge Robert Sweet ruled against Myriad Genetics Inc. and the University of Utah Research Foundation on their gene patents. Myriad and the research foundation hold patents covering the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes, which have been linked to a small proportion of hereditary cancers.

 I spent time in this field.  In the early 1990s I founded the Project to Label Gene Altered Food.  So I met the other key people in the field, and I know the issues.  I ended my own campaign when the Department of Agriculture finally agreed on a definition of "organic" food that excluded gene altered varieties.

I totally support Judge Sweet's ruling, without having read the decision. I hope he has written a good decision and the ruling holds up at higher court levels.

The problem with patents is that the patent law clearly prohibits the patenting of obvious ideas and tools and objects in the natural world.  So clocks, hammers, wind power and lightening can't be patented, but a specific clock mechanism, hammer with toe nail clipper, specific wind generator and blade and copper lightening rod can be patented.

So what about genes?  Humans have several thousand genes on each genome that produce proteins and tens of thousands of others whose function is unknown.  Myriad Genetics and others have argued that a specific segment of the human gene can be patented.  Myriad found the gene and its connection to a human disease, therefor they claimed a right to have a patent on that specific gene.  Trouble is, (1) that specific gene sequence could do many other things, under a variety of developmental circumstances and a patent would restrict other uses of that gene sequence, (2) worse, other researchers could find other ways to identify and isolate that gene that may be useful and important but would be prohibited from doing so because of the Myriad patent.  

Genes are part of the natural world, like wind and lightening.  How you use them, how you extract them should be patentable, but the genes themselves should not be patented.

Tax the rich?

The core Lefty polemic is "tax the rich".  

The U.S. Congress and the current administration obviously believe in this ideological fiction. 

 When they passed the recent ObamaCare bill they built in several tax increases.  

One is to raise the tax on income earned on dividends from 15% to 20%. 

A second is to raise the top level of progressive taxation from 35% to 39.6%. 

The third is to raise taxes on rental income and interest by 3.8%.

The problem with Lefty polemic is that it is nothing more than polemic.  It has no substance.

The ObamaCare tax increase is supposed to raise $1.2 trillion dollars from people earning over $500,000. It will not generate one penny of the $1.2 billion.  It will in fact reduce revenue by several billion dollars.

I personally can attest to the tax on dividends.  When the tax rate moved from 20% to 15% I moved part of my portfolio into dividend earning stocks.  Now I will move them out of dividend earning stock.  Most everyone else will do what I do.  No revenue gain there.

Several top economists have measured the impact of increased tax rates and their ability to generate income.  Start with a fact: people earning over $500,000 provide half the total income tax revenue of the United States.

 Add two more facts.  The brilliant Bates award winner, Emmanuel Saez, has shown that for most of the bottom half of current tax payers (which itself is only about 20% of people with taxable income), a tax increase of $1.00 will yield $.40. So that the bottom 10% of the tax base will only generate $0.40 of each dollar of expected new revenue on each dollar increase in taxes. 

The neutral Treasury economist, Bradley Heim, has shown that the increase of taxes on the $500,000 (supposed to generate $1.2 trillion) earners of $1.00 will reduce tax revenue by $.20. 

Put it together and a tax increase at our current tax levels will yield virtually nothing.

Who are these people in Congress and the Administration?  Lefty ideologists, for whom data and reality are irrelevant.

Why don't others work hard?

 I am perpetually baffled by the exceptional work habits of Americans (U.S.) most Asians and Israelis and the poor work habits of all Europeans, Spanish speakers and Russians.  I have no comment on Africa and Arabia workers because it has nothing to do with work habits (tribal cultures).

So why do Americans work longer hours and more aggressively than any group in Europe who live for the weekend and their two month vacations?

Just two reasons:

(1)America (and major parts of Asia, and immigrants) can do work based on merit.  That is worth working hard for.  (2) We can also find work we love.

Work

 With 7 million more people unemployed today than two years ago, why is the GNP higher than it has ever been?  Who was really working?

This enigma is widely discussed among economists.  Opinions range from, we are seeing the benefits of many years of increased productivity,  fear of job loss makes people work harder, and this is just a pattern in recessions, employment will pick up later in the economic expansion, when new hires can really pay for themselves.

I want to add my two cents.  First, you could layoff every green worker and many government workers (it has been done before) and no one would know the difference. We need to add in all the people who complain about their jobs, nearly everyone who has a job based solely on union rules and everyone who works for an incompetent supervisor or manager.  

That would add up to far more than 7 million.  So the issue disappears for me.

What California teaches about progressive income tax

 You may not know it and it may be irrelevant but the Governor and Legislature of California set up a tax committeee to deal with an interesting problem.

The problem is that California has a progressive income tax. It generates about one-third of total state revenue.  Most Californians pay nothing, salaried workers pay a few percent of their income and a tiny proportion of high income earners pay nearly all the income tax (about 80%) at rates between 6 and 10%.  Income taxes include capital gains and stock options.

As a consequence of progressive income taxes,  the tax revenue to the state is highly volatile.  In the most recent economic downturn, the tax revenues to California fell much faster than the economy.  High income people have incomes that are more volatile than salaried workers. The effect is visible in State tax revenues. 

Because the State saw falling tax revenues it was forced to cut, pair and shorten the hours of many union workers on the State payroll.  Unions and their political voice, the Democratic Party, are, under the circumstances, willing to consider a trade off: greater stability of State tax revenues and government union jobs, for a more level income tax scheme.

Intelligence formed the tax investigation committee, will there still be intelligence left when the time comes to write and vote on a bill?

Frightening time to be alive

 This must be a frightening time to be alive... if you can't do simple statistical reasoning.

There are constant emails flying around with the latest technological terror.  Global warming caused by humans, autism caused by vaccinations, cancer caused by power lines, automobiles accelerating without any controls and cell phones causing brain cancer.  The world is a terrifying place if you can't figure these issues out by yourself.  Each one has multiple authorities giving us multiple answers and constant saturation of the media by these authorities.  So who do you trust?

No one. If you can read numbers, interpret data and reason logically, because all the data is at you Internet finger tips.

The latest email I saw was about rising brain cancer caused by cell phone use.

So I Googled the National Institute of Cancer data and got this chart on brain cancer occurrence in U.S. over the past twenty years. No change, despite 30 billion man years of cell phone use in the U.S. during that time.

To me that is about as clear as anything can be.  No brain cancer from cell phone use, regardless of the authorities who say we should worry.

I try to get my grandchildren to understand the importance of math and statistics.  I don't want them to grow up worrying about nonsense.

You choose

After the last blog I couldn't resist asking the question: 'Which Palestinian behavior is the most outrageous and never receives any worldwide condemnation?'

Hell; not 'condemnation" not even 'a comment' by BBC, France2 TV, CNN or anyone else.

 * A perpetual willingness to kill gay men for being in love.

* A perpetual willingness to kill young women for refusing to accept a pre-arranged marriage.

* A perpetual willingness to kill young women for sex outside of marriage. 

* A perpetual demand for a recognized Palestinian State without recognition of a half century old Israel.

* A perpetual demand that no Jews live in Palestinian territory while 1.5 million Arabs live in Israel.

* A perpetual propensity to take one Israeli hostage and demand 1,000 jailed Palestinians in return.

* A perpetual willingness to hide militants and terrorists in hospitals, ambulances and private homes.

* A perpetual President (Abbas) who was elected for a 48 month term and is in his 64th month.

Confidence building measures

 In case you missed it, the U.S. Department of Transportation issued an agreement to let U.S. and Israeli airlines have unlimited flights between the two countries. 

That is good for me, as it should reduce airfares, slightly.

The timing of this announcement is propitious.  It looks like a confidence building step by the U.S., which has done immeasurable damage to the entire Middle East with its anti-Jew policy in Israel.

The new view of Pax Americana

Until the mid 1990s, the prevailing American view of international history was a view of America coming late, naive and reluctantly to the international table.

 But with the American victory over the USSR and the Pax Americana that had lasted 50 years at that point, the longest in world history, a new view began to emerge.  I want my readers to know about the new view.

The seminal book was by Walter McDougall published in 1997, Promised Land, Crusader State.  McDougall was quickly supported by Michael Lind, Anatol Lieven, Robert Kagan and Walter Russell Mead. 

The new thesis is that America's long history of creating a union out of disparate states has uniquely prepared America for the role of global suzerain.  It took America nearly a decade to form the first government, another century to settle the most difficult intra-state battle over slavery, and the 20th Century to develop a strong and viable national government.

We have experience in negotiation, accommodation and problem resolution, something that is unavailable to the rest of the world.  

Now you know.

McClellan revisited

I've always thought McClellan was a lazy and cowardly general.  I was probably wrong.

from  Allen C. Guelzo  Winter 2009 issue of the Claremont Review of Books. Professor of the Civil War Era at Gettysburg College.

 "..what, actually, did Lincoln learn from his auto-didactic pursuit of military science? The standard textbooks of the day were written under the spell of Napoleon Bonaparte, and they hewed to the belief that victory in war was the product of single, decisive battles in which one side, in one massive stroke, disabled the opposing army and compelled its political leadership to come to the peace table. This might have served Napoleon's purposes at Jena and Austerlitz. But by the 1850s, field armies had swollen to dimensions which ensured that single-stroke, "decisive" victories would be impossible. What would certainly cripple an enemy army, however, would be to shift the blow to the enemy's logistics—lines of supplies, depots, and manufacturing centers—since these newly-gargantuan armies had stomachs which no mere foraging on the countryside could any longer satisfy. McClellan, curiously, understood this, and so his initial plans for war-making were aimed at the Confederacy's logistical centers, rather than at its field armies. Hence McClellan's grand plan to side-step the rebel army in Virginia, shift his own Army of the Potomac by water to the James River peninsula, and hit the Confederate capital at Richmond through its back door.

"But Lincoln, who already had ample reason to resent McClellan's unconcealed contempt for the president he called "the original gorilla," interpreted McClellan's strategy as politics, not warfare—as a desire to avoid a straight-up, knock-down confrontation with the rebels. When Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army turned the tables on McClellan and ripped out McClellan's own logistical wiring during the Seven Days' Battles, McClellan hastily retreated. This looked to Lincoln like cowardice, not prudence, and when Lincoln finally relieved him of command in November 1862, he was adamant that McClellan's successors stop fooling around with plans to take Richmond, and drive up the middle, overland, to slug it out with Robert E. Lee and the Confederate army. "Lee's Army," he told Joseph Hooker, "and not Richmond, is your true objective point."

 "But was it? Obediently, a succession of generals—Burnside, Hooker, Meade—struggled to follow Lincoln's directive, and ended up with nothing to show for it but indecisive collisions with the rebels. When Lincoln brought Ulysses S. Grant to take control in Virginia in 1864, Grant was handed the same mandate. But Grant enjoyed Lincoln's political confidence like no other of the generals, and after another resultless string of stalemates, from the Wilderness to Cold Harbor, Grant prevailed on Lincoln to let him try the McClellan strategy below the James River. The result was a siege of Richmond and Petersburg which drained the life out of Lee's army, and when Lee finally broke away and tried to make a run for it in April 1865, the rebel army, lacking a logistical base, stumbled and collapsed into Grant's arms. The same pattern held true elsewhere in the war—it was not the defeat of rebel armies at Perryville or Murfreesboro, but the capture of Chattanooga and Atlanta, which wrecked the Confederacy's war-making capacity. In retrospect, Lincoln's directive to make "Lee's army...your true objective" was almost the worst advice a commander-in-chief could have given in the 19th century."

by subscription: http://www.claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1693/article_detail.asp

Svengali for the Left

 One of my favorite bloggers, a brilliant woman who lives in Marin County, (I've met her twice) wrote an article about how Lefties believe that listening to Rush Limbaugh for even a few minutes could destroy their world.  

I'm not kidding.  Not kidding that Bookwormroom.com wrote about that.  I'm not kidding that it is true.  None of my Lefty, or even slightly Lefty friends will listen to 5 minutes of Rush. They all think he has magical powers to sweep Lefty brains clear of their cherished Lefty Fundamentalism.

Word got to Rush about the blog and he read the whole blog on the air.  Rush is the most powerful force in the global media with 21 million weekly listeners to his 3 hour a day program.  The Bookwormroom website went down from the volume, but Bookwormroom was sure happy.

The answer to our distrust

A few blogs back I summarized the evidence that the majority of concerned Americans no longer consider their government legitimate. After 230 years of struggling to make our country work, most of us have given up. We are angry and disappointed and clueless about to do.

 The problem is that Americans (and most other people living in a democracy) don't really know what they want, they just know what they have is not working the way it should.

The two overriding expressed citizen concerns are: corruption, meaning too many self-interest groups (unions, trial lawyers, Hollywood types and big businesses) have excessive influence on legislators and Congress never sounds like it understands ordinary real people.

The answer is a U.S. House and lower houses of state legislatures selected, like juries, from a list of ordinary citizens.  Random samples of real people would be selected to serve three year terms as legislators.  Corruption would be virtually non-existent because only a few ordinary people could be bought, especially if they were serving at the pay level of current legislators.  

Trust in government would slowly return as the people recognized the legislatures as a reflection of themselves.

That is the answer. I wrote an article about it in the mid 1970s and a book in 1984.  Will I live to see it happen?

Can a decent Jew be a lefty?

I suspect that there are very few Lefty Jews left among my tens of thousands of readers. So there is no reason to reiterate my strongly held view that such a combination is a social and biological monstrosity.

For the rest of my readers I simply want to keep you posted on the inherent political threats to business of Jew hatred.

The Left is always a threat to business. That is the inherent value system of the Left.

The Left has always been somewhat hostile to Jews, Karl Marx hated them. The reason is simple: Jews, like many other peoples in the world have a high proportion of good business people. That is sufficient reason for Lefties to hate Jews. As Thomas Sowell has pointed out, the same hatred is always directed against overseas -Chinese for the same reason.

If you are in business or love business, it is worth appreciating the fact that Jew-hate is a good early sign of impending attacks on business. Fidel Castro's Lefty revolution immediately drove out 9,500 of Cuba's 10,000 Jews.

Jew hate is like the canary in the mine. When the canary dies, the miners are next.

This is to let you see into the future of business a little bit. Jew-hate is boiling over in Venezuela. Lefty Venezuela should be good evidence that Jew-hate thrives in the land of Lefties and always has. It is the forerunner of anti-business politics.

The American revolution underway

See the bottom. Thesis proved.

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

I haven't seen a good analysis of what is happening in the U.S. these days. 

 We Americans no longer accept the legitimacy of our government. 

There has been a steady rebellion, challenge to the legitimacy of our government, underway since the embarrassment the American public has felt since 1979 when Jimmy Carter became a global clown figure.

 * The first public rebellion was the election of Ronald Reagan over the loud opposition by the mainstream media and political elites.

 * The second rebellion was the elevation of an unknown weirdo to 34% public support in July of the 1992 presidential election (Ross Perot).

 * The subsequent lesser rebellions were the election of a Republican Congress in the off-year 2002 and the overwhelming re-election victory of the much ridiculed (by the main stream media and the political elites) of President Bush. 

 

* The newest and most vigorous open rebellion began after Americans reacted to a financial melt-down in August 2008 and elected an ostensibly moderate reformer (candidate Obama). When the moderate-reformer turned out to be a wild spend-and-tax ghost of the worst of Democratic Party nightmares, the Tea Party emerged along with the new "peoples' goddess" Sarah Palin.

 * When Obama and the Democratic Congress showed the most open contempt for the democratic processes, with visible corruption, and the end of legitimacy, the Tea Party exploded into a new mainstream national power.

 America is now in complete rebellion, ready for a new direction. No one can know where we are going... we are in the beginning of a ferocious change cycle.    

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Two weeks after I posted this blog I found this chart in the WSJ of Pew survey data.  This data not only supports my thesis, exactly but the timing and dates match mine.  

Folks, this is real.

I solved it last year

 More than a year ago I solved the query: 'Why are so many people getting so fat over the past 25 years?'

With intense self honesty (1) I admitted what was known: everyone in America except yuppies and gay men were getting fat, and (2) what wasn't known: why some national groups aren't getting fat, such as the Japanese.

The consequence of self-honesty, careful data examination and a decade of thought, I concluded that food marketing was evolving to take advantage of intense human appetites. Those appetite temptations were leading to uncontrolable eating.

Turns out the proof was already four years old.  Malcolm Gladwell had written this article in the New Yorker about how tomato sauce and mustard had been evolving with mathematical models to reach more people with intense taste preferences.  Proof of my thesis.

PPS: I just read a collection of Gladwell's articles

WWII revisionism.;

I regularly rant about the high level of Jew-hate in Europe. I don't really need to support that thesis, the evidence grows more alarming every day. Jews driven out of Malmo, Sweden, without a peep of protest from anywhere in Europe, should tell you everything. Only Denmark,  Holland and Germany are exceptions to the Jew-hate milieu.

 This has led me to a revisionist view of WWII.

It is now clear to me, because I know the history well, that the level of Jew hate in Europe in the 1930s was similar to today. Then, the exceptions were only Denmark and Holland.

When we look at the enthusiasm with which the French, Poles and everyone else, sent their Jews off to the gas ovens, and the deep unwillingness of the Russians or English to stop the Nazi pogroms before the war, it appears to me that: nearly all of Europe would have gassed their Jews if they had been half as competent as the Germans.

The only real protection that Jews in Europe had before 1938 was that every country, other than Germany, had the same incompetent governments that they have today.

Just the facts, please

 It is so hard to believe that I refuse to comment on it.  Nearly every Japanese now believes that President Obama is the rudest American president in history.

To make a statement "nearly every Japanese" is not an exaggeration.  The Japanese often have opinions that are held by 96% of the population. It is a very homogeous society.

The Prime Minister of Japan was given ten minutes to talk to President Obama, last week, and only Obama talked during the ten minutes.  A grave insult, especially since the Prime Minister, Hatoyama, a Leftist like Obama, just recently defeated the 60 year dominant majority LDP party by a large margin.

Then the WaPost reported Obama insiders called Hatoyama "loopy".

Hatoyama's Japanese supporters, like Obama's supporters, had hoped for a new and better Japan-America relationship.

It is no longer a relationship. Its a relationshit.

Disturbing book

I have been disturbed ever since I finished reading B.R. Myers' The Cleanest Race: How North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters.

 * I'm disturbed because I have never, ever, been given as reliable and accurate a picture of who the North Koreans are.  There is no question that Myers is right on point with his well documented and illustrated book.  North Korea is not a communist puppet state, it is a racist fantasy land.  

The North Koreans believe they are superior beings because they are clean and child like.  Their leader (one of three Kims), whom they love as a parent, protects them from the outside world that wants to destroy them, particularly from ugly long-skinny nosed rapist-torturing-Americans who are run by Jews. They believe that their fellow Koreans in the South want to be governed by the North but are being manipulated and restrained by the Americans who are also destroying their Korean racial purity.

There is a whole history that goes with this, all of which is preposterous.  Exposure to outside radio and DVDs has not changed a thing in the past decade.  The North Koreans are proud that they lied to Jimmy Carter and the world about creating a nuclear arsenal and proud of forcing Bill Clinton to bow down to the North's power.

 * I'm disturbed because I have been forced to remember that every nation and every peoples has lived similar propaganda lies. The French believe that General De Gaulle liberated France from Germany in WWII, when he in fact caused the death of many allies by his intransigence and he was a serious burden on the allies who liberated France with no help from fatuous, incompetent De Gaulle.  

All of Europe lives with lies about Jews and believes a putrid stream of outrageous lies from their news media about Israel.

America has lived 150 years with big lies about the Civil War and carpet baggers; the South still believes the war was not about slavery.  Americans believe in the Kennedy Camelot myth when the truth is JFK was the most divisive President until Barack Obama came smoking and apologizing along.

National lies and false histories are widespread, I simply never knew the story of North Korea. I'm sure the U.S State Department pays no attention to what is really going on there and has its own fantasies about the world.

The mystery of Japanese veggies

 I have bad news for people who want to know why Japanese veggies are the best in the world and why they are many time better than the best in American farmer's markets. We already know why the fruit is so good; each fruit sprout is wrapped in paper while it grows.

The bad news on why Japanese veggies are so great is that the most fanatic home-grown-organic garden can never duplicate what Japanese farmers do on a large scale.

The information comes from my friend of 30 years, Murayama san, who has been head of the Japanese Organic Farmers Association for decades and on the boards of every major international organic farm organization. He and his brother created the largest organic farm in Japan and he still farms (his wife does most of the work).

 When the Japanese are ready to expand a farm, they prepare the soil for 10 years with intense composting, no growing.  The compost is made from local roughage and the excrement of the humans and animals that eat from the local farm.  Nothing is planted until the 11th year.  For the next ten years the amount of added compost is reduced annually until in year 20, and from there on, no compost is added.  

One key ingredient, used in Japan and a very few places in the world, is local human waste (from family septic tanks) which is carefully treated and added to the compost.  Called 'night soil'.  

The only semblance of a theory about this highly local growth-regeneration farming practice is that it aims to: create and maintain a local and stable micro-organism world to nourish the vegetable crops; and it assumes that underground water-flows and rain include a significant volume of nutrients.

For the 'local/organic/foodie' crowd this is going to be hard to replicate.  The whole methodology has been discussed at international meetings on agriculture and a few Japanese are showing farmers from other regions how to duplicate it.

Why is it hard to throw out books

 I've asked many friends that question. There are a number of answers. I only buy one explanation.

I see that for people who have books, it is harder to reduce the number of books, than any other possession. People are more likely to die with a big book collection than anything comparable. The exceptions to this statement are women's shoes, coin/stamp collections, family pictures and bonsai.

I think the reason is that books, because they exist only as a part of the mind, are a more central part of identity than most other things. Part of the mind is a key element. While books are good as weights to flatten a wet drawing, as door stops and to use as a booster seat, they really have no function except as they have been read, known about or in some other way processed by the mind.

It is this mind connection of books that helps them be so integral to identity. The presence of books, books in a book collection is a way to make visible a uniquely human attribute: the human mind. For people who have an active mind... this is an important element of identity.

Pope to be tried

 Great news.  Many thanks to Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, we may have a suit filed in Britain under the Universal Jurisdiction Laws to arrest the Pope if he ever goes to Britain.

These laws, which have been used as threats against Israeli leaders, were supposed to be removed from the books by the current British government.  But Jew-hate is so intense i Britain that nothing has been done, so far, but lie and promise and lie. 

It would be nice to have Catholics around the world as angry at Britain for its six hundred year history of Catholic hate, as informed Jews are about Britain's thousand year history of resurgent Jew-hate.   

The Universal Jurisdiction Laws might be taken off the books, thanks to the intelligence and concerns of Dawkins and Hitchens.

Read the lines and in between

 The Japanese newspaper I read daily, Mainichi, (which means daily in Japanese) has the most startling article showing the strains between the U.S. and Japan.

This confirms the many posting I've made that Japan and China are very close and moving closer.  Japan is distancing itself from a totally unreliable U.S. and demanding that nearly all American bases be pulled from Japan and that Japanese financial support of the bases be ended.

Moreover this article says what nearly every pro-commerce commentator in America and around the world has said: "Obama praises our enemies and deliberately offends our strongest allies."  

Wonderful review

 There is a wonderful book review of a book I co-authored in 1985.  This is the first substantial review in 25 years.  My time has come.

The book was A Citizen Legislature, (a proposal based on an earlier article I wrote for the Co-Evolution Quarterly) on the creation of a random legislature. The book is still free online.  I hope to talk the co-author, Chick Callenbach, into putting it online for a low price.

Reminder, the idea is slowly coming to life.  Next years California legislative districts will be apportioned by a randomly selected committee of 15 ordinary citizens. 

Sheer terror

 Because the Puritan ethic, for over four hundred years, has abjured smoking, drinking and dancing, I have never been surprised at the hatred, venom and human indecency directed at smokers and drinkers.

The Puritan effluvium has even penetrated the argument about the effect of smoke on nearby non-smokers and nearby non-drinkers (think .08 alcohol levels).

But I would personally rather sit in a room full of smokers or be on the highway at 3AM on January 1st than to be sitting next to an empty airplane seat and see a 300 pounder coming down the aisle.

There is nothing as unpleasant as sitting for a long time on an airplane next to a person who is far too big for the seat.

I personally know many people, wonderful people, who are gigantic and would be awful seat mates. Seeing one of them come down the aisle would still terrify me.

Is Sweden stuck?

 When Sweden introduced a package of pro commerce reforms, I bought an ETF (exchange traded fund) of Swedish stock in anticipation of rapid Swedish growth.

Now I've sold the Swedish ETF because I have finally realized that it could be a long time before Sweden benefits from anything.  Two reasons: one, as this article points out, more than half of Swedes are on the dole.  Second, as this article points out, people on the dole, barely look for jobs. They certainly don't work hard.

The problem with Sweden and many other advanced socialist nations is that working hard is not something that we know how to re-create.  Maybe it will return slowly.  Too slowly for me as an investor.

See America from outside

I had lunch with my Japanese foreign policy insider.

Four key points: The State Department; Japan the U.S. and China; Korea; and domestic Japan.

 * Looking at the Obama government from abroad, it looks like the State Department bureaucracy was angry from the first days of 2009 when Obama insulted Britain, France, Columbia, our allies in Latin America, Poland and others.  The revenge from the State Dept. insiders was to send Hillary into the mouth of the lion in India where she was openly insulted.  Then sending Obama into massive insults in China and finally, the ultimate insult of meeting with low level Indian and China staffers who explained to Obama, in Copenhagen, that he was a total loser.

* I was right a year and a half ago when I reported that the week long visit of the Chinese premier to Japan signaled a realignment of power in Asia.  Japan and China have become strong allies and the ties will get stronger every year.  China and Japan just announced they have agreed on a common description of their history... a vital source of mutual support in Asia. That alliance grows in strength daily.    

Japan is now telling its former patron, the U.S. to remove most of the U.S. military bases (80 specific sites) starting in Okinawa.  

* South Korea is now left out in the cold.  It has little power to offer China.  It looks forward to the disaster of dealing with the future collapse of North Korea and the subsequent nuke problem.

* Japan has gotten rid of its 55 year rule by the LDP, is totally disenchanted with the corrupt and inept political system. The people don't know what to do. The DSP is in disarray and hasn't the power to make change if it knew what change to make.  Much like America. 

The big theory of everything

My beloved loyal readers, tens of thousands of you, know that several social problems have been perplexing to me. I consider it my personal responsibility to treat these problems as a challenge.

 So, it is with great pride that I have developed a nearly complete Theory of Everything. It is a theory of everything that has been perplexing to me.

At the center of my problems is why all cities vote Democrat. Subsidiary problems deal with Lefty unhappiness, prevalent political mean-spiritedness, common self-hate and widespread anti-Americanism.

The answer is to be found in a thesis developed more than a century ago by Frederick Jackson Turner. What is known at Turner's thesis is that America's vitality and enthusiasm originates in the wide open West. Because Americans could always leave behind the misery, oppression, European class warfare and stultifying city life for the great West, they had energy, vigor and optimism. (I'm giving the Turner thesis a more interesting twist than Turner did.)

So the Turner thesis is my Theory of Everything. Cities are what people run away from, if they can. They run to the suburbs if they are optimistic and vigorous. That leaves the dominant life form in the city: angry, mean-spirited, self-hating, anti-American Democrats. That disproportionately includes trust-funders, non-profit do-gooders, academics, government employees and union supporters.

California has in the past been the land of optimism and innovation. Movies, exuberance, the weakest class consciousness in the country, good schools, freeways and clean non-partisan politics. The last vestiges of the West was when California became the home of the hippies and the San Francisco peninsula became the home of the modern electronic, computer and Internet world. 

Suburbs are generally joyful, enthusiastic, cooperative and Republican. Optimistic people leave the city.  That leaves the cities with the Democratic malaise mongers.

That is my Theory of Everything.

I happen to live in San Francisco, so I  know that there are a few people, like myself, who are optimistic, pro-commerce and pro-American in cities. We are the extreme isolated exceptions. I simply contend that we are the weeds. The rare survivors. We survive in the urban world simply because we love the diverse environment and have the super strength to survive the onslaught of misery around us.

Buy an American nuclear umbrella?

 Would you buy an American nuclear umbrella if you were Saudi Arabia?  Or anyone else?

So far the South Koreans and the Japanese bought American nuclear umbrellas.  They saw nuclear warheads developed by North Korea and missiles tested over Japan.  Not reassuring about the umbrella, especially considering the U.S. had 49 Patriot missiles only miles from the North Korean launch site and three patriots could have probably destroyed one North Korean missile shortly after launch.

Maybe potential American umbrella buyers may have looked at the protection Israel got from American Patriots in 1991.  It looked just like the photo.

With America's current love your enemies and betray your long time friends foreign policy, our announce your pullout from Iraq and Afghanistan in advance policy, our break promises to Poland and Israel policy....  To buy an American nuclear umbrella doesn't look like a wise move.

Concorde was a gov't decision

We are immersed in a regular debate about a government's ability to play a constructive role in the market place.  

The issue surrounds healthcare, subsidies for new industry (think alternative energy) and giant government programs such as NASA, DARPA, IARPA and agriculture.

I want the debate to include the decision by business not to produce the supersonic passenger plane called the Concorde and the European government's decision to produce and operate it.

I saw the inside of the Concorde. The seats were only comfortable for a small Japanese woman (much like the French TGV trains). No person could stand upright in the aisle if they were taller than 5'11”. The tickets cost more than a first class standard airfare. All this for a shorter time on a plane between very few cities.

Most cities were off limits to the Concorde because the noise from breaking the sound barrier was unacceptable.

I doubt the Concorde was ever profitable, over decades of operation.

Here is a wonderful example of a good business decision (don't do it) and a bad government decision.