Pro Commerce

My prerogatives

One of my prerogatives is to turn a response to a comment into a full scale blog.

One of my beloved readers was having trouble understanding the current Obama Jew-hate-fest regarding a neighborhood in Jerusalem, so I offer the following analogy:

The President of Mexico declares that California is Mexican (claiming they never signed a peace treaty with the U.S.) and San Francisco is the new capitol of Norte California. All gays are to leave California and especially the future capital: San Francisco.

There will be no negotiation with the Gays because they and their friends are liars, who claim to have been killed by the Nazis; they are "a gutter" people, they try to rule the world from their control of the film, clothing, restaurant, fashion and finance industries. Mexico runs national TV children's programs and public education that explains why gays are an "abomination".

Mexico demands that no new gays be permitted into California and gays in San Francisco must not build or rent new apartments. All of California belongs to Mexico. The "California gringos" are an occupation army and gays in particular are oppressing Mexicans and putting them in jail and prisons disproportionately.
 There are two other countries in this scenario. Venezuela, that hates Gays even more publicly than Mexico and is developing nuclear weapons, on the record, to threaten San Francisco and California. Venezuela already has long range missiles.

There is China that has become a neutral broker in the Mexico-Gay battle because many Chinese live in San Francisco, and China needs Mexican and Venezuelan oil.

The new Prime Minister of China (BHO) announces on taking office that both the Mexicans and the Gays have equal justice in their arguments. He does nothing to stop Venezuela from building nuclear weapons, he merely wants to be "engaged" with Venezuela. The new Prime Minister of China agrees with Mexico that no new gays should be permitted into California. 

One year after taking office the Prime Minister of China (BHO) notices that gays are buying and renting apartments East of Dolores St, near the Mission District and "condemns" the gays. He demands that no gays buy or move East of Dolores St. in the Castro.

Do you understand the Obama Israel bashing now?

Helping green

My readers know that when I talk about helping green I sure as hell don't mean the dead-end ecology green, I mean the Green revolution in Iran.

 We have a president who, by the definition of the U.S. Constitution (Article 2, section 4) "shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and conviction of, Treason....."

Treason is helping our enemies.  President Obama has directly helped our sworn enemies: the  presidente of Venezuela, the ruling class in Honduras, the rulers of Iran, the tyrants of Syria, Gaza who openly express hatred of us and the unelected prime minister of the West Bank, the ruler of North Korea and Hezbollah. Treason is the pervasive foreign policy of this administration.

I particularly want to single our President's treason in Iran where the Iranian rulers, daily, excoriate and threaten America and have sent arms to kill our troops in Iraq. 

The Obama administration has been treasonous in neglecting the Green revolution in Iran.  From the day, last year when Iranians rose up against the rulers who spew venom on America, the President should have supported the revolution.  He didn't.  He waited, waited and waited.....and finally issued a mild press release to the NYTimes.

The Iranian rulers have followed the model of Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Castro, most rulers in Arabia and every American hating tyrant for 80 years: they cut off the communication tools of the Green revolution. 

America should have been in the air with flying transceivers. Iraq is only 230 miles from Tehran.  Two drone planes can fly at 50,000 feet perpetually and that altitude is in line of sight of telephone and radio transmission to and from Tehran.  We can get 1,000 appropriate phones to leaders of the Green revolution in one week. 

We should be doing that now, helping the Green leaders organize against tyranny, despite a year of treason. 

Long tradition of Lefty bitterness

  I owe a great debt to Fred Siegel for reminding me that the truly powerful-clear thinker has always been rare on the American scene*. The clear head (Bernard DeVoto) was singular and true while the bitter Lefty intellectual has always been a mob, filled with anger, Euro-love, and NPR style self-hate. 

The Lefty mob has always been the cacophony of mean voices, a one note tantrum with a discordant chorus in the media and academe. This article by Siegel is worth buying the magazine for.

In the first fifty years of the 20th Century, the Lefty tantrum was spent full time decrying the "Puritan/Pioneer" ignorant masses.  That was the uniform Lefty intellectual analysis and expression of contempt for Americans.

Now that one of these hated beasts is a brilliant, beautiful, female, competent political candidate, the modern Left has gone, literally, insane.

*Fortunately, much more common today.

Right wing and Sarah are dangerous

How in the world can anyone explain the hysterical anger that Lefties have toward Sarah Palin, the “Rightwing” and have in the past had for George Bush and Dick Cheney. I refuse to demonstrate the intense level of this Lefty hatred and the nearly complete absence of such venom in the rest of our society. It is either self-evident or you are never going to accept it.

I offer a simple suggestion to explain the hysterical anger. My suggestion has two parts: (1) ideology and (2) worldview.

As the father of Social Sorting, I call on my own discovery about human self categorization as part one of this suggestion.

People who are attracted to a highly structured life, with little ambiguity and much stability find the world of political ideology a comforting home. These are generally, but not always, attracted to life in the ideological Left. (Patrick Buchanan and Lyndon LaRoche offer similar homes though very tiny.) It is a comforting world. Everyone around you agrees on nearly every subject from, movies, food, and lifestyle to daily talking points that are read in Doonesbury or the Huffington Post.

So suggestion (1) is that the hysterical anger we see around us is a socially occasioned behavioral style that is worn by people who self-select into the ideological Left. They need and have chosen a highly structured world.

Suggestion (2) is that the Left has a great deal to lose if any part of the Lefty worldview is challenged. That near catastrophic risk of loss is the basis for gut wrenching intense hysterical anger.

The Left, more than any other component of society, has a highly structured, fragile and deeply intertwined view of the world. This world view is taught every hour of the day by 92.3% of academia, 97.7% of mainstream media, 91.3% of Hollywood movies and in 98.9% of all conversations among Lefties. Such coherence of attitudes are not found elsewhere in our society; the Left has coherent attitudes toward global warming, using alternative energy, eating organic local foods, how horrible big corporations are, the evil of Wal Mart, unfairness of rich people and on and on and on.

Summary: people who want a comfortable well structured life select the political ideology of the Left. Once inside this political cohort they happily find a finely tuned, deeply intertwined, and very fragile world view. When this volatile, daily reinforced, hourly lived worldview is threatened, the only recourse is hysterical rage and vitriolic anger.

What is one of the things that can generate such anger? A beautiful, athletic, happily married, mother, who was elected governor, loves hunting, is wildly popular throughout the country, able to win TV debates, graduate of a lowly state college, former cheer leader, and holds non-Lefty views.

Museum of flight, 100 years and still wrong

I went to the Museum of Flight in Seattle with my 3.5 year old grandson. 

How can they still get the rudiments of flight so wrong?

As I've pointed out here many times, what we call wind is only an average movement and direction of the air flow in the atmosphere.  The reality is that the air is moving in many different directions at different speeds.  Look at the flight of a butterfly or watch the leaves on a big tree move.

Without this understanding of airflow the Museum of Flight gets several things wrongs.  Birds are seen as the models on which early planes were built.  Which is why they failed so often and so tragically.  Butterflies would have been better models, not storks and cranes that move fast from start to landing.

Without this understanding, the Museum displays several jet packs and several attempts at one man flying platforms.  None are in production or use because air flow is too turbulent and it turns these objects upside-down regularly.  Nothing is said about the high accident rate and similar failure of large Harrier type planes.  To survive these 'jump jets' all take off and land like helicopters, with a glide path and a take-off path to provide momentum and avoid the volatility of the air flow.

The most embarrassing  display is an auto-plane from the late 1940s.  There is no explanation of why this technology was a complete dead end.  People still try to build them.

Get back to basics, Museum of Flight, or change your name.

Disturbing for a soldier

  These two photos are disturbing for a former enlisted soldier..... me. 

There is a website that makes the same point and has many photos of George W. Bush with the troops. Sheer crowd love and it is mutual.

Bush and the troops were convivial, comfortable and close.  

Barak Obama and the troops are as cold and distant as the president himself. (Obama selected this photo). Not an accident.

Sad, very sad.

Harvard and the Ivy League killed her

President Kennedy's father, Joe, was very disturbed that his daughter Rosemary (JFK's sister) was often emotional, temperamental and moody. While Rosemary was not bright she wrote, what we now read, as a credible and self aware diary. Maybe she was 'frisky' a term used in those days.

Joe was a Harvard graduate and he had the highest regard for Harvard and the Ivy League college world.  His friends were all Ivy League. 

So when Joe's friends suggested that a simple surgical procedure by eminent Ivy League professionals would cure Rosemary of her various unseemly mood swings, Joe had no hesitation.  If the brilliant boys at Harvard and Yale say they can cure Rosemary, then cure her we must.

So Joe arranged for Rosemary to have a lobotomy at age 23 in 1941, performed by doctors Watts and Freeman, both graduates of Yale. Freeman was so preeminent that he became president of the AMA.

You don't want to read about the surgery. While Jimmy Watts mushed around in her brain with an ice pick, Walt Freeman asked questions to gauge the degree and area of damage.  After the surgery Rosemary was incontinent and had the intelligence of an infant, until she died 64 years later.

So much for trusting the Harvard crowd.  Anyone who thinks that an Ivy League education is now much better deserves to get what Joe gave to Rosemary.

1955

I was thinking about 'the good old days' when I was a teenager.  I almost can't remember how we survived.  Despite all the 'good old days' sentimental emails I get, I remember them differently.

There were a whole series of problems that none of us considered problems.  I had to ask a druggist to show me condoms, they were never displayed.  When I drove between cities I always checked to make sure the spare tire was filled with air.  Changing tires was a ritual everyone knew. If I needed cash I had to stand in line at a bank, which is also what I did to make a deposit.  I carried much more cash than I do now for two reasons: banks were closed most of the day and the week; there were no general purpose credit cards.

If I were going to be late to an event, I had to find a public phone, put in the coins and phone the host or date to say I'd be late. Phone booths often smelled like piss and the vital Yellow pages were ripped or missing.

There was no place to get espresso, there was no national newspaper, certainly no home delivery of the Wall Street Journal, and most information was not on the Internet, it was in the Yellow pages or in the local newspaper.  All political sentiment was Lefty.  My circle of friends were all anti-anti-communist, and ignorant of Stalin's murderous regime, angry at my country for the Sacco-Vanzetti, Hollywood black listing and Rosenberg cases.  We had air raid warnings in school, even though no Soviet airplane could possibly reach the U.S.  Television had only three channels.

There is plenty I have left out.  But 'the good old days' are hard for me to be sentimental about.

How will history remember you?

 I have often commented on the way history will record George W. Bush as the greatest friend of the Jewish people in 3,000 years.

The current imbroglio between Obama and Israel has brought forward several people who think about history like me. The following comes from Yehuda Avner who was in the room in 1975 when Henry Kissinger was negotiating with Yitzhak Rabin over Sinai and they had reached a serious impass:

At the height of the confrontation between the two men, Kissinger told Rabin: “You will be responsible for the destruction of the third Jewish commonwealth,” and Rabin replied, “You will be judged not by American history but by Jewish history.”

I love that.  

As for the current situation, I have an observation.  The first black president of the U.S. sounds and acts too much like Louis Farrakhan to get any appreciation in Jewish history.

 

Pro life choicers

A big surprise for those of us who follow long social trends. There is a shift away from public support for abortions.  

Americans still believe abortions should be legally available, no change there, but on a personal basis they are becoming more opposed to abortions, a rise from 33% anti-abortion in 1996 to 51% today.  

The shift is most surprising because it is occurring among younger people and Protestants.

I have long expressed my opinion on what is happening among my friends and family but not in my blog.  I see three phenomenon occurring simultaneously and interactively.

1. The widespread availability of the morning-after pill has shifted public thought from 'an unfortunate mistake' to ' those idiots' referring to girls who get pregnant out of ignorance or raging hormones.

2. Increased use and effectiveness of ultra-sound and the declining age of surviving preemies.  This moves the needle of 'it is not a human' in the direction of 'no' to abortions.

3. The failure of the pro-abortion feminists to pay attention to the real world around them.  The pro-abortion movement has stuck to 'abortion is a civil right' position which means nothing to Americans and never did.  There is relatively no issue of fairness here (which is what civil rights are about). The pro/anti-abortion issue is strictly moral, based on sympathy for others: 'should a girl or woman have a baby who doesn't want one?'

The pro-abortion movement should have, from the day I started writing letters on the subject in the early 1990's, advertised to young people, teen and pre-teen agers, the availability of the morning-after pill.  A movement that made a genuine effort to prevent pregnancies would have much more credibility today with young people.

The big shift in the past year in attitudes opposed to abortion is due to one thing. The anti-abortion Congressmen are the ones who initially stopped the ObamaHealthCare bill which the overwhelming majority of Americans strongly opposed.  So the anti-abortionists of the year 2009 became the public heroes to many.

Three strong reasons that the pro-abortion movement has lost the support of the majority of Americans. I expect the situation to slowly move closer to the pre-Roe v Wade era with a few major states keeping abortion legal into the second trimester.

'My name is Dick'

How often do you hear that these days?

When I grew up, Richard/Dick was a common name, one of the top four most common male names.

Now I never hear Dick. Never.

So how did a name migrate from common to unacceptable.  I suspect that it is a case where the slang for penis migrated into the daily language and wiped out the common name. 

Do you have any evidence or measures of this?  Do you know any other names that have met the same fate?