Pro Commerce

Lead in toys

It is a very common trope of aspiring literary Lefties to raise the question of why poor people don't always vote for Lefties... the demented thesis being that the Left always acts most in favor of the poor people's interests.

It is always a great pleasure for me to point out the absurdity of this Lefty nonsense.

The most recent example of the Left attacking the well being of poor people concerns lead in toys. A Democrat Congress passed a law last year requiring all stores selling second hand toys to test the toys for lead content.

Considering the pricing of second hand toys, usually under a dollar and rarely over $3 it is not possible to test the toys for lead.

Consequence: in my area, second hand stores no longer carry toys. It is standard 'screw the poor people and their children'... every day logic for the Left.

The problem for me is that I think one of the reasons for demented teenagers, particularly black boys, is the total absence of stimulus they experience as infants and children. So in my mind the mindless Left is creating more future criminals by keeping poor people from having more toys.

Also this is an insane issue. The problem of lead levels in blood has never been serious, but the trivial level we had to begin with has been declining at very rapid rates for decades and is now  approaching 0%. It is now unmeasurable.

Oh God, please save us from the enviros and the Lefty do gooders.

Will of the People, part 2

I explained earlier the stunning phenomenon of the “Will of the People”.

Now it is time to question the phenomenon. How does it work?

I see three elements: transmission, resilience and sense of justice.

The issue of transmission is best answered by observing the U.S. in the 1966-68 period. The young population was marching in the streets against the Vietnam War, in favor of sexual freedom and supporting self indulgent drugs. The anti-war message was acceptable to the mass media of the time, TV, local newspapers and national magazines. That was the only message carried by the pervasive (and stultifying) mass media. The public saw the other parts of the message.

Yet Richard Nixon was elected president against the demands of the entire media. I pick this era to show that the medium of transmission for the popular will was not talk radio, the Internet or Fox News. The medium was citizens talking privately to their trusted friends who held the same or similar views and together they reinforced these views on a mass scale. A verbal Samizdat.

Resilience is a stunning characteristic of the Will of the People. Very few subjects in the daily news cycle last for more than a few weeks, whether it is O.J. Simpson, Tiger Woods, Obama criticizing the Cambridge police.... It doesn't matter. As in the case of Governor Gray Davis of California interfering in the Republican primary campaign in January of 2002 to knock out the strongest likely opponent, the Will of the People followed the matter, watched Davis win a general election because of his crooked behavior. Fifteen months later a petition drive was started and 21 months later Davis was recalled. Resilience.

Lastly, the sense of justice. What I see as the consistent and universal and totally surprising element of the Will of the People is that it is a sense of outrage that is evoked whenever the norms of a truly democratic society are violated. It is engaged when a judicial decision countermands the popular government whether legislative or electoral. It is engaged when democratic election processes are foiled. And it occurs when an appointment process is used to subvert or distort an elective process.

Is the pseudo field of political science ever likely to take up this issue? No.

Tom Smith solar

It is hard for me to look a the weekend newspaper editions that devote half a dozen pages to the issue of environmentally conscious homes.

The articles are always breathless and the information they convey invariably claim to be the newest or latest understanding of architectural science.

This from an earlier blog: “Back in the late 1970s I worked on and wrote about the first envelop house that was built by Tom Smith at Lake Tahoe. The house had an envelope of air that circulated around inside it from the basement through the roof rafters. It was entirely self-sufficient in heating and cooling.

Tom went on to build nearly a hundred similar houses in Westchester County New York”.

A totally self-sufficient house in terms of heating and cooling is a simple matter nearly anywhere in the U.S. We just don't learn.

One of the most surprising things I learned in Tom's houses was that the comfortable rooms in the winter were comfortable for one reason: no drafts. What a simple lesson. Tom had learned it early on. A room that was comfortable at 70 degrees with ordinary air movement was comfortable at 65 degrees with no drafts.

Really simple, like everything else in eco-architecture, but too hard to pass on.

Wars of commerce

The first combination of a post Civil War Democrat president and Democrat Congress entered more wars than any previous American government. See Woodrow Wilson's wars (go to 'Other foreign affairs').

Now the first veto proof Democrat president and Congress have embarked on a variety of commercial wars. Against Japan (retaliation for US anti-dumping nightmare), against South Korea and Columbia (both have trade treaties the U.S. won't sign), against Europe (over WTO rulings against the U.S.), Canada and Mexico over NAFTA defaults by the U.S.

This looks like more commercial wars than I've seen before. The Democratic Party is controlled by unions, which is a disaster for everyone on the planet who benefits from international trade.

Definition of a Mexican

A Mexican, stereotypically, is a person who leaves a socialist country because it is poor, dangerous, restrictive and hopeless. When he or she finally becomes an American he votes for the American version of socialism (80% of Mexicans in California vote Democrat).

You may have to remember that all major businesses in Mexico are owned by the government, which was the PRI, a socialist party, for 100 years. The current reform government has changed very little. Mexico is a third world socialist country where 20% of the people have left in the past 15 years at the risk of their life to be illegals in the U.S.

If you want final confirmation, watch our own Mexican TV: Univision.  The happy home of anti-American Marxism right here in the USA.

Mexicans are not inherently socialists... they vote majority Republican in Texas and they voted nearly 90% against gay marriage in California.

I use the word Mexican rather than Latino.

All of Latin America is not a waste basket like Mexico. Chile and Columbia have lifted themselves out of third world poverty with support for commerce and Brazil is making a few positive moves.

Had you seen the world this clearly before?

Apple joins telecom

You may already know that many big urban areas are a nightmare for mobile phone companies to install cell tower transmitters. The environmentalist-assisted paranoid residents think the cell transmitters are harmful (see the facts here).

San Francisco has a new wave of cell permits underway. The big cell tower users are slogging through the arrogant stupidity of local politics, but a new force has joined them.

Google and Apple have told the mayor and political powers that they intend to move employment out of San Francisco if the City doesn't create a rational cell tower policy.

What is interesting is not Google, who's importance in mobile phones was evident weeks ago when Google joined with Verizon to create a new 'hands-off-cell-phones' policy in Congress and before the FCC (the hands-off policy will win), because Google sees its future in Android.

What is interesting is to see that Apple also sees its future in mobile phones AND is making political noises in that arena too.

Vancouver, Washington

Vancouver Washington is just across the Columbia River from Portland Oregon.

In the past half year, Portland and Oregon have become union controlled tax-and-spend-on-government-wages-and-pensions political domains.

Vancouver and Washington are tax havens.

So when I called a tech rep at the company of a new hardware gift I recently got, we got to chatting while some software downloaded.

He and his company had recently moved to Vancouver from Portland because of the beneficial tax differential.

This is for all you readers who doubt the impact of tax increases. If the differential is between close and similar political jurisdictions, all people and business that can move quickly will do so. If the differential is not so great, and/or the distance is greater... the movement will be slower. Eventually nearly everyone and every business will move.

The idiots in San Francisco politics, and most of my fellow citizens, can't see that the taxes and other City penalties have driven EVERY single big business founded in San Francisco to move to Contra Costa (some moved to other states) over a few decades since the 1960s.

Taxes are part of reality to businesses, not part of an ideological debate.

Union housing

I have included two photos that come from different periods in San Francisco construction history.

The first photo describes standard houses in the period before WWII when the only people who could buy a house where well to do people who could come up with 50% of the price of a house (mortgages started out at 25% of the house appraisal and slowly moved up to 50% by the 1930s. Nearly all people who could buy a house were, self employed, business owners or managers.

The second photo describes homes built after WWII when mortgages were more commonly given to salaried workers for 90% of appraised value. In San Francisco these were predominantly union workers who had nearly lifetime jobs with high salaries. This style house is appropriately called 'union housing', the housing above is 'upper income' housing.

Which do you prefer? Have unions really had a beneficial effect on our society?

I lived to see it

When I was a boy of 14, I had figured out the issues of god and creation pretty much the way Baruch Spinoza had, 400 years earlier.

This was also the time when nuclear physics and cosmology were coming together to understand the galactic red shift as evidence of a big bang theory.

To me, the point origin of the universe sounded too much like Judeo-Christian theology (really just Judeo, because Christianity doesn't have its own cosmology).

I looked forward to the day when the Big Bang Theory would be displaced by Hindu or Daoist theology. I didn't expect to see that day.

But it arrived. A Chinese scholar (Wun-Yi Shu at the National Tsing Hua University in Taiwan) has demonstrated that because time, space and gravity are mathematically connected, the universe could be expanding and contracting over time and we would not be able to detect it. Almost pure Daoist cosmology.

Three cheers.

Childhood leukemia

I've known several doctors and medical professionals in my life who worked with terminal childhood leukemia patients. I always had great regard for the kindness and compassion of these people.

In talking to a married couple who are young doctors they gave me the astounding good news. Better than 75% of childhood leukemia patients are now successfully treated and never have a recurrence.

Nothing has changed about the slash and burn agony of chemo and radiation used to destroy the bone marrow white cell generators, it is the successful recovery of the marrow that has made the historic difference. Great.

The sex question

Cute story.

In the early 1980s I was a celebrity in Sweden for creating the program that generated over 4,000 new businesses. I was given an honorary dinner and seated next to the woman who was head of Swedish education. She asked me for my comments on education.

I said that education had failed me. Every year from age 9 to 12,  I was told that my questions would be answered in school in the next grade. They never were.

I had two questions: 'what is sex?' and 'why are people so mean to each other?'

I've recently come up with an answer that would satisfy a young person on the first question and it would be accurate:

'Sex begins with you. You must first be able to satisfy your own sexual desires by yourself. For the rest of your life you will be able to explore how to have other people join you in your self satisfaction. Most often by helping them to satisfy themselves'.

The woman sitting next to meet in Sweden turned to the person on her other side to continue the dinner conversation.

American expats

I don't know if anyone has pointed it out before but it seems to me that American expats are a major source of anti-Americanism.

I'm not just talking about the Vietnam war resisters who went to Canada and have derided America ever since. I'm talking about expat Americans everywhere who spew a never ending stream of venom about America.

I remember 40 continuous years of idle expat discussions, cocktail parties and dinner parties where Americans are the first and most vocal to express hate for Nixon, Reagan, George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh.. the list is endless and the patois is pure hate-America Liberalism.

The startling thing about this 40 years of venom that I've lived with is that it encourages nationals of other countries to feel safe spewing the same anti-American venom.

Is there a solution to expats bad-mouthing? The only thing I can think of is to get some diversity out to the world of expats. Maybe we could convince Rupert Murdoch to create a global version of Fox News.

Cloudy weather in San Francisco

We have had a month and a half of unseasonably cloudy weather in San Francisco.

I've begun hearing the suggestion that the City is cursed for its terrible politics. The list of people who are cursing the City is long and that has become a game.

People who are cursing San Francisco:

poor people who can't live here because stores they shop in are banned like WalMart, Target, Home Depot and Applebees;

people who smoke who are banned from every possible venue including outdoor beaches, parks and golf courses; stores are rapidly being banned from selling cigarettes.

people who own cars and want to buy or rent living space because the City limits garage space to a small fraction of dwelling units;

shoppers who are banned from using durable plastic bags at grocery stores;

former tourists who loved San Francisco but won't return because abundant homeless beggars are frightening;

emergency care workers who quit ambulance, fire and hospital work because foul smelling, perpetual bums are the dominant users of emergency services;

hundreds of thousands of workers who saw their corporations, founded in San Francisco, driven out of the city; over 50 the past years;

The list is endless, but we all seem to enjoy putting our pet complaint on the list.

FDR syndrome

A while back, I used the phrase FDR Syndrome to describe the current very high unemployment malaise.

FDR syndrome arises from such great industrial uncertainty that businesses are unwilling to make investment in permanent employment and related expansion.

We are really in that mess now and our current mess is what probably validates this historically based description of an economic reality.

My observation is not based on a general hostility to Democratic Party polices, it is based on my forty years of experience advising businesses of all sorts and thinking about their issues. Small businesses can grow in any environment because their context is usually immediate. (Right now they are having trouble getting credit). The problem is large businesses who need a long timeline of pay-off to justify investment.

That is the current dilemma of large businesses. Between ObamaCare, pork-stimulus and the Dodd-Frank financial legislation, there are more than 4,500 pages of law. A lot of uncertainty to swallow at one time.

Tattoos and cowardice again

In an earlier blog I simply pointed out the obvious, that tattoos have migrated from macho men to a giant class of cowards. I get an endless stream of comments, on that blog, that has led me to two thoughts.

First, the macho crowd that has always gotten tattoos, soldiers, sailors, merchant marine, prisoners and circus types, are feeling squeamish when they are surrounded by the modern day cowards who are wearing tattoos. These traditionally macho people are writing to get reassurance that they are still macho.

Yes you are. Especially our soldiers in the Middle East who get “Infidel“ tattooed on their chest.

Second, I'm not sure we know what macho is in our modern urban society. I see it on occasion.

The situation is a belligerent out-of-control individual in a public place who is scaring or threatening innocent bystanders, often women and old folk.

I personally intervene, because I am macho and proud of it (I have no tattoos). I'm also careful about how I handle the situation. I am always aware of who else joins me in protecting or trying to protect the innocent and vulnerable. These are other macho people. Usually they are men, and usually they look like responsible members of our society, based on clothing.

It is often, the people who don't step forward to help, who have tattoos these days.

Jews have enemies

In reading a recent book, Start-up Nation, the authors give appropriate credit to the Israeli Army as the source of national-political, commercial, social and entrepreneurial success.

The IDF is based on a  near 100% draft. The IDF trained the similar Singapore Army. Many other nations, South Korea, Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden have 100% service armies with reserves....yet none of these other armies produce the spectacular social and economic results the IDF generates for Israel.

In most other armies the draftees spend their time doing irrelevant training, shuffling papers and sitting on their asses. That is why I title this blog Jews have enemies. It is the presence of many, serious (partially insane) and dangerous neighboring enemies that makes the IDF so powerful, vital and effective.

Maybe the tired old adage that the enemies of the Jews have made the Jews so successful has some merit. The problem with such a thesis is that surrounding enemies haven't had such an effect on the Rom people.

Lowes again

I complained in an earlier blog about Lowes bad pricing.

I think Lowes is spectacular on product selection, staff training and quality. However, somewhere in the corporate structure there is a serious integrity mess.

My local Lowes has big signs $97 to install carpeting in your whole house. No asterisks, just a “see staff for complete details”.

Turns out, when you buy carpet and installation there are two exceptions. Stairs are not included and you pay for carpet tack strips.

Damn it. Lowes must have some top level employees who came from a third world country. Sure, in Egypt, Laos, Malaysia the man delivering the carpet will tell you you have to pay extra because his two brothers came along to help him... but in the U.S. We don't add on extra charges in a sneaky manner.

Lowes needs help in the realm of ethics and marketing. Lots of help.

Summary of blogs Aug. 1st to 15th

These are my blog highlights, summarized on the 1st and 15th of the month.

The most recent blog includes one of my core ideas, that Islam is not our current enemy.  Our long term enemy,of which Islam is a subset, from the founding of our country unto far in the future is tribalism.

There are several blogs on the endurance of social movements and the unexpected directions they take.

I cover the realm of millenarianism which includes modern Liberalism.

I cover the half century of views on capital punishment.

All of which leads to my view that, in California, the Modern Tea Party will converge with the anti-gay marriage movement to create the perfect political storm.

We should all be glad we didn't become economists.  No one else seems to have pointed it out, but modern macro economics has fallen apart.

His middle name

The wonderful story of the Emperor Has No Clothes has a particularly poignant message. The message is that only a complete outsider is authorized to make reasonable comments about popular society. Only a child, in the case of the naked emperor story, can be candid because everyone else lives under an acknowledged cloud of common accepted blindness.

Please give me the latitude we would give a child about social convention. I heard that President Obama told an Israeli television station, in answer to the question of why Israeli's distrust him so much, that it is probably because of his middle name.

I've seen and read the remarks, he is not trying to be funny. He believes it.

The more I try to contemplate how any responsible person could make such a statement the more I wonder if our president is deranged. I feel like the child observing the naked emperor. No one else is suggesting such a serious problem,

When Jack Kennedy was president I was privy to the leak that he and his brother Bobby were fucking-up a storm. One of the men sending the brothers recommended women, was a political acquaintance of mine. After Bobby was murdered, by a Palestinian, I met two women who each personally verified the story.

I never got the report on JFKs heavy daily dose of pain killer.  It came out decades later.

But I'm getting no such leaks from the current White House. Let me be a child on this call.

Do Muslims?

Islam is big in the news lately because of a proposed mosque in lower Manhattan and a fiery speech by Newt Gingrich.

I'd like to state my position. Islam is not the problem.

There are Muslims in many areas from Kosovo to India to Johor Bahru (next to Singapore) to Timbuktu (Mali) who are peaceful and sympathetic to the U.S. We have Muslim Kurds who love the U.S. and Israel.

Defining our enemies as Islamists doesn't improve the distinction. We have the Shia/Sunni divide with no religious groups on both sides.

Our current enemies at the moment are Arabs, Persians and Afghans with very little in common. The only commonality that I see is tribalism.

I personally believe we are fighting all tribal people in the world. They like tribal life. We in many guises disrupt their lives, often with our good intentions (clinics, roads, electricity).

Tribal people do not like our disruptions to their stable meaningful lives. The dislike turns to resentment, then resistance and when we finally provide military training and weapons to tribal peoples, as we often do, it all turns to terrorism and warfare against us,

This has happened since our founding days with many of the tribes in the Americas. It has continued uninterrupted all over the world, most recently in Guatemala, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Afghanistan and in Vietnam. We are not the only targets; the Wiegers are targeting the Chinese.

We may have to learn to leave tribal people alone; lest the battle continue for centuries.

Waters and Rangel

I see a number of black leaders and spokespeople supporting Congressmembers Rangel and Waters because they are black.

There are two arguments used in their defense. One is that they are being picked on because they are black, that they are held to a higher standard. The problem with this argument is that because it is blatantly untrue (Democrats are the sole force against both of them) it is a slander on the many fine black politicians including such greats as Willie Brown, Tom Bradley and Edward Brooke.

Two is the argument that many people have behaved in much worse ways than Rangel or Waters, especially in big corporations. That argument doesn't work either. Everyone else, in this country, but serving members of Congress, is subject to criminal and civil laws.

Because of that exclusion alone, Congressmembers should be subject to forceful ethics standards. Out with them both.

Woe to economists

Economists must be having a rough time these days... if they are honest with themselves.

The Phillips curve turns out to be a farce.  It was the curve showing inflation and unemployment rates moving in parallel.  Not now... no way.

Keynes macro models failed badly both in Japan in the 1990’s and the U.S. where the Keynes stimulus equation predicted a reduced unemployment to 8% but after vast stimulus it came in above 10%.

Going off the gold standard was suppose to help keep economies more independent.  All markets on the planet have been in minute to minute sync for the last 15 years.

Deflation is  supposed to be a negative ruling force.  But GDPs have been growing despite the absence of a model showing the connection.  

Japan has an extreme debt to GDP ratio but the yen is the strongest currency in the world.

My favorite: after P. Krugman ( he became a political hack) claimed the geo-political nature of economic engines and got a Nobel prize, many non-geographic industries have emerged: computers, the Internet, apps, TV news, cable and satellite systems.

Woe to be an economist.

Buddhism and gambling

I've given a Buddhist universal dharma talk a long time ago.

There is not a lot new on this subject... until I had a recent revelation.

When you have just done an extraordinary thing in gambling, say ten heads in a row, you have to ask yourself the question, what are the odds of throwing another heads.

Any statistician will tell you the odds are 50-50, but you know that the odds of ten in a row must be a thousand to one, so the odds of another heads must be consistent with your good luck.

This is a good point to get some Buddhist instruction. You are at an immediate moment in time and at an infinitesimal place in the universe.  The string of 11 heads in a row is happening millions of times right now in a million places.  Don't expect it to be right where you are right now.

You are right now, right here and that is the only fact that you can know.

Heartsick

I can't write a blog today.  I am heartsick.

I read a long article by Joel Kotkin, the most brilliant social analyst of our time, a man who's basic study is urban/suburban development. He appreciates suburbs, business and real Americans.

Kotkin accurately describes the desperate decline that has savaged California.  It is largely the consequence of the end of non-partisan politics in 1959, the rise of government unions, the new  religious-environmentalism and the associated anti-business demagoguery.

It is very disheartening.  Read it, forget me today.

Could it be price?

In the battle between publishers of conventional books and epublishing, the conventional publishers are losing and may have permanently lost.

I would like to offer my opinion. Conventional book publishers are stuck in a mold that is moldy.

When I offered to let Random House publish my Seven Laws of Money (I had several publishers bidding for the rights) I required that the paperback edition come out at the same time as the hardcover. Usually the hardcover comes out a year earlier forcing up to 15,000 copies on libraries for some high demand books.

We immediately sold 20,000 paperbacks in the first two months while the 2,000 hardcover copies that were printed took a year to sell. The book still sells, forty years later.

Sarah Palin's book was sold at WalMart in hardcover for $10. Well over a million copies, immediately.

In my opinion all the options when lined up at the price most likely to sell the most copies would have ebooks between $5 and $8, paper (called trade in the trade) between $9 and $14, and hardcover $14 to $17.

Right now the market is way off the target prices that I think would sell the most books at the most revenue.

A perfect storm

I pointed out in the last blog that the Federal Court ruling overriding the vote of the California electorate may result in a public reaction.

This decision has come at the same time as the Modern Tea Party has come to life in a case where the Congress has passed important legislation that the people reject (ObamaCare).

I suspect that the combination of the two could result in a perfect storm. The California Republicans for Senator, Governor, Lt. Governor, and Attorney General could sweep the election at a time where one major issue alone would see only one or two Republicans winning.

My logic is simple, maybe naïve.

The Modern Tea Party is focused in California, largely on economic issues, a hopeless State budget deficit and high progressive taxes. The issue of gay marriage will not lose the Tea Party supporters many votes.

The anti-gay marriage voters include a high proportion of core Democrat voters, Mexicans, Catholics and evangelicals. These people could very well vote Republican on a issue that strongly arouses them.

The combination of Modern Tea Partiers and anti-gay marriage religious Democrats could be a perfect storm.

Will of the people

As a San Franciscan, deeply tied to the gay community of the Castro, I can not help but examine Judge Walker's decision Wednesday about gay marriage.

My interest deals with the social consequences of a court decision to override the second vote of the people on the gay marriage issue.

I am immediately struck by the way my life has been shaped by previous instances of a division between the public's opinion and our government's actions.

The first instance was the Brown v Board of Education case. The Court decision had no immediate impact because it was part of a long term trend to give full civil rights to blacks. The impact came when Federal District courts directed active integration measures in urban schools.

I was an activist who helped plan and explain to San Francisco parents what school integration by busing meant. I saw the hatred of mothers who wanted nothing to do with their children being bused to an integrated school.

 Over the next decade the majority of white families with children moved out of San Francisco. The public school system has been an inadequate shambles for the past forty-five years as a direct result of forced public school integration.

I saw the executive branch, elected by a wide popular majority (Nixon's second term) face a vehement urban population that wanted out of the Vietnam War. The urban population elected a Congress that committed patricide on the president and deliberately lost a war that had already been won on the ground and in a peace treaty. Millions of Cambodians died as a result.

I saw a U.S. Supreme Court establish a right of women to an abortion, after a steady progression of states (17 major states) had already made abortion legal. Consequence: a political issue that lasted more than 30 years and created anger and acrimony in millions of homes and shaped many elections.

I saw Rose Bird put on the California Supreme Court, express her personal opposition to the death penalty ( not reflected in her court decisions) and saw the citizens rise up and throw her out (1986 by 67%) along with two other justices (one was a friend of mine).

I saw a California governor, Gray Davis, a Democrat, actively meddle in the the Republican primary to get himself an easier opponent in the general election. A year later Davis was recalled by the voters angry at his thwarting the will of the people.

The list goes on. But I hope my readers get the point. The pro-gay marriage decision by a Federal judge, Vaughn Walker, overriding two public elections will result in serious and meaningful public reactions.

Compassion and crowds

I confess to being baffled by a phenomenon that is very hurtful: good individual people when in an organized crowd can be social monsters.

How is this possible?

Nurses, firemen, ambulance drivers, and special education teachers are compassionate as individuals. But their unions harm the society around them openly and regularly.

Nurses union members regularly sabotage hospitals prior to a strike, fireman pass laws to keep their stations open despite having three times more stations than safety requires.

All these compassionate unions go out of their way to vote for state and federal legislation that impedes business, stifles employment, retards community development and supports outmoded socialist ideology.

Why?

Capital punishment

A recent local California survey of public opinion found that Californians are in favor of capital punishment. They have been since the first poll on the subject in 1956. The support has always been in the 70 to 80% range.

What does this mean?

It means that on social issues where most people assume that there is a long run tide to social liberalism, most people are wrong.

We are not becoming more like Europe. Californians are sticking to the anti-European position on capital punishment for over a half century.

If you think that gay marriage is a certainty over time, look again.

The public has moved against the social liberalism on abortion over a forty year period. About the same percentage of people maintain that abortion should be a legal right but we have gone from 30% who wouldn't consider it for themselves in 1975 to over 60% who wouldn't consider it today.

Swedes and Danes who were the stars of porn movies in the 1970s are not to be found at all on the modern Internet porn videos.

Labor unions are, of course, disappearing at a high rate.

Social liberalism is not a one way street.

Millenarianism

The Left is just like the Millerites, the Seventh Day Adventists, the Shakers, the Zealots, Diggers, Levellers, and the Jehovah's Witnesses.

Some of my readers wish I would stick only to business.  But I came to have a unique overview of business (a) because I consulted with several thousand businesses and (b) because I spent nine years producing the national public radio program Social Thought.  The two go together.

My interest in the structure of institutions (social thought) applies to many areas.

Many friends ask me why the Left hasn't died out; the Leftist ideology was tested and failed in the 20th Century.  Nothing could be more obvious than the recent G8 conference where our Leftist ideological American president told the leaders of other industrial nations to follow failed Keynesian policy and increase deficit spending.... and 20 other leaders ignored him.

The sorry fact is that movements have momentum.  I gave examples, in the first sentence, of the various millenarian movements that predicted the end of the earth, and when it didn't happen they survived for decades or in many cases, for a few centuries after their ideology had failed.

The Left has spent a century trying to show that citizens can be changed by appropriate government policy.  Having killed a few hundred million people, they have still failed.

Like the many failed millenarian religions, the Left can survive for a century on a failed ideology.

Every time somebody tries to hand you a Watchtower remember the Left... we are stuck with their blind ideology for several more generations.

Call me:

Racist, anti-Semite, McCarthyite, NeoCon, communist, fascist, Nazi, scallywag, dolt, beaner, misanthrope, misogynist or scab.

At this point I believe all of these epithets have been so frequently used and misused that they carry little or no emotional baggage.

Racist has been so misused by liars like Al Sharpton and old farts like the NAA of Colored People when they have nothing intelligent to say, that it is now a farce; it has lost the valuable sting it once had.  It is used with a blindness that only President Obama could display when he told Israeli's that the reason they distrust him is because his middle name is Hussein. (What an arrogant self-centered dolt.)

I no longer use anti-Semite for the same reason, toothless phrase.  I call the same phenomenon the more accurate Jew-hate.