Pro Commerce

Not so funny

If it hasn’t crossed your mind that the Democratic party is anti-commerce (and the affirmative action president is anti-Israel), it is time to take note.

Look at the blog in front of your eyes, Pro Commerce.

On the left side, under Links, is a highlighted line: Buy from Amazon.  That no longer works.  I haven’t removed it because I don’t know what happens when we use it.  Maybe it will work some day soon.

The California legislature and governor, 100% the work of Democrats,  prefer to tax retail sales by Amazon....  that’s me in this case, than to reduce state employee pensions or health care by even a fraction of 1%.  That is in the new budget passed a few days ago. They are sacred we are scum.

Thousands of California retail entrepreneurs will be put out of business.  Too bad.

Many of them and many of their family members voted Democrat. I doubt most will see the connection. Few people learn anything after the age 22.

We should all be working for the government and getting much higher wages than are available in the market, and pension and health coverage only available to CEOs of large companies.

I only lose about $600 a year because of the Democratic Party.   I’m not laughing.  I know Jerry Brown, the Gov.  He only did this absurd act because he is a Democrat, not because it is an intelligent thing to do.

Good laugh

The governor of Texas, Rick Perry, suggested that Americans who are on the flotilla to invade Israel should be warned and punished.

“Under federal law, anyone who "prepares a means for, or furnishes the money for, or takes part in, any military or naval expedition" against a friendly country can be fined or jailed for three years. Perry also suggested that Holder prosecute the protesters for providing materials or assistance to a terrorist organization.” (AP)

Three of the Americans planning to invade Israel are close personal friends of our affirmative action president. (Bill Ayres his wife Bernadine Dorn and Alice Walker.)

The idea that a president with no backbone, no leadership ability and a twenty year anti-Jew record would even consider this, is a good laugh.

Marketing a physical invention

I was recently involved in a traditional marketing question, how to market a technically complex and untested electronic product.

I have been in involved in such issues many times in the past.  I have developed a simple rule: shown me the product in a hotel meeting room with no cables or wires attached.   The rule has arisen because I have seen many beautiful demos in laboratories where the product turned out to be irrelevant or imaginary,

For a real product that is actually demonstrable, under my conditions,  it is still hard to believe how long the route is from demonstration to a product on the market.

I saw a flatscreen book at the MIT media Lab in 1993 in demo form.  I was able to buy one, the Sony Reader, 10 years later.  That is how long it takes to get a product ready for market.

It is hard to believe the number of barriers between a brilliant new product demo and a marketable product.  Sometimes large companies with highly advanced research and development divisions can accelerate this process.  But not often.

Polygamy might increase population growth

There is a simple correlation that is overlooked for politically correct reasons.  Countries that have polygamy have high birth rates.

This is an issue because most of the industrial world is facing a declining population.  Virtually every imaginable policy has been tested to increase the birth rate of native born industrial populations. There are many consequences to declining population most of them negative. The worst are the losses of vitality and innovation.

The reason I think polygamy may result in a population increase is that it has traditionally been operational in cases where a man of substance and means is allowed multiple wives.  This should also mean that child rearing is significantly less costly with multiple wives ( no babysitters) and that women who want to have children will opt for polygamy.

Tell me if I’m wrong.

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Two weeks after writing this blog, I read this news article.  An Orthodox Israeli is suggesting polygamy as a way to increase population growth.

Hippie physics

This article in the New York Times reviews a book about the hippie physics world.

A few guys, mostly in North Beach in San Francisco, who claimed that quantum physics and esoteric religion were the same.  They also believed in many science fiction concepts.

Of course I knew all of the players.

They were all first hippies and secondly educated in physics.  I knew and argued with all of them.  In most cases they didn’t know science very well and had no interest in testing their hypotheses. Their physics was mostly religious idolatry.

I did my own experiment in the field of hippie physics.  I introduced a very reputable working physicist (as opposed to the hippies who hung out at coffee shops) from the Stanford Linear Accelerator, to the leading Buddhist teacher in the area.

  I walked with the two of them for days and tried to help them find overlap between their respective domains.  

Both were very honest men, who concluded that there was no genuine overlap of their domains.  One domain was based on technology, testing and empirical observation of the physical world; the other was based on theory, deduction and human observation of humans.  Different bases for intellectual structures.

The hippie physicists  (of the NYTimes article) did not contribute anything useful that I could see.  They just fed their own fantasies and the fantasies of the women they tried to seduce.  A few men too.

Anti-Israel metric

I read an interview with David Mamet in the Financial Times.  It was apparent that the interviewer was the classic British Jew hater.  Mamet didn’t seem to comment on it directly.  But when the article was published Mamet was provoked to comment on the soul deep Jew hate that is British tradition.

The signal to me that the Financial Times interviewer was a run-of-the-mill British Jew hater was his question to Mamet about ‘whether criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic?’

That question is precisely the evidence of a Jew hater, just as the statement that ‘I have black friends’ is evidence of a black bigot.

Why?

Because the OECD, a once reputable European organization,  used the following definition: any one who holds Israel to higher standards than other nations in an anti-Semite.

To me that is a good metric.  It is not possible to criticize Israel under those conditions.

Israel has a better record on 100 significant measures than 170 members of the UN. Israel treats women, gays minorities of every sort, voters, Arabs, non-Jews, neighboring countries, old people and young people, medically needy people, immigrants, blacks, the disabled.... etc. etc. better, than any nation bigger or smaller including Canada.  Additionally, Israel makes more contributions to the well-being of the world, in medical, technical, healthcare and direct emergency response than any other group of humans on the planet. The Israeli army has always done more to protect civilians, in harms way, than any military in history.

So where is the criticism of Israel that is not based on lowering the bar for nearly every other country going to come from?  Nowhere except from a Jew hater.

No bubbles

Among the anti-commerce crowd, the idea of bubbles seems to have become a popular notion.  Since they don’t like commerce they perpetually seek ideas about commerce that are negative.

There are no bubbles.  The most commonly referred to bubble is the so called dot-com bubble of 2000.  It wasn’t a bubble. The NASDAQ rose rapidly for one year and declined just as rapidly over the next year, with a peak in July.  Maybe a roller coaster, an unpleasant one if you had money in it, but not a bubble. It took two years from trough to peak to trough.

The financial crash of 2008 was not a bubble either. it was the financial community confronted with a serious fraud by the US government and two members of Congress, Chris Dodd and Barney Frank.  The underlying cause was the very rapid rise in housing prices based on the federal government bundling decent mortgages, with rotten second mortgages.  When an accounting rule (mark to market) put an end to the fraud stock markets dropped precipitously.

The underlying housing market was not a bubble.  The prices of housing rose steadily for a decade to a peak a year before the financial crash, 2007, and have fallen steadily for the past four years with no bottom in sight.  Steady rise, steady decline no bubble.

The left has created the image of a bubble out of its hostility to commerce.

The most recent market that is described as a potential bubble is college tuition.  College tuition is growing very rapidly and no one in their right mind thinks that a college degree will pay for itself by improved earnings.

That is not a bubble or a potential bubble. That is a government created anomaly.  There is no effective competition with low-cost alternatives from overseas or from technology.  There is a tiny amount of competition from profit making schools but the Democrats are trying to shut that rapidly grown segment down.

In the real world of commerce, there are no bubbles; wildly overinflated markets have to confront competition.  That will come to the academic world as well as the other two insane worlds in the US, healthcare and homebuilding.

Statistical mystery

I have been visiting Japan annually for 40 years.  Over that period, the issue of American obesity has arisen.  With it comes the question of why Japan has so little obesity, maybe 1 out of 30 people,  and why Japanese longevity is so great.  Japanese have a life expectancy of 83 years compared to the American 79. Japanese women average 86 years.

While the average weight of the Japanese is not itself an explanatory variable in terms of lifespan, I realized on my latest trip, that the average is a particularly deceptive number in this instance.

The reason is that the average Japanese weight ignores the great skewness in the data.  From observation and counting, I estimate that 45% of adult women are skinny and 30% of men are skinny.  We are talking all ages. (By skinny,  I mean a BMI of under 20 for the women).

Having such a large population that is skinny is probably the most relevant point to the extended Japanese lifespan.

The two other relevant contributors to extended lifespan are a diet of fish that is probably five times greater than America’s with the associated very low intake of fat,  and a water purity that is incomprehensible.  Nearly all ice the Japanese use is crystal clear.  The 50 m pool I swam in is so clear you can see toes underwater across the pool.

To me the mystery is now solved.

Morality and diversity

This issue is raised in the comments section in an earlier blog.  A wonderful and reliable reader raised the question of whether my claim that diversity, which is generated by commerce, is a moral value.

Consider the  military slaughter of fellow Syrians by the Syrian government (which is ignored by our current affirmative-action president but was not ignored in Libya).  I don’t know the reason we down-play this slaughter, but I do know that Arabs of all sorts are barbaric in their treatment of religious and ethnic differences.  The same is true in China, think Tiananmen Square (where outsiders were brought into staff military brigades).

The beauty and wonder of Beirut, for several centuries, arose because of the population diversity automatically found in an ancient commercial city.  What the Arab world lacks is diversity in cities something commerce generates. Along with diversity comes the moral imperative to treat humans as individuals rather than as tribal or ethnic members.

America’s longest running internal problem has been the unwillingness to treat the original African population as members of our society. It is a form of diversity we have trouble accepting. We have an affirmative action president, a dark skinned figurehead, as a result of that persistent horrible problem.  We will not celebrate the 150th anniversary of the end of the Civil War because this is still a divisive national issue.

My argument that diversity is a moral issue, derives from the consequences of the behavior of humans in an environment with diversity. They are forced to recognize and accept individual differences.

That is the nature of all morality.  Morals are meaningful only as they play out in society.  Think about honesty and the consequences as they play out.  Think about the treatment of others including parents and children, about brutality and self-defense based on moral strictures.  These only play out in a social environment.  Honoring your parents with a shrine while you are in Antarctica is meaningless.   Morals are always about how a particular behavioral attribute plays out in the social environment.  

When I think of a non-diverse society in the American context I always think about suburbs where homogeneity is an important value.  Lawns are cut faithfully, houses painted sensibly and national chain stores thrive.

Diversity is a moral value. A diverse society is one where individuals get to develop and fulfill their personal distinctions.  I argue that that is in fact the  greatest overall moral value of commerce.... individuals get to become fully developed individuals.  No other institution achieves that end.

Affirmative-action president

I was personally alarmed by an article written by Shelby Steele in the Wall Street Journal.  He pointed out that president Obama, in addition to having incumbency on his side in the next election,  has a subtle moral force on his side: he is the first black President.

I believe that that is an accurate and significant consideration for those of us who would like to replace him.  Mr. Obama, running in Democratic primary states lost in any state where there was voting by the electorate but won in states that use a caucus selection system.  To me that says there was a sense of personal obligation that Mr. Obama was able to invoke in caucus delegates but not the electorate.  

I believe this obligation is what we publicly call an affirmative action obligation.  It is the explicit sense, when we meet a person who has some visible disability, that they must be given an extra chance if they appear charming and appealing.  That is the modern public sense of affirmative action.

I see two approaches to use against an affirmative action president.  One is to tag him as a person given extra benefits who has substandard talents but continues to survive despite his substandard talent.  Of course he never was an executive and he has been unable to learn the appropriate skills in three years.

  Second, run a woman against him.  The strongest emotional argument that Americans feel against affirmative action is that it excludes others who are equally worthy of assistance.  That may not be a universal public sensibility but it is the sensibility among a large percentage of women who constitute an important segment of the independent voting block.

Summary: tag the president as an affirmative action byproduct who has failed to live up to his expectations and run a woman against him.

Puritan rudeness

America is a Puritan country.  The Puritan influence is stunning and pervasive.  Puritans were strongly opposed to licentious behavior in public.  They singled out, four hundred years ago, alcohol, smoking, lewd dancing and most music.

There has been absolutely no change in 400 years.   Every generation of politicians, their wives and talking heads complains about the latest dance craze and songs (the words to the song most of the time). The taboos around alcohol are extensive (driving... even for mature people, using under 21, selling in most blue states)  and smoking is virtually a felony.

What most people don’t know is that Puritans never invaded the bedroom and believed in rabbit-like sex. It was biblical pro-creation. What they abhored was the idea that ‘somewhere someone was having fun’.

So, I want to raise the question of whether Americans' Puritan values have made us rude.  The answer to this question can be found in Japan where rudeness is nearly illegal.

Japan, in all the big cities visited by Americans and on public transportation, have voluntarily adopted the American anti-smoking policies.  However,  because smoking with  coffee and alcohol are such a significant pleasure for such a large part of the population there are smoking rooms in nearly all coffee shops and cigarettes are not banned in bars.  

That is what we would find if Puritanism didn’t have a complete disregard for civility.

Let me add, that the Japanese have never accepted the American view that there is such a thing as harm from secondhand smoke.  There isn’t.  One of the simplest statistical design issues is to compare morbidity and mortality rates for married couples where one is a non-smoker.  Such data never supports the absurdity of secondhand smoking as a malefactor.   

This erroneous second hand smoke argument is used to ban smoking on beaches and public parks, usually modified for its blatant absurdity by claiming cigarette butts are a serious problem.

A journalist and a politician come into a bar

A short while back, Congressman Anthony Weiner, was involved in a gross public lie which the journalists in the mainstream pursued halfheartedly while taking the Congressman seriously.  When the journalists and the politician were both discovered to be frauds both ganged-up and blamed Andrew Breitbart a creative conservative blogger.

Both journalists and politicians are self-selected misanthropes.  I am not creating or perpetuating a false stereotype.  Both groups are made up of people who have sorted themselves into these fields based on their personal characteristics.  While a few people in each field are decent and commendable that is not true for the vast majority.

More than a quarter of a century ago I developed the model that I call social sorting that explains how people in a voluntary environment develop groupings that are fairly homogeneous.  

* People are attracted to their occupation because of qualities they have that they believe will be rewarded in those professions.  (The flag).

* There is a screening process that makes sure the individual fits the character of their fellow professionals.  In the case of politicians they need to stand for election and to be elected... to do that they must be egomaniacs. If you’ve been in politics you can verify this.

In the case of journalists they must be left wing and morally corrupt.  Again, you need do no more than pick up the NYTimes or look at PBS.

* Ultimately, membership in either group requires that the member must be comfortable.  Conservatives who are morally upright leave the field of journalism.  Politicians who can’t stand being around other egomaniacs drop out of politics.

In an earlier era when I was a legislative analyst and a campaign manager I was always surprised that entire bars in Sacramento (the capitol of California) could be filled with politicians and journalists completely drunk.  There were hookers and lobbyists in the bars as well, but they weren’t the drunks.

In the case of Andrew Breitbart, he is a man who is both morally honest and deeply concerned about other people neither a journalist nor a politician.... That made him a perfect target for the anger of both journalists and politicians.

I find the Weiner incident good evidence of social sorting.

Visiting friends in Japan

I have been going to Japan virtually every year for 40 years and staying for a month or two.

During those decades I have invited and entertained many friends, family and acquaintances.  It has always made Japan more interesting for me to see the world through the eyes of my associates.

Without being rude to my readers I must point out that Japan is a significantly different culture than America, a culture that is thousands of years old.  While Japan may look like a version of the United States with a slightly shorter people...  that is completely untrue.  Japan is a world of its own; unique, creative and extraordinary.

The people who arrive to visit me who understand the nature of culture and cultural differences are quick to see the radical and bizarre differences in every microscopic vista. Most often artists are the people who are able to see the extraordinary uniqueness of the landscape and social environment around them.  Probably because they have the most open non-ideological perspective on the world.

I have learned a great deal about the world and people as I introduce them to a new culture.  Japan is a wonderful place to enjoy this lesson because it is so immaculately clean, the food is so exquisite, the people are so kind and everything works.

The core lesson that I have learned in this exposure of newness to my associates is that most people can only expand their perceptive boundaries a small distance.  If the boundary is on a large radius it has a large circumference and a great deal can be absorbed.  Conversely a person whose life boundaries have a small radius can absorb much less.

A person’s boundaries of perception in life are generated by their experiences.  A person who has been curious since early childhood has explored everything available, has bravely ventured into new domains. Such a person has a much larger boundary radius and circumference.

Just my experience.

Department store evolution in Japan

In Japan there are a stunning number of first-rate private railroads that originate in an urban center and radiate to the distant suburbs.

Most of these railroads were built by the department store magnates in the early 20th century.  The rails radiate out to stations around which entire suburbs were built.  The railroads generated business for the department stores and this system was effective for many years.

By now most of these suburbs are urban centers themselves and the initial marketing plan is significantly attenuated.

The solution has been for the department-store-railroads to build enormous shopping centers as part of their suburban railroad stations.  The shopping malls are vast, modern, beautiful and stunningly successful.

That is evolution in marketing in a very physical form.

Rove on ‘get even’

Many critics of Karl Rove’s book dismiss it as a ‘get even’ book. 

Yes, Rove does describe many of the vicious and often fantastic attacks on him.  What he does is not ‘get even’.  He precisely describes the errors and fallacies of his critics.  Most often the critics have created an entire fantasy because they are ideologues entirely detached from reality, living in the upper West side New York cocoon, or the Beltway Democratic hate caucus.

When one is attacked by falsehoods and one corrects those attacks that is not ‘get even’. Get even is when you have the journalist fired or sued or beat-up. (Exemplified by what the Obama White House has done to three journalists by locking them out of 'feed' reports.)

Publishing the truth of the story in a book is not getting even for malicious slander published and repeated in millions of media outlets.

I personally did the latter.  A nasty journalist in the '80s working for the Hearst Examiner, at the suggestion of Mayor Feinstein, wrote a four part series attacking my park for drunks.  The two worst lies were (1) paying one of the park residents to make up an incredible and false story about his life in the park and (2) publishing statistics on a four block area, also false, data that was not available to the public or for me to use in rebuttal.

When confronted by me and a powerful supporter of the park, the journalist rudely answered that we could write a letter to the paper.

I privately vowed to ‘get even’.  Four years later, the journalist and I were at a Christmas party of a society matron and he was with a beautiful date.

I began yelling over the buffet table, so that 50 of San Francisco’s elite, could hear me. I explained what a monster this journalist was and how he had lied and fabricated.

He demanded a fight outside the house.  By the time I got down the stairs he had left.  I went back to the party and enjoyed myself.  He had left his beautiful girlfriend behind. Most people got the message that the reporter was a coward and probably a liar.

I felt great.

There is no moral to this story, but I was never again invited to that friend's Christmas party. 

Rove on politics

I enjoyed Karl Rove’s book Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight.  He says a great deal about politics and election processes both of which brought me great pleasure.  Rove is supremely competent in both areas and a man of extraordinary honesty.

In the realm of politics he ignores two important elements.

He particularly emphasizes that campaigns cannot be dishonest and dirty, they must always be forward looking and optimistic.  The trouble is that dirt must be used in some instances.  

This is where I would add that all negatives about your own candidate must be aired very early in the campaign or before the campaign, by you or your people.  (Schwarzenegger may be doing this now, in preparation for a Senate run in 4 years.) The same is true for your opposition, but in that case it cannot be your candidate that explains the dirt and it should only be done after the opposition has declared its candidacy.  This rule comes from Murray Chotiner, a genius in the field before Rove.

The great counterexample that Rove used is the George W. Bush DUI from very early in his life was thrown at him by the Gore people four days before the election.  Bush still won but would have won by much more had he disclosed his DUI problem a year earlier by himself. (He had never even told his daughters about it.)

The second subject not covered by Rove is the ineffectiveness of ‘Get out the vote’ campaigns.  I have tested this particular campaign tool and found that it does not work at all.  I think it is very important for campaign managers to understand that the reason for a ‘Get out the vote’ campaign is to give hard-core supporters an active way to participate in the election and utilize their enthusiasm at a peak moment.

That’s all.  Everything else Rove talks about campaigning is consistent with my experience.

Parallels: prisons and academia

On the face of it the parallels between the people in prison (prisoners) and the faculties in academia is superficial and intentionally humorous.

The problem is that there is a genuine parallel between these two worlds.  Both are 80% or better Democrat.  Both are the chosen location, disproportionately, of people who don’t want to be part of commercial society.

Both prison and the academia are societies based on seniority.  The longer you are in the institution the more power and prestige you have.  It is not surprising that two thirds of the people who are freed from prison return to the comforting womb of a completely structured life with no vagaries of everyday living.

Wait, that sounds just too much like college or university life.  Maybe the parallels are two ends of the same spectrum, one end is in prison with significantly below average intelligence the other, are the lazy people, at above average intelligence end.  

If I could design and execute a survey to verify this thesis, the single question that would probably elicit the highest ‘yes’ response among prisoners and academics is ‘Do I want a stable secure life above all else?’  The only other groups that would get such a positive response would be union members and government employees ( there is a 50% overlap in these two groups).

Of course, every society needs to accommodate this group of stability seeking people.

Blogs from June 2 to June 14th

A very important blog.  I suggest that the American nuclear umbrella of the Cold War era has seriously damaged democracy in many countries.

The reliable evidence is in.  Good analysis shows the Democratic stimulus package was harmful.

Two articles on the San Francisco circumcision proposition.  The first one on the history of how we got this bizarre idea on the ballot,  the second on some speculative outcomes.

We no longer need to connect the dots about the new America, we now have a line projected into the future.

The Emperor has no clothes and the world has no international financial structure.

The Japanese recent, 3/11 Tohohu earthquake, only slightly farther from Tokyo than the ‘89 San Francisco earthquake and 100 times more violent, left Tokyo with 5 minutes of noisy shaking and virtually no damage in the world’s most high-tech city.

Jefferson against Jeffersonianism

For those who don’t know American history, it is possible to associate the modern Democratic party with Jefferson. For those who know history:

Such a connection is ironic.

There is a direct line between Jefferson’s party and his opposition to the Federalist founders, particularly because Jefferson’s Democratic Party became the party of slavery.

The most characteristic elements of Jefferson’s political views were his ferocious opposition to federalism, his opposition to Hamiltonianism, to the power and influence of urban commerce and his terrible distaste for the use of government to create a stable economy and a strong military.

Over time, the Democratic Party has retained the core distaste for urban commerce, the military, and forced unionism (modern slavery) but has primarily become the party of strong federalism and perpetual expansion of government power, even to limiting CO2 the life-supporting chemical for most plant life.

Economic dip

The first half of this year, 2011, saw a significant economic dip, a decline in the growth rate of the GDP.  It is well below 2% for the first half.

The issue of unemployment is secondary.  Unemployment cannot go down until GDP growth rate exceeds 3%.  The current growth rate is occurring without adding a single real new job.  We are growing entirely on the high productivity rates put in place over the previous 10 years.

In a strange reversal of patterns, the economy showed significant weakness before the stock market reflected it.

There are three reasons for this very slow GDP growth rate.  The first is one I have explained before, the government has a negative multiplier,  meaning the trillion dollars that the Democrats spent on stimulus wiped out more than $1 trillion in the economy and we are still seeing the consequences.  

The second, is that most domestic economic growth comes from new small businesses, the 20% of businesses that have less than 20 employees.  The source of expansion capital for small businesses is primarily their friends and family.  Banks only lend on equipment and assets.  

The people who lend to small businesses, friends and family, have suffered from a significant drop in their net worth, partially from stock but mostly from real estate.  Nothing is improving in either case. There is no end in sight for real estate declines.

The reality is that nothing has been done by the two-men who were the main contributors to this financial collapse, Christopher Dodd and Barney Frank, to ameliorate the real portfolio shrinkage that occurred and to cope with the expected future risks faced by small lenders.  

Dodd and Frank have simply made it more difficult for everyone to do business with their latest financial legal nightmare.

The third reason for the recent weakness in GDP is XXX.  I don’t really know what XXX is.  It must be a systemic block on the economic system.  Systemic problems are always hard to identify.  

There is much pontificating about the miserable business climate that the president and his party have generated with his class warfare.  It is hard to measure such climatic conditions, and it is unlikely to affect the day-to-day decisions of business people.  Businesses want to reduce costs and horatory nonsense has little to do with cost reduction.  

It will take a little time to figure out what XXX is.

Last man standing

Why is Gnome* Chomsky still around?

He is the one man on the planet that every lefty and every intellectual knows.

There are two prominent reasons why Chomsky is the last man standing.

The first is that the entire academic world has abandoned official Marxism so what was once a chorus is now a single voice.

The second reason is that the entire 20th century has destroyed the central Marxist thesis along with tens of millions of formerly living human beings.

That leaves the ideologues with nothing to grasp, with no refuge in fact or data or examples.  All they have is the shrill call they hear in the academically precise language of Chomsky.  'Academically precise language' is soothing to the bewildered, lost, college graduate.

On the basis of 100% fantasy, dozens of references and sub-references Chomsky sounds so solid, so convincing and so professorial. Sentimentality for a lost world. A dream that became a nightmare.

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*I use a software program to transcribe my blogs. Gnome is how the program heard the name Noam.  Programming with my kind of ironic bias.

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Photo.  He looks like Woody Allen in this photo.  Both schlemiels (wimps) .

Japanese engineering

On a recent trip to Tokyo I asked all my friends about their experience on 3/11 ( that is the same code system we use for 9/11).  

None of them had significant damage in their home or office.  A few described bookshelves that fell over and bottles of wine that fell.  

Some friends were in tall skyscrapers others were in midsized concrete re-bar buildings still others were in wooden frame suburban style homes.

To me the most astounding reality is that every building in Tokyo is still standing and none of them had any real earthquake damage (parts of a ceiling fell in a 120 year old auditorium).  This Tohoku earthquake was 100 times more powerful than the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, which destroyed houses, several freeways and a section of major bridge.  The epicenter of the Tohoku quake was about 160 miles away ( based on the hypotenuse) from Tokyo, a little further away than the San Francisco earthquake (120 miles).

I looked at the skyline of Tokyo, rode the subways and saw the vast expanse of the city from tall buildings.  I could only marvel at the genius of Japanese engineering that protected this enormous densely populated area. 

(I deal with the Fukushima Dai-ichi reactors elsewhere).

‘Red Flag’ on major speeches

A few weeks back there was a major brouhaha when the president used a reference, ‘1967 Israeli border’, that everyone knew was a 'red flag'.  The president tried 'to walk back' that statement and said he was misunderstood, a few days later.

I am sorry, the press and too many others let the president get away with that 'walk back'. Anyone who has friends in the White House or has read even one book about life in the White House as described by presidents and staff knows a simple fact: all important speeches are read by all relevant departments before they go public.  Always, no exceptions, never.

Not only the State Department but everyone else in government knew the president had crossed a red line and was renouncing previously established American policy.  That phrase only got into a speech because the president had demanded it.

Fact.  Like it or lump it.

Easy run against Obama’s $1 billion

Politics: In reading a number of political commentators, I have seen the suggestion that Republican candidates are reluctant to enter the field for fear of running against Obama in a general election who will have $1 billion to spend.

I personally can’t believe this is true.  I have stated in this blog many times that running a campaign against large amounts of money is easy (I’ve run such campaigns) and the money is irrelevant to the election outcome.

Even if the president diverts some of his money to Senatorial campaigns and other state level campaigns,  to run against $1 billion is straightforward.

Simply announce you that you are the underdog and the president is a hypocrite.  

To spend a $1 billion for an incumbent in at 2 ½ month period is just as ridiculous as his trillion dollar stimulus package which did nothing but deceive everyone.

Underdog, when truly believed by Americans, is a winning campaign theme especially when directed at a hypocrite who believes in class warfare and has a solid record of attacking rich people, corporations and Wall Street.

No international financial structure

We must learn the lesson of the last four years: there is no international financial structure.  The G8,  the IMF, and the central banks were completely incompetent and unwilling to cooperate in dealing with the American generated financial collapse.  After the collapse and since that time, the governments of the world have been operating independently and with complete disregard for each other.  The dollar is the only source of coherence, and the dollar has been falling fast.

To put it in the simplest words, while finance is international, there is no international financial moderating structure.  

The occasional calls for a non-American currency are the pathetic sound of reality....  there is no alternative financial structure being proposed.

We need an international financial structure to moderate financial practices and more importantly to insulate national economies from the periodic destructive consequences of financial extremes.

I do not have a proposal at this time.  The most effective international organization that has worked at all, has been the WTO,  which took 40 years to create.

The new American world

Say goodbye to irony and cynicsm.

Historians will see that the America-versus-Soviet /Cold War created in America the awareness of herself as a free market people, an original democracy and as a country with a secular version of Christianity (think the AA view of god).

The current war with Traditional Islam is adding new definition to the nature of America.  This new definition is more subtle than the one developed in the previous 50 year evolution.

We are beginning to define ourselves in new moral, intellectual and cultural terms.

There is a dotted line from Ronald Reagan to Texas-George W Bush and the campaign of John McCain/Sarah Palin.  That dotted line became a solid line beginning with the Tea Party.

The new moral America is best exemplified in Sarah Palin (the hero of the Tea Party) -- a deeply honest, caring and compassionate being (think of her son Trig).  This blog (Pro Commerce) is another part of the moral America. It identifies commerce with the moral values of diversity, openness and meritocracy.

The new intellectual America comes with a Renaissance of dozens of brilliant men and women from the Kristols and Gertrude Himmelfarb to Shelby Steele, Thomas Sowell, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, Max Boot, Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Leo Strauss, Michael Medved, Dennis Prager, Victor Davis Hanson, Matt Ridley...etc

The new culture is Scotty McCreery in the pop world, a true folk hero and new kind of celebrity. Add David Mamet the refreshing new and powerful light in the theater.

All of these are the new America.  A compassionate morality (of course America already pioneered freedom for the disabled), a brilliant intellectual foundation ( a completely new global level of thinkers) and a fresh appreciation of down home folksy Middle American behavior. Clean-cut, strong and honest.

 

San Francisco circumcised: part 2

Now that the highly volatile San Francisco circumcision issue has emerged on the world stage the consequences are not predictable.

I want to identify some of the underlying related trends.

* Most importantly, we are living in the greatest Jew hate period in world history.  The United Nations is the wet dream of any Nazi.  It is the Fourth Reich, perpetually pouring hatred and the desire for a new Holocaust on Israel.  Some recognition of this horror may be possible thanks to the S.F. circumcism ballot measure.

* Jew hate is deeply ingrained in the Left.  Arising lately out of anti-Israel sentiment.  

The connection between Jew hate and anti-Israel sentiment is easy to explain.  Jew hate has always been premised on the vulnerability of the Jews; as early as the 1st Crusades the ease of extracting hostage money from Jews with threats of slaughter became a well known and common practice.  

Now, the super hero status of the Israeli military adds a new twist to this ancient hatred. Israel is what the Left hates most, because it combines Lefty pacifism and Lefty traditional urban-commercial Jew hate.  Some of this reality may seep through to the brains of American Lefty Jews who may abandon the Left.

* The anti-circumcision issue is significant to an unexpected sector: Muslims.  Muslims will see the anti-circumcision movement as a threat directed at them.  There is no way to know what the reactions will be and who will be blamed. Americans are more circumcized than Europeans or most other large non-Muslim populations.

* There is the entire world of MSM (male sex on males), that is widespread in Africa and the Arab world.  Since some men prefer uncircumcised partners it is hard to know how this will play out on the political level.

San Francisco circumcised: part 1

Somehow I am being asked to write a blog on this subject.  The news of this subject seems to have spread the world over, so my role is not to broadcast details about the information.

My role is to explain the origins and suggest some of the ramifications.  

There are three sources of this anti-circumcision movement.  It appropriately began in the San Francisco Bay Area for reasons you will see.

* As early as the 1970s, the hippies and the back-to-the-land people started talking about the unnatural nature of male circumcision.  Hippies, and then suburban organic-people, began talking about skipping circumcision and actually did so with their children.  Even in families where the mother was a Jew.  The argument in some cases was that the son should look the same as his uncircumcised father when naked. I saw that first in Marin County and then it spread to Walnut Creek and Contra Costa County. Contra Costa County is also where suburban-organic parents stopped giving infants inoculations and whooping cough emerged years later.

* The reaction of Jew haters to this emerging movement was strong support. They saw a parade going by and they recognized immediately that it fit in perfectly with Jew hate.  Because this is the Bay Area where Jew hate is endemic to the Left, as part of the anti-Israel coterie, anti-circumcision found a welcome home in the 1990's.

* By the time this movement was to emerge as a political issue, where signatures were needed on petitions, the movement converged with the sexual aesthetics of the gay community.

Many gay men have a personal sexual preference for uncircumcised men.  In sex, taste is a powerful force.  Some people prefer blondes, or dark skin or freckles..... sexual preference is a strong driving force.

Signature gathering for the San Francisco ballot measure was most successful in the Castro District, the gay male district.  Driven purely by sexual preference.

The three movement strands have now combined, and each will contribute its part to the vast emerging American debate.

What drug for airline interior designers?

The people who design airline interior seating particularly coach seating must be using some drug that has insulated them from reality.... completely. (Photo is recent design plan.)

These people continue to design most coach seating in groups of three.

The human grouping of three is among the rare cluster of groupings. By my calculations, especially among travelers, 50% are single 35% are paired and the remaining 15% are in groups of more than two.  That means that the most efficient sets of seats would be fours and ones.  So where does the idea of threes and fives come from?  

I think it is a drug induced number.

Astounding

The Nobel economist, Robert Lucas, has carefully analyzed the current, recession, which is the most severe since 1933, and concluded that it was caused by Obama and the Democrat Congress.

His analysis is more subtle and more complex but the conclusion is the same.  

The cause of the financial collapse, was the large financial sector that has emerged since the 1970s, outside of the banking industry.  The Fed and Bush did the right thing to salvage the financial crash which was very short.

The prolonged commercial disaster has been caused by three things: (1) the creation of Obama-care a giant federal expansion, the same welfare problem that has kept Europe 30% below U.S. growth rates, (2) the creation of the Dodd-Frank expansion of government in finance by the same two-man crew who brought down the housing industry and (3) the ceaseless hate campaign run by Pres. Obama against the wealth producers, corporations and high income citizens.

Read it and weep.

America has destroyed governments

This is a significant blog.  I have not heard anyone ever say this before.

The American nuclear umbrella that has protected Japan and Europe for 60 years: it has destroyed democracy in the countries that are protected.

What do I mean?   First, these countries do not have the capacity for self defense. The pathetic weakness of the Europeans trying to battle a tiny Third World country, Libya, is the strongest evidence of European military incompetence.  An earlier example was the failure of Europe to take any military action in the failed state of Yugoslavia.

The second part follows from the first.  When a country no longer has the capability or interest in it’s self defense the core of the government becomes mush, and the people can't rise up against policy (the way the American Tea Party did) when they no longer have confidence in their government.  

In Japan today, there is not a single person outside of the government who has any confidence whatsoever in their government. Japan is incapable of the kind of popular uprising that we saw in the American Tea Party.  

The main EU countries are in such a pathetic condition that their citizens are allowing their countries to be taken over and dominated by Muslim immigrants with no effective resistance.  No European country is taken seriously anywhere on the planet after 60 years of governmental indecisiveness and inaction.  England may be an exception as a result of the Falkland Islands battle.

The main EU countries are even worse off.  They believe in a post-national idea where self-defense is no longer needed.  As evidence of this I cite the fact that Europe let’s Arabs and Persians speak about and act out the most evil destructive behavior imaginable without a peep of objection.  Never a peep of objection. Europeans, filled with Jew hate for 500 years, are incapable of having learnt any lessons from World War II. Their governments, with a core of mush, are complete failures to act as governments and help their citizens learn the lessons of WWII. This is because the governments of Europe are themselves completely incompetent to understand self-defense of any sort.  Their hatred of Jews persists because they are in a “post-national” fantasy world were no evil exists.

These are the consequences of not having a government responsible for self-defense.  The Beacon of the Middle East that is democratic Israel cannot shine on countries in Europe that are not real countries in the first place.

We must remove the nuclear umbrella from Europe promptly,  and from Japan over a 10 year period.

The American nuclear umbrella has destroyed more than a dozen countries.