The Scenic Route

The War in the Streets - Oakland 2012

2012-01-29T01:03:00.000-08:00

[click on the four outward-pointing arrows at lower right for fullscreen]

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Dead Pool 2012 - Jack's List

2012-01-28T13:51:00.000-08:00

2012 Croakers

1. Michael J. Fox
2. George McGovern
3. Jimmy Carter
4. Queen Elizabeth II
5. Charlie Sheen
6. George Herbert Walker Bush
7. Muhammad Ali
8. John Glenn
9. Demi Moore
10. Liza Minelli

Monsters Among Us

2012-01-26T13:52:00.000-08:00

[Iceland]

The record for bicycling around the world is held by Englishman Alan Bate who did it in 2008 in 97 days. The rules require a minimum of 18,000 miles on the bike. Rest days, if any, count against total time. Which means that Bate AVERAGED 185.6 miles per day every day for more than 3 months. And even that assumes he did the minimum, which isn't likely.

Just for comparison, I have been bicycling most of my adult life and the furthest I have ever ridden in a day was 114 miles on a dead flat route with a strong tailwind the whole way.

February 28 is the beginning of a race to beat Alan Bate's record. http://worldcycleracing.com/

Yesterday, above Norway

2012-01-24T15:58:00.000-08:00

The Point of Punctuation

2012-01-24T15:47:00.000-08:00

Warhorse

2012-01-20T20:05:00.000-08:00

[Captain Henry Page and Bealeton at Army of the Potomac Headquarters, 1863]

Saw 'Warhorse' yesterday. I expected some sugary drivel about a boy and his horse. Wrong. Like 'Titanic' it was a sentimental little personal story set in the middle of an actual disaster. As with 'Titanic' the purpose of the little story was to sugar-coat a documentary about a larger subject. 'Warhorse' is about the Western Front during the First World War. Through the device of the horse, the Front is seen from the English, the French, and finally the German side.

It is an excellent movie, well-made, reasonably well-acted, as one expects from Spielberg. Even though the horror of trench warfare is considerably toned down from the reality, it is still horrible enough that I strongly recommend that no one see this movie. Life is hard enough without recurring nightmares. Don't see this movie. An academic understanding of what the Western Front was all about is all modern Americans need to know about it.

Unfortunately the cinematography of Devonshire at the beginning and end of the movie was so mannered as to verge on the telling of a fairy tale. It detracted from the rest of the movie.

It occurred to me during the movie that any realistic portrayal of the First World War makes a compelling anti-war argument. The British are shown as understandable and human characters. The Germans are shown the same. One does not want to see anyone on either side killed.

The British charge into battle shouting "For G_d and the king!". Spielberg is subtle enough to omit scenes of the Germans doing the same, but leaves it to the viewer to realize that they must have done it too. He leaves it to the viewer to realize that the Germans fighting for Germany and the Kaiser were no more evil than Englishmen also fighting for king and country.

The odd symmetry is that just as any portrayal of the First World War leads to an anti-war argument, any portrayal of the Second World War leads to a pro-war argument. Whether the King defeated the Kaiser or the Kaiser defeated the King ultimately was no more important to English farm boys than it was to German farm boys. It was somebody else's fight that they got dragged into. And died horribly in their millions in the fighting of it.

The Second World War was the opposite. Whether the Nazis conquered Europe and perhaps eventually the world, was everybody's fight. It mattered intensely to English, German, and Russian farm boys who won. It was their fight, it was everyone's fight. The army of the Kaiser was not there to kill your mother. The Nazis were there to do precisely that.

So let no one accept Spielberg's anti-war message uncritically. The Second World War proves otherwise.

Why the Laffer Curve is Wrong

2012-01-13T21:24:00.000-08:00

The Laffer Curve, supposedly invented by the conservative economist Arthur Laffer during lunch with Ronald Reagan and sketched on a napkin, is one of the key arguments used by conservatives to justify low tax rates for the rich. The graph on which the curve appears has tax rates on the up-and-down y-axis and government revenues on the left-to-right x-axis. The object of the exercise is to figure out what tax rate will maximize government tax revenues.

The argument is that at zero tax rate the government will collect nothing no matter how much money the taxpayers earn because the rate is zero.. At 100% tax rate the government will again collect nothing because no one will bother to work. The government will take all their money so there is no point in working. No one works, no one has any money, so the government revenue is again zero.

According to Laffer, somewhere in between is a tax rate that maximizes government revenue. Among those who accept the premise, the debate is whether the rate should be low (advocated by conservatives) or high (advocated by everyone else). Conservatives think anything above 35% will discourage capitalists from working to make more money. Everyone else thinks the figure is around 65%

But even a moment's thought tell us that the two premises behind the Laffer Curve are both false. First is the idea that capitalists are lazy. According to conservatives, if a capitalist has to make three million to keep two she will be too discouraged to continue to make more money and will go fishing. Capitalists are just too lazy to take the trouble of making money if they have to give up more than a third. (Actually that's a hypothetical male capitalist. Anybody knows that a woman with two million dollars will go not fishing but shopping, which is itself a good thing for the economy.)

We can get some idea of how high the highest tax rate can go before people will give up working from the old Beatle's song, 'Taxman'. Click on the link on the next line.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoGVGIzNXB0

Let me tell you how it will be
There's one for you, nineteen for me
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

Should five per cent appear too small
Be thankful I don't take it all
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah I'm the taxman

If you drive a car, I'll tax the street
If you try to sit, I'll tax your seat
If you get too cold I'll tax the heat
If you take a walk, I'll tax your feet

Taxman!
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah I'm the taxman

Don't ask me what I want it for (Aahh Mr. Wilson)
If you don't want to pay some more (Aahh Mr. Heath)
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

Now my advice for those who die
Declare the pennies on your eyes
'Cause I'm the taxman, yeah, I'm the taxman

And you're working for no one but me
Taxman!

For those still wet behind the ears, Mr. Wilson and Mr. Heath were the heads of the Labour and Tory parties when the song was released on their 1966 album, 'Revolver'. The relevance is that even though they were paying a tax rate of 95%, the Beatles continued to write, perform, and publish songs. So far from stifling their willingness to work, they went on to write, perform, and publish, 'Rubber Soul', 'Sergeant Pepper', 'Magical Mystery Tour', and 'the white album', some of their best music ever. We are not talking about mere work here, but work informed by a splendid creativity.

Had they paid no taxes and earned twenty times as much as the 5% that made them absurdly rich, they might well have had too much money to bother to write, perform, and publish at all. George Harrison would have retired to a huge estate in India with his own private ashram and harem of groupies. John Lennon would have bought a castle in Scotland and the title that went with it and then gone on to terrorize the House of Lords. Paul McCartney would have married for love someone who married for money and been fleeced by her attorneys. Ringo Starr would have gotten confused about how many zeroes were involved and have bought a pub in Liverpool for 182 million quid.

Joking aside, too much money might have made them lazy and uncreative, as the children of self-made women so often are. Being clipped of most of their money every year most likely kept them from retiring in their twenties as they might otherwise have done.

In fact high earners are usually hard-working unto driven and unpleasant. High taxes will rarely keep them from working.

The unspoken assumption behind the Laffer Curve is that people work for money and only for money. In fact only people whose jobs are boring drudgery to them work only for money.

Nuns and priests pay an almost 100% tax on what their work might otherwise produce. They live in cloisters or rectories often in spartan conditions and work long and hard at teaching, nursing, ministry, or as missionaries because they are dedicated to their work and to the service of the Church, not for the money. They take vows of poverty. They worship G-d, not Mammon.

Soldiers live in barracks and in wartime in foxholes, eat in messes, are on call 24 hours a day, and perform not only hard work but often heroically struggle to the death. There is no overtime for being under fire all night. Selflessly risking her life gets a soldier not a fat bonus but a shiny medal to show her mom. Soldiers serve for honor, duty, and love of country and of their comrades, not money.

Similarly, it is a rare poet who is in it for the money. Yet most of what we treasure of our heritage from past ages is poetry.

So the first premise of the Laffer Curve is mistaken. Even at a 100% tax rate, dedicated people will work long and hard. Whether the tax gatherer is the Church or the Marine Corps or the Muse, people work long and hard for no material reward.

The second premise is related. It is that how hard and well people work in ordinary occupations like small business owners, professionals, highly skilled workers, and so on, is proportionate to the incomes they earn from their labor.

Among ordinary occupations it is everyone's experience that one works harder and longer at work one enjoys doing. People are excellent and devoted at work they love. And that is what the economic and tax systems are for - to get people to produce the most and best goods and services they can. And the social system, according to Aristotle, is about enabling people to use their talents to the full. People who enjoy their work are only secondarily motivated by money.

So the correlation between tax rate and the amount of work done, i.e. the taxable production of each person, does not correspond in any important way with the tax rate.

So the Laffer Curve, which is merely an extrapolation from its endpoints of 0% and 100%, is wrong at both of them, and wrong at every point in between.

Alexander the Great, when shown the legendary Gordian Knot which could not be untied, drew his sword and chopped it in half. "Thus do I untie all Gordian Knots", he said. Thus do I untie all Laffer Curves, and, like the Marine Corps, piss on their corpses.

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Harvey's Dead Pool 2012

2012-01-11T18:42:00.000-08:00

I am keeping the same names I had for 2011. They are due to kick any time now. I did replace the three, yes three, on my list who passed last year, may their memory be a blessing. Also, I am no longer listing new people who are in their nineties. Like shooting fish in a barrel. Some on the list are wishful thinking, others will be missed.

1. Zsa Zsa Gabor
2. Michael Douglas
3. Kirk Douglas - Bam- a father and son team
4. Hosni Mubarak
5. Ruth Bader Ginsberg
6. Mohammed Ali
7. Tariq Aziz
8. Roger Ebert
9. Aretha Franklin
10.Dick Cheney

Couth? I got couth up the ...

2011-12-31T17:44:00.000-08:00

I can teach you one or two things about boxed wine right now. When you live in an RV it doesn't roll around because it doesn't come in a round bottle. It doesn't break because it comes in a plastic bladder in a cardboard box instead of a glass bottle. If you care about fuel efficiency it is better to save weight by having plastic and cardboard instead of glass. Cardboard boxes stack nicely and save space in your overhead compartment compared to bottles. When you cork an opened wine bottle the air inside makes the wine go bad fairly quickly. With box wine, the bladder is flexible so no air goes into it. Which means that the wine remains good indefinitely even after it is opened. In spite of its reputation, box wine is actually pretty decent wine. And it is dead cheap. About $12 for the equivalent of ten bottles. You do the math.

Not a pressing concern but still interesting

2011-12-31T16:41:00.000-08:00

Mechanical Dog

2011-12-31T15:22:00.000-08:00

[click on picture for fullscreen]

Imagine this thing self-contained, with cameras and remote control, and armed with missiles, guns, or poison gas. And you have the soldier of the future. This is a prototype of a ground drone. Paid for by the same folks who actually did invent the internet - DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). Coming to a battlefield near you.

When these things are mass-produced and cheap, the dogface of yore will be replaced by actual imperialist running dogs. When boots-on-the-ground are no longer needed or wanted for warfare, the advantage of high-tech powers over low-tech ones will be complete. Once these things are ready for rollout they will be easy to miniaturize. A rat-sized one could go almost anywhere and be able to shoot a poison dart or a high-powered small caliber pistol.

Locked doors and windows? No problem. Every house has a 4" pipe connecting its toilet to the outside world. Robot goes up drain pipe from main sewer, waits until sensor shows terrorist is on the crapper, then literally pops a cap in his ass.

Hey all you people who think Ron Paul is so Great...

2011-12-31T14:49:00.000-08:00

Ron Paul with former American Nazi Party member and current KKK Grand Wizard and Stormfront.org webmaster, Don Black.

Rock (and Roll) of Ages

2011-12-20T13:23:00.000-08:00

Ding Dong Kim is dead

2011-12-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

Which old Kim, the wicked Kim!

An easy 31 points. Add that to the 21 for Liz and the 44 for Steve and it makes 96 for the year, a new record. And there are still 12 more day left in the year. Come on Michael and Kirk, Ruth and Mohammed.

The View of a devout Heterodox Jew

2011-12-16T15:37:00.000-08:00

One of the most intriguing things in physics is the two slit experiment. It, like Schrodinger's cat, suggests that the physical reality of things depends on the presence or absence, and implicitly on the existence, of an observer. Feynman even showed that it is quantifiable and dependent on the sensitivity of the detector.

There have been subatomic reactions dependent on an observer since the beginning, billions of years before there were human observers. Further, Feynman, a human observer, could only be in one place at any one time and only observe one or two reactions. It seems to require a universal observer who is everywhere and has always been everywhere for the universe to have discrete outcomes, like Schrodinger's cat being either alive or dead. Without a universal observer neither the universe nor anything in it can exist in any definite state.

Yet we see all around us that things do exist in definite states and that they always have.Even so, we also see from Feynman's experiments that not everything exists in definite states. The passage of the electrons through one slit rather than the other was not definite until Feynman detected it. Which to my mind suggests something I have always suspected about Hashem - She is not unlimited. If Hashem really had the characters attributed to Her, omnipresence, omniscience, omnipotence, omnicausal, eternity, omnibeneficience, unity, perfection, and so on, there could not be evil. Yet there is.

It seems to me that the contradiction between the existence of Hashem and the existence of evil lies in assigning attributes that would make evil impossible. It seems to me that Hashem, like Her creation, is a partial integration, neither complete nor perfect. Nothing in the universe is complete, nothing is perfect, nothing is permanent and eternal except the universe itself. Which is a reflection of the characteristics of Her who made it.

Evil exists where Hashem is not. Horror happens not because G_d wills it, but because She cannot stop it. When Hashem cannot prevent evil, people must do it.

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2011-12-11T18:14:00.000-08:00

A Humpback Virtuoso by CaptGene

An Alternative? Maybe not.

2011-12-09T20:04:00.001-08:00

Newt Gingrich is unelectable. It is hard to see the evangelicals voting for a thrice-married man with a marital scandal involving a martyred wife. Whatever they may feel about Obama being black, there has never been a whiff of scandal about his marriage to Michelle and they have the two lovely little kids. The Reverend Wright ridiculousness will stand him in good stead because it graphically put him in a pew in a Protestant church for twenty years. A faithful church-going family is hard to beat with Newt for the evangelical vote.

And it is hard to see women voting for a man who is every wife's nightmare of what her husband might be up to.

His influence-peddling career may well splinter Tea Party members for whom he is precisely what they hate about Washington. Not even Koch's money would be able to clean up that stink and keep the rednecks on board.

And to a television electorate, it matters that Gingrich is fat and rumpled-looking whereas Obama is tall, slim, younger, and looks good in clothes.

The most effective political commentary I see is John Stewart on the Daily Show. How appropriate is it that the Republic is guarded most honestly by the Sixth Estate, the comedians. When politics becomes a joke, the jokers are the ones to explain it.

On the other side of the sky

2011-12-06T12:33:00.001-08:00

Jupiter map realised in 2011, between October 10th and October 15th, from the Pic du Midi Observatory from Jean-Luc Dauvergne on Vimeo.

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

The Great Red Spot is 25,000 miles across. The earth is 8,000 miles across.

Down Time

2011-12-03T14:46:00.001-08:00

I am home in bed with a cough and a sore throat and general crumminess today. Oliver the doggapotamus is in bed snoring alongside me. Rita is off running errands including getting chicken soup.

When you find a woman to whom your being sick is a cue to get you chicken soup rather than to get herself a flu shot, you have really got something. Or someone. Someone imprudent, certainly.

My nephew Steve Wilhelm, a perspicacious young man, put up on Facebook a link to a Wall Street Journal article on how difficult it is to cut the deficit. It contained the following paragraph,

"The White House, after saying all fall that Obama's jobs agenda must be paid for with tax increases on high-income earners, appears willing to simply pad the nation's $15 trillion national debt instead of finding offsetting cuts."

To which I commented, "So why did we vote for this guy?"

Earlier in the day I heard from an old and dear friend, Karen Trendler Petit. She called me "a cynical old poop". Unfortunately, I could not find a basis on which to disagree with her.

As it stands, the US economy is dysfunctional. The Congress is dysfunctional. The President sees no connection between betraying the people who elected him the first time and his prospects of being elected a second time. The Left are narcissistic idiots with a strong taint of anti-Semitism. The Republicans have fielded a row of right-wing idiots. Their un-electable frontrunner, Gingrich, yesterday proposed repealing the child labor laws.

Iran is building an atomic bomb. Yet Russia and China are more afraid of disrupting the price of oil than they are of a government in which the lunatic Ahmadinejad is the more moderate faction. And that is even though Iran has missiles to deliver nukes to Russian and Chinese cities. The survival of the European Union has come to depend on the good will and generosity of the Germans, a people not noted for either. The Arab Spring is more and more being revealed as merely a device for replacing repressive military regimes with repressive Islamist ones.

Cynicism both at home and abroad is more and more the description that matches reality.

I worked on the 2008 Colorado campaign which brought us a politician created by the Chicago Daley Machine and funded by Wall Street, and I worked on the 2010 debacle which saw the people of Wisconsin discard Senator Russ Feingold like a beer can out a car window. Clearly, participating in politics and world affairs accomplishes exactly the same result as not participating in them. Except for the disappointment afterwards.

From which it follows that it is time to stop reading the news. It is bad for me and it is not helping anyone else. Further, I am in a perfect position to live as an escapist. I am retired, Rita wants me to live with her in her big house amid oak trees in a canyon in the Berkeley Hills, and we already have all the gadgets and clothes we want. The world's reality sucks. Mine is actually quite good.

Reading used to mean spending time in Dostoyevsky's or Tolstoy's Russia. Or visiting the drawing rooms of Austen's England. It can be that again. I am going back to reading fiction.

I have been accused of saying, "I've got mine. Too bad about yours." Which would be a crummy thing to say. But "I've got mine. I've tried and there is not much I can do about yours." does not make me a heartless prick, does it?

The Open Road

2011-11-23T17:50:00.001-08:00

http://www.wimp.com/solarhighways/

Don't Tread On Me

2011-11-18T13:31:00.001-08:00

Origin of the Self

2011-11-13T10:31:00.001-08:00

What the Founding Fathers Have to Say to Modern America

2011-11-12T17:20:00.001-08:00

[Patrick Henry's landed estate was in Henry County, Virginia. I too was raised in a county named for my family, Kessler County, California.]

Those who think the Constitution stands against Wall Street just don't know our history.

The fundamental debate at the Constitutional Convention was between the liberal-agrarian-libertarians like Jefferson who represented not the people, though they often claimed to (politicians were hypocritical liars then too), but country gentlemen like the Virginia aristocracy

The liberal democrats like Jefferson wanted a weak central government run by southern aristocrats which would not be able to impose direct taxes and most of all not be able to interfere with slavery. A government composed of people like, say, Jefferson and his class.

The Federalists, led by Hamilton and the New Englanders and New Yorkers wanted a strong central government that could create a positive business climate for commerce and banking. They wanted to impose taxes to pay for infrastructure like the Erie Canal, turnpikes, harbors, and suppression of the Indians. They wanted a strong government to limit and eventually suppress the slave trade.

Now we have come to an era when everybody quotes one Founding Father or another for some principle or another as though the Founders were unified and agreed on anything. They agreed on absolutely nothing. They only reason they were able to stick together at all was the personal prestige and leadership of George Washington. Without Washington they would have been defeated, the British army would have rounded them all up and hung them, just as Franklin predicted.

In modern times the libertarians call on the Constitution to give freedom to business against the interest of the common people. Completely wrongheaded and false.

Similarly, the liberals call on the Constitution for a strong government to regulate business. Equally wrong.

The fact is that the situation of American business and banking is now so far from when it was just getting started in the near-wilderness of 1787 that the comparison is meaningless. American business and banking are a colossus that bestrides the world. Slavery has been gone for a century and a half and the slave trade even longer. So the reasons for wanting a strong or a weak government in 1787 are meaningless today.

Which means, to me at least, that quoting the Founders for this purpose or that is doubly meaningless. They were all over the map on every issue and fought bitterly over every word and phrase in the constitution. Patrick Henry, who did as much as anyone to get the Revolution underway, "smelt a rat" and refused to even attend the convention.

On the other side of the question, it is meaningless to try and figure out what Jefferson or Adams would have thought of tapping cellphones or abortion or racial equality. Those things would be inconceivable to them. So I think we have to look to how we the living want to govern our country and not worry too much about what the Founders would have thought about the issues that divide us. The real fact is that they would not have thought anything at all. They couldn't have.

The Growing Darkness

2011-11-06T16:42:00.000-08:00

The end of daylight savings time in the wee hours of the morning today has begun my least favorite time of the year. I do not like the short days. I do not like the cloudy overcast skies. I do not like the cold. I do like the rain but not like the wet after the rain.

I get depressed and moody during the dark months. Every year I promise myself that I will escape to sunnier climes. Chile and New Zealand come to mind. I think about renting an apartment in Valparaiso or Auckland. And every year I decide that being alone in a far-off country where I know no one would be worse than staying here in the cold and wet and dark.

There is lots to recommend the Southern Hemisphere. It is springtime there when it is November and December here.

Outside the United States one is free of endless tape loops of Bing Crosby singing 'Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer', and of 'Jingle Bells' sung by people who have never seen, and who never will see, a one-horse open sleigh. Outside the United States one is not inundated in red and green decorations, and in images of Frosty the Snowman in California where there are no snowmen. Outside the United States one is not subjected to endless seasons greetings cards from people whose sole purpose in sending them is to show themselves and others that they are married. I have long since given up any sense of guilt or obligation about not sending cards myself. I have accepted that I am a curmudgeon and that I just don't care and I rely on my friends to recognize this.

Outside the United States one is not subjected to the idiocy of receiving presents one doesn't want in return for buying and giving presents the recipient doesn't want either. For some reason the presents have to be wrapped in colored paper which is promptly thrown away, as though that somehow conceals the fact that they are mass-produced in Chinese sweatshops.

If one gives expensive presents, one gives a label of which the message is, "I pointlessly gave a prosperous store owner a lot of money for something functionally worth far less than I paid for it in hopes you would feel good about me, or at least not be pissed at me for not getting you anything." Does anyone not know that luxury goods are sold at a far higher markup than useful things? But then again, you know me well enough to know that the reason I spent so much money was out of desperation about not being able to think of anything interesting or original to get you.

Rita sometimes gives people notices that she has sent money in their name to a sanctuary for homeless pot-bellied pigs. People buy them as piglets because they are so cute, smart, and easy to train. They ditch them when they grow into enormous hogs which occasionally eat their neighbors' pets and small children. Why they don't just eat the pigs is hard to understand. Having an edible pet seems like a practical foresight. One can imagine a vegan with a pet carrot.

And New Year's Eve has become a waste of time. It used to be an evening to get drunk and laid after a loud party. Now one is married or close to it and one goes home with the one one came with. So there is nothing to look forward to about it except being a year older, which isn't much to look forward to at all.

Rita has an enormous and quite ridiculous bulldog named Ollie. He is a likable pooch and a hopeless goofball. He is fat and farts a lot and snores when he sleeps. That pretty well describes me too, so I wonder what exactly Rita sees in me. But I am far from the first to not understand women.

Ollie is a good ol' dog but he is a problem if we want to move to Punta Arenas or Christchurch for a month. It seems wrong to put him in a kennel for more than a few days. On the other hand am I willing to be depressed and miserable staying here so that Ollie won't be depressed and miserable staying in a kennel? It is a quandary.

The only good thing about winter is skiing. Sadly I am getting close to being too old to go anymore. But I have been going to the gym semi-religiously to get my legs into shape for a few ski runs. It is harder on the legs than it used to be because I am a lot fatter than I used to be and a lot heavier. Which makes standing up on the skis harder, and falling down at speed problematic.

Another only good thing about winter is driving through snowy scenery. I like that a lot. I am not yet too old to do that though my back complains loudly if I sit too long. I have a mechanical back massager thing which move steel knuckles up and down my back as I drive. I doubt I could still drive long distances without it.

So I am semi-stuck and semi-dreading the winter and its thoroughly annoying holidays.

A Murmuration

2011-11-02T20:05:00.001-07:00

Murmuration from Sophie Windsor Clive on Vimeo.

[Click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

Where Little Pumpkins Come From

2011-11-02T10:16:00.001-07:00

What's Inside Dawud Shehab?

2011-10-31T21:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's Wall Street Journal -

An Israeli aircraft struck a pair of Palestinian militants on Sunday, killing one man and wounding a second. On Saturday, nine militants and an Israeli civilian were killed in some of the worst violence in the area in months.

"When all of the jet fighters leave the skies of Gaza we will stop firing rockets," said Dawud Shehab, a senior member of Islamic Jihad.The latest round of violence was set off by a rocket attack last Wednesday by Islamic Jihad.

When the overall situation is reduced to a single incident one can see clearly what the problem is. Shehab and his organization started the exchange by firing rockets last Wednesday. And four days later he was indignant about the reprisals for it.

Ordinarily can imagine the Palestinians having some sort of amnesia about their aggressions and their imagining the Israeli reprisal to have been unprovoked. But this was last Wednesday and Dawud Shehab knew exactly the sequence of events. So how could he with a straight face make such a demand and even be indignant about it?

All the usual adjectives about such a person - fanatic, bigot, racist, terrorist - are all too general. Those address only why he would be a senior member of an organization like Islamic Jihad. But the question here is, what went wrong in Dawud Shehab's brain that he was unable to connect what he did on Wednesday with the consequences of it the next few days? If one could understand that, one would understand why there is no peace.

I suspect the problem may be one of national identity. Most nations have long histories reaching back centuries. They are defined by shared history, shared traditions, shared language, shared religion, shared customs, shared literature, shared art, shared cuisine, by a sense of solidarity. The Palestinians have none of these.

What defines a Palestinian? Their language is not distinguishable from Jordanians, Syrians, or Egyptians. Having persecuted and driven out the Christians among them, they have merely the ordinary Sunni Islam of the places they immigrated from - primarily Egypt and Syria. There having been no Palestinian people before the British Empire separated what few of them there were from centuries of Turkish and Egyptian rule, there are no Palestinian traditions and no history separate from reaction against Israel. There is no Palestinian literature, no national epic. There is no distinctive Palestinian cuisine, no famous art works.

Tellingly, there are no Palestinian holidays whatever that have no reference to Israel. Land Day is a protest against Israel, not a celebration of anything Palestinian. There was no Palestinian history until the Zionist settlers arrived because there was no Palestinian people before that. When the Jews arrived, their economic activity attracted the parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents of the Palestinians from Egypt and Syria with the prospect of jobs in Palestine.

There have never been Palestinian kings or kingdoms, no great victories, no heroes, no literature. Nothing defines the Palestinian national identity but their hostility to Israel. Palestinian personal and national identity is recently formed and has no content except hatred of Israel. That is pretty slim pickings to look inside yourself and your society and see so little, so very little.

The arrival of the Zionist pioneers and their hiring of Arab immigrants from Egypt and Syria led to the formation of an amorphous proletariat, a fellaheen, of people who could define themselves only by what they were not.

That is apparently what Dawud Shehab is saying. He is not saying that he has forgotten that he and his friends started shooting rockets at Sderot and Ashdod last Wednesday. He was saying that he was feeling empty because he had not restated his identity recently. While this seems a blanket condemnation of Dawud Shehab, one has to sympathize with him slightly. It would be horrifying to look within oneself and to see nothing. Or at least nothing but hatred.

It also explains why there can never be peace until the Palestinians suffer so vast a catastrophe that they are able to construct some other identity from it. The Germans were able to forego their Aryan superman national identity only when American bombers and Red Army tanks crushed those pretensions out of them. Only when the Palestinians are forced by some vast catastrophe to absorb the reality of their situation will they be able to construct some other identity for themselves as individuals and as a people.

My guess is that only an existential disaster will change them. Only when people like Dawud Shehab can look inside and see some sort of identity and self-image other than hatred of a neighboring people will there be peace. It won't be soon but it will one day come.

Usually I Don't Do Cute Animal Pictures But....

2011-10-29T14:16:00.001-07:00

Shameful Child Porn

2011-10-26T11:58:00.000-07:00

The World, the Whole World!

2011-10-22T14:37:00.000-07:00

A hundred years ago the idea of a world powered by anything but coal would have seemed a daydream. The transition to petroleum took place naturally and through ordinary market mechanisms.

The transitions away from it, driven both by market mechanisms and by political will can make the changeover to other forms of energy quicker and less costly than the change from coal to oil was.

Henry Kissinger once said that the way to become energy independent was to put a floor under the price of oil. The reason capitalists are so reluctant to invest in alternate energy sources is that the price of their main competitor, oil, is so volatile. No one will lay down a billion to build an energy plant if the price of oil might plunge and make the plant unprofitable. If there were a floor under the price of oil, money could be invested in any number of ventures to produce energy by other means.

The actual radicals are not the conservationists. The real radicals, the ones who will do any crazy thing at all if there is a chance of a decent return on it, are the capitalists. Let them have a shot at the problem. They can't until they have some way to know what the prices are going to be.

.

Inhuman Conditions in Gaza

2011-10-21T11:55:00.001-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/embed/FePZ0y6aOos?mid=50

So is the problem in Gaza economic deprivation? Or maldistribution of incomes?

.

Old Glory

2011-10-18T19:06:00.000-07:00

I was in Cambridge with Rita yesterday and after the Harvard Natural History Museum we went through the Memorial Church on the Harvard campus. The main hall of the church is lined with plaques honoring the Harvard men who fell in the Civil War. Each plaque has the young man's name, his dates of birth and death and where he died. Gettysburg, Antietam, Chickamauga, Fredericksburg, Cold Harbor, Bull Run, Petersburg. And others.

The plaques made them suddenly real. In their mid- to late-twenties, they had been young officers., lieutenants and captains. They died in the prime of their lives.

The name of one of them, Benjamin Franklin Pierce, had been appropriated by a television program as the name of the character 'Hawkeye' on the television program ' MASH'.

Once on a bicycle trip up the Potomac I had shied away from a short side trip that would have taken me to the Antietam National Battlefield. I was afraid of hearing the voices, the screams of the wounded and dying, attenuated by a century and a half, but not silenced. Here in Harvard Yard I had stumbled among them.

I got a lump in my throat and started crying. I had to get out of there before I made any more of a fool of myself. Rita was kind and understanding and left with me.I had been sneering at Harvard men and women as snobbish, self-satisfied, elitists, who made lots of money but were second rate at the research that had won Berkeley so many Nobel Prizes and Harvard so few.

Suddenly that seemed shallow. Harvard men had been dying in arms to save the Republic and to free the slaves before before there was a Berkeley.Certainly none of the privileged young people walking about in Harvard Yard were likely to die in arms for a cause they believed in. Those times are gone. But they are heirs of those who did. For the first time I understood the meaning of a tradition. The dead honor the living in a way that is hard for the rest of us to comprehend.

Here at Cape Elizabeth in Maine, a few hours drive north of Boston, Rita and I drove up to the hotel. In front of it there was a flagpole with an American flag flying. Over the years I had come to think of that flag as the emblem of the dominant world power, the American imperial republic. It had a stale look to it.

After the plaques in Harvard's Memorial Church, the flag was fresher, the colors brighter. It was the flag of the Union, the last best hope of mankind.

.

OMG...Obama is Hoover!

2011-10-18T09:08:00.000-07:00

Nostalgia

2011-10-15T15:29:00.000-07:00

[The morons couldn't even spell 'Caen' - click on yellow arrow for fullscreen]

Hallelujah! The Recession is Over! NOT!

2011-10-11T16:18:00.000-07:00

[1933 bread line]

According to an article in the New York Times, median household income in the United States has fallen an additional 6.7% since the end of the recession in June 2009. This is in addition to the 3.2% it fell during the recession which lasted from December 2007 to June 2009. Unemployment, which rose to 9.5% during the recession, has remained above 9% since the recession ended.

Those who lost their jobs were out of work an average of 16.6 weeks when the recession began and an average of 24.1 weeks when it ended. Now that there is no recession, those losing their jobs are now out of work an average of 40.5 weeks, the longest in 60 years.

For those still employed, wages adjusted for inflation have continued to fall since the recession ended. The number of people neither working nor receiving unemployment benefits has continued to rise.

Which means that the government's definition of a recession, "a period in which gross domestic product falls for two or more consecutive quarters" is worse than wrong - it is meaningless.

A Clearer View

2011-10-11T08:47:00.001-07:00

[a sukkah, 'booth' in English, made for Succot, the Festival of Booths]

Harvey said...

Your view on doing charity work is off. To not help others because the system that created the need should to be changed is foolish. It is not living in the present. Besides, revolution changes nothing but the characters.

You do not feed a hungry person because you want to end world hunger, but because he is hungry now. There is no end to the projects you can do.

Several year ago I got a grant to build sukkahs for people who never had one before. (Chico went from 2 sukkahs to 8. Earthshaking? No. but a nice difference) I bake and distribute challahs free to people on Shabbat. (One person told me they were just going to have dinner, but because they received the Challah they set the table, lit the candles and had a family Shabbat dinner.) My project to make and distribute tsitsit is taking off. A number of people now wear tsisit, a reminder to be a good person and to consider your actions.

Small steps on a small scale. Not as big as feeding people, but at least it may be feeding hungry souls. Or maybe not, but it is what I can do. The talmud says if you save a life, you save the world. That's big.

Seen Through the Fog

2011-10-10T08:16:00.000-07:00

[Overthrow the Bastards!]

The Rosh Hashonah and Yom Kippur high holidays have left me still in a quandary about what to with myself. At long last I have achieved some modest security of means and still enjoy good health. I live in arguably the most beautiful area in the world. And now in a particularly good part of it, with a woman who loves me and whom I am coming to love. She takes care of me and there is a view of city lights from above from our bedroom.

Now what? When life's problems of subsistence and comfort are solved, what should one, I, do? The obvious answers are all wrong.

Doing charity work without changing the system that makes it needed, has long since been shown to be a waste of time, counter-productive even. It is simply doing for free individually what should be done collectively and paid for by taxes on the rich.

Making revolution has been shown by a lifetime of listening to idiots talking about "building a movement" to be a fool's errand in a plutocracy with a show of elections. It was once said of William Randolph Hearst that there is no point in getting into a shouting match with someone who buys ink by the barrel.

Besides, life has taught me that I don't really want a revolution. In each of the great revolutions, France, Russia, and China, the wars and mass killings were caused not by the destruction of the old order but by the instability of the new one. Yesterday's massacre of Coptic Christians in Cairo shows that the Arab Spring will be no different.

Reformist politics, at least in the US, have once and for all been given the lie by the election of Barack Obama. His campaign rhetoric of hope has been followed by endless concessions to those whose excesses one hoped would be restrained by his reforms, reforms which never came to pass.

So what does that leave? One listens to the voice of the master, Voltaire. His advice was "tend one's own garden". I take that to mean that one should try to live a good life on one's own and not imagine grand social reforms nor any other great work.

So of what does a good life consist? According to another master, Aristotle, the good life consists of developing and exploiting whatever talents one has. Not even to excel, but to live to one's own limits - not to throw the discus further than anyone ever has, but to throw it as far as one can possibly throw it oneself.

I am either particularly unfortunate or particularly blessed in this regard. I once took the Johnson O'Connor Foundation's three-day battery of aptitude tests to find out what sort of career I should take up. I was dismayed to learn that according to the Johnson O'Connor Foundation my talents and aptitudes, while uniformly high, were all roughly equal. Which told me exactly nothing about what I should do.

In the exit interview, the regular guy was on vacation so I got a substitute, a hippy airhead, who suggested that what I should do with my life was either to end world hunger or build a starship. I am not making this up. I paid $300-odd dollars for this back in the 1980's when $300 was a month's rent.

But in retrospect the Johnson O'Connor Foundation did give me a valuable bit of information. It told me that there is no help, that experts are worthless. I could have prayed to G_d for guidance and saved the $300. Whatever one is going to do with one's life, one must decide on one's own.

Islamophobia in the Press - Again

2011-10-05T14:32:00.000-07:00

[Saul Perlmutter holding up the permanent UC campus parking permit awarded to Berkeley Nobel Prize winners]

The various agencies of the media are all reporting that Berkeley's own Saul Perlmutter and Technion's Daniel Schechter have both won 2011 Nobel Prizes, Perlmutter for physics and Schechter for chemistry.

Perlmutter and his team studied extremely distant supernovae and discovered not only that the universe is expanding, which was known, but that the expansion is accelerating. The energy of universal acceleration is called Dark Energy. It constitutes 73% of the mass-energy content of the universe.

As I understand it (a huge caveat) it combines two notions from high school physics and one from college. According to Newton: F = mA where F is force, m is mass, and A is acceleration. Force through distance is work. E = mc2 where E is energy, m is mass, and c is the speed of light.

Work is in units of energy, is energy. Here, the force equals the mass of the universe times the observed acceleration of the extremely distant supernovae. The force necessary to accelerate everything in the universe is applied through the distance by which the acceleration exceeds what the expansion would have been had it been un-accelerated. That force applied through that distance is the amount of work done. One is tempted to say that that is a ton of work/energy. But it is vastly more. The mass-equivalent of that much energy is expressed as m = E/c2.

So far from being a mere ton of energy, that much energy exceeds all the rest of the mass of the universe by almost three to one. Even the remaining 27% of the universe that is not dark energy is problematic as well. 23% of the mass of the universe is dark matter, detectable only by its gravitational effects on things we can see, like stars, gas, and dust. Only 4% of the mass of the universe consists of the stuff that we had until recently thought was all of it.

Which means that 96% of the universe consists of stuff that we have no idea whatever what it is. And Saul Perlmutter discovered three quarters of it. In 1998.

Daniel Schechter discovered and published, into the teeth of intense scientific opposition, the theory that the atomic arrangements of quasi-crystals are uniform and mathematically predictable but do NOT repeat. This so flew in the face of well-known and established principles both of crystallography and of the philosophy of science that Schechter almost lost his position at the university on account of it.

Neither reality nor Schechter succumbed to the pressure, and in the end the one validated the work of the other. The Swedish Academy added its imprimatur (and a million and a half dollars worth of Swedish kroner) to his work this year.

Though the Swedish Academy, and the academic world generally, recognized the work of Perlmutter and Schechter, they shamefully refused to acknowledge the equivalent accomplishments of Arab or even of Muslim scientists. Given that the much touted 1.4 billion Muslims out-number the much-reviled 14 million Jews by roughly 100 to 1, there must surely have been far greater accomplishments among the Muslims, among the 100, than among the Jews, the 1.

So the press must have covered up or omitted the vast accomplishments of the Muslims. What else could it be but a Zionist conspiracy of the Jewish-controlled media? Either that or the Muslims are exactly the stupid bastards their violent primitive behavior suggests they are. :o)

The View From On High

2011-09-27T12:59:00.000-07:00

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

Rosh Hashanah 5772

2011-09-23T15:33:00.000-07:00

[click on 4 outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

Ask me if I care. Go ahead, ask me.

2011-09-20T21:22:00.000-07:00

From the Sage of Chico....

The Taste of Crow

2011-09-18T21:13:00.000-07:00

[Paris Hotel de Ville - City Hall]

I was wrong in defending Dominique Strauss-Kahn.

I assumed all along that the rape charge was completely trumped up. DSK was recognized as the only person in France with a real prospect of winning the Presidency of France against Nicholas Sarkozy. It seemed much too convenient to the powers-that-be, the Big Money, in La Belle that he should be involved in such a sordid crime.

Indeed, every government in Europe and America who would not have welcomed a socialist government in France was a suspect in a frame. When it came out that the accuser had underworld connections it looked even more like a frame, a set up, the Old Badger Game.

But DSK's confession today that what he did in the New York hotel room was "a moral failure" is not the statement of an innocent man being framed. He was a victim only of his own lack of impulse control. He is exactly what his feminist accusers said he is - a rich powerful sonofabitch who couldn't keep his dick in his pants.

I like Nicholas Sarkozy but not his Gaullist party comrades. I am only slightly less enthusiastic about the ideologically-driven slimeballs in the Socialist Party than I am about the privileged SOB's in Sarkozy's party, the UMP. Any party that could choose Jacques Chirac as its leader is a party with no moral standards at all and the UMP is just such a party. By no coincidence at all former President Chirac is now on trial for corruption while Mayor of Paris.

Remembering 9-11

2011-09-10T19:40:00.000-07:00

The media lady can rationalize as she will, but those are Palestinians celebrating the massacre of 3,000 Americans by Muslims. Let the administration trim its Middle East policies as it will, those who celebrate the massacre of Americans are our enemies and should be treated as such.

Wearing Out Their Welcome

2011-09-05T13:25:00.000-07:00

Remember how I have been this crazy bigot for suggesting that unlimited immigration of people hostile to the US and to American society might not be such a great idea? It turns out that my logic is now that of the famously tolerant Dutch government as well.

The Netherlands, where six per cent of the population is now Muslim, is scrapping multiculturalism:
The Dutch government says it will abandon the long-standing model of multiculturalism that
has encouraged Muslim immigrants to create a parallel society within the Netherlands.

A new integration bill, which Dutch Interior Minister Piet Hein Donner presented to parliament on June 16, reads:
"The government shares the social dissatisfaction over the multicultural society model and
plans to shift priority to the values of the Dutch people.
In the new integration system, the values of the Dutch society play a central role.
With this change, the government steps away from the model of a multicultural
society."

The letter continues: "A more obligatory integration is justified because the government also
demands that from its own citizens. It is necessary because otherwise the society gradually
grows apart and eventually no one feels at home any more in the Netherlands..."
The new integration policy will place more demands on immigrants. For example, immigrants will be required to learn the Dutch language, and the government will take a tougher approach to immigrants who ignore Dutch values or disobey Dutch law.

The government will also stop offering special subsidies for Muslim immigrants because,
according to Donner, "it is not the government's job to integrate immigrants."
The government will introduce new legislation that outlaws forced marriages and will also
impose tougher measures against Muslim immigrants who lower their chances of employment by the way they dress.

More specifically, the government will impose a ban on face-covering Islamic burqas as of January 1, 2013.

There seems to be some sort of rough rule here, that whenever Muslims live in close proximity with non-Muslims, the non-Muslims wind up not liking them very much.

Worth Reading

2011-09-01T12:53:00.000-07:00

[The United Nations - just as successful as the League of Nations]

from today's New York Times--

UNITED NATIONS — A United Nations review has found thatIsrael’s naval blockade of Gaza is legal and appropriate but that the way its forces boarded a Turkish-based flotilla trying to break that blockade 15 months ago, killing nine passengers, was excessive and unreasonable.
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The report, expected to be released on Friday, also found that when Israeli commandos boarded the main ship they faced “organized and violent resistance from a group of passengers” and were therefore required to use force for their own protection. But the report called the force “excessive and unreasonable,” saying the loss of life was unacceptable and the Israeli military’s later treatment of passengers was abusive.
The 105-page report, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, was completed months ago. But its publication was delayed several times as Turkey and Israel sought to reconcile their deteriorating relationship and perhaps avoid making the report public. In reactions from both governments included in the report, as well as in interviews, each objected to conclusions. Both believe the report, which was intended to help mend relations, will instead make reconciliation harder.
Turkey is particularly upset by the conclusion that Israel’s naval blockade is in keeping with international law and that its forces have the right to stop Gaza-bound ships in international waters, which is what happened here. That conclusion oversteps the mandate of the four-member panel appointed by the United Nations secretary general and is at odds with other United Nations decisions, Turkey argued.
The report noted that the panel did not have the power to compel testimony or demand documents, but instead had to rely on information provided by Israel and Turkey. Therefore, its conclusions can not be considered definitive in either fact or law.
The foreign ministries in Turkey and Israel declined to comment publicly on the report, saying they preferred to wait for its official release. No one was available to comment in the office of the United Nations spokesman.
Israel considers the report to be a rare vindication for it in the United Nations. A Security Council statement at the time assailed the loss of life and Israel suffered widespreadinternational condemnation. It thought that by offering to negotiate an agreement with Turkey that would stop publication, Ankara might soften its position.
But the two countries’ negotiations, which focused on some kind of apology from Israel and compensation for the victims — eight Turks and an American of Turkish descent — ended in failure. Israel says it is willing to express regret and pay compensation. But the Turks want a full apology. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel believes that apologizing would demoralize his citizens and broadcast a message of weakness. Aides say he might reconsider at a later date if the Turks soften their position.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey says an apology and compensation would not be sufficient to return his ambassador to Tel Aviv. Israel also has to end its naval blockade of Gaza, he insisted.
The report does recommend that Israel should make “an appropriate statement of regret’ and pay compensation, but the Turks say that formula does not express sufficient remorse.
The United Nations investigation into the events on the Turkish-flagged ship known as the Mavi Marmara, the largest of six vessels that were commandeered by Israeli commandos on May 31, 2010, was headed by Sir Geoffrey Palmer, former prime minister of New Zealand, aided by Álvaro Uribe, former president of Colombia, along with a representative each from Israel and Turkey.
It takes a broadly sympathetic view of Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza.
“Israel faces a real threat to its security from militant groups in Gaza,” the report says in its opening paragraphs. “The naval blockade was imposed as a legitimate security measure in order to prevent weapons from entering Gaza by sea and its implementation complied with the requirements of international law.”
The report is hard on the flotilla, asserting that it “acted recklessly in attempting to breach the naval blockade.” It said that while the majority of the hundreds of people aboard the six vessels had no violent intention, that could not be said of IHH, the Turkish aid group that primarily organized the flotilla. It said, “There exist serious questions about the conduct, true nature and objectives of the flotilla organizers, particularly IHH.”
It also said that the Turkish government tried to persuade the organizers to avoid an encounter with Israeli forces but that “more could have been done.”
Regarding the boarding of the ship, the Palmer committee said Israel should have issued warnings closer to the moment of action and should have first turned to nonviolent options.
The report assailed Israel for the way in which the nine were killed and others injured. “Forensic evidence showing that most of the deceased were shot multiple times, including in the back, or at close range has not been adequately accounted for in the material presented by Israel,” it says. The report does, however, acknowledge that once on board the commandos had to defend themselves against violent attack. The report also criticizes Israel’s subsequent treatment of passengers, saying it “included physical mistreatment, harassment and intimidation, unjustified confiscation of belongings and the denial of timely consular assistance.”
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Like so many elements of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the events on the Mavi Marmara produced two fiercely competing narratives, each full of self-justification and contempt for the other.
An official Israeli investigation found not only that its naval blockade was legal but that everything done by Israel, from the actions of its commandos to the treatment of the passengers afterwards, was honorable and appropriate. The flotilla organizers, it said, included 40 members of a “hard-core group” who were not properly checked before boarding in Turkey.
A Turkish investigation came to precisely the opposite conclusion. It asserted that the blockade was illegal in all aspects, amounting to collective punishment of the Palestiniansof Gaza. It said all of the people on board were civilians, all had been checked out and were unarmed and therefore subject to protection from any invasion under international humanitarian law.
The Turks also concluded that Israeli commandos used live fire before landing, leading to death and injury; the Israelis said they had not. The Palmer committee said it was unable to determine who was right.
Those critical of Israeli actions toward Gaza have viewed the naval blockade that began officially in January 2009 as part and parcel of a siege imposed by Israel on the coastal strip shortly after Hamas took full control there in 2007. That siege, which has eased considerably in the past year, prevented the movement of most goods and people.
But the Palmer committee said while it had concerns about that policy and urged that it be loosened further, it saw the naval blockade as a purely security-oriented tool that had been imposed to stop weapons arriving to Gaza by sea. It also expressed strong concern for the thousands of rockets and mortars fired into Israel from Gaza in recent years. It said that because Gaza’s port cannot handle large ships, a naval blockade has little impact on the supply of civilian goods.

It may be that the UN has seen the hand-writing on the wall.

After the UN voted a resolution that "Zionism is racism" in 1975, Congress suspended payment of the US's annual dues to the UN. Only when the resolution was rescinded in 1991 did the US resume its dues payments. Our dues constituted one-third of the UN's operating budget. The arrears have never been paid.

My guess is that the UN officials are rightly afraid that any further Israel-lynchings will be answered by the US Congress with a second cutoff of payment of the US' annual dues. Given the current rage for budget-cutting in Washington, it would be hard to defend continued payment if the UN continues to present itself in a bad light.

I think the UN will be on its best behavior for several years to come. This is just one example. Putting next year's Durban III Anti-Racism Conference in New York where it will not, one hopes be controlled by anti-Semitic Muslim radicals as Durban I and II were, is another example.

Home Soon

2011-09-01T09:43:00.000-07:00

[Yes, it's sarcasm]

After endless screwing around with being sick first in Grande Prairie and now in Edmonton, I am reluctantly throwing in the towel.

I have been taking antibiotics for six days now and am at last able to eat normal food again. At least I hope so. I had real food for breakfast - lox and a bagel - and I am now waiting to see if my innards can handle it. The lox was greasy so I am uneasy about what will happen during the next few hours. It is remarkable how quickly and how much one comes to miss food. Oatmeal and soda crackers are technically food, but only technically.

I was willing to start bicycling again subject to the deconditioning of not having exercised regularly for two weeks. But I was not willing to start subject to both the deconditioning and the considerable debilitation from being sick. My sister Gail pointed out to me that I also faced the risk of a relapse and possibly getting sicker than before. And of being on the road when it happened. Which I hadn't thought of. It gave me pause.

The bicycle trip was becoming more a medical enterprise than a touristic one. This was supposed to be fun and it has stopped being so.

Even if I set out, there is nothing south of here but endless vistas of prairie for hundreds of kilometers south to Calgary and then more of the same into Montana. There is much to be said for prairie vistas but once that has been said, there is no more to say about them. I am too far east of the Rockies and it is too late in the season to do much of anything toward going home.

No, that isn't true. If I were fit and inclined, I could bull my way across Alberta, Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and California in a month. The fact is that I am tired, sick, and discouraged. There is no point in pretending that I am forced out. The fact is that I am quitting because I don't want to do this anymore. I have been on the road since June 20, for just over two months now. It is just over.

So I have said the magic words, "the hell with it" and booked a flight home. I feel really crappy about it ending with a whimper but I would have felt a lot worse if it had ended with a bang.

Irene

2011-08-27T11:04:00.000-07:00

[click four outward pointing arrows for fullscreen]

Air Swimmers

2011-08-27T09:43:00.000-07:00

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

A Policy Statement on the Deficit

2011-08-27T01:04:00.000-07:00

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

2011-08-23T21:21:00.000-07:00

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq1zpHF0J04

Mission Accomplished

2011-08-23T05:45:00.000-07:00

[Nafissatou Diallo]

From today's Wall Street Journal -

Until his arrest, Mr. Strauss-Kahn was viewed as the only politician who could defeat France's President Nicolas Sarkozy in next year's election. Although Mr. Strauss-Kahn has yet to reveal his plans, few French Socialists believe the former chief of the International Monetary Fund can revive his presidential ambitions.

I think I owe Nafissatou Diallo an apology. In a previous blog entry I questioned her competence as a perjurer. But if the Wall Street Journal is correct, then she did exactly what she was sent to do. Success is the measure of a job well done.

Here I am speculating, but one could make the case that her story came unglued at exactly the right time. She was credible enough to convince the hotel management and security people that she was telling the truth. She was credible enough for the police investigators to believe her and the Manhattan prosecutor to file charges, ruining Mr. Strauss-Kahn and assuring the re-election of President Sarkozy.

This is the woman who was able to bring herself to tears in describing a gang-rape in her native Guinea that was later determined never to have happened.

But she was not credible enough to get the case brought to trial. Which prevented her from being investigated and cross-examined and subjected to deposition after deposition, during the course of which she might have revealed who put her up to it.

When one consider the Dreyfus Affair, if the French military establishment had merely disgraced Dreyfus, drummed him out of the army, and sent him to prison for a few years, nothing much else would have happened to him nor to the Army. Nobody would have investigated. They would have gotten away with it.

But instead they sent Dreyfus to Devil's Island for life. Which was dramatic enough that when exculpatory evidence came to light, it was worth Emile Zola's time to write 'J'Accuse' and worth

Georges Clemenceau's time to publish it in his newspaper L'Aurore.

The subsequent investigations and unraveling scandal between 1895 and 1906 permanently damaged the reputation of the French Army and of the class it was part of.

So Diallo had just the right amount of credibility - enough to knock Strauss-Kahn out of the race for the presidency of France - but not enough to convict him and make him a martyr, nor to risk too much investigation into who sent her.

Diallo, so far being an example of the difficulty of getting competent help in New York, is an example of to what high levels the arts of skulduggery, lying, and manipulation have been raised in our time.

What happened in New York was a seizure of the Elysee Palace for the next seven years, a clandestine coup d'etat. And it appears that they got away with it, in plain sight.

South African Liberation

2011-08-22T09:44:00.000-07:00

[Nelson Mandela retired in 1998. He is now 93 years old.]

Remember when the end of apartheid in South Africa was going to mean the spread of democracy throughout Africa? Instead South Africa traded what it had, political clout, legitimacy, and mercenary soldiers, for what the Khadaffi regime had, which was, well, money. And oil.

Now that Khadaffi is discredited and all but overthrown, surely the South African government has seen the error of it ways and recognized its hypocrisy? Well, no.

JOHANNESBURG—The spreading rebel control of Libya on Monday appeared to deal a diplomatic setback to South Africa and other African nations that had argued a change in Libyan government should happen at the negotiating table and not on the battlefield.

South Africa, a continental power broker, has sought to bring rebels and Col. Moammar Gadhafi's forces together for talks to end the conflict. That stance hasn't changed.

Even as rebel trucks streamed into the Libyan capital of Tripoli on Monday, South Africa gave no indication it would recognize a rebel-led government. The U.S. and the U.K. are among more than 30 countries that recognize the rebel body, known as the National Transitional Council, as Libya's legitimate government.

Pretoria instead has supported an African Union plan for a transitional government once there is a "durable cease-fire." The transitional government should include elements from both the rebel forces and the current regime—but not Col. Gadhafi—and move toward drafting a new constitution and holding elections, according to the South African Minister of International Affairs, Maite Nkoana-Mashabane.

"If this government falls, there is no government," she told reporters at a briefing.

She said there were plans "afoot" to form such a broad transitional government in that case.

So we have the heirs of Nelson Mandela supporting a brutal primitive military dictatorship, even after it has been overthrown by the revolt of its own people. Cool, huh?

This is morally consistent with the heirs of the revolution against apartheid sponsoring the overtly racist Durban I and Durban II anti-racism conferences, with their open anti-semitism, both held in Durban, South Africa.

This got so primitive and extreme that one of the main organizers of the conference, Mary Robinson, former President of Ireland, was obliged to disavow the conference she had herself organized.

Let it not be said that this is just a failure of the ANC (African National Congress) party which has ruled the country essentially without opposition for more than twenty years now. The tenor of social life in South Africa can be estimated from the repeated lynchings of Zimbabwean immigrant workers by South African mobs.

They Wouldn't Do That. Would They?

2011-08-22T09:24:00.000-07:00

From today's Wall Street Journal -

New York prosecutors are likely to seek dismissal of all criminal sexual assault charges against former International Monetary Fund chief Dominique Strauss-Kahn on Tuesday, a person familiar with the matter said.

The request, to be made Tuesday when Mr. Strauss-Kahn is due in New York State Supreme Court, comes after more than two months in which prosecutors for Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr. have probed not only Mr. Strauss-Kahn, but also his accuser, Sofitel hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo.

Ultimately, prosecutors have come to believe that in light of what they saw as serious questions about Ms. Diallo's credibility, it would be unlikely they could convince a jury that Mr. Strauss-Kahn, 62, sexually assaulted the 32-year-old Guinean immigrant in his suite at the Sofitel on May 14, the person familiar with the matter said.

So this whole thing has come to nothing. Nothing, that is, except that it stayed in the news long enough to discredit Strauss-Kahn and take him out of contention for election as the next President of France.

No one but a crazy conspiracy theorist would suggest that anyone could have put Diallo up to removing by far the strongest Socialist candidate from contention. I think the greater scandal here is that it shows the difficulty of hiring a decent perjurer these days. If one can't get good help, how is capitalism to thrive?

Surgical Operations in the Middle East

2011-08-21T23:23:00.000-07:00

From today's Wall Street Journal:

"In the first hour of the cease-fire, which Palestinian and Israeli media reported was starting Sunday evening, several rockets were fired into southern Israel. An Israeli government spokesman said Israel's responses to rocket fire would be "surgical" and measured. A spokesman for Hamas wasn't available to comment."

One can perhaps assume that the reason the spokesman wasn't available was.... Let's hope so.

Where is George Orwell when we need him?

2011-08-21T18:55:00.000-07:00

[Mao-tse-tung]

According to today's Wall Street Journal, in commenting on the visit of Joe Biden to the People's Republic -

[Xinhua, the official organ of the Chinese government] urged Washington to "end its excessive reliance on overseas borrowing, make substantial reforms and cuts to its bloated entitlement programs, reduce budget deficits and restructure its economy."

"Bloated entitlement programs"? This is the Communist Party?

What can one expect from a politburo all of whom were born after the Long March and who were small children during the Cultural Revolution? More than ever we can join Karl Marx in saying, "The workers have no homeland."

Auto-emancipation

2011-08-21T11:07:00.000-07:00

In the August 2011 issue of Scientific American appears this squib reprinted from the August 1861 issue of the same magazine.

Civil War at Sea
The schooner S.J. Waring, which had been captured by the privateer Jeff Davis, arrived in this port on July 21st, having been retaken by the black steward, with the assistance of one of the seamen. When the S.J. Waring was taken, her captain and mate were taken off, but the colored steward, two of the seamen and a passenger were left on board. The steward having discovered by a conversation which he heard, that it was the intention of the prize master Captain Amiel to sell him into slavery as soon as the schooner arrived in Charleston, determined to make a desperate attempt to retake the vessel. The steward's name is William Tillman.

The steward was engaging in auto-emancipation. He did not wait for the authorities. He did not have faith in the system. He did not implore anyone's conscience. He did not organize a reform movement. He did not wait for better times. He did not shrug and say, "What're you gonna do?" He did not petition. He did not put it to a vote after free and fair debate.

He freed himself by force, with permission from no one. William Tillman engaged in auto-emancipation.

In 1882 a Russian Jew named Leo Pinsker published the founding document of the Zionist movement, titled "Auto-emancipation" which advocated that the Jews do for themselves what William Tillman had done for himself twenty one years earlier.

William Tillman was a Zionist. The IDF are William Tillmans.

A Common Misunderstanding

2011-08-19T15:18:00.000-07:00

When I was a teenager I rebelled against belief in a G_d whom I had been led to believe was a bearded white-haired old man on a throne amid clouds in heaven.

Only when I grew up did I come to understand that what I didn’t believe in was a stupid caricature, a cartoon.

So let us get one thing perfectly clear - G_d is not a bearded, white-haired, old man on a throne on a cloud. G_d is not an Angry Santa Claus. That is an image that has been provided over the centuries for children and those too ignorant to understand anything else.

The fact that you no longer believe the fable you were told about as a child does not mean there is no G_d. It means the bubbe meisse you were told is not true.

Literate people have never believed that. Greek philosophy shows that not even Roman and Greek pagans believed that Zeus and the other gods were literally over-sized human beings as shown in statues.

I would point out that in the Middle Ages the hardest thing to believe about religion was that G_d created the universe out of nothing, and that nothing preceded it.

Modern astronomy has established that the universe came into existence in the Big Bang 13.7 billion years ago. If that is not creation out of nothing, then what would be?

Further, the physics is that the Big Bang is when space-time came into existence. Before time existed there was no ‘before’. So the two major obstacles to belief in creation have been laid to rest by the ten or eleven observational bases for believing the Big Bang theory.

The Big Bang also implies that everything in the universe has a common origin, has a common cause, a common destiny, and everything that happens or can happen is the expression of the same common process.

Even Deism, the theory that G_d created the universe and then abandoned it, does not survive the Big Bang theory. The Big Bang does NOT posit that something happened at a moment a long time ago and then nothing happened since. What it does say is that universal expansion started then and continues now, not a moving outward into space, but an expansion of space itself. Which is to say that the act of creation, the expansion, is continuous and is going on now, this very instant, and will go on forever, to the best of our knowledge.

None of this should be confused with pantheism. All possible universes throughout eternity are, according to Spinoza, the Face of G_d - a surface or manifestation.

To deny the unity of the universe one would have to engage in the same denial of Big Bang observations as the fundamentalists use to deny the existence of dinosaurs. Nothing but closing one’s mind to evidence will support the atheist’s unexamined 19th Century mechanistic assumptions.

One can easily extend this argument to the results of Feynman’s two slit experiment in the 1940’s. He found that the quantum mechanical wave function collapses in the presence of an observer. Since the wave -particle duality is a demonstrated fact, there must be a physical significance to there being an observer. Human beings are recent, quantum particles are ancient. Yet their properties depend on an observer.

What kind of conclusion can an atheist draw from this? The usual shrug of the shoulders is merely denial - that again puts them in the company of hard-shell fundamentalists whose beliefs are not open to reason or observation.

The widespread atheism among Jews is not a proof that G_d is dead, it is a proof that the level of Jewish education is pathetic.

Michelle Bachmann

2011-08-18T19:40:00.000-07:00

Michelle Bachmann in a radio interview--

But what people recognize is that there’s a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward. And especially with this very bad debt ceiling bill, what we have done is given a favor to President Obama and the first thing he’ll whack is five hundred billion out of the military defense at a time when we’re fighting three wars. People recognize that.

The Soviet Union?

If everyone supports a two state solution, why isn't it happening?

2011-08-16T11:39:00.000-07:00

If everyone supports a two state solution, why isn't it happening?

Nabil Sha'ath, the PA foreign minister, explains that the PA supports a Palestinian state for the Palestinian people, but will never agree to a Jewish state for the Jewish people.

Could that just possibly be the obstacle to peace, and not the settlements?

A Link to Some Pictures from this Bicycle Trip

2011-08-16T11:21:00.000-07:00

https://picasaweb.google.com/101620971752378953137/2011BikeTripYukonBC

To go to the next picture, click on the pale blue arrow at the right or press the right arrow on the keyboard.

Too Big To See?

2011-08-16T08:45:00.000-07:00

[PG&E power generating plant at Moss Landing, near Monterey]

A lodge in the north is a combination gas station, cafe, store, and motel. The lodges along the Alaska Highway are too remote to have power lines running to them. There is instead a small building near the main buildings where the generator runs constantly. These small generator buildings are sometimes better sound-insulated, but usually worse.

I have been fussy about turning off lights I am not using because one knows that the generator is outside converting fossil fuel, usually diesel oil, to electricity. This seems like an incredibly wasteful way to get electricity, burning an ancient and irreplaceable resource to get temporary pleasures like watching television, leaving lights on, heating a whole building instead of wearing warm clothes inside it, and so on. It seems unsustainable.

But, I reasoned, it is part of the rigors and remoteness of the north. Everything is expensive here because everything has to be trucked a long way, that is, there is a higher overhead. It makes sense that electricity would also be produced in a fairly primitive, expensive, high-overhead way, by burning fossil fuel, because one is far from the grid.

But then it occurred to me that that is how the grid itself works. Our power plants all burn an ancient and irreplaceable resource to provide temporary pleasure like televisions, curling irons, and heating houses instead of wearing warm clothes inside them.

But we do it on such a vast scale that it seems like an abstraction. An Alaska Highway lodge brings it down to a scale where we can see how primitive and wasteful it is to burn fossil fuel to generate electricity.

We have to find a better way.

Do It Yourself

2011-08-10T16:03:00.000-07:00

[Great on burgers too]

"The study, by the Mayo Clinic, found that seven known risk factors contribute to up to half of Alzheimer's cases worldwide. For Americans, the single biggest risk factor is physical inactivity, which the study linked to 21 percent of U.S. Alzheimer's cases.

Depression accounts for another 15 percent, and smoking for 11 percent. Globally, lack of education is the greatest risk factor, with a link to 19 percent of cases; scientists say minds that are not active and engaged in learning are more susceptible to the disease.

The findings contradict the widespread belief that Alzheimer's is a predetermined genetic fate."

Which means that Alzheimer's is caused by couches and spreads from the toukes to the brain.

Life and Death

2011-08-10T11:39:00.000-07:00

It is fortunate that Jews don't believe in reincarnation. If we did, then being born would come shortly after having died in a previous life. Which would mean that a birthday would also be a yahrzeit which would just be tacky. I like it the way we have it. You get one shot at it, you do the best you can with it, then fertik.

I am always bemused by my and everyone else's fear of death and desire for medical care and long life, followed by days consciously wasted. I do it. You do it. Everybody does it.

If we are so afraid of death, why do we piss away our lives? I don't know what life is supposed to be about nor what exactly constitutes not pissing away days.

But I know very clearly what does constitute pissing away a day. And I still do it all the time. I have done it repeatedly on this trip. I do it constantly at home. Promising myself to live a more active life is much like promising myself to go on a diet - long on promising, short on delivery.

Aristotle says that the way to live a good life is to acquire virtuous habits through practice. By practicing virtuous habits, they eventually become second nature, habitual, done without effort. He may be right. Nothing else seems to work.

My sister Gail replies:
If you have no regrets, then it is not pissing away a day. If you regret not doing something else then maybe it is a day pissed away. The Jewish ethic is that you should first do no harm, if you do, then make amends, if you have a talent it is a sin to not nurture it, if you have much, it is good to share with those who have little. You do not have to do these things every day but enough to not have regrets. A life well lived includes sometimes just lying on the couch and reading something interesting.

The wisdom of 73 years and still learning.

If It's Not Funny, Why Am I Laughing?

2011-08-06T16:33:00.000-07:00

[66 years ago today]

The Yiddish word "shlemazel" or "shlemazzle" means a person who is chronically a victim. The teaching mnemonic is, "the schlemiel spills the soup on the schlemazel."

At Arches National Park in Utah in 2007 I was especially cautious around Balancing Rock because, though it had stood for perhaps thousands of years, if it chose to fall today, and fall on me, not only would I be dead, I would also be ridiculous. I would be a cosmic shlemazel.

It turns out this kind of luck has actually happened to people. In Japanese, the word hibakusha means 'explosion survivor'. Niju hibakusha means 'double explosion survivor'.

On August 6, 1945 - 66 years ago today - Tsumoto Yamaguchi was in Hiroshima on a business trip. An American B-29 bomber, the Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb on the city that day, and Yamaguchi, like many tens of thousands of others, was injured in the immense explosion. So he cut short his trip and went home to Nagasaki.

According to Japanese statistics there were a total of 165 niju hibakusha to whom the same thing happened. I don't know if Mr. Yamaguchi was a believing Buddhist or not, but if he was, he must have been a real schmuck in a past life to have such mazel. Or maybe not. He died last year at the age of 93.

Why S&P Downgraded the US Government's Credit Rating

2011-08-06T01:27:00.000-07:00

S&P's statement:

"More broadly, the downgrade reflects our view that the effectiveness, stability, and predictability of American policymaking and political institutions have weakened at a time of ongoing fiscal and economic challenges."

One's credit rating is based both on one's assets AND whether one is able to manage money reliably. Congress has just demonstrated that they as an institution are unable to do that.

The consequence of poor money management is lower credit rating and the consequence of that is higher risk to lenders and correspondingly higher interest rates. Which means that this folly in Congress redounds to the benefit of creditors of the United States, those who own treasury bonds, bills, and notes. They will collect, and we will pay, higher interest rates indefinitely as treasury auction after treasury auction is shadowed by the lowered credit rating.

A large fraction of the federal government's debt is owned by the Chinese and Japanese governments and by corporations in those countries. So the debacle in Congress and its result will result in still larger transfers of wealth from the United States to our creditors Back East than before.

Higher interest payments on the debt because of the lowered credit rating are an unfunded new obligation of the government. They will add to future deficits and thus increase future debt and the interest on it.

One would like to say, as most who write about this likely will, that everyone in Washington is to blame. That there is plenty of blame to go around. That Congress is to blame. Or Obama. That both parties are equally culpable.

But the facts are otherwise. Any recollection of what happened is that almost everyone offered to compromise. The Democrats offered to compromise. The Republican leadership offered to compromise. President Obama tried to arrange a compromise. The one group, and it turned out to be a decisive one, that repeatedly refused to compromise was the Tea Party faction of the Republican party.

Congress has been negotiating budget compromises since 1790, and it has always more or less worked. Clearly what changed, the new thing in Washington, was the election of a cohort of right-wing radicals to Congress in the 2010 elections.

When asked how it happened, it would be easy to shake one's head and mutter something about "gun-toting morons in the fly-over states", or "The country is turning right right now. But it will swing back."

The fact is that people in the middle of the country were no brighter ten or twenty years ago, and no less enamored of their guns then. And the notion of a pendulum swinging back and forth requires one to believe that things happen for no reason, that there is no such thing as cause-and-effect.

But there are reasons why things happen. I strongly suspect that the decision in Citizens United v. FEC in January 2010 and the rise of the Tea Party are not coincidental. In Citizens United the Supreme Court held that money is speech and that corporations have the same First Amendment rights to free speech as human beings. They made the saying, "Money talks" into a maxim of constitutional law.

Since then corporations have been legally able to contribute unlimitedly to political campaigns. And they have. Since Citizens United, large sums have been put into political campaigns that could not legally have been contributed before. Judging by the results in the 2010 elections, that new money has been going primarily to right-wing candidates and causes.

That created the Tea Party and the Tea Party created the budget impasse in Congress, and that is on its way to create higher interest on the national debt, larger deficits on account of the higher interest, increased debt overall, and increased transfers of trillions of dollars from the United States to China and Japan.

The moral here is that the situation we see today will not soon go away. The obvious riposte of the voters to the Tea Party for their intransigence in 2011 is to turn them out in 2012. It won't happen. The Supreme Court is right. Money does talk. And it will talk at least as loudly in 2012 as it did in 2010.

The right-wing intransigents in Congress are not going away. Their numbers and influence will not be diminished in the foreseeable future. If anything they may grow in power.

What do we get in return for these harms to the nation? We get free speech for corporations.

Good Times

2011-08-03T23:44:00.000-07:00

It was a major piece of work getting away from Muncho Lake today. The road followed Muncho Creek from its mouth at the lake to its headwaters at a mountain pass. It was up and up, and up, continuously for fourteen miles.

Even after making it to the pass and then down into the Toad River canyon my legs were unreliable for climbing.

The prize was that Toad River canyon is spectacular, with vista after vista. The weather was perfect. At one point I found myself spontaneously shouting, "Life is good!" And the echo off the canyon walls assured me I was right.

The Good Old Days

2011-08-01T19:20:00.000-07:00

[click on photo to enlarge]

Passing on the Savings

2011-07-28T12:40:00.000-07:00

[click on cartoon to enlarge]

What's In It For Me?

2011-07-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

So suppose the Republicans actually follow through on the premise that they would rather the country collapse than suffer rich people to pay taxes? What will happen?

Everyone agrees at least that interest rates will rise and the dollar will fall. But interest rates are like energy prices. They are built into every other price somehow. If they rise, it seems like prices should rise generally. But interest is a transfer of wealth from borrower to lender. If rates rise, that should increase the amounts transferred.

My impression, is that the relationship between borrowers and lenders is that in general lenders have more money than borrowers. If it were any other way, the borrowers wouldn't need to borrow and the lenders wouldn't have anything to lend. So one can say that in general interest is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.

And the Republicans' obduracy in Congress, if it leads to higher interest rates, is almost certain to benefit the rich at the expense of the poor. Isn't that a surprise to find the Republicans pursuing such a policy? Who would have thought it?

As the dollar falls, as surely it must with trillions of recently created dollars floating around, the price of imported goods must rise. Which is further inflation.

How does the government, usually through the Federal Reserve Board, fight inflation? By raising interest rates. That should not be too hard, considering that interest rates - to banks at least - are now less than zero. I.e. zero less the inflation rate.

But the reason the rates are zero - to banks - is to keep money flowing by banks borrowing for free so they can lend at low interest rates so borrowers can invest and buy and sell. That is, to keep the economy from stopping. Less politely, to keep it from collapsing. Which it nearly did in 2008 and 2009.

So the economy faces the risk of inflation if nothing is done, if interest rates are kept low. And as we have seen in earlier decades, particularly the 1970's, that once started, an inflationary spiral can be hard to stop, very hard.

Conversely, if interest rates are raised, either by the Federal Reserve raising them, or by the Republican sabotage of the national economy, we could fall back into a deflationary spiral. As the example of Japan in the 1990's has shown, once a deflationary spiral starts, almost nothing can stop it. And the attempts to slow it down leave the government with staggering amounts of debt afterward.

Assuming I were a Republican and thus so selfish that I were willing to destroy my country and impoverish its people rather than pay even a token amount of taxes on my income and assets, which disaster would I prefer to inflict on my country?

A deflationary spiral would mean that prices would go down so the cost of living would be less. Or would it? It would mean that costs incurred by corporations selling goods would go down. Prices would only go down if they lowered prices in response, if they passed on the savings to their customers. That is, if the market were really competitive rather than oligopolistic. In short, do falling producer price really mean falling consumer prices?

Oddly enough, even during the recent sharp retreat in consumer demand, there were almost no price reductions. Instead, there were special offers, things were 'On Sale', there was this gimmick and that, all of which were ways to disguise price reductions. This was so they would not have to admit to either the price reductions nor the inevitable price increases when consumer demand returned.

For goods in which the demand is less elastic, i.e. in which the consumer has fewer choices and little opportunity to simply not buy the product, e.g. medical care, pharmaceuticals, utility bills, food staples, and the like, the corporations have simply pocketed the difference and passed on none of the savings from falling costs.

So does supply-and-demand economics, the marketplace setting prices, really work in real life? In a word, NO.

Though I am no economist, my guess is that the Adam Smith model of the free market only works if every buyer and and every seller has identical economic power. Since that happens exactly never, the free market model is a theoretical construct that never actually happens. The ideology of the Republican Party and of free-market conservatives generally, is based squarely on this fantasy.

In short, if there were a serious deflation, my pension and the rents from my house would be seriously diminished. My stocks would go down. My mortgage would remain the same. The cost of living, though disguised, would not fall significantly. I would be screwed.

Conversely, if there were a serious inflation, my pension would rise about the same amount, the rents from my house would rise about the same amount, my stocks would rise about the same amount, and prices would rise about the same amount. Travel would probably not become much more expensive because though the dollar would be worth less, there would be more of them.

BUT my mortgage payment, which is a fixed rate mortgage, would NOT go up. Paying this is by far the largest expenditure I have. More than half of every dollar I get goes to paying it. If the inflation were severe enough, the mortgage might become just another bill like the utility bill - noticeable, but not crushing.

So it is in my interest for the party bickering to go on forever, for the deficits to grow ever-larger, for interest rates to rise ever-higher to keep the Chinese lending us money for the ever-larger debt.

Fortunately for my soul, I am not quite that selfish. I plan to live in the United States for the rest of my life and I would prefer that it not be a social and economic wreck, neither in my time nor after.

So what I would like to see would be for Anders Breivik to escape from prison in Norway, and come to the US and kill everybody in Congress. And then for the next Congress to raise taxes, reduce expenditures, and eventually balance the budget.

p.s. Hi, FBI. Just kidding about killing everybody in Congress. It's a metaphor for the 2012 elections. Get it? Really. Just kidding.

Hey, wait. I am in Canada - I can say anything I want. Go get 'em Anders!

More to me than to you

2011-07-26T12:27:00.001-07:00

Victory of the Borg

2011-07-26T11:21:00.000-07:00

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for fullframe]

Numbers Matter

2011-07-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

[click four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

With all due respect for the victims of both, 93 defenseless people have been murdered by a lone madman in Norway in the past few days. 1,600 defenseless people have been murdered by the regime in Syria in the past few days. Compare the coverage and world reaction to each.

Close, But No Cigar

2011-07-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

[James Dean, 1956]

In his Dead Pool selections for 2010 Harvey had Amy Winehouse as number 8 on his list of croakers. Today she bit the big one at the age of 27, which would have given Harvey a monumental 73 points. But it was not to be. Not on either of our lists for 2011.

But there is always next year. Question for next year's list - does Charlie Sheen, age 46, own a motorcycle?

How Bad Is Oslo?

2011-07-22T12:09:00.000-07:00

[click the four outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

The destruction appears to be so general that it is hard to understand what happened. But from the video the building fronts appear to be bashed in rather than out, so the blast was on the street rather than inside. The incinerated cars suggest that it was a coordinated series of car bombs.

The fact that there was a shooting attack at a government party youth camp at the same time makes it almost impossibly unlikely that the motive was not terrorism.

There are lots of crazy people in the world and there is as yet no evidence that this was a jihad attack. But an awful lot of the crazy people whose craziness takes the form of bombing public places are jihadi Muslims. Norway is more than 10% Muslim and it is a very real likelihood that the attack was perpetrated by jihadis.

According to the New York Times,

Earlier this month, Norwegian prosecutors filed a terrorism charge against Mullah Krekar, the Iraqi-born founder of the Kurdish Islamist group Ansar al-Islam, who is accused of making death threats against the head of Norway’s Conservative Party, Erna Solberg. Mr. Krekar co-founded Ansar al-Islam in 2001, but said a year later that he no longer led the group, which is listed as a terrorist organization by the United States and United Nations.

If the attack does turn out to have been done by jihadis, the irony will be palpable. Norway has been foremost among Western countries in its anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian policies.

I remember being on a bicycle trip in Norway in 2001 during a diplomatic crisis there. From CNN in my motel room I followed it for several days.

A Palestinian who had murdered two Israelis applied for asylum in Norway on the ground that he would be subject to persecution if he were turned away. His asylum petition was granted. Israel and the United States protested. The Norwegian government deflected, saying it was an immigration service administrative decision and they could not change it. Whereupon the newly inaugurated Bush administration sent the US Navy to conduct war games off the Norwegian coast.

The message, I am pretty sure, was not that the United States was going to invade Norway, but rather that the US was serious about it and that it was not a routine diplomatic note. I think the further implication was that if the decision were not changed, that Norway would be informally suspended from membership in NATO.

Which would have meant, among other things, that if Russia had wanted to establish an equally informal sphere of influence over Norway's all-but-empty northernmost territory of Finnmark (Norwegian Lappland) and the arctic island of Svlabard, the Norwegians would have been on their own to do anything about it.

The government got the message, the person who granted the asylum petition was transferred to other duties, and the Palestinian murderer was extradited.

The lesson of Oslo in 2011 is the same as was learned at such vast cost at Munich in 1938 -- appeasement doesn't work.

One could well say there is another lesson as well. Oslo is where the Oslo Accords were negotiated and signed in 1993. These were the "Land for Peace" deal between Israel and the PLO. Israel conceded the land - much of Judea and Samaria and all of Gaza were handed over to the newly-constituted Palestinian Authority. Jericho, Ramallah, Qalqilyah, Gaza, and many other cities got Palestinian governments. And got nothing in return. There was and is no peace and no diminution in Palestinian hostility. Nor a diminution in their teaching hostility and delegitimization to their children.

So the earlier lesson of Oslo is that negotiating with people who are negotiating in bad faith is worse than not negotiating.

Today and Tomorrow

2011-07-19T23:12:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I crossed the continental divide between the waters of the Swift River that flow north and west, eventually into the Yukon River and the Pacific, and those of the Rancheria River that flow north, eventually into the MacKenzie and the Arctic Ocean. It should have been a minor tourist factoid but it wasn't. It was exhilarating. It made the wind fresher and the sky brighter to be up on a mountain pass dividing two parts of the world. It was also reassuring that I had gotten to the top and that it was all downhill from there.

Today has been a rest day at the Rancheria Lodge. It puts the "run" in rundown, the "shab" in shabby, and the "funk" in funky. It has reputedly been here since 1942 when the highway was built. And looks like it.

Tomorrow will be a longish day and then Thursday I should be at Watson Lake. I am little by little coming to have more stamina and leg strength. My heart rate recovers to lower levels more quickly. So the road therapy if one may call it that, is beginning to work.

Plus it is a good trip. It is nice now and again to take a season away from the madding crowd, to put behind the daily dailiness of daily life and get away, to be among white spruce and poplar, the road and the true blue sky.

Tomorrow I am going to get back on my bicycle and begin once more to ease on down, ease on down, ease on down the road.

"One of the..."?? There're more?

2011-07-15T23:32:00.000-07:00

2011-07-14T11:55:00.000-07:00

[click 4 outward-pointing arrows for fullscreen]

Flotilla Fun

2011-07-13T13:48:00.000-07:00

Why Evan Longoria is in the big leagues and you aren't....

2011-07-05T12:57:00.000-07:00

[click four outward-pointing arrows for full-screen]

Reflections on the Revolution

2011-07-05T12:15:00.000-07:00

[Louis XVI making his final appearance on the French stage, with Robespierre in a supporting role]

Along the way I have been sometimes listening to books-on-CD. One of them was volume one of a two volume biography of John Adams. Adams had been, along with Franklin, part of the commission to Paris to get French aid for the Revolution.

At a time when Washington's army was being driven from the field by the redcoats for lack of gunpowder, Louis XVI sent 60 tons. It saved the Continental Army, and the Revolution, from certain destruction. This is never mentioned in conventional histories of the Revolution.

Adams pleaded for, and got, French naval support to keep the British armies separated and unable to be re-supplied. This too was instrumental in the war. It was why the British army attempted to march overland from Canada to New York rather than going by ship. In the course of which they were defeated at Ticonderoga. Not in our textbooks.

Louis le bien-ame, did more. He sent a field army commanded by le comte de Rochambeau to join Washington and the Continental Army. In the final and decisive battle of the war, at Yorktown, there were 8,000 soldiers of the Continental Army under Washington and 7,000 French regulars under Rochambeau, and 2,500 militia. Opposing them were 8,000 British soldiers under Cornwallis.

Cornwallis' army was unable to escape or get reinforcements because a French squadron commanded by Admiral de Grasse had defeated a smaller British fleet under Graves and blockaded the coast.

Cornwallis, outnumbered and trapped, surrendered to both Washington and Rochambeau. Very much not in our textbooks and complete news to me, who consider myself historically well-informed.

One can well imagine that the legend of Lafayette has been magnified in proportion as the fact of Rochambeau has been deliberately forgotten. Young Lafayette brought himself and a handful of adventurers to America. He served as an officer of American soldiers and led the expedition that was defeated in Canada. That was a grand gesture.

The comte de Rochambeau had 40 years of military experience when he arrived. In addition to giving Washington excellent advice, he brought an army, at least as well trained and equipped as the Americans and certainly better-paid, and a fleet at his back. That was considerably more than a gesture.

It is deliberate forgetting and misrepresentation for us to remember Lafayette and not Rochambeau. That we remember and teach our children about Lafayette and not Rochambeau is to make an empty pretense of gratitude to France for our independence. It is a falsification of our history. French aid was not a gesture.

Seen thus, the American Revolution and republic were as much a product of French intervention as of American resistance. Which puts a very different cast on the origins of the Republic and thus of its nature. Seeing our republic as merely an artifact of the clash of foreign empires makes it considerably less edifying than the more familiar narrative.

One can wonder about the wisdom of a hereditary absolute monarch aiding a republican revolution. The popularization of republican ideas and ideals in France by the American Revolution did not in a specific sense cause the French Revolution. Louis himself did that - by his unwillingness or inability to impose and collect taxes on the wealthy.

But once the Estates-General met, it was the ideas and ideals popularized by the American Revolution that made it a runaway horse that could not be stopped or even restrained. In a very real sense it was Louis' aid to American revolutionaries in 1775 that put his neck in the guillotine of French revolutionaries eighteen years later.

The Hard Truth About Bicycle Touring

2011-06-28T01:05:00.000-07:00

The hard truth is that the limit of one's initial capacity to ride long distances is not just one's stamina but also one's ability to endure the seat. The organ most challenged is not the lungs or heart nor even the legs, but the butt.

Thus far I have reached Nishkina (spelling?) on the Glenn Highway, a day short of Glenallen. Thus far I have begun to acquire the initial stages of stamina and thus am able to ride longer and further each day. And the Glenn Highway is now carrying me north from the Chugach Mountain Range which has turned south following the coast, giving me flatter country to ride through. At least that's the theory.

Another "Progressive" Against Zionism

2011-06-25T20:09:00.000-07:00

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for full screen]

David Duke, the Grand Dragon of the Ku Kux Klan, speaking in support of the Muslim cause against Israel. Can't get much more progressive than that....

Trip Journal - Layoff Day

2011-06-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

[a two-stage bottle rocket, suitable for attacking targets in Asia]

How to make a bottle rocket: http://www.lnhs.org/hayhurst/rockets/

After one easy, and one moderate day of bicycling, I have taken a day off to rest. I was even more out of shape than I thought. Last night I had muscle spasms in my left leg which was no fun at all. One always gets them with insufficient stretching, but it is unusual to get them this soon in the trip.

I was making a pleasure out of a necessity this morning by watching early rounds play at Wimbledon on the motel room television, and found that I kept dozing off. I missed whole sets. Dozing in the morning after a full night's sleep is a sign that I was more tired than I thought. Last night I even dozed off while sitting on the pot.

Plus, as usual, I have badly overloaded the bike at the outset. Why can't I learn the basic lesson to bring only what one will need and not what one might need? Every bicycle trip for as long as I can remember begins with an overloaded bicycle and sending a box of seemed-necessary-at-the-time stuff home.

The bicycle as it stands when loaded is painfully heavy. I am going to go through my luggage and send home as much as possible. Even cherished right values will have to be foregone. I brought a notably large and heavy digital SLR camera and a second lens for it in addition to a small pocket camera. The theory was that a long bike tour alone would be the perfect time to really learn photography. That is a laudable, correct thing to do. But not necessary. It would be good to teach myself Spanish on this trip too, but I am not going to carry a Spanish textbook. The DSLR and the extra lens for it go home.

I am carrying too much food as well. The whole point of going on the easier Alaska Highway instead of the all-but-unpopulated Cassiar Highway of 2008 is to be within a day or two of services, to carry credit cards instead of luggage. I do not need two weeks supply of granola with me. That is just crazy.

I do not need a spare bicycle chain. I have never broken a chain in all my years of bicycling. It goes home. I do not need five extra notebooks to write in. I do not need any. I can write as well on this computer as in a notebook, even if it isn't as sexy. I will transcribe the work I did in Le Taha'a and send home even the partially-filled one. I can save whatever I have written to Google documents. It will be a lot safer on their servers in Cupertino than on my bicycle.

I don't need the nifty nylon briefcase-style computer carrying case. It is for carrying the computer on airplanes, in cars and such. I am not even using it. It goes home.

I have a box of stationery and no envelopes. After I write a few letters today, it goes home. I have a two fountain pens and two ballpoints. I even have an extra plastic bottle of ink. Half of all that will go home. I have two pairs of bicycle shorts. One, though brand-new, are useless because they constantly hang on my legs and make it all but impossible to swing my leg up to mount the seat. The other, though badly worn and still too small, will stay. If the seam in the butt gives way as I fear it may, I can sew it up by hand.

I have four quart bottles of rubbing alcohol for spraying black flies and mosquitoes. This is post-trauma over-compensation. They made me so miserable back in 2008 that I have over-prepared for them. Two bottles will surely get me to Tok and more bottles if need be. Two can stay here. So far there have not been many bugs, but I am still near towns with their mosquito abatement districts. Further out, there may be more. Or it may yet be too early in the season for them.

Conversely, I do not have enough water with me. I ran out of water well before reaching Palmer and was quite thirsty when I got here. As soon as I got to the hotel-cafe-liquor store here and got a room, I bought and downed three small orange juices and one large Budweiser. Enjoyable as that ending was, it would have been better to have had sufficient water with me. Maybe I can empty and wash out the rubbing alcohol bottles and fill them with water.

For future reference for my fans: When traveling light, a two liter soda-pop bottle from a food market or convenience store makes an excellent canteen. It is cheap, light, readily available, well-made, good-sized, has a well-designed and reliable screw-on plastic cap. It is designed to withstand interior pressure from carbonation, so it will not readily leak from the cap nor will the container crack or puncture. One can pour out or drink the soda-pop sold with it as one prefers. What it lacks in class it makes up in utility.

Only two paragraphs after speculating that it is too early in the season for flying pests, a mosquito has found its way through the window screen and onto my arm to bite me. Whereupon I returned the kindness by squishing her into a digusting small black mass of bug guts.

Conversely to everything I ought to get rid of, I really do need to get sunscreen and insect repellent before leaving Palmer.

Early Travel Note

2011-06-23T23:26:00.000-07:00

[Not the moose I saw]

In view of my advanced age and corpulence I am starting off slow and, in the Rappaport tradition, tapering off. I have gotten as far as Palmer, on the Glenn Highway 42 miles from Anchorage.

The good news is that I saw a moose. She was beautiful but shy. She watched me warily from some bushes in a vast marsh alongside the highway. Moose like marshes because they prefer eating marsh plants. It was also clear that the marsh protects them from predators. No wolf, bear, wolverine, or man can make much headway in a marsh. Unless the man is penis-deficient and needs to shoot things to compensate.....

The bad news is that tomorrow will contain some scary-sounding sections of road.

Good News, Bad News

2011-06-17T10:49:00.001-07:00

[Many years to come]

I got the results of two days of cardiology testing yesterday. The good news is that the results of all the tests were normal. Which means I am likely to live a good many years to come. And also that I have no reason not to set out for Alaska and the lands of the northwest of the world.

The bad news is that I plan to continue being as much of a pain in the ass to as many people as I can.

Mobile Blogging

2011-06-10T15:33:00.000-07:00

I am setting out on a bicycle trip next week. With any luck I will be gone all summer. I will try to keep in touch from the road.

.

Sounds Like Horseshit But It Would Be Funny If It Were True

2011-06-03T20:48:00.000-07:00

[Shagetz unt a maidel?]

Sent to me by an Orthodox (Sephardic) rabbi in Israel:

It could happen!

It is interesting to note the following in the family tree of Kate Middleton, wife of Prince William:

Kate's mother is Carol Middleton, daughter of Ronald Goldsmith and Dorothy Harrison (both Jews)

The parents of Dorothy Harrison are Robert Harrison and Elizabeth Temple (both Jews), the latter a descendant of the Myers family (traditional English Jews in the 19th century)

Bottom line: Princess Kate is a Jew on her matrilineal side, and as a consequence, the future king of England will be a Jew according to Jewish Law and tradition.

Jules and Jim

2011-06-03T19:48:00.000-07:00

I just saw 'Jules and Jim' last night on Netflix. It was directed by Francois Truffaut in 1962 and is considered a classic of the French New Wave. I didn't get it.

What was so wonderful about Catherine that either of them would have been so devoted to her and willing to obey her every whim? And willing to put up with her childishness and self-centeredness? Why would Gilberte be such a hapless doormat for Jim?

So many men had died in the War that there were far more women than men in both France and Germany in the 1920's. Given the gender imbalance why would Jules, Jim, and Albert and all the others have been following Catherine around like dogs following a bitch in heat? She was far from the only woman available. There would have been plenty of women interested in them and they would soon have been distracted from Catherine and her verbal abuse and craziness.

French women are often shown in film as arbitrary, childishly unto insanely self-absorbed and willful and whimsical. They are shown as under the impression that being pretty and sexy entitles them to indulge every momentary whim, regardless of the consequences to themselves or others, even unto Catherine's pointless murder-suicide of herself and Jim.

Real Frenchwomen are not like that at all. Real Frenchwomen strike me as practical and reasonable. French housewives are considered the very model of thriftiness and prudence. I wonder if the film image of Frenchwomen as snotty willful children is not a result of the continuing impact of 'Jules and Jim' on subsequent French cinema.

The contrast of the ease, simplicity, and happiness of pre-War France with the tortured complexity of post-War seems exaggerated unto silly. Whether it is to be regarded as realistic or as a mere representation of the director's feelings, it is stupid either way. Life is not a cartoon.

However much it is a beloved classic of the French New Wave, 'Jules and Jim' doesn't work and I don't recommend it.

How I Became....

2011-05-27T21:23:00.000-07:00

[Wearing my streimel]

I was in Mongolia for the eclipse of 1997. It occurred to me that I was one of vanishingly few Judeans in the country. So I thought of declaring myself Chief Rabbi of Mongolia. But rabbis have to be trained and actually know something so I couldn’t claim to be a rabbi even of Mongolia.

However there are no such requirements to be a former rabbi. So I cut past the training part and the rabbi part, and started my rabbinical career as Former Chief Rabbi of Mongolia. Which I was and am fully qualified to be. It is a title I bear proudly to this day.

There are no actual perks to the office except being able to ask for the Clergyman’s Discount—a discount invented by my Uncle Sol while shopping in a drugstore in Minneapolis in 1968.

And it makes me as legitimately a rabbi as Mr. Lerner, the head of Tikkun, who is just as much qualified to be a rabbi as I am. Maybe it’s time for Michael to ‘fess up and become a Former Rabbi too. I’ll even cut him in on my Clergyman’s Discount.

The Hidden Bomb in the Innocuous-Seeming Pumpkin

2011-05-21T15:52:00.000-07:00

Now that I think of it, there was something strategically important in Obama's speech. He mentioned Palestine's borders with "Israel, Egypt, and Jordan". It seemed at the time an unnecessary and merely rhetorical amplification of "borders with Israel". But it isn't.

If Israel retains the line of fortified settlements along the Jordan River (right edge of the map) that the Prime Minister mentioned in his speech after the President's, Palestine would not have a border with Jordan. There is no territorial issue with Jordan. The Hashemites claim nothing west of the river.

The 'border with Jordan' question is a question of who will be on the other bank of the river from Jordan -- the Israelis or the Palestinians. For Obama to mention Palestine's border with Jordan is to say that he opposes Israel retaining the Jordan River line of fortified settlements. This line of fortifications goes directly to the question of defensible borders. It also clarifies what the Prime Minister meant by referring to the bad old days when Israel was only nine miles wide.

Even in the unlikely event the Palestinians were sincere in their willingness for Palestine to be demilitarized, what would prevent an Arab or Iranian army from crossing the river unopposed and planting itself on the Israeli border? Without the Jordan River Valley fortifications, the American and Palestinian promises that Palestine would be a demilitarized state would not be worth the paper they were written on.

Without the Jordan River Valley fortifications, Israel could be quickly cut in two by an armored column driving nine miles across the level Plain of Sharon (left edge of the map). Israeli defenders would have almost no room to maneuver tanks and artillery. Israel would face almost certain defeat.

The Arab surprise attack that began the Yom Kippur War in 1973 almost achieved this. Only the territorial depth of Judea and Samaria and the Sinai Peninsula kept Israel from being over-run in the first few hours of the war. So the question is far from academic for the Israelis. Indeed the majority of middle-aged Israelis alive today remember personally fighting for their and their country's survival in that war.

With those fortifications, an Arab or Iranian army approaching from the east would be faced by IDF tanks, artillery, infantry, and attack aircraft in serried tiers behind the Jordan. Major tank and troop barriers in depth have been constructed in the desert there which are impractical on the densely populated Plain of Sharon.

To defend against Palestinian attacks behind the lines from Jericho, the IDF stations nearby its elite Israel Army Drum and Bugle Corps which has traditionally been successful against Jericho's defenses.

Territorially Israel is still only nine miles wide. But militarily its frontier is at the Jordan River. The Prime Minister wants to keep it there. The President does not.

This is a good, indeed a complete, reason to support the Prime Minister and oppose the President. Including opposing his re-election if need be.

Note in the map above that there is a line of Jewish settlements (the black dots in the blue-green areas toward the right of the map) in the Jordan Valley and no Palestinian settlements except Jericho (the orange and red blotch near the Dead Sea) there. The Jordan Valley is largely desert.

The map also shows what else the President meant by Palestine being a "contiguous" territory. One can see that Jerusalem separates Palestinian settlements in Judea, centered on Hebron, from Palestinian settlements in Samaria. Contiguity presumably means connecting not just Gaza and the rest of Palestine with a highway, but also connecting Palestinian parts of Judea with Palestinian parts of Samaria with a second highway.

The obvious route of such a highway is into Israel, through the eastern part of Jerusalem, and then back into Palestine and on to Ramallah. Which raises a difficult question indeed. Putting the eastern part of Jerusalem on the highway between two of the three parts of Palestine would make the eastern part of Jerusalem effectively the center of Palestine and its natural capital.

But for three thousand years Jerusalem has been the capital of Israel. We have prayed either in or facing Jerusalem all three thousand of those years. Israelis are united and unwavering on the proposition that Jerusalem is our eternal and indivisible capital. So are Judeans abroad with any sense.

Which means that the highway connecting Palestinian parts of Judea with Palestinian parts of Samaria will necessarily have to go around Jerusalem, presumably through Jericho.

There is a certain fitness about this. Jericho was one of the capitals of the Ummayad Caliphate, the first great Arab conquest empire from the year 661 to 750. One can still see the ruins of the Ummayad Caliphs' palace there. Jerusalem on the other hand has never in its long history been the capital of anything but ancient and modern Israel.

So the central issue in the upcoming quarrels, uh, I mean negotiations, will be whether there will be a Hebron to Ramallah highway and, if there is, whether it will go through the eastern part of Jerusalem (i.e. into and out of Israel) or whether it will go only through Palestinian territory, via Jericho. When and if negotiations are resumed, that is some of what they will be arguing about.

There is an oft-repeated claim that Jerusalem is the third holiest place in Islam in spite of not being mentioned anywhere in the Koran. The implication is that this somehow obliges the world to make it Palestine's capital.

The two holier places than Jerusalem are Mecca and Medina. Yet the capital of Saudi Arabia is Riyadh, 500 miles away. So the holiness of places to Muslims apparently does not oblige them to make those places their capital. It didn't in the 7th Century for the Ummayad Caliphs of Jericho and Damascus, nor in the 8th Century for the Abbassid Caliphs of Baghdad. Unless of course they are trying to make up reasons to demand territory from Israel.

The Venus Project

2011-05-21T13:55:00.001-07:00

These are some images from Jacque Fresco's Venus Project website. It is at www.thevenusproject.com. It is about a Jacque Fresco's plans for rebuilding society along lines developed by him. It is becoming popular among New Age and Left people, particularly in Britain.

This is based on forgetting that it has already been proposed and tried -- with disastrous results. If one looks at Le Corbusier's designs they are so initially appealing that one forgets the monumental egotism of supposing that one person, or one person and the party chairman, whether Stalin or Tito, can and should decide how everyone else should live. In this case the pathological egotism is that of Jacque Fresco rather than of Le Corbusier but the result is the same.

I remember hitch-hiking through Novy Belgrade in Yugoslavia in 1978 when Tito was in power there. It was a Le Corbusier worker's paradise development of huge apartment blocks and looked-great-in-the-model landscaping. It was also a vast horrible dehumanizing slum which no one wanted to live in if they could help it. Soviet postwar architecture was largely based on Le Corbusier's imagery of vast futuristic buildings. Soviet architecture is the very byword of horrible oppressive inhuman concrete monumentalism. The architecture itself was a significant part of what the peoples who lived under those regimes rejected about Communism, as much as the corrupt party regimes. I guarantee you Jacque Fresco is the same cocksure egotistic asshole who knows what's good for everyone else as Le Corbusier was.

I will re-phrase the question about whether we are brave enough to rebuild our societies around Jacque Fresco's images and principles. Let us ask instead if we are brave enough to let go of our egocentric controllingness enough to let other people decide for themselves how they should live? Are we brave enough to risk that it will still work out all right in the end even without us and those who believe what we believe being in charge? Can we trust other people to decide things for themselves, even life and death important things, and, after taking a deep breath, give up control? Just let the chips fall where they may? Just step out in faith and hope that things will be okay even without our making sure they are not going awry, that order will, I say will, will emerge from uncontrol, from chaos?

Never mind Dylan's Chimes of Freedom Flashing. Have we got the Brass Balls of Freedom on us?

The capitalists are as much guilty of dehumanizing architecture and design as Le Corbusier-ist communists. One has only to drive through the taupe sameness of a vast California condominium development or housing tract to want to scream and run away. Whether the motive is ideology and party control or corporate profit, the result is the same. The capitalists have the slight advantage of having to answer to a market, albeit a market they can readily manipulate. The Communists answered to no one. To whom does the Venus Project answer?

Maybe I am being clueless but...

2011-05-21T01:39:00.000-07:00

[Dominique Strauss-Kahn and some other rich, important banker asshole. He is the one on the right but does it matter?]

The rape allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn are puzzling. On the one hand, given a contest between a poor immigrant maid and a powerful wealthy banker, it is hard not to side with the maid. But there are problems with her story.

From the May 17th Telegraph --

The maid alleges that when she arrived to clean the IMF managing director's suite at noon on Saturday, he locked her inside, attempted to rape her and forced her to give him oral sex.

How is that possible? How would one lock a hotel room door from the inside such that one could not get out? Hotel doors lock from the inside to keep intruders out, but are designed for quick and easy exit in case of fire. If anyone reading this has ever seen a hotel door that worked any other way I will be glad to be corrected, but I haven't seen one nor do I expect to.

If she was able to repel his attempt to rape her, she was willing and able to resist by force. There is no allegation of coercion with a weapon or threat of one, only of force. If she could keep him out of her vagina, how could she not keep him out of her mouth?

If the maid did not want Dominique Strauss-Kahn's penis in her mouth and she was not so intimidated as to be afraid to resist, why would she not just have kept her jaw closed? Or once inside, not have bitten his penis and bitten it hard?

Her husband's description of the maid, though affectionate, makes her sound plain, obese, and unstable. As Strauss-Kahn showed by raising a million in cash for bail on short notice, he could lay his hands on plenty of money. New York has no end of hookers and it is a certainty that a rich, smart, connected guy like Strauss-Kahn could have had no end of women in his room with a phone call, every one of them more attractive than the African maid.

It is conventional to say that rape is a crime of violence rather than one of sexual desire. Which makes sense here. Nothing about the maid was more attractive than any one of the high-priced hookers Strauss-Kahn could easily have afforded. So it wasn't a sex crime. It was a crime of violence plain and simple. Which is to say that for the maid's accusation to be true, Strauss-Kahn would have to have a screw loose.

Conversely, for Strauss-Kahn's denial to be true, either the accusation is an attempt at blackmail, or the maid is the one with a screw loose.

This is beginning to have a something of the odor of the poor innocent woman who was raped by the Duke lacrosse team in 2006 . Except she wasn't. In the end the prosecutor in that case was disbarred for concealing exonerating evidence and the woman went to jail.

And the 1987 Tawana Brawley case in which a poor woman from the slums was raped and abused by New York police officers, smeared with dog shit, and kidnapped inside a large canvas sack. Except she wasn't. Forensic evidence demonstrated that every allegation she made was false. The Reverend Al Sharpton adopted her cause but never apologized or retracted when she was proven a liar. The prosecutor he smeared in the press sued for defamation and got a judgment of $345,000 against him.

The underlying problem is that treating a woman's word as sacrosanct gives crazy and malicious women too much power to destroy whomever they don't like by false allegations. But treating a woman's word as something to be ignored or dismissed gives men a carte blanche to rape women and get away with it. There seems to be no balanced way to do it. The world is full of liars and head cases and there is no reliable way to deal with them. The legal system tends to lynch the poor and hand out hereditary 'Get Out of Jail Free' cards to the rich.

Dominique Strauss-Kahn is an international banker and a leader of the Socialist Party of France, and a candidate to run against the current President, Nicholas Sarkozy, in 2012. It is not too much to suppose that a socialist international banker would make some powerful enemies. Nor is it too much to suppose that a prospective candidate for President might be subject to dirty tricks by the regime. Or by friends of the regime.

It is not unreasonable to suppose that the Socialists would have won the Presidency in 2005 if their candidate had not been the inept but stunningly beautiful Segolene Royal. Nor unreasonable to suppose that the Socialists would have an excellent chance against the increasingly unpopular Nicholas Sarkozy if their candidate in 2012 were an experienced world banker like Strauss-Kahn. One does not have to be John LeCarre to suspect a plot here.

It is not clear what is going on in the case against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, except that it is not what we are being told.

Could It Be Any More Obviously Class War?

2011-05-18T19:09:00.000-07:00

from today's Washington Post --

A Democratic measure that would have repealed tax subsidies for the five biggest oil companies failed to clear the Senate on Tuesday, falling short of the 60-vote threshold needed to advance in a near-party-line vote.
The Senate rejected S.940, or the “Close Big Oil Tax Loopholes Act,” in a 52-to-48 vote. Three Democrats – Sens. Ben Nelson (Neb.), Mary Landrieu (La.) and Mark Begich (Alaska) – joined nearly all Republican in voting against the measure, while two Republicans – Sens. Susan Collins (Maine) and Olympia Snowe (Maine) – voted “yes.”
Democrats had contended that the bill, which would have repealed $21 billion in tax subsidies for the top five oil companies over the next decade, represented a step toward addressing the country’s soaring deficit and rising gas prices. The White House issued an official statement of administration policy earlier Tuesday saying that it strongly backed the bill.
But even as Democratic leaders had been strongly pushing the measure, it was expected that the bill would fall short. That’s the case, too, with a separate energy-related measure that will be on the Senate floor Wednesday – a Republican-sponsored bill aimed at increasing domestic energy production.
The end result: the congressional debate over addressing rising gas prices will have little changed by week’s end.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) maintained Tuesday that the subsidy issue will continue to play a role in the debate over raising the debt ceiling. Asked what he expected to come from the vote on the Democratic measure, Reid told reporters that he expected that a final deal on the debt ceiling would include a repeal of tax subsidies for the top five oil companies.

Mind you, this was the Democratic majority Senate, NOT the Republican House.

Eye Candy with Music

2011-05-16T13:29:00.000-07:00

El Cielo de Canarias / Canary sky - Tenerife from Daniel López on Vimeo.

[click on four outward-pointing arrows for full screen]

Another Amazing Coincidence

2011-05-15T12:56:00.000-07:00

[John Profumo]

Dominique Strauss-Kahn was arrested in New York on charges of sexually assaulting a hotel maid. Which is a good thing for the rich and powerful. Dominique Strauss-Kahn was the head of the IMF (International Monetary Fund) and also a leader of the French Socialist Party. He was considered a strong candidate to run against Nicholas Sarkozy for the Presidency of the French Republic.

But he got caught in a sex scandal so the rich and powerful were saved.

Elliot Spitzer had been a crusading Attorney-General for the State of New York who investigated and prosecuted a number of Wall Street criminals whom both the US Attorney for New York and the Securities and Exchange Commission somehow forgot to investigate and prosecute. He was so popular that he was handily elected Governor of New York. He was discussed as a possible presidential candidate.

But he got caught in a sex scandal so the rich and powerful were saved.

Julian Assange published the Wikileaks documents. He didn't say anything. He didn't claim anything. He didn't prove anything. He just published what people in positions of power had themselves said. He clearly was going to publish more.

But he got caught got in a sex scandal so the rich and powerful were saved.

John Edwards was a smart successful trial attorney, a poor boy who made tons of money in his practice and was elected US Senator from North Carolina. He was a supporter of labor unions and working people's interests. He was a strong candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination.

But he got caught in a sex scandal so the rich and powerful were saved.

The rich and powerful sure are lucky that everyone who opposes them just happens to get caught in sex scandals.

The Other Side of Things

2011-05-11T14:58:00.000-07:00

[The Southern Cross on the flag of Samoa. It also appears on the flags of Australia, Brazil, New Guinea, New Zealand, and the US Army's Americal Division.]

Pretty exciting Southern Hemisphere day yesterday. Saw the entirety of the constellation of Scorpio with the brilliant binary red giant Antares, the Heart of the Scorpion, in the midst of it. It is huge and obvious. And then as plain as night, high in the sky, was the Southern Cross. IMpressive. In Centaurus I saw the bright star Alpha Centauri, the nearest star to our own, 4.3 light years away. I waved and conveyed your regards.

I even got up at five and went out to see the close grouping of Venus, Mars, and Jupiter predicted for this morning near the dawn horizon. At five one can go out bare-ass-naked without concern for weather or being seen. I was not seen nor sadly were the planets because of the clouds.

Other interesting facts learned -- a small amount of Polynesian ukulele music goes a long way, even when accompanied by local dance troupes. Especially when accompanied by local dance troupes.

The Bin Laden Situation

2011-05-02T21:29:00.000-07:00

The latest bulletin: At this moment Osama Bin Laden remains dead. It is not known how long this situation can go on. More as it develops.

Ding! Dong! The Witch is Dead! The Wicked Witch!

2011-05-01T22:28:00.000-07:00

Two things were new about the assault on the Abbottabad compound. One is that when the Al Qaeda people used Osama's youngest wife as a human shield, the Special Operations Forces and Navy Seals unhesitatingly shot her and the men using her as a shield. Openly doing that is novel.

The second thing is that is there is no pretense of being sorry "that any human being has been killed". No one in the government nor in the public is going through even the slightest shedding of crocodile tears over the violent death of Bin Laden.

Both of these changes represent the diminution of an always perfunctory pretense of the sacredness of human life. Given the brutality of the wars of the past centuries, it has never been more than a gesture, an insincere politeness.

Now even that has been discarded.

A Middle East Peace Agreement At Last!

2011-04-27T13:36:00.000-07:00

[Mahmoud Abbas, Barack Obama, and Ismail Haniyeh after signing the Palestinian peace accords]

Fatah and Hamas Said to Reach Deal to End Schism Breaking News Alert
The New York Times
Wed, April 27, 2011 -- 12:33 PM ET

Fatah and Hamas, the rival Palestinian movements, reached understandings on Wednesday to end the years-long internal Palestinian schism, according to Egyptian and Palestinian officials.

Citing an Egyptian official, the official Palestinian news agency Wafa reported that delegations led by Azzam al-Ahmed of Fatah and Moussa Abu Marzouk of Hamas had agreed in Cairo on issues including the formation of a temporary unity government and the holding of Palestinian elections.

Fortunately the Palestinians will have the same good faith in keeping agreements with one another that they have had in keeping agreements with Israel. This should last as long as the Oslo Accords did in 1993.

Where Does the Word "Jew" Come From?

2011-04-24T21:00:00.001-07:00

[Master Kung, Confucius, said that before there could be right rule there had to be right naming of things]

In Hebrew, our people are called Yehudim, after our country Yehudah. When the Romans came, they called our country Judea and its people Judeans. We were expelled from our country after two long wars of rebellion against the Romans, in the year 70 CE and again in 135.

The refugees in the Roman Empire were called Judeans. Over the centuries Roman Latin morphed into other languages and each of the new European languages adopted new words for the Judeans. German preserves much of the original spelling in calling us "Jude" and plural "Juden". Spanish calls us "Judio" and "Judios". Dutch is "Jood". Russian is "Yoodei". In each, both the sense and sound of "Judean" is preserved.

It is a meaning worth considering. The homeland of the Jews, even the right to a homeland of the Jews, can be, and was, debated at great length. But can one really debate what is the homeland of the Judeans?

But the long, long antisemitic tradition of denying and obscuring our right to our homeland was not to be brushed aside so lightly.

The lands of Judea and Samaria were called by their proper names on maps and in common usage until the 1980's. At which time they somehow became the West Bank. When I first heard of the West Bank, it took me a while to figure out what it referred to. it is a strange term. It means the western bank of the Jordan River.

The "West Bank" includes cities such as Qalqilya and Ramallah that are some fifty miles from the Jordan. It is as though San Francisco were said to be on the South Bank of the Russian River fifty miles north, or Boston to be on the East Bank of the Hudson. It is an entirely modern and invented phrase. There is no West Bankian people, no West Bankian language, no history of West Bankia, no tradition of West Bankian life under the British or the Romans or the Ottomans.

It is hard not to believe that expression was invented precisely to avoid calling Judea and Samaria by their actual names. And a moment's thought shows why one would want to do that.

If the headline reads, "Jews invade West Bank, Build Settlements", it is easy to be convinced that it is an atrocity and an aggression and that the settlements must be illegal encroachments on the rights of the West Bankians.

It would be ever so much harder for Arabs, leftists, and journalists to keep a straight face while protesting if the headline read, "Judeans return to Judea". Which is precisely why the name was changed.

Remember every time you see the phrase "West Bank" that you are being lied to, being manipulated for someone else's political agenda, an agenda that doesn't do well if things are called by their real names.