What Caused the Second Boston Massacre?

[The First Boston Massacre - 1770]

Dogs are generally sweet lovable little guys and gals who love being petted, who protect our homes and children, and who can generally be persuaded to shit on our neighbors' lawns and not on ours.  Occasionally they bark too much or barf at inopportune times, occasionally one will bite someone, but we still enjoy having them around.

Most pit bulls are equally well-behaved and kindly.  It is rare for a pit bull to harm anyone.  It is rare for a pit bull to kill a child.  But when when one reads of a dog killing a small child that dog is not a poodle, nor a dachshund, nor a Labrador retriever.  It is a pit bull.

Few pit bulls ever harm anyone.  It is not fair to say that pit bulls harm children, nor is it true.  Most pit bulls are sweet good neighbors.  But it is also true that only pit bulls kill children.

So when Congress is deliberating what kinds of dogs to permit to be imported into the United States, should we import lots of pit bulls?  Or should we say, that as harmless as almost all pit bulls are, we should reduce or close the quota on pit bulls that may be imported, and increase the number of Saint Bernards and Irish setters that come in?

It would be unfair and unreasonable to discriminate among dogs already in the country, but as to importing them, shouldn't we limit the number of pit bull coming in from other countries?  We are bound to treat all dogs and their owners equally once in the country.  But we are under no such obligation as to dogs outside the country that are sought to be brought in.  As to which breeds we permit to be imported, we have nothing to consult except our national self-interest.  And it is not in our national interest to import pit bulls in preference to Afghans or foxhounds that might otherwise be imported in their stead.

This is true no matter how nice and sweet almost all pit bulls are after arriving.

Suppose we are not talking about importing dogs but people, about immigration.  There are as many nations in the world as there are breeds of dogs.  Which ones should we admit and which exclude or limit?

Once people are here it is unthinkable to us to discriminate against or among them.  But while they are living in their own countries seeking admission to ours, we are in no way bound to consider their interests but only our own.  We exclude people with communicable diseases, mental defectives, criminals, welfare dependents, addicts, alcoholics, and so on, not because it is fair but because it is in our interest.

It is true that, as with pit bulls, almost all Muslims are well-behaved honest citizens.  When bombs are placed at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, almost all Muslims are as horrified as anyone else.  But  just as when a child is killed by a dog, that dog is a pit bull, when people are massacred with bombs in Boston, the perpetrators are Muslims.

It would be unthinkable to discriminate against Muslims already in the US on the basis of the acts of a few.  But it is simply stupid to pretend there is no connection when we have seen the same pattern here and abroad over and over again.

People living abroad who seek admission to the US have no right to come here.  We choose which ones to admit and which to exclude.  Which ones we should admit is not an issue of fairness but of self-interest.  Reducing the number of people admitted from Muslim countries can and should be compensated by increases in the number of people admitted from China, India, the Philippines, Korea, Latin America, Africa, and so on.

People from those countries are just as law-abiding and kind and good citizens as immigrants from Muslim countries, but they do not come with the added cost of a handful of terrorists among them.

This is not rocket science and it is not likely that Washington does not see the obvious as well as anyone else.   One cannot help but wonder why the government would pursue such a policy.  The history of immigration policy in the US is a long sad tale of racism and bigotry from the McCarran Acts of the 1920's and on.   Minor reforms started only in the time of Lyndon Johnson and have progressed only slightly since then.  One cannot help but wonder what the reason might be for admitting so many from Muslim countries when so many from other countries are clamoring equally loudly for admission.

Given that racist history, one cannot help but wonder if part of the reason could be that Muslim countries west of Pakistan are predominantly white, while the peoples of India, China, the Philippines, Korea, Africa, and Latin America are not.

Call me a bleeding-heart liberal if you will, but I would rather see a Tiger Woods-colored America without bombs than a lily white country that pretends away its racism at the expense of seeing its citizens massacred.

8:45pm West Coast time.  
Now that they have arrested suspect #2 and have been more forthcoming about what authorities knew, my point is amplified and endorsed by events.  When the Russians told our government about the older brother Tamerlane, the FBI sent agents to talk to him.  Presumably they gave him the "We know all about you, we've got our eyes on you, so don't try anything or we will come down on you like a metric ton of bricks."  But having made the speech, there was nothing else they could do.  

We don't have preventive detention in the US.  Unless and until Tamerlane committed a crime our authorities could do nothing against him, even knowing how dangerous he was and how likely to commit a terrorist act (which is precisely what the Russians were warning us about).   Unless he violated the terms of his immigration status, they couldn't even deport him.  The only preventive measure open to the United States government would have been not to admit him to the US in the first place.   That would have worked.   But it wasn't what we did.

We All Have to Die, So Why Not Plan How to Do It?

[for fullscreen click 4 outward-pointing arrows at lower right corner of video]

As one gets older, more and more of the people one knew begin to die.  My parents are both gone, my mother from lung cancer, my father from complications of diabetes.  My sister Miriam died of heart failure.  My Aunt Sophie died of bone cancer.  My friend Otis also died of bone cancer.  Danny died either of a heart attack or a drug overdose.  Jay Trachman died of lung cancer.  Rita's late husband Maurice died of prostate cancer.  My relative Bob Jaffe just died of liver cancer.

Most of them died in hospitals hooked up to machines.  Commonly when their cases became hopeless they were transferred to palliative care to make their last days or hours as comfortable as could be arranged.  The palliative care usually consists at the end of increasing and finally lethal doses of morphine.

While perfectly reasonable and understandable, this seems like an unconsidered, cramped way to go.  Death is an important moment in one's life and it should be done well if possible.   We are familiar with the notion of nobly dying in battle for one's country but the increasing technical improvements in combat mean that in the future the risks of combat will be that one might strain a thumb operating the trackball controller of a drone.  And in any case death in battle contemplates both that one is young and in the military, neither of which the old and infirm ever are.

As a lifelong Zionist, I wondered whether after a confirmed diagnosis of fully metastasized stage four cancer, I might try to infiltrate either Gaza or Teheran and blow myself up next to some Hamas or Iranian bigshot.  But there is too much wrong with terrorism to do it, even at no cost to myself.

I have been close enough to death to think about it a few times.  Once I worked on a halibut boat in Sheepshead Bay in Alaska for a man named Shorty Jessup.  The dory had an outboard but the pressure release on the motor didn't work so Shorty couldn't start it.  Which meant that if I fell in the water that he couldn't come after me.  The water was no more than a degree above freezing so if I fell in I would be dead of hypothermia in 20 minutes.  I thought that I was a middle class college graduate and I was doing this as an adventure and for the romance of it, not as a career that I was committed to.  I thought of telling Shorty that we had to go back.  But then it occurred to me that instead I could rely on myself to hold on tight, be prudent about what I did, and take personal responsibility for my not falling out of the boat.  I put my own abilities between me and death and that was enough.  One can, and indeed must, live without guarantees.

Another time, I and a friend were rock climbing in Yosemite.  We had started late, had lost the light, and had lost our way.  We were beginning to tire and it was starting to rain.  I begin to see how it was becoming possible that we weren't going home that night nor any other night.  While I was seconding my partner I had time to think.  I was in my early 40's then but in looking back on my life, though it had been shorter than I would have liked, what I had lived had been good enough that I could settle for it.  I had lived enough that I could die content.  That realization enabled me to relax and not be afraid.

These experiences gave me the notion that death is not really that terrifying.  It is not huge and existential.  It is just something one does on one day of the week, either in the AM or in the PM.  It is just one last thing to do.  Everybody does it sooner or later.

We have gotten so used to the trivialization of the expression 'quality of life' as an excuse for euthanasia that we don't hear it anymore.  All we mean by it now is dulling suffering with drugs or death.  All our lives we are hemmed in and weighed down by concerns about safety and prudence.  We hear our mothers inveighing against running with scissors.  Finally at the end of life when the jig is up, we are for a moment free of caution if we are willing to accept it.  Why can't the proximity of death mean an end-of-life life full of thrills, beauty, and adventure instead of drugs and hospitals?  

Which makes thinking about how to do it not morbid at all.  Planning one's death is as reasonable and ordinary as making a will.  But I still hadn't thought of an exciting or interesting way to do it when the time comes.

Last night everything changed.  Rita and I saw a documentary on television.  Now I know how I want to go.  I had considered skydiving but it seemed (and still seems) stupid.  One jumps out of an airplane to scare the crap out of oneself (often literally) but other than that just falls until the parachute opens and then just hangs until one alights.  It just didn't seem that interesting.

Things started to change with the invention of steerable-wing parachutes.  These ingenious devices are a silken wing composed of aerodynamic cells and the parachutist hangs in a harness below it.   The glide ratios of these things have been improved so much that they can be flown in places with updrafts all afternoon long.  I have seen steep-sided valleys in the French Alpes with the air crowded with flocks of brightly-colored wing-parachutes and their passengers floating in them.

The wing parachute has in the past few years dwindled to a minor pastime for those too faint of heart for wingsuit flying.  Wing parachutes have a merely vestigial role in wing suit flying.  Wingsuit flying converts a mere mortal into a flying squirrel.  Wingsuit flying is probably as close as human beings will ever come to actual human flight though in actual fact it is really a fast steerable glide.  At the end, instead of dying, one pops a wing-parachute to land.

Judging from the videos I have seen, such as the one above, it is about as close to completely exhilarating as one can get.  Everyone agrees that it is thoroughly dangerous since it involves flying through the air at around 100 mph (160 kph).  One of the pilots said in an interview with apparently no exaggeration, that if one hits anything, anything at all, a tree branch, a glancing blow off a cliff face, one is certain to die.  Having on occasion ridden bicycles downhill as fast as 30-odd miles per hour, I fully agree.  At 100 mph there are no serious injuries, only death.

Initially the purpose of the sport was to fly as far from the jumping-off point as possible and in the process to stay as far away from obstacles such as the ground, as possible.  As glide ratios improved, airplane jumps gave way to jumping off high mountain cliffs, now called 'base jumping'.

The day came when some American wingsuit flyers saw an anonymous Frenchman glide down the face of Mont Blanc, going not as high as he could but as low.  This was a revelation and a revolution.  Wingsuit flying became flying as close to the terrain as possible.  Instead of the terrain and its features being seen hundreds of feet below, one now saw them rushing by at three digit speeds only a few feet, and even fewer meters, below.  Wingsuits which had been flown only for stable lengthy flight, now were flown for maneuverability, agility, and dash.  This is called proximity wingsuit gliding, or just proximity gliding.  It is, judging by the videos shot from the pilots' helmets, the most exciting sport in the world.

The caveat for me is my ferocious acrophobia.  Even watching videos of other people jumping out of airplanes or off cliffs greatly upsets me, even though I am safe in my bed at home.  Standing near a precipice with anything less than an immovable armpits-high barrier in front of me induces panic.  I get agitated on some elevated sections of freeway and driving, let alone bicycling, next to drop-offs requires studied suppression of panic.

But I remember that I was able to diminish or perhaps to push down the panic by conditioning and by force of will.  I had to keep my eyes closed on ski lifts and would ask the person next to me to tell me when we were getting close to the hopping off station at the top.  With practice I could keep my eyes open longer at the beginning and open them sooner at the end.

This mitigation of the terror enabled me to undertake technical rock climbing.  There is an interior monologue in which one tells oneself that now (while one is climbing hundreds of feet up a cliff face) is  not the time to panic.  I will panic later when I am off this climb.  With real justifiable fear to back up one's arguments, even panic can be reasoned with, pushed down, but it never completely goes away.

I climbed for several years and though I was never good at it, I was able to follow easy 5.9's and to lead easy 5.8's.   On the Yosemite Scale, the 5 indicates technical climbing and the number after the dot measures the difficulty of the climb.  For perspective, the scale now goes up to 5.14 and is logarithmic, so each subsequent digit is at least half again as difficult as the one before it.  Any normal healthy young adult can climb 5.5 right now without really thinking about it, and can climb 5.6 if she pays attention to what she is doing.  So I wasn't that good.  On the other end of the scale, 5.14 is close to climbing across the bottom of a horizontal sheet of glass.  There are guys who can do things on rock that one doesn't believe even though one just saw it done.  I am not one of them.

The acrophobia was always somewhere nearby, right at my elbow, but I pushed it away as best I could and climbed anyway.  So here's the parlay.  To get to the top of really high mountain cliffs, one does not hike to them, one climbs to them.  These people do a long technical climb just to get to their jumping off place.  They reach the lip of an immense cliff face.  And jump off.   Intuitively what follows next is their bodies being crushed to a broken bloody mess on the rocks, moments of agony, then nothing, tears of those who cared about them, a funeral, and then after a decent interval, she remarries.  But that doesn't happen.  Instead they fly.

After millennia of envying birds, we can at last do it, we can fly.   But the miracle comes now, only now when I am old, fat and feeble.  The old is not negotiable, the fat I am fixing in 2013, and the feeble I mean to fix in 2014 as best I can.

If I don't get killed doing it, then I can go up and do it again.  If I do, then as Shakespeare says of some of his characters, "[exit laughing]".

The Scale of the Universe

http://www.htwins.net/scale2/

President Obama, President Peres, and Miss Israel

This is one of the many reasons why airlifting the Bnei Israel community from Ethiopia to Israel was such a good idea......

P.S.   She immigrated to Israel when she was 12, is an IDF veteran, and can kill you with a pencil.

The Wealth of the Nation

More Zionist Oppression

In yet another blow to the so-called Peace Process we read of the following outrage.   

The government demolished 75 houses in the Palestinian al-Rimal neighborhood; government officials say the houses were illegally built on public lands. Families occupying the homes demonstrated in front of the Legislative Council.

Where were Arab governments while this was happening?  Why didn't the UN pass yet another condemnatory resolution?  Where was the British Left while this was going on?  Why didn't the EU say something?  Why didn't the Norwegian or Belgian governments withdraw their ambassadors?   Have they gone soft on Israeli aggression?

The explanation for their unexpected flaccidity of a self-appointed world opinion can be found when the quote is seen without my devious editing.

The Hamas-run government in Gaza demolished 75 houses in the al-Rimal neighborhood; government officials say the houses were illegally built on public lands. Families occupying the homes demonstrated in front of the Palestinian Legislative Council.

The supposedly pro-Palestinian Europeans, the Left, and "human rights" organizations come out in full-throated howl when Israelis so much as build new houses near the Palestinians.  Here Hamas actually tore down Palestinians' houses without compensation and no one gives a crap.

Does anyone still believe that any of those condemning Israel at every opportunity actually gives a damn about the Palestinians? Tell me again how hostility to Israel is not an expression of Jew-hatred but only sympathy for Palestinians.  The Jew-haters themselves clearly don't believe it.

A Question for Gun Owners

A question for people who own guns to "protect my home" or to "protect my family" - if someone breaks into your house, is your plan to engage in a gun battle with them?  Really?  That's your plan?

You can let them take your stuff, leave, then call the police and your insurance company.  Or you can pull out your shootin' 'arn if you can get to it, then start shooting on the theory that they won't shoot back nor shoot first.   But if your excuse for buying the gun is that criminals are armed should happen to be true, then you will be mistaken and they will shoot back.  Even if you shoot first, you would have to find and shoot all of them to death before they can shoot you or anyone in your family.  

Go back to your original theory that you were worried about the safety of your family.  Are you really going to turn a routine burglary into a bloodbath on the theory that that will make your family safer?

So let's go back to the reason you bought the gun.  It wasn't really to protect your family was it?


.

Benefits of Global Warming?

Dead Pool 2013

Dead Pool

Jack

1. George Bush Senior
2. Barbara Bush
3. Senator Frank Lautenberg
4. Pope Benedict XVI
5. Jack Nicholson
6. Peter O'Toole
7. James Earl Jones
8. Charlie Sheen
9. Hosni Mubarak
10. Ronnie Wood



Harvey

Lindsey Lohan
Fidel Castro
Hugo Chavez
Billy Graham
Nancy Reagan
Don Rickles
Margaret Thatcher
Sandra Day O'Connor
Sid Caesar
Dick Cheney


Russell

Reb Zalman
Keisha
Steve Winwood
Jimmy Carter
John McAfee
That Chinese political artist
John Madden
Harry Reid
Kim Jong-il's wife
Brittney spears


David

Mikhail KalashnikovHugo Chavez
Fidel Castro
Hosni Mubarak
Zsa Zsa Gabor
Nelson Mandela
Bashir Assad
Dick Cheney
Prince PhillipMargaret Thatcher



Feel free to send me your list.

Public Weirdness

Black holes are intriguing.  At the event horizon not only can nothing ever escape, but the passage of time, seen from outside, slows to zero because of the intense curvature of space.  Time's arrow shrinks to zero.  Inside the event horizon the curvature of space-time is progressively greater and time's arrow should be reversed.  The further one progresses toward the center the faster time should flow into the past.  Upon reaching the singularity point in the middle of the thing, one should have traveled back in time to the Big Bang.  

But traveling backward in time makes no sense.  Effects would come before things that caused them, things exploding would re-assemble, the old would become young, particles would assemble into the radioactive elements that emitted them, the stink would flow back into the skunk.  Yet that is the logic of time curved more than perpendicularly from our own.  

I have read that the explanation of those impossibilities is that the key phrase is "as seen from outside",  It is the nature of the event horizon that what happens inside cannot be seen from outside.  Which suggests that the event horizon is not just an inconvenience but a logical necessity.  2 plus 2 does not equal 4 because we have carefully measured and found that it is 4 to so many decimal places.  2 plus 2 are exactly 4 because it is a logical necessity and we don't have to measure. Which means that as seen from inside, time would continue to flow normally in one's own immediate frame of reference.

But the problem does not go away so neatly.  The event horizon is only opaque from the outside.  From the inside one should be able to see the outside universe perfectly well because light streams unimpeded into the black hole.  It is as seen from inside the event horizon that all the absurdities would be seen to be happening outside it.   Out here, where you and I are.  Right now.  It is not the inside of the black hole that is impossible and unimaginable, it is right here and now that is. Welcome to the madhouse.

The Romance of Maps

[The range between the blue and pink areas of West Africa are the 'Mountains of Kong', which appeared on maps for 60 years until discovered not to exist in 1889.]

The "romance of maps" is hokum. Twenty years ago I was on a bicycle trip in Patagonia and riding along the South Atlantic coast of Tierra del Fuego. There was a whale skeleton on an empty beach. I let go of my usual skepticism and allowed myself some self-congratulation on having reached a genuinely remote and exotic place. Until I came to a tiny town somewhat away from the main road.

There were teenagers hanging around, clearly bored out of their minds, and counting the days until they could graduate from high school and get out of this boring dump of a town and leave for the Big Apple, Buenos Aires. Which showed that no matter how exotic a place may seem to travelers, to people who live there, it is always same-old, same-old.

The concepts of "romantic", "remote", and "exotic" are all failures of perspective and imagination.

.

How the UN Works

What if there is no fiscal cliff?

[John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946), founder of the conventional wisdom]

We have been led to believe that the sequester, the tax increases and spending cuts known collectively as the  fiscal cliff, will devour not only the US economy but also the world economy.  We cheer when Washington figures show themselves willing to negotiate to avoid it, as though they were warring Middle Easterners, almost without regard to the substance of the compromises reached.

The theory is that the sequester's tax cuts and spending increases will jointly cut demand so sharply that it will lead to falling sales and production and that will lead to supply chain layoffs, to workers losing jobs.   Marginal and even otherwise healthy businesses will go out of business, profits will fall and the stock market will tank.  The business climate will darken and the economic contraction will feed on itself.  There will be a serious recession or worse.  Falling on the heels of the Great Recession of 2008-2010, the two together will become a double-dip recession.

The Democrats will complain of the suffering of ordinary people in their tens of millions losing their livelihoods, of millions forced into destitution, tens of millions forced into desperation, hundreds of millions into uneasiness.  

The Republicans will complain of the suffering of hundreds of thousands of millionaires postponing purchases of yachts, limousines, summer villas, huge corporate bonuses, and all the other trappings of life to which respectable people of their class are entitled.  The way they will phrase it will characterize plutocrats as job-creators, never mind that their policies have un-created tens of millions of jobs during the past five years.

But is it true?   For the fiscal cliff to have all these terrible consequences requires that Keynesian economics work as it is expected to.  But it has not been working and has not worked in quite a long time.  If Keynesian economics worked, the one-and-a-half trillion dollars in stimulus money the administration pumped into the economy in various forms would have ended the recession years ago.  One could argue that the 1.5 trillion did indeed end the recession - now at the end of 2012 the stock market is up, unemployment is still high but at last decreasing.

The government's reflationary policy started in the latter part of the second Bush administration in mid-2008, almost five years ago.  Yet the Great Recession has lasted longer and has been more severe in both unemployment and reduction of gross domestic product than any since World War II and arguably is not yet over.  From which we conclude at least that Keynesian reflationary policy, i.e. large government deficits and other spending, either doesn't work or is counter-productive.  To the argument that the Obama administration's spend-and-lend policies have worked to end the recession, the obvious reply is that it has been five years now and that the recovery from the recession would likely have happened by now anyway, in the normal course of the business cycle.  Earlier recessions have ended sooner and without this much government intervention.

The textbook example of Keynesian economics not working is Japan.  In the 1990's Japan fell into a deflationary spiral from which it has not yet recovered.  The American government and others publicly demanded that Japan borrow and spend more to deal with the problem.  Japan did, and now in addition to chronic deflation (which has pushed the yen to all time highs against the dollar), they now also have a colossal debt, by far the highest in proportion to GDP of any developed economy - almost twice as high as Greece.

Japanese voters, discouraged by the persistent failure of government policies, have changed parties on an enormous scale and put the Liberal-Democrats back in power with a near-two-thirds majority in the parliament.  The LD's in spite of their name are neither liberal nor particularly democratic, for forty years they represented business, business-as-usual, and the US alliance, and presided over the post-war economic recovery.  

The new prime minister, Shenzo Abe, is a new kind of LD, nationalistic, anti-Chinese, and not particularly impressed by the United States as an ally.  He is talking about revising the pacifist post-war constitution and re-militarizing Japan.  He is also a hawk on the economy and proposes borrowing and spending even more aggressively than recent governments.  

Insanity they say is repeating the same things that didn't work before.  A fully militarized Japan was unable to completely defeat the backward, impoverished, anarchic China of the 1930's and '40's.  That they would want to confront the resurgent, nuclear-armed China of the 21st Century seems a fool's errand.  Similarly, even more aggressive borrowing-and-spending when it hasn't worked so far is also not clearly a great policy.  The problem for Japan is that there is as yet no better theory than Keynesianism, even though it seems not to work any more. 

Britain in the 1970's and 1980's experienced an economic condition known as "stagflation", a combination of stagnation and inflation.  In the Keynesian model that should not have been possible - moderate inflation should have encouraged investors and businesses to invest in new plant and equipment to protect the value of their dwindled-by-inflation cash assets, and that should have led to economic growth.  But it didn't.  It was not until the structural reforms of the Thatcher era that the British economy began to thrive.  That the Thatcher reforms were imposed brutally, even cruelly, is beyond question.  But they did eventually work.  

The point is that more radical and structural changes are needed to repair a dysfunctional economy.  Mere Keynsian or monetarist tinkering have not worked in Japan, nor in Britain nor now in the US , and in all likelihood will not work in the future.  

The reason to spend money on the poor is to relieve their hardships, which are especially severe in hard times.  The government should spend money on the poor because it is the right thing to do.  But giving the poor money in hope that their increased spending power will reflate the economy has not worked and apparently will not work.

The reason to save the automobile industry was that it was the right thing to do, not because it saved the economy.  It probably didn't.  Lending vast sums to banks at effectively zero interest probably achieved less than nothing because the banks refused to lend it to the public.

Which brings us back to the sequester.  Keynesian theory says that simultaneous tax increases and spending cuts should be sharply deflationary.  Which is why it is called the fiscal cliff that Keynesianism tells us we will fall off if the sequester goes into effect.  

What if it isn't true?  What if there is no fiscal cliff?  If the parties in Washington are unable to agree, the tax increases and spending cuts will substantially reduce the government's 2013 deficit.  If I were an investor or was making expansion and hiring decisions for a corporation, the optimum environment in which to invest would be one of stability, of a long series of balanced or nearly balanced budgets.  If I were planning for the future - the likely future return on my investment on new plant, equipment, and hiring - I would want clarity and predictability.  

Government spending and interest rates would interest me only for short term investments.  For long term investments that would become the infrastructure of the future economy, I would want stability and predictability more than anything else.  The same would be at least as true if I were a foreign investor.  A stable low-deficit policy would likely attract a flood of foreign capital which would force interest rates still lower.  

Investors want sustainable economic policies.  Without a foreseeable future, an investment is always a pig in a poke.  When investing millions or billions that is not what one wants.  The fact is that none but the smallest deficits are endlessly sustainable and even those only so long as there is at least commensurate growth.  An unsustainable policy is one that must inevitably change or become ruinous.  Whether the future is ruin or unforeseeable, it is not a hospitable climate for investing or hiring.

If I were making decisions about expansion and hiring, I would want to see government deficits reduced and government economic policy predictable.  The sequester will do that more than any policy either party is proposing.   Judging by history, if no agreement is reached and the sequester goes into effect, not only will the sky not fall nor the economy fall off a cliff,  it might be the best thing that could happen to us.

The Israeli Army in Peacetime

[click on video for fullscreen]

High Flight

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, --and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of --Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew --
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

                                                                                John Magee (1922-1941)



.

Happy Chanukah Muthaf__kas!

What the world really thinks of Israel

[Jerusalem - 2012- doubleclick for fullscreen]

My Friend Jasmin

Right Here in San Francisco

[double-click on video for fullscreen]

Who won the election?

Nobody is born a Republican or a Democrat.  People are born rich or poor.  People are born men or women.  People are born black or white or Latino.  Having been born one way or another, we collect various social images of ourselves and of others, and those collected images we call being Republican or Democrat.

A majority of men voted for Romney but a larger majority of women voted for Obama.   Women, not Democrats, won the election.

A majority of whites voted for Romney but a larger majority of everybody else voted for Obama.  Colored people, not Democrats won the election.  (Why is 'colored people' retrograde and racist, while 'people of color' is radical and right on?  What's the difference?)

A majority of rural and suburban voters voted for Romney but a larger majority of urban voters voted for Obama.  The cities, not the Democrats won the election.

This is an interesting series of factoids considering that most of the people who just won the election weren't even allowed to vote or hold office not that long ago.



Which make an interesting aside about being here is Australia.  Here, the Prime Minister is a woman, Julia Guillard, her finance minister is Penny Wong, the deputy leader of the parliamentary opposition is a woman, Julie Something, several premiers of the six Australian states are women.  The camera panning the benches of parliament during question time shows that about half of the members of parliament are women.

Question time is when the opposition puts questions to the prime minister and the other government ministers.  Of course the questions are tendentious, as are the answers, but they put the political debate out in the open and keep both the government and the opposition responsive to criticism.  In the US, the Congress cannot unseat the President by a mere majority vote, nor can the caucus of the majority party remove her, as happened recently when the Labor Party undid a sitting Prime Minister, Paul Rudd.

Here in Australia voting is mandatory.  Failure to vote carries a $100 fine.  I would have thought people would find that oppressive and absuord.  But they don't.  Every Australian we have spoken to, from cab drivers to prosperous guests at fancy hotels, has said it is a better system than our lackadaisical vote-if-you-feel-like-it practice.  I suppose it is worth that much compulsion to ensure that the government has the legitimacy of having been elected by the majority of Australian adults, not by the majority of those who got around to voting, invariably a minority of American adults.

The US could learn a lot from Australia.