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An Occupy Wall Street (Boston) person whines that his movement has become “fascist”.

I’d be more impressed with this supposed epiphany if people like that didn’t define “fascist” as, “someone who told me no.”

The Occupiers are not naive, idealistic, children. They do not act out of a desire for the greater good. They act out of megalomania. They see themselves as some kind of Nietzschean supermen whose superhuman political insight and moral superiority mean they don’t have to follow the same rules as anyone else.

They’re special and get to occupy public property for their sole use. They’re special and get to violate the property and movement rights of others. They’re special and get to cost other people their jobs and livelihood without consequence. They’re special and nobody else has the moral right to restrain them in any way or refuse their dictates. It follows that no one has the moral authority to tell them “no”. Anyone who does tell them “no” is axiomatically evil and the worst kind of evil at that, i.e., fascist.

That includes their fellow ideologues.

Communists and fascists were driven by a similar self-righteous arrogance but both philosophies held that in the grand scheme of things, individuals were unimportant.

The great majority of communists and fascists were perversely proud that they would voluntarily submerge their individuality into an anonymous mass and blindly follow leaders that impersonal “historical forces” had put in charge. The willingness of front-line communists and fascists to suppress their egos and follow commands gave communist and fascist movements their deadly power.

The rest of us should be grateful that these OWS jerks are so individually arrogant and egocentric that they immediately turn fratricidal in groups of six or more. Any group that has a “committee” of  60+ people taking four hours to discuss where to put a single Porta-Potty isn’t much of a threat to the rest of us.

The Tea Party by contrast represents the type of decentralized, bottom-up organization that the OWS types fantasize they have. The Tea Party is grounded in the great American tradition of ad hoc teamwork in which people from a wide variety of backgrounds and beliefs spontaneously join together to perform a specific task. Nobody is too good to follow or too good to lead. Each individual leads at some times and follows at others as the task at hand requires. At no time does an individual have to submerge his or her individuality into some anonymous mass.

Unlike OWS, the people in the Tea Party do not hubristically see themselves as the template for a future utopia. As such, they have no fear that any temporary hierarchy established to organize a specific task will become the rigid class structure of all future society. In the Tea Party, everybody doesn’t have to be on top and involved in absolutely every decision.

The OWS will never have the level of individual, voluntary self-sacrifice and ego humility needed to turn it into an effective movement. If they did, then we would definitely be seeing the rise of a new fascism.

Until then, let’s encourage them to whine about the “fascists” who won’t buy them lollipops.

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Mythbusters is a science popular show on the Discovery channel. They test urban myths and the like using a variety of cleverly improvised experiments.  They often say their insurance company has stopped them from doing this or that experiment. I really believe that. A lot of their stuff is clearly very dangerous despite their precautions.

When I see someone sweating something, I often quip, “He looks more nervous than a Mythbuster’s insurance agent.”

Well, it looks like the Mythbuster’s insurance agent really has something to sweat about now. During an experiment at the Alameda county bomb range that involved firing a large blackpowder cannon with what looked like an 8-12 inch cannonball, the ball skipped out of the range and shot through a house in the nearby suburban neighborhood.

Nobody was hurt but it’s California so they’re going to get sued for all kinds of emotional trauma.

When I told this my son observed, “That’s seems like (an assumed) risk of living near a bomb range.” Yep, but that won’t help.

I hope it doesn’t do in the show.

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So, a new memo has surfaced regarding US military intelligence prior to Pearl Harbor.

In the newly revealed 20-page memo from FDR’s declassified FBI file, the Office of Naval Intelligence on December 4 warned, “In anticipation of open conflict with this country, Japan is vigorously utilizing every available agency to secure military, naval and commercial information, paying particular attention to the West Coast, the Panama Canal and the Territory of Hawaii.”

That’s supposed to be a significant revelations? What, previous memos only warned about Japan’s keen interest in Minnesota? I hate to tell people who are all a twitter about this memo and other similar “revelations” but nobody in the American military or government was really surprised there was an attack on Pearl Harbor or any other major US pacific military asset. The entire Pacific was under a war warning and the entire US military was prepping for a possible Japanese attack somewhere. The US carriers were not caught at Pearl Harbor because they had been deployed to ferry aircraft to points in the western Pacific where an attack was anticipated, e.g., Wake Island.

Pearl Harbor wasn’t a surprise of intent, it was a surprise of capability.

No one in the US Navy thought the Japanese had the physical capability to strike Pearl Harbor with carrier aircraft. That was the surprise.

Yamamoto surprised the US Navy, and everyone else, because he was a “black swan”, i.e., a rare and unpredictable outlier.  

Yamamoto was arguably the greatest naval mind of the 20th Century. He saw possibilities that no one else did. In a culture that prized conformity and respect for the past, he was a maverick rule breaker. American planners did not and probably couldn’t have anticipated how radically and quickly Yamamoto would change Japanese doctrine, tactics and technology.

Yamamoto surprised the US Navy in two ways: Firstly, he completely inverted the controlling doctrine of the entire Japanese Navy. Secondly, he developed technology to enact that doctrine before anyone else thought to do so.

Japanese navel doctrine in the post-WW1 era was dictated by their belief that any future navel conflict would repeat the battle of Tsurigami, i.e., a US fleet would arrive in or near Japanese home waters, where a single decisive battle would take place in which one fleet or the either would be annihilated and the war would then come to a negotiated end. In such a conflict, long-range vessels would be unnecessary.  This doctrine arose in part because prior to the 1930s Japan would have been hard-pressed to get enough oil to fight a long-range conflict.

The home-water doctrine controlled absolutely everything in the Japanese Navy, from technology to training to indoctrination. Every ship was designed from the keel upward for an intense, short-ranged and short-duration conflict. Japanese ships usually had only half the fuel capacity of US or British vessels. All training focused on fighting that one climactic battle. Such a battle was portrayed as not only the only practical solution but the only moral one as well. This concept so dominated Japanese naval thinking that, after Yamamoto’s death, the Japanese navy instantly reverted to it. Making the conceptual leap to a radically different strategy was no trivial feat, and neither was convincing everyone else to go along. American naval planners were well aware of all this and they filed any possible long-range Japanese attacks by capital ships in the highly unlikely file.

After Yamamoto broke the pattern for the controlling doctrine of the Japanese navy, he next had to overcome the technological limitations. He had three major problems: (1) Fueling long-range operations, (2) developing air-dropped torpedoes that wouldn’t bottom out in the relatively shallow water of Pearl Harbor and (3) developing air-dropped bombs that could reliably penetrate the armor of capital ships.

As late as January 1941, none of that technology existed. American planners in December of 1941 assumed it still didn’t exist.

Yamamoto couldn’t just put a bunch of oilers (tankers) with the carrier fleet and set sail. The oilers were just large merchant vessels that couldn’t keep up with the fleet. The normal pattern was for tankers to stay around some island and for the warships to sally out and come back to tranquil waters to refuel. Nobody planned to bring tankers along on a sneak attack. Yamamoto solved the problem by constructing some oilers on some old cruiser keels which made an oiler that could reasonably pace a fleet.

The other problem was that refueling in even moderately heavy seas was tricky. Ships getting bounced around a tug at the wrong time could send flammable fuel everywhere. Yamamato solved that problem with a new kind of coupling system that could safely disengage.

This coupling technology gave the Japanese capital fleets unlimited striking range at good speed. Unknown to anyone outside the upper levels of the Japanese naval command, the Japanese carriers could strike West-East from Madagascar to the Panama canal and North-South from Alaska to Australia. The surprising series of naval air strikes that controlled the first few months of the war depended on the Japanese navy’s ability to refuel on the fly.

Yamamoto solved the other two problems with typical Japanese elegance and simplicity. Attaching wooden fins to the torpedoes allowed them to enter the water at a much shallower angle so they wouldn’t plow into the bottom of the harbor but would run true. Attaching fins to existing armor piercing cannon shells turned them into armor penetrating air delivered bombs.

American planners also took into consideration that even with the technical ability to strike plus the element of surprise, a carrier attack on Hawaii was very dangerous for the Japanese.

The Japanese had no more idea of the location of the US carriers than the US did about the location of the Japanese carriers. The Japanese fleet could have been counter ambushed and overwhelmed by the combined force of the US carriers, battleships and land-based planes from Hawaii. Admiral Nagumo failed to launch follow up attacks on the oil storage and dry docks of Pearl Harbor in part because of this realistic fear of a devastating counterattack.

American planners didn’t believe the Japanese would risk so many capital ships and aircraft in such a risky attack.

The combination of all these factors meant that even though Admiral Kimmel, General Short and others understood the theoretical dangers of a carrier attack on Pearl Harbor, they didn’t think it a likely enough scenario to take counter measures against, especially if that meant exposing Pearl Harbor to more likely forms of attack.

When they began actively preparing for war with Japan in early November 1941, they did not irresponsibly plan for an almost “impossible” carrier strike but instead responsibly planned for likely modes of attacks that the America navy thought the Japanese could carry out: Submarine attacks on ships, submarine shelling of the shore, submarine-landed commandos, aerial bombing from lumbering seaplanes and sabotage attacks by covert agents.

Kimmel seriously ramped up anti-submarine defenses around the harbor. Short put the coastal artillery on high alert. Both configured air defenses to repel a high-altitude attack from large seaplanes. Both guarded all land assets from commando or saboteur attacks. Most famously, both the Navy and the Army tightly clustered all their aircraft together on the airfields so they could be easily protected from a ground attack by light infantry or saboteurs.

Like competent baseball coaches, Kimmel and Short had covered all their bases. Unfortunately, the Japanese were playing football.

Most historical works conflate the surprise of the general public at Pearl Harbor with the surprise of the military. The Roosevelt administration worked tirelessly to downplay the risk of attack from Japan because FDR didn’t want attention distracted from Europe. Negotiations were still underway, and Americans of that era assumed that no one would attack during negotiations. The military, however, was actively preparing for war with Japan and was not particularly surprised that it broke out. They were only surprised by a radical change in Japanese doctrine and capabilities.

All the conspiracy theories about Pearl Harbor hinge on the idea that all the warnings about Japanese attacks should have made it obvious that a carrier strike on Pearl Harbor was imminent. Such theories ignore that the best intelligence estimates of the time said that Japan could not carry out such an attack, and even if they could would not as a matter of doctrine. Nothing in the bits and pieces of intelligence that in hindsight indicated a possible carrier attack on Pearl were interpreted as such, because a carrier attack was thought (as a practical matter) operationally impossible.

The specter of technological surprise has haunted US planners ever since Pearl Harbor. The US military did learn to never underestimate the technical ability of an enemy to strike. Some would argue the US has systematically over estimated such abilities.

We learned a lot from Pearl Harbor but we really didn’t learn not to attempt to read the minds of people from other cultures and ideologies We haven’t learned to plan for the appearance of exceptional individuals changing the rule of the game.

Most importantly, we haven’t learned to plan for things we can’t possibly plan for or to admit that such scenarios even exist. Instead, we assume that all eventualities can be and should be planned for.

No doubt future historians will write “books” about how everything we will blunder into was in retrospect so obvious that the only reasonable explanation was some grand incompetence or conspiracy. In the end, we just really don’t understand most of what is going on and never did or will. Life is about surprises good and bad.

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Aptera, the 120-300mpg car design, has shuttered it doors for good as I predicted it would three years ago.

The failure of Aptera and similar designs reveals the real-world functional differences between stated preferences i.e. what people tell themselves and others they want, and revealed preferences i.e. the things people actually end up choosing. People tell car designers and manufactures they want and will buy an inexpensive, efficient, two-seater commuter car but when it comes to putting money down for one they don’t follow through.

The conflict between stated and revealed preferences has significant political ramifications.

Looking back over my previous post on Aptera and the subsequent comments, it’s clear that Aptera specifically failed for three major reason:

1. It was uni-dimensional design that sacrificed every other functionality for fuel efficiency.
2. Cars are general tools. Every if  people spend 80% of their milage commenting, they still have other task the car needs to perform to some degree. A car that cannot fulfill these secondary task necessitates that the car owner spend time and money finding other solutions. That additional expense usually destroys any economic advantage the unidimensional design purports to offers.
3. The Aptera specifically represented nothing knew. Everything in the design had been repeatedly tried before and always failed. Specifically, highly efficient, two-seater commuter cars using a wide array of  technologies have been repeatedly offered since at least the 1920s in all parts of the world. They all failed to catch on.

The last reason brings me to the “Smart” car. Marketed as “unboring”, “uncluttered” and the “uncar”, they should have added “unusable” and “unsellable”.  The Smart car is another in a long, long, long list of attempts at a highly efficient, two seater, urban car. Arguably, it could be the best attempt ever made. It’s failure should, but won’t, drive a stake into the two-seater commuter car concept.

The Smart car’s design and technology are impressive.

Safety is a concern in small cars so the Smart car is basically an overbuilt roll cage with wheels on the conners. It is physically impossible for the momentum of the car to supply enough energy to breach the passenger compartment i.e. you can run the car into anything at any speed, even something large enough to bring it to a dead stop, and still not breach the passenger compartment. Of course, this doesn’t protect against driving off a height, having a tree-limb or rebar punch through or getting punted by a larger vehicle but this is still a really good design given the limitations of size. It’s probably pretty safe for most dense urban environments.

The interior is roomier than many larger cars even for tall people. There is easily accessible cargo space. Acceleration is okay and fuel economy is great. The car is highly customizable which people like these days. Plus, it has the image of being economically friendly which is a big selling point for the urban hipsters.

Despite this technical excellence and marketing edge, after an initial flurry of interest, Smart car sales plummeted and have remained anemic.

People keep trying to sell this type of design because it feels intuitively like it should work. Having a jaunty little car that can let one or two people zip around town seems very reasonable. I think everyone has at one time has thought, “I wish I could have a car without the hassles.” People believe they want an inexpensive to buy, inexpensive to operate, clean, quite, zippy and easy to park vehicle .We also believe that we will tolerate the tradeoffs of capacity and functionality that will require.  We honestly tell market researchers we will buy such a car. That is why dozens of manufactures over the last 90 years have tried to make this two-seater commuter car design work: Everyone tells them to.

The two seater commuter doesn’t work because while it meets most transportation needs in terms of overall milage and reason for miles driven, it doesn’t meet enough. Seemingly minor lapses in functionality cripple its overall utility and doom the design.

By analogy, imagine two road systems, one a pristine, modern four-lane highway and the other an old, crumbling two-lane. Now imagine that both roads run in parallel for a hundred miles/kilometers to the same destination. The four-lane would seem clearly superior but what if in that hundred mile/kilometer run, there is a 10-foot/3-meter gap that the old two-lane bridges but the four-lane does not? Suddenly, the four-lane is nearly useless for making the whole trip and people will prefer the teeth rattling journey down the two-lane instead. People might use the four-lane for the 50 mile/kilometer trip on either side but if they don’t know for sure how far they will be going that day, they will pick the old road. In the end, the majority of the traffic will end up on the old road because all things considered, it performs the function of a road better.

The two-seater has several of these seeming insignificant functional gaps that it does not “bridge”. The real deal killer seems to be the lack of any possibility of squeezing in four people. Even for childless, 20-something, urban hipsters, cars have a social function. Want to go out once a week with three friends? Someone else is driving. Need to go to lunch with coworkers? Someone else is driving. Want to buy a bookshelf at Ikea? Hit up a friend with a four-door. And so on.

The original Volkswagen (People’s Car) design of the 1950s was about as minimalistic a design as one can get but it succeeded because you could at least theoretically cram four people inside (5 or 6 if they were friendly). Most people who drove a Volkswagen usually drove alone but when they needed to haul more people or stuff they could. If a two-seater commuter car would succeed anywhere it would be crowded Japan in the 70s but even the tiny original Honda-Civic, could hold squeeze in four people. The Indian Neo seats four as well and looks to succeed.

The Smart company seems to have come to the same conclusion and will replace the two-seater design with a four-seater. Most likely, it will be “two” little, to late . The stigma of a failed design will have attached to the brand. A four-seater versions won’t stand out as so “smart” and will look like just another of the many small, cheap, boxy cars made for first time buyers.

In the end, stated preferences are really hypothesis i.e. guesses about what we think we want or what we think will work. Revealed preferences are really the experimental results we get after we test the stated preference hypothesis in the real world.

The free-market eventually always works on revealed preferences. People who supply goods and services usually start with their customer’s stated preferences but very quickly the customers reveal what they will actually put down money for.

Politics works on stated preferences. It’s starts with stated preferences and pretty much stays there. Individuals rarely have to expend their own resources to reveal how they really evaluate a political idea. Even if they do, they have to bundle that revealed preferences together with hundreds of stated preferences when they vote for candidate A or candidate B.

Experimentation trumps educated and uneducated guessing. It’s no mystery why the experimental free-market performs better at actually solving problems and making people content than the babbled of guess-work that drives government.

Leftism basically boils down to running almost all of society based on stated preferences. Leftists pseudo-intellectuals create persuasive rationales, people decide that sounds good and then the entire polity hand and hand jumps off a cliff because everyone states that is what they desire. By the time impact with ground reveals everyone’s true preferences, it’s to late.

Aptera closed its doors after it failed to secure $150 million dollar loan from government. Given different circumstances, the ever green stated presences for an efficient two-seater commuter could have easily convinced government officials to put us all on the hook for hundreds of millions of dollars of squandered money.

The amount of error possible from untested stated preferences is functionally infinite. The scale of error on the part of government is likewise infinite. The scale of error for the free-market is always much, much smaller and much easier to correct. Better to have the freedom to buy a two-seater commuter and learn by personal error than to be forced to drive one because everyone believes that is the correct thing to do.

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So, Bill Ayers himself admits that Obama began his political career in Ayers’s living room.

Some people owe me an apology.

Ayers, you may recall, is the leftist intellectual’s Timothy McVeigh (without McVeigh’s murderous competence). The comparison to McVeigh is not hyperbole. The psychology of political terrorists has been well studied by many people in many different countries. All studies conclude that such terrorists are megalomaniacal sociopaths who latch on to the most visible political movement of their time and location and then use that movement’s ideology to justify their crimes. They don’t actually care about the good the ideology purports to accomplish.

Instead, they care about exploiting the ideology to advance their own interest. The ideology merely justifies their sociopathic vainglory. The strategy behind both Ayers’s and McVeigh’s terrorism was to trigger a broad-based political upheaval that would leave individuals such as Ayers and McVeigh on top of society. They rationalized that by killing they could make themselves the pebble that starts the political avalanche. They desperately convinced themselves that they could murder their way to the top like Lenin or Mao.

Ayers never cared about all the things that contemporary leftists care about, and he never will. He doesn’t care about anybody or anything other than himself (although, like all sociopaths, he is very good at convincing people he does). Ayers isn’t a basically good person who went too far in advancing a good cause, he’s just evil. In another era, he would have killed for right-wing causes just as readily.

This makes the contemporary Left’s continuing embrace of Ayers, Dorn and other Weatherman sociopaths even more disturbing. They simply don’t care what these sociopaths did nor what they continue to profess. (Ayers has never recanted his terrorism and even let himself be photographed trampling an American flag in a grimy alley for a NY Times story published on 9/11.)  Neither are leftists concerned in the least that such an individual moved in the same small political circle and continually interacted with the person who is currently the President of the United States. Neither are they concerned that Ayers et al all heartily approve of Obama.

Worst of all, they are utterly unconcerned that Ayers is a prominent national educator with significant influence on the K-12 education of America’s children. In the video where he makes his admission, he is speaking to a group of teachers unionists and urging them to corruptly use their positions of trust as educators of children to advance Ayers’s political agenda. The audience has no problem with doing just that.

I really think that someone in the Chicago area needs to crowd source the tracking of Ayers and to publicly link him to every group or policy he adopts. The hardcore Left doesn’t care about Ayers’s sociopathy and murderous megalomania but I imagine others will.

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What am I thankful for?

I’m thankful that I can crush my enemies and see them flee before me, that I can take their horses and belongings and hear the lamentations of their women.

Okay, I’m not thankful for that today but 1,000 years ago I probably would have been. Today, I am thankful that we do not have to repeat the mistakes and evils of our ancestors but that we can go forth to make our own, hopefully lesser, mistakes.

What else?

I thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea.

If it is sad that good people do not live forever, it is joyful that evil ones do not as well. I think Shakespeare’s Anthony was wrong and it is the evil that men do that is (eventually) interred with their bones. The good we leave behind accumulates over the generations. This would not happen if everything lived forever. So, I am thankful that nothing lasts forever and that things and people change. I am thankful even when that change is death.

I am thankful that the preacher of Ecclesiastes was literally wrong and that there are new things under the sun and that each day brings some new wonder to explore. I am thankful that, even if he was correct in his metaphor that human nature never changes, then at least we can change how we act on the impulses that come from that nature.

I am thankful that I live in America, where each morning is the beginning of the great tomorrow promised yesterday. I am thankful that I have the right to strive, to experiment and to improve. I am thankful I have the right to fail, to fall and get back up again.

Most of all, I am thankful that I know to be thankful for these things.

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Following on my previous post on the “We are the 99%” people who seem to view education as more ritual than the acquisition of practical skills or knowledge, it occurred to me that many of these young people may not understand that they aren’t really, despite the time and money spent, actually educated.

The liberal arts of today are those fields with little or no empiricism. In other words, if the field doesn’t have a lot of math, the information it deals with is subjective and untestable. Even supposed “soft” sciences in the liberal arts like sociology or psychology lack true scientific rigor. Given that, how do liberal-arts graduates know that they’ve really been taught something worthwhile? How do they know they haven’t been loaded up with gibberish?

For example, I don’t know much about music, so someday I want to take some courses about music. How would I know whether any particular instructor was teaching me anything valid? Since I have no real knowledge about music, how would I know if I was paying someone to fill my head with nonsense?

Some music education would teach concrete skills, e.g., reading music or learning to play an instrument, so I could evaluate whether I had been educated by my ability to read music or play an instrument.

However, what if I spend $50,000 being taught “Music Theory” or “The Sociology of Music“.

How would I ever know whether I was taught anything remotely true and, more important, of practical use? If I want to be a musician will a degree in either actually help my career or am I better off spending more time practicing in the garage studio?

Most of what is taught in the liberal arts does not equip the student with objective skills. Instead, most of what students learn are elaborate hypotheses validated only by a popularity contest among the professors themselves. Most of those hypotheses will end up judged by history to be gibberish — e.g., Marxism.

Most degrees in the liberal arts, especially the advanced degrees, really just equip the student to become a liberal-arts professor. Given how few professorships open up, most liberal-arts graduates don’t actually end up with marketable skills.

I think a lot of liberal-arts graduates have been convinced they have learned something of great value. Why should they believe otherwise? We are taught since childhood how wise and wonderful all our teachers are. We are told how uplifting and ennobling education is. Why would students question whether their trusted professors are teaching them anything true and/or valuable in the future workplace?

What a horrible realization to find out that you haven’t actually been educated. What a horrible realization to find out you owe tens of thousands of dollars and you don’t have any skills to compensate. What a horrible realization to find out you are no more employable than someone who never went to college in the first place.

These kids feel cheated and they are right. They were told they were actually getting “educated” but they weren’t. They borrowed tens of thousands of dollars for nothing.

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I’ve been reading through the “We Are the 99 Percent” and other related web sites. A constant refrain is that young adults went tens of thousands of dollars into debt for degrees and now they can’t find even minimum wage jobs. I don’t think they really understand the purpose of education.

This one complains that, “I have a Magna Cum Laude BA, and not even the grocery store will hire me.” This one says, “I’m over $100k in student loan debt and my career isn’t even in the field I went into copious amounts of debt over.”  This one says, ‘My husband and I both went to college like we were “supposed” to do.’  This one says, “I am 25 yrs old and months away from a master’s degree. My bachelor’s is in literature/9-12 education…Well over $30K in student loan debt.”

Carefully missing from most of the complaints is the type of degree they got, but I think it’s fairly clear that most of these people got liberal-arts degrees. Moreover, there is no evidence that they pursued these degrees with any eye towards practical economic returns for their considerable financial investment.

I really get the sense that many of these people simply don’t understand that an education is supposed to equip you with skills that make you valuable to other people. Instead, I think these kids have somehow got the idea that college is more of a ritual you have to go through, a kind of right of passage, that entitles you to a middle-class or better life-style while pursuing a job you find interesting and emotionally fulfilling.

They’re just shocked and amazed that they’ve gone through all the rituals, got the degrees and the accolades of their professors and nobody out in the real world gives a damn.

We need to think long and hard how so many young people simply don’t understand the purpose of education. Where did they get the idea that a liberal-arts degree automatically entitled them to a middle-class income that could easily pay off tens of thousands in student loans?

I don’t think it was Wall Street.

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Is it just coincidence that Herman Cain is now facing the same charges of sexual impropriety as Clarence Thomas? Of all the charges to level, why have both of the most prominent black conservatives of the past 20 years been targeted by sexual allegation? Why don’t white conservatives get similarly accused? Why does the Left seem to find such charges against black conservatives so credible? Why do charges of sexual impropriety against conservative black men”stick” so readily in the minds of the Left?

I think that the Left has fallen into a psychological rut worn deep in our collective cultural conscience by a century of scientific racism. I think they are all primed to see black men as sexually impulsive. That is why they instantly think such charges as credible.

Classical racism (pre-WWII) held that non-white races were less evolved away from animals than whites and therefore had more animalistic natures. Under the non-Darwinian concept of evolution ascendent at the time,  the “scientific consensus” held that natural forces were pushing all living things along a predetermined development towards some “higher” or “perfected” state. In humans, that meant our brains grew larger, increasing intellect and emotional control but at the same time weakening the body.

Non-whites were believed to be less evolved and therefore mentally and emotionally inferior but with the relative strength and stamina of animals. In a time when most men still performed manual labor for a living, the era’s progressives argued that the “lesser” races had an unfair advantage in the free-market when it came to competing for manual labor jobs so the government had to step in. Most Jim Crow laws, unions and immigration restrictions on Asian were supported by the era’s progressives with the argument that “greedy” business owners would hire non-whites because they could do the job better without paying attention to the “socially responsible” need to maintain white supremacy.

One side effect of seeing non-whites, particularly black people, as more animalistic, was that they were also seen as being more sexually virile.  However, they were also viewed as being more animal like in having far less sexual self-control and more likely to give into impulses. In a time when people had direct exposure to the highly aggressive and dangerous sexual behavior of bulls, stallions and boars, it was easy to see the supposedly more animalistic black males as poising a similar danger. That is where the idea that black men looking at white women poised a danger comes from this concept. It got a lot of innocent men and boys killed.

Many African-American thinkers today maintain that the fading echoes of this old concept still resonates within our cultural subconscious and that we are all, regardless of race, primed to see African-American males as overly sensual and sexually impulsive. While being stereotyped as virile is boon to the teenager and college aged, being seen as impulsive in any way is detrimental to rising to positions of trust and authority. Many black men still feel they are viewed as impulsive and thoughtless.

Given this history, shouldn’t we be asking just what is driving accusation of sexual harassment against first Clarence Thomas and now Herman Cain? Why these particular allegations against the only two African-American male conservatives to seek high Federal office?

The acts that Anita Hills alleged, even if taken at face value, were trivial acts. Did Thomas’ race and sex amplify the significance of those acts in Hill’s mind?  Moreover, were they amplified in the minds of the Leftists who sought to bring Thomas down? Did Cain’s secret accusers likewise assume that a black man, even an older, educated black man, must be sexually impulsive and magnify innocuous comments into something sexual and aggressive?

Does our collective legacy of racism drive us all to we assume that the faintest hint of sexual suggestion on the part of a black man must represent the tip of an iceberg of animalistic sexuality? Do women, even black women, feel more threatened by the comments of black men than those made by other men?

Most worrisome, do these charges gain instant traction on the Left because of cynical political calculation or because of the Lefts’ latent racism? When faced by an African-American male who refuses to defer to them, do they revert to cultural subconscious racism and assume that the offending black man must be sexually dangerous?

I think it quite possible.

One of the defining aspects of Leftism is a complete lack of individual moral introspection. Leftists have an unshakable faith in their own moral rectitude. They are the elect and the rest of us are the damned. Leftists never stop to wonder if subtle, inherited racism influences their thoughts and actions.Believing themselves immune to such failings, they never defend against them and always fall prey.

Racism is a moral failing Leftist definitely believe themselves immune to. They won’t admit that in their hearts, they see African-Americans as lessor people, ever trapped in an infantile state and always requiring the benevolent protection of the noble white Leftists.

They won’t  admit that Cain and other black conservatives provoke such a strong emotional reaction precisely because they refuse to act like dependent, subservient infants. The won’t admit to themselves that they are so quick to believe accusation of sexual misconduct against black conservatives because when blacks challenge Leftists the Leftists have no psychological barriers to reverting back to culturally inherited stereotypes about the supposed dangerous sexuality of black men.

The Left thinks they’ve advanced so far but they haven’t. When tested they fail. All it takes is the least suggestion and they revert to the ugly past.

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This article on the Kindle Fire versus the iPad inspired my previous post. Reading it again I noticed something else…

… there is no mention of Microsoft.

This article isn’t unusual. Microsoft seems to be disappearing from the casual computer related “chatter”, such as the Wired article. I’m not talking about the Microsoft specific press like PC World or the like but rather the less specific and more general press and blogs that sometimes writes stories about computer issues.

Five years or more ago, you simply did not see computer stories that didn’t mention Microsoft. When Apple did something there was always some notice paid to how Microsoft might respond. More importantly, Microsoft showed up in political, economic or cultural writing that weren’t computer specific. Microsoft was on the minds of the general public, not just computer geeks.

Today, Microsoft is almost invisible. I’m an Apple/Unix guy so I don’t read the Microsoft specific press but in the past Microsoft intruded into every part of the industry. Today, when the Mac/Unix specific press talks about non-Apple companies, they talk about Google’s Android or one of the web services. Microsoft has been reduced to an afterthought. The company no longer has “mindshare”.

I’ve seen this before. From 1975-1995, computers meant IBM, especially in the minds of the general public. There was a great deal of “chatter” about IBM. Sometime after 1992, the chatter began to drop off and by 1995 it had virtually disappeared. With the release of Windows 95, Microsoft supplanted IBM as the main computer company in the popular culture and quickly in the industry itself.

I think the same thing is happening to Microsoft. Microsoft is certainly in no danger of disappearing. The majority of computing on earth is still done with Microsoft software. But IBM didn’t disappear either it just became old hat and uninteresting.

Might want to short Microsoft long-term.

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Compare and contrast ads for Apple’s iOS/iPhone/iPad and ads for Google’s Android.

The Apple ads center visually on products themselves. The Apples ads just linger on showing the Apple hardware and software in use. Apple believes that the products speak for themselves and all Apple has to do is show the products in action. Basically, the ads just say, “Here’s our stuff. Isn’t it neat?” This works because the Apple products are finely tuned by a focused and discipline design, production and support system. There is a definitive iPhone, a definitive iPad and a definitive iOS operating system.

The Android ads by contrast don’t show the actual devices or Android itself in use. They are not Android specific at all. They might as well be snippets cut from some Sci-Fi movie or video game. The actual Android products are largely hidden. Instead of showing the hardware and software in action, they instead nearly try to associate the Android brand with cool and exciting Sci-Fi imagery.

Most Android ads, regardless of who makes them, fit this pattern. Android devices are seldom seen, when seen they seldom hold prolonged focus and are seldom seen in use.  Basically, the ads say, “Look at the girl in leather fighting robots! That’s cool right? So, Android must be cool too!”

The two different ad styles reveal the problem with fragmentation that Google faces in making Android a trusted, respected and widely adopted OS brand.

I post to StackOverflow, a site/community for answering technical programming questions. One of my highest rated answers addressed the question of which mobile OS a startup should target. Back in Oct 09 I observed:

As near as I can tell, Android isn’t actually a platform but more like a loose standard. Each phone vendor can customize it to a high degree so there doesn’t seem to be a means by which you can write a single app and know it will run on all Android phones. That will cause major market fragmentation so even if Android takes off big time that doesn’t mean that every developer, especially small developers, will be able to sell to the entire installed base.
 
Long term, open platforms (like contemporary PCs) present major problems for small developers. There is no intellectual property protection so developers who don’t have large institutional customers they can sue can’t prevent piracy. Security will become a major issues as black hats target people’s phones. There will be a huge number of crappy or actually fraudulent apps cranked out that make end users leery of buying software from a vendor they don’t recognize. This means small developers will have a hard time breaking into the market.
 
One of my professors in college told me something that has proven true in my 20+ years in the computer industry: The major strength of every design is also its critical weakness and vice versa. The very things that make open platforms attractive to developers and customers are also the same things that will cause them major problems. The very things that turn developers off about closed platforms are the things that provide the greatest benefit to developers long term. Having a closed platform’s vendor vet every app slows down acceptance and limits choice but improves overall quality, security and consumer trust. And so on…

My predictions of two years ago (a long time in the computer world) have largely come to pass. The Android market has fragmented into different software versions and wildly differing hardware. While this provides benefits, it is also creating problems for Android users, developers and Google’s marketing department.

The fragmentation means that neither Google nor anyone else can make an Apple-like Android ad because there is no real, integral “Android” OS to show off nor any impressive hardware specific to the Android platform. They have no hardware or software they can make the sole star of an ad so instead they are reduced to running ads that merely create positive emotional associations with the Android brand.

That same lack of focus that frustrate the guys in marketing makes it hard for developers and hardware manufactures to create functional and strongly branded software and hardware for the Android platform. That weak branding in turn makes it makes it hard for end user to understand exactly what capabilities any particular Android device has or what software or accessory hardware will work with it.

None of this means Android is or ever will be, a failure. I fully expect Android to be a major, if not the major mobile platform. However, I don’t think Android will ever be viewed as the best mobile platform. The inherent tradeoffs and compromises necessary to interoperate with so widely varying hardware and software means that Android will always be the “eh, good enough,” mobile platform.

By contrast,  Apple and those who develop for Apple platforms, will always have the luxury of fine tuning their products to standardized hardware and system software which themselves are equally fine tuned. The focused Apple model will always provide a higher level of developer and user experience than Android’s scatter-shot model. That’s why I think Apple has little to worry about as long as it keeps its quality up.

I don’t think we will ever see an iOS/iPhone/iPad “killer” simply because no one else seems capable or willing to make the design and ecosystem tradeoffs that Apple makes. The common impulse always seems to be to go for quantity instead of quality even though people will pay for quality. In order for another company to get to the level where the company’s products seriously threaten Apple’s dominance and/or profitability, they will have to deny the common impulse and make the same design and ecosystem tradeoffs that Apple makes.

So, far, there are no signs that anyone will.

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Watching the older members of the Occupy movement always puts me in mind of this Austin Lounge Lizard song. I can’t find a complete online rendition but you can listen to the second stanza.

I think the last stanza sums up the emotional lives of these people. They are all convinced they are special somehow and that the greatest proof of the current world’s inherent injustice is that they don’t get the income, status and regard they innately deserve. They really do believe they’re better than the business people who actually provide all the material benefits of modern life. They chafe that mere executives, bankers and inventors get the money and status that should rightly go to them.

They dress all their rage up as concern for the poor and victimized but they’re really only upset about how the world treats them individually. Their “concern” is really thinly discussed selfishness.

That selfishness is the base reason why all their policies always hurt more than help the nominal targets of their concern. Their selfishness means that any policy or programs must first and foremost advance their interest. Any program that doesn’t do that is violently resisted regardless of its potential or proven ability to help those who need help.

All this rage, rioting and posturing is really just a thinly disquised shout of, “me, me, me!”

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Every year, thousands of boy and girl scouts head out into the wild and set up camp sites. They even do so on a scale of thousands when they have Jamborees. Even more impressively, the vast majority of the people organizing and doing the work are just teenagers. We see the same level of impressive self-organization when natural disasters hit. Strangers instantly come together to pool limited resources and help each other out. Within hours, they can create a physically safe and emotionally supportive ad hoc community while they wait for outside help to arrive.

Given all that, just how pathetic is it that the various “Occupy” mobs can’t even come close to providing the same level of effective self-organization in their little campground cum shantytowns? Even the most trivial decisions take hours of protracted debate that often end without deciding on an action. The “Occupiers” in many cities have rioted, attacking random individuals and destroying businesses large and small. Almost all of the sites nationwide are plagued  internally by violence and theft. The New York Occupy campground has even had to establish a women’s only tent to prevent rapes.

Do these pathetic, immature, egocentric twits actually expect the rest of us to allow them to influence any major public policy? When people are losing jobs and homes and entire communities and even states are sliding into bankruptcy, why would we turn to such overt incompetents for leadership? If they can’t manage a campground or honestly manage 500,000 donated dollars, why would we think they can manage a city government or regulate a bank?

It might be one thing if the Occupiers had some original or insightful ideas. People advancing novel ideas have to be given the leeway to fail. But all the ideas the Occupiers put forward are at best ’60s retreads. All these ideas have been tried and they have failed. Like the rest of the world-wide Left which hasn’t had an original idea in 40+ years, the Occupiers are political reactionaries seeking to return to ’60s, the last time they had any influence. Why should we give the Occupiers any leeway for repeating stupidity?

The Occupiers offer nothing new and they can’t even manage themselves. They and their supporters are pathetically delusional if they think they were, are or will ever be significant or influential decision-makers. They are the spoiled children of privilege whose acting out the middle-class tolerates precisely because the middle-class knows they are impotent children. The moment their disruptions grow too large or go on too long, the  middle-class adults will show up and send everyone home.

I think playtime’s gone on long enough, don’t you?

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With violent crime in New York on the rise, nanny mayor Bloomberg has involved himself in Virginia’s internal legislative process in an attempt to restrict the Second Amendment rights of the people of Virginia. His rationale for doing so is that New York criminals buy guns in Virginia, and since Bloomberg can’t control those criminals in New York itself, the law abiding citizens of Virginia have to give up some of their rights.

In reality, Bloomberg is just another impotent and incompetent big city mayor with a expensive, bloated, unionized, dysfunctional and often corrupt police force who cannot provide basic civil order to many parts of the city they notionally “serve and protect.” Rather than admit that he can’t actually perform the most basic duty of his office, Bloomberg desperately tries to shift the blame to some group outside his jurisdiction over which he can plausibly claim he has no control.

Bloomberg’s message boils down to: “Hey, you can’t blame for me runaway crime in New York because it’s all the fault of those ignorant rednecks in Virginia over whom I have no control!”

Blaming outsiders for internal woes is the oldest political trick in the book.

It is extremely amusing to see the oh-so sophisticated New Yorkers falling for such a naked appeal to their bigotries against rural people and southerners. All that money, elite education and cosmopolitanism doesn’t make them wise enough to see through such a crude trick.

Bloomberg is hardly alone. Many big-city mayors in the Northeast are trying to shift blame for crime in their jurisdictions to people in other states. It’s sad and ridiculous that so many people in the big urban cores are apparently falling for it. All the more so because many cities in the Northeast don’t have severe crime and many are right next door to those that do.

History is clear that the sole cause of runaway crime is political dysfunction. Every community has its bad actors and every community must figure out how to deter and control those bad actors. When communities are politically functional, so is their criminal-justice system and crime is low. When communities are politically dysfunctional, so is their criminal-justice system and crime spirals out of control. When the citizens of a jurisdiction see crime running rampant, it means their politicians need replacing in mass.

Let us hope that the people of New York stop and think about what Bloomberg is really saying when he blames Virginia for New York violence. By claiming that the actions of law-abiding Virginians are the controlling factor driving violent crime in New York, Bloomberg is saying that his administration and his police force are incapable of protecting the citizens of the city. When Bloomberg shifts blame to Virginia, Bloomberg is saying he is useless.

Frankly, I agree. Wake up, New York.

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German chancellor Merkel recently made a statement that mirrors sentiments voiced by virtually all European leaders and EU proponents:

“Nobody should take for granted another 50 years of peace and prosperity in Europe. They are not for granted. That’s why I say: If the euro fails, Europe fails,” Merkel said, followed by a long applause from all political groups.
 
“We have a historical obligation: To protect by all means Europe’s unification process begun by our forefathers after centuries of hatred and blood spill. None of us can foresee what the consequences would be if we were to fail.” [emp added]

So, as an American, I have to ask: How crazy dangerous are contemporary Europeans anyway?

I mean, from reading the statements of these EU leaders and EU proponents, people outside the EU could easily get the idea that the majority of the EU population are nothing but a bunch of war crazed psychos quiveringly eager to drop the hammer on their neighbors at the slightest provocation. And here I thought you Europeans were all better now and so morally advanced compared to the rest of the planet. Have you been keeping secrets?

If Europeans are so irrationally war prone, is the EU really a good idea?

I mean, I can attest from personal experience that if you have a problem with a pickup full of drunken rednecks looking for trouble on a Saturday night, the solution isn’t to round up all the other drunken rednecks in the county and organize them. If Europeans are so bloodthirsty, organizing them all together in the EU would simply amplify their dangerousness to the rest of the world by making them a deranged superpower. The Germans and Italians were bad enough on their own, back in the day, but now we have to deal with all of Europe going nuts at once?

Maybe the Russians are right to be paranoid and we should probably keep our bases over there. I mean, if European leaders are so afraid of their own populace I guess the rest of the world should be as well.

I suppose cynical Europhobes will say that this depiction of a bloodthirsty European populace is just a cynical attempt by European elites to terrify their own population into supporting more risky Euro spending. Nah, it couldn’t be that because Europeans are so sophisticated and all. They’d never fall for a scam like that.

Nope, it must be that Europeans are just a bunch of barely restrained thugs. The next time you see a European coming towards you down the street, play it safe and cross the street out of their way. You don’t want them going all gangster on you.

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In an otherwise excellent article, John Stossel repeats a historical fallacy that is one of my pet peeves. He says:

The railroad didn’t make economic sense at the time, so the government subsidized construction and gave the companies huge quantities of the best land on the continent. [emp added]

This is one of those assertions that gets repeated endlessly until it becomes widely viewed as unquestionable fact. Indeed, it does seem self-evident because one need only look at a map of the 19th century land grants to see that the grants covered vast stretches of land that today are some of the most productive and valuable agricultural lands in the world.

There is just one problem. Most of that land today, and even more so in the late 19th century, is valuable for only one reason:

It has a railroad running though it.

There is nothing intrinsically valuable about land no matter how fertile. Land only has value if people can farm it, mine it, lumber it, build on it or pay good money just to look at it. In order to do any of those economic activities people have to (1) be able to get to the land themselves, (2) bring in supplies and tools to carry out some economic activity and (3) ship the resulting products to market at a price the customer will pay.

Prior to the railroad, any farmlands, timberlands or mineral deposits were valueless if a heavy wagon could not carry a load from the site to navigable water within a day.  It’s no coincidence that even today, the most valuable real estate in the world sits around natural ports linked to inland water ways, e.g., Manhattan. Prior to railroads, this reality lead to strange economic paradoxes such as it being cheaper in 1830 to ship coal to New York from 3,000 miles away in England than to ship coal mined just a couple of hundred miles away in Appalachia.

Looking again at the land grant maps with an eye towards geography reveals that the vast majority of lands “given” away to railroads had no significant navigable waterways linking them to distant markets. For example, the largest land grant ran across modern day North Dakota, Montana and Idaho, none of which have any significant navigable waterways. Even places that look to modern eyes like they should have had water transport, e.g., Michigan or northern California, didn’t. Although Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes on three sides and had coast ports that rivaled those built on saltwater, the interior of Michigan was originally ruggedly wooded with no navigable waterways. Even dirt roads and farms had to be laboriously hacked through dense hard wood forest. A day’s ride inland from the Great Lakes and people found themselves in a transportation desert. On the west coast, there is not a major usable harbor between San Francisco and Portland and no navigable rivers. One of the most verdant areas of earth just sat there largely unusable before the railroad.

When the land grants were “given” to the railroads, the federal and state governments didn’t own vast tracts of “valuable” land. They owned vast tracts of worthless land. The land would only become valuable if someone built a railroad, but investors wouldn’t risk building a rail line unless it lead to valuable land that generated trade the railroads could carry at a profit.

It was a classic chicken and egg dilemma. No economically productive land, no railroad. No railroad, no economically productive land.

The land had to pay because railroads back then were tremendously expensive to build. It took the equivalent of modern billions in investment to create a useful rail line of just a hundred miles and the risk of failure was very high. In the modern world, probably only deep sea drilling rigs cost as much and pose as great a danger of failure. During the Civil War, railroads were still so expensive that most states only had one or two rail lines across the entire state. Sherman burnt Atlanta because a whopping four rail lines lead into the city making it the transportation hub of the entire Confederacy!

Because of the great expense and long payoff times, it was mathematically impossible for anyone to fund a railroad out into the unsettled boonies and make a profit. “Build it and they will come” didn’t pay for railroads. Without land grants, railroad investors would have to build the entire line out into the wilderness, then operate the line at a loss for years until the people who settled the land (only after it had a railroad) started shipping goods back to market. That could take years or decades. Covering the cost of that much capital for that long of a time would have made the necessary price for shipping the land’s eventual output far too high to make the output salable at all.

The land grants solved this problem by giving investors something they could sell at a profit as soon as the railroad finished construction. They could even sell speculators the possibility to buy the land if the government transferred ownership. Everyone knew the land would be valuable if it had a railroad, so once people saw the land could possibly have a railroad, rights to the formerly worthless land became valuable enough to be sold to fund the development of the railroad that made the land valuable.

The railroad land grants worked the same economic alchemy as the Homestead Act, transferring economically worthless land into private hands who turned it into land of great economic value. The property of the American heartland and that of America in general exist because of the positive development feedback loop the railroad land grants jump started.

It is true that there there were a lot of government abuses associated with the development of the railroads. There always are when government and land ownership collide. Most of those abuses occurred east of the Mississippi on long settled land when corrupt officials used eminent domain to steal people’s land and hand it to railroads. Usually, they did so under the same “economic development” excuse that Kelo made the law of the land today. The land grants weren’t a major part of the corruption for the simple reason that the land granted had no value without major private investment. Since no one could make money off land grants without risking a great deal of their own money, corrupt politicians shied away.

Ever since the time of the railroad land grants, people have tried to use them as an example of supposed large scale economic intervention by the state in the 19th century, or to justify big government spending or intervention today. However, the land grants differed from modern interventions and modern spending precisely in that they cost neither the government nor private citizens anything. The government didn’t have to raise taxes or spend any money. The government didn’t regulate or control anything. The government didn’t take from one group of citizens to give to another. All the government did was to promise to sign a piece of paper transferring ownership if, and only if, private investors ponied up the modern equivalent of billions to successfully build a railroad. It was if anything, a devolvement of government power and intrusion.

If that is all the government action it took to increase private investment in “green” technology (or whatever the latest fad will be when you read this) fiscal conservatives and libertarians would be giddy supporters. The conventional story of the railroad land grants gets the story exactly backwards and draws the opposite moral as it should.

That’s why I’m peeved.

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My spouse works for Apple in the finance department and today took over 30 calls from finance contacts, e.g., accounts payable, comptrollers and the like, who called to express their condolences to the company on the passing of Steve Jobs. Note that these weren’t people who expressed condolences in passing during a routine business call, these were people who called specifically to express their condolences.

My spouse mused, “If  Bill Gates died do you think people would call Microsoft just to say how sad they were?”

I gonna go with, no, no they wouldn’t.

It’s strange to see a billionaire entrepreneurial executive lionized and mourned like a heroic soldier or a great artist. Most business people, regardless of the good they do or how much they change the world for the better are hated and resented by the greater public. People seldom believe they’ve earned their wealth or deserve respect for their work. Jobs was different.

Of course, like all American game changers such as Ford and Edison, Jobs relentless marketed himself. He practically made himself a brand. Yet, that doesn’t quite explain the Jobs phenomena. Marketing only gets you so far and in the case of business personalities, is more likely to get you well known and despised than well known and admired.

I think the Jobs mystique arose because millions of individuals could experience the results of Jobs’s work every time they used an Apple product or service.

Psychologists have long noted that people don’t resent all wealthy equally. People resent millionaire bankers but don’t resent actors, athletes or musicians who make as much or more for less work of far less import. The key differences seems to be that the work of bankers is mysterious and largely invisible to the ordinary person while the work of actors and athletes occurs right out in the open where everyone can see it. People can connect specific songs or other works of art with specific artists. People don’t seem to intuitively begrudge great wealth and power as long as they can “see” the work that created the wealth and connect that to an individual.

When people used a Mac, iPhone, iPad or iTunes, they got an intuitive sense of results of Jobs work. In a sense, they could “see” him working just like they could see the work of an athlete or an actor. When people held an iPhone, they thought, “Steve Jobs created this.”

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Noting the passage of the creator of the Doritos chip who recently died at the ripe old age of 97, Glenn Reynolds quips, “I think the preservatives in junk food keep you young.”

Actually, there is reason to suspect that he might be right.

One of the most common preservatives is butylated hydroxyanisole also know has BHA or E320 in food labeling. BHA keeps foods from growing rancid by preventing the oxidation of fats by oxygen free radicals.

Say, what do you call a substances that controls oxygen free radicals? It’s right on the tip of my tongue…

… Oh, right, an anti-oxidant! You know, those things every other organic food product is advertised as having.

Benzoic acid, probably most commonly seen as Sodium Benzoate (E211) is another common bugaboo. In fact, its probably the poster child preservative being one whose name most people will recognize.

Benzoic acid is a naturally occurring substance originally extracted in the 1600s from brushes such as Lindera benzoin, also known as Common Spice Bush, which grows all over North America. Benzoic acid is an anti-fungal and anti-bacterial agent generated by plants in response to microbial attack. Apples produce rather a lot of it. It slows microbe growth in acidic mediums like fruit juices, pickles and your stomach acid. It’s an all natural, low grade, antibiotic that you consume whenever you eat many food plants. Oh, the horror!

It never seems to occur to the hysterical advocates of [sic] natural foods that preservatives preserve by keeping foods as close to their natural, fresh and alive state as possible. In fact, that’s pretty much what “preserve” means in the context of food. It follows that they will do the same thing inside the human body. Butylated hydroxyanisole will absorb dangerous free radicals anywhere in the body and Sodium Benzoate will help you fend off microbes in your stomach. Both functions are clearly more beneficial, and obviously working on a much more significant scale, than any highly hypothetical harm they might do. Plus, they fend off very real harms like food poisoning. The tradeoff is a no-brainer.

Heck, preservatives are even good for the environment because they reduce food waste, which reduces the environmental impact associated with producing more food to replace wasted food.

Balanced against these obvious and unquestionable benefits is the highly dubious claims that preservatives cause any harm whatsoever. Every time I read something about preservatives causing harm, I see nothing but “possibly”, “might”, “conceivably” and other qualifiers that make it clear that no hard evidence exists. Preservatives are consumed by billions of people for decades. That is the biggest epidemiological sample imaginable. If food preservatives actually caused harm, even if only to a small subset of the population, we would have firm, unquestioned evidence by now. But we don’t have the evidence, so they don’t cause the harm.

So, don’t skip the food preservatives, they preserve you as well.

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I remember once when I was eleven I got a new mountain bike. It was really sweet at the time though in retrospect it was not the greatest bike in the world. It had push button gear shift which meant that under any kind of duress the bike would shift into the most inappropriate gear possible. So Im riding my new bike on this dirt trail when I come across these really gnarly jumps and I think to myself I should take my new bike off of these rad hills and totally get some air. Well, the first one I went off of I landed wrong because I didnt know what the hell I was doing, I flipped over my handlebars and dislocated my knee. I also wrecked my new bike and had to hobble home carrying it. Anyway it was a way better time than this movie.

A member’s review on Netflix of the Movie “Gor”. I wish all movie reviews where that evocative.

However,my favorite review of all times is here (second from the top):

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From the Princess Bride:
Vizzini has just cut the rope The Dread Pirate Roberts is climbing up
Vizzini: He didn’t fall? Inconceivable!
Inigo Montoya: You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

Of course, Montoya is correct. Vizzini isn’t actually using the word inconceivable correctly. Inconceivable means “not capable of being imagined” but Vizzini uses the word to mean, “I didn’t plan on that happening when I set up this little political kidnapping.”

Right now, the word “extremist” is much bandied about in Washington these days but clearly it doesn’t mean what people seem to think it means. People claim that this or that group of “extremists”  in Congress have hijacked the federal government, and hyperventilate about it endlessly.

By defining as “extremist” people who are in fact not at all “extreme” people end up in a delusional world of political plans that fail as “inconceivably” as Vizzini’s did, and if they don’t start thinking clearly, their political fortunes could end up sharing Vizzini’s fate.

The word “extreme” means, “furthest from the center or a given point” and that concept is extended metaphorically to people to give us “extremist”, meaning someone who holds political views far from the center of the political spectrum. So what constitutes “far from center” in the context of America’s political system?

By convention, political scientists have divided the political spectrum into five 20% chunks of the population called quintiles. The 3rd quintile in the middle represents the 20% of the population who are centrist/moderates. The 2nd quintile on the left is the 20% of the population who comprise the “Left” and the 4th quintile on the right is the 20% who comprise the “Right”. The 1st quintile on the left is defined as the 20% of the population who are “far-Left” and the 5th quintile on the right is is defined as the 20% of the population who are “far-Right”.

At first it might seem that both the “far-Left” and the “far-Right” could be accurately labeled as “extremist” because 80% of the population is to the right of the “far-Left” while 80% of the population of is to the left of the “far-Right”. However, such a definition would mean that at any given time 40% of the population would be classified as “extremist” one way or the other. Looked at another way, if you had three randomly selected Americans in a room, one of them would be an “extremist”.

Even classifying the 10% most left and right as extremist would still classify 20% or 1 in every 5 Americans as an extremist. Using the 5% most left and tight would mean that 1 in every 10 people would be an “extremist”.

In most usages, leftists define the rightmost 20% of the population as extremist while those on the Right define the leftmost 20% as extremist. Both conveniently ignore their own “extremist” quintile on their side of the Left/Right divide.

When people define some political stance which has nearly 50% support as “extremist” they aren’t using “extremist” to mean what it should mean. What they really mean is something along the lines of, “I extremely dislike that idea”.

When the Democrats began enacting their agenda in 2008 many on the Right cried that they were “extremist” even though the Democrats had won majorities in both the legislative and executive branches. One might argue that the scale of their programs was “extreme” in historical context, but the basic ideas that drove those policies were not “extremist” because at least 1 in every 3 Americans strongly supported them at the time.

Now it is common for Democrats to label the Tea Party as “extremist” even though the Tea Party goals are supported by 4 out of every 10 Americans. There is simply no objective way that the Tea Party can be labeled “extremist”.

What politicos are really trying to say when they label someone as “extremist” is that they represent the points of view of a tiny minority and therefore don’t have any moral authority to strongly influence policy that affects everyone. However, that rhetorical trick undermines itself, because in the American system of government a small minority cannot impose policy on everyone else. If a group or view truly is “extremist” then they are automatically a small minority of no political import. Conversely, if they are politically powerful, they are not on the extremes.

Words mean things. When people use the wrong word to describe some phenomenon, that means that they are thinking about the phenomenon wrong. Using “extremist” incorrectly leads to political defeat because it induces people to ignore facts. If you incorrectly think some political stance is “extremist”, you will translate that in your mind to “has little widespread political support”, which in turn will lead you to massively underestimate the political power behind the idea. You will consistently be defeated by the “extremists” simply because you refuse to label the idea correctly.

In the end, the real problem we face in American politics is not one of various extremists but what we might call “dual centers”. We have large minorities clustering up around right and left centers. Roughly, 40% of Americans will line up on either the left or right of every issue, while the remaining 20% vacillate in between depending on circumstances. If we did have “extremists” we could ignore them but we have competing blocks of “centristd” instead.

We are at loggerheads right now because on very nearly every major issue nearly half the population wants to go left and nearly half of the population wants to go right. We don’t actually have any significant “extremists” of any kind. Obama isn’t an “extremist”, and if he were he wouldn’t be a threat to the Right’s agenda. Likewise, the Tea Party isn’t “extremist”, and if they were the Left wouldn’t be so afraid of them.

We should tell the politicos to lay off the “extremist” accusations. The word doesn’t mean what they think it does.