Free Market Realities

Anyone who's read more than a few posts at this tiny little blog is probably pretty sure I'm a stark raving conservative.  Oh hell, just run down the sidebar.  You don't even have to actually read a post.

So, you might think that I would sympathize with the owner (or former owner?) of a Chinese restaurant in San Francisco, from whence the picture below comes.

Many thanks for this reference to Maggie's Farm.

Well, I have no sympathy whatsoever for James Chu.  He chose to fight the free-market, and thus his customers and he lost.  And that's the way it should be.

When I had my own home repair and remodeling business, I knew never to tell a customer that they were wrong for wanting anything that was a matter of aesthetics or style or taste.  Outside of anything that was absolutely necessary to get the job done correctly, anything in the variable or optional range was purely at the discretion of the customer.

It's been no secret that over about the last fifteen years, people all over the world have been waking up to the fact that MSG (Monosodium Glutamate) is both an excitotoxin and neurotoxin.  You may not be convinced, and James Chu might not be convinced, but there is enough research and evidence available that myself and millions of others know that we don't need the risk.  As for the gluten, we aren't talking about the gluten that naturally occurs in the plain old wheat or other grains that our grandparents thrived on.  Today a lot of the cheap commercial wheat flour, sold in 25 to 50 lb. bags to restaurants and bakeries, is genetically modified (probably Monsanto patented) to contain double or triple the amount of gluten, but not natural gluten. They did that to make bread have that great chewy texture with only about a third of the kneading time and resting time that is required for regular bread production, thus cutting production time and increasing profits.

No, I'm not against profits.  Not at all.  If you can find a way to increase your profits, good on ya, mate.  But the consumer has (or should ALWAYS have) the right to decide if your resulting product is something they want to consume, and they should have all the information to make that decision.  If you want to eat all the foods that are processed and genetically modified and have cellulose fillers from pine trees and laugh at me for not wanting to put that stuff in my body, . . . well,  KNOCK YOURSELF OUT!

 I'd never heard such a thing as a gluten allergy until about ten years ago.  Today, I think about 1 in 10 people I meet has a gluten allergy that became so severe that it drove them to the endocrinologist to find out what was making them so ill.

If James Chu wanted to not only stay in business but even thrive, he should have listened to the customers and provided what they wanted. 

I'm living in a rural area of Kentucky right now.  In this whole city where I am, there is one little health food store.  It's in a great location in the biggest shopping district.  The population here is about 20,000 in the city limits, within a 6 mile radius of the shopping district, about 35,000 people.  This little health food store is barely hanging on.  Why?  Because this is rural Kentucky.  People still smoke in some of the little Mom & Pop establishments.  There's an empty business space on main street that used to be a gym.  There's another one on an adjacent street that used to be a yoga place.
There is not a synagogue within 100 miles of here.

How long would I survive as a businessman if I opened up a Kosher Deli here?  These people have never heard of knishes or falafel or gefilte fish, let alone would they try it.  How stupid would I be to blame the people who live here for not wanting to buy stuff they don't want to eat?  I would be outraged if anyone blamed me for the local Waffle House closing down because I don't want to eat at a place that cooks pork and eggs and potatoes all on the same grill surface.

James Chu is like a guy who is angry because he decided to sell computers that use 3.5" floppies and only have 586 mb of RAM and he's pissed off because nobody is buying. I once lived in an area of Atlanta where a small Mom & Pop Pizza place opened up.  They quickly discovered that the immediate neighborhoods were full of both Jewish and Muslim families.  They made their establishment completely kosher, or halal if you will.  They made sure they had no pork or shellfish products and they advertised it on their menus, takeout and delivery.  The Domino's and Papa John's places within 10 blocks couldn't match the Mom & Pop's place combined.  That's the beauty of competition.

Notice what the wording of the sign reveals:  "We're closed because of you customers."   He revealed that he didn't think of them as his customers.  That's getting off on the wrong foot right from the get-go.  James Chu failed the reality test of natural selection in free market economics.  Phony conservatives, or what some might call "Neocons," might support James Chu, but I'm a real conservative.  I believe in free choice for everyone.  For James Chu and people who might have wanted to be his customers.

That also means that no money taken from taxpayers should ever be used to subsidize any business.  None, whatsoever.  Not dairies. Not soybean farmers. Not peanut farmers.  Not oil companies. Not chemical companies. Nobody. Ever.  There should be no FDA or USDA or any of these agencies who rubber stamp toxic crap so the gullible public can say, "It must be safe, the FDA approved it."
Check out the stories on Youtube just on aspartame, (NutraSweet).

Freedom means taking responsibility for your own life and health.  Do your homework. Otherwise don't bitch when you end up sick, with Alziemers, or multiple sclerosis, or Parkinson's or Fibro-myalgia or a dozen other conditions that were never heard of a 100 years ago.  Sorry, went a little off topic.  I'll stop here.

Shalom and Shanah Tovah

What Part Of BROKE Don't You Understand?

You could go look at this site.

Or you can watch this video:



If you need more of a graphic representation, I borrowed the following images from here.

Here is what $10,000 looks like; a stack of one hundred $100 bills.

Next, you can see what a million dollars looks like.

To keep that in perspective, if you could spend a thousand dollars a day, it would take you about two years and nine months to spend it.  If your household budget is $3,000 per month, it would take you about 28 years to spend it.

Next graphic shows what 100 million dollars looks like.  Now you need a forklift.

Now, a Billion dollars is 1000 times one million:  $1,000,000,000  and the graphic below lets you see what it looks like.

I don't know what you could think to spend it on, but you could spend $1,000,000 a day and it would take you 2 years and nine months to work your way through this amount.

So what does $1 TRILLION look like?  $1,000,000,000,000 is one million times one million.

Take out just 190 of those double stacked pallets.  Thats not quite two rows. That represents the 38 billion that Congress compromised on cutting from the budget.  That means we will continue to go into staggering debt.  So here's a graphic that might help you wrap your brain around the problem.

This is what we get for believing that it's okay for government to take from the productive people of society and give it to the non-productive.

If you haven't started making plans for what you are going to do when this house of cards comes tumbling down, then you are way, WAY behind.

Integrity In Science

More than fifteen years ago, I was calling BS on the idea that CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons) could possibly be hurting, let alone destroying the ozone layer.  Most people who bought into that nonsense wouldn't know a triple oxygen molecule from dihydrogen monoxide.  By the way, there are tremendous amounts of dihydrogen monoxide in pretty much all of the tap water around the world.  This chemical is so deadly that if you inhale enough of it, you could die.

Today, I had the fortune of running into the post below.  All the necessary links are contained within.  I have to say that I am just a bit proud to have been on the cutting edge of reality and truth on this subject years ago.

Hal Lewis: My Resignation From The American Physical Society – an important moment in science history

Posted on October 8, 2010 by Anthony Watts

Hal Lewis

We’ve previously covered the APS here, when I wrote:

While Copenhagen and its excesses rage, a quiet revolution is starting.

Indeed, not so quiet now. It looks like it is getting ugly inside with the public airing of the resignation of a very prominent member who writes:

I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
…
In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.- Hal Lewis

Below is his resignation letter made public today, via the GWPF.
This is an important moment in science history. I would describe it as a letter on the scale of Martin Luther, nailing his 95 theses to the Wittenburg church door. It is worthy of repeating this letter in entirety on every blog that discusses science.
What I would really like to see though, is this public resignation letter given the same editorial space as Michael Mann in today’s Washington Post.
Readers, we can do this. Here’s the place at WaPo to ask for it.  For anyone writing to the WaPo, the  national@washpost.com, is the national news editorial desk. Spread the word on other blogs. Let’s see if they have enough integrity to provide a counterpoint. – Anthony
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Sent: Friday, 08 October 2010 17:19 Hal Lewis
From: Hal Lewis, University of California, Santa Barbara
To: Curtis G. Callan, Jr., Princeton University, President of the American Physical Society
6 October 2010
Dear Curt:
When I first joined the American Physical Society sixty-seven years ago it was much smaller, much gentler, and as yet uncorrupted by the money flood (a threat against which Dwight Eisenhower warned a half-century ago).
Indeed, the choice of physics as a profession was then a guarantor of a life of poverty and abstinence—it was World War II that changed all that. The prospect of worldly gain drove few physicists. As recently as thirty-five years ago, when I chaired the first APS study of a contentious social/scientific issue, The Reactor Safety Study, though there were zealots aplenty on the outside there was no hint of inordinate pressure on us as physicists. We were therefore able to produce what I believe was and is an honest appraisal of the situation at that time. We were further enabled by the presence of an oversight committee consisting of Pief Panofsky, Vicki Weisskopf, and Hans Bethe, all towering physicists beyond reproach. I was proud of what we did in a charged atmosphere. In the end the oversight committee, in its report to the APS President, noted the complete independence in which we did the job, and predicted that the report would be attacked from both sides. What greater tribute could there be?
How different it is now. The giants no longer walk the earth, and the money flood has become the raison d’être of much physics research, the vital sustenance of much more, and it provides the support for untold numbers of professional jobs. For reasons that will soon become clear my former pride at being an APS Fellow all these years has been turned into shame, and I am forced, with no pleasure at all, to offer you my resignation from the Society.
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organizes the facts very well.) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion. I would almost make that revulsion a definition of the word scientist.
So what has the APS, as an organization, done in the face of this challenge? It has accepted the corruption as the norm, and gone along with it. For example:
1. About a year ago a few of us sent an e-mail on the subject to a fraction of the membership. APS ignored the issues, but the then President immediately launched a hostile investigation of where we got the e-mail addresses. In its better days, APS used to encourage discussion of important issues, and indeed the Constitution cites that as its principal purpose. No more. Everything that has been done in the last year has been designed to silence debate
2. The appallingly tendentious APS statement on Climate Change was apparently written in a hurry by a few people over lunch, and is certainly not representative of the talents of APS members as I have long known them. So a few of us petitioned the Council to reconsider it. One of the outstanding marks of (in)distinction in the Statement was the poison word incontrovertible, which describes few items in physics, certainly not this one. In response APS appointed a secret committee that never met, never troubled to speak to any skeptics, yet endorsed the Statement in its entirety. (They did admit that the tone was a bit strong, but amazingly kept the poison word incontrovertible to describe the evidence, a position supported by no one.) In the end, the Council kept the original statement, word for word, but approved a far longer “explanatory” screed, admitting that there were uncertainties, but brushing them aside to give blanket approval to the original. The original Statement, which still stands as the APS position, also contains what I consider pompous and asinine advice to all world governments, as if the APS were master of the universe. It is not, and I am embarrassed that our leaders seem to think it is. This is not fun and games, these are serious matters involving vast fractions of our national substance, and the reputation of the Society as a scientific society is at stake.
3. In the interim the ClimateGate scandal broke into the news, and the machinations of the principal alarmists were revealed to the world. It was a fraud on a scale I have never seen, and I lack the words to describe its enormity. Effect on the APS position: none. None at all. This is not science; other forces are at work.
4. So a few of us tried to bring science into the act (that is, after all, the alleged and historic purpose of APS), and collected the necessary 200+ signatures to bring to the Council a proposal for a Topical Group on Climate Science, thinking that open discussion of the scientific issues, in the best tradition of physics, would be beneficial to all, and also a contribution to the nation. I might note that it was not easy to collect the signatures, since you denied us the use of the APS membership list. We conformed in every way with the requirements of the APS Constitution, and described in great detail what we had in mind—simply to bring the subject into the open.
5. To our amazement, Constitution be damned, you declined to accept our petition, but instead used your own control of the mailing list to run a poll on the members’ interest in a TG on Climate and the Environment. You did ask the members if they would sign a petition to form a TG on your yet-to-be-defined subject, but provided no petition, and got lots of affirmative responses. (If you had asked about sex you would have gotten more expressions of interest.) There was of course no such petition or proposal, and you have now dropped the Environment part, so the whole matter is moot. (Any lawyer will tell you that you cannot collect signatures on a vague petition, and then fill in whatever you like.) The entire purpose of this exercise was to avoid your constitutional responsibility to take our petition to the Council.
6. As of now you have formed still another secret and stacked committee to organize your own TG, simply ignoring our lawful petition.
APS management has gamed the problem from the beginning, to suppress serious conversation about the merits of the climate change claims. Do you wonder that I have lost confidence in the organization?
I do feel the need to add one note, and this is conjecture, since it is always risky to discuss other people’s motives. This scheming at APS HQ is so bizarre that there cannot be a simple explanation for it. Some have held that the physicists of today are not as smart as they used to be, but I don’t think that is an issue. I think it is the money, exactly what Eisenhower warned about a half-century ago. There are indeed trillions of dollars involved, to say nothing of the fame and glory (and frequent trips to exotic islands) that go with being a member of the club. Your own Physics Department (of which you are chairman) would lose millions a year if the global warming bubble burst. When Penn State absolved Mike Mann of wrongdoing, and the University of East Anglia did the same for Phil Jones, they cannot have been unaware of the financial penalty for doing otherwise. As the old saying goes, you don’t have to be a weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing. Since I am no philosopher, I’m not going to explore at just which point enlightened self-interest crosses the line into corruption, but a careful reading of the ClimateGate releases makes it clear that this is not an academic question.
I want no part of it, so please accept my resignation. APS no longer represents me, but I hope we are still friends.
Hal
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Harold Lewis is Emeritus Professor of Physics, University of California, Santa Barbara, former Chairman; Former member Defense Science Board, chmn of Technology panel; Chairman DSB study on Nuclear Winter; Former member Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards; Former member, President’s Nuclear Safety Oversight Committee; Chairman APS study on Nuclear Reactor Safety Chairman Risk Assessment Review Group; Co-founder and former Chairman of JASON; Former member USAF Scientific Advisory Board; Served in US Navy in WW II; books: Technological Risk (about, surprise, technological risk) and Why Flip a Coin (about decision making)