Last night we held the Pasadena premiere of the movie that Dave, Brian and I have worked on so long.  The event was excellent.  attendance was well over 200 people, the equipment worked, and most of the comments were positive.  We got lots of leads for new screenings and even had some groupies.

One of the best things to come out of the event was meeting Bob Gordon who moderated the very short panel discussion after the screening.  Bob is a former head of the screen actors guild and has a call in show called From Left Field 

I’m pretty sure that our politics disagree but I could tell in the few minutes that we spoke that our objectives are the same:  To make sure that the trend toward liberty and prosperity continues.

Bob did a great job moderating the panel and giving each of us a chance to speak.  Thank him for me by visiting his web site and making a comment.

This is a new book by Mark Krikorian the president of The Center for Immigration Studies.

In my review on Amazon I wrote: “The New Case Against Immigration” is not a “new case”. Its arguments are based on the same fears that stopped immigration in the 1920′s. In the words of Michelle Wucker author of Lockout “they were wrong then and they are wrong now.”

The rest of my review of the book is on Amazon and is mostly unfavorable. Krikorian is a good writer and a clever manipulator of emotional arguments. One example is he doesn’t say “population growth” he says “artificial, government engineered population growth.” Of course I do the same thing with lines like “the right to live where you choose.”

You can read all of my review on Amazon here. You would be doing me a great service by taking a minute to follow the link and rate my review. Thanks.

“The believer is happy; the doubter is wise.”

Hungarian Proverb

I am not making this up.

I took this picture of the largest zucchini to ever grow in our garden. I realized that it had no scale to show how big it was. So I put it on a chair.

It all of a sudden looked like a penguin. I took another picture.

Note that I wrote “that ever grew” not “that I ever grew. I have no idea why they are so big this year. If I did I’d be able to grow them every year.

I put the green arm chairs from the old family room out by the street on Saturday morning.  These were the most comfortable chairs we had ever owned but they were getting a little long in the tooth.

goodbye wonderful green chairs

I made a small sign that said “Free, Gratis” and put it on them and went back in the house to get my camera to take a picture and got distracted. By the time I got back, fifteen minutes later, they were gone.

What a great country. What a relief. For some reason I’d been hanging on to them for eight months trying to sell them or give them to someone I knew. They filled a quarter of the garage and were an even bigger mental burden.

Many of the projects I want to work on begin with “first clean the garage …” and when the chairs were in there I couldn’t get myself started cleaning it. Possessions are a burden that often won’t let go of you. In this case Less is More!

Why did it take me so long? We will never have room for those chairs again. Our new chairs are better in every way but it still took almost a year to let them go. They also appear in lots of pictures so we can remember them. In fact we could probably make a green chair album. But we won’t.

Give something away that you aren’t using anymore. It will make you and the person who gets it feel better.

Ben Wattenberg an author and thinker who has influenced me greatly over the years has a new book. I highly recommend it. He also wrote Fewer that is one of the books that created the philosophical underpinnings of Radical Immigration.

He is one of the people we interviewed for Beyond Borders

Available on Amazon

“Fighting Words” is an enlightening ramble through the thickets of American politics from the 1960′s to the present. Ben Wattenberg is the host of the long running PBS show “Think Tank” and the love of word and ideas that is so apparent on the show runs on steroids through this book. The main theme of the book is how Wattenberg who started as a loyal Democrat became a neo-con. Wattenberg makes no apology for his break with the center left coalition that now runs the Democrat party. He uses examples of the Democrat shift to the left on foreign and domestic policy and explains the rise of the neo-cons as Democrats who stayed with the old values. These old values of the Democrat party included spreading American values and liberty throughout the world and affirmative action without quotas at home. These and others are the values that according to Wattenberg’s narrative the neo-cons have stayed with as the Democrat party has moved left towards a world view that doesn’t recognize American exceptionalism and domestic policies that strive for equality of outcome (quotas).

But the best part of “Fighting Words” is not the main narrative. It is the personal stories, tangents and illuminating anecdotes that fill in the pictures of the political landscape that Wattenberg is painting. He tells a story about how Hubert Humphrey helped to insert “under God” into the pledge of allegiance in 1954. Another story about Adlai Stevenson, who ran as against Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956, quotes him as explaining a newspaperman’s job “is to separate the wheat from the chaff and print the chaff.”

Politics is not linear and neither is this book. It tells why Reagan opposed Carter’s Olympic boycott and offers a theory on why voter turnout is so low in the US. Wattenberg emphasizes his most salient comments with the phrase “sound familiar” but lets us the reader make the analogy to the present.

This is not quite an autobiography and not quite a political how-to manual it is however a delightful look at the American political scene through the eyes of one of our times best political operatives, scholars and writers. “Fighting Words” is an excellent read that puts this years heated political debate into much needed perspective.

Now if you have read this far do me one more favor. Go to Fighting Words on Amazon and scroll down to the reviews. Rate my review (all you have to do is click the stars) and rate the book. By doing this you are, at no cost, boosting my ego and helping Ben Wattenberg sell some books.

Last year I took pictures of the crepe myrtle trees around Pasadena. This year I took a picture in my back yard. There is something wonderful about flowering trees. Here are some pictures of trees at Swarthmore last spring.  I like California’s more…but I’m a homer.

I belong to the Executive Forum at Cal Tech. it meets four times a year and is made up of some very smart people and me. I sometime get to sit next to Vern Orr who was the secretary of the Air Force under Ronald Reagan.

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to ask him about the shake up at the top of the Air Force as a result of sending atomic bomb parts to Taiwan. If you recall two of the top generals were replaced as a result of the mistake. Vern agreed with the firing decision but told us a story about a much bigger air force problem. It is of course getting almost no attention yet. The army and the marines are using unmanned drones for close surveillance and increasingly for targeted attacks. But the air force has been left behind. It hasn’t supported the use of unmanned aircraft even though they are much cheaper to build and operate.

The reason for this, Vern explained is that all of the generals in the air force except for one are pilots. They therefore have an institutional bias against eliminating pilots and have missed one of the biggest changes in aviation. Stay tuned. The air force as we know it could become marginalized in much of their mission.

What is the purpose of government?

Allowing people the freedom to rise as far as they can?

Or giving people the safety of not having to far to fall if they fail?

The two are not mutually exclusive and the task of our leaders is to find the right balance of the two.  If the safety net is to high it discourages enterprise but without a safety net society is a very harsh place.

Wow very philosophical.

Some facts:

• In 1901 the federal government had a budget of $13.5 billion, in todays dollars, by 2005 population had quadrupled and the budget had grown to $2.7 trillion, a 200 times increase.
• In the last 100 years the combined spending of all levels of government has grown from 8% of the total economy to 31%.

Some Perspective:

• The USA is among the lower of the developed nations in the percent of its GNP that is spent by public sector.

“Americans generally believe we are the good guys of history.”

Ben Wattenberg

In his new book: Fighting Words