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Two global items to comment on. (1) China made one of the first successful transfers of power in the past year without force. This is an important historic signal that secular non-democratic governments can survive transitions without violence. (2) Koizumi’s re-election by his own LDP signals that the Japanese public is no longer fanatically peacenik.

The latest Gallop poll results show four things: (1) the recall election is being driven by the body politic. (2) Two-thirds of the voters know that it is being driven by the body politic and know that the Republicans didn’t create the recall initiative, (3) the greatest force for the recall is in the Central Valley and (4) the numbers I gave in my blog of July 26th for the defeat of Davis and the margin of victory for Arnold are correct.

Most importantly, I am now predicting that the TV debate with Arnold was the most watched political debate in TV history. The numbers are so high that it will register on the level of national prime time programming listed in next Monday’s NYTimes.

The turnout for the election will eclipse any election turnout in the past forty years.

Bold predictions but I am known to be bold and willing to be wrong.

I am always looking for mechanisms that evince the body politic at work.

For the record, drivers have a group behavior that suggests a common understanding.

On the Golden Gate Bridge there are signs that say: “Double fine for exceeding 45 mph”. This worked. Drivers on the GG bridge go 45 mph.

About six months after this sign was put up on the Golden Gate, the Bay Bridge put up the same sign with the limit at 50 mph.

Drivers did not respond to the new threat of punishment on the Bay Bridge.

My conclusion. Drivers could see that the two-way traffic on the Golden Gate posed a safety hazard and that the 45 mph limit was a reasonable solution to head-on crashes.

The Bay Bridge is one-way on each level. There is no potential for head-on crashes and drivers see no safety reason for obeying the law or responding to the feeble threat.

The body politic is always pretty smart.

Again for the record, I’ve never seen anyone mention that running a farm is not a business.

Over the past thirty years I have been a consultant to over 1,000 businesses, probably over 1,500. Giant corporations, one person operations, and many in between.

Twice I have been begged to consult with farmers. I did. That is where I realized that farming was not a business.

Why? Business is about minimizing risk. Please, ignore the stupid bullshit that entrepreneurs are bold gamblers on new visions. Every competent businessperson who ever lived did everything possible to reduce the risk of failure to as close to zero as possible. That is just reality. I have no interest in some counter-example. I just told you, I’ve consulted over a thousand businesses; I know from the deepest empirical place.

Farmers total lives are based on unbearable, unfathomable risk. The weather can destroy a crop, several crops and crops for several years in a row. So can insects and disease. That is the kind of risk that no business mind can live with.

Farming is not business. It is mystical, religious or voodoo. You pick.

Time for the National Social Science Observatory.

The proposal was made more than fifty years ago that we have such an observatory. The plan was to have a sample of locations in the U.S. where an observer would make regular and periodic records of everything on their block. Like how many Christmas decorations were on the outside of the houses. Like how many cars parked in front of their garage the previous night. Like, the number of window boxes planted with floors.

Over time, social scientists would have a data base of actual behavior on a reasonable scale to begin understanding social phenomenon.

The time has come.

By my rough calculation, the Internet has made the cost of such an observatory feasible. We could have 1,000 randomly selected addresses, chosen to be observers. We would pay each observer $20 every two weeks to fill in a questionnaire online. The questionnaire would have about 40 questions, 36 that don’t change unless the data changes (like the number of cars parked in front of their garage). The administrative cost would be about $.5 million a year for a total cost of $1 million.

Within two years, the observatory would be paying for itself by selling parts of the data to commercial market research firms.

In the past few years more and more Lefties have concluded that Lefty Fundamentalism is bereft of any coherent ideas. As a consequence, the Lefties with original minds are jumping ship and leaving the other lefties behind. The following is my short current list. I know there are a few more but I can’t come up with their names at the moment.

Send suggestions. The definition of a convert is: a full fledged public Lefty who has openly renounced his past and is espousing a new position.

Excuse me for my ignorance. It turns out that I know little or nothing about the human lymphatic system.

My readers know that I am interested in the body-politic.

I asked myself the question: “Does the body-politic read newspapers or watch television?” In response I came up with the metaphor: the body-politic is like the lymph system, a major byway of communication that is largely invisible.

I then concluded that the body-politic doesn’t follow the news directly, but it has readers and watchers of news and the readers and watchers (like the lymph nodes that create anti-bodies) pass along information only when it is reliable. For example, all the people who personally know Gray Davis have passed along horrid descriptions of Davis to the rest of the body-politic.

The exception to the body-politic not following the news is going to be tonight — the California Recall debate on TV. I expect the body-politic to watch the debate. Maybe 3-5 million Californians will watch, just to make sure that the next governor, Arnold, is an OK guy. Arnold takes office on October 8th, one day after the election.

Imagine the chaos at the Governor’s Mansion and the Governor’s Office with only one day to move out before Arnold moves in. Of course Arnold will be polite, he doesn’t need to be in a hurry.

Back to my ignorance. After coming up with the metaphor of the body-politic having a communication system like the human lymph system, I had to read the Encyclopedia Britannica section on the lymph system.

The lymph system weighs about as much as the liver; it is distributed all over the body. Every day half the proteins in the bloodstream leak out and the lymph system returns them to the blood. Lymph is colorless, and almost the same composition as plasma. The exception to colorlessness is that lymph is white when it is transporting cholesterol, which is the main way fat moves about the body. The lymph nodes are the main locus of bacterial combat, where the anti-body system is initiated. Lymphocytes are in every organ, are self generating and can be found concentrated in bone marrow and the thymus.

Before I looked it up I knew that the lymph system brings garlic to the skin surface, so you can smell it on someone else and does the same with sperm odor, transporting it from the vagina. to the skin surface.

The Britannica entry on the lymph system has more “recently discovered” and “is currently unknown” phrases than any other entry I’ve seen in the Britannica. The lymph system was discovered nearly four hundred years ago. It is still much of a mystery, but better understood than the body-politic. So far, we haven’t even discovered the body-politic, which remains an imaginary entity.

I have already written my blog to post the night before the election. It tells blog readers what the body politic is going to do on election day.

My friend Alex, who’s business blog is listed on the left, suggests that the current debate in the USA is not left-right but fits the more traditional American dichotomy — Hamilton-Jefferson.(Jefferson is on the left)

Hamilton favored a strong central government with policies directed toward supporting commerce and a commercial America. He created a national bank, believed deeply in the rule of law and strongly opposed embargoes of foreign goods. Hamilton, was a New Yorker, was a bastard son and married into a wealthy family. Hamilton was a key thinker in designing our Constitution, our divided government, and giving the judiciary strong powers. Hamilton disliked France.

Jefferson was an agrarian philosophe. He believed that a democracy based on landowning farmers was the closest political idea to perfection. Farmers were Jefferson’s idea of moral, upright clear-headed philosopher-kings. Jefferson, like most agrarian American’s, hated corrupt sin-filled cities like New York, and demanded that the US capitol be in the rural South. He got his wish with the District of Columbia.
Jefferson wanted the States to dominate all government matters except foreign affairs. He loved France.

In future blogs I will come back to the Hamilton-Jefferson dichotomy.

For now it is sufficient to note that AG Ashcroft in his policy of standardizing the conditions for capital punishment and plea bargains is Hamiltonian.

AG Ashcroft is also aware that US Supreme Court decisions are increasingly overturning cases where different standards of justice are used in different states for Federal matters.

The California Republican convention closed last Sunday night without endorsing either Republican candidate.

I should have seen apologies from all the media in the country and the tens of thousands of Democrats and Lefty Fundamentalists who have been saying the Recall ‘is a Republican conspiracy to steal the election from a duly elected governor’.

How can a party that runs a ‘conspiracy’ fail to endorse a candidate for the soon to be vacant office?

The issues of urban ecology are not easy to see. I saw one issue at the Palace of Fine Arts because I used to do my morning run nearby. I noticed beautiful white goslings one morning. I’d never seen gosslings in the previous twenty years. I went to investigate and found that the goslings and their mother were living in a fenced off construction area that had been up for about three months.

What happened? Geese are always flying over this area, which was once a breeding ground. When they saw the isolated area, safe from predators, inside a cyclone fence, they landed and delivered their offspring.

Who are the urban predators off goslings: cats and dogs. Cats and dogs keep us from having much more beautiful wildlife in the city.