Stocks Rise!!!

Sooooo....the "joy" for some is that the world Central Bank made a move, and in so doing people were relieved in the world of finance, and we saw joy in the stocks around the world. BUT before we go merrily
skipping along our way, and think all the wonderful good times will soon be back, we have to realize as one of Canada's reporters did, see what's behind the world Central bank stepping in. It was as this reporter said to the Canadian people, because Europe is in such a MESS, and the banks of Europe stopped lending AMONG THEMSELVES ...... that if something was not done by the Central Bank to revive a little, give a little oxygen to a drowning man, Europe would go under, and the world, especially the West, would go under the water also, and a large, even more serious depression would result.

So as others have pointed out, this is only a life saving bit of oxygen given until the Western leaders continue to try and sort out the big whole in the life-jacket of the West, and more specifically the United Europe Power.

The "big guys" of the important nations on this very serious matter, meet again on Dec. 9th I think they said. Then they hope they will come out of the meeting with more positive means of keeping the head above water. Other meetings have proved unproductive, and just about useless.

The British have put on a mass "strike" such as not been seen for decades, to complain about "austerity" plans by the Government, like Greece, Italy, and other nations of Europe MUST DO to bring them out of disappearing below the dark blue and cold sea of debts and mis-managable money from decades previous. This smash in 2008 was not something kinda sudden (yet it was sudden when it happened) but it was simply the burst of the balloon that had been blown up for decades previous. It had been blowing up under cover by the Fall/WAll STREET and BANKERS of the USA and all the other nations of the West who were in bed with them; all taking a jolly good ride, expenses paid (all the money many of them made) down the river on a Sunday after pleasure ride with a catered feast meal at the end.

There is MUCH yet to have to happen if the West is to pay back it's massive debts, get economies going again, get people back to work, stop spending in crazy ways, stop the ever widening gap between the rich and the poor,  and stop Government wasteful ways with tax-payer money. There needs to be an overall mending and re-structuring of Governments and putting the priories in correct order. And people need to manage their finances better; they need to plan well ahead of time, stop looking for Governments to hand it out to them; stop demanding all the "high perks" many were getting from far too many Western countries.

Will the coming year of 2012 produce the CHANGES needed in Government and people of the West?.... as they say time will tell; but the problems are so massive, it will take some introspective look by Governments and by peoples, to bring the dead man dying back to life.
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DETROIT - down the drain!!!

DETROIT DESTRUCTION

by Mark Steyn

　

SEE THE U.S.A. IN YOUR CHEVROLET

You don't have to engage in H. G. Wells speculations about the near future. Put a time-traveler from 1950 in Detroit sixty years later. He, too, would doubt he'd landed in the same country. For decades, Americans watched the decline of a great city and told themselves it was an outlier. It didn't used to be: "When General Motors sneezes, America catches a cold." When Detroit gets the ebola virus, America is surely in line to catch something-unless you're entirely convinced that its contagion can be quarantined. Half-a-century ago, the city was the powerhouse of the world. Now it's a wasteland. It's a motor city with no motor, a byword for industrial decline and civic collapse that Big Government liberals seem determined to make their template. To residents of the mid-twentieth century it would have seemed incredible that one day the president of the United States would fire the CEO of General Motors and personally call the mayor of Detroit to assure him he had no plans to move the company's head office out of the city. By the time it actually happened, it provoked barely a murmur.

In 2009, General Motors had a market valuation about a third of Bed, Bath & Beyond, and no one says your Swash 700 Elongated Biscuit Toilet Seat Bidet is too big to fail. For purposes of comparison, GM's market capitalization was then about $2.4 billion versus Toyota's $100 billion and change (the change being bigger than the whole of GM). General Motors, like the other two geezers of the Old Three, is a sprawling retirement home with a small money-losing auto subsidiary. The United Auto Workers is the AARP in an Edsel: it has three times as many retirees and widows as "workers" (I use the term loosely). GM has 96,000 employees but provides health benefits to a million people. How do you make that math add up? Not by selling cars: Honda and Nissan were making a pretax operating profit per vehicle of around $1,600; Ford, Chrysler, and GM a loss of $500 to $1,500. That's to say, they lose money on every vehicle they sell. Like Henry Ford said, you can get it in any color as long as it's red.

President Obama, in that rhetorical tic that quickly became a bore, likes to position himself as a man who won't duck the tough decisions. So, faced with a U.S. automobile industry that so overcompensates its workers it can't make a car for a price anybody's willing to pay for it, the president handed over control to the very unions whose demands are principally responsible for that irreconcilable arithmetic. Presented with a similar situation thirty years earlier, Mrs. Thatcher took on the unions and, eventually, destroyed their power. That was a tough decision. Telling your political allies they can now go on overpaying themselves in perpetuity is a piece of cake.

When the going gets tough, the tough get bailed out. Your car business operates on a failed business model? Don't worry, the taxpayers will prop that failed business model up forever. You went bananas on your credit card and can't pay it back? Order another round and we'll pass a law to make it the bank's fault. Your once Golden State has decayed into such a corrupt racket of government cronyism that the remaining revenue generators are fleeing your borders faster than you can raise taxes on them? Relax, we're lining up a federal bailout for you, too. Your unreadable newspaper woke up from its 96-page Obama Full Color Inaugural Souvenir bender to discover that its advertising revenue had collapsed with the real-estate market and GM dealerships? Hey, lighten up, John Kerry's already been pleading your case in the Senate. Is it really so hard to picture the President calling the Mayor to assure him he has no plans to move the New York Times out of New York?

America is now a land that rewards failure - at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you'll get the Radio City Christmas Spectacular of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you also abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge sucking statist swamp. From Motown to no town, from the Golden State to Golden Statists. What happens when the policies that brought ruin to Detroit and decay to California are applied to the nation at large?

Did it to themselves

Nobody did this to Detroit. The city and its business and civic leaders did this to themselves. In once functioning parts of Africa, civil war, a resurgent Islam, and other forces have done a grand job of reversing all the progress of the twentieth century. But the deterioration of Sierra Leone or Somalia is as nothing compared to the heights from which Detroit has slid. Entire blocks are deserted, and the city is proposing to turn commerci land back into pasture-on the unlikely proposition that attracting Michiganders to graze Holsteins between crack houses will lead to urban renewal. For a coffee-table book of ineffable sadness, two French photojournalists, Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre, wandered through the rubble of lost grandeur: the ruined auditorium of the United Artists Theater, built in 1928 in the Spanish-Gothic style, abandoned in the Seventies. The shattered ballroom, with upturned grand piano, of the Lee Plaza Hotel, an art deco landmark from 1929, derelict since the Nineties. The Woodward Avenue Presbyterian Church, pews splintered, dust-caked Bibles and hymnals scattered across the floors. Messieurs Marchand's and Meffre's predecessors would have seen such scenes in bombed-out European cities circa 1945. But this was America, and no bombs fell. And the physical decay is as nothing to the deterioration of human capital: 44 percent of adults in the city have a reading comprehension below Grade Six level. Or to put it another way: nearly half the grown-ups in Detroit could not graduate from elementary school. And, believe me, what Sixth Grade requires of American 12-year-olds is no great shakes.

According to Time magazine: "The estimated functional illiteracy rate in the city limits hovers near 50 percent."

With that pool of potential employees, why would anybody start a business in Detroit? What could you hire people to do?

Detroit did this to itself

Well, you say, maybe things'll brighten up with the next generation? Don't hold your breath. In March 2010, the president of the School Board, Otis Mathis, sent out the following email:

"If you saw Sunday's Free Press that shown Robert Bobb the emergency financial manager for Detroit Public Schools, move Mark Twain to Boynton which have three times the number seats then students and was one of the reason's he gave for closing school to many empty seats."

Here's another one from President Mathis:

"Do DPS control the Foundation or outside group? If an outside group control the foundation, then what is DPS Board row with selection of is director? Our we mixing DPS and None DPS row's, and who is the watch dog?"

A while back, I heard the English writer Anthony Daniels read aloud some correspondence from Jack the Ripper's first victim, a 43-year-old domestic servant called Mary Anne Nichols. In 1888, the year of her murder, she wrote to her father:

"I just write to say you will be glad to know that I am settled in my new place, and going on all right up to now.... It is a grand place inside, with trees and garden back and front. All has been newly done up. They are teetotalers, and religious, so I ought to get on...."

Mary Anne Nichols was born in 1845 - a quarter-century before the Education Act brought universal elementary schooling to all children in England and Wales. The correspondence of an uneducated domestic servant in and out of workhouses and prostitution is nevertheless written with better expression, better spelling, better punctuation and, indeed, more human feeling than the president of the School Board in a major American city.

Otis Mathis is not only a Detroit high school graduate but a college graduate. His degree from Wayne State was held up for over a decade because of his repeated failure to pass the English proficiency test. Eventually, he did things the all-American way: he sued the college. So Wayne State dropped the English proficiency, and Otis Mathis got his degree. By then, he'd already been elected to the School Board.

By the way, he's not the only beneficiary of America's joke academic standards. In the Eighties, Chowan College in Murfreesboro, North Carolina, also dropped its English proficiency requirements in hopes of attract ing wealthy foreigners. It worked. As Michelle Malkin pointed out, a chap called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed enrolled, fell in with a group of hardcore Muslims, transferred to North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University to study mechanical engineering, and used the knowledge he acquired to pull off the first World Trade Center attack, the African embassy bombings, the assault on the USS Cole, 9/11, and the beheading of Daniel Pearl. A little larnin' is a dangerous thing - particularly for Americans on the receiving end.

Whether or not Khalid Sheikh Mohammed sees himself as a role model for American students, Otis Mathis certainly does. "Instead of telling them that they can't write and won't be anything, I show that that cannot stop you," Mr. Mathis told the Detroit News. "If Detroit Public Schools can allow kids to dream, with whatever weakness they have, that's something...."

The only one dreaming here is the president of the School Board. Being illiterate "cannot stop you" in Detroit, but try it in Bombay or Bangalore or almost any city in China - and then ask yourself to whom the future belongs. On present projections, at some point around the year 2025 American teachers will be earning two million per annum, and American Twelfth Graders will be unable to count their toes.

Detroit did this to itself

Its profligate past destroyed the present, and its present will ensure there is no future, because lavishly funded civic institutions are incapable of providing the educational standards of a one-room schoolhouse of 200 years ago. This is an American city at the dawn of the twenty-first century, and one in two of its citizens are illiterate. That's about the same rate as the Ivory Coast, and the Central African Republic, which for much of the Seventies and Eighties was ruled by a cannibal emperor. Whereas in the Seventies and Eighties Detroit was ruled by a Democrat mayor, a bureaucracy-for-life, and an ever more featherbedded union army, all of whom cannibalized the city. Say what you like about Emperor Bokassa but, dollar for dollar, his reign was a bargain compared to Mayor Coleman Young's. Hizzoner called himself the MFIC--the Muthafucker In Chargeand, by the time it was over, Detroit was certainly fucked, and the only mothers still around were on welfare.

Return to those auto statistics: GM has one worker for every ten retirees and dependents. That math is Detroit's math, too. The city's population has fallen by over 50 percent since 1950. So who's left? Thirty percent of the population are government workers. According to the Detroit News, another 29 percent are out of work, "using the broadest definition of unemployment. According to Dave Bing, Mayor Young's successor as MFIC, the real unemployment number is 'closer to 50 percent.'"

An unemployable, dysfunctional citizenry, a rapacious government, crimeridden streets, and an education system that dignifies moronization as a selfesteem program: in Detroit, everything other than government is dead.

Decay sets in imperceptibly, but it accelerates, and, by the time you notice it, it's hard to reverse. Somewhere like Detroit isn't Somalia, not yet. But like other parts of the country it is en route to Latin America - a society with a wealthy corrupt elite that controls the levers of power, and beneath it a great swamp of poverty, whose inhabitants divide into two species - predators and prey. The Motor City is the Murder City, with one of the highest homicide rates on the planet - and 70 percent of them go unsolved.

It will not seem quite such an outlier in the future.

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Yep Detroit is in a mess! The USA is in a mess. Europe is in a mess. Obama today met with Europe guys to encourage, encourage, and encourage them to get their financial mess sorted out, for he knows and the world knows if Europe goes further under, so does the USA, and this time around so does Canada, that up to now has escaped much of the depression of the USA and Europe. But the whole pack of those nations in Europe, except Germany, and the USA pack of Fall (Wall) Street guys and Banker brokers ( broke - for the population but not themselves) have brought this on themselves, by allowing all the Bankers and Fall Street people to get into bed with each other. Now the bed is so dirty with body-sweat, the bed sheets may not hold together when put under the pressure of the washing machine. Yet all those bed-bug people (except for just a few) are still in the money, and have their fancy cars and houses and boats and planes, and sugar-canes. Go figure....not hard to figure.....Humpty-dumpty sat on a wall, Humpty-dumpty thought he had it all.  Humpty-dumpty strove and strived, to make all he could before the beeze arrived. But the beeze finally came and stung the stinger in the head. Humpty-dumpty had a great fall, landing on his head, he ended up in bed. Yet the boss of the wall told the people they would have to take the fall, and put Humpty-dumpty back together again. So the people paid the dues, out of work, food and shoes, they put Humpty-dumpty on the wall, and he sat there in all his glory, like there was no fall.

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Steve Jobs #6

Time again to see the beginning years of the work life of Steve Jobs.

STEVE JOBS #6

by Walter Isaacson

GOING PUBLIC

A Man of Wealth and Fame

　

When Mike Markkula joined jobs and Wozniak to turn their fledgling partnership into the Apple Computer Co. in January 1977, they valued it at $5,309. Less than four years later they decided it was time to take it public. It would become the most oversubscribed initial public offering since that of Ford Motors in 1956. By the end of December 1980, Apple would be valued at $1.79 billion. Yes, billion. In the process it would make three hundred people millionaires.

Daniel Kottke was not one of them. He had been Jobs's soul mate in college, in India, at the All One Farm, and in the rental house they shared during the Chrisann Brennan crisis. He joined Apple when it was headquartered in Jobs's garage, and he still worked there as an hourly employee. But he was not at a high enough level to be cut in on the stock options that were awarded before the IPO. "I totally trusted Steve, and I assumed he would take care of me like I'd taken care of him, so I didn't push," said Kottke. The official reason he wasn't given stock options was that he was an hourly technician, not a salaried engineer, which was the cutoff level for options. Even so, he could have justifiably been given "founder's stock," but Jobs decided not to. "Steve is the opposite of loyal," according to Andy Hertzfeld, an early Apple engineer who has nevertheless remained friends with him. "He's antiloyal. He has to abandon the people he is close to."

Kottke decided to press his case with Jobs by hovering outside his office and catching him to make a plea. But at each encounter, Jobs brushed him off. "What was really so difficult for me is that Steve never told me I wasn't eligible," recalled Kottke. "He owed me that as a friend. When I would ask him about stock, he would tell me I had to talk to my manager." Finally, almost six months after the IPO, Kottke worked up the courage to march into Jobs's office and try to hash out the issue. But when he got in to see him, Jobs was so cold that Kottke froze. "I just got choked up and began to cry and just couldn't talk to him," Kottke recalled. "Our friendship was all gone. It was so sad."

Rod Holt, the engineer who had built the power supply, was getting a lot of options, and he tried to turn Jobs around. "We have to do something for your buddy Daniel," he said, and he suggested they each give him some of their own options. "Whatever you give him, I will match it," said Holt. Replied Jobs, "Okay. I will give him zero." Wozniak, not surprisingly, had the opposite attitude. Before the shares went public, he decided to sell, at a very low price, two thousand of his options to forty different midlevel employees. Most of his beneficiaries made enough to buy a home. Wozniak bought a dream home for himself and his new wife, but she soon divorced him and kept the house. He also later gave shares outright to employees he felt had been shortchanged, including Kottke, Fernandez, Wigginton, and Espinosa. Everyone loved Wozniak, all the more so after his generosity, but many also agreed with Jobs that he was "awfully naive and childlike." A few months later a United Way poster showing a destitute man went up on a company bulletin board. Someone scrawled on it "Woz in 1990."

Jobs was not naive. He had made sure his deal with Chrisann Brennan was signed before the IPO occurred.

Jobs was the public face of the IPO, and he helped choose the two investment banks handling it: the traditional Wall Street firm Morgan Stanley and the untraditional boutique firm Hambrecht & Quist in San Francisco. "Steve was very irreverent toward the guys from Morgan Stanley, which was a pretty uptight firm in those days," recalled Bill Hambrecht. Morgan Stanley planned to price the offering at $18, even though it was obvious the shares would quickly shoot up. "Tell me what happens to this stock that we priced at eighteen?" Jobs asked the bankers. "Don't you sell it to your good customers? If so, how can you charge me a 7% commission?" Hambrecht recognized that there was a basic unfairness in the system, and he later went on to formulate the idea of a reverse auction to price shares before an IPO.

Apple went public the morning of December 12, 1980. By then the bankers had priced the stock at $22 a share. It went to $29 the first day. Jobs had come into the Hambrecht & Quist office just in time to watch the opening trades. At age twenty-five, he was now worth $256 million.

Baby You're a Rich Man

Before and after he was rich, and indeed throughout a life that included being both broke and a billionaire, Steve Jobs's attitude toward wealth was complex. He was an antimaterialistic hippie who capitalized on the inventions of a friend who wanted to give them away for free, and he was a Zen devotee who made a pilgrimage to India and then decided that his calling was to create a business. And yet somehow these attitudes seemed to weave together rather than conflict.

He had a great love for some material objects, especially those that were finely designed and crafted, such as Porsche and Mercedes cars, Henckels knives and Braun appliances, BMW motorcycles and Ansel Adams prints, Bosendorfer pianos and Bang & Olufsen audio equipment. Yet the houses he lived in, no matter how rich he became, tended not to be ostentatious and were furnished so simply they would have put a Shaker to shame. Neither then nor later would he travel with an entourage, keep a personal staff, or even have security protection. He bought a nice car, but always drove himself. When Markkula asked Jobs to join him in buying a Lear jet, he declined (though he eventually would demand of Apple a Gulfstream to use). Like his father, he could be flinty when bargaining with suppliers, but he didn't allow a craving for profits to take precedence over his passion for building great products.

Thirty years after Apple went public, he reflected on what it was like to come into money suddenly:

"I never worried about money. I grew up in a middle-class family, so I never thought I would starve. And I learned at Atari that I could be an okay engineer, so I always knew I could get by. I was voluntarily poor when I was in college and India, and I lived a pretty simple life even when I was working. So I went from fairly poor, which was wonderful, because I didn't have to worry about money, to being incredibly rich, when I also didn't have to worry about money."

I watched people at Apple who made a lot of money and felt they had to live differently. Some of them bought a Rolls-Royce and various houses, each with a house manager and then someone to manage the house managers. Their wives got plastic surgery and turned into these bizarre people. This was not how I wanted to live. It's crazy. I made a promise to myself that I'm not going to let this money ruin my life.

He was not particularly philanthropic. He briefly set up a foundation, but he discovered that it was annoying to have to deal with the person he had hired to run it, who kept talking about "venture" philanthropy and how to "leverage" giving. Jobs became contemptuous of people who made a display of philanthropy or thinking they could reinvent it. Earlier he had quietly sent in a $5,000 check to help launch Larry Brilliant's Seva Foundation to fight diseases of poverty, and he even agreed to join the board. But when Brilliant brought some board members, including Wavy Gravy and Jerry Garcia, to Apple right after its IPO to solicit a donation, Jobs was not forthcoming. He instead worked on finding ways that a donated Apple II and a VisiCalc program could make it easier for the foundation to do a survey it was planning on blindness in Nepal.

His biggest personal gift was to his parents, Paul and Clara Jobs, to whom he gave about $750,000 worth of stock. They sold some to pay off the mortgage on their Los Altos home, and their son came over for the little celebration. "It was the first time in their lives they didn't have a mortgage," Jobs recalled. "They had a handful of their friends over for the party, and it was really nice." Still, they didn't consider buying a nicer house. "They weren't interested in that," Jobs said. "They had a life they were happy with." Their only splurge was to take a Princess cruise each year. The one through the Panama Canal "was the big one for my dad," according to Jobs, because it reminded him of when his Coast Guard ship went through on its way to San Francisco to be decommissioned.

With Apple's success came fame for its poster boy. Inc. became the first magazine to put him on its cover, in October 1981. "This man has changed business forever," it proclaimed. It showed Jobs with a neatly trimmed beard and well-styled long hair, wearing blue jeans and a dress shirt with a blazer that was a little too satiny. He was leaning on an Apple 11 and looking directly into the camera with the mesmerizing stare he had picked up from Robert Friedland. "When Steve Jobs speaks, it is with the gee-whiz enthusiasm of someone who sees the future and is making sure it works," the magazine reported.

Time followed in February 1982 with a package on young entrepreneurs. The cover was a painting of Jobs, again with his hypnotic stare. Jobs, said the main story, "practically singlehanded created the personal computer industry." The accompanying profile, written by Michael Moritz, noted, "At 26, jobs heads a company that six years ago was located in a bedroom and garage of his parents' house, but this year it is expected to have sales of $600 million.... As an executive, Jobs has sometimes been petulant and harsh on subordinates. Admits he: "I've got to learn to keep my feelings private.'"

Despite his new fame and fortune, he still fancied himself a child of the counterculture. On a visit to a Stanford class, he took off his Wilkes Bashford blazer and his shoes, perched on top of a table, and crossed his legs into a lotus position. The students asked questions, such as when Apple's stock price would rise, which Jobs brushed off. Instead he spoke of his passion for future products, such as someday making a computer as small as a book. When the business questions tapered off, Jobs turned the tables on the well-groomed students. "How many of you are virgins?" he asked. There were nervous giggles. "How many of you have taken LSD?" More nervous laughter, and only one or two hands went up. Later Jobs would complain about the new generation of kids, who seemed to him more materialistic and careerist than his own. "When I went to school, it was right after the sixties and before this general wave of practical purposefulness had set in," he said. "Now students aren't even thinking in idealistic terms, or at least nowhere near as much." His generation, he said, was different. "The idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs, though, and most of the people I know who are my age have that ingrained in them forever."

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TWO new great movies!! One coming out on DVD!!

Went to see "Happy Feet 2" the other evening. Every fine song and dance (from the penguins)  and just a super good family movie .... two thumbs up.

Tonight went to see "Hugo" and it also was very fine, somewhat different, but in good ways, going back in old silent movie times was part of it. A nice story, and so indeed a fine family movie.....two thumbs up for this one also.

I see that soon the movie "The Help" will be out to buy.....a great movie, you need to see or buy for your family collection, many true life lessons from the not so long ago history of the USA.

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Nato mess-up/HIV make aging/Arab League on Syria

The Nato made a terrible mistake - the bombed Pakistan military out-posts killing 20 or so Pakistan soldiers.
Naturally Pakistan Government is outraged. The country claim Nato knows where all Pakistan outposts are, and something like this should never have happened,  a real tech space mess-up on the part of Nato.
Hence the riff between Pakistan and the USA gets another kick to the stomach, and looks like moves in Pakistan to stop the USA using it soil to keep the war going in Afghanistan. I can fully understand Pakistan would be upset and would be developing a hostile attitude towards not wanting to work with the USA, and calling for "getting outside of the USA war with Afghanistan."
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The Arab League looked upon as being toothless in the past, is asserting itself more against Syria, realizing the mad-dog Syrian leader is just ignoring The Arab League requests and demands, so tougher sanctions will come into play to wear down the Syrian mad-dod dictator.We'll see if their teeth have any bite behind them.
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The latest research and facts about people with HIV is that they are by having to take all the daily drugs - are age quicker that people not having to take  those drugs. The longer term results are what you'd expect in much older people - heart problems, strokes, diabetes, and simply not as good an overall health compared to those not having to take HIV medicine.
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On a light note: The MOVIE "Happy Feet 2" is very fine, went to see it tonight. A better 3D than a lot I've seen in the last 6 months. And a good story line with interesting characters. This is a musical
animation movie. But well done with a somewhat better 3D production. Certainly a good family movie.
For animation musical movies I'd give it an 8 out of 10. Fun, excitement, thrills, and comedy. Yes a fine movie for the family over the next month.
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The IMF (INternational Monetary Fund) that makes loans to countries in need (because of their trouble debt problems, just ain't in the mood to roll out the red carpet, and hand out Billion of Euros, well not without tough stipulation, like finance reform, tax hikes, and cut-backs from that country. It could well be looking we are in black hole looking done further into the financial mess, with little way out, as they say, "It;s going to get a whole lot worst till it gets better."
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INSANE People - Family movies!

Well it was again "black Friday" in the USA, and again as like other black Fridays .... here and there you had the crazies going ... yes...crazy...over "stuff" to buy. Okay I know you get some pretty super bargains on this day, but.....really now....oh I just shake my head when I see all the frenzied people going bananas over physical "stuff" that will be on sale for the next month, right into the 1st of January holiday.

You'd think most of those people would already have close to the latest in TVs, iPads (remember the huge lines of people ready to buy the iPad the day it came out), and "smart" phones and etc. But it is a part of human nature, that when people are out of work, have lost their homes, the mind tends to go on "material things" - kinda like a "comfort pill" (if there was one...ah I guess there is, it is called alcohol) to take away the troubles and pains of not having the things you once had (which a lot of people were actually not qualified to have in the first place, but we all now know that story inside-out since the crash of 2008).

Then LISTEN TO THIS......on the USA news tonight; ONE IN FOUR people/families in the USA, DO NOT KNOW WHERE THE NEXT MEAL IS COMING FROM!!! Yes that is in the USA not some African country!

Some kind "restaurant" people (around the USA) have opened their hearts to give FREE meals to those who cannot afford it, and so a "pay forward" culture has been raised up. If you have the money this week you give a little extra for those who do not have the money this week, and/for you know it could be YOU next week having to ask for a free meal.
That is GREAT, that people have made such a movement, I applaud them all. I know what it can be like. Thirteen years ago I was out of work, for a short time, going through a divorce, no money in the bank, and living just barely on unemployment insurance. I was going down to the charity "soup kitchen" in the local town, about 3 times a week. I know what it feels like, I know how I appreciated that soup kitchen charity. Ya as they say "been there, done that" - I know how it can be, situations you have little control over.
For the first time in my life I, at different times of the day, went weak in the knees, and had to sit down for a while. I was so concerned about it (never had experienced it before in my life) I went to the doctor. They took blood, they tested me with this and with that. I went back after a few days for the results, and was told I had perfect good health. Then I told the doctor my physical situation. "Oh yes, " he said, "that can bring on the very symptoms you have." The next week I found full time work again, and the weak-knee symptoms disappeared within the hour I was hired.

Most of us in North America have it pretty darn nice, maybe too many of us have it too nice, compared to the large majority in the Eastern world  and on the African continent. Yes since 13 years ago, I have been blessed materially, in a way, just a very small way, like a Job. I was brought low, to see if I was still willing to walk with the true God and serve and obey Him. I did have my computer and it was during some of those days when there was no secular work for me, that I poured many hours into Bible studies for a website, and the Lord provided me a brother (going into PC work) who built free of charge my original website - John Rumanus was his name. It was a start, and John for about 3 years would upload my studies for me free of charge. He was a married man raising 3 small children, and he finally had to say to me, he did not have the time. I understood. After finding work again in Calgary, Alberta, I met Jesse (whose website is here on my website) and she took up the job of getting my website going again, and before her death, taught me how to upload.  Both John and Jesse were a great blessing to me. Then some years after Jesse died, Tara Chapman came along in my life, from the USA. And Tara redid my website as it is today. Tara and Nathan her husband, needed to go to a larger iMac (for their children as they were watching movies on it at times) and they sent me the one they had (plenty big enough for me (it's not some small thing). So my writing right now is on the iMac, and the sermonette studies I've just started (called "What is your attitude towards the commandments of God?) up on: Youtube 1horsesrcool
is done on the iMac.

Yes, I know what it is like for those 1 in 4 USA people who do not know where the next meal is coming from, and I know in a very small way what Job had to go through, and remain faithful to God. And I have been blessed very much so in the last 13 and 1/2 years here in Calgary. I really never expected to get at age 62 (7 years ago) my golden Palomino "Trigger" horse I wanted since age 7, when I saw my first Roy Rogers movie (in color) and was blown away with the beauty and speed of Trigger. Many see her and say "She's like Trigger and just as fast." And indeed she is.

It's not wrong to have nice physical things or "stuff" - but priorities must be put in proper priority list down. As Jesus said, seek you first the Kingdom of God and His righteousness and all these other things will be added to you. Some things ... well you may not get right away, maybe decades before you get them.

So you serve the Eternal FIRST, His way of life, His righteousness, desiring to help spread the Gospel; you put all of that first; if married and raising children, that comes next in your life's concern. You be faithful to that first, and in time, God may give you the physical desires of your heart.
But to line up for a day or a week (as some have done) just to burst through the doors pushing and shoving, kicking and "pepper spraying" (as was done this Friday by one lady) others so YOU get to what you LUST after......no friends, that's not the way the child of God does things, or how the servant of the Lord lives their life.
..........

This is a good time right now for the many fine family movies out already and a few more to come. I did go to see "The Muppets" movie, the day it opened here in Calgary - Wednesday just gone. Yes a fine movie, even the "movie" critics give it a 9 out of 10. Not sure I would have given it a 9, but still a very good family movie. I like Amy Adams, one of my favorites. And she does some singing and little bit of dancing that may surprise you how natural she does it, it surprised me.

You also have "Happy Feet" and "Puss in Boots" - which I have not yet seen, and a few others that look like fun family movies. I must go to see them in the next 3 weeks before I head off to visit my Dad in Kelowna, B.C. (about an 8 hour drive West, but I'm taking the plane - 45 minutes), for 10 days, over the holiday season.

So enjoy some good family movies, be thankful for the physical things you have, but do not be like the world. The Christian is IN the world but NOT a part OF the world.
..........

Love, Hate, and Propaganda "The Cold War"

WOW!! A new series on CBC TV. It is "Love, Hate, and Propaganda - The Cold War"

It is the continuation of the "Love, Hate, and Propaganda - the Rise of Hitler and the Second World War."

The first series was mind-blowing, and so revealing and instructive on the "propaganda" from both the Germans and the British/USA - just so revealing, shocking, and terrible, are the ways of man in using the lies and bending truths out of all proportions in the use of propaganda.

This series is going to be a BUST - a bust to show the crazy propaganda on both sides of the iron curtain, and certainly in the West, in the USA who are paranoid that the USSR is the big enemy and science-fiction monster that has to be put down, kept away, and anything close to a communist leaning must be exposed and black-listed, even if many mistakes came along .... the end result gave freedom to make errors. This work and fight of propaganda even goes to black Africa.

You want to know the behind scenes of the "cold war" on both sides, you need this second series on "Love, Hate, and Propaganda - The Cold War."

This is going to be a series eye opener for those who did not live through that time period, so good for you raising children, to learn a side of modern history not exposed before in any large manner

And more info at cbc.ca/docs

Maybe obtainable from Amazon.com

..........

Barbecue Beef/Red Wine/Rosemary Herb

Science has now shown that to barbecue meat produces a chemical change that is ..... not healthy, or to put it more straight up .... dangerous to your body, those radicles we hear about, bad radicles going after your body in not the friendliest way. But using the herb "rosemary" science has also proved reduces those free radicles when barbecuing.
......

Science has also proved that indeed red wine does contain anti-oxidants that do attack free radicals in our body system, hence is good for you....but like everything good, in moderation.
......

Science did an experiment with a Canadian gal of dropping her into a tub at 14 C temperature (in a bikini) - all the way under for a few seconds (some touch gal) and science machines did a scan of body heat loss. The body lost heat from anywhere exposed to the air. So.....the idea that you loose more body heat through the top of your head is false. Any part of the body exposed to the air looses just as much heat. Naturally covering up keeps the heat in, hence wearing a hat in cold weather keeps the heat in at the top of your head, wearing gloves keeps the heat in over the hands, and etc.
......

Grandma said eating fast would make you gain weight. Was she correct?
Science experiments with one of the world's fastest eaters and a regular slow eater. Chemicals are released in the body when we eat that also relate to the brain. Well the long and short of it, less of these chemicals are released in fast eaters. So indeed Grandma was correct - eating fast gain weight.
......

The blind they say have better hearing than sighted people. True of false?
Science experiments with blind and seeing people DO prove it is correct, the blind hear better than sighted people. Then one step further with science tests, the back of the brain for sight, rewires itself for those loosing sight early in life and the same rewired area of the brain, produces a kind of sight through hearing.
......

Well for the fascinating details on all this and more, go to:  cbc.ca/natureofthings

Make sure if you are raising children you use cbc.ca/natureofthings

..........

Don't Bother To Knock - movie

I've just watched one of the recent DVD movies I've bought "Don't Bother To Knock" staring Richard Widmark and Marilyn Monroe - a 1952 Twentieth Century Fox - Black and White, which in this movie is probably the best color, as it adds to the dark side of the movie story.

If anyone has ever doubted the acting ability of Marilyn, this movie blows that away. She is portraying a mentally and emotionally tortured young lady, who has recently lost her man (she was to marry) when he returned from a flight overseas.

Widmark plays a guy that is loosing his girl because she believes after a long courtship, he does not have understanding or feeling.

The whole movie takes place in a Hotel. It's not a long movie - 76 minutes.

The story plays out that the Marilyn's dark character is helped, but so is Widmark's character.

Actually a nice movie by the time it is all over, a good adult movie, not for children as it is a serious adult life story that you could actually see happening somewhere at some time, or something along the same line.

Yes, good character points it brings out, especially for men to be emotional and understanding, when needed. And as I've said, shows the ability of Marilyn Monroe to act as most people have never seen her. It is noted in the latest biography book on her life, that she had aspirations to act in Shakespeare plays. She was always reading, and had many photos taken of her doing just that - reading books. She really was no "dumb blond" in real life.

Yes a movie to put on your list to see sometime.
..........

The BEASTS kill us and CRAZY ideas!

WILD BEASTS KILLING US AND SOME NUTTY PEOPLE;

HERE'S WHAT MARK STEYN HAS TO SAY ON THE MATTER:

(The "headings" are mine)

　

There is a fairly recent journalistic genre, specimens of which now turn up on the news pages with numbing regularity. A cougar kills a dog near the home of Frances Frost in Canmore, Alberta. Miss Frost, an "environ mentalist dancer" with impeccable pro-cougar credentials, objects strenuously to suggestions that the predator be tracked and put down. A month later, she's killed in broad daylight by a cougar who's been methodically stalking her.

"I can't believe it happened," wailed a fellow environmentalist. But why not? Cougars prey on species they're not afraid of. So, if they've no reason to be afraid of man, they might as well eat him. He's a lot easier to catch than a deer. Taylor Mitchell, a singer-songwriter, was killed by coyotes in Cape Breton National Park in Nova Scotia. "It's hard to understand why this may be happening," said Derek Quann, a resource conservation manager, after a second attack. "We don't think there's been a significant increase in the population. There could be a larger problem in the ecosystem at play." That was his coy way of suggesting that coyotes are losing their traditional fear of man, and with it their tendency to stay out of his way.

Aside from the boom in Islamic terrorism, the Nineties and the Oughts were also the worst decades ever for shark, bear, alligator, and cougar attacks in North America. The obvious explanation is that there are more of these creatures than ever before - the bear and cougar populations have exploded across the continent. But the more sinister one is that animals have not just multiplied but evolved: they've lost their fear of man. They now see him for what he is: a tasty Jello pudding on legs.

In 2003, Disney brought us its latest animated feature, "Brother Bear," the usual New Age mumbo-jumbo with a generic Native American gloss. It told the tale of Kenai, a young fellow in a bucolic Pacific Northwest at the end of the Ice Age. To avenge his brother's death, Kenai kills the brown bear responsible. But trouble's a-bruin: his late brother is wise enough to know that killing is not the answer and so gets the Great Spirit to teach Kenai a lesson by transforming him into a bear. He thereby learns that bears are not violent beasts but sensitive beings living in harmony with nature who understand the world they live in far more than man does. I would certainly agree that bears are wiser and more sensitive than man, if only because I've yet to meet a bear who's produced an animated feature as mawkishly deluded as this.

Among the technical advisers on the film, hired to ensure the accurate depiction of our furry friends, was Timothy Treadwell, the self-described eco-warrior from Malibu who became famous for his campaign "to promote getting close to bears to show they were not dangerous." He did this by sidling up to them and singing "I love you" in a high-pitched voice. Brother Bear is certainly true to the Treadwell view of brown bears, and he would surely have appreciated the picture had he ever gotten to see it. But, just as Kenai found himself trapped inside a bear, so did Mr. Treadwell - although in his case he was just passing through. In September, a pilot arrived at the ursine expert's camp near Kaflia Bay in Alaska to fly him out and instead found the bits of him and his girlfriend that hadn't yet been eaten buried in a bear's food cache.

Treadwell had always said he wanted to end up in "bear scat," so his fellow activists were inclined to look on the bright side. "He would say it's the culmination of his life's work;" said his colleague Jewel Palovak. "He died doing what he lived for."

I wonder if he was revising his view in the final moments. And if his girlfriend was quite so happy to find she had a bit part in "the culmination of his life's work."

You'd have to have a heart of stone not to weep with laughter at the fate of the eco-warrior, but it does make Brother Bear somewhat harder to swallow than its technical adviser manifestly was. There are People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, but sadly no Animals for the Ethical Treatment of People. And, just as bugs are becoming resistant to antibiotics, so the big beasts are changing, too. Wild animals are not merely the creatures of their appetites; they're also astute calculators of risk. Not so long ago, your average bear knew that if he happened upon a two-legged type, the chap would pull a rifle on him and he'd be spending eternity as a fireside rug. But these days it's just as likely that any human being he comes across is some pantywaist Bambi Boomer enviro-sentimentalist trying to get in touch with his inner self. And, if the guy wants to get in touch with his inner self so badly, why not just rip it out of his chest for him?

North American wildlife seems to have figured that out. Why be surprised if other predators do? A soft Eloi culture will bend and accommodate and prostrate - and still be consumed as easily as Timothy Treadwell.....

COOING TO YOUR FOE

Think of Frances Frost vigorously objecting to any suggestion the predator cougar be tracked down. Al-Qaeda understand that mentality - which is why they advise captured jihadists always to claim they've been tortured, and let the Frances Frosts of the grievance industry help them get lawyered up. So do the armies of the Undocumented. That sends a message about U.S. will, and not just to Latin-American peasants seeking economic betterment.

Picture Timothy Treadwell cooing love songs to his killers. You don't have to go to the Arctic to see that. In Philadelphia, there is an organization called the BDS Coalition. BDS? As in "Bush Derangement Syndrome"? No. It stands for "Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions," and it's an alliance of groups committed to working for "social justice" in "Palestine." So they staged a disruptive "flashdance" at a Philly supermarket to protest the store's "policy" of carrying brands of hummus made by companies perceived to have too close ties to Israel. Watching these young white twentysomething American students "dance into action" around the hapless grocery clerks, you couldn't help noticing that (without wishing to stereotype from modes of dress and levels of hirsuteness) more than a few of the young ladies appeared to be stern feminists, if not, ah, persons of orientation. In America, so what? But try it in Hamas-run Gaza.

MORE COMPROMISE

AND CRAZY WAYS

There is a group called "Queers Against Israeli Apartheid". When they march in Gay Pride parades, they chant:

Butch, femme, bottom, top

Iarel apatheid has to stop.

Queers Against Israeli Apartheid - now there's a cause. When he spoke to Columbia University, President Ahmadinejad of Iran told his audience that there are no homosexuals in Iran. Not one. Where are they? On a weekend visit to Gaza to see the new production of Mame? Alas, there was no time for follow-up questions. In Mullah Omar's Afghanistan, homosexual men were put to death by being crushed under a wall specifically built for that purpose. Under the Taliban, it was just about the only work you could get in the otherwise depressed Afghan construction industry. Have you tried being a lesbian in Yemen? Have you tried being a woman in Yemen?

A few years back, I thought even spaghetti-spined western liberals might draw the line at "Female Genital Mutilation" - or "FGM," as it's already known in far too many western hospitals from Virginia to Australia. After all, it's a key pillar of institutional misogyny in Islam: its entire purpose is to deny women sexual pleasure. True, a lot of us hapless western men find we deny women sexual pleasure without even trying, but we don't demand genital mutilation to guarantee it. On such slender distinctions does civilization rest. Yet already female genital "mutilation" has been replaced by the less judgmental term of "female genital cutting." In 2010, the American Academy of Pediatrics floated the suggestion that, because certain, ahem, "immigrant communities" were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo "cutting," in a spirit of multicultural compromise perhaps U.S. pediatricians should amend their opposition to the practice, and provide a "ritual nick" to young girls.

Nonetheless, at the Gay Pride parade they know their priorities:

Butch, femme, bottom,

top Israeli apartheid has to stop.

Is there a Queers Against Sharia?

Butch, femme, top, bottom

Gay bars in Riyadh?

Hard to spot 'em.

Bottom, top, femme, butch

Pride parade's dull since the Taliban putsch.

Top, bottom, butch, femme

With complimentary FGM.

Top, bott, butch, femme, trans

Quit your chanting and read your Korans.

MORE CRAZY IDEAS

There is a moral frivolity to the Eloi's generalized concerns for "the planet." But it quickly advances to the next stage - a moral decadence that expresses itself by venerating those who will gladly kill them when they have served their purpose as useful idiots. Listen to Sheikh Muhammad al-Gamei'a, an Egyptian Muslim of such exemplary moderation that he was the head imam at the Islamic Cultural Center and Mosque in NewYork at the time of 9/11's, er, "controlled explosion." Shortly thereafter, he explained why he agrees with Philadelphia BDS Coalition and Queers Against Israeli Apartheid that it's all the fault of the Jews: "You see these people all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs. Because of the Jews there are strip clubs, homosexuals, and lesbians everywhere. They do this to impose their hegemony and colonialism on the world ......

So Jews are to blame for lesbians? Do the prancing sapphists in that Philly supermarket know they're just tools of the International Jewish Conspiracy?

Fortunately for them, they're taking their courageous stand for Palestinian "social justice" in Pennsylvania. Not everyone keeps such a discreet distance. In 2008, the Italian performance artist Pippa Bacca set off to hitch hike from Milan to the Palestinian Territories to promote "world peace." She was dressed as a bride, and the purpose of her trip was to show that if only you put your trust in our common humanity then all will be well.

A month later, her naked body was found in the bushes near Gebze in Turkey. She had been gang-raped and then killed. Like Timothy Treadwell's, her illusions met reality.

Most of us as individuals retain enough of a survival instinct that, if we find ourselves on a rough city block in a foreign land late at night, we mothball the PC pieties until we get back to the lobby of the Grand Hyatt. But what happens when Pippa Bacca's illusions become the dominant political discourse of a free society? And how many Timothy Treadwells crooning to their killers does a society have to have before it loses even the very idea of a survival instinct?.....

An America that abandons the American idea will be a turbulent society. The present de facto segregation - in Maywood, California, and elsewhere - will decay into tribalism, both cultural and economic. The United States will quietly retreat from the southern borderlands and other redoubts of the Undocumented, in the way that the Government of France has retreated from those banlieues that Muslims regard as part of the Dar alIslam. Other neighborhoods will opt for de facto secession, and still functioning states will opt for de jure secession, anxious to escape being buried by federal debt. Balkanization will cease to be a pejorative and become the least worst hope: united we're done for, but divided a few corners of the map might stand a chance. The Eloi elites who did this to America will hunker down within protected enclaves while outside life grows increasingly savage and violent. But eventually they will come for the elite communities, too - as the cougar came for Frances Frost, and the bear for Timothy Treadwell.

..........

NOTE:

Concerning the rise of wild animals killing more of us than ever before. You may come up with ideas as to why (like building communities out in the forsets, where we never built before). But there is a prophecy in the Bible that tells us God will send the wild beasts after us to kill us, because of our unrepentant sinful ways of living. In fact it is no where near what one day it will be; the very beasts of the land will come against us in a huge way, which will be part of our destruction to come upon most of the countries of the Western world, as we are the very children of Israel, the House of Israel, the so-called "Lost 10 tribes of Israel" which have never been lost to God. Most Bible prophecy is for the time yet ahead of us; for the last 42 months of the and of this age, before and leading up to the literal return of Jesus Christ, to establish the Kingdom of God upon all nations of this planet.

Here is the prophecy; speaking to the House of Israel:

"Moreover I will make thee waste, and a repraoch among the nations that are round about thee ....When I shall send upon them the evil arrows of famine, which shall be for their destruction, and I will increase the famine upon you, and will break your staff of bread: So will I send upon you famine AND EVIL BEASTS, and they shall bereave you; and pestilence and blood shall pass through thee; and I will bring the sword upon you, I the Lord have spoken" (Ezekiel 5:14-17).

"Son of man, when the land sinneth against me by trespassing grievously, then will I stretch out mine hand upon it....If I cause noisome BEASTS to PASS THROUGH the land, and they spoil it, so that it be desolate, that no man may pass through BECAUSE OF THE BEAST" (Ezekiel 14:13-15).

"Say you unto them, Thus says the Lord God; As I live, surely they that are in the wastes shall fall by the sword, and him that is in the open field will I give to THE BEASTS to be DEVOURED, and they that be in the forts and in the caves shall die of the pestilence. For I will lay the land most desolate, and the pomp of her strength shall cease....Then they shall know that I am the Lord, when I have laid the land most desolate because of their abominations which they have committed" (Ezekiel 33:27-29).

"Woe to the shepherds of Israel that do feed themselves! Should not the shepherds feed the flock? .... The diseased have you not strengthened, neither have you healed that which was sick, neither have you bound up that which was broken, neither have you brought again that which was driven away, neither have you sought that which was lost; but with force and with cruelty have you ruled them. And they were SCATTERED, because there is no shepherd: and they became meat to ALL THE BEASTS of the field, when they were scattered" (Ezekiel 34:2-5).

GOD IS NO RESPECTOR OF PERSONS: EVEN IF YOU DO NOT BELIEVE WE ARE THE NATIONS OF THE HOUSE OF ISRAEL, IT WILL STILL COME UPON US BECUASE WE HAVE FORSAKEN THE LORD AND HIS WORD AND HIS COMMANDMENTS, AND WE ARE UP TO OUR NECK IN SIN AND WICKEDNESS.

YES THE DAY COMES WHEN EVEN THE WILD BEASTS OF THE FIELD WILL DEVOUR US IN GREAT NUMBERS, WHEN WE AS NATIONS OF THE WEST, FALL TO OUR LOVER ENEMIES. THE PROPHETIC BOOKS OF THE BIBLE I HAVE EXPOUNDED TO YOU IN DETAIL ON MY WEBSITE. AND YOU CAN ALSO HAVE IT ALL IN BOOK FORM IF YOU WISH. THE BOOK IS CALLED "THE BIBLICAL PROPHETS FOR TODAY" AND CAN BE OBTAINED FROM AMAZON.COM

Keith Hunt

......

The Disappearance of MANLINESS!!

Here's Mark Steyn on "manliness"

MARK STEYN ON THE MALENESS WE NO LONGER HAVE
(Headings are mine)

NO MAN'S LAND

SPERM DROP LOW

"It is easier," said Frederick Douglass, "to build strong
children than to repair broken men." But what if, as a matter of
policy, we're building our children to be broken men? And broken
not just psychologically but biologically. Headline from the
Daily Mail, 2004: "Concern as Sperm Count Falls by a Third in UK
Men."
Don't ask me why: I'd blame Tony Blair's cozying up to Bush were
it not for "Sperm count drops 25 percent in younger men" (The
Independent, 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the
European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

Do we still need sperm? Oh, a soupcon here and there still has
its uses. In 2009, a shortage of the stuff was reported in
Sweden.  There had been an unexpected surge in demand, from
lesbian couples anxious to conceive. So they headed off to the
sperm clinic, whereupon the Sapphic demand ran into the problem
of male inability to satisfy it. The problem seems to be higher
than usual levels of non-functioning sperm. Even for a
demographic doom-monger such as myself, you could hardly ask for
a more poignant fin de civilisation image than a stampede of
broody lesbians stymied only by defective semen, like some
strange dystopian collaboration between Robert Heinlein and Russ
Meyer.

H. G. Wells' Time-Traveler writes of the softened Eloi:
It happened that, as I was watching some of the little people
bathing in a shallow, one of them was seized with cramp and began
drifting downstream. The main current ran rather swiftly, but not
too strongly for even a moderate swimmer. It will give you an
idea, therefore, of the strange deficiency in these creatures,
when I tell you that none made the slightest attempt to rescue
the weakly crying little thing which was drowning before their
eyes.

WOMEN KILLERS
BRITISH CRAZY POLICE GEEKS

Instead, it is Wells' Victorian gentleman who leaps in the river,
rescues the poor girl, and brings her back to land. He did what
any man would have done, didn't he?
Are you sure about that? As I say, the author's dystopian vision
is off only insofar as the world he predicted showed up 800,000
years ahead of schedule. In Wells' Britain in the early
twenty-first century, men routinely stand around watching girls
drown.
In May 2010, a 37-year-old woman was drowning in the River Clyde
while police officers called to the scene stood on the bank and
watched. 121 "As a matter of procedure it's not the
responsibility of the police to go in the water," explained a
spokesperson, sniffily, "it's the Fire and Rescue Service." And,
as they weren't there yet, tough. The woman would have died had
not three Glasgow University students jumped in to save her.
Needless to say, the students were in complete breach of "matters
of procedure."
In February 2010, a 5-year-old girl was trapped in a car
submerged in the icy River Avon for two hours while West Mercia
Police stood around on the bank watching. They were "prevented"
from diving in to rescue her by"safety regulations." In 2007, two
police officers watched as a 10-year-old boy, Jordon Lyon,
drowned in a swimming pool in Wigan.  The same year, fireman Tam
Brown dived into the River Tay to rescue a drowning girl and got
her back to shore, only to find he was now subject to a
disciplinary investigation by Tayside Fire Service.
In 2008, Alison Hume fell sixty feet down an abandoned mine
shaft. An 18-strong rescue crew arrived, but the senior officer
said that a recent memo had banned the use of rope equipment for
rescuing members of the public. It could only be used to rescue
fellow firefighters. So Alison Hume died, in compliance with the
memo.

IN THE USA?
STUPID TRAINING

Could this sort of thing happen in America? Oh, it already does.
In 2010, KING-TV in Seattle broadcast footage of three "security
guards" at a downtown bus station standing around watching while
a 15-year-old girl was brutally beaten for her purse, phone, and
iPod. But it's okay, the "guards" were "just following orders not
to interfere." The victim later told police that she had
deliberately stood next to the "guards" while waiting for her bus
thinking it would be the safest place. As the video shows, she
was punched and slammed against the wall while standing adjacent
to socalled "security"--and still they did nothing. And King's
County Sheriff's Department congratulated the "men" on their
forbearance: "The guards were right to follow their training."
You have to be "trained" to stand around doing nothing?
Recall Harvey Mansfield's definition of manliness-"confidence in
the face of risk" - and then look at the helmets grown men wear
to take a Sunday bicycle ride 'round a suburban park. As for
Plato's concept of "thumos" - an animal instinct to bristle at
the sense of danger-the instinct seems all but lost.

MALE WEAKNESS
THE CANADIAN MANHOOD SHAME

To return to Gloria Steinem, when might a fish need a bicycle?
The women of Montreal's Ecole Polytechnique could have used one
when Marc Lepine walked in with a gun and told all the men to
leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the
women."
To those who succeeded in imposing the official narrative, Marc
Lepine embodies the murderous misogynist rage that is inherent in
all men, and which all must acknowledge.
For a smaller number of us, the story has quite the opposite
meaning: Marc Lepine was born Gamil Gharbi, the son of an
Algerian Muslim wifebeater. And no, I'm not suggesting he's
typical of Muslim men or North African men: my point is that he's
not typical of anything, least of all what we might call (if
you'll forgive the expression) Canadian manhood. The defining
image of contemporary maleness is not Monsieur Lepine/Gharbi but
the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to
leave by the lone gunman, obeyed, and abandoned their female
classmates to their fate-an act of abdication that would have
been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human
history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as
they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was
over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still
did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does
not suffer from an excess of testosterone.
In 2009, the director Denis Villeneuve made a film of the story
Polytechnique. "I wanted to absolve the men," he said. "People
were really tough on them. But they were 20 years old.... It was
as if an alien had landed."

FALSE FILMING

But it's always as if an alien had landed. When another Canadian
director, James Cameron, filmed Titanic, what most titillated him
were the alleged betrayals of convention. It's supposed to be
"women and children first," but he was obsessed with toffs
cutting in line, cowardly men elbowing the womenfolk out of the
way and scrambling for the lifeboats, etc. In fact, all the
historical evidence is that the evacuation was very orderly. In
real life, First Officer William Murdoch threw deckchairs to
passengers drowning in the water to give them something to cling
to, and then he went down with the ship-the dull, decent thing,
all very British, with no fuss. In Cameron's movie, Murdoch takes
a bribe and murders a third-class passenger. (The director
subsequently apologized to the First Officer's home town in
Scotland and offered 5,000 POUND toward a memorial. Gee, thanks.)

THE RIGHT

Mr. Cameron notwithstanding, the male passengers gave their lives
for the women, and would never have considered doing otherwise.
"An alien landed" on the deck of a luxury liner-and men had
barely an hour to kiss their wives goodbye, watch them clamber
into the lifeboats, and sail off without them. The social norm of
"women and children first" held up under pressure.

MALENESS GONE

Today, in what Harvey Mansfield calls our "gender-neutral
society," there are no social norms. Eight decades after the
Titanic, a German-built ferry en route from Estonia to Sweden
sank in the Baltic Sea. Of the 1,051 passengers, only 139 lived
to tell the tale."' But the distribution of the survivors was
very different from that of the Titanic. Women and children
first? No female under fifteen or over sixty-five made it. Only 5
percent of all women passengers lived. The bulk of the survivors
were young men. Fortythree percent of men aged 20 to 24 made it.

MIXED UP MALENESS

No two ship disasters are the same, but the testimony from the MV
Estonia provides a snapshot of our new world: according to the
Finnish Accident Investigation Board's official report, several
survivors reported that "everyone was only looking out for
himself." According to a Swedish passenger, Kent Harstedt, "A
woman had broken her legs and begged others to give her a life
jacket, but it was the law of the jungle. "Some old people had
already given up hope and were just sitting there crying," said
Andrus Maidre, a 19-year-old Estonian. "I stepped over children
who were wailing and holding onto the railing."
You "stepped over" children en route to making your own escape?
There wasn't a lot of that on the Titanic. "There is no law that
says women and children first," Roger Kohen of the International
Maritime Organization told Time magazine. "That is something from
the age of chivalry."
If, by "the age of chivalry," you mean the early twentieth
century.
As I said, no two maritime disasters are the same. But it's not
unfair to conclude that had the men of the Titanic been on the
Estonia, the age and sex distribution of the survivors would have
been very different. Nor was there a social norm at the Ecole
Polytechnique. So the men walked away, and the women died.
Whenever I've written about these issues, I get a lot of emails
from guys scoffing, "Oh, right, Steyn. Like you'd be taking a
bullet. You'd be pissing your little girlie panties," etc. Well,
maybe I would. But as the Toronto blogger Kathy Shaidle put it:
"When we say 'we don't know what we'd do under the same
circumstances,' we make cowardice the default position."
I prefer the word passivity - a terrible, corrosive passivity.
Even if I'm wetting my panties, it's better to have the social
norm of the Titanic and fail to live up to it than to have the
social norm of the Polytechnique and sink with it.

WHEN MEN WERE MEN

These are Finnish men, Estonian men, Canadian men. Are you so
confident after the blitzkrieg on manhood waged by the
educational establishment that the same pathologies aren't taking
hold in the U.S.? Consider the ease with which an extraordinary
designation has been conferred upon the men who won America's
last great military victory - long ago now, before Afghanistan,
before Mogadishu, before the helicopters in the Iranian desert,
before Vietnam, before Korea. When Tom Brokaw venerates the young
men who went off to fight in Europe and the Pacific seven decades
ago as "the Greatest Generation," by implication he absolves the
rest of us. For, if they are so great and so exceptional, it
would be unreasonable to expect us to do likewise.
"Under the new conditions of perfect comfort and security, that
restless energy, that with us is strength, would become
weakness," wrote Wells. "Physical courage and the love of battle,
for instance, are no great help may even be hindrances - to a
civilized man." As the Time-Traveler observed of the Eloi: "Very
pleasant was their day, as pleasant as the day of the cattle in
the field. Like the cattle, they knew of no enemies and provided
against no needs. And their end was the same."
Wells describes the Eloi drifting into "feeble prettiness." Here
is the writer Oscar van den Boogaard from an interview with the
Belgian paper De Standaard. Mr. van den Boogaard is a Dutch gay
"humanist," which is pretty much the trifecta of Eurocool. He was
reflecting on the accelerating Islamization of the Continent and
concluded that the jig was up for the Europe he loved. "I am not
a warrior, but who is?" he shrugged. "I have never learned to
fight for my freedom. I was only good at enjoying it." In the
famous Kiibler-Ross stages of grief, Mr. van den Boogard is past
denial, anger, bargaining, and depression, and has arrived at a
kind of acceptance.
I have never learned to fight for my freedom. I was only good at
enjoying it.
Sorry, doesn't work - not for long. Cuties in a death cab
eventually have to pay the fare.
..........

NOTE:

For the Christian under the New Covenant, it is just not possible
or correct to be a part of a nations's war machine. BUT that does
not mean you will not give up your life for others. Jesus said no
greater love has a man towards man that he should give his life
for others.
The Canadian example Mark Steyn gave on those men at the
PAOLYTECHNIQUE, who willfully left the room, leaving the ladies
behind, stood in the hall way as they heard the gun shots, did
nothing, to try and save those ladies, is SHAMEFUL and DISGUSSING
to say the least. We here in Canada never heard it from that
point of view. Probably because we have a society where maleness
is no longer - just a generic kind of people today, neither male
not female, so too bad for you if you are left behind to be shot
to death, while the rest of us go free.

What should they have done. I'll tell you what they should have
done. When those men were told to leave, they should have used
logical sense that this man was going to do something harmful to
those ladies. One or more of those males should have pick up a
desk, and if that was not possible, rushed the guy, throwing
things at him that they could, but rushed the guy, even if it
meant getting killed or injured. If all those men had rushed him
someone would have gotten at him and pulled him to the ground.
Some lives may have still be lost, some men may have died, but
the incedent would have gone down in Canadian history (and world
history) as an EXAMPLE of what true MANLINESS is all about. Those
men that may have been killed would be immortalized as true
heroic men, and lived on forever in history as having so much
love that they would give their lives for another, and in this
case for women, just as real men should do.

It is indeed SAD that MANLINESS has and is fast disappearing from
the world of the MALE!
......

Steve Jobs #5

WE CONTINUE WITH THE EARLY LIFE OF
STEVE JOBS

XEROX AND LISA

Graphical User Interfaces

A New Baby

The Apple II took the company from Jobs's garage to the pinnacle
of a new industry. Its sales rose dramatically, from 2,500 units
in 1977 to 210,000 in 1981. But Jobs was restless. The Apple II
could not remain successful forever, and he knew that, no matter
how much he had done to package it, from power cord to case, it
would always be seen as Wozniak's masterpiece. He needed his own
machine. More than that, he wanted a product that would, in his
words, make a dent in the universe.

At first he hoped that the Apple III would play that role. It
would have more memory, the screen would display eighty
characters across rather than forty, and it would handle
uppercase and lowercase letters. Indulging his passion for
industrial design, Jobs decreed the size and shape of the
external case, and he refused to let anyone alter it, even as
committees of engineers added more components to the circuit
boards. The result was piggybacked boards with poor connectors
that frequently failed. When the Apple III began shipping in May
1980, it flopped. Randy Wigginton, one of the engineers, summed
it up: "The Apple III was kind of like a baby conceived during a
group orgy, and later everybody had this bad headache, and
there's this bastard child, and everyone says, "It's not mine.'"
By then Jobs had distanced himself from the Apple III and was
thrashing about for ways to produce something more radically
different. At first he flirted with the idea of touchscreens, but
he found himself frustrated. At one demonstration of the
technology, he arrived late, fidgeted awhile, then abruptly cut
off the engineers in the middle of their presentation with a
brusque "Thank you." They were confused. "Would you like us to
leave?" one asked. Jobs said yes, then berated his colleagues for
wasting his time.

Then he and Apple hired two engineers from Hewlett-Packard to
conceive a totally new computer. The name jobs chose for it would
t have caused even the most jaded psychiatrist to do a double
take: the Lisa. Other computers had been named after daughters of
their designers, but Lisa was a daughter Jobs had abandoned and
had not yet fully admitted was his. "Maybe he was doing it out of
guilt," said Andrea Cunningham, who worked at Regis McKenna on
public relations for the project. "We had to come up with an
acronym so that we could claim it was not named after Lisa the
child." The one they reverse-engineered was "local integrated
systems architecture," and despite being meaningless it became
the official explanation for the name. Among the engineers it was
referred to as "Lisa: invented stupid acronym." Years later, when
I asked about the name, Jobs admitted simply "Obviously it was
named form my daughter "

The Lisa was conceived as a $2,000 machine based on a sixteen-
bit microprocessor, rather than the eight-bit one used in the
Apple II. Without the wizardry of Wozniak, who was still working
quietly on the Apple 11, the engineers began producing a
straightforward computer with a conventional text display, unable
to push the powerful microprocessor to do much exciting stuff.
Jobs began to grow impatient with how boring it was turning out
to be.

There was, however, one programmer who was infusing the project
with some life: Bill Atkinson. He was a doctoral student in
neuroscience who had experimented with his fair share of acid.
When he was asked to come work for Apple, he declined. But then
Apple sent him a nonrefundable plane ticket, and he decided to
use it and let Jobs try to persuade him. "We are inventing the
future," Jobs told him at the end of a three-hour pitch. "Think
about surfing on the front edge of a wave. It's really
exhilarating. Now think about dog-paddling at the tail end of
that wave. It wouldn't be anywhere near as much fun. Come down
here and make a dent in the universe." Atkinson did.
With his shaggy hair and droopy moustache that did not hide the
animation in his face, Atkinson had some of Woz's ingenuity along
with Jobs's passion for awesome products. His first job was to
develop a program to track a stock portfolio by auto-dialing the
Dow Jones service, getting quotes, then hanging up. "I had to
create it fast because there was a magazine ad for the Apple II
showing a hubby at the kitchen table looking at an Apple screen
filled with graphs of stock prices, and his wife is beaming at
him-but there wasn't such a program, so I had to create one."
Next he created for the Apple II a version of Pascal, a
high-level programming language. Jobs had resisted, thinking that
BASIC was all the Apple II needed, but he told Atkinson, "Since
you're so passionate about it, I'll give you six days to prove me
wrong." He did, and Jobs respected him ever after.
By the fall of 1979 Apple was breeding three ponies to be
potential successors to the Apple II workhorse. There was the
ill-fated Apple III. There was the Lisa project, which was
beginning to disappoint jobs. And somewhere off Jobs's radar
screen, at least for the moment, there was a small skunkworks
project for a low-cost machine that was being developed by a
colorful employee named Jef Raskin, a former professor who had
taught Bill Atkinson. Raskin's goal was to make an inexpensive
"computer for the masses" that would be like an appliancea
self-contained unit with computer, keyboard, monitor, and
software all together-and have a graphical interface. He tried to
turn his colleagues at Apple on to a cutting-edge research
center, right in Palo Alto, that was pioneering such ideas.
The Xerox Corporation's Palo Alto Research Center, known as Xerox
PARC, had been established in 1970 to create a spawning ground
for digital ideas. It was safely located, for better and for
worse, three thousand miles from the commercial pressures of
Xerox corporate headquarters in Connecticut. Among its
visionaries was the scientist Alan Kay, who had two great maxims
that Jobs embraced: "The best way to predict the future is to
invent it" and "People who are serious about software should make
their own hardware." Kay pushed the vision of a small personal
computer, dubbed the "Dynabook," that would be easy enough for
children to use. So Xerox PARC's engineers began to develop
user-friendly graphics that could replace all of the command
lines and DOS prompts that made computer screens intimidating.
The metaphor they came up with was that of a desktop. The screen
could have many documents and folders on it, and you could use a
mouse to ,, point and click on the one you wanted to use.

This graphical user interface - or GUI, pronounced "gooey" - was
facilitated by another concept pioneered at Xerox PARC:
bitmapping. Until then, most computers were character-based. You
would type a character on a keyboard, and the computer would
generate that character on the screen, usually in glowing
greenish phosphor against a dark background. Since there were a
limited number of letters, numerals, and symbols, it didn't take
a whole lot of computer code or processing power to accomplish
this. In a bitmap system, on the other hand, each and every pixel
on the screen is controlled by bits in the computer's memory. To
render something on the screen, such as a letter, the computer
has to tell each pixel to be light or dark or, in the case of
color displays, what color to be. This uses a lot of computing
power, but it permits gorgeous graphics, fonts, and gee-whiz
screen displays. Bitmapping and graphical interfaces became
features of Xerox PARC's prototype computers, such as the Alto,
and its object-oriented programming language, Smalltalk. Jef
Raskin decided that these features were the future of computing.
So he began urging jobs and other Apple colleagues to go check
out Xerox PARC.    

Raskin had one problem: Jobs regarded him as an insufferable
theorist or, to use Jobs's own more precise terminology, "a
shithead who sucks." So Raskin enlisted his friend Atkinson, who
fell on the other side of Jobs's shithead/genius division of the
world, to convince Jobs to take an interest in what was happening
at Xerox PARC. What Raskin didn't know was that Jobs was working
on a more complex deal. Xerox's venture capital division wanted
to be part of the second round of Apple financing during the
summer of 1979. Jobs made an offer: "I will let you invest a
million dollars in Apple if you will open the kimono at PARC."
Xerox accepted. It agreed to show Apple its new technology and in
return got to buy 100,000 shares at about $10 each. 1  By the
time Apple went public a year later, Xerox's $1 million worth  of
shares were worth $17.6 million. But Apple got the better end of
the bargain. Jobs and his colleagues went to see Xerox PARC's
technology in December 1979 and, when Jobs realized he hadn't
been shown enough, got an even fuller demonstration a few days
later. Larry Tesler was one of the Xerox scientists called upon
to do the briefings, and he was thrilled to show off the work
that his bosses back east had never seemed to appreciate. But the
other briefer, Adele Goldberg, was appalled that her company
seemed willing to give away its crown jewels. "It was incredibly
stupid, completely nuts, and I fought to prevent  giving jobs
much of anything," she recalled.

Goldberg got her way at the first briefing. Jobs, Raskin, and the
Lisa team leader John Couch were ushered into the main lobby,
where a Xerox Alto had been set up. "It was a very controlled
show of a few applications, primarily a word-processing one,"
Goldberg said. Jobs wasn't satisfied, and he called Xerox
headquarters demanding more.

So he was invited back a few days later, and this time he brought
a larger team that included Bill Atkinson and Bruce Horn, an
Apple programmer who had worked at Xerox PARC. They both knew
what to look for. "When I arrived at work, there was a lot of
commotion, and I was told that Jobs and a bunch of his
programmers were in the conference room," said Goldberg. One of
her engineers was trying to keep them entertained with more
displays of the word-processing program. But Jobs was growing
impatient. "Let's stop this bullshit!" he kept shouting. So the
Xerox folks huddled privately and decided to open the kimono a
bit more, but only slowly. They agreed that Tesler could show off
Smalltalk, the programming language, but he would demonstrate
only what was known as the "unclassified" version. "It will
dazzle [Jobs] and he'll never know he didn't get the confidential
disclosure," the head of the team told Goldberg.

They were wrong Atkinson and others had read some of the
papers published by Xerox PARC, so they knew they were not
getting a full description. Jobs phoned the head of the Xerox
venture capital division to complain; a call immediately came
back from corporate headquarters in Connecticut decreeing that
Jobs and his group should be shown everything. Goldberg stormed
out in a rage.

When Tesler finally showed them what was truly under the hood,
the Apple folks were astonished. Atkinson stared at the screen,
examining each pixel so closely that Tesler could feel the breath
on his neck. Jobs bounced around and waved his arms excitedly.
"He was hopping around so much I don't know how he actually saw
most of the demo, but he did, because he kept asking questions,"
Tesler recalled. "He was the exclamation point for every step I
showed." Jobs kept saying that he couldn't believe that Xerox had
not commercialized the technology. "You're sitting on a gold
mine," he shouted. "I can't believe Xerox is not taking advantage
of this."

The Small talk demonstration showed three amazing features. One
was how computers could be networked; the second was how
objectoriented programming worked. But Jobs and his team paid
little attention to these attributes because they were so amazed
by the third feature, the graphical interface that was made
possible by a bitmapped screen. "It was like a veil being lifted
from my eyes," Jobs recalled. "I could see what the future of
computing was destined to be."

When the Xerox PARC meeting ended after more than two hours, Jobs
drove Bill Atkinson back to the Apple office in Cupertino. He was
speeding, and so were his mind and mouth. "This is it!" he
shouted, emphasizing each word. "We've got to do it!" It was the
breakthrough he had been looking for: bringing computers to the
people, with the cheerful but affordable design of an Eichler
home and the ease of use of a sleek kitchen appliance.
"How long would this take to implement?" he asked.
"I'm not sure," Atkinson replied. "Maybe six months." It was a
wildly optimistic assessment, but also a motivating one.

"Great Artists Steal"

The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the
biggest heists in the chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally
endorsed this view, with pride. As he once said, "Picasso had a
saying--'good artists copy, great artists steal' - and we have
always been shameless about stealing great ideas."
Another assessment, also sometimes endorsed by Jobs, is that what
transpired was less a heist by Apple than a fumble by Xerox.
"They were copier-heads who had no clue about what a computer
could do," he said of Xerox's management. "They just grabbed
defeat from the greatest victory in the computer industry. Xerox
could have owned the entire computer industry."
Both assessments contain a lot of truth, but there is more to it
than that. There falls a shadow, as T. S. Eliot noted, between
the conception and the creation. In the annals of innovation, new
ideas are only part of the equation. Execution is just as
important.

Jobs and his engineers significantly improved the graphical
interface ideas they saw at Xerox PARC, and then were able to
implement them in ways that Xerox never could accomplish. For
example, the Xerox mouse had three buttons, was complicated, cost
$300 apiece, and didn't roll around smoothly; a few days after
his second Xerox PARC visit, Jobs went to a local industrial
design firm, IDEO, and told one of its founders, Dean Hovey, that
he wanted a simple singlebutton model that cost $15, "and I want
to be able to use it on Formica and my blue jeans." Hovey
complied.

The improvements were in not just the details but the entire
concept. The mouse at Xerox PARC could not be used to drag a
window around the screen. Apple's engineers devised an interface
so you could not only drag windows and files around, you could
even drop them into folders. The Xerox system required you to
select a command in order to do anything, ranging from resizing a
window to changing the extension that located a file. The Apple
system transformed the desktop metaphor into virtual reality by
allowing you to directly touch, manipulate, drag, and relocate
things. And Apple's engineers worked in tandem with its
designers-with jobs spurring them on daily-to improve the desktop
concept by adding delightful icons and menus that pulled down
from a bar atop each window and the capability to open files and
folders with a double click.

It's not as if Xerox executives ignored what their scientists had
created at PARC. In fact they did try to capitalize on it, and in
the process they showed why good execution is as important as
good ideas. In 1981, well before the Apple Lisa or Macintosh,
they introduced the Xerox Star, a machine that featured their
graphical user interface, mouse, bitmapped display, windows, and
desktop metaphor. But it was clunky (it could take minutes to
save a large file), costly ($16,595 at retail stores), and aimed
mainly at the networked office market. It flopped; only thirty
thousand were ever
sold.
Jobs and his team went to a Xerox dealer to look at the Star as
soon as it was released. But he deemed it so worthless that he
told his colleagues they couldn't spend the money to buy one. "We
were very relieved," he recalled. "We knew they hadn't done it
right, and that we could-at a fraction of the price." A few weeks
later he called Bob Belleville, one of the hardware designers on
the Xerox Star team. "Everything you've ever done in your life is
shit," Jobs said, "so why don't you come work for me?" Belleville
did, and so did Larry Tesler.

In his excitement, Jobs began to take over the daily management
of the Lisa project, which was being run by John Couch, the
former HP engineer. Ignoring Couch, he dealt directly with
Atkinson and Tesler to insert his own ideas, especially on Lisa's
graphical interface design. "He would call me at all hours, 2
a.m. or 5 a.m.," said Tesler. "I loved it. But it upset my bosses
at the Lisa division." Jobs was told to stop making out-of-
channel calls. He held himself back for a while, but not for
long.

One important showdown occurred when Atkinson decided that the
screen should have a white background rather than a dark one.
This would allow an attribute that both Atkinson and Jobs wanted:
WYSIWYG, pronounced "wiz-ee-wig," an acronym for "What you see is
what you get." What you saw on the screen was what you'd get
when you printed it out. "The hardware team screamed bloody
murder," Atkinson recalled. "They said it would force us to use a
phosphor that was a lot less persistent and would flicker more."
So Atkinson enlisted jobs, who came down on his side. The
hardware folks grumbled, but then went off and figured it out.
"Steve wasn't much of an engineer himself, but he was very good
at assessing people's answers. He could tell whether the
engineers were defensive or unsure of themselves."

One of Atkinson's amazing feats (which we are so accustomed to
nowadays that we rarely marvel at it) was to allow the windows on
a screen to overlap so that the "top" one clipped into the ones
"below" it. Atkinson made it possible to move these windows
around, just like shuffling papers on a desk, with those below
becoming visible or hidden as you moved the top ones. Of course,
on a computer screen there are no layers of pixels underneath the
pixels that you see, so there are no windows actually lurking
underneath the ones that appear to be on top. To create the
illusion of overlapping windows requires complex coding that
involves what are called "regions." Atkinson pushed himself to
make this trick work because he thought he had seen this
capability during his visit to Xerox PARC. In fact the folks at
PARC had never accomplished it, and they later told him they were
amazed that he had done so. "I got a feeling for the empowering
aspect of naivete," Atkinson said. "Because I didn't know it
couldn't be done, I was enabled to do it." He was working so hard
that one morning, in a daze, he drove his Corvette into a parked
truck and nearly killed himself. Jobs immediately drove to the
hospital to see him. "We were pretty worried about you," he said
when Atkinson regained consciousness. Atkinson gave him a pained
smile and replied, "Don't worry, I still remember regions."
Jobs also had a passion for smooth scrolling. Documents should
not lurch line by line as you scroll through them, but instead
should flow. "He was adamant that everything on the interface had
a good feeling to the user," Atkinson said. They also wanted a
mouse that could easily move the cursor in any direction, not
just up-down/left-right. This required using a ball rather than
the usual two wheels. One of the engineers told Atkinson that
there was no way to build such a mouse commercially. After
Atkinson complained to Jobs over dinner, he arrived at the office
the next day to discover that jobs had fired the engineer. When
his replacement met Atkinson, his first words were, "I can build
the mouse."

Atkinson and Jobs became best friends for a while, eating
together at the Good Earth most nights. But John Couch and the
other professional engineers on his Lisa team, many of them
buttoned-down HP types, resented Jobs's meddling and were
infuriated by his frequent insults. There was also a clash of
visions. Jobs wanted to build a VolksLisa, a simple and
inexpensive product for the masses. "There was a tug-of-war
between people like me, who wanted a lean machine, and those from
HP, like Couch, who were aiming for the corporate market," Jobs
recalled.

Both Mike Scott and Mike Markkula were intent on bringing some
order to Apple and became increasingly concerned about Jobs's
disruptive behavior. So in September 1980, they secretly plotted
a re organization. Couch was made the undisputed manager of the
Lisa division. Jobs lost control of the computer he had named
after his daughter. He was also stripped of his role as vice
president for research and development. He was made non-executive
chairman of the board. This position allowed him to remain
Apple's public face, but it meant that he had no operating
control. That hurt. "I was upset and felt abandoned by Markkula,"
he said. "He and Scotty felt I wasn't up to running the Lisa
division. I brooded about it a lot."
..........