Saturday, September 21, 2013

Cab Thoughts 9/21/13

  


 
Carefree, mocking, violent--
That is what Wisdom wants us to be.
She is a woman. She loves
Only a man of war.--Zarathustra

                                                             
Kimberley Strassel has an article on an investigation into Jeffrey Thompson and allegations of national campaign money laundering. It has some significant potential as many big names are involved and Thompson had very high access in Washington. The question is, of course, the seriousness not only of the crime but of the Justice Department.

The famous historian Josephus was, as a young man, a Jewish ascetic who lived in the desert. He became a respected Roman through his efforts to talk the Jews out of rebellion and accompanied Titus, the future emperor, on the final destructive attack on Jerusalem.His histories, including the first autobiography, made him one of the great sources of information of the time and he also wrote specifically about Jesus. He is remembered as a traitor to the Jewish cause but did write a polemic against Jewish prejudice.

A single mother of two in the state of Pennsylvania gets annual benefits of $45,000. Her marginal tax rate on any earnings she might gain up to $69,000 is 100%.

An index made up of companies based on their lobbying expenses outperformed the S&P by 11%.

For the first time ever, the National Book Awards' annual '5 Under 35' list is made up of all women writers.

According to NSA leaker Edward Snowden's classified documents, at least one in five applicants for CIA positions have had significant ties to terror groups Hamas, Hezbollah and al-Qaida. Most were translators. Hezbollah spy Nada Nadim Prouty successfully infiltrated both the CIA and FBI as a linguist working counterterrorism. Fewer than 2,500 Americans currently are studying Arabic at colleges across the country.
Who was....Harold J. Smith?

The "dialectic" is not disorder, in an evolutionary sense. It is a conflict of orders.

Assad is the key link in the anti-Western Shiite crescent stretching from Tehran through Damascus and Beirut to the Mediterranean — on which sits Tartus, Russia's only military base outside the former USSR.

Jon Krakauer's book Into The Wild follows Chris McCandless, a hiker who died after surviving for months in the Alaskan wilderness. Krakauer has written an addendum to the book for The New Yorker defending his theory that McCandless' death was caused by accidental poison with wild potato seeds — a theory that was met with wide derision after the seeds were tested and found to be safe. But Krakauer says new research may prove him right after all: A recent paper suggests the seeds shared a toxin with the grass pea, which killed inmates of Vapniarca, a World War II-era concentration camp in the Ukraine. He says the toxin is most dangerous in young men close to starvation.

Golden oldie:

A secretive Syrian military unit at the center of the Assad regime's chemical weapons program has been moving stocks of poison gases and munitions to as many as 50 sites to make them harder for the U.S. to track, according to American and Middle Eastern officials.

Dennis Kimbro's new book, "The Wealth Choice: Success Secrets of Black Millionaires," emphasizes the need to save first to build wealth. "If you cannot save money, the seeds of greatness are not in you," he writes. He then gives some statistics to highlight some of the problem.
The median net worth, or wealth, of white households is 20 times that of black households. In 2009, 35% of black households had no wealth or were in debt. Twenty-four percent of black Americans spend more than they earn, compared with 14% of all Americans. Thirty-two percent of blacks do not save at all, compared with less than 25% of all Americans.
To underscore these statistics, Earl Graves Jr., CEO of Black Enterprise magazine, said blacks are six times as likely as whites to buy a Mercedes-Benz and that blacks who purchase Jaguars have an income one-third less than whites who purchase the same vehicles.

There are 60,000 megawatts of hydro projects in 45 states awaiting final approval at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. That's a huge number, nearly as much as all wind capacity. Additionally, last year, the highest number of licenses--25--were issued for new hydro projects since 2005.

crepuscular \kri-PUS-kyuh-lur\, adjective: Of, pertaining to, or resembling twilight; dim. ety: Crepuscular comes from Latin crepusculum, twilight, from creper, dark, obscure; ultimately of Sabine origin. Sabine!

The Internet is, in essence, a Rube Goldberg system in process if not structure. It breaks down each bit of information and sends it along to routers which pick and choose the next route. Each router contains a regularly updated routing table, similar to a local train sched­ule. If the best pathway is blocked, congested, or damaged, the routing table is updated accordingly and the information is diverted along an alternative path­way, where it will meet the next router in its journey, and the process will repeat. A packet containing a typical web search may traverse dozens of Internet routers and links -- and be diverted away from multiple conges­tion points or offline computers. Thus it fills the original requirement of the Net's creation: The military wanted to create a communication system that could resist enemy attack and not be stymied by a strike on any part of the system.

AAAAANNNNDDDddddd.....a map:

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