Saturday, December 28, 2013

Cab Thoughts 12/28/13

What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)
 
According to an Information Handling Services, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (IHS CERA) report, the energy storage business could grow from $200 million in 2012 to a $19 billion industry by 2017. Read that again.
The parents of Trayvon Martin are talking to publishers about a possible book, according to The New York Times' Julie Bosman.
 
A Christmas story about a Christmas icon:
For its December 1963 issue, Esquire Magazine's managing editor Harold Hayes let his cover designer George Lois pick the cover. The cover became a close-up of boxer Sonny Liston in a Santa Claus hat. Esquire's advertising director would eventually estimate that the magazine lost $750,000 due to the cover. According to Vanity Fair, "Hayes lit the fuse, and Sonny Liston exploded a ragged hole in the country's Norman Rockwell preconceptions of Christmas." An art-history professor at Hunter College proclaimed the cover "one of the greatest social statements of the plastic arts since Picasso's Guernica." For Hayes, Liston-as-Santa was "the perfect magazine cover," he wrote in a 1981 article in Adweek magazine, "a single, textless image that measured our lives and the time we lived them in quite precisely to the moment." Published in a national climate "thick with racial fear," he explained, "Lois' angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season—goodwill to all men, etc.—carried irony more than sentiment."
"Norman Rockwell preconceptions?" "one of the greatest social statements..?" ".. image that measured our lives..?"
Wait a minute here. Race trumps everything in this culture but.....Liston was a criminal and was mob connected. He knocked out the extremely popular Floyd Patterson in 1962, a fight that was opposed by the NAACP because of damage they thought the fight would do to the Civil Rights Movement. And Liston threw a championship fight against Ali. Liston told a sports writer later, “That guy [Ali] was crazy. I didn’t want anything to do with him. And the Muslims were coming up. Who needed that? So I went down. I wasn’t hit.”
Liston was terribly unpopular for a lot of good reasons.
Can this race monster ever get sedated? And is it possible these media types might be taking themselves a little too seriously?
Golden oldie:
 
The EPA’s highest-paid employee and a leading expert on climate change deserves to go to prison for at least 30 months for lying to his bosses and saying he was a CIA spy working in Pakistan so he could avoid doing his real job, or so say federal prosecutors. High quality, well balanced guys running our world. Probably will give seminars with the IMF rapist.
 
What was..... Picasso's Guernica?
 
A barrel of Bakken oil will travel to the Gulf in roughly 8 days, the East coast about 5 days and to the West coast about 10 days faster by rail than by pipeline.
 
Between 1980 and 2010, the hourly wages of young men with advanced degrees went up by 32%. For college graduates, wages went up by 20%. High school graduates saw their wages decline by 8%. And high school dropouts? The wages of high school dropouts went down by 14%.
 
misoneism \mis-oh-NEE-iz-uhm, mahy-soh-\, noun: hatred or dislike of what is new or represents change. Misoneism comes from the Greek miso- + neos meaning "hatred" and "new."
 
The carbon activists are upset over a recent EPA study which predicts coal will lose just 5 percentage points of market share from 2013 to 2035, and renewable energy will gain just 2 percentage points of market share from 2014 to 2040.
Costs of instillation are dropping, it is true. But continuity of energy depends on storage and that just does not exist yet in any reliable, economic way.
 
Ford has announced that it plans to have Start-Stop technology integrated into 70 percent of its North American vehicle fleet by 2017.
 
AAAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnnndddddd.....a painting, Picasso's "Guernica":
File:PicassoGuernica.jpg

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