Wednesday, January 29, 2014

Cab Thoughts 1/29/14

It is difficult to free fools from the chains they revere. -Voltaire, philosopher and writer (1694-1778)
 
 
 
The United States Army in 1936 ranked twenty-first in the world in size, right behind the armies of Argentina and Switzerland.
 
The European Commission wants to forgo ambitious climate protection goals and pave the way for fracking -- jeopardizing Germany's touted energy revolution in the process.

Gates in an interview said that McCrystal was one of the best military leaders America has produced since the Second World War.
 
Vulcan was the Roman god of fire and forged the weapons and jewelry of the gods. In Greek  he was Hephaestus. He was an artisan--a working god. He had a limp--a wounded god--and married Aphrodite, the goddess of love, who always humiliated him--a vulnerable god. "Volcano" comes from his name as does Vulcanize (to treat rubber with hot sulfur in order to make it more elastic,) and "volcanism," the phenomenon of eruption of molten rock (magma) onto the surface of the Earth or a solid-surface planet or moon. The Vulcan Death Grip, I'm not so sure.
 
A Department of Treasury study using income tax data shows that people who were in the top 1% of income in 1996 had their incomes fall by 26% by 2005. This made their decline disproportionately high across incomes.  More, over half the people who were in the top 1% in 1996 were no longer there in 2005. Should the federal government help this group?

“Why did I have to listen in music humanities to this Mozart? My problem with the core is that it upholds the premises of white supremacy and racism. It’s a racist core. Who is this Mozart, this Haydn, these superior white men? There are no women, no people of color.” -- David Denby quoting a student in his book on Columbia’s core studies.

Rudyard Kipling had been sent by his family from their home in India to live with an unfamiliar family in England; he learned to live in  multiple worlds. These two themes, abandonment and boundary crossing, are prominent in his fiction.
 
Golden oldie:
 
During the brutal winter at Valley Forge, George Washington's troops were starving not because there was no local food available, but because the colonial farmers preferred to go to Philadelphia and sell their food to the British, who could pay more.
 


"Because it is not a moment, it is a sense, an instinct, a flicker of insight and nerve so sud­den that you have to act on it before it is a thought. What do you see? A subtle shift of weight, a lowering of the hands, a leaning forward, a glance, and that is enough to set off a chain of events. They are actions that stem from a thousand tiny in­stincts. But from where we are sitting above the court, we are unable to explain the game through these small moments, and instead talk about the Bulls' second chance scoring and the Rockets' bench production. I understand the need to do that, I have done some of that in this book, but I also know that we are simply describing a simulation of the game, rendering a three-dimensional activity in two dimensions." From Julius Irving's autobiography explaining when he decided not to broadcast basketball any more.

Obama was the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to never publish an article
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/liberal-icon-urges-obama-impeachment/#1Y3jl0kJX3fSGvab.99
Who was....David Oliver Relin?
Obama was the only editor of the Harvard Law Review to never publish an article
Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2014/01/liberal-icon-urges-obama-impeachment/#1Y3jl0kJX3fSGvab.99

Obama was the only editor of the Harvard Law Review never to publish an article.
 
“Lithium-ion, for example, cannot start a car,” said JCI vice president Brian Kesseler. The demands on the battery in a start/stop system are substantial, he said. And lithium-ion batteries, though lighter in weight and with higher energy density, don’t like temperature extremes. Lead-acid is a natural choice.
 
A Vatican monsignor already on trial for allegedly plotting to smuggle 20 million euros ($26 million) from Switzerland to Italy was arrested Tuesday in a separate case for allegedly using his Vatican bank accounts to launder money.
 
The 2014 Modern Language Association conference,  the annual gathering of America’s literature  faculty, will address “embodiment, poverty, climate, activism, reparation, and the condition of being unequally governed . . . to expose key sites of vulnerability and assess possibilities for change.”  But no Milton.
 
Obama focused on gender wage inequality in the State of the Union speech. The inequality chant of the wage inequity between men and women continue to be repeated, like a mindless prayer. But there are countless studies showing that  women and men in the same occupation, with the same skills, experience, education, hours of work and continuous years of full-time work earn exactly the same. Differences in earning is always related to differences in education, hours and continuity. For example, young male doctors earn much more than young female doctors. Yet young male doctors work over 500 hours a year more than young female doctors. But politicians would rather inflame resentment than encourage truth.
 
AAAAAAAAnnnnnnndddddd.........a graph:
 Chart of the Day

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