Cab Thoughts 2/5/14

Unless you can watch your stock holding decline by 50% without becoming panic–stricken, you should not be in the stock market.” --Warren Buffett

Stephen Fincher, over the years, has received farm subsidies totaling $3,483,824. He has been the Representative for Tennessee's 8th congressional district since 2011. As a Rube-publican, he is probably opposed to "big government."

The Fed has facilitated another credit-fueled recovery, wherein the US consumer is, again, borrowing aggressively against a collateral base that is defined by paper wealth, rather than real income growth. The stock market has replaced the housing market as that collateral base against which the US consumer is now borrowing hand-over-fist. (from an economic letter arguing that the same problems that created the 2008 bubble is now at work again, caused by the very efforts used to blunt the 2008 bubble.)

Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, by which Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin agreed to divide up central Europe in 1939, was not repudiated by the Russian government until 1989. Such a renunciation, however, did not mean independence for the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, which were invaded by Soviet troops in 1940 and still ruled from the Kremlin half a century later. Since then the Soviet Union has collapsed, and sovereign Baltic governments have joined NATO and the European Union. Mr. Putin recently defended the notorious bargain with Nazi Germany as a step by the Soviet Union to "ensure its interest and its security on its western borders." Breaking eggs --and heads--again for the bigger omelet picture.

Who is....Lenny Skutnik?

Ah, capitalism. In Windfall: The Booming Business of Global Warming, journalist McKenzie Funk looks into how some entrepreneurs and even some nations stand to benefit from a changing climate. Topics range from investors buying water rights and farmland around the world, to private wildfire protection services for affluent homeowners, to gates preventing surging water threatening cities, to infrastructure companies supporting melting permafrost, to the nation of Greenland, which will be able to exploit new mineral deposits as its ice melts.

Woodrow Wilson broke a century-old presidential tradition of delivering the State of the Union message only in writing by making a speech of it.

Atlas: A book containing maps of various locations. Atlas was a titan condemned to hold up the sky on his shoulders after the titans were defeated by the Olympians. Often he is erroneously pictured as holding up the world. He is identified with the Atlas mountains in North Africa and also appears in the story of the labors of Hercules. He is associated with "enduring."

There are 10,750 hedge funds in the U.S. with 2.2 trillion dollars in assets. 1600 of those funds control 99% of the total assets and 350 of the funds control 60%

Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the four-star general who was forced to resign from the military after his aides were quoted in a Rolling Stone article making disparaging remarks about members of the Obama administration, spent the bulk of his career in special operations, very elite units that carry out highly classified missions. In Iraq, he eventually became the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command, tasked with hunting down and killing insurgents. In McChrystal's memoir, My Share of the Task, he describes a culture gap between the military and civilian worlds. The lack of understanding, he says, complicated the U.S. war effort in Afghanistan and bred distrust between the White House and the Pentagon. Anyone reading about the Joint Chiefs during the Cuban Crisis will think that distrust is well earned.

Covey's "7 Habits of Highly Effective People" has some astonishing observations that have some gross experimental support. One is this: The impression a person makes is made 10$ with words, 30% with tone of voice and 60% nonverbal behavior. If true, this is really worth paying attention to.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/square-man-in-round-nature.html

One of Bush's speechwriters has noted the similarity of Obama's State of the Union Speech this year and one of Bush's. Big surprise. In 2011, Alvin Felzenberg, presidential scholar and former spokesman for the 9/11 Commission, wrote an op-ed for U.S. News and World Report stating the Obama's speech "contained enough recycled ideas and lines lifted from speeches of others to make historians wince." I'm sure this was unintentional. But when generalities and cliches are the backbone of your--and everyone's--speech, it is inevitable.

Oscar Pistorius' murder trial will have a dedicated 24-hour television channel in South Africa.

Theoretical high energy density available from a metal-air battery type has stimulated research into variants of these types. Regarding the lithium air battery:  The quality of the air has to be better than that of the ambient air; during the charge/discharge cycle, one unwanted side reaction is the production of oxygen gas inside the battery; various forms of lithium oxides are formed extraneous to the process and interfere with the electrodes like sulphation; it is not easily recharged over many times. interestingly, energy density is close to maximum for current metal batteries.

Rogue waves can be as high as 100 feet or more. In 1737 , a huge wave estimated to be 210 feet in height hit Cape Lopatka, Kamchatka (NE Russia). At the Eagle Island lighthouse (1861), water broke the glass of the structure's east tower and flooded it, implying a wave that surmounted the 130 ft. cliff and overwhelmed the 85 ft. tower.

 

 

AAAAnnnnnnddddd......a picture of a stallion fight in China: