Saturday, May 30, 2015

Cab Thoughts 5/30/15


"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -Frederic Bastiat, 1848 
 
 
Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, The New York Times reports. Kushner, in an email to the Times, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with Charlie Hebdo's "cultural intolerance" and promotion of "a kind of forced secular view." Those views, the Times added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event. Carey told the Times that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression. "A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?" he said in an email to the newspaper. Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel The Satanic Verses, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are "horribly wrong." In a statement Sunday, PEN said: "We do not believe that any of us must endorse the content of Charlie Hebdo's cartoons in order to affirm the importance of the medium of satire, or to applaud the staff's bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats." 

Who is....Clara Petacci?
 
Mary Celeste was a British ship built in 1861. In 1872 she was discovered completely deserted. The ship was still in an excellent condition, none of the cargo had been stolen, and there was a supply of food that would have lasted for several more months. The crew's personal possessions were all found onboard, but all the crew members themselves had disappeared - along with one lifeboat. The weather conditions were good for sailing, and the seamen were all strong and able. 
 
Recently there was a sort-of Italian night, with appropriate food and wine--and speakers, the nephew of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of  “The Leopard.”  He has restored the ancestral home. The book was made into a movie but it is a towering tribute to the written word, a beautiful, wistful and melancholy description of a family, a state and a way of life in decline. It is almost unbearable in its profound and simple genius.
The nephew (and his wife) are erudite and thoughtful people, with large and far-ranging interests--more musical and less literary than I expected. (They also have a few little businesses, cooking, boarding and the like.)They never once mention the obvious connection of "The Leopard" to Pittsburgh. The story is loosely written about the author's ancestor who lived during the Garibaldi revolution and ends in 1910. The author hoped to continue living in the old mansion his ancestor lived in but, appropriate to the theme, it was hit during the Second War by allied bombers. He writes of the building's beautiful interior:  “From the ceiling the gods, reclining on gilded couches, gazed down smiling and inexorable as a summer sky. They thought themselves eternal; but a bomb manufactured in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was to prove the contrary in 1943.”
 
Scientists have explored only 1% of the ocean depths.
 
The great Ralph Waldo Emerson began to decline into dementia but still would speak publicly, often prompted by his daughter, Ellen. He famously said,  "Strange that the kind Heavens should keep us on earth after they have destroyed our connection with things." The other famous story of Emerson is, while at Longfellow's funeral when they stood by the coffin, he said, "Where are we? What house? And who is this sleeper?"
 
Jon Krakauer has done some fine books but I saw him interviewed on Charlie Rose and he was terrible, imprecise and lost.
 
"Bootleggers and Baptists" is a phrase used by Yandle to describe the coalition of opposing groups and the cynicism of politics. Evangelical Christians were prominent in political activism for restricting the sale of alcohol. Bootleggers sold alcohol illegally, and got more business if legal sales were restricted. “Such a coalition makes it easier for politicians to favor both groups. … [T]he Baptists lower the costs of favor-seeking for the bootleggers, because politicians can pose as being motivated purely by the public interest even while they promote the interests of well-funded businesses. … [Baptists] take the moral high ground, while the bootleggers persuade the politicians quietly, behind closed doors.”

 
The SS Sultana was a Mississippi River steamboat paddlewheeler that exploded on April 27, 1865 in the greatest maritime disaster in United States history. An estimated 1,600 of its 2,427 passengers died when three of the ship's four boilers exploded and it sank near Memphis.
 
Allometry refers to the way in which two variables are associated. It can be 1:1—the longer the fore-arm, the longer the total arm, or it can show deviations. For examples, the larger a mammal is, the more of its body consists of bone. Why? Because the strength of bone only goes up as the square of bone length whereas body weight goes up as the cube—thus larger bodies, weighing more, require relatively more bone.  And huge Godzilla-like monsters are impossible as their weight increases as cube, it must be compensated by a comparable increase in the cross-section of the two dimensional weight-bearing bone.
 
Golden oldie:
 
An internal memo from Leon Rodriguez, the director and co-chair of the DHS' "Task Force on New Americans," said, "This report outlines an immigrant integration plan that will advance our nation’s global competitiveness and ensure that the people who live in this country can fully participate in their communities." Sources at the Department of Homeland Security report that the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services is reallocating significant resources to sending letters to all 9,000,000 green card holders urging them to naturalize prior to the 2016 election. This means that DHS is not only rushing green card holders toward citizenship before the next election, but also jamming previous visa holders toward green card status. 
 
Here is a breakthrough in thought from Mrs. Clinton: “Far too many women are still denied critical access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth. All the laws we’ve passed don’t count for much if they’re not enforced,” Clinton said. “Rights have to exist in practice — not just on paper,” Clinton argued. “Laws have to be backed up with resources and political will. And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed.” Yes. So........the state plans to do what with religious and cultural beliefs?
 
46 million light-years distant, spiral galaxy NGC 2841 can be found in the northern constellation of Ursa Major. It has a diameter of over 150,000 light-years.
 
Maudlin: adjective:1. tearfully or weakly emotional; foolishly sentimental: a maudlin story of a little orphan and her lost dog. 2. foolishly or mawkishly sentimental because of drunkenness. Maudlin entered English in the early 1500s. It stems from the Greek word Magdalēnḗ referring to Mary Magdalene, who was portrayed in art as a weeping penitent.
 
In 1945, “Il Duce,” Benito Mussolini, and his mistress, Clara Petacci, were shot by Italian partisans who had captured the couple as they attempted to flee to Switzerland.
 
In the 1930s the U.S. Mint maintained a “Collector’s Window.”  You could go up to the window and exchange circulating coins for newly minted ones, even if they’d not yet been officially released.  This was never a problem until Roosevelt decided not to release the $20 gold coins they had just minted — over 400,000 of them! — in early 1933.  (He wanted to limit ownership of gold to keep it from draining demand for paper money.) Some few people exchanged old gold coins for the new ones and some of those were recently found in an old safe. Even thought he government had received old $20 dollar coins for the new ones (accidentally) and had not lost anything, the government confiscated them. They won the first case but recently lost the second. The government is fighting over $11,300 worth of coins, minus the huge legal fees involved and in spite of the fact they would get a lot back in estate taxes.
 
Bill and Hillary were the only First Couple to be fingerprinted by the FBI.
 
"Yet sweatshops are only a symptom of poverty, not a cause, and banning them closes off one route out of poverty.  At a time of tremendous economic distress and protectionist pressures, there’s a special danger that tighter labor standards will be used as an excuse to curb trade.  When I defend sweatshops, people always ask me: But would you want to work in a sweatshop?  No, of course not.  But I would want even less to pull a rickshaw.  In the hierarchy of jobs in poor countries, sweltering at a sewing machine isn’t the bottom.”--Nicholas Kristof, NYT, 2009
 
There is an interesting opinion about the current wave of people trying to get from North Africa to Europe. In exchange for a diplomatic relationship with the U.S., Gadhafi abandoned terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. But there was more; the good Colonel was willing to block human trading that emanated from Libya. "Tomorrow Europe might no longer be European, and even black,” threatened Gadhafi, “as there are millions who want to come in. We don’t know if Europe will remain an advanced and united continent, or if it will be destroyed, as happened with the barbarian invasions.”
According to Richard Spencer, Middle East editor of The Telegraph, as part of an agreement he made with Silvio Berlusconi’s government, “Col. Gadhafi had agreed to crack down on the trade in people.” And Libya had a navy. Under the same accord with the Berlusconi government, Gadhafi’s admiralty stemmed the tide of migrants into Europe.
Because he cracked down on their customary trade, the Zuwarans of Libya rose up against Gadhafi; the real reason for the Libyan uprising, in 2011, was not the hunger for democracy, it was in opposition to Gadhafi's human trade restraints. And the removal of the good Colonel by the Americans also removed the human trafficking deterrent.
 
'My object was to terrorize so as to force society to look attentively at those who suffer.'  Thus spake Ravachol who, with Kropotkin, embodied the Anarchism of the Nineteenth Century. Property and oppressive structure were seen as the enemy with a Rousseau-like optimism; they saw a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him. Six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could qualify as a tyrant. Their deaths were gestures.
 
Inclusive fitness is a concept developed by William Hamilton. In Darwin’s system, natural selection refers to individual differences in reproductive success in nature, where reproductive success is the number of surviving offspring produced. Hamilton enlarged the concept to include effects on other relatives—that is, not just fitness or reproductive success but inclusive fitness, defined (roughly) as an individual’s reproductive success plus effects on that of relatives, each devalued by the appropriate degree of relatedness.



AAAAAaaaaaannnnnddddd.....a photo, by amateur astronomer Dave Jurasevich identified on 2008 July 6 in the complex Cygnus region as The Soap Bubble Nebula: 
See Explanation.  Clicking on the picture will download  the highest resolution version available.

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