Cab Thoughts 6/17/13

The meaning of peace is the absence of opposition to socialism. --Karl Marx

 

Rachel Dolezal, the president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, has resigned, according to a letter from her that was posted Monday. Her parents, who are white, allege that she has been lying and presenting herself as black when she is not. She began identifying herself more with the African-American community in 2007, according to her parents. Now why is her identity as another race any different than having another identity as a gender, as Jenner did? And why do we, as a culture, have so much regard for the one decision and so little for the other?

Ross Andersen writes that "cosmology’s hot streak has stalled. Cosmologists have looked deep into time, almost all the way back to the Big Bang itself, but they don’t know what came before it. They don’t know whether the Big Bang was the beginning, or merely one of many beginnings. Something entirely unimaginable might have preceded it. Cosmologists don’t know if the world we see around us is spatially infinite, or if there are other kinds of worlds beyond our horizon, or in other dimensions. And then the big mystery, the one that keeps the priests and the physicists up at night: no cosmologist has a clue why there is something rather than nothing."

There may be limits to our understanding; theories in the future may be beyond proof. They may require faith.

 

The Persian Gulf holds 60% of the world’s oil reserves. Iran alone has reserves of 125 billion barrels of oil, or 10% of the world’s total reserves. Iran pumps nearly 4 million barrels of oil each day.

 

What is.... Open Science Framework?

 

Man is generally considered by statesmen and projectors as the materials of a sort of political mechanics. Projectors disturb nature in the course of her operations on human affairs, and it requires no more than to leave her alone and give her fair play in the pursuit of her ends that she may establish her own designs…. Little else is required to carry a state to the highest degree of affluence from the lowest barbarism but peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice; all the rest being brought about by the natural course of things.  All governments which thwart this natural course, which force things into another channel, or which endeavour to arrest the progress of society at a particular point, are unnatural, and, to support themselves, are obliged to be oppressive and tyrannical.--Adam Smith

 

Sandy Koufax was the youngest player ever inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. To point out how things have changed in the world, he chose not to pitch Game 1 of the Dodger's 1965 championship World Series because it fell on Yom Kippur.

 

Cynosure: n: 1. something that strongly attracts attention by its brilliance, interest, etc.: the cynosure of all eyes. 2. something serving for guidance or direction. An interesting evolution; Cynosure entered English in the late 1500s in reference to the most prominent star in Ursa Minor, Polaris. It can be traced to the Greek word Kynósoura meaning "dog's tail," a description of what the constellation was thought to resemble. 

 

The first great Holocaust in history, the mass murder of Mozarabs (Spanish Catholics culturally assimilated by Islam) in Spain was undertaken by Muslims: One third of the Spanish nation was exterminated. (In the last thousand years, only the Qing extermination of the Dzhugarians was more complete.) 

 

The search for consensus: The suggestions by geneticist Barbara McClintock in the 1940s and ’50s that some DNA sequences can “jump” around chromosomes, and by biochemist Stanley Prusiner in the 1980s that proteins called prions can fold up into entirely the wrong shape and that the misfolding can be transmitted from one protein to another, went so much against prevailing orthodoxy that both researchers were derided mercilessly—until they were proved right and won Nobel prizes.

 

In Spain while fighting for the Republican cause, George Orwell was shot in the throat in front-line fighting.

In a 2014 report analyzing long-term data from the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study (HPFS), investigators found that among the nearly 50,000 study participants, more than 6,000 men were diagnosed with prostate cancer during the 24 years of follow-up. “There appeared to be a slight increase in the risk of prostate cancer among the 25 percent of men who had undergone vasectomy compared with those who had not, and there was also a modest increase in the rates of high grade and lethal prostate cancer,” said Thomas J. Walsh, MD, MS, associate professor of Urology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and Director of the University of Washington Men’s Health Center.
 

The ability of a cat to find its way home is called "psi-traveling." Experts think cats either use the angle of the sunlight to find their way or that cats have magnetized cells in their brains that act as compasses.

 

"We're going to have to change how our body politic thinks, which means we're going to have to change how the media reports on these issues, and how people's impressions of what it's like to struggle in this [economy looks like."--President Obama. "Deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs and structural biases have to be changed."--Hilary Clinton. Where does the certainty of how to think come from? Why does the political elite have such a good grasp of it? And how, exactly, will the religious and political beliefs of the public be changed?

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/03/future-of-medical-care-and-health-care.html

 

Open Science Framework (OSF) is a plan for the improvement of scientific projects. Essentially it is a registration plan. Researchers write down in advance what their study is for and what they think will happen. Then when they do their experiments, they agree to be bound to analyzing the results strictly within the confines of that original plan. This sounds like what every researcher does but the fact that it has emerged as a popular idea for improving research proves it does not. Interestingly, the area it has caught on most firmly has been, historically, the biggest manipulator of research data: Pharmaceuticals.
 

In 1758, 10-year-old Mary Campbell was abducted from her home in Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, by Lenape Indians. The Proclamation Line of 1763 prohibited  settlement beyond the Appalachian watershed but this was repeatedly violated which led to a united Indian effort to push white settlers back to the coast; this was known as Pontiac's War.  Campbell was returned to a European settlement at age 16 in the famous release of captives orchestrated by Colonel Henry Bouquet at the conclusion of Pontiac’s War in November 1764. At the end of a year of dispersed fighting between western Indians, the colonist Bouquet and a force of over 1,000 men managed to convince the allied Indian forces, who faced a winter low on supplies, to surrender without an exchange of fire.

She is said to have lived through the major turning points of late 18th-century America. She was a child taken captive during the imperial competition between Britain and France, an adolescent among the Indians as they attempted to reassert their rights to the American landscape and a woman among colonists as they fought to free themselves of the British empire. She married in 1770 and bore seven children into the new America.

 

This is a recent opinion on the state of the U.S. economy: The U.S. economy ground to a standstill in the first quarter of 2015 wracked by massive job losses in the oil sector, falling personal consumption, weak exports and droopy fixed investment. Real gross domestic product (GDP), the value of the production of goods and services in the US, increased at an abysmal annual rate of just 0.2 percent in Q1 ’15 according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis demonstrating conclusively that 6 years of zero rates have done nothing to improve the real economy, boost demand or reduce unemployment. Economic recovery requires credit expansion, business investment and jobs. The Guardian reports all three of these were severely impacted by the Obama’s goofy plan to push down oil prices in order to destroy the Russian economy. 

Here’s a brief summary: “John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, allegedly struck a deal with King Abdullah in September under which the Saudis would sell crude at below the prevailing market price. That would help explain why the price has been falling at a time when, given the turmoil in Iraq and Syria caused by Islamic State, it would normally have been rising.” (Stakes are high as US plays the oil card against Iran and Russia, Larry Eliot, Guardian)
"Allegedly." As with so much of the world, there is little to support this heartfelt contention. Saudi oil production has actually dropped so...is the price of oil and the wreck it has made in the U.S. production side a function of demand--i.e. is the decline of oil a result, not a cause, of the declining economy? A real science would at least raise the possibility.

"Regardless of firm size, minority-owned firms are less likely to receive loans than non-minority owned firms," the White House stated in a report. "When minority-owned firms do receive financing, it is on average for less money and at a higher interest rate than for those firms owned by non-minorities." One can see where this is going despite, according to the Federal Reserve, African-American owners are more likely to have bad credit and default on business loans. In fact, black owners are three times as likely as white owners to have bankruptcies and judgments against them.

 

Alexander Pope was born in London in 1688 , the only child of middle-aged, Catholic parents. This was the year of the Glorious Revolution, and the broom that swept out Catholic James II and swept in Constitutional reform also brought new restrictions and suspicions upon English Catholics. His Catholicism barred him from politics, from attending university in pursuit of such careers as law and medicine --even from living within ten miles of London. Pope began as an outsider and seemed destined to remain so. In his early teens he contracted a tubercular bone disease--called Pott's Disease--which caused him to be hunchbacked, no more than 4' 6" tall, and he was plagued by various secondary ailments. Many attribute Pope's legendary sourness and satire to such circumstances, agreeing with Samuel Johnson that "The weakness of his body continued through his life, but the mildness of his mind perhaps ended with his childhood." Nonetheless, it is said that Pope was the first English writer to achieve financial independence solely from his writing.



AAAAAaaaaaannnnnddddd..... a map.  This map depicts free states in pink and slave states in dark green. The light green area in the West was composed of a number of territories at that time.

Reynold's Political Map of the United States…,
[New York]: William C. Reynolds, 1856.