Cab Thoughts 7/15/15

"I was told by the founding members of the Women's Studies Department at the State University of New York at Albany that I had been brainwashed by male scientists to believe that hormones even existed, much less had any role in the shaping of our identity and character."--Camille Paglia

 

 

Think about that quote above. Is this kind of willful ignorance any different from Creationism--aside from being much worse, I mean?

 

John Bogle is founder and former CEO of The Vanguard Group and author of best-selling book "Common Sense on Mutual Funds: New Imperatives for the Intelligent Investor." He projects long-term stock market returns based on dividend yields and earnings growth. His math is elegantly simple: the current dividend yield of about 2.0 percent plus projected earnings growth of around 5.0 percent produces  a 7.0 percent return. Bogle sees potential for the market's price to earnings ratio (P/E), which is currently around 20, to revert to as low as 15 in coming years. That 25 percent drop equates to about a 3.0 percent annual negative speculative return.When this negative return is subtracted from the 7.0 percent dividend and earnings return, it yields a projected overall return of about 4.0 percent.

Bogle is also projecting 2.0-3.0 percent bond yields over the next decade as well. According to Bogle, a portfolio comprised of a 50/50 balance of stocks and bonds would likely yield around 3.5 percent returns over the next 10 years. "When you factor in the costs associated with index funds, inflation, and taxes, you are actually looking at real returns of nominal to zero," Bogle explained.

This is grim stuff.

 

Who is....Philippa Langley?

 

To many people, even today, high profits are often attributed to high prices charged by those motivated by “greed.”  In reality, most of the great fortunes in American history have resulted from someone’s figuring out how to reduce costs, so as to be able to charge lower prices and therefore gain a mass market for the product.  Henry Ford did this with automobiles, Rockefeller with oil, Carnegie with steel, and Sears, Penney, Walton and other department store chain founders with a variety of products.--Thomas Sowell’s Basic Economics

 

The United States produces more nuclear-generated electricity than any other country, nearly 1/3 of the world's total. The second largest producer is France, which generates more than 3/4 of its electricity in nuclear reactors.

 

The escaped N.Y. murderers were on 'Honor Block' for well-behaved inmates.

 

In 1881, Count Leo Tolstoy sets off on a pilgrimage to the Optina Pustyn  monastery disguised as a peasant. The Russian nobleman was engaged in a spiritual struggle and felt torn between his responsibility as a wealthy landlord to improve the lot of the people, and his desire to give up his property and wander the land as an ascetic. He had started giving away his possessions and declared that the public owned his works, but his wife, Sofya, worried about the financial stability of the couple's 13 children, gained control of the copyrights for all his work published before 1880. Later in his life, Tolstoy embraced Christian anarchism and was excommunicated from the Russian Orthodox Church. Biographer A. N. Wilson wrote "the progress from artist to sage or holy man, which, to western readers seems embarrassing or a bit of a bore, is a fairly common phenomenon among Russian writers..."

 

Cat ownership in childhood has now been reported in three studies to be significantly more common in families in which the child is later diagnosed with schizophrenia or another serious mental illness.

 

Juan Felipe Herrera has been named Poet Laureate  of the United States. From Wiki: Juan Felipe Herrera is a poet, performer, writer, cartoonist, teacher, and activist. Herrera's experiences as the child of migrant farmers have strongly shaped his work. This is from the Times announcement: He is an unusual laureate, the son of California migrant workers, a man whose poems are filled with hard labor and indeterminate spaces, an awareness of chromosomatic imperialism and of Greyhound Bus stations of the soul. He understands people who are drained from the day's hassle.
Maybe not Coleridge.

 

One need go no further than the debate over the minimum wage to see the complexity and conflict in the minds of well meaning people looking at the same data. What one should also note is the tendency for one side of the debate to interject moral outrage mixed with reproach. Reproach and outrage are not elements of thoughtful discussion or debate.

 

One of the daily world's stranger stories is that of Philippa Langley's successful search for the body of Richard III. She was at site of the old Greyfriars Church in Leicester, England. She'd been working on a screenplay about Richard III and was curious to see where the maligned king had been buried nearly 500 years earlier. It was 2004 and the church had long since been dismantled, and everyone simply accepted that Richard's grave had been lost with it. The most popular theory about Richard's remains held that they'd at some point been tossed into the River Soar by an angry mob. As she walked across the parking lot, "I had goosebumps," she says. "I just knew I was walking on his grave." After six years of campaigning, Langley persuaded the Leicester City Council to let her hire archaeologists and conduct a dig in the parking lot. She funded it with crowdfunding from Richard III groups throughout the world. She dug with a backhoe exactly where she had experienced the "goosebumps" six years earlier. Bingo!

Sometimes the magic works.

 

Contumacy: n: 1. obstinate and willful rebelliousness or resistance to authority; insubordination; disobedience.  2. the willful refusal of a person to appear before a court or to comply with a court order. Late 14th century, from Latin contumācia, from contumāx obstinate; related to tumēre to swell, be proud. Also "contumacious" and  "contumely":  harsh language or treatment arising from haughtiness and contempt; also :  an instance of such language or treatment

 

Women in Whitesville, Delaware, could be charged with disorderly conduct if they propose marriage to a man.

 

Cause and effect update: Two Canadian brothers, a Dutch woman and a British woman were arrested in Malaysia because they stripped naked at the summit of Mount Kinabalu for selfies. The mountain was shaken by an earthquake a week later in which at least 16 people were killed. The indigenous people of Sabah believe the tourists' behavior on May 30, deemed disrespectful of local culture, angered the spirit of the mountain and was the reason for the earthquake.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/06/flocking-think-tanks.html

 

Troy, according to calculations made some 900 years later by the North African Greek, Eratosthenes, was sacked and burned in the year 1184 B.C.. The city itself, long thought to be as legendary, has been identified -- or rather, ten distinct Trojan settlements have been identified at Hissarlik, in present-day Turkey, each built upon the ruins of the others. The Troy of Homer and Virgil, if it existed, is most likely "Troy VIIA," a settlement that appears to have been destroyed by fire at about the time calculated by Eratosthenes.
The poem that immortalized the possible town and war, The Aeneid by the Roman Virgil, itself almost didn't survive. Virgil worked on his epic for the last decade of his life; as he was dying -- from a fever contracted while on a voyage to Greece to gather more research for the poem -- he instructed that the Aeneid be destroyed because of its unfinished state. Emperor Augustus, whose reign the poem was designed, in part, to glorify, countermanded his wishes.



President Obama's fast track of his "great job creation" bill was defeated in a 126-302 procedural vote which stumbled over what is known as the Trade Adjustment Assistance. Following Pelosi's comments that "its defeat is the only way we will be able to slow down fast track," and "people would rather have a job than assistance", the defeat of a measure to provide aid to workers displaced by trade deals means the fast-tracking of the TPP is done (for now).

 

Studies show that 85% of police officers, 80% of regional pilots, and 48% of air-traffic controllers nod off on the job. Forty-one percent of medical workers admit they have made fatigue-related mistakes.

Politicians will find redistribution from widely dispersed disorganized groups (e.g. taxpayers and consumers) to easily-identifiable, concentrated interests (e.g. labor, business, farmers and the elderly) far more attractive than egalitarian transfers.  Similarly, the shortsightedness effect indicates that transfers which provide easily identifiable current benefits while imposing future costs (e.g. slower economic growth) that are difficult to identify will be attractive to political entrepreneurs. These are the types of reshuffles one can expect from the political process.  There is little reason to believe that they will be egalitarian.-- Richard E. Wagner’s 1988 essay “Public Choice and Constitutional Order,”

 

The money supply continues to rise. Dramatically. If MV = PQ where M is the supply of money, V is the velocity of money (how quickly and often it is spent), Q is quantity of goods to buy and P is price of goods--if the supply of M increases, the quantity of goods is relatively stable, why isn't the price of goods rising? Why isn't there inflation? Because, for reasons no one understands, velocity of money is low and declining.

After a torrid 2014, in which there was a 24% surge in beef prices which central planners blamed on everything except their policies, in May the Beef and Veal price index just rose to a new all time high of 260.8, up 12.3% from a year ago, and up 30% in the past two years.

The troubled former head of the IMF--The International Monetary Fund!!!--whose reign at the top of the international  organization ended dramatically after an alleged 2011 rape scandal in a NYC hotel, Dominique Strauss-Kahn finally got some good news when a French court cleared him of "aggravated pimping" charges in which he was accused of helping to operate a prostitution ring of seven women out of the Carlton Hotel in the northern French city of Lille.  At his trial in February, Strauss-Kahn calmly fended off the accusations, saying that while he was a libertine who enjoyed group sex, he was unaware any of the women attending the soirees had been paid to be there. THE IMF!!!!

This month is the 20th anniversary of Bill Clinton’s 100-point National Homeownership Strategy which sought to raise homeownership rates in America to record levels — and it did. Unfortunately, the foundation upon which this miracle was built began to crack in mid-2007 and by the summer of 2008, the two entities which had for years underwritten the American Dream were in receivership. A new study by The Urban Institute has more on homeownership by age group: For 30- to 34-year-olds ... homeownership rose from 26 percent in 1940 to 56 percent in 1960 and continued climbing to 61 percent in 1980. The homeownership rate for adults in their early 30s then declined to 53 percent in the 1980s, grew by 1 percentage point between 1980 and 2007, and plummeted to 44 percent in 2013. Given the parallel decline in homeownership for 25- to 29-year-olds, it is unclear whether working-age Americans will ever regain 1980’s peak homeownership rate.




AAAAaaaaannnnnndddd.....a poem by Poet Laureate  of the United States, Juan Felipe Herrera:

 “Are You Doing the New Amerikan Thing”

For all movement, ex-movement and anti-movement affiliates and
for Brandi Treviño,1978.

Are you doing that new Amerikan thing?
Sweet thing, handsome thing, that thing about coming out, all the
way out
About telling her, her telling him, telling us, telling them that we
Must kill the revolutionary soul, because it was only a magical thing
A momentary thing, a thing outside of time, a sixties thing, a sacred
thing
A brown beret thing, a grassroot thing, a loud thing, a spontaneous
thing
A Viet Nam thing, a white radical thing, an Aztlán thing, a Cholo thing
A nationalist thing, a for Pochos only thing, a college thing, an
August 29,1970
Chicano Moratorium thing, an outdated thing, a primitive thing.
Sweet thing, handsome thing, that thing about coming out, all the
way out
On a Communist scare thing, a Red thing, a let’s go back to war thing
Because we must stop the El Salvador thing because it could lead to
another
Nicaragua
Thing because we need Reagan and Order in the Americas thing.
Are you doing that new Amerikan thing?
The chains, pins and leather thing
The aluminum thing
The transparent plastik underwear thing
The lonely boulevard thing
The hopeless existentialist thing
The neo-Paris melancholy thing
The nightmare thing
The urban artist thing
The laughing thing
The serious suicide thing
The New Amerikan Chicano thing
The end of the world thing
The victim thing
The enlightened quasi-political thing
The university hustle for the pie thing
The We Are the Community thing
Are you doing that new Amerikan thing?
The nacimos para morir thing
The yo te protejo thing
The Dios y Hombre thing
The quién sabe thing
The así nomás thing
The todo se acaba thing
The la vida es un misterio thing
The quisiera ser thing
The vatofirme thing
The chavala de aquellas thing
The no me toques thing
The no quiero problemas thing
Are you doing that new Amerikan thing?
Doing the be clean be seen by the right people thing
Doing the be macho again because women like it anyway thing
Doing the look out for number one because you tried the group
thing thing
Doing the be submissive again because after all a woman needs a man
thing
Doing the Army thing because it really pays more than hanging
around the Barrio thing
Doing the women’s draft thing because you can do it better than the
men thing
Doing the purity thing because no one got to be president by eating
greasy tacos
thing
Doing the spa thing because there you will meet the right tall & dark
& blond & tender thing
Doing the homophobic thing because you caught yourself lusting at
an abberration thing
Are you doing that new Amerikan thing?
Sweet thing, handsome thing, that thing about coming out, all the
way out
About telling her, her telling him, telling us, telling them that we
Must kill the revolutionary soul?
From Exiles of Desire, 1983.