Saturday, July 25, 2015

Cab Thoughts 7/25/15

"We give this solemn warning to Kaiser Wilhelm: The Skibbereen Eagle has its eye on you." --from an editorial that appeared in a provincial Irish newspaper in the fateful year 1914


The U.S. has the highest gun ownership rate in the world. There are 89 guns for every 100 Americans. In England and Wales, there are 6 guns for every 100.

From Albert Venn Dicey's 1905 study, "Lectures on the Relationship Between Law & Public Opinion in England During the Nineteenth Century:" Parliament in most instances pays little regard to any general principle whatever, but attempts to meet  in the easiest and most off-hand manner some particular grievance or want. Parliament is guided not by considerations of logic but by the pressure which powerful bodies can bring to bear upon its action.

"Using ancient DNA, we were able to show that Kennewick Man is more closely related to Native Americans than any other population," Dr. Morten Rasmussen, a researcher at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark and an author of the study, said in a written statement. But isn't it likely he was a forefather of the northwestern American Indian anyway so isn't the genetic similarity inevitable? Isn't this like saying the Mayan's are related to the Sioux? What question does that answer?

Cavil: V: 1. to raise irritating and trivial objections; find fault with unnecessarily (usually followed by at or about ): He finds something to cavil at in everything I say. 2. to oppose by inconsequential, frivolous, or sham objections: to cavil each item of a proposed agenda. ety: Cavil entered English in the mid-1500s from the Latin cavillārī meaning "to jeer, scoff, quibble."

Toyota's new communications chief Julie Hamp, an American and its first senior woman executive, was arrested on suspicion of illegally bringing pain killers into Japan just two months after her appointment. 57 addictive Oxycodone pills were found in a small parcel labeled "necklaces" that was sent from the United States and addressed to Hamp in Japan. The pills were in packets or buried at the bottom of the parcel, which also contained toy pendants and necklaces. She was fiercely defended by the CEO. Then she was gone.

For local governments, a key change came in 2013 when Moody's decided it would no longer rely on cities' and states' targets for investment returns when it calculates pension liabilities-one of the biggest costs shouldered by local governments. Moody's own estimates are more conservative, meaning holes in pension funds look bigger.
As WSJ reports, rather than admit that their return assumptions are indeed unrealistic as suggested by Moody's, local governments have opted to drop Moody's instead. More than a year before Moody's Investors Service downgraded Chicago's bonds to junk status, one of its senior analysts asked top city officials to explain why the third-largest U.S. city was healthier than a troubled island commonwealth flirting with insolvency, according to people familiar with the conversation."Help me understand why Chicago is different than Puerto Rico?" said the Moody's analyst, Rachel Cortez, during a February 2014 meeting that Mayor Rahm Emanuel attended, two of these people said.

Who is...Bluebeard?

Ancient Egypt stands among the most closely controlled economies in history. No matter who farmed it -- Egyptian peasant, Greek settler, temple priest -- most land was royal land. As such, Cleopatra's functionaries determined and monitored its use with an extensive and meticulous efficiency. Only with government permission could you fell a tree, breed pigs, turn your barley field into an olive garden. The greatest of Egypt's industries -- wheat, glass, papyrus, linen, oils, and unguents -- essentially constituted royal monopolies.
 
It is curious that gays want to marry and that heterosexuals just want to live together.

The infallibility of the Pope in matters of dogma was declared by Pius IX at the First Vatican Conference in 1870. It was not delivered to consensus approval. The Pope's recent announcement about poverty, warming and the West are not covered by infallibility but are nonetheless important. Many will dismiss them because the Pope is from a South American revolutionary culture. That, regrettably, is not enough. These problems and questions are real and constant and they need discussion. I would start with which state, where centralized power has been used to solve the problems the Pope calls attention to, we should emulate.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-filter-of-memory-and-motive.html


Bluebeard is the nickname of Raoul, the blue-bearded main character in a fairy tale by Charles Perrault (1628-1703). In the story, Bluebeard's wife finds the bodies of his previous wives in a room she was forbidden to enter. The feminine equivalent of the word could be black widow.

"Rolling the dice" is not generating a random event. You do not get a random number when you throw a pair of dice. There is only one way to get to 2 or 12, but there are many combinations that will yield, for example 7 (1&6, 2&5, 3&4, 4&3 (not the same as 3&4), 5&2, and 6&1).

The Marxists have had, as a basic tenet, the belief that the family was an impediment to egalitarianism. "Abolition of the Family! Even the most radical flare up at this infamous proposal of the Communists," is a line from "The Communist Manifesto." Anne Applebaum has written the historian Stuart Finkel observed that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. When Lenin launched the New Economic Plan in the 1920sApplebaum notes, the "systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated." (The Iron Curtain) The Nazis did the same. Any sub-division, any community, is the enemy of the Collective.
"Resistance is futile." Diversity is displaced one level up to the "many-faced god."

New "Heroes of Beslan:" Attackers fired semiautomatic weapons at a child's birthday party in Detroit, killing one person and wounding nine others, authorities said. About 400 people attended the party, but there are no leads so far, and witnesses are not cooperating, Assistant Police Chief Dolunt said.
Attacking a child's birthday party with automatic weapons is probably the result of loose gun laws. Those guys probably would behave just fine if they had more gun laws.
But state and city rules on gun ownership are regarded as tough. Every legal gun buyer in Michigan, and particularly Detroit, must be approved by the local police at least twice each and every time they purchase a gun and undergo a background check by the federal government.
Detroit police chief James Craig has repeatedly called on "good" and "law-abiding" Detroiters to arm themselves against criminals in the city.

"What is Enlightenment?" is not Kant's best work, but it is one of his shortest and most anthologized, and it offers a handy account of Enlightenment, describing it as an eternal yearning for intellectual autonomy, rooted deep in human nature. This yearning had hitherto been cruelly frustrated, but Kant thought that things might be about to change. Various recent developments-the American revolution and the reforming government of his own sovereign master Frederick the Great-seemed to offer "indications" that "obstacles to universal Enlightenment" were being gradually removed, and he therefore permitted himself to salute the dawning of an "age of Enlightenment."
According to Ferrone, however, the title of "father of the Enlightenment" does not belong to Kant but to Hegel a generation later. Kant's "age of Enlightenment" was the expression of a bland hope for perpetual peace, but Hegel was more circumspect and pessimistic. When he took up the idea of Enlightenment in his Phenomenology in 1807, he treated it as part of a tragedy in which a shallow and conceited form of rationality led to disaster. He also rooted it in France rather than America or Germany, and treated it as a prelude to the storming of the Bastille, followed by revolution, suspicion and the Terror. (From Jonathan Rée's review of The Enlightenment: History of an Idea by Vincenzo Ferrone)

In the Old West, owning a running iron, a type of iron that could be used to change a brand, marked a man as a cattle rustler to be dealt with by the law if he was lucky, vigilantes if not.

For people around the world, except sub-Saharan Africans, about 1 to 3 percent of their DNA comes from Neanderthals, our close cousins who disappeared roughly 39,000 years ago. Scientists said recently a jawbone unearthed in Romania, of a man who lived about 40,000 years ago, boasts the most Neanderthal ancestry ever seen in a member of our species. He carries more Neanderthal DNA than any other present-day or ancient modern human seen to date," said Harvard Medical School geneticist David Reich. 6 to 9 percent of this individual's genome is derived from a Neanderthal ancestor.

The emotional fallout of ostracism is so poignant that the brain registers it as physical pain.

In the Nineteenth Century, both the size of the global human population and its ability to conduct modern warfare depended on nitrates, as a fertilizer and a constituent of gunpowder. The largest sources of naturally occurring nitrates are produced as animal waste, mostly in the form of bat and bird guano (first brought to Europe in 1804 by the German naturalist and world explorer Alexander von Humbolt, and then extracted in ever greater amounts and exported by British merchants.) Upon exhaustion of the guano source, they turned to sodium nitrate. Wars were fought over it in South America. In 1909 a chemist named Fritz Haber synthesized ammonia (which contains nitrogen that could be processed into nitrates) in his laboratory, and a year later the issues of industrial production were resolved by Carl Bosch of the German firm BASF. The process of synthesizing ammonia, known as the Haber-Bosch process, shaped the subsequent course of world history. Anyone worried about industrialization should think of this incredible aid to farming and food production.



AAAaaaaannnnnddddd...a picture of a first edition:
zorro

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