Cab Thoughts 8/12/15

"Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists, but too few capitalists."--Chesterton

 

The Environmental Defense Fund has assets of $209 million and since 2008 has had over $540 million from charitable foundations, plus $2.8 million in federal grants. In that time it has spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has fifty-five people on thirty-two federal advisory committees. 

 

German-owned Patriot missiles stationed in Turkey were briefly taken over by hackers, according to media reports. The attack took place on anti-aircraft ‘Patriot’ missiles on the Syrian border. The American-made weapons had been stationed there by the German army to protect Nato ally Turkey. The missile system carried out “unexplained” orders. It was not immediately clear when these orders were carried out and what they were.

The estimated number of people living in the U.S. with a viral STI/STD (sexually transmitted infection/sexually transmitted disease) is over 65 million. One in two sexually active people will contact an STI/STD before the age of 25.

Who is...Robert Oppenheimer?

 

An interesting line from Bordeaux implying Progressivism is societal creationism: Adam Smith rejected the naive myth that beneficial social order, which is unquestionably the result of human action, must therefore be the result of human design.  In short, Smith showed that creationism is as naive a theory of human society as it is of the cosmos.

 

Coca has been used forever in South America because of alleged help the plant gives with altitude sickness. Coca consumption is legal in Bolivia, where it’s considered comparable to coffee, but it is banned by most countries because it is the base ingredient for cocaine. Millions of people in the region chew coca leaves, which have a tiny amount of cocaine, and even Bolivia’s president, Evo Morales, first came to prominence as a leader of coca growers.

The best-known use of the coca leaf in the U.S. is in Coca-Cola, the drink introduced in 1886 by an Atlanta pharmacist as a combination of coca-laced syrup and water. Coca was removed from the recipe about 110 years ago. Today’s formula is flavored with a nonnarcotic extract from the coca plant.

A recent report projected that the cost of manufacturing in the U.S. will fall below costs in China within the next three years, in large part due to the rise of fracking. So total costs in industry might shift back to the U.S. on the basis of energy--and hence transportation --costs. China is far from their target markets.

The White House.gov website has corrected President Obama during his press briefing about the Islamic State when the President said that U.S. forces were "training ISIL."

Recherché: A NYT word meaning, appropriately, "unusual and not understood by most people."  1. a : exquisite, choice b :  exotic, rare  2. excessively refined : affected 3. pretentious overblown. ety: French from past participle of rechercher to seek  out, alteration of recercher, from Middle French. First Known Use: 1722

 

Re: the IRS scandal of targeting groups because of their political beliefs where the IRS agent Lerner took the Fifth(!): The evidence shows “that the Obama IRS scandal is also an Obama DOJ and FBI scandal,” noted Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “The FBI and Justice Department worked with Lois Lerner and the IRS to concoct some reason to put President Obama’s opponents in jail before his re-election. And this abuse resulted in the FBI’s illegally obtaining confidential taxpayer information.” In a recent interview he asks, “How can the Justice Department and the FBI investigate the very scandal in which they are implicated?” How, indeed.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2008/08/politics.html

In her chapter in Climate Change: The Facts, Joanne Nova points out that the entire trillion-dollar industry of climate change policy rests on a single hypothetical assumption, first advanced in 1896, for which to this day there is no evidence.

"The assumption is that modest warming from carbon dioxide must be trebly amplified by extra water vapour—that as the air warms there will be an increase in absolute humidity providing “a positive feedback”. That assumption led to specific predictions that could be tested. And the tests come back negative again and again. The large positive feedback that can turn a mild warming into a dangerous one just is not there. There is no tropical troposphere hot-spot. Ice cores unambiguously show that temperature can fall while carbon dioxide stays high. Estimates of climate sensitivity, which should be high if positive feedbacks are strong, are instead getting lower and lower. Above all, the temperature has failed to rise as predicted by the models."

(For the record, I have no idea if the book referred to above has any merit.)

Enigma was the Germans’ most sophisticated coding machine, necessary to secretly transmitting information. The Enigma machine, invented in 1919 by Hugo Koch, a Dutchman, looked like a typewriter and was originally employed for business purposes. The Germany army adapted the machine for wartime use and considered its encoding system unbreakable. The Brits had broken their first Enigma code as early as the German invasion of Poland and had intercepted virtually every message sent through the occupation of Holland and France. Britain nicknamed the intercepted messages Ultra.

It can be something of a culture shock to move from profit to non-profit. There are many changes that occur with such a move but one is the change in emphasis on process. There is a de-emphasis on performance--it makes nonprofits uncomfortable--and an emphasis on how things are done. Rules homogenize and bleach everything. An example: A waiter was running a 13 man lunch at a tony private club and was really hustling. He rushed on to the elevator and encountered a woman passenger from HR who said to him that he had entered the elevator in a manner inconsistent with safety rules. She demanded he go with her to the boss to discuss this violation--this with his lunchroom waiting. This would never happen in the working world. But process is all and it is unforgiving. It is how people in the future will judge.

 [There is a far-off sound as if out of the sky, like the sound of a string snapping, slowly and sadly dying away. A stillness falls, broken only by the thud of an axe on a tree, far away in the orchard.]--closing stage directions for Anton Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard 

 

If the political philosophers are correct in concluding that the nature of men is such that they will, given the opportunity, seek to take advantage of other men and to impose their will upon them, it is then not unreasonable to assume that these same men would seek to gain control of a monopolistic instrument of coercion such as the political state in order to effectuate such a design. .......The result of this process would be that “order” is no longer solely perceived in terms of the “hygienic” function of eliminating acts or threatened acts of aggression and violence, but instead is perceived as including the organization and structuring of human relationships in order to permit some men, through the use of state coercion, to make the behavior of other men more predictable for their objectives.  That such, in fact, has been the history of man’s efforts with political processes cannot be denied by any realist.--from page 458 of Butler Shaffer’s  September 1975 University of Miami Law Review article, “Violence as a Product of Imposed Order,” as reprinted in the 1979 collection The Politicization of Society (Kenneth S. Templeton, Jr., ed.)

The Vatican Library was founded in 1451 by Pope Nicholas V (born Tommaso Parentucelli). It holds some 180,000 manuscripts, 1.6 million books and 150,000 images and engravings. Last year, non-profit organization *Digita Vaticana Oculus* was founded with the aim of helping fund the digitization of 80,000 of the manuscripts, or 41 million pages. The first 500 manuscripts are now available to view, along with 600 incunabula - books or pamphlets printed before 1500 AD. http://digital.vatlib.it/en/collection

"Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds." This is attributed to  Robert Oppenheimer quoting the Hindu Bhagavad Gita. Oppenheimer was the scientific director of the Manhattan Project, the USA's World War II program to develop the first nuclear weapons. This quote is usually attributed to Oppenheimer on the occasion of the first successful nuclear test, the Trinity test in New Mexico in 1945, after which USA President Truman authorized the atomic bombings of the cities Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan, killing well over 200,000 men, women and children. It is not clear whether Oppenheimer used these words at the time of the test or at a later date. What he did say at the time was, "It works!"

On June 30th, an unexpected blood moon was seen over a significant portion of the United States, and only in the U.S.. As light from the moon or sun enters the atmosphere it gets scattered by particles like water, aerosols, and in this case smoke from wild fires in Canada. Green, blue, and purple colors are sent in all directions but colors with longer wavelengths like red, orange and yellow continue through the atmosphere and remain visible to the human eye.
 

One variation of the black bear is a white bear called the Kermode, ghost, or spirit bear. These bears are very rare. Native Americans believed these white bears had supernatural power.

Of the 30  presidential policy directives (PPD) issued by Obama, 19 have not been released. And for 11 of those, the White House has not disclosed even the subject of the order. "It's not only the public that doesn't have copies. It's also Congress that doesn't have copies," Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists said. "It's a domain of largely unchecked presidential authority. It doesn't mean it's bad, but it's lacking in independent oversight." PPDs have the same legal force as an executive order, forming a body of largely secret law, said Harold Relyea, a political scientist who advised Congress on national security directives before retiring from the Congressional Research Service."The difference is that while executive orders are public by law — they must be published in the Federal Register to be effective —- PPDs are not," he said.

AAAaaaaaannnnnddddddd......a chart: