Cab Thoughts 11/11/15

[T]o indulge in any racial preference is not to award to a Race, but to the State the power to create differing classes of citizens, and to rule on who shall belong to each class.--Mamet

John Boehner's decision to resign is a mystery to me. But it seems to be a mystery to everyone. The whole thing looks to be a good example of how little insight the free press is offering.

During eclipses Aristotle noted Earth's shadow on the Moon was always circular. For that to be true, Earth had to be a sphere, because only spheres cast circular shadows via all light sources, from all angles, and at all times. If Earth were a flat disk, the shadow would sometimes he oval. And some other times, when Earth's edge faced the Sun, the shadow would be a thin line. Only when Earth was face-on to the Sun would its shadow cast a circle.

At a site on the edge of the desert escarpment at Saqqara, overlooking the capital city of Memphis, an Egyptian nobleman named Imhotep supervised the construction of a pyramid of six steps to house the tomb of Netjerikhet (Djoser), a pharaoh who reigned in the twenty-seventh century BCE. The Step Pyramid at Saqqara was the first monument in the world to be built entirely of stone. Rising to a height of 204 feet, it was the tallest building of its time. And its construction marked the beginning of the Pyramid Age. Pyramid building required a highly organised supply system involving quarries, mines, shipyards, storehouses, workshops and a labour force of thousands. The pyramid itself consisted of 600,000 tons of limestone blocks. Its main burial chamber was made up of ten blocks of granite, each weighing twelve and a half tons, which had been transported by river barge from quarries at Aswan. But the construction went further. The pyramid was set within a forty-acre complex of buildings enclosed by a mile-long rectangle of perimeter walls built of fine white stone. It is estimated that the quantity of copper chisels needed to cut such a vast assembly of stone blocks would have amounted to seventy tons' worth, delivered to workshops from newly opened copper mines in the eastern desert. --from The Fortunes of Africa: A 5000-Year History of Wealth, Greed, and Endeavor by Martin Meredith

Who is....Sidney Blumenthal?

Harbin-based Heilongjiang Longmay Mining Holding Group, or Longmay Group, the biggest coal miner in northeast China which has been struggling to reduce massive losses in recent months as a result of the commodity collapse, just confirmed China's "hard-landing" has arrived when it announced it would cut 100,000 jobs or 40% of its entire 240,000-strong labor force.

Asians are on pace to become the largest immigrant group in the the United States. Meanwhile, the share of new arrivals who are Hispanic is smaller than it was 50 years ago.

Neil DeGrasse Tyson writes the Earth is not rigid. Its surface rises and falls daily as the oceans slosh in and out of the continental shelves, pulled by the Moon and, to a lesser extent, by the Sun. Tidal forces distort the waters of the world, making their surface oval. A well-known phenomenon. But tidal forces stretch the solid earth as well, and so the equatorial radius fluctuates daily and monthly, in tandem with the oceanic tidal and the phases of the Moon.

Henry Clay, in the first half of the nineteenth century, pioneered the "American System" that was later adopted by Abraham Lincoln and the Republican Party. To achieve this goal the power of government, through sale of its enormous landholdings, could well afford to subsidize internal improvements. By levying protective tariffs, the government should foster the development of American manufacturing and agricultural enterprises that, in their infancy, might not be able to withstand foreign competition. The promotion of industry would create a home market for agricultural commodities, just as farms provided a market for manufactured products. The enemy in the thinking was Britain, whose free trade policy threatened to swamp the new America.

Between 30% and 60% of cocaine users combine the drug with alcohol. This concurrent use is the cause of nearly 75% of cocaine-related fatalities in the U.S., and a cocaine user is 25 times more likely to experience sudden death when combining it with alcohol.

Child pornography is one of the fastest growing Internet businesses, increasing at an average 150% per year for each of the last 10 years.

"I think that another generation will look back and say 'how could you have made that mistake all over again? How could you have failed to understand Hayek's notion of the fatal conceit, that central planners can't do better than the dispersed knowledge and signals of free market processes?'"--Mark Spitznagel, hedge fund manager. He is talking about, amazingly enough, the Fed's --and the government's--belief the Fed can centrally manage economies.

Espial: n.: 1. the act of spying. 2. the act of keeping watch; observation. Espial is related to the word espy, which comes from the German word spähen meaning "to spy." The suffix -al forms nouns from verbs, as in the word refusal.

The Panama Canal, built by the U.S. Government between 1904 and 1914, was at the moment it was undertaken the biggest financial and engineering feat in the history of the world. President Theodore Roosevelt, known for his boundless optimism and inexhaustible supply of energy, was perhaps the individual most responsible for making it happen, according to David McCullough in The Path Between the Seas.

This is astonishing, if true. Human trafficking around the globe is estimated to generate a profit of anywhere from $9 billion to $31.6 billion. Half of these profits are made in industrialized countries. 

"The truly unique feature of [Homo Sapiens or Sapiens] language is not its ability to transmit information about the [tangible]. Rather, it's the ability to transmit information about things that do not exist at all. As far as we know, only Sapiens can talk about entire kinds of entities that they have never seen, touched or smelled. Legends, myths, gods and religions appeared for the first time with the Cognitive Revolution. Many animals and human species could previously say, 'Careful! A lion!' Thanks to the Cognitive Revolution (which occurred about 70,000 years ago), Homo sapiens acquired the ability to say, 'The lion is the guardian spirit of our tribe.' This ability to speak about fictions is the most unique feature of Sapiens language."--Yuval Noah Harari.

Because the earth has a bulge at its center, if you stand at sea level anywhere on the equator, you'll be farther from Earth's center than you'd be nearly anywhere else on Earth.

Influential psychology textbooks have illustrated mass panic by citing supposed examples such as the Iroquois Theater fire of 1903 in Chicago in which some 600 people perished and the Cocoanut Grove Theater fire of 1942 in Boston in which 492 people died. In the textbook explanations, theatergoers burned to death as a result of their foolish overreaction to danger. But Jerome M. Chertkoff and Russell H. Kushigian of Indiana University, the first social psychologists to analyze the Cocoanut Grove fire in depth, found that the nightclub managers had jeopardized public safety in ways that are shocking today. In a 1999 book on the psychology of emergency egress and ingress, Chertkoff and Kushigian concluded that physical obstructions, not mass panic, were responsible for the loss of life in the infamous fire. Current belief is that during disasters people are very practical and community minded. Referencing the behavior of the British during the civilian bombings of WWII, 'The Blitz spirit' has become a cliché for communities pulling together in times of adversity.

There were no Libya analysts at State during the Benghazi attack. Instead, Hillary Clinton employed a private intelligence service, whose chief was......Sidney Blumenthal! Blumenthal's operation employed a former top CIA official, Tyler Drumheller, to supply intelligence for the secretary of state at the same time he worked as a paid consultant to CBS News.
Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/02/oscars-entertainment-and-sharing.html

When the British captured Philadelphia on September 26, 1777, they expected collapse of the revolution. The city was the birthplace of the Declaration of Independence, seat of the Continental Congress and de facto capital of the United Colonies. They didn't realize that, unlike a traditional European power, the decentralized American government would not crumble once its capital was conquered. Congress quickly reassembled at York, and General Washington moved his forces to Valley Forge after the Battle of Germantown. There were a lot of British Loyalists in Philadelphia and considerable fraternization with the army. When the French entered the war, the army, now under Clinton, withdrew to New York and left their Loyalist friends behind. The rebels reentered the ruined city immediately. There was some violence against the Tories but General Benedict Arnold, military commander of the city, limited violence by declaring martial law. Councils of Safety, composed of radical Patriots, seized Tory property and ordered Loyalists to report for trial. The estates of seventy-nine Philadelphians were confiscated, and over one hundred were convicted of treason. Three of them were executed.

AAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd.....a picture of the Stepp Pyramid at Saqqara: