Cab Thoughts 1/27/16

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!"--Woodrow Wilson


The Chinese were using the decimal system as early as the fourteenth century B.C., nearly 2,300 years before the first known use of the system in European mathematics. The Chinese were also the first to use a place for zero.

Some students are demanding that Woodrow Wilson's name be expunged from the Princeton campus, most prominently the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs. They also want a mural of him taken down. They feel so strongly about this that they occupied the university president's office, holding it for 32 hours until the school's administration agreed to consider their demands. 

Modern warriors fighting in the past.

 

Autolycan: adjective: Characterized by thievery or trickery. ety: From Autolycus, the son of Hermes and Chione in Greek mythology, who was skilled in theft and trickery. He was able to make himself (or things he touched) invisible, which greatly helped him in his trade. Shakespeare named a con artist after Autolycus in A Winter’s Tale. Earliest documented use: 1890. Examp: “In a disarming note at the beginning of the book, Adams offers an apology for his autolycan procedures.” Times Literary Supplement; Jun 5, 1981. I was going to say the word has nothing to do with wolves but some research raises a question about that.    Autolycan appears as a character in Homer, pertaining to Odyssess:

And Meriones gave Odysseus his bow and quiver,
and a sword, and put on his head a helmet
made out of leather. On the inside it was firmly strung
with leather thongs; on the outside white tusks
of a shining-tusked boar were closely set this way and that,
well and skillfully. And in the middle a felt cap was fitted into it.
This helmet Autolykos once stole out of Eleon, from Amyntor, son of Ormenos,
penetrating into his close-built house,
and gave it to Amphidamas of Cythera to take to Skandeia.
And Amphidamas gave it to Molos as a guestgift,
and he in turn gave it to Meriones, his son, to wear.
But then it was put on the head of Odysseus and protected it.

 

George Akerlof’s and Robert Shiller’s new book, Phishing for Phools, contains a lot of contemporary liberal thought. One of the more interesting is their opposition to free speech. From the book:  "Our view of free speech closely mirrors our view of free markets.  We view both as critical for economic prosperity; and free speech as especially critical for democracy.  But just as phishing for phools* yields a downside to free markets, similarly, it yields a downside to free speech.  Like markets, free speech requires rules to filter the functional from the dysfunctional." 

Free speech seems to be a tool, not an ideal, to these people. "Dysfunctional" speech seems to be speech they feel is less well thought out or emotional--essentially political speech they disagree with. That they could get this published in America is telling.

 

Who is...John Jay?

 

Scientists have discovered a new species of dinosaur that roamed around Australia - a heavily-armoured sheep-sized creature with a parrot-like beak. The dinosaur, named "Kunbarrasaurus", was identified following a 3D construction of the creature, whose remains were dug up in the outback in 1989. The skeleton was one of the most complete set of dinosaur remains found in Australia and one of the world's best-preserved fossils of an ankylosaur, a four-legged, herbivorous creature which had bones in its skin and was closely related to stegosaurs.

 

According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "social expenditures" are expenditures that occur with the purpose of redistributing resources from one group to another, in order to benefit a lower-income or presumably disadvantaged population. These can be direct transfers or indirect. The U.S. has lower than most direct transfers but the indirect, through incentives, credits and private structures are high. Re-distributive social spending in the US is indeed different from many other countries. But the overall magnitude is actually greater (both proportionally and in absolute terms) in the US than in almost all other countries measured.

 

Conspicuously missing from President Hollande’s decisive declaration of war was any mention of the biggest elephant in the room: state-sponsorship. A senior Western official familiar with a large cache of intelligence obtained this summer told the Guardian that “direct dealings between Turkish officials and ranking ISIS members was now ‘undeniable.’” And what about the Saudis?

 

The "carbon tax." Heritage Foundation analysts modeled the cumulative costs of the Obama administration's climate agenda by modeling the economic costs of a carbon tax. They estimate that by 2030 the damage would be:

• An average annual employment shortfall of nearly 300,000 jobs;

• A loss of more than $2.5 trillion (inflation-adjusted) in aggregate gross domestic product;

• A total income loss of more than $7,000 (inflation-adjusted) per person.

So Americans will get higher electricity rates, higher unemployment and lower levels of prosperity. Even though electricity generation accounts for the single largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States, the estimated reduction is minuscule compared to global greenhouse gas emissions.

I hope there will be a vote. 

Those who say the United States should have intervened in 2011 to topple Assad should explain either how they could have rallied U.S. public support for an Iraq-like occupation and rebuilding of Syria, or, in the absence of that, how Syria would have avoided Libya’s fate.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/10/we-have-met-1-and-it-is-us.html

 

Following centuries of colonial rule by countries including Portugal, Britain and Italy, Mogadishu became the capital of an independent Somalia in 1960. With bad luck and predatory leaders, by 1981, close to 2 million of the country’s inhabitants were homeless. A civil war killed some 50,000 people; another 300,000 died of starvation as United Nations peacekeeping forces struggled in vain to restore order and provide relief amid the chaos of war. In early December 1992, outgoing U.S. President George H.W. Bush sent the contingent of Marines to Mogadishu as part of a mission dubbed Operation Restore Hope. Backed by the U.S. troops, international aid workers were soon able to restore food distribution and other humanitarian aid operations. Sporadic violence continued, including the murder of 24 U.N. soldiers from Pakistan in 1993. As a result, the U.N. authorized the arrest of General Mohammed Farah Aidid, leader of one of the rebel clans. On October 3, 1993, during an attempt to make the arrest, rebels shot down two of the U.S. Army’s Black Hawk helicopters and killed 18 American soldiers. Clinton withdrew all U.S. troops.

"The Islamic State has grown that strong due to the irresponsible policy of the United States," exclaimed Russian PM Dmitry Medvedev, demanding that "really consolidated efforts" are needed to counter ISIS' terrorist threats. This comes just hours after President Obama toughened his rhetoric, vowing that the global coalition formed to destroy ISIS "will not relent," adding, rather oddly, that the group responsible for the Paris terror attacks is "a bunch of killers with good social media."

 

The term "fortified" conveys quite literally how wines are strengthened with the addition of a distilled spirit at varying stages of the production process. The spirit acts to raise the total alcoholic content of the finished product to around 15% to 20% by volume. There are many fortified wines produced around the world. In the case of most Ports (from Portugal, that is), port-style wines and sweet Madeiras, spirit is added during fermentation, thus killing off the yeasts and leaving a varying amount of sugar. This approach also applies to the many so-called natural sweet wines or vins doux naturels such as those based on the Muscat grape in southern France and other Mediterranean countries. Some fortifieds are termed "liqueur" wines, and for this style the fortification is done in the very early stages of, if not before, fermentation so that the grapes macerate and release their flavors through the action of the added alcohol.

 

A wise man said recently that "the problem with academics is they feel the need to be smarter than truth."
In a recent review of literary criticism by Lisa Ruddick in "Criticism," these little gems shone. 

Judith Halberstam on the psychopathic killer, Buffalo Bill, in "Silence of the Lambs:" In a well-known reading of the film, Halberstam suggests that Bill is as much “hero” as villain. For he “challenges the . . . misogynist constructions of the humanness, the naturalness, the interiority of gender.”  By removing and wearing women’s skin, Bill refutes the idea that maleness and femaleness are carried within us. 

Then the prose romances of William Morris are praised for modeling a society devoid of private property and of individual human personalities. The article suggests that in Morris’s “grim present”—the actual social world of late Victorian Britain—the “individual idiosyncrasy” of human beings was “overvalued.” Further, the feeling of “personal identity” enjoyed by the Victorians was a species of “portable property,” like the other kinds of “private property” enjoyed by “disaggregated liberal subjects.” Morris’s socialist fiction, by contrast, offers a scheme for a society whose members would lack a “durable sense of self” and even any “differentiation between persons.” 

Finally, in the journal "ELH: English Literary History," we read for example that “free love” is a “radical” answer to the monogamy that serves “a capitalist and patriarchal sense of property and propriety.” 

Smarter than truth indeed.

 

The FBI estimates that over 100,000 children and young women are trafficked in America today. They range in age from nine to 19, with the average being age 11. Many victims are not just runaways or abandoned, but are from "good" families who are coerced by clever traffickers.

 

John Jay was an influential man at the time of the American Revolution who, surprisingly, was opposed to separation from Great Britain. Jay was elected to the First Continental Congress in 1774 as a representative from New York, where he published a paper entitled Address to the People of Great Britain, in which he promoted a peaceful resolution with Great Britain instead of independence. Jay was reelected to the Second Continental Congress in 1775 but, upholding his opposition to complete independence from Great Britain, he resigned in 1776 rather than sign the Declaration of Independence. Upon his return to New York, Jay helped draft the state’s constitution before his election as the state’s first chief justice in 1777. Despite his early misgivings about independence, Jay served as president of the Continental Congress from 1778 to 1779 and in 1782 signed the Treaty of Paris with Great Britain. He contributed to the The Federalist Papers, part of the successful campaign waged by Alexander Hamilton and James Madison to win ratification for the Constitution in 1788 and 1789. Soon after, President George Washington appointed Jay as the first chief justice of the United States.

On Dec. 10, 1941 twenty-six-year-old Thomas Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemane, a Trappist Order near Bardstown, Kentucky; and on the same day in 1968 the fifty-three-year-old Merton died in Bangkok, Thailand, from accidental electrocution.

A lifting body spaceplane is relatively straightforward. Launch a spaceship into space that can then return to earth smoothly via landing on a runway like a normal aircraft does. This would theoretically increase safety, cut costs and enhance mission flexibility. The Shuttle was a very large, and some would say bloated version of the this concept. While a number of versions of this idea have been developed, Boeing's X-37B is the current favorite. Boeing has launched the X-37B space plane four times into orbit, with the little space plane’s endurance being pushed farther and farther each time. The last flight saw the ship stay aloft for almost two years (674 days to be exact) and Boeing may be looking at building a larger version and possibly one that is capable of carrying passengers in the future.    

AAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnnddddddd.....a picture of Boeing’s X-37B (Credit- Boeing):