Wednesday, January 31, 2018

Reverie

“Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine — the special pleading of selfish interests.” — Henry Hazlitt, “Economics In One Lesson” (1946)



In 1997, $1 of new [money] increased GDP by $2.20. [Now] it is $1.43. The money multiplier is the amount of money that banks generate with each dollar of reserves. Due to the over-indebtedness of the economy—or more precisely, the lack of “savings”—the multiplier has plunged from 12.1 in 1985, to 3.6 today. Velocity of money s an indicator of how much it is used. Money can go into productive--reusable--projects or in to unproductive--in-reusable projects:

Sources: Hosington Investment Management






ABC News reports a new study by the CDC analyzing “500,000 privately insured pregnant women in 2014...found that about 70% of women in the first trimester received antibiotics for UTIs.” However, the piece says that some of “these medications have been associated with birth defects, including brain malformations, heart defects, and cleft lips and palates, in past studies, though more recent studies have shown the link might not be as strong.”


Who is....George Gilder



"The minimum wage, too, is high in South Africa. The Congress of South African Trade Unions insists on it. COSATU had an honorable role in the struggle against apartheid, and is viewed with indulgence by politicians. The result is that low-wage workers cannot compete with trade unionists. The poor sit in huts in the countryside of Kwa-Zulu Natal, pacified by a small income subsidy to someone in the family. Low-skilled people, such as young people, don’t have a chance."--McCloskey


Descriptively, we now live in what might best be called “constitutional anarchy,” where the range and the extent of federal government dominance over all our lives, over our private behavior, is largely dependent on the accidental preferences of politicians in judicial, legislative, and executive positions of power.  Increasingly, men feel themselves at the mercy of a faceless bureaucracy, itself irresponsible and subject to unpredictable twists and turns that destroy and distort personal and private expectations.--Buchanan


George Gilder is a guy with a different angle on most things. He has written that we need a new economics, an economics that avoids laws and no longer analyzes the past. He writes the economy is driven not by “centralized” institutions wielding rewards and punishments, but by an ever-growing pool of knowledge. This knowledge is the source of wealth: wealth that is ultimately distributed throughout an economy. This sounds much like McCloskey.
But here’s a crucial point: Entrepreneurial creations—the source of wealth—are unpredictable and always come as a surprise. Gilder often quotes former Princeton economist Albert Hirshman on this: “Creativity always comes as a surprise to us. If it didn’t, we would not need it; we could plan it.”
Believe it or not there is an economic theoretical basis for what Gilder is saying.The fundamental principal of information theory is that all information is surprise; only surprise qualifies as information. Gilder  recognized the tie between entrepreneurial surprise and information theory: “Claude Shannon defined information as surprise, and Albert Hirshman defined entrepreneurship as surprise. Here we have a crucial tie between the economy and information theory. For the first time, it became possible to create an economics that could capture the surprising creativity of entrepreneurs.




One of the curious themes of the Alabama election is that these difficult choices between really bad people with bad behavior and ideas is somehow seen as unusual in American politics.

Chris talked passionately about the internet bullying case--the first I had heard of it. My take is that safety of children in a school is a simple and unarguable responsibility of educators and that making it more complex is either insincere or cowardly. That said, I read this this morning, showing how complex we have become: "The administrator of a GoFundMe drive that has collected nearly $60,000 for bullied child-turned-viral sensation Keaton Jones has halted the drive after Jones’ mother, Kimberly Jones, was accused of racism." (yahoo)

Boustrophedonan: an ancient method of writing in which the lines run alternately from right to left and from left to right. A word with a wonderful origin.
Only students of ancient scripts, especially (but not exclusively) of ancient Greek, will know the meaning and etymology of boustrophedon “like the ox turns (in plowing).” The major components of the Greek adverb boustrophēdón are the nouns boûs (stem, bou-) “bull, cow, ox,” and strophḗ “a turn, twist.” In the earliest Greek writing (mid-8th century b.c.), the first line was written from right to left (“retrograde,” as always in Phoenician and Hebrew); the second line from left to right; the third line retrograde, etc. Boustrophedonic writing was obsolete in Athens and most other parts of Greece by the mid-5th century b.c. Boustrophedon entered English in the 18th century.

The maximum known depth of Mariana Trench in the western Pacific is 10,994m (36,070 ft.). For example if Mount Everest(8,848m) was dropped in Mariana Trench its peak would still be over 1.6 km underwater.


The NFL Network has suspended three members of its on-air team—Marshall Faulk, Ike Taylor and Heath Evans—in response to allegations of sexual harassment made in a lawsuit by a former employee.


steeleydock.blogspot.com
This is the Sun on January 6, 2014 with a "small" area at about ten o'clock off center. That is a sunspot about the size of the earth. Sunspots were not ...





The courts are determining who the military can pick for soldiers. Should pacifists be able to enlist?

In 1976 Bellow accepted the Nobel Prize for literature. In his speech he said: "After years of the most arduous mental labor, I stand before you in the costume of a headwaiter" and "All I started out to do was show up my brothers. I didn't have to go this far."

There is a flurry of complaints about politicians and their intrusion into the lives of others to satisfy their personal--in these instances sexual-- desires. But sexual demands are only one of the intrusions these people make. This is what they do; with great arrogance and righteousness they are always making some unwanted demand on the people. Before democracy this kind of thing was done at the point of a sword. Now they feel entitled to the people and the land.

On September 10th, 2001, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced that "According to some estimates we cannot track $2.3 trillion in transactions," after a Pentagon whistleblower set off a probe. A day later, the September 11th attacks happened and the accounting scandal was quickly forgotten.



The stock market at record highs, the bond returns at record lows, the volatility at record lows--what is that thesis about when an avalanche isn't, and then is?
I read that Bulgaria seized a lot of property in an anti-corruption police action and now holds $3 billion in Bitcoins.
(The Princess Diana's Benny Baby sold at its high for 24 thousand dollars.)

From a study of 95 students (75 of whom returned for a second session) at the University of Waterloo: The students were tested on their ability to recall written information inputted in four different ways -- reading silently, hearing someone else read, listening to a recording of oneself reading, and reading aloud in real time. They were tested on recollection of short, four-to-six letter words on a list of 160 terms. The results show that reading information aloud to oneself led to the best recall. Oral production is effective because it has two distinctive components, a motor or speech act and a personal auditory input, the researchers explain. "[The] results suggest that production is memorable in part because it includes a distinctive, self-referential component. This may well underlie why rehearsal is so valuable in learning and remembering," the study concludes. "We do it ourselves, and we do it in our own voice. When it comes time to recover the information, we can use this distinctive component to help us to remember."



Fifteen percent of men between the ages of 25 and 54 – who should be in their most productive years of contributing to their families and society – don’t even want a job. That’s up from 5% in the mid-’60s, and the number has been steadily rising. Fifty-six percent of these people receive federal disability payments, averaging about $13,000, which is roughly equivalent to the pay for a minimum-wage job, after taxes – except that disability comes with free Medicare. Unless these people find ways to develop needed skills, there is not much financial incentive for them to look for jobs.

If you play poker on-line, how do you know your opponent's computer can not read your cards?




AAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph:
Sources: St Louis Fed

Tuesday, January 30, 2018

Irrational Markets

William Grant is an economic and quasi-political commentator who recently wrote an article on what he believes is growing irrationality in the investment world. He picks two events that occurred on November 15:

(1) the sale at auction of Leonardo da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi for $450.3 million – a painting that sold for $10,000 as recently as 2005 – and (2) Société Générale’s overwhelming success of in selling €500 million in 3-year senior unsecured zero-coupon bonds of Veolia, a former water and wastewater treatment provider turned global entertainment wannabe. The unsecured notes were priced to yield -0.026%.


“That’s right,” says Grant, “a BBB-rated company managed to convince investors to pay them, at issuance, for the privilege of lending the company money.”

Monday, January 29, 2018

Some Numbers

From a peak of nearly 19.5 million US factory workers in 1979, the number of manufacturing employees has steadily declined to a recent low in 2010 of 11.6 million workers before rebounding to slightly more than 12 million employees [in 2014].


The amount of manufacturing output produced per US worker … more than doubled in the 42 years between 1955 and 1997 from $40,000 to $85,000, and then more than doubled again in only 13 years between 1997 and 2010 to about $171,000 (all figures are expressed in constant 2014 dollars).
 
Manufacturing output per employee last year [2014] of $171,538 established a new all-time record for the productivity of the American factory worker, measured in manufacturing output per factory worker.


In inflation-adjusted constant 2014 dollars, US manufacturing output has increased more than five-fold over the last 67 years, from $410 billion in 1947 to a record-setting level of output last year of $2.09 trillion

In the U.S., the price of goods relative to services fell by 52 percent between 1970 and 2010.

 
Drug arrests account for nearly 50% of federal prisoners, and more than 16% of people in state prison. Today, about 500,000 Americans are behind bars for drug law violations, 10 times the number in 1980. 

Largely because of drug prohibition, the US is the World’s No. 1 Jailer, and has an incarceration rate (700 per 100,000 population) higher than Cuba (510 per 100,000), China (118 per 100,000), Russia (450 per 100,000), Rwanda (434 per 100,000) and Iran (287,000).
 
The US accounts for 4.4% of the world’s population, but houses 22% of the world’s prisoners.

In 2012 alone, the US Justice Department confiscated $4.2 billion in forfeitures. In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did as asset forfeitures surpassed burglaries.

From 2006 to 2010, heroin overdose deaths in the U.S. increased by 45%, and the numbers continue to climb. As the nation has cracked down on prescription opioid abuse, people suffering from addiction have turned to heroin, a cheaper, easily accessible option.

At least 60,000 Mexicans have died since 2006 in drug cartel-related murders, deaths and violence, and some estimates of the drug-related body count in Mexico are as high as 125,000.

Since the War on Drugs began more than 40 years ago, the U.S. government has spent more than $1 trillion on interdiction policies and spending on the costly, failed war continues to cost U.S. taxpayers more than $51 billion annually.

Sunday, January 28, 2018

Sunday/Thursday

The Man Who was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton among other concepts includes "the lawlessness of art and the art of lawlessness." It opens with a poem that includes the line, "The world was very old indeed but you and I were young." This is the opening of the poem:


A cloud was on the mind of men, and wailing went the weather,
Yea, a sick cloud upon the soul when we were boys together.
Science announced nonentity and art admired decay;
The world was old and ended: but you and I were gay;
Round us in antic order their crippled vices came --
Lust that had lost its laughter, fear that had lost its shame.


 
 
 
 

Saturday, January 27, 2018

Reverie

The strongest argument for socialism is that it sounds good. The strongest argument against socialism is that it doesnt work. But those who live by words will always have a soft spot in their hearts for socialism because it sounds good. --Sowell




A letter from Alan Turing to his former math teacher was bought at auction recently for £75,000 (estimate £20,000-30,000).


From an article on Racism: "...because racism is prejudice plus power,and all structural power is situated in the hands of whiteness, nonwhites may be capable of prejudicea bad thing to be surebut they cannot be racists. The default use of the term whitenessas the target of opprobrium bakes this contention into the language."

This obsession with "Power" is a hangover from many impenetrable writers and it forgives a lot. Cruelty is evil whether effective or not.


This is interesting.
Some of the nations law schoolsincluding at Harvard and Georgetownare letting applicants take the GRE instead of the grueling LSAT in an effort to attract students with a broader range of experience.


Heroes of Beslan update:
Husnain Rashid, 31, allegedly made a post threatening the four-year-old prince George on messaging app Telegram, along with other posts which allegedly could help others identify UK targets such as stadiums. But it's ok I guess because Mr. Rashid has no "power." Or maybe it becomes ok if he has power. Or something.

Deaths from opioid-related hospitalizations more than quadrupled from 2000 to 2014 as providers treated patients with more severe cases of pain addiction,according to a study published Monday in Health Affairs. The study found inpatient mortality rose from 0.43% in 2000 to 2.02% in 2014. The analysis also showed that hospitalizations due to opioid or heroin poisoning have increased in recent years, even as the rate of people seeking treatment of opioid addiction at a hospital has gone down.


Despite appeals and warnings from world leaders, President Donald Trump has reversed decades of policy by declaring Jerusalem Israels capital, and moving the U.S. embassy there. Every objection acts as if this is a threat to peace. A remarkable mindset. Well, Hamas got the Peace Prize.


Who is...Richard K. Morgan?


The New York Times (12/4, Park, Subscription Publication) reports that according to McKinsey, the median rise in premiums for bronze plans was 18 percent from 2017 to 2018. 

So with the rise in premiums, is anyone surprised? And who should be responsible for it, the guys who wrote the law or the guys who can't fix it?







I went to the Science Center for a talk on dinosaurs and Antarctica. It was fascinating. Before the Age of Mammals, Antarctica was a hot swamp with many species isolated after the separation of the single Pangaea continent into its smaller parts. So the world's understanding of dinosaurs is skewered by the prominence of Northern Hemisphere research. The Southern Hemisphere is different in evolution and one can track migrations of little beasties--like marsupials, for example. And the Antarctica is virgin, with very little research. That said, it is horrible to work there and only a few areas have enough exposed earth to be rewarding. An interesting night--and the area will be terrific to work in after global warming gets going.
I left to go home and see Monday Night's Survival of the Fittest.

Watched the gang war cleverly disguised as a football game. Shazier's injury was an accident, a quirk of violent actions on huge, fast-moving and leveraged bodies. The other stuff was the purposeful attempt to injure. I had a bit of sympathy for JuJu--it was a fast play but the hit was certainly marginal. If he had not acted like Skelator after he might be forgiven.  But generally it was like cheering for a loosely connected felony collection. And the announcers lost control of it.




www.espn.com
It's true that Burfict's on-field persona -- domineering, explosive, mercurial -- does not appear to extend off the field. But the problem is how he plays football -- with a violence that can be excessive.







Netflix has a new, expensive sci-fi story called Altered Carbon based upon Richard K. Morgan’s cyberpunk novel. Netflix just announced the drama’s premiere date: Feb. 2, 2018.




There has been some debate over the free market and capitalism kicking around on some of the libertarian sites. One rather surprising thing to see in print from Mingardi although I think it is probably true, if hard to explain: "I would maintain intellectuals are still typically more anti-capitalist than any other group."

Than any other group? That must mean something.

From a recent study on the minimum wage: We find a significant impact of increasing minimum wages on prices in grocery stores. Our baseline estimate of the minimum wage elasticity of grocery prices is 0.02. This magnitude is consistent with a full pass-through of cost increases into prices.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/10/sunday-101815.html





There is an interesting problem developing in Pakistan. Billions of dollars have been planned to be invested in Pakistan by China through a program the Chinese have been developing as they try to increase their international financial presence. A small article reported the successful agreement between the two in principle but there was no specific money invested yet because of the country's "instability." The years of Pakistani underwriting of terrorism has come back to bite them. And modern growth--with its attendant risk--is not compatible with medievalism.  


“We have a very serious and destructive problem in America. Yes, we know, we have many.  But this one is different because it is widely tolerated and, sadly, carefully nurtured by our nation’s leadership regardless of party. Truth has become one of the lowest coins in the realm.  The narrative, carefully conceived, studiously nurtured, and determinedly communicated has, it seems, become the highest coin of the realm.”--Gershowitz. And Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year.




Over the past decade, Pakistan has been the target of a vicious jihadist insurgency that has claimed as many as 80,000 lives.




Harvard Business School professor predicts that half of America’s 4,000 colleges will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years.  Why? Because online education will become a more cost-effective way for students to receive an education, effectively undermining the business models of traditional institutions and running them out of business.


AAAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnndddddd.......a graph:


Friday, January 26, 2018

Islam and America

The academic world can be a procrustean one.

Loyola Marymount University theology professor Amir Hussain in his new book, Muslims and the Making of America, argues that Islam was an inherent part of America's founding.

Hussain writes that Founding Father Thomas Jefferson’s “owning a copy of the Qur’an and reading it is crucial to my argument that Islam is part of the history of America.” Jefferson “began learning Arabic in the 1770s, after he purchased a translation of the Qur’an in 1765,” namely the 1734 English translation of the Quranic Arabic by English Orientalist George Sale. “It was this Qur’an that Keith Ellison used when he was sworn in as the first Muslim member of Congress in 2007,” Hussain enthuses. 
 
“To be clear, Jefferson was no fan of Islam,” Hussain writes, and Sale’s Quran offers reasons why. Sale’s introductory essay describes Islam as “so manifest a forgery” that has motivated “calamities brought on so many nations by the conquests of the Arabians.”

Hussain also notes President Jefferson’s campaigns against North Africa’s Muslim Barbary pirates; thus the “founding of the modern American Navy is connected to the Muslim world.”

Any connection is a good connection, I suppose.

Thursday, January 25, 2018

Ferguson, Trade and Income

The historian-economist Niall Ferguson believes that global trading has cause disruption in the West as some jobs naturally move to Third World countries and sees a lot of the disruption in the West as the result of that trade-off. But shouldn't Americans be happy? The improvement in world income status and the flattening of income distribution is what we want, right? Wouldn't Americans be emotionally rewarded by the improvement of Third World living standards at the cost of stagnation of their own?
 
Source: Harvard Business Review

 
Apparently not.
A 2017 study from the Brookings Institution found that there is a high correlation between jobs losses which occurred as a result of the financial crisis, and increased support for anti-establishment political parties in Europe. This populist backlash shouldn’t come as a surprise to us. During a recent discussion, Niall pointed out that: “If one looks at all the elections back to 1870, financial crises lead to backlashes against globalization that erode to the political center.”

 
The Western world has reacted, he says:

Austria elected a 31-year-old, anti-immigration candidate as Chancellor.
Italy’s populist Five-Star movement is leading in the polls for the general election, which takes place March 4.
The Visegrad group, which consists of the governments of Poland, Hungary, Czech Republic, and Slovakia, have strongly opposed the resettlement of refugees and are battling with the EU over the issue.
Angela Merkel did win the German elections, but four months later, she hasn’t been able to form a government because of the strong showing by the populist Alternative for Germany party.


But, according to him, globalization is in decline--a long time before Trump. Since peaking in 2007 and 2008, respectively, trade and foreign direct investment as a percentage of world GDP have fallen sharply. McKinsey Global Institute found that global flows of goods, finances, and services have declined by 15% since peaking in 2007.

So, since that was under Obama, was Obama an anti-globalist? And is Trump just continuing Obama's policies?

Wednesday, January 24, 2018

Reverie

“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” --Yogi Berra
 
Switzerland-based Viking River Cruises, which announced in 2015 that it would be launching an American cruise business on the Mississippi River, revealed this month that it has discontinued its efforts due to the high cost of ship construction in the U.S. The Jones Act requires vessels in domestic commerce to be built in U.S. It likely would cost the company nearly twice as much to build its ships in an American shipyard and it already has a contract with a European shipbuilder. In addition, the current political climate in the U.S. makes it unlikely a variance to the Jones Act allowing Viking to use European-built vessels, would be approved.
The fact that Viking, which operates virtually world-wide with 63 cruise ships on rivers in Europe, Russia, China and Southeast Asia, was unable to successfully navigate the Jones Act and launch a river cruise operation in the U.S. demonstrates how draconian the country’s national shipping laws are.
Patrician: n:  a person of noble or high rank; aristocrat; a person of very good background, education, and refinement; a member of the original senatorial aristocracy in ancient Rome.
The Latin adjective and noun patricius, patritius dates to the comedies of the Roman dramatist Plautus (c254-c184 b.c.). The word means having the rank and dignity of the patrēs (Roman senators), or a person with that dignity, a noble. According to the Roman historian Livy (59 b.c.–17 a.d.), Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, appointed the first 100 senators and named them patrēs (fathers). From the time of the reign of the emperor Constantine (288?–337 a.d.) onward, patricius was a high honorary title that entailed no specified duties and was only occasionally awarded. Patrician entered English in the 15th century.
 
This is from an article claiming that Christian values in France are offensive to the national secular mandate but Islamic values are not: "Meanwhile, in France, authorities were busy dismantling its Judeo-Christian heritage. A superior court recently ordered the removal of a cross from a statue of the Pope John Paul II in a town in Brittany, because the cross supposedly breached rules on secularism. The Conseil d'État, France's top administrative court, evidently decided that the cross violated a 1905 law imposing the separation of church and state. After that, the same Conseil d'État ordered a Nativity scene in the municipal hall of the town of Béziers to be torn down. Then, Macron's special envoy for heritage, Stéphane Bern, proposed charging a fee to enter French cathedrals and churches -- as if they were museums.
A few days later, however, France's Macron displayed all the double-standards and empty rhetoric of this "secularism". The French authorities allowed Muslims in the Paris suburb of Clichy La Garenne to a hold a mass prayer on the street. That is why 100 French politicians and administrators took to the streets of Paris to protest against these prayers. "Public space cannot be taken over in this way", said Valérie Pécresse, president of the Paris regional council.
That is exactly the tragic dead end of French fake "secularism": it allows public expressions of the Islamic religion in France, but prohibits the Christian ones."


Who is ...Akihito?


In 1995 a landmark study found that children whose families were on welfare heard 1,500 fewer words every hour—or eight million fewer per year—than children from professional backgrounds. Eight years later these same children performed significantly worse on vocabulary tests and language assessments than their higher-income peers did.
These findings have influenced child-rearing practices ever since, and it is now taken for granted that the more time a parent talks to an infant, the better. In subsequent studies infant-directed speech has consistently been linked to a child’s language skills, which in turn influence IQ, executive function and emotion regulation.
I wonder what else the researchers could have isolated.
 
A current thesis around that the radio nucleotide in the Urals are downstream processed materials, not the result of reactors. 

The decline in manufacturing’s share of U.S. GDP over the last forty years is nearly identical to the decline in world manufacturing as a share of world GDP, which fell from 26.6% in 1970 to 16.2% in 2010. Therefore, we can conclude that the declining share of manufacturing’s contribution to GDP is not unique to America, but reflects a global trend as the world moves from a traditional manufacturing-intensive “Machine Age” economy to more a services-intensive “Information Age” economy.

An important reiteration:
"Just about every argument opposing the unfettered freedom to exchange goods and services across all borders rests on the failure to appreciate that, as Adam Smith put it, “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”
For example, Kevin L. Kearns, president of the protectionist U.S. Business and Industry Council, says, “America must adopt new policies and strategies based upon a unified national industrial/technology strategy, one that favors producers over consumers”. These policies, according to Eamonn Fingleton’s summary, include “tariffs, quotas, domestic content requirements, government incentives for domestic production and technology development, and ‘buy American’ requirements.”
Such thinking could not more clearly embrace the mercantile system Smith demolished in The Wealth of Nations over two centuries ago — that is, the system that “seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.”"--Richman

Japanese Emperor Akihito will abdicate on April 30, 2019, which will end his three-decade reign by passing the throne to his son. (wsj)

Up to 800 million people—including a third of the work force in the U.S. and Germany—will be made jobless by 2030. In the eight-month study, the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm's think tank, found that almost half of those thrown out of work—375 million people, comprising 14% of the global work force—will have to find entirely new occupations, since their old one will either no longer exist or need far fewer workers. Chinese will have the highest such absolute numbers—100 million people changing occupations, or 12% of the country's 2030 work force.

Golden oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/09/cab-thoughts-92315.html





From Allen: Great diversity is inherent in a university.  The very word – university – suggests a fruitful bringing together of diverse elements and activities.  But the latest cause of campus agitators is for still more diversity.
The agitation typically is incoherent at any level above sloganeering, but doubtless the main pressure is on race or gender.  Everyone with legitimate business on a university campus agrees that it is totally reprehensible to deny faculty appointment or student admission on grounds of race and gender – or on grounds of religion, as was done in an earlier day.  Should it be more acceptable to favor people on such grounds?

In the United States, 20 percent of reservation households make less than $5,000 annually, and Native Americans are more likely than non-Natives to be assaulted, incarcerated, or to commit suicide.

Uh oh:
I hope there is no push for equality here.


I watched "Blindness " last night. I really like Saramago and this story is really good in his usual simple way. Certainly more brutal than his usual, too. The clean, efficient style emphasizes the drama, both good and bad. That said, the movie was more careful than the novel. It could have been really horrific had the movie been as descriptive as the written story.
The wonderful sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe was asked once to explain the difference between a science fiction writer and a writer of "magical realism" and he said a writer of magical realism spoke Portuguese.

Epigenetics is the influence of the environment upon behavior and morphology. So, during hunger, the placid skinny and asocial grasshopper becomes a shaggy, voracious and communal locust. One wonders about these sexual abusers. They have a very similar MO, a behavior pattern that almost all men would say is not just wrong but weird.
One wonders if power and material success has its RNA influence. 

The Supreme Court heard 60 minutes of speech about when, if at all, making a cake counts as constitutionally protected speech: a baker refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple for "religious reasons." (He also does not make Halloween cakes.) This will be a problem because the guy is not a bigot; the decision will not be perfect, regardless.
Pro Bakery: https://www.hoover.org/research/let-them-bake-cake
Anti Bakery: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-cake-is-food-not-speech-but-why-bully-the-baker/2017/12/01/7e05773c-d5f0-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.fc60254a3548

www.washingtonpost.com
The same-sex marriage fight is over. Time for the victors to act a bit more magnanimous.


www.hoover.org
The Supreme Court should end all totalitarian applications of state antidiscrimination law.

The NYT story on federal funding of UFO investigation initiated by the giant brained Harry Reid included these three revelations: 1. Many high-ranking people in the federal government believe aliens have visited planet Earth. 2. Military pilots have recorded videos of UFOs with capabilities that seem to outstrip all known human aircraft, changing direction and accelerating in ways no fighter jet or helicopter could ever accomplish. 3. In a group of buildings in Las Vegas, the government stockpiles alloys and other materials believed to be associated with UFOs.
This is from a Scientific American report: "Points one and two are weird, but not all that compelling on their own: The world already knew that plenty of smart folks believe in alien visitors, and that pilots sometimes encounter strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere. Point No. 3, though -- those buildings full of alloys and other materials -- that's a little harder to hand wave away. Is there really a DOD cache full of materials from out of this world? Here's the thing, though: The chemists and metallurgists Live Science spoke to -- experts in identifying unusual alloys -- don't buy it. "I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science. "My opinion? That's quite impossible." Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common -- in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are -- and very well understood.

AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a graph: