Saturday, August 4, 2018

Reverie

Life never knows the return of spring. --John Gay in Beggar's Opera










In Hoffa’s time, many Teamster leaders partnered with the Mafia in racketeering, extortion and embezzlement. Hoffa himself had relationships with high-ranking mobsters, and was the target of several government investigations throughout the 1960s. In 1967, he was convicted of bribery and sentenced to 13 years in prison. While in jail, Hoffa never ceded his office and ran the union from his cell. Richard Nixon commuted his sentence in 1971; why would he do that?

Unitarianism evolved out of a dissenting Christian tradition that denied the concept of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ. Unitarians instead believed that God was one being and that Christ was a human spokesman of God’s truth. This is in distinction to the Arian heresy a nontrinitarian belief, that asserts that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, created by God the Father, distinct from the Father and therefore subordinate to the Father. Arian teachings were first attributed to Arius (c. AD 250–336), a Christian presbyter in Alexandria, Egypt.
Who is....Joseph Priestley?




Milton Friedman was visiting India sometime in the 1960s and was shown by proud Indian-government officials the construction of a canal. Observing the work in progress, Friedman turned to one of the officials and asked why the workers were using hand-held shovels and pick axes instead of bulldozers and other modern machinery. The official responded that the chief purpose of this construction project is to create jobs. Friedman is said to ask if the purpose for the project was jobs, why did they let the workers use shovels and pick-axes. They would create far more jobs if the workers were made to use spoons.






J.P. Morgan Chase’s CEO Jamie Dimon said Monday that his partnership with Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett to improve healthcare for employees will likely start small, “akin to Amazon’s small-scale operation during its first few years.” Dimon stated, “This is an absolute critical issue and all of us have a long-term view and we’ve been through the amount of money spent on fraud, administration, end-of-life, the misuse of drugs. I’ll remind people that Jeff Bezos, when he started Amazon, he might have had visions about the ‘everything store,’ but he started with books. And he spent 10 years getting books right.” He added, “So we may spent a bunch of time getting one piece of it right, and testing various things to see what works.”

Health care like Amazon? This is a big deal.



Joseph Priestley shared the liberal religious and political philosophy of many of America’s revolutionary leaders, including Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, all of whom became his friends and correspondents. In 1774 he discovered oxygen. While still living in England, Priestley endorsed both the American and French revolutions, authoring pamphlets in support of each. On the second anniversary of Bastille Day, a mob in Birmingham, England, burned Priestley’s home, including his first-class scientific laboratory and the Unitarian church where he preached. As a result of the attack, he decided that he could no longer live in England and immigrated to the United States in 1794.









When Ocasio-Cortez  was asked about how she would pay for her program of free Medicare for All, college tuition and housing, she explained that we could just raise the corporate tax rate to 28% and close some loopholes, and "that's $2 trillion right there." Which would pay for ... approximately seven months of Medicare for All. Then, Ocasio-Cortez explained that she'd find money by cutting the defense budget ($700 billion per year), which would still not cover Medicare for All. And she'd create a carbon tax, which could crush industry, leading to lesser tax revenue.

These people simply do not understand money or economics.

It seems, then, that I am asserting that the conventional wisdom about international trade is dominated by entirely ignorant men, who have managed to convince themselves and everyone else who matters that they have deep insights, but are in fact unaware of the most basic principles of and facts about the world economy; and that the disdained academic economists are at least by comparison fonts of wisdom and common sense. And that is indeed my claim.--Krugman





I have no knowledge of anything involving the Washington infighting over the last year. I simply can not stand it. But this question about the FBI's working its way into the Trump campaign has a very strange element: If they were worried about the integrity of the people whom Trump had taken on, why didn't they tell him?







In the Washington Post (5/22) “The Health 202” blog that perhaps “the number of people without health insurance isn’t dramatically worsening under the Trump administration, at least not yet.” An analysis conducted by the CDC found “only a tiny – and statistically insignificant – uptick in the share of Americans lacking coverage in 2017 compared to the year prior.” Data show 9.1 percent of Americans were uninsured in 2017, compared to nine percent in 2016. Cunningham says “it’s not yet clear that policies advanced by the Trump administration to eliminate parts of the ACA have done much yet to shrink its insurance expansions.”


"Russia’s experience indicates that freedom cannot be legislated; it has to grow gradually, in close association with property and law.  For while acquisitiveness is natural, respect for the property – and the liberty – of others is not.  It has to be inculcated until it sinks such deep roots in the people’s consciousness that it is able to withstand all efforts to crush it."--Pipes
 "...acquisitiveness is natural, respect for the property – and the liberty – of others is not." Words to remember.




On Nov. 27, 2015, an international team of scientists found a shipwreck while aboard the Colombian Navy research ship ARC Malpelo. The wreck was found at a depth of about 2,000 feet. It looks to be a Spanish treasure ship, the San Jose, with ore from Peru valued  between $4 billion and $17 billion.
2000 feet is a long way down.


As many as one in four students at some elite U.S. colleges are classified as disabled, largely because of mental-health issues, entitling them to a widening array of special accommodations like longer time to take exams. (wsj)
So 25% of American college students are mentally dsiabled?



Democracy update: Maduro was sworn in for his second term.


An unspoken aspect of diversity is competition and destruction. Diversity expands the base and allows for selective pressure to be applied to a larger population, presumably to a better statistical end. This implies that diversity is not an endpoint but rather part of a creative, if destructive, process.

Military service personnel have been accused of involvement in an LSD ring. They were from the 90th Missile Wing, which operates one-third of the 400 Minuteman 3 missiles that stand "on alert" 24/7 in underground silos scattered across the northern Great Plains.
Documents obtained by the AP over the past two years through the Freedom of Information Act describes off-duty use of LSD, cocaine and other drugs in 2015 and 2016 by airmen who were supposed to be held to strict behavioral standards because of their role in securing the weapons.
So, will the defense be they were off-duty? And will that make taking mind altering and addictive drugs ok?


Britain's Royal College of Physicians called any attempts by public officials to discourage smokers from switching to vaping "unjust, irrational and immoral."

Two unidentified men walked into a restaurant in the Canadian city of Mississauga and set off a bomb, wounding more than a dozen people, local police said. 
Believe it or not, Mississauga is Canada's sixth largest city.

The percentage of parents who don’t want their children marrying outside of their political party has doubled.
Ah, Religion.



Investigators probing the 2014 downing of flight MH17 said for the first time that the missile which brought down the plane over eastern Ukraine originated from a Russian military brigade.
Oh, well. These things happen.
 

The administration has demanded that Mexico, as part of a renegotiated NAFTA, institute a $16 minimum wage for Mexican factory workers.
Read that again.



In 1977 the Chinese government lifted its decade-old ban on the writings of William Shakespeare.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2016/04/knoxville-summer-of-1915.html

Noam Chomsky claims that in "most of the world" the issue of Russian interference in U.S. elections is "almost a joke." The real villain, according to him, is, of course, Israel -- as it almost always is with Chomsky. According to the world's "top public intellectual," Israeli intervention in U.S. elections, "vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done."
Is anyone reassured? 

Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy, working with several other organizations, just released four studies to boost the carbon tax.
And below you’ll see the most relevant table, which comes from study #4. It shows—in theory—what politicians might do with the additional money, with a critic's comments in green.




Aaaaaannnnnddddd....a table:



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