Wisdom of the Inuit

This is a quote from an Inuit from Greenland made famous in the Danish writer Peter Freuchen's Book of the Es­kimo. Freuchen tells how one day, after coming home hungry from an unsuccessful walrus-hunting expedition, he found one of the successful hunters dropping off several hundred pounds of meat [for him]. He thanked him profusely. The man objected indignantly: 
'Up in our country we are human!' said the hunter. 'And since we are human we help each other. We don't like to hear anybody say thanks for that. What I get today you may get tomorrow. Up here we say that by gifts one makes slaves and by whips one makes dogs.' 
The "humanity" the man was claiming was the idea that there was no calculation of his "gift," no "accounting." It is the accounting of debt that ruins the gift, that makes man a slave. This has become an important concept in the world of anthropology.

An Anniversary of a Disaster

There is always a conflict between human confidence and our tendency to become the Sorcerer's Apprentice.

On March 11, 2011, a massive earthquake and tsunami hit the northeast coast of Japan, killing 20,000 people. Another 160,000 then fled the radiation in Fukushima. It was the world’s worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl, and according to some it would be far worse, if the Japanese government did not cover up the true severity of the damage. At least 100,000 people from the region have not yet returned to their homes. A full cleanup of the site is expected to take at least 40 years. 40 years.

"The future existence of Japan as a whole was at stake," admitted Japan's prime minister regarding the time of the 2011 quake and tsunami, revealing that the country came within a "paper-thin margin" of a nuclear disaster requiring the evacuation of 50 million people.
Conservation group Greenpeace warned that "signs of mutations in trees and DNA-damaged worms beginning to appear," while "vast stocks of radiation" mean that forests cannot be decontaminated.
Today, the radiation at the Fukushima plant is still so powerful it has proven impossible to get inside to find and remove the extremely dangerous blobs of melted fuel rods.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power has made some progress, such as removing hundreds of spent fuel roads in one damaged building. But the technology needed to establish the location of the melted fuel rods in the other three reactors at the plant has not been developed. That is, we are using technology for which there are no known technological solutions for known and anticipated technological complications.
The fuel rods melted through their containment vessels in the reactors, and no one knows exactly where they are now. This part of the plant is so dangerous to humans, Tepco has been developing robots, which can swim under water and negotiate obstacles in damaged tunnels and piping to search for the melted fuel rods.
But as soon as they get close to the reactors, the radiation destroys their wiring and renders them useless.
The reactors continue to bleed radiation into the ground water and thence into the Pacific Ocean but the company has built a wall that has diminished the contamination considerably.

Another problem: Much of the work involves pumping a steady torrent of water into the wrecked and highly radiated reactors to cool them down. Afterward, the radiated water is then pumped out of the plant and stored in tanks that are proliferating around the site. What to do with the nearly million tonnes of radioactive water is one of the biggest challenges, said the site manager. He is “deeply worried” the storage tanks will leak radioactive water in the sea - as they have done several times before.
Yet the company hopes to get permission to do exactly that, to release the contaminated water into the sea.

Sunday 3/13/16

Today's gospel is that of the woman caught in adultery, in flagrante delicto as they say. This occurs against the background of "in gathering," a sort of agricultural Thanksgiving, an old Jewish social and religious holiday.
It appears today in John but, apparently, no one believes him the source and most think it from Luke.
Interestingly, there is no man charged, a violation of the law itself.
It is a clever trap for Christ as the Mosaic law is undeniable. She must die. And adultery was a significant event for the culture for, like cowardice in battle, it threatens social foundations.
Christ switches the question from a legal one to a moral one. Then implicates all humanity in her crime. Not only are we equal before God, we are equal among our fellows.
As the accusers melt away, she is left with Christ alone, Christ being the only one who actually fills His own definition of a righteous stone thrower as only an innocent could condemn her.
As such He is the only one who can forgive, which He then proves.

Cab Thoughts 3/12/16

A certain kind of rich man afflicted with the symptoms of moral dandyism sooner or later comes to the conclusion that it isn't enough merely to make money. He feels obliged to hold views, to espouse causes and elect Presidents, to explain to a trembling world how and why the world went wrong. -Lewis H. Lapham, editor and writer (b. 8 Jan 1935)


Herman Woulk wrote Marjorie Morningstar, The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War and War and Remembrance. When Isaiah Berlin suggested Woulk write his memoir, his wife—“Betty Sarah Wouk, the beautiful love of my life”—discouraged him with the words, “Dear, you’re not that interesting a person.”

Obama has created some new gun laws. This phenomenon is worth a lot of thoughtful attention but likely will get only the attention part. This follows the San Bernardino atrocity where a number of innocent county workers were murdered while having a Christmas party. Obama wants to legislate against guns. Trump wants to legislate against Muslims. Some probably would ban Christmas or parties or both. But there are two significant problems here. The first is that there is no clear understanding of the factors involved in these types of episodes; banning guns or Muslims, or parties are more than just a placebo, they are easy. They are substitutes for the real hard questions and complex answers that are at work here. The desire to do something--anything--is very human and very wrong. The second problem is that the U.S. is meticulously divided up in governmental responsibility.

There is a legislative branch, an executive branch and a judicial branch. The legislature writes the laws. Obama is in the executive branch and can only enforce the laws the legislature has written. He can not write laws, however caring or brilliant.

When Ghana became independent in 1957 it had a G.N.P. equal to that of South Korea. Now South Korea -- less richly endowed in natural resources than Ghana -- is exporting cars and television sets to Africa.

Storms on Saturn can last for months or even years. A long-lived 2004 storm on Saturn, named the “Dragon Storm,” created mega-lightning 1,000 times more powerful than lightning on Earth.

Who is....Bismarck?

When Iran learned that Saudi Arabia had beheaded a prominent Shiite cleric, Sheikh Nimr al-Nimr, on Saturday, "the Shiite theocracy in Iran took it as a deliberate provocation by its regional rival and, true to form, Iranian protesters torched the Saudi embassy in Tehran and another Saudi diplomatic outpost in Iran. Iran is having second thoughts. The Saudis "knew we couldn't look the other way,” Fazel Meybodi, a cleric from the Iranian holy city of Qum, told The New York Times. “Saudi Arabia killed Mr. al-Nimr at this sensitive juncture in time to widen the gap between Sunni and Shiite Muslims.... Unfortunately they had predicted our overreaction, and now they are using it against us to try to isolate Iran once again."

One factor in the decline of liberal arts in college must be how depressing it all is.

Democracy and equal rights are not the norm in the world. The revolution that created the American Republic was just that, a revolution. And unique. It was so because the tendencies of us, as beings, are contrary to democracy and equal rights. We have, as a species, had a lot of opportunities to create cultures from the ground up; it took a long time to create the U.S.. The reasons for that delay and uniqueness should  always be on our minds as the nation mulls reversion to the norm.

At least 3,600,000 black slaves were brought to Brazil alive [4.86 million according to Eltis and Richardson], while thousands more perished aboard the ships traveling from Africa to Brazil. Between 1800 and 1852, during the period when some European nations began to turn against the institution of slavery and pressure slave traders to cease, more than 1,600,000 slaves arrived in Brazil. In Africa, slaves were captured, branded, placed in heavy iron manacles, and transported on voyages that sometimes took as long as eight months to reach their final destination. The international trade was outlawed in 1830, but slave ships continued to journey to Brazil. By the 1840s, the British were seizing ships carrying slaves and freeing their captives, although when slavers saw hostile naval vessels approaching, they often threw their human cargo into the sea to avoid fines and the confiscation of their ships.

Golden oldie:

 http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/04/tyranny-of-good-ideas.html

The reviews of "The Big Short" continue. Here's another: The question that neither The Big Short nor Margin Call address is the one everyone should be asking: how did so many smart people get it so wrong for so long? Of course, market traders can be wrong. But why was most everyone wrong? Why were their errors centered on housing and not some other sector? And why were they wrong on housing in this period and not previously? Any explanation that does not deal with these questions directly is not really getting to the core of the problem that needs to be explained. Here is where we must deal with the delicate signaling system of interest rates and the way they came to be so distorted through 1) Fed policy, 2) subsidized lending, and 3) the recklessness of traders in the face of too-big-to-fail policies. 

Obsequy: plural: Obsequies: n: A funeral rite or ceremony. ety: 1350-1400; Middle English obseque < Middle French < Late Latin obsequiae, alteration (by confusion with exsequiae funeral rites) of obsequia, plural of Latin obsequium. Interestingly, "obsequious" has the same root: Excessively eager to please or to obey all instructions; fawning, subservient.

The minimum wage debate will go on forever. But some people have used it to great effect. During South Africa’s apartheid era, the secretary of its avowedly racist Building Workers’ Union, Gert Beetge, said, “There is no job reservation left in the building industry, and in the circumstances, I support the rate for the job (minimum wage) as the second-best way of protecting our white artisans.” The South African Economic and Wage Commission of 1925 reported that “while definite exclusion of the Natives from the more remunerative fields of employment by law has not been urged upon us, the same result would follow a certain use of the powers of the Wage Board under the Wage Act of 1925, or of other wage-fixing legislation. The method would be to fix a minimum rate for an occupation or craft so high that no Native would be likely to be employed.”

The paragraph that gave the book by Alan Paton its title: "Cry, the beloved country, for the unborn child that is the inheritor of our fear. Let him not love the earth too deeply. Let him not laugh too gladly when the water runs through his fingers, nor stand too silent when the setting sun makes red the veldt with fire. Let him not be too moved when the birds of his land are singing, nor give too much of his heart to a mountain or a valley. For fear will rob him of all if he gives too much. "

The Enlightenment is a period in European history, around the 17th century, when science and reason came to triumph over faith and tradition. There were two central ideals in the Enlightenment: the perfectibility of human nature and the belief in human progress through the development of human knowledge, especially the sciences. While quantum physics in the early 20th century had seriously questioned the possibility of a deterministic world, the power of reason was still affirmed and so was the belief in human progress. Modernism still allowed for faith in human improvement and endeavors but began to make such more personal and less generalized. The great wars destroyed what remained. Postmodernism has no faith in anything. Post-modernism can be thought of as modernism taken to its logical conclusion, from an Old Master's "this is what there is to see" to Picasso's modernist "this is the way I see it" to Jackson Pollock's postmodern "here's a blotch, see whatever you want to see." 

Is one of the appeals of Islam its simple, redefined order and meaning that the Enlightenment inadvertently subverted?

A new paper on income inequality is out by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, coming as an article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Reynolds writes,  "the Zucman-Saez data are so misleading as to be worthless. They attempt to estimate top U.S. wealth shares on the basis of that portion of capital income reported on individual income tax returns--interest, dividends, rent and capital gains.

This won't work because federal tax laws in 1981, 1986, 1997 and 2003 momentously changed (1) the rules about which sorts of capital income have to be reported, (2) the tax incentives to report business income on individual rather than corporate tax forms, and (3) the tax incentives for high-income taxpayers to respond to lower tax rates on capital gains and dividends by realizing more capital gains and holding more dividend-paying stocks." Amazingly, Friedman criticized the approached used---in 1939.

A significant factor influencing the 20th Century was the Franco-Prussian War of 1870. Prussia had defeated Austria in the Seven Week War of 1866 and Bismarck wanted to confirm Prussia's dominance among the German states and unify them. France's motives under Napoleon III were less clear but they felt confident with their new military structure, their new breechloaders and their machine guns. They got overwhelmed, Napoleon was removed, Germany unified,  Alsace and Lorraine lost to the Germans in the treaty and pride and resentment simmered until the Great War's mind altering bloodbath.

The square-root of 2 cannot be written as the ratio of two integers. That statement is provable, and the proof is very simple. Yet this is a statement that could never have been discovered experimentally. The ancient Pythagoreans considered it to be a different kind of knowledge, essentially a knowledge of the spiritual world.

AAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd....a picture of the Earth setting from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter:

 

The Clinton Foundation

Anyone who takes Clinton seriously as a candidate must wrestle with this information:

The Clinton Foundation stopped accepting donations from foreign governments while Hillary Clinton served as secretary of state. As if the contribution before she became Secretary was reasonable. But the Wall Street Journal reported  in March 2015 that individual donors with direct ties to foreign governments had made millions in donations while Clinton was in office:

All told, more than a dozen foreign individuals and their foundations and companies were large donors to the Clinton Foundation in the years after Mrs. Clinton became secretary of state in 2009, collectively giving between $34 million and $68 million, foundation records show. Some donors also provided funding directly to charitable projects sponsored by the foundation, valued by the organization at $60 million.

 

But the sainted Foundation has an off-shore account as well, an account in Canada that can take money without reporting it and funnel that money to the mother ship Foundation.


In April 2015, the Washington Post and Reuters revealed that a Canadian charity affiliated with the Clinton Foundation had failed to reveal the identities of 1,100 donors:

The number of undisclosed contributors to the charity, the Canada-based Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership, signals a larger zone of secrecy around foundation donors than was previously known.

Details of the organization’s fundraising were disclosed this week by a spokeswoman for the Canadian group’s founder, mining magnate Frank Giustra.

The Canadian group has received attention in recent days as a potential avenue for anonymous Clinton Foundation donations from foreign business executives, including some who had interests before the U.S. government while Hillary Rodham Clinton was secretary of state.

Sharapova and a Crime of Intent

Meldonium is also known as mildronate. It is manufactured in Latvia and only distributed in Baltic countries and Russia. It is said that Meldonium is used to treat ischemia: a lack of blood flow to parts of the body, particularly in cases of angina or heart failure. It works by dilating blood vessels and increasing blood flow, which in turn improves exercise capacity, physical and mental endurance, and also brain function.

Now that is quite a claim. Such a drug would have a lot of applications in many of the problems that are a function of poor blood flow. But surprisingly it is used only in the Eastern Block. Perhaps it will soon be coming to a Mexican clinic near you.
       
The World Anti-Doping Agency  found "evidence of its use by athletes with the intention of enhancing performance" by virtue of carrying more oxygen to muscle tissue.
L'Equipe reported that the scientific advisor to the French Agency Against Doping (AFLD), Professor Xavier Bigard, said in interviews with athletes at last year's European Games in Baku that a wide proportion of athletes admitted taking meldonium.
The drug was name-checked in the latest investigative documentary on Russian doping reforms by the German Hajo Seppelt. The documentary referred to a 2015 study in which 17% of Russian athletes (724 of 4,316) tested were found to have meldonium in their system. A global study found 2.2% of athletes had it in their system.
Several athletes have been suspended since the turn of 2016 after testing positive for the drug. Abebe Aregawi, the 2013 women's 1,500m world champion, has been provisionally suspended after meldonium was found in a sample she provided. Endeshaw Negesse, the 2015 Tokyo marathon champion, was also banned after reportedly testing positive for the same substance. Others include Olga Abramova and Artem Tyschcenko, two Ukrainian biathletes, Eduard Vorganov, a Russian cyclist and Ekaterina Bobrova, a Russian ice dancer.

But just because people use it does not mean it works.

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1043661815301717  has a summary of the drug's claims and purported mechanism of action.
The mechanism of action is based on the regulation of energy metabolism pathways through l-carnitine lowering effect. l-Carnitine biosynthesis enzyme γ-butyrobetaine hydroxylase and carnitine/organic cation transporter type 2 (OCTN2) are the main known drug targets of meldonium, and through inhibition of these activities meldonium induces adaptive changes in the cellular energy homeostasis. Since l-carnitine is involved in the metabolism of fatty acids, the decline in its levels stimulates glucose metabolism and decreases concentrations of l-carnitine related metabolites, such as long-chain acylcarnitines and trimethylamine-N-oxide.
 

Graphic:

Cab Thoughts 3/9/16

Concentrated power is not rendered harmless by the good intentions of those who create it.--Friedman

 

 

Pew's recent study found that the middle class was no longer the majority of the country, having dipped from 61% of U.S. households in 1971 to 50% today. 120.8 million adults are now in middle income class households, while a combined 121.3 million are in lower and upper income classes. While I strenuously oppose the use of "class" in reference to the U.S., these are surprising generalizations.

"Shadow banking" refers to the performance of risky bank-like functions by institutions that are not as carefully regulated as banks. The most dangerous such function is that of borrowing short-term in order to invest in longer-term financial instruments, all while hoping that you will be able to "roll over" - renew or refinance - your short-term loans over the durations of those longer-term investments. When you can do that, you can make a great deal of money by investing in higher-end speculative financial instruments, because short-term borrowing costs are lower than long-term speculative yields. But you also put those who lend to you - notably bank depositors or counterpart small savers (more on them, below) - at great risk, for you're engaged in a "musical chairs" form of finance: You avoid bankrupting yourself and your lenders only as long as your speculative investments keep rising, bubble-fashion, in price. high-end securities firms - firms like today's J.P. Morgan and Goldman Sachs - through which mainly the rich invested. Securities firms borrowed short-term from depositories - hence from their depositors - then used the borrowings to purchase high-yield speculative financial products. The result was first a bubble-inflating binge of speculative buying of such products, then the massive failure of both the securities firms that bought them and the banks and depositors who lent the short-term money once the bubble had burst. For this reason, the Glass-Steagalll Act, passed shortly after the 1929 crash in 1933, put an end to these relations between depository institutions and securities firms. It ended, in other words, the 1920s version of shadow banking. Many of the most dangerous shadow banking operations were - and still are - conducted by institutions that are affiliated with ordinary depository institutions under single holding company structures, structures that the original Glass-Steagall Act prohibited and which President Bill Clinton and Secretary Summers pushed to allow.

Who is....Louis Hughes?

People all say that time seems slower when they are young, speeding up as they age. A number of studies have shown that time perception is unchanged with aging. But the feeling of speeding time persists. Some reasonable explanations:
One, we mark time by significant events and young people's lives are more crowded by them. Two, time seems to pass faster when you are occupied and older people are busier. And, three, if clear memories form our personal timelines, then everything we remember clearly will seem more recent than it actually was. Realizing that isn't true makes us feel like time has passed us by.

What the Cubs have done is going to challenge the existing baseball structure. They have gone out and bought so much talent that other teams are almost in a different league. Rich teams are simply becoming overwhelming. The Dodgers have eight potential starters. Eight. The Yankee's bullpen looks like a who's who in baseball. These disparities are going to hurt the game.

 

A coffle is 'a train of men or beasts fastened together,' says the Oxford English Dictionary, and indeed Louis Hughes referred to the coffle he marched in as 'a herd.' The word comes from the Arabic qāfilah, meaning 'caravan,' recalling the overland slave trade that existed across the desert from sub-Saharan Africa to the greater Islamic world centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

The opening of Thirty Years a Slave by Louis Hughes: I was born in Virginia, in 1832, near Charlottesville, in the beautiful valley of the Rivanna river. My father was a white man and my mother a negress, the slave of one John Martin. I was a mere child, probably not more than six years of age, as I remember, when my mother, two brothers and myself were sold to Dr. Louis, a practicing physician in the village of Scottsville. We remained with him about five years, when he died, and, in the settlement of his estate, I was sold to one Washington Fitzpatrick, a merchant of the village. He kept me a short time when he took me to Richmond, by way of canal-boat, expecting to sell me; but as the market was dull, he brought me back and kept me some three months longer, when he told me he had hired me out to work on a canal-boat running to Richmond...

 

A year and a half ago, the Rolling Stone published a now-retracted article telling the story of a woman called Jackie's gang rape at a University of Virginia fraternity, and the gross misconduct of administrators that followed. One of those administrators, associate dean Nicole Eramo, has since filed a defamation suit against the magazine.

 

Sybaritic: adj: 1. pertaining to or characteristic of a sybarite; characterized by or loving luxury or sensuous pleasure: to wallow in sybaritic splendor.
2. (initial capital letter) of, relating to, or characteristic of Sybaris or its inhabitants. Sybaritic derives from the name of the ancient Greek city Sybaris, which was known for the luxurious lifestyles of its inhabitants. It entered English in the early 1600s.

There has been some fuss about Trump's accusation Bill Clinton and of sexual harassment. In 2009, Gallup looked at how much attention different age groups paid to political news. The older the voter, the more attention was paid. About a fifth of people under 30 followed political news "very closely;" 46 percent of those 65 and over did so. More importantly, 20% of current Americans of voting age were born after Bill Clinton was in office. This stuff is going to be meaningless to a lot of people. Or maybe new.

Well, this is interesting--or could be. Former Democratic presidential candidate Jim Webb is accusing his party's front-runner for her "inept leadership" in Libya as secretary of State. "Hillary Clinton should be called to account for her inept leadership that brought about the chaos in Libya, and the power vacuums that resulted in the rest of the region," Webb wrote in a post recently.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/12/the-killer-of-men.html

 

The death toll of the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-13) was 1.2 million. A century later, the Napoleonic Wars killed 1.9 million men. And a century after that, the First World War cost more than 9 million servicemen their lives. Perhaps as many as 8 million people died in the Russian Civil War of 1918-21 (though most of these were the victims of the famine and pestilence unleashed by the conflict). But even this figure pales into insignificance alongside the total mortality caused by the Second World War. For military personnel, the total body count was roughly twice the figure for the First World War. But this figure excludes civilian casualties. According to the best available estimates, total civilian deaths in the Second World War amounted to 37.8 million, bringing the total death toll to nearly 57 million people. Somewhere in the region of 2.4 per cent of the world's entire population was killed in the Second World War and 0.5 per cent in the First, compared with roughly 0.4 per cent in the Thirty Years War and 0.2 per cent in the Napoleonic Wars and the War of the Spanish Succession. ... In the Second World War roughly 3 per cent of the entire pre-war population of all combatant countries died as a result of the war. For Germany, Austria and Hungary the figure was around 8 per cent, for Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union 11 per cent and for Poland -- of all countries the worst affected by the war -- nearly 19 per cent.--Ferguson

 

Communism's grand total of victims is  variously estimated at between 85 million and 100 million murdered, the most colossal case of political carnage in history.

 

Ketchup derives its name from the Indonesian fish and soy sauce kecap ikan. The names of several other Indonesian sauces also include the word kecap, pronounced KETCHUP, which means a base of dark, thick soy sauce. Why would English garum [or fish sauce] have an Indonesian name? Because the English, starting with the medieval spice trade, looked to Asia for seasoning. Many English condiments, even Worcestershire sauce, invented in the 1840s, are based on Asian ideas.

 

Here is a quote--and attitude--I have always found disturbing: "Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but rather have those because we have acted rightly. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit." - Aristotle. I do believe there are some born with virtue and some without. It is distressing, though, to think that many need example and training--teaching--to have virtue. This idea places demands upon the home and the education system. The ancient Greeks taught citizenship actively. Very significant, if true.

Spanish explorers: Juan Diaz de Solis and Giovanni da Verrazano were eaten by natives. Balboa, after discovering the Pacific, was betrayed by his colleague Francisco Pizarro and executed on trumped-up charges. Pizarro in his turn was murdered by rivals. Hernando de Soto marched an army pointlessly all over what is now the southeastern United States for four years until he caught a fever and died.

 

Muslim pirates (or corsairs) in North Africa, in retaliation for the encroachment of Spanish kings, raided the Mediterranean and the coast. They enslaved at least a million European Christians in Algiers and other port cities. In Europe, corsairs were regarded as a barbarian menace, reviled for selling thousands of Christian sailors into slavery. But they themselves viewed their war as a religious conflict against Christian invaders and were seen by Arab and Berber inhabitants of the coast as local heroes. The most famous of the corsair commanders were two brothers, 'Aruj and Hizir, both known in Europe by the Italian name of Barbarossa.

 

Joe DiMaggio had a 56-game hitting streak, still unsurpassed in the majors, which ran from May 15 to July 17, 1941, when it was stopped in Cleveland by a average pitcher named Al Smith. The next day he began a streak that lasted for an additional fifteen games.

 

Martin Frobisher explored the Arctic region of Canada, found what he thought was gold, and carried fifteen hundred tons of it home on a dangerously overloaded boat only to be informed that it was worthless iron pyrites. Undaunted, Frobisher returned to Canada, found another source of gold, carted thirteen hundred tons of it back, and was informed, with presumed weariness on the part of the royal assayer, that it was the same stuff.

 

AAAAAAaaaaannnnnnnddddd......a picture of Louis Hughes: