Cab Thoughts 3/30/31

Until the lions have their own historians, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. (A concept articulated by Chinua Achebe)

Less than 4% of depositors account for almost 60% of the deposits in Cypriot banks.

The Nazis ran 42,500 concentration camps in Europe during the second war according to a new report from the Holocaust Museum.

In the 30's, 40's and 50's in the U.S. the door-to-door salesman became a local staple. The king was the Fuller Brush Man. In the Disney animated version of 'The Three Little Pigs,' which won an Academy Award in 1933, the Big Bad Wolf tried to get into the pigs' houses by disguising himself as a Fuller Brush Man. Donald Duck earned his living for a while selling Fuller Brushes. In 1948 Fuller salesmen, all of them independent dealers working on straight commission, made nearly fifty million house-to-house sales calls in the United States -- a country that at the time had fewer than forty-three mil­lion households.

A Chinese national, a Mr. Jiang, was arrested trying to flee to China. He works for the NASA at Langley. NASA Inspector-General Paul Martin said he believes there are nearly 200 Chinese nationals working in positions that afford them significant access to the agency and its programs. Does this sound at all reasonable?

The Marcellus is now America's biggest gas producing field that provides already 9 billion cubic feet per day and soon will produce an amazing 10 billion cubic feet per day. Gas principally from Pennsylvania but also West Virginia and Ohio now totals about 15% of America's daily gas supply. (The opponents used to claim this was a Ponzi scheme.)

The M in the NiMH battery is the rare earth metal lanthanum and the planet can't produce enough to satisfy current demand, much less additional demands in automotive. Toyota cleverly locked up their lanthanum and NiMH battery supply chain and leaving their competitors out in the cold. lithium batteries are actually the second choice.

In 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. 

In the nineteenth century Francis Cabot Lowell toured England and visited its industrial sites. He was horrified. He left fearing that Britain was teetering on the brink of social upheaval because of child labor. Back in New England he instituted new labor conditions. He paid higher-than-normal wages and created decent mill housing for young farm girls willing to work away from home for a few years. The idea was that the girls would leave the farm, build up some savings, then return. Their facilities were cleaner and often safer than farm work and generally it was a great success. Charles Dickens, on a trip to America commented on the facilities: "I am now going to state three facts, which will startle a large class of readers [in England] very much. Firstly, there is a joint-stock piano in a great many of the boarding-houses. Secondly, nearly all these young ladies subscribe to circulating libraries. Thirdly, they have got up among them­selves a periodical called The Lowell Offering . . . [of which] I will only observe . . . that it will compare advantageously with a great many En­glish Annuals."

In two sentences I heard read aloud many years ago in a large auditorium, Wright Morris introduced me to the virtues of an unadorned prose. The two sentences were these: “The father talks to his son. The son listens and watches his father eat soup.”--Annie Dillard

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/revolt-of-masses-by-ortega-y-gasset.html

Nicholas Maduro, aged 50,  is the front runner in the election to replace the giant brained Hugo Chavaz, who died recently after creating poverty in an oil rich nation. Maduro, a former bus driver who is trumpeting his working-class roots like Chavez, has a lead over Capriles--a guy who wants to recreate Brazil in Venezuela-- of more than 10 percentage points, according to two recent opinion polls. Maduro has recently said that several old Bush staffers are plotting Capriles' assassination, a revelation that should worry Capriles plenty. Both of these men are new breed of South American leaders: No uniforms.

The sentimentalized version of C.S. Lewis' relationship with Joy Davidman is largely known through the play and movie “Shadowlands.” An American divorcee with two small children, Davidman seems to have been, at least initially, little more than a gold digger who contrived to make Lewis her rather willing “sugar daddy.” But when Davidman grew seriously ill, the relationship deepened into real love, and the two were married by an Anglican priest. There followed a short period of happiness, before Lewis was utterly traumatized by Davidman’s death at age 45. “A Grief Observed” was his attempt to deal with the resulting emotional devastation. Lewis himself died, after much suffering from “renal failure, prostate obstruction, and cardiac degeneration,” at the age of 64, on the same day that John F. Kennedy was shot.

2.9% of workers are minimum wage and over 50% are between 16 and 24 years of age.

A new book from prominent primatologist Jane Goodall "contains borrowed passages without attribution," according to a report in The Washington Post. The book, Seeds of Hope: Wisdom and Wonder From the World of Plants, is due out next month and was co-authored by Gail Hudson, who worked on two of Goodall's previous books.

A science fiction story years ago had the U.S. jettison the Congress and provided for national computer voting on every national topic. The result was, of course, chaos. These two Supreme Court cases on same-sex marriage, Hollingsworth v. Perry (the Proposition 8 case from California) and U.S. v. Windsor (the Defense of Marriage Act case), have the same feel to me, precipitous, meddling and premature. The Court should be a filter, evaluating national opinion, not creating it.

In the 1990s, Bhutan expelled or forced to leave nearly one-fifth of its population in the name of preserving its Tibetan Mahayana Buddhist culture and identity, claiming that those expelled were illegal residents. The decision was motivated by the concern that the fast growing Nepali minority would take over the country, recalling similar events that caused the collapse of the nearby kingdom of Sikkim in 1975.

The Employee Benefit Research Institute’s latest survey on retirement shows most households saving for retirement but unsuccessfully. Excluding the value of a primary home and any defined benefit plans, 57 percent of households say they have less than $25,000 in savings and investments. Twenty-eight percent say they have less than $1,000. Only 18 percent of American retirees are very confident about having enough money for a comfortable retirement, compared to 41 percent in 2007. At the same time, 14 percent are not at all confident and 22 percent are not too confident.

A report in Federal Computer Week, a magazine covering technology within the federal government, cites anonymous sources claiming that the CIA has signed a contract with Amazon worth about $600 million over the next decade to develop cloud computing technology.

While on the campaign trail in 1912 in his effort to win a third Presidential term (this time for the new Progressive Party) Teddy Roosevelt was shot in the chest. The would-be assassin was a thirty-six-year-old psychotic New York bartender named John Schrank, a Bavarian immi­grant who feared--prompted by a dream--that Roosevelt's run for a third term was an effort to establish a monarchy in the United States. Roosevelt's heavy overcoat, folded speech manuscript and spectacle-case he carried in his pocket saved his life, but the bullet traveled five inches deep near his rib cage, giving him a superficial but bleeding wound. Roosevelt delivered his speech, his coat unbuttoned to reveal a bloodstained shirt and his speech held so that all could see the two holes made by the bullet. He cried "It takes more than that to kill a bull moose!" Because of the incident, the party became known as the Bull Moose Party.

There is an assumption that people are essentially the same--in virtually all ways--and that subjects are interchangeable and valid proxies for all. A 2008 survey of the top six psychology journals shows more than 96 percent of the subjects tested in psychological studies from 2003 to 2007 were Westerners—with nearly 70 percent from the United States alone. So 96 percent of human subjects in these studies came from countries that represent only 12 percent of the world’s population.

An announcement in Pittsburgh marked the opening of the Center for Sustainable Shale Development, which has established 15 initial performance standards representatives said are designed to ensure safe and environmentally responsible development of the Marcellus and Utica shale plays. At least one of the participants at the announcement, made at the office of the Heinz Endowments in Pittsburgh, likened the initiative to Pittsburgh’s earlier efforts to make the city less polluted
The group is made up of environmental groups and several industry leaders. Think supply control.

An old observation by Richard Cantillon (writing decades before Adam Smith) is called the “Cantillon effect." He argued that those closest to the money source benefited at the expense of others. His original observation was of the mining of gold and silver. Those who benefited most were closest to the creating of the wealth and they, in turn, used that wealth to buy goods which raised the price of those goods down the line to the later consumer. In other words, the beneficiaries of newly created money spend that money and bid up the price of goods with their higher demand. Those who suffer are those who have to pay newly higher prices but did not benefit from the newly created money. One wonders if there is any application of this theory to current government policy where the politicians and bankers are closest to the money created, literally, and then the inflation of price is passed on down the line to the less fortunate citizens.

Kipling and his sister were sent home from India as children in the care of total strangers and lived with them for five years before seeing their parents again. This was a common practice among the Brits who were fearful of the intimacy that Indian servants developed with all children; the English felt this attention made children unmanageable when they grew older--and the men less manly. Maud Driver in her 1909 book The Englishwoman in India was one of the first publicly to express these fears. According to her, it was necessary to send Anglo-Indian children 'Home' in order to remove them from 'the promiscuous intimacy of the Indian servants, whose propensity to worship at the shrine of the Baba-log [the children] is unhappily apt to demoralize the small gods and goddesses they serve'.

Chinua Achebe has died. One of a group of well regarded novelists, he was a Conrad foe. In his first and most famous novel, Things Fall Apart, he showed the devastating effects of colonialism on a Nigerian village in the late 1800s. He wrote: "The white man is very clever. He came quietly and peaceably with his religion. We were amused at his foolishness and allowed him to stay. Now he has won our brothers, and our clan can no longer act like one. He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart."

Obama would like to change the computation of inflation to "chained CPI." Right now most feel that inflation is underestimated. Obama's plan would be to assume that, if prices rise, the consumer will not buy less of a product, they will switch to something else. If beef goes up, people will not pay more for it, they will switch to chicken. The end result is that chained CPI is generally lower than the current CPI used for measuring inflation. The CPI for the past 12 months was measured at 2.0%. The chained CPI for the same period would be 1.8%.

AAAAnnnndddddd........a picture:

Bowdlerism Reconsidered

 

"Bowdlerized" ("ISE" in England --"ISE" for any none Greek-based words-- or "IZE" in North America) is a fierce academic epithet because it is an accusation of something untrue, untrue on several levels. First it is a change from the original, from the art from which it comes, so it is a counterfeit. Second, it is a denial of the art's truth, its essence. The motive is meaningless. Bowdler had a good motive for what he did; the process is a lie, a sacrifice of artistic truth for some reason, trivial or not, that is opposed to truth. Synonyms in the Thesaurus include: emasculate, alter, neuter, shorten, reduce, cut, abridge, castrate, spay, contract, foreshorten, demasculinise, expurgate, demasculinize, and abbreviate. Antiintellectual and declasse are not included but none are flattering.

Henrietta and Thomas Bowdler were English siblings who, in the early 1800's, prepared and published editions of Shakespeare’s works meant for women and children and for families to read together. They wanted people exposed to these great works but were eager to eliminate any controversial or offensive material they felt inappropriate for women and children. (It may well be that this approach exposed many to the genius of Shakespeare who might well have not were the material not scrubbed.) In 1818 Bowdler published his edition of 'Shakespeare,' the work by which he is best known. Its title ran: 'The Family Shakespeare in ten volumes; in which nothing is added to the original text; but those words and expressions are omitted which cannot with propriety be read aloud in a family.' In the preface Thomas Bowdler wrote: 'Many words and expressions occur which are of so indecent a nature as to render it highly desirable that they should be erased.' He also complained of the unnecessary and frivolous allusions to Scripture, which 'call imperiously for their erasement.' Four editions were published before 1824, and others appeared in 1831, 1853, and 1861. During the last years of his life Bowdler was engaged in rewriting Gibbon's 'History.' The work was completed just before his death in 1825, and published in six volumes by his nephew Thomas.

He has always been reviled for his prudery, his destructive approach which can only be characterized as non-artistic, and his willingness to sacrifice the art and truth of genius to a lesser god. He was, however, not alone. Samuel Johnson said that Cordelia's death in Lear was too painful to be endured. Mr. Nahum Tate agreed so much he rewrote it. In his version Cordelia lives, marries Edger and everyone lives happily ever after. His play was quite successful. It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838. While many critics sneered and dismissed it, Samuel Johnson quite approved. The memorable Lear of David Garrick was Tate's!

Nor is this a behavior of older and rigid times. When Taming of the Shrew was staged in New York at their Shakespeare Festival in1990, it was bowdlerized to dilute the play's misogynist sentiments, sort of the essence of the play.

The sacrifice of truth for sensibilities never ends, perhaps because the targets are endless. We must make Julia's confessor a lay adviser, the Merchant a pedantic Calvinist, substitute a jousting contest for Agincourt, a swede for the Moor, but maybe a Moor for Henry the Fifth. And no dwarfs. Or madmen. Or hunchbacks.

So it seems, for all its faults, to Bowdlerize is Politically Correct.

The Rube Goldberg Path to Action

A new program has appeared in American schools whose purpose seems to be to teach objectivity. While this may be a noble goal, it is focused on a peculiar event: 911. The gist of the course episode seems to be to show some understanding of the terrorists and their mindset. One of the sections raises the question of how the Americans are perceived internationally and how American policies might engender antagonism in other nations. This is an effort to make the 911 atrocity understandable.

This is very dangerous ground.

Open-mindedness. Parallax. Seeing things in context. It all sounds commendable. But seeing the better side of atrocity is no virtue. Strangely, seeing an action as the product of many fused factors, usually social and economic, never seems to include elements of immorality, savagery or evil.

Should we really argue that the strain of World War 1, an unfair Treaty of Versailles and inflation led to the Holocaust?

When the Bell Tolls for No One

A new program has appeared in American schools whose purpose seems to be teaching objectivity. While this may be a noble goal it is focused on a peculiar event: 911. The gist of the particular course episode seems to be to show some understanding of the 911 terrorists and their mindset. One of the sections raises the question of how the Americans are perceived internationally and how American policies might engender antagonism in other nations. This is an effort to make the 911 atrocity understandable.

This is very dangerous ground.

Open-mindedness. Parallax. Seeing things in context. It all sounds commendable. For years it has been used to explain differences among peoples, particularly differences in the success of cultures. But seeing the better side of atrocity is no virtue. Strangely, seeing an action as the product of many fused factors, usually social and economic, never seems to include elements of immorality, savagery or evil.

Should we really argue that the strains of World War 1, an unfair Treaty of Versailles and inflation led to the Holocaust?

Pruning the Economy

During the Second World War ballroom dancing became popular and sophisticated and, in parallel, the "Big Bands" developed. Dancing was a center of American entertainment in the 30's and 40's.

In 1944, the United States government levied a steep tax against any and all establishments which contained dance floors, served alcohol and other refreshments, and/or provided musical entertainment. This was the so-called "Cabaret Tax." It was 30% of the gross receipts. After the war it was continued in 1947. Two thirds of musicians in the industry left their work forever and the Big Bands broke up. After the war people went out less, stayed home.

The power to tax is the power to destroy. So said Daniel Webster, counsel for the Second Bank of the United States, repeated by Chief Justice Marshal in McCulloch vs Maryland in 1819. In McCulloch the debate was over the state's right to tax the national government. It is used in special arguments, taxation of religion especially. For some reason the wisdom of this statement is seen very parochially, very limited in its scope, when it is the essence of one of government's greatest powers and evils.

Priorities and Well Rounded Men

Several days ago I attended a conference where several small companies were presenting themselves to potential investors. It is common for such events to be attended by university students interested in small businesses and startups; often interested guests will be in the audience as well. I met two young men there, both graduates of graduate programs, one in geology from Cornell, one in bio-engineering from Carnegie Mellon. Both were there for possible contacts, the mysterious "networking." Neither had been employed since graduation and both were supporting themselves with small jobs.

It is unsettling to see competent people, well educated and presentable, who can not get work. And indeed these are difficult economic times for many reasons. But there was something else at play, at least with the geologist. He had gone to job fairs while in school and had been called back for a second interview by a major oilfield service company but he had missed the interview. It had been in conflict with a rowing event he could not miss.

Palm Sunday Sermon 3/24/13

Palm Sunday's gospel follows Christ from his arrival in Jerusalem to His burial. The searching and questioning is over. All the interaction here is a concentration of insincerity, malice, mendacity, betrayal, cruelty and weakness all revolving around Christ who stands at the center of this savagery, calm and detached. It is as if He is on some parallel timeline as he speaks over and past His questioners and apostles, immersed in a different prophetic-filling space with its own direction and momentum. Christ's challenging answers to Pilate are well known but there is another remarkable exchange buried here.

Christ asks the apostles what money He gave them to go out and preach and they answer none. Then He says:
"But now he that has a purse, let him take it....; and he that hath not, let him sell his coat and buy a sword."

Get some money? Buy a sword? He is saying here that this is the moment of materialism and ambition against spirituality, the purse and the sword against the soul. This is the purse and the sword's last gasp.The apostles, missing every possible point, actually rummage about and find swords!
"But they said: Lord, behold here are two swords. And He said to them, it is enough."

Wouldn't you love to see His expression when He said that?

Cab Thoughts

"I am just going outside and may be some time." Lawrence Oates, leaving his tent to die on Scott's return from his doomed South Pole expedition.

 

A government document released on February 14, 2013 shows that the contract for V.P. Biden's one night stay in the Hotel Intercontinental Paris Le Grand came in at $585,000.50.

Illness has interesting subsets. In a submarine, the work is so specialized that if 15% of the sailors get the flu the sub must go to base.

 

John Delaney, who launched Intrade’s parent company in 1999, died on Mount Everest in May 2011. Other investors: Paul Tudor Jones and Stanley Druckenmiller.

A college team (Cal Bears) in Nancy Pelosi's district is in the March Madness tournament and Pelosi was asked who she wanted to win. She replied she did not want anyone to lose. She said she would root for everyone.

 

Anhydrobiosis (“life without water”) is a wide-spread phenomenon in all major groups of lower organisms. Anhydrobiotic organisms often contain as little as 2% water content. They persist in the dry state for lengthy periods, but when they are returned to water they rapidly rehydrate and resume active metabolism. The key seems to be Trehalose, a suger, which has the ability to stabilize dry membranes and proteins, and, it is emerging, intact cells in the absence of water. Recently, these findings have been applied to mammalian cells, and it is becoming possible to reduce these cells to a dry state, with excellent recovery, findings that are likely to have applications in clinical medicine. In the dry state, anhydrobiotic organisms show an arrest of metabolism, during which they appear not to age. When the cells are rehydrated, they resume active metabolism, but the life span is not shortened by the length of time spent in anhydrobiosis. The same appears to be true of mammalian cells dried with trehalose. From CROWE, J.H.*, CROWE, L.M., University of California, Davis. Anhydrobiosis: a unique biological state, who add, "We suggest that such an effective extension of the life span should have profound ecological and philosophical implications."

Cyprus’s population is 1.1 million, about the size of Dallas. The Cyprus banking system is around 8 times the size of the country’s GDP. I wonder where all that money comes from and who the tax is really aimed at.

 

Bob Dylan is the first rock and roll star to win the Medal of Freedom, the same award won by the apparently esteemed anti-American Dolores Huerta. B.B.King and Arethra Franklin also have won it. Odetta, a folk singer (but classically trained), was said by Dylan to have been one of the major influences in the development of his musical style. The '60's were filled with these singers singing folk songs, some really old. Many of the older songs of the time known to academics as "Child ballads," songs cataloged by Harvard professor Francis Child, originated in the British Isles and were still sung by descendants of immigrants, partic­ularly in the isolated communities of the Appalachian mountains.

Ben Carson, the Hopkins neurosurgeon said this at the C-PAC: “Let’s say somebody were [in the White House] and they wanted to destroy this nation,” Carson postulated in remarks at the Conservative Political Action Conference. “I would create division among the people, encourage a culture of ridicule for basic morality and the principles that made and sustained the country, undermine the financial stability of the nation, and weaken and destroy the military. It appears coincidentally that those are the very things that are happening right now.”
This guy better hire someone to start his car for a while.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/01/assassination.html

 

Julian Jaynes published only one book, in 1976, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, which tells the story of how mankind learned to think. The American Journal of Psychiatry called Jaynes “as startling as Freud in the Interpretation of Dreams.” Drawing on evidence from neurology, archaeology, art history, theology, and Greek poetry, Jaynes captured the experience of modern consciousness—“a whole kingdom where each of us reigns reclusively alone, questioning what we will, commanding what we can”—as sensitively and tragically as any great novelist. The field of psychology, he wrote, was little more than “bad poetry disguised as science.” In 1988, when Life asked Jaynes and several other thinkers to comment on the meaning of life, he responded that he had no answer. “Words have meaning, not life or persons or the universe itself,” he said. “Our search for certainty rests in our attempts at understanding the history of all individual selves and all civilizations. Beyond that, there is only awe.” He concluded that consciousness had no location in the brain. Instead, it was a function of language. “There is no such thing as a complete consciousness,” he writes. “All about us lie the remnants of our recent bicameral past.”

He has a cultist following, especially with the evolution of the computer. There are small societies devoted to him. But his insights, while interesting but vague, are somewhat sad. And it showed. He became an alcoholic. He held the same job, never gaining tenure, for the rest of his career. He lived alone in a single room on Princeton’s campus, a bachelor all his life. He gave lectures around the country but complained that there was “something wearing about them, as if I should have to try to interest anyone.”

 

The United States government is buying enough of a new smallpox vaccine to treat two million people in the event of a bioterrorism attack, and took delivery of the first shipment of it last week. An interesting debate has emerged on its price. Somehow a government that generally questions nothing gets concerned over lifesaving drugs. It has a inherent problem: There is only government and its fear of terrorism that creates this market and, consequently, the science behind it. There is no private market. So there must be some balance. These research companies have a monopoly, but so does the buyer. Without a buyer to pay, there is no technology. It is like a company that builds aircraft carriers. The other option is to sell it exclusively to an enemy, an equally bad alternative.

 

North Korea should convince everyone in the world of the danger of the state. Here is an organization whose sole function seems to be arming itself and threatening its neighbors--as well as anyone it feels, however dimly, might be opposed to its existence. Any benefit to its citizen victims seems coincidental. Yet these lunatics must be taken seriously. One would expect to see states across the spectrum from dangerously homicidal to calmly benevolent but, no; belligerence and citizen abuse seem to be remarkably common threads, almost to the point of being a characteristic. Seeing the state as a tool for good is like having wolves as housekeepers.

 

Lance Armstrong said in an interview that the public will soon forget about him being the biggest dope cheat in cycling’s history, just like they did former president Bill Clinton for his affair with an intern.

 

Controlling for socioeconomic status, race and place of residence, the strongest predictor of whether a person will end up in prison is that he was raised by a single mother. A study back in 1990 by the Progressive Policy Institute showed that, absent single motherhood, there would be no difference in black and white crime rates.


Lux Research is forecasting that start-stop systems alone, not including full hybrids, will be found on eight million new vehicles by 2017, which would be four times the number of hybrids on the road today. Johnson Controls expects that by 2015 more than 35 million vehicles worldwide would employ start-stop systems. But stop-start requires specific battery capabilities. The lightest one, the most common, least expensive current solution is to use AGM batteries. Unfortunately, there is a big scandal brewing there, as AGM batteries fail in their start-stop function within just a few months.

 

Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Michael Vick has cancelled the book tour for his autobiography, Finally Free, after "protests escalated into threats of violence," his publisher told CNN.

 

“We are spending money we don’t have,” Mr. Bloomberg says. “It’s not like your household. In your household, people are saying, ‘Oh, you can’t spend money you don’t have.’ That is true for your household because nobody is going to lend you an infinite amount of money. When it comes to the United States federal government, people do seem willing to lend us an infinite amount of money.… Our debt is so big and so many people own it that it’s preposterous to think that they would stop selling us more. It’s the old story: If you owe the bank $50,000, you got a problem. If you owe the bank $50 million, they got a problem. And that’s a problem for the lenders. They can’t stop lending us more money.” (Observer.com) This is quite a remarkable view from a respected businessman and politician.

 

William Zinsser lamenting the state of writing--and language--in America: “Toddlers have sandbox issues. Issues are what used to be called the routine hills and bumps of getting from morning to night. They have been around a long time; Job had issues. By calling them issues we wrap ourselves in the palliative language of therapy. We no longer phone or visit friends who are in trouble; we reach out to them. That way we can find closure.”

 

Eleven states have welfare benefits that are higher than the minimum wage.

 

Who--or what--was....Jeanie Johnston?

 

"Electricity generation in Norway is almost entirely from hydroelectric power plants. Of the total production in 2005 of 137.8 TWh, 136 TWh was from hydroelectric plants, 0.86 TWh was from thermal power, and 0.5 TWh was wind generated. In 2005 the total consumption was 125.8 TWh.
Norway was the first country to generate electricity commercially using sea-bed tidal power. A 300 kilowatt prototype underwater turbine started generation in the Kvalsund, south of Hammerfest, on November 13, 2003." (Wikipedia)

 

American skiing. American Lindsey Vonn won the world downhill championship despite skiing only 4 of the 7 races. It was a record sixth straight World Cup downhill title. She suffered a significant injury her last race. Vonn's downhill trophy gives her a World Cup record 17th crystal globe, overtaking Austrian great Annemarie Moser-Proell. The 28-year-old American has won four overall titles and 13 in individual disciplines. Dominating. And American Ted Ligety capped his huge season in giant slalom with a sixth World Cup win Saturday, fueling comparisons with the best GS skier in history. The American skier joined Ingemar Stenmark as the only men in the 47-year World Cup history to get six GS victories in a season. Stenmark's 10-race sweep in 1978-79 is the record. What is going on here?

 

“It is an asset in the sense that it embodies a future economic benefit that will be realized as a reduction of future cash outflows.” This is Bernanke talking about Treasuries the Fed has overpaid for. He is saying that, in the future, they will be worth less. I.E. the rates will rise, the values will diminish. Who will pay for those losses? We will.

 

ENN Group Co Ltd, one of China's largest private companies, is quietly rolling out plans to establish a network of natural gas fueling stations for trucks along U.S. highways.

 

AAAAANNNNNdddddddd.....a graph. This is from Mauldin, a graph (in German) noting the decline in the Argentine peso since the 30's. Every horizontal bar is a devaluation of 90%. Ninety!

Obama and Juliet

A number of years ago, in a movie called "Romanov and Juliet" with the wonderful Peter Ustinov, the U.N. was overwhelmed by a difficult and contentious domestic fight in a small member county. The British decided it best to partition the country and their U.N. representative rose and delivered a somber speech centering around "a house divided against itself can not stand" in favor of partition. A few days later the British realized they had made a mistake and wanted to reunite the recently partitioned country. The British ambassador rose and somberly gave the identical "house divided" speech, word for word.

Comedies abound in politics. Perhaps it is the only thing about these people that keeps us sane. This time in Ramallah two Nobel prize winners were united on the stage, symbolically of course with the President speaking on the podium and Arafat on one of those huge posters so characteristic of despotic countries behind, but as greater symbols--one an accomplished bomber of school buses and planes, one a semi-accomplished community organizer--both reminding us that no one pays any attention to anything these people do or say.

On this occasion Obama announced that the Palestinian Authority was having financial difficulties not helped by what Hamas could extort or steal or that homicidal Saudis could gift so the U.S. would give them money. This when we do not have the money for White House tours. He then compared the American civil rights movement to the Palestinian struggle. Finally he compared the Israel-Palestinian conflict with the Canadians and the U.S.--he wasn't saying which was which: "And those two states I think will be able to deal with each other the same way all states do. I mean, the United States and Canada has arguments once in a while, but they’re not the nature of arguments that can’t be solved diplomatically." 

Now who could take any of this seriously?

Raising Taxes

The laughingly named "American Taxpayer Relief Act" will start to do its work this quarter. Some of the laws develop over time as they are pretty stiff changes. The following is a summary of the law's content, from Van R. Hoisington and Lacy H. Hunt, Ph.D.

The initial direct impact of the federal tax changes totaled approximately $250 billion for 2013. The return of the FICA tax rate to 6.2% is the largest component ($127 billion), but several other federal tax changes also became effective. These include:
1. A 4.6% increase in the top marginal tax rate to 39.6%;
2. A phase-out of itemized deductions (mortgage interest expense, various state taxes - income, property and sales - and charitable gifts) for high-earners;
3. A phase-out and elimination of personal exemptions for high-earners;
4. An increase in the tax rate to 20% for capital gains and dividends for high- earners;
5. A 3.8% surtax on capital gains, dividends and other investment-type incomes for high-earners;
6. A 0.9% surtax added to the Medicare tax for high-earners;
7. A 2.3% excise tax on medical device manufacturers;
These taxes amount to a reduction in real household income, less transfer payments, of 2.6% ($250 billion divided by $9600 billion).

But, not surprisingly, the pain resulting from these changes will not be "spread around." These changes will be shrugged of by the rich. The disruptions caused by these changes will damage a minority, one of the few without a lobbiest or a PAC. The working producer.

Repainting the Potemkin Village

2.9% of workers in the United States make minimum wage. Over 50% of them are age 16 to 24. In the largest study ever done on homosexuality in the Western world, 0.7% of women and 1.4% of men admitted to having at least one (and some only one) episode of homosexual physical contact (kiss and/or caress included) in their entire adult lives.

Why is it that such small parts of our population --and such peripheral parts of the bell curve--demand such a disproportionately large part of the society's time and energy? In a culture such as ours with economic problems, unemployment, drug use and crime, broken homes with fatherless children, endless and pointless wars, and general malaise and philosophical uncertainty it cannot be that we have no more important projects to focus upon.

One would hate to think these small problems are the result of pointed self-absorbed special interests or, worse, insincere political distraction from the bigger and more difficult problems.

 

In Defense of the U.S. Post Office

The Post Office (USPS) is going to cut Saturday delivery. That's not the only change in 2013. It will close half of its processing centers, more than 3,000 of its local branches, and eliminate about one-third of its workforce -- nearly 220,000 employees. One reason is that the USPS lost $15.9 billion in 2012. This, and the rising cost of stamps, support the conservative mantra that the government can not do anything right. Virtually no one who has ever visited a Post Office is surprised.

Yet it is more complicated than that. And the broader picture is much more indicative of what is wrong here.

Look at the money lost last year. $11.1 billion of that loss was from pre-funding of the USPS' pension and health benefit fund and half of that ($5.5 billion) was deferred from 2011 when they defaulted on its pre-funding to fund operations. Funding its pension and health benefits is reasonable enough but this has some special circumstances. First, the funding is to cover 75 years of liability. Second, the funding for that 75 years is mandated to be done in 10 years. 75 years of funding in 10 years. Why? In 2006, Congress passed the Postal Accountability and Enhancement Act, forcing USPS to pre-fund the present value of 75 years of its pension and health-benefit fund in 10 years -- about $5.5 billion annually for a business mandated to break even. That is virtually impossible for anyone to do.

When faced with bizarre and byzantine strictures, look for the special interests. For example, USPS has invested heavily in modern systems to speed distribution, and, in fact, has partnerships with FedEx and UPS for "last mile" delivery. In particular, FedEx relies heavily on USPS, which delivered more than 30% of FedEx Ground shipments in 2011. So the USPS provides service that is cheaper than the service UPS and FedEx can provide for many locations. That is government subsidizing private business.

Whenever USPS tries to enter a new arena, private competitors complain to Congress. There are multiple examples: plans to develop an online payment system in 2000 (Internet industry cried foul); public copy machines (office supply stores complained); in-store sales of phone cards and money transfers; selling postal meter cartridges (Pitney Bowes objected). And with rivals such as UPS complaining, Congress in 2006 restricted USPS to mail delivery.

It's bad enough that USPS is forbidden from entering new markets. But rivals complain to Congress even when USPS does a good job on its basic assignment. As economist Dean Baker explains, "About a decade ago, the Postal Service had an extremely effective ad campaign highlighting the fact that its express mail service was just a fraction of the price charged for overnight delivery by UPS and FedEx. [They] went to court to try to stop the ad campaign. When the court told them to get lost, they went to Congress. Their friends in Congress then leaned on the Postal Service and got it to end the ads." When they could not outlaw their success, they outlawed their taking credit for it.

And when USPS tried to take advantage of web shopping? As Elaine Kamarck at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government explains. "But parcel shipments were generated by large organizations and the USPS was not allowed to negotiate discounts and thus lost business. It was forbidden by law from lowering prices to get more business. This resulted in the entirely incredible situation in the 1990s where the United States government negotiated an agreement for the delivery of U.S. government package services with Fed Ex because the USPS was not allowed to negotiate for lower prices!"

One of the great problems in the Post Office is its incredibly hostile and off-putting employee-customer interface. It looks like a make-work project and reinforces the notion that government can not do anything right. As service declines, that opinion will be magnified. But, as these distortions clearly show, there is more corruption at work here than the USPS can be held responsible for.

When the Whole is Less than any of its Parts

Subway posters are appearing in New York subways criticizing teen pregnancies. (I don't know their sponsor.)  Planned Parenthood's Haydee Morales has complained that the ads are creating a  "stigma" and "negative public opinions about teen pregnancy." Like in national politics, every cultural shard gets more than a fair hearing and a seat at the State of the Union Address. The problem from a political view is that most of this slandered class in this case are too young to vote. But every subset gets a champion. After all, there's NAMBLA.

Aside from the fact that Planned Parenthood has a vested interest in teen pregnancies like Philip Morris has in smoking, the idea that anyone, anyone, would try to defend teen pregnancies in this culture shows how far from reality many social positions are and how difficult it will be to correct the cultural drift. A core component of this subset preoccupation seems to be the myopic focus on the subset without any ability to see the broad, national cultural picture. Soon the NRA will be supporting the right of the individual to own bio-weapons.

This is more than simply the problem of difficulty, where controlling drink sizes is easier than controlling real problems. This is treating this self-destructive underclass separate and isolated, like a cult or an endangered species where protection is seen as abstractly deserved beyond any logic or practicality or consequence.

Sometimes failure is earned.

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/12/angels-and-pinheads.html

Sunday Sermon 3/17/13

Today's gospel is a mini-doctoral thesis on the New Testament. In it the scribes and Pharisees bring a woman caught in adultery. The Mosaic Law prescribes her death. What, they ask, should we do? This is man at his most officious and cynical. The scribes and Pharisees care nothing for this woman. Nothing. They do not care that she has sinned nor that she has been caught. Her ruination is meaningless to them. She is nothing other than a means to an end.

Christ is their antithesis. He substitutes the spirit for the letter of the law, forgiveness for judgment. He rescues her dignity.

When it is over it is just Him and her.

Cab Thoughts 3/16/13

I have naturally expressed my statements so that I am also right if the opposite thing happens.-- Marx


Impeachment, Italan style:
March 15, 44 BC, one month after he was appointed dictator for life, Caesar was assassinated. He was not assassinated by Brutus alone nor with the cry of "et tu, Brute," -- a line penned by Shakespeare -- but by twenty three dagger strokes from a crowd of sixty led by Tillius Cimber, a victim of the harsh rivalries and merciless political maelstrom of ancient Rome. Only one of the twenty three strokes was fatal. Caesar's dead body lay where it fell on the Senate floor for nearly three hours before other officials arrived to remove it. The ancient historian Suetonius wrote of it in his Life of the Divine Julius Caesar. Having mentioned the unfavorable omens that had been observed in Rome and the prophet Spurinna's personal warnings to Caesar, he recorded the scene as follows:
'As a result of these warnings and poor health, Caesar hesitated for some time whether to stay at home and postpone what he had planned to do in the Senate. Finally Decimus Brutus persuaded him not to disappoint the Senate, which was in full session and had been waiting for him for some time now, and at about ten o'clock he set off for the House. As he went, someone handed him a note about the plot on his life, but he merely added it to the bundle of petitions in his left hand, which he intended to read later. Several sacrifices were made, but despite consistently unfavorable omens, he entered the House in defiance of the portents, deriding Spurinna as a false prophet on the grounds that the ides of March had come and he had suffered no harm. Spurinna replied that they had indeed come, but had not yet gone.
'As soon as Caesar took his seat, the conspirators crowded round him as if to pay their respects. Tillius Cimber, who had taken the lead, came up close, pretending to ask a question. Caesar made a gesture to put off his request to some other time, but Cimber caught hold of his toga at both shoulders. 'This is outrageous,' Caesar exclaimed, and at that moment one of the Casca brothers stabbed him from one side just below the throat. Caesar grasped Casca's arm and ran it through with his stylus. He was leaping up when another dagger caught him in the chest. Confronted by a ring of drawn daggers, he drew the top of his toga over his face, and at the same time with his left hand drew the lap of his toga down to his feet, so that he would die decently, with the lower part of his body covered. Twenty three dagger thrusts went home. Caesar did not utter a sound after the first blow, though some have recorded that when he saw Marcus Brutus coming at him, he said 'kai su, teknon' [Greek for 'you too, child']. " (From Julius Caesar by Christian Meier)

Bumper stickers are already made up endorsing Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama as running mates for President and Vice-President in 2016. Apparently the order is secret. The Republicans could counter with Tom Brady and his wife. Wait, she's not a citizen so that is unreasonable.

A day care center is plagued by parents who pick their kids up late so they develop a "fine system" to encourage parents to be more prompt. So for every fifteen minutes late a parent is, they pay extra. The result? The tardiness rate among parents increases. Why? Of course, there are only guesses but one prominent guess is that the parents are really trying to be on time and are driven by guilt to do so. When fined, their motivation to be on time drops as they feel they are paying for their error.

4,500 members of medical academic faculties were surveyed and 25% said they were strongly considering leaving the academic world. The commonest reason was they felt there was something wrong with the culture and they were suffering "moral distress."

RedEye On Demand, a rapid prototyping and direct digital manufacturing service, and its parent company Stratasys, Ltd. (NASDAQ: SSYS) today announce a collaboration with KOR EcoLogic to produce URBEE 2, the first road-ready, fuel-efficient car built using 3D printing, or additive manufacturing, technologies. Targeted to hit the road in two years, URBEE 2 represents a significant milestone in the world of traditional assembly-line manufacturing. (from Product Design and Management)

Olauduh Equiano was a slave who bought his freedom and became quite famous in exploring the Artic, merchandising, and in the Abolition movement in Britain. He has a very disturbing quote on slavery that needs serious thought because it is unsettling, has a broad application if true and he deserves being taken seriously. According to Equiano, a crippling aspect of slavery is the loss of honor. He says, "To be able to recover his honor, a slave must necessarily adopt the rules and standards of the society that surrounds him, and this means that, in practice at least, he cannot absolutely reject the institutions that de­prived him of his honor in the first place." He seems to be talking about honor in respect to context. Honor is the thing that must be restored and it needs a context to see itself and grow.

Who was... Harriet Beecher Stowe's father?

The Department of Homeland Security has purchased 1.6 billion bullets, 7,000 Ar-15s and 2,700 armored vehicles. What for?

To make a 1 kWh lithium-ion battery totals 472 kWh equivalents of fossil fuels; more energy goes into making an 85 kWh battery pack for a Tesla Model S than the car will consume in 150,000 miles. ( Barnhart)

The Bible, produced by Mark Burnett and Roma Downey, scored 13.1 million viewers and 4.6 million adults 25-54 during its premiere. The 10-hour miniseries became the new year's no.1 cable entertainment telecast.

In an article recently about Abe Karem, a man responsible for much of the advancement of drone technology, it is casually noted that "drones are being built by hobbyists". Nice to know. Karem has moved on to Karem Aircraft which aims to bring the A160’s variable-speed rotor technology to fixed-wing passenger planes. AeroTrain is an aircraft capable of vertical take-off and landing. It is intended to compete with the Boeing 737 and Airbus A320, the workhorse narrow-bodied aircraft that dominate commercial aviation, great for small countries and small airports.

John Maynard Keynes helped create the Cambridge Eugenics Society.

“Gammon’s Law” is named after a British physician named Max Gammon, who noticed that with healthcare socialism in England, increased “inputs” in the form of massive amounts of money spent always seemed to disappear “as though through a black hole” with little or nothing to show for it in terms of health care.

Bus driver Alexei Volkov, aka 'The Punisher,' is famous in Russia for exacting revenge on the rude drivers in the city of Zelenograd by simply not slowing down when they cut him off. Volkov claims to have been involved in more than 100 accidents in his career and the clips from his dashcam documenting them are on YouTube.

Russell Gold of the Wall Street Journal reports that BNSF, Buffett's railroad, is working to begin switching all of its 6,900 locomotives from expensive, dirty diesel to cheap, cleaner natural gas, starting next year.


North America a few million years ago had giant sloths, Mastodons, Nine-foot saber-toothed salmon, dire wolves. And, now, camels. Camels originally arose in North America 45 million years ago and lived there until human migrated into the area around 16,000 years ago.

For millions of years, the Amazon River was a vast inland sea that covered the central part of the continent. Finally, during the Pleistocene epoch, which began approximately 1.6 million years ago, the rising waters broke through the continent's eastern escarpment and poured into the Atlantic Ocean. In their wake, they left behind the world's greatest river system and the former inland seabed -- a vast basin of rich sediments and fertile lowlands perfectly suited to sup­port an array of plant and animal life almost without parallel on the face of the earth. It is a river so vast that by itself it accounts for 15 percent of all fresh water carried to sea by all of the planet's rivers put together, and so long that it travels a distance equivalent to that from Bangor, Maine, to San Francisco, California. The river's mouth is so large that the is­land in the middle of it, Marajo, is nearly the size of Switzerland.


An earlier classic of "quantitative history," Time on the Cross, was a controversial study that purported to show the economic efficiency and relatively benign conditions of slavery. Time on the Cross appeared as two volumes in 1974, one for general readers and a second for data-minded scholars. The authors were Robert Willian Fogel and Stanley L. Engerman.

In the early 1400s Rome had shrunk. A million people had lived in Rome during the height of the Empire, but the city's population was less than that of Florence. The Black Death of 1348 had reduced numbers to 20,000, from which, over the next fifty years, they rose only slightly. Working and living Rome had retracted into a tiny area inside its ancient walls and its great monuments and art had declined in disrepair. partly because the Christians had disrespect for them.

The Japanese had a 15%+ savings rate in 1990. It is now down below 1%. And the trade deficit has recently turned negative. It is assumed the Japanese will support their bonds. But, since savings are no longer available, the question is whether that will be financed simply by printing more yen. In that situation the bond will not decline but the bond will buy less. This seems to be a laboratory for what the U.S. is doing and will predict our future.

Keynes believed that classical economic theory, which focused on the long-run was a misleading guide for policymakers. He famously quipped that, “in the long run we’re all dead.” His view was that aggregate demand, not the classical theory of supply and demand, determines economic output. He also believed that governments could positively intervene in markets and use deficit spending to smooth out business cycles, thereby lessening the pain of economic contractions. Keynes called this “priming the pump.” (Minard)

In one of a series of studies done by the McKinsey & Co. consulting firm, we spend more on health care than the next 10 biggest spenders combined: Japan, Germany, France, China, the U.K., Italy, Canada, Brazil, Spain and Australia. After President Lyndon B. Johnson signed Medicare into law in 1965, the House Ways and Means Committee predicted that the program would cost $12 billion in 1990. Its actual cost by then was $110 billion. It is likely to be nearly $600 billion this year.

The Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute is over a very small chain of five uninhabited islets and three rocks in the middle of the East China Sea. They are located roughly due east of mainland China, northeast of Taiwan, and west of Okinawa Island (the largest of the Ryukyu Islands). Chinese discovered the islands in the 15^th century. The Japanese nationalized them in 1895. After WWII, the US administered them but gave control back to Japan in 1971. Everyone not Japanese is pissed because everyone has an historical claim--that same wonderful human drive that makes Jews want Israel, Palestinians want Israel, Mexico want Arizona and California.....on and on and on. Oh, by the way, there may be oil there.

The British blockade in the Revolutionary War cut off the American supply of bibles so Robert Aitken, a publisher from Philadelphia, published a bible to make up the slack and presented to the Congress for evaluation. The Aitken Bible of 1782 was reviewed, approved and authorized by the U.S. Congress. The bible was reviewed first for accuracy by the Congressional Chaplains White and Duffield and they reported on its accuracy. Then the Journals of Congress for September 1782 records on page 469, "Resolved. That the United States in Congress assembled highly approve the pious and laudable undertaking of Mr. Aitkin, as subservient to the interest of religion as well as an influence of the progress of arts in this country and being satisfied from the above report (by the congressional chaplains), they recommend this edition of the bible to the inhabitants of the United States and hereby authorize him to publish this recommendation."

The Hedge Fund universe is made up of 10,600 funds that manage $2 trillion. 1600 funds manage 99% of the money; 350 funds manage 60%.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/11/money-for-nothing.html

A Mr. Updegraff in the 1800's dismissed the history of Christianity as mythological and was arrested. He defended himself on the Freedom of Speech claim and was imprisoned anyway because blasphemy was a crime against the state as part of common law.

Black holes that are as large as a billion solar masses can be found at the heart of most galaxies.

The German winter averages 160 hours of sun. Less than 100 hours of sunshine have been recorded so far over the course of this year's meteorological winter. It the gloomiest winter in at least 43 years. The winter of 1970, with an average of just 104 hours of sunshine, was the bleakest since records began in 1951. But if the sun fails to show itself much more this year, the winter of 2012-2013, will "probably reach a new all-time low," National Meteorological Service spokesman Gerhard Lux told news agency AFP.

AAANNNnnnnnddddddd.......a graph:

Social Diamonds in the Rough

Buried in the silliness over the dreaded sequester impact on White House tours is a significant point. Since the deprivations of sequester are appearing more and more politically inspired, responsibility for the tour cancellations have shifted again and again, amazingly at very high levels. But underneath these shifts is a profound social problem: Lying. Insincerity.

Now many just slough the mendacity off as "politics as usual." And it might be. But reverting to the lowest common denominator does not make something justifiable or right. Or desirable. It creates a corrosive cynicism in the culture, a culture that, at its core, has high aims and ideals whether we admit it or not. Those ideals must be maintained for the culture to be maintained.

Last year Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Congressional questioners were haranguing each other about the Benghazi mess and when Mrs. Clinton finally screamed, "What difference does it make?" the question hung there until it became rhetorical.

But the answer was, "Truth. Truth makes a difference."

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2009/04/mendacity.html

If It Is Needed, It Will Work

The number of Americans who are considered obese, a Body Mass Index (BMI) of 30 or higher, has tripled since 1960, while those considered morbidly obese (BMI above 40) has increased six fold. A study completed by researchers from the Mayo Clinic last year showed that obese people on average pay $1,850 more in health costs a year, while the morbidly obese saw costs soar an additional $5,500 a year. "Smoking added about 20 percent a year to medical costs," said Mayo's James Naessens. "Obesity was similar, but morbid obesity increased those costs by 50 percent a year."

Several proposed solutions to obesity have moved to the investment forefront, a pill by Vivvus and an implantable device, the VBLOC by EnteroMedics Inc, which purports to block the vagus nerves to suppress appetite. The surgically implanted device uses electrical pulses to block that nerve regulating digestion. Unlike pacemakers, patients power the EnteroMedics' VBLOC device on and off with a control belt worn around the waist. When VBLOC is on, patients are supposed to feel less hungry, eat less and lose weight.

Success or failure of such therapies is measured by "EWL", calculated as a percentage equal to total weight loss in the trial (the numerator) divided by the difference in baseline weight and "ideal weight" using a BMI of 25 (the denominator.)
Gastric bypass surgery patients lose an average of 28% of their body weight. For the sample female patient standing 5' 4" and weighing 240 pounds, that equates to 67 pounds or an EWL of 70%.

The EWL for VBLOC-treated patients was 17% compared to 16% for control patients. Clearly, there was no statistically significant difference at all in excess weight loss between the two groups. The result missed statistical significance by a wide margin, with a p value of 0.70. From an investigative perspective, this was a disaster showing little distinction between the device and placebo. The share value of the company plummeted appropriately.

 

But the stock is coming back. Investors are buying the company now and have been advised to do so by someone as cautious as Andrew Tobias. Why? Because the obesity problem is a big national expense and something, anything, must be done. These investors are betting the FDA will approve the device in spite of the fact there is no evidence of its effectiveness because "we must do something."

It will be interesting to see if the investors profit by investing against the FDA's integrity (and on bureaucratic desperation.) And it will be an interesting and revealing insight into the thinking of government.

Overwhelming Notions, Staggering Numbers

Sometimes the studies from astronomers yield simply stupefying results and numbers.

Black holes that are as large as a billion solar masses can be found at the heart of most galaxies. Because they are created at the same time as their host galaxies, understanding how they formed could provide important information about galaxy formation and evolution. It is theorized that if the Black Hole sucks material from one specific direction it could develop a "spin". That spin could be measured by the X-rays emanating from material the inner edge of the disc which is affected by the black hole's gravity more when the black hole is spinning. Motion creates a "redshift", a "stretching" of the wavelength of characteristic X-rays emanating from iron and other elements in the accretion disc. By measuring the redshift--sort of a Doppler effect for light--, the spin of the black hole can be deduced. The problem, however, is that these X-rays must first travel through fast-moving clouds of gas that surround the accretion disc. The absorption of X-rays by the gas could mimic the effect of a spinning black hole.

Guido Risaliti of the Arcetri Observatory in Florence and astronomers in the US, Denmark and the UK have separated the redshift and cloud effects using data from NASA's NuSTAR space telescope. Risaliti looked a the "Supermassive Black Hole" (SMBH) at the centre of the galaxy NGC1365, which is about 56 million light-years away. This black hole, which is about 2 million times more massive than the Sun, is of particular interest because previous studies had suggested that it was rotating rapidly.

The study confirms that the SMBH is spinning at a rate close to the limit defined by the general theory of relativity. While the rotational properties of a spinning gravitational singularity are difficult to describe in a simple way, Risaliti explains that the rotational energy of the SMBH at the heart of NGC1365 is about the same as the energy that is given off by a billion stars burning for a billion years.

Is there anybody who can really grasp that?

 

Spinning black hole NGC1365:

 

 

"You Do Not Need Any Passports"

This is a letter written 1847 by the German immigrant Phillip Best trying to persuade his relatives to leave Germany and join him in Milwaukee as it appears in  The Pabst Brewing Company by Thomas C. Cochran. It gives an idea of how the European sees America as political and religious life turned on its head with freedom from government and religion, a war fought by volunteers, and rich, rich land.

Milwaukee, May 10, 1847

"Dear Mother-in-law, Brother-in-law and Sisters-in-law,

"It is now high time that I reach for the pen myself ... One beholds here how the farmer lives without worries. ... In Germany no one knows how to appreciate the liberty to which every human being is entitled by birth, only here in America can he experience it. Here the farmer may speak as freely as the nobleman and the scholar, everyone may express his opinion in accordance with his knowledge and judgment, for all the laws depend upon the people, and all the officials as well; that is, the people get together and elect them the way the burgomasters are elected in Germany, and they receive no more remuneration than they need for a reasonably good living. There is a tremendous dif­ference, here the officials and priests are dependent upon the people, and in Germany the people are dependent upon the officials and priests. The preachers' trade is a poor business here, they have to toil at it in the sweat of their brows.

"I also want to write something to you about the Mexican War, it might frighten you somewhat if you should hear something about it and that without any definite basis. It is just about as far from here as it is from here to you, in keeping with liberty there is no com­pulsion to join in the war, only those who join voluntarily for pay. There were recently recruited again in the United States ten regi­ments, in the course of which two companies were shipped out from here also, one German and one American, they go directly to the capture of the capital of Mexico. Everyone receives nine dollars and board, and when he comes back again 160 acres of land, or if he is shot to death and has wife and children or parents they get it, if these are in Germany then they get half the value of the land sent to Germany. They believe that the Americans will win the war against the Mexicans very soon, for they have already conquered some of the major fortresses, whereby the American armies, which include many Germans, proved themselves very valiant. Many a German has lost his life in this wonderful region of Mexico. A great deal of money has been collected in the United States (and still is) to give partial support to the unfortunate poor Europeans.

"You cannot imagine how much flour and wheat is already being produced in this young state [of Wisconsin]. A great deal of this flour (packed in light barrels) goes to Europe, I believe most of it remains in the Netherlands, Ireland and France. For here there is most excellent wheat land, and it will be­come one of the best states in America, and Milwaukee is and re­mains the first city in the state, for it already numbers 12,000 in­habitants. The property of people who bought places for themselves here three years ago and built thereon rises tremendously in value and likewise the land. ...

"Well dear friends, if you want to decide upon this important step, then the sooner you do it the better. ... You do not need any passports."

Lomborg and Crisis

There has been a general assumption that global warming has resulted in the "devastating impact of raging fires, and crippling drought, and more powerful storms" observed by the casual observer and the press.

Bjørn Lomborg is a well known environmentalist and Adjunct Professor and Director of Copenhagen Consensus Center at the Copenhagen Business School. He has had a reassessment in his approach to environmental changes and now emphasizes priorities in world problems. Where, he asks, is the best target for intervention? His main focus is poverty's influence on health. He recently published an article that disputes the above notion of increasing natural disasters that includes the following observations:
1. Analysis of wildfires around the world shows that since 1950 their numbers have decreased globally by 15%.
2. A study published in Nature in November shows globally that "there has been little change in drought over the past 60 years."
3. Measured by total energy (Accumulated Cyclone Energy), hurricane activity is at a low not encountered since the 1970s. The U.S. is currently experiencing the longest absence of severe landfall hurricanes in over a century—the last Category 3 or stronger storm was Wilma, more than seven years ago.
4. A March 2012 Nature study shows that the global damage cost from hurricanes will go to 0.02% of gross domestic product annually in 2100 from 0.04% today—a drop of 50%, despite global warming.

These are not arguments against global warming but they are arguments against the hysteria that seems to be necessary to preface any discussion.

Cab Thoughts 3/9/13

More and more I am convinced that Russian Communism in its total disregard of truth, in its fanaticism, its intolerance and its resolute denial of God and religion is something utterly evil.-----Henry Wallace. (Yes, Henry Wallace)

The politicians sometimes look like New Years resolutions makers. A UN summit in 1990 set as a goal for the year 2000 universal primary-school enrollment. (That is now planned for 2015.) A previous summit, in 1977, set 1990 as the deadline for realizing the goal of universal ac­cess to water and sanitation. (Under the Millennium Development Goals, that target is now 2015.)

Teddy Roosevelt once said, speaking of depression ("black care", he called it): 'Black care rarely sits behind a rider whose pace is fast enough.' He had plenty of reason to know. His father died suddenly when he was young. They were very close and he was distraught. And his mother died of typhoid and his wife of Bright's disease within a day of each other. Roosevelt's response was action, hard physical work. When his father died he went to the Dakota frontier; when the two women died he went to the Maine woods. He had been a sickly child; he emerged a vital, healthy guy. His sorrow was never far away but it somehow was tamed by action.

According to research conducted by Ben Sacks from the University of California at Davis and his colleagues, the dog emerged from wolves but only became a separate beast when genetically isolated from them, as occurred in Southeast Asia because, after they were brought south of the Yangtze River some 6,000 years ago and the dogs were isolated from their wolf forebears. Without that proximity, the Southeast Asian dogs could no longer interbreed with wolves, and thus followed their own evolutionary path. The ability to digest starch also became advantageous as humans farmed (and dogs no longer had to hunt.)

When Alan (A.A.) Milne died at age 74, his only child Christopher Robin was estranged from him. Alan was a highly successful playwright of adult dramas who had unexpectedly gained worldwide fame and fortune by writing poems and children's stories about his son -- starting with the books When We Were Very Young (1924) and Winnie-the-Pooh (1926). The two had been extremely close. But the adult Christopher Robin had become bitterly resentful of his overwhelming inadvertent fame -- a burden he carried in dealing with his boarding school and college classmates. His estrangement began with his marriage shortly after his army service, and they had not reconciled when Alan passed away.

There is now instead a growing trend of the affluent moving back to the cities, and the resulting rise in prices is pushing the poor to the perimeters of these cities. Even immigrant populations are now more likely to establish suburban enclaves than urban ones.

Golden Oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/11/commons.html


The 7 percent of babies born prematurely figure disproportionately among those who are victims of child abuse. This may be a function of touch, which makes babies more content and parents happier with them.

The Ring of Fire is home to 452 volcanoes and over 75% of the world's active and dormant volcanoes.

The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) -- an international economic group comprised of 34 member nations has been collecting information on a number of subjects. Some of the health care numbers show 1. the average American now lives 78.7 years in 2010, more than one year below the average of 79.8 years, 2. the number of hospital beds in the U.S. was 2.6 per 1,000 population in 2009, lower than the OECD average of 3.4 beds, 3. the average spending on health care among the other 33 developed OECD countries was $3,268 per person, 9.5% of GDP; in the U.S. it is $8233, 17.6% of GDP.

In 1860, the critic Alfred Delvau wrote that 'as soon as it awakes, Paris leaves its abode and steps out, and doesn't return home until as late as possible in the evening -- when it bothers to return home.' He went on to write that 'Paris deserts its houses. Its houses are dirty on the inside, while its streets are swept every morning .... All the luxury is outside -- all its pleasures walk the streets.'

Anne Lamott has a book entitles "Bird by Bird" on life and writing that contains some wonderful bits of advice. Here are two of them. "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write, which was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'" And the second by E. L. Doctorow: "'Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.' You don't have to see where you're going, you don't have to see your des­tination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you." This is truly worthwhile advice.

Most American citizens did not know that Roosevelt was crippled by polio. It was not referred to in print and pictures of a "disabled" president were kept out of the American media. They were also kept out of the international media. This was a time of war and it was deemed imperative that the leader of the United States be perceived as strong, able to lead the country to victory in wars in the pacific and in Europe. Even the meeting at Yalta with Churchill and Stalin show Roosevelt bundled against the cold with a robe on his lap....never his crutches or wheelchair. (from a CUNY tutorial description of "Gatekeepers.")

The French mathematician Bachelier wrote his mathematics thesis on finance, finishing in 1900. The basic idea was that probability theory, the area of mathematics invented by Cardano, Pascal, and Fermat in the sixteenth and seven­teenth centuries, could be used to understand financial markets. In other words, one could imagine a market as an enormous game of chance. While ingenious--he had just invented mathematical finance and the way of the future--it was a personal disaster. The problem was the audience. None of his contemporaries were in a position to properly appreciate what he had done. Instead of a community of like-minded scholars, Bachelier was evaluated by mathematicians and mathematically oriented physicists. Mathematics was in turmoil over errors in long established theorems; no one wanted this new field to be opened, mathematics had more important fish to fry. So poor Bachelier got a future-killing acceptable grade on his thesis rather than the necessary exceptional one. Sometimes, out on the cutting edge, the cut is slow and the wound opens late.

'Politics has gone from the age of 'Camelot' when all things are possible to the age of 'Watergate' when all things are suspect.' --William Hungate, Missouri congressman and member of the House Judiciary Committee that brought down Richard Nixon, right before his own retirement.

We can be blind to the obvious. And focusing helps: Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons in their book The Invisible Gorilla constructed a short film of two teams passing basket­balls, one team wearing white shirts, the other wearing black. The viewers of the film are instructed to count the number of passes made by the white team, ignoring the black players. This task is difficult and completely ab­sorbing. Halfway through the video, a woman wearing a gorilla suit appears, crosses the court, thumps her chest, and moves on. The gorilla is in view for 9 seconds. "Many thousands of people have seen the video, and about half of them do not notice anything unusual. It is the counting task -- and especially the instruction to ignore one of the teams -- that causes the blindness. No one who watches the video without that task would miss the gorilla." Lesson? Don't text and drive.

Research into habits have revealed a completely believable and predictable answer: It takes about 21 days to build a habit--but only if it is easy. If it is hard--50 sit-ups, memorizing Russian--it takes longer, sometimes months.

According to Gordon S. Wood in "Empire of Liberty," after declaring its independence in 1776, the predominant form of government in the United States was not the Articles of Confederation but the thirteen state governments. And some of those state governments were aggressive experiments in democracy, with the governors and legislators elected directly by the people, unicameral rather than bi-cameral legislatures, and yearly elections of legislators, all of which made those state governments highly responsive to immediate mood of the people. "The Federal Constitution of 1787 was designed in part to solve the problems created by the presence in the state legislatures of these ...... men. In addition to correcting the deficiencies of the Articles of Confederation, the Constitution was intended to restrain the excesses of democracy and protect minority rights from overbearing majorities in the state legislatures."

Some have felt the origin of the word "hooker" for "prostitute" emerged from the Civil War related to camp followers of Union General Joseph 'Fighting Joe' Hooker's troops. While at the time there was a prostitute group in Washington called "Hooker's Division", in "Euphemania" by Ralph Keyes, calling any such woman a hooker predates the Civil War by at least a couple of decades. According to lexicographer Stuart Berg Flexner, 'hooker' originally referred to prostitutes who worked in Corlear's Hook during the mid-nineteenth century, a section of New York also commonly known as 'the Hook.' They were hookers. Others believe that this appellation originated with the fact that prostitutes said they hooked customers. Their brothels were called hook shops. When academy was a euphemism for 'brothel,' those who worked there were called academicians.


A memoir out next month from Robert Bork, the solicitor general under President Nixon, claims that Nixon promised him the next open spot on the Supreme Court after Bork fired Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox in 1973's "Saturday Night Massacre."

Who is....Amity Shales?


India's ancient class or varna system is still partially observed and includes Brahmans (priests), Kshatriyas (warriors), Vaishyas (merchants and landowners), Shudras (serfs), and those outside this system known as the Dalits or untouchables:

Bed nets are an alternative to DDT in preventing malaria. At the World Economic Forum in Davos in 2005, celebrities from Gordon Brown to Bill Clinton to Bono liked the idea of bed nets as a major improvement for the poor. Sharon Stone raised a million dollars on the spot. But these nets never made it to the targets; they ended up on the black market. There is a significant distance from the word to the deed.

A Map of the Ring of Fire:

Unions As Investment Advisors

There is anxiety about pension funds in the United States. A 2011 study by the Congressional Research Service pegged the combined liabilities faced by state and local pension funds at over $3 trillion.

One fund, CalPER (California Public Employees’ Retirement System), manages $230 billion. The fund now calculates that it is underfunded by $80 billion. The management arrives at this number by assuming they will make 7.5% on their investments. Joe Nation, a public finance expert at Stanford University, estimated that CalPERS’s long-term pension debt is a $170 billion if CalPERS achieves an average annual investment return of 6.2 percent in years to come. If the return is just 4.5 percent annually – a rate close to what more conservative private pensions often shoot for – the fund’s long-term liability rises to $290 billion. CalPER ranks in the bottom 1% of all pension fund managers. In the bull market of the last year, CalPERS made a 1% return to June 2012.

Just imagine how unions make investment decisions.

This is bad stuff. And the taxpayers will be on the hook to make up the shortfalls.

Here is a simple but interesting graph showing what happens to assets at different returns.

Redheads and Empire

The Ottoman Empire was founded by Osman in 1299 and it was ruled for ten successive generations by capable and often brilliant leaders, culminating in the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent (1494-1566), who led the Empire to its cultural and geographic zenith. He built Topkapi, captured Belgrade and Budapest and completed the conquest of the Balkans. He besieged Vienna, the keystone of central Europe, and except for a quirk in the weather would have taken it.  He was well on his way to solidifying the Ottomans as the rising historic star in Europe.

All that changed when he met the redhead.

He was given a red-haired Russian girl named Ghowrem, who came to be known as Roxelana, as part of his share of a slave-gathering raid into what is now Poland. She must have really been something. He was so taken by her he rejected his hundreds of other harem girls and spent his time with her exclusively. Then he did the unheard of. He married her.

She was soon known as "The Witch." She had a son, Selim II, and she poisoned Suleiman against his favorite, the brilliant and able Mustafa, to the advancement of her son. Mustafa was clearly the man to succeed the throne but she had Suleiman kill him. Suleiman actually watched as it was done. Selim became the new leader of the Empire and its new genetic father. A drunk and a coward, he brought dissolution to the Empire, personally and genetically. He started the tradition of killing every male in reach that looked to be a competent rival. This negative selective pattern reaped incompetent rewards. The behavior continued into the 20th Century when the Ottoman Empire fell apart in World War One, leaving the rest of the world with the aimless Middle East.

There is a great difference between phenotype and genotype.