Doppelganger Alert, Justice Section

Eric Holder wants to have an off-the-record discussion with representatives of the Press to discuss recent problems that have arisen over the intrusion of Justice into activities of the Press.

In essence he wants to have a discussion of Freedom of the Press in secret.

5/11/13 Cab Thoughts--Second Try

Barnes  and Noble stock shot up 24 percent in trading Thursday amid rumors that Microsoft is interesting in buying all of Nook Media's digital assets.

North Korea has created a perfect counterfeit $100 bill, so good the U.S. government has decided to change their own bill. Today's quiz question: How is North Korea's flooding the world with made-up money different from the Fed creating $2 Billion a day of theirs?

One of life's mysteries is why people think that young people can be taught to blow themselves up with strangers but can not be taught to be good citizens.

President Obama has attended 44% of daily intelligence briefings since his election. That is somewhat higher than in his previous term. That is extremely low for a president.

Zelda and Scott Fitzgerald were terrible drinkers and Zelda was insane. They liked to crash parties and were prone to show up at the door uninvited, on all fours and barking like dogs. If the host let them into the house, they might strip naked and take a bath in the master bathroom tub. Zelda frequently disrobed in public.

The 5000 tickets for the annual Apple App conference sold out in 90 seconds. 5 years ago it took 61 days.

Journalist Michael Wolff on The New York Times Book Review in The Guardian: "There is an untested assumption ... that the NYTBR is quite a vital and even necessary part of the Times. ... That day is gone. Only the awkwardness of admitting otherwise maintains the assumption of a necessary Book Review."


The so-called cash economy is an indicator of the amount of money floating about uncounted, depending on the honesty of the participants in the commerce. It reflects illegal trade like drugs but also is indicative of the underground economy that has developed to augment government supported people who would lose that support should they report income as well as employers trying to minimize additional mandatory payments like medical care, taxes ans FICA. Estimates are that underground activity last year totaled as much as $2 trillion, according to a study by Edgar Feige, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, double 2009's. (The total economy is about $16 Trillion.)

John Smiley was a power left-hander in the days of Pirate dominance. In addition to his power pitches he threw a great circle-change to complement his other pitches. He pitched a one-hitter against the then Montreal Expos. Years later one of the Expos on the team told him he was tipping his change. (The grip on the circle-change is awkward and some pitchers accidentally "flare" the glove fingers while positioning the grip.) Smiley was "flaring" during his one-hitter but, despite the foreknowledge the Expos had of his pitches, they still could not hit him; he--and his circle-change--were that good. Lesson? Nothing beats quality.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/02/money-laundering.html

Heracleion was an Egyptian city of extraordinary wealth mentioned in Homer, visited by Helen of Troy and Paris but it supposedly disappeared beneath the Mediterranean around 1,200 years ago. Also called Thonis, it was in the center of the Egyptian trade routes. French underwater archaeologist Dr Franck Goddio was the first to rediscover the city while doing surveying of the area while looking for French warships that sank there in the 18th century Battle of the Nile. The remains of more than 64 ships have been found as well as huge statues and the site of a temple.

In a book, "Why We Cheat," comes a disturbing hypothesis. Social contagion may help explain the high prevalence of cheating in relatively small groups of people. For example, 125 Harvard students were recently under investigation for cheating on the final examination in an introductory government course. (More than half these students were told to withdraw from school for up to a year as punishment.) It is statistically unlikely that nearly half the 279 students in that class are sociopaths given the low prevalence of sociopathy -- about 3 percent in males and 1 percent in females. A more plausible explanation is contagion. One can only wonder what that means in a society, if true.

In the mid-nineties, the British Home Office analyzed 184 crimes to see how many times profiles led to the arrest of a crimi­nal. The profile worked in five of those cases. That's 2.7 percent.

50% of working people do not have access to 2000 dollars should they need it in an emergency. That is true for 52% of retirees.

Who was....Francis Gary Powers?

SN 1006 was a supernova, widely seen on Earth beginning in the year 1006 AD; Earth was about 7,200 light-years away from the supernova. It was the brightest apparent magnitude stellar event in recorded history. In Asia it was called the "guest star."

Sports Illustrated estimated in 2009 that 78 percent of NFL players are bankrupt or facing serious financial stress within two years of ending their playing careers and that 60 percent of NBA players are broke within five years of retiring from the game.

Afghanistan won't let the "international community" leave "before we are fully on our feet, before we are strong enough to defend our country, before we are powerful enough to have a good economy, and before we have taken from President Bush and the next administration billions and billions of more dollars,” Karzai said in an interview in 2008. The New York Times reported Monday that the CIA dropped suitcases, backpacks and shopping bags full of money for Karzai in a bid to purchase influence.

Some 50 well-known authors, including J.K. Rowling, Seamus Heaney, Tom Stoppard and Ian McEwan, have agreed to annotate first editions of their novels for an auction benefiting English PEN, an organization that supports freedom of expression.

Watching the football draft would make one think every one of these super humans will have great careers. Everyone moaned at each selection as everyone thought their team was missing a great athlete. But the numbers are harsh. Over a ten year period the average draftee played 1.6 years as a starter, 1.9 years for the most successful drafting team (Ind) and 1.2 for the least (Clev). The first several picks did considerably better than average. From pick 136 down they averaged less than one year as a starter. And a few starters can make the stats look good for a lot of guys that never played.

One of the aspects of the debate over debt is where the borrowed money is spent. In the Second War the money went for armaments and the tools that created them. They were all adaptable when the war ended. And that spending stopped. But current borrowed money is not going for production or growth, it goes to entitlements and pet projects. It does nothing to assist the future economy. Borrowing money to build a factory shop floor is a lot different than using it to live.

Winnie-the-Pooh author and prominent pacifist A.A. Milne secretly wrote propaganda during World War I for MI7b, a now-defunct arm of British military intelligence services, according to recently discovered documents.

A rendition of the probable appearance of Heracleion

Cab Thoughts 5/25/13--A Second Try

E-book sales rose a 44.2 percent, to $3.04 billion, last year, according to figures released by BookStats.

The fifth edition of the “bible” of mental illness, formally known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will include new disorders, and has changed how some conditions - like ADHD and autism - are diagnosed. According to the new definitions, some experts say almost 50 percent of Americans could be diagnosed as mentally ill in their lifetimes.

Following the theories of Philadelphia engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the nation's first specialists in shop-floor management whose book The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century, Henry Ford broke his auto assembly system down to simple, short, repetitive tasks. It was brutally boring and "dehumanizing." Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees. That retained workers and began to build a working middle class.

If you want 3% GDP growth in a country whose population is shrinking by 1%, do you need about 4% productivity growth?

In a survey of three hundred thousand contractors, two-thirds said they had no direct employees, meaning that they did not need to pay workers’-compensation insurance or payroll taxes. In other words, for lots of people off-the-books work is the only job available.

It was the Aztecs who first used graphite as a marker. The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called 'plumbago' or black lead--after the Latin word for lead(hence the 'plumbers' who work on lead water-carrying pipes) and that error persists in our use of pencil 'lead'.

A recent analysis in The New Yorker investigates cash in the American economy. Contrary to the widely cited figure that 65 percent of U.S. currency is abroad, direct evidence supports the notion that overseas holdings amount to less than 25 percent. And the underground economy (called by the economist Edgar Feige "The Unreported Economy) totals about $2 trillion a year in the US. And the "lost" tax revenue is in the neighborhood of $400 billion a year. Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another. He thinks this explains some of the disparities in the economy. Lack of concern/respect for law is a dangerous lesson to teach.

In 1410 Prince Henry the Navigator, the second son of Portuguese King John I, founded a school for navigators at Ponta de Sagres. He had extraordinary students including Vasco da Gama, who made the first voyage from Europe to India, and Magellan, whose expedition first circumnavigated the globe. Their aim was to develop direct trading routes to Europe and bypass the expensive Muslim middlemen on the Silk Road.

Who was....Tawana Brawley?

The U.S. economy: jobless claims rose sharply last week while ground-breaking at home construction sites dropped in April. The total number of people on welfare is about 4,300,000. The total number of people getting food stamps (the SNAP program) is 46,700,000.

Stratfor is sometimes insightful, sometimes rehash. This is a quote from one of its writers, George Friedman, that is quite disturbing as he searches for some balance in society's search for "comfort and transcendence": "I am not talking here of the economic crisis that is gripping Europe, leaving Portugal with 17 percent unemployment and Spain with 26 percent. These are agonizing realities for those living through them. But Europeans have lived through more and worse. Instead, I am speaking of a crisis in the European soul, the death of hubris and of risk-taking. Yes, these resulted in the Europeans trying to convert the world to Christianity and commerce, in Russia trying to create a new man and in Germany becoming willing to annihilate what it thought of as inferior men. The Europeans are content to put all that behind them. Their great search for the holy grail is now reduced to finding a way to resume the comforts of the unexceptional. There is something to be said for the unexceptional life. But it cannot be all there is."

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur is an incomplete epic poem on King Arthur. It has been edited for publication by his son, Christopher Tolkien, and has just been released. Started in the 1930's it was abandoned for The Hobbit and never resumed. It is written in Old English alliterative verse (the meter of Beowulf). It begins: "Arthur eastward in arms purposed/ his war to wage on the wild marches, / over seas sailing to Saxon lands, / from the Roman realm ruin defending." There are a lot of notes, drafts and experiments in the manuscript which might put off Tolkien fans in the book.

A company with:
-revenues of 15 million dollars is in the top 1.7% of U.S. companies
-employees of over 100 is in the top 1.8% of U.S. companies.

The Nikkei Stock Average suffered one of its worst single-day declines in decades, a 7.3% drop. Japanese stocks are up more than 60% since late November, when Shinzo Abe, now Japan's prime minister, hinted that his administration would sharply increase the money supply in a bid to restart a sputtering economy.

Illicit drug use in the workforce involved an estimated 14.1% of employed adults (17.7 million workers). Illicit drug use in the workplace involved an estimated 3.1% of employed adults (3.9 million workers). The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration says that, of the 20.3 million adults in the U.S. classified as having substance use disorders in 2008 -- the latest year for which figures are available --15.8 million were employed either full or part-time.

"President Obama Wishes American Citizens Well"--Headline which should be from the Onion but I made it up instead.

The IRS employees have a union, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). Representing 150,000 members from 31 federal agencies and departments including the Internal Revenue Service, the NTEU says it is the nation’s largest independent federal union. In 2012 the NTEU contributed $580,412 to federal candidates—94% of which were Democrats.They would like a waver to get out of Obamacare.

If currency is linked to gold, any Fed management of the money supply impossible. From what we have seen over the last two centuries, is that reasonable?

More than 8,000 French households' tax bills topped 100 percent of their income last year, the business newspaper Les Echos reported on Saturday, citing Finance Ministry data.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-are-people-for-wendell-berry-book.html

The Bank of Japan is engaging in almost as much quantitative easing as the US Federal Reserve but in a country 1/3 the size of the US. And the yen is falling in response. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the main Japanese business newspaper, has reported that every one-yen fall in the yen/dollar rate will translate into a $2.7 BILLION increase in profits for the 30 largest Japanese exporters. Those profits come from sales, sales that are in large part due to better terms of trade and lower costs. Those profits are from sales that might have gone to other companies based in other countries, which is why there are some objections to Japan's decision in other nations. Most fear that, in order to fight their own deflation, the Japanese are exporting it.



AAAAANNNNNNDDDDdddddddd..........a picture: (a Hong Kong apartment)

The Fox Applies for the Henhouse Job and He Has an Agent

'I am troubled by the possibility that leak investigations may chill the investigative journalism that holds government accountable," President Obama said in a speech Thursday at the National Defense University. "Journalists should not be at legal risk for doing their jobs." He continued, "I have raised these issues with the attorney general, who shares my concern. So he has agreed to review existing Department of Justice guidelines governing investigations that involve reporters, and will convene a group of media organizations to hear their concerns as part of that review. And I have directed the attorney general to report back to me by July 12."

Now the Doppelganger alert. NBC News has reported that the attorney general, Eric Holder, personally signed off on a controversial search warrant that identified Fox News reporter James Rosen as a "possible co-conspirator" in violations of the Espionage Act and authorized seizure of his private emails.
So the President is shocked--shocked!-- that pressure has been brought against the free press by the government's legal arm and is asking the guy who authorized it to investigate where it came from.

Fortunately he "shares..[the president's] ..concern."

Cab Thoughts 5/29/13

"I have no child for whom I could wish to make a provision-no family to build in greatness upon my Country's ruins." --Washington

For the first quarter of 2013 the Fed purchased $277.5 billion in securities (net) as their security portfolio expanded from $2.660 trillion to $2.937 trillion. A review of post-war economic history would lead to a logical assumption that the money supply (M2) would respond upward to this massive infusion of reserves into the banking system. The reality is just the opposite. The last week of December, 2012 showed M2 at $10.505 trillion, but at the end of March, 2013 it totaled only $10.450 trillion which was an unexpected decline of $55 billion. Where did the money go? The money multiplier effect where banks use the available money for loans did not occur. If this is true, the essence of the "aggregate demand" concept does not work.

Isn't this Enroll America thing peculiar; a private entity whose purpose is to support a public one. Enroll America is a private sector organization responsible for a massive public outreach campaign intended to get millions of uninsured Americans to sign up for subsidized insurance coverage of the Affordable Care Act  through new online marketplaces, or exchanges, that will begin open enrollment on October 1. And they are doing this with donations. Apparently Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius is soliciting private funds to bankroll this effort. This is combined with campaign-style organizations staffed with loyalists and former campaign or White House aides to mobilize grassroots support for government policies. The first involved Organizing for Action, an independent non-profit group seeking to harness both the energy and personnel from Obama's re-election campaign in support of the president's legislative agenda.
It's a national street organization.

Australia was discovered in 1606 by a Dutch explorer named Willem Janszoon when he reached the Cape York peninsula in Queensland with his ship Duyfken, or so it has been believed. But in 1944, Australian soldier Maurie Isenberg was stationed on an island off Australia's north coast. While sitting in the sand with his fishing-rod, he discovered a handful of coins in the sand. In 1979 he decided to send the coins to a museum to get them identified. The coins proved to be 1000 years old.

Riots in Sweden are rare but have been much more frequent recently. It has been blamed by commentators on the mysterious but ubiquitous "inequality." The recent riots appear to have been sparked by the police killing of a 69-year-old man wielding a machete in the suburb of Husby this month, which prompted accusations of police brutality. The ethnic makeup of the rioters is unreported. Some 15 percent of the population is foreign-born, the highest proportion in the Nordic region. Unemployment among those born outside Sweden stands at 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for native Swedes, according to OECD data.

After decades of practicing the "Swedish model" of generous welfare benefits, Sweden has been reducing the role of the state since the 1990s, spurring the fastest growth in "inequality" of any advanced OECD economy.

From an interview with Cooperman and Einhorn from Omega Advisors in Barron's:

Cooperman: We totally misunderstood the significance of the Lehman insolvency and its impact on the economy, and we weren't alone. The U.S. government didn't understand it; most people didn't understand it.

Einhorn: The surprise with respect to Lehman was the reach it had into so many other financial institutions and the freezing of credit that it brought about. The recession we experienced in 2008 and the first half of 2009 would not have been nearly as severe without the freezing of credit flows between financial intermediaries as a result of the Lehman insolvency.

Who was.....Cynthia Ann Parker?

NRDC and Ceres study says:

"A major new report on U.S. power plant emissions from the top 100 power producers shows that the electric industry cut emissions of NOx, SO₂ and CO₂ in 2011 even as overall electricity generation increased, largely due to increased use of natural gas and growing reliance on renewable energy."

First the erased CIA draft: "We do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in this attack."

Then Mrs. Clinton's spokesman, Victoria Nuland, and her emails to excise earlier CIA warnings of terrorism in Benghazi: ".. [this]...could be used by Members [of Congress] to beat the State Department for not paying attention to Agency warnings so why do we want to feed that? Concerned."
There is a difficult spectrum where "public relations" blends through "propaganda" into "lying."

The price of luxury cars in China is falling amid a frugality push by government. (Bloomberg)

Pasquinade: lampoon or satire. In Rome in 1501 a sculpture was disinterred and placed in Palazzo Orsini. The sculpture was nicknamed Pasquino, and once a year Romans posted humorous verses to the sculpture. Over time these satirical poems became named pasquinades because of the name of the statue. The statue is still in Rome with pasquinades on its base.

James Rosen, a reporter, has been targeted by the Justice Department in a "leak" of classified material under the Espionage Act of 1917 . In 2009 the reporter published a story saying that the U.S. knew that North Korea planned to respond to looming U.N. sanctions with another nuclear test. That U.S. knowledge was classified. It is rare for the Federal government prosecute a journalist for disclosing classified information, one reason being reporters can't be sure what's classified and what isn't. (Recall the NYT's damaging story on how the government was tracking bin Laden.) In the last 95 years the only "journalist" prosecuted under the Espionage Act was Julian Assange of WikiLeaks, who isn't really a journalist and published far more damaging leaks but has never been indicted for it.
It will be interesting to see how the Press responds to this.

Unit 61398, a cyberunit of the Chinese army accused of hacking, is back in action using different techniques, according to computer industry security experts and American officials.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/11/soft-numbers-hard-results.html

A never-before-seen novel by Nobel Prize-winning author Pearl Buck was discovered in a Texas storage unit and will be published in October.

There is a new bill rattling around in Congress aimed at the "Too Big to Fail" banks called the "Terminating Bailouts for Taxpayer Fairness (TBTF) Act of 2013." It is simple, basic, requires sensible cash reserves and treats all asset classes and liabilities equally – including derivatives. No chance.

Southern Company's 582-megawatt coal gasification Kemper, Mississippi plant, that was budgeted to cost a very large $2.4 billion, now is running an astonishing $4.2 billion or $7 per watt. Ah, the merits of monopoly. Coal power plants generally run at around $2.10 a watt. The Three Gorges Dam (a hydroelectric system) is reported to have cost ¥180 billion (US$26 billion), about $1 a watt, but actual costs are widely believed to be much higher and do not translate well to the U.S.. Solar panels are currently selling for as low as US$0.70c a watt in industrial quantities.

"There's a forest of trees — trees, trees everywhere, but not a branch to burn. And that's the truth. You have no axe; you have no way of gathering wood; you can't find fallen wood because there's 3 1/2 feet of snow. And we sent Paul on a constant vigilance for anything that would burn. Fire was life, Steve, fire was life, and at different times during the night we had no fire. And I've been on many search and rescue situations as a Mountie where you'd go into these camps looking for lost hunters or motor vehicle accidents in the back bush, and you find the people, eventually, but you find them as frozen corpses. And I figured that's how we'd be found."--Scott Deschamps, a police officer and one of four survivors of a plane crash in the snows of the Canadian wilderness.

AAAAAaaaannnnnnddddd ............a graph:

Health Care and Shortstops

Baumol is an economist who is most famous for identifying Baumol’s Cost Disease in the 1960s. His observation is that although the economy as a whole becomes more productive with the advance of technology, not all sectors progress equally, and some don’t improve their productivity at all. For example, a 21st-century farmer feeds far more people than a 19th-century farmer. Likewise, a worker at a modern shoe factory makes more shoes than a 19th-century cobbler. But it still takes four talented musicians to perform a Beethoven string quartet, and they don’t do it any faster than they did in Beethoven’s day. String quartets have not seen a productivity increase. Nor has baseball.

The economic consensus of the 1960s said that wages were tied to productivity. If that were true, then classical musicians and shortstops would have seen their incomes crash relative to farmers and shoemakers, who would by now be vastly wealthier than the lowly performers of the New York Philharmonic or the Boston Red Sox.

In fact that didn’t happen, because in the long run the labor market has a supply side as well as a demand side. Asian workers can attest to that.  And, on the other side, every profession has to pay enough to induce talented people to make whatever sacrifices are necessary to enter that profession. But something has to give somewhere, so we see the productivity difference as inflation: The price of a New York Philharmonic or Yankee ticket is going to rise much faster than the cost of a loaf of bread or a pair of shoes.

Industries with a large component of personal service (e.g. health care) will not improve their productivity as quickly as other components of the economy and consequently inflation in those centers is inevitable. While health care has a large technical component, that technology--and growth--is on the outcome side rather than the productivity that leads patients to it.

Baumol decided that inflation in health care was inevitable, not because of profit motives of doctors or insurers or the inherent inefficiencies of socialized systems but by its very economic nature. If true, one wonders what the giant brained leaders will do to make the health care square peg fit in to traditional economic round hole. And what distortion that will create.

Doppelganger 2

Again, on Mr. Obama at the National Defense University. He seemed to define his doppelganger presidency a bit more clearly--at least as a technique if not a philosophy. He spoke against drones as if someone else was launching them, Gitmo as if some other country controlled it. Benjamin Wittes, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on the Web site Lawfare: “To put it crassly, the president sought to rebuke his own administration for taking the positions it has — but also to make sure that it could continue to do so.”

But his most interesting pronouncement came on his assessment of the War on Terror that someone is waging. “Our systematic effort to dismantle terrorist organizations must continue,” Mr. Obama said in the speech at the National Defense University. “But this war, like all wars, must end. That’s what history advises. It’s what our democracy demands.” One could spend all day analyzing this goofy section but the zenith of its goofiness is the implication that war is some sort of affliction, like smoking or fasting or chicken pox, that is subject to natural or philosophical laws. To the contrary, war is an insane agreement involving at least two groups that promises to kill, maim and destroy as many of the enemy's people as possible. The very idea that this is somehow under some civilized and civilizing political or natural law should be offensive to all thinking people. The naive notion that wars "end" by some force other than the destruction of one of the participants should not be publicly uttered by someone in national office.

But this idea has some history, if you will. Historicism, Doppelganger 1 and Reductionism, Doppelganger 2. The  historicist positions claims that there is an inevitable and deterministic pattern to history and, importantly--especially in this context, denies individual responsibility of each one of us to make our own free contributions to the evolution of society. Reductionism is the belief that all phenomena are reducible to smaller components, in Obama's situation groups and economics, which determine behavior, again diminishing the influence and value of the individual and his efforts.

What does the man in the most powerful position in the world think? That the war is in the fourth quarter and someone else controls the clock.

Sunday Sermon 5/26/13

This Sunday's reading contain some beautiful writing and ideas.
First, Proverbs' extols wisdom: "I was set up of eternity and of old before the earth was made." "I was with him forming all things and was delighted every day playing before him at all times./ Playing in the world: and my delights were to be with the children of men."
Romans discusses hope no politician would understand: "..but we glory also in tribulations, knowing tribulations worketh patience; And patience trial; and trial hope;" encouraged by the charity of God through the Holy Spirit.
Finally, Christ in John: "I have yet many things to say to you: but you cannot bear them now."

Again the message that the materialistic, thoughtful world is not enough to grasp all of the truth. Wisdom, here through the Holy Spirit, will expand knowledge.

It is reminiscent of Picasso's response to the man who asked him to explain one of his paintings. "It I could explain it," he said, "I wouldn't have had to paint it."
The Greeks did not like this thinking. Plato in Phaedrus has Socrates say, "I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence."

It is a knowledge beyond all words.

Cab Thoughts 5/25/13

Writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence.--Plato (Phaedrus)


Two former Republican secretaries of State -- James Baker and George Shultz -- led the U.S. delegation to the Thatcher funeral but no representatives from the current administration attended.

The Greek battles at Troy and Thermopylae are both relatively well known events; much less is known about the Battle of Leuktra, in which the Thebans — led by Epaminondas — defeated the Spartans in what was perhaps one of the most stunning military victories of all time. Military historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote of the battle in The Soul of Battle. He has a new book--fiction--about the event. The Thebans were an agrarian people falling somewhere closer to Athens than Sparta in governmental structure and further away from Sparta in militarism.

The sabermetric community contends Pirates lefty Jeff Locke cannot sustain his performance to date. After seven shutout innings against the Astros on Sunday, Locke has lowered his ERA to 2.73. But, according to Fangraphs.com, Locke continues to strike out too few batters and walk too many. Worse, he’s throwing the same three-pitch mix as in prior years and the same three-pitch percentages as he did last year when he struggled. His ERA is a terrific 2.73 but FIP – a metric of fielding-independent run prevention – suggests his ERA should be 4.47. His FIP last year was 4.43. The advanced stats think he’s the same pitcher he was last year. But why is last year the standard and this year the outlier? Why can't it be the other way? Is it just strikeouts and walks?

E-book sales rose a 44.2 percent, to $3.04 billion, last year, according to figures released by BookStats.

The fifth edition of the “bible” of mental illness, formally known as the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders will include new disorders, and has changed how some conditions - like ADHD and autism - are diagnosed. According to the new definitions, some experts say almost 50 percent of Americans could be diagnosed as mentally ill in their lifetimes.

Following the theories of Philadelphia engineer and businessman Frederick Winslow Taylor, one of the nation's first specialists in shop-floor management whose book The Principles of Scientific Management was the best-selling business book of the first half of the twentieth century, Henry Ford broke his auto assembly system down to simple, short, repetitive tasks. It was brutally boring and "dehumanizing." Ford's daily absentee rate was 10 percent, while annual turnover exceeded 350 percent. To reduce turnover, which was costly to the company, Ford doubled the daily wages of his most valued employees. That retained workers and began to build a working middle class.

If you want 3% GDP growth in a country whose population is shrinking by 1%, do you need about 4% productivity growth?

In a survey of three hundred thousand contractors, two-thirds said they had no direct employees, meaning that they did not need to pay workers’-compensation insurance or payroll taxes. In other words, for lots of people off-the-books work is the only job available.

It was the Aztecs who first used graphite as a marker. The modern pencil was invented in 1795 by Nicholas-Jacques Conte, a scientist serving in the army of Napoleon Bonaparte. Initially it was believed to be a form of lead and was called 'plumbago' or black lead--after the Latin word for lead(hence the 'plumbers' who work on lead water-carrying pipes) and that error persists in our use of pencil 'lead'.

A recent analysis in The New Yorker investigates cash in the American economy. Contrary to the widely cited figure that 65 percent of U.S. currency is abroad, direct evidence supports the notion that overseas holdings amount to less than 25 percent. And the underground economy (called by the economist Edgar Feige "The Unreported Economy) totals about $2 trillion a year in the US. And the "lost" tax revenue is in the neighborhood of $400 billion a year. Feige points to the growing distrust of government as one important factor. The desire to avoid licensing regulations, which force people to jump through elaborate hoops just to get a job, is another. He thinks this explains some of the disparities in the economy. Lack of concern/respect for law is a dangerous lesson to teach.

In 1410 Prince Henry the Navigator, the second son of Portuguese King John I, founded a school for navigators at Ponta de Sagres. He had extraordinary students including Vasco da Gama, who made the first voyage from Europe to India, and Magellan, whose expedition first circumnavigated the globe. Their aim was to develop direct trading routes to Europe and bypass the expensive Muslim middlemen on the Silk Road.

Who was....Tawana Brawley?

The U.S. economy: jobless claims rose sharply last week while ground-breaking at home construction sites dropped in April. The total number of people on welfare is about 4,300,000. The total number of people getting food stamps (the SNAP program) is 46,700,000.

Stratfor is sometimes insightful, sometimes rehash. This is a quote from one of its writers, George Friedman, that is quite disturbing as he searches for some balance in society's search for "comfort and transcendence": "I am not talking here of the economic crisis that is gripping Europe, leaving Portugal with 17 percent unemployment and Spain with 26 percent. These are agonizing realities for those living through them. But Europeans have lived through more and worse. Instead, I am speaking of a crisis in the European soul, the death of hubris and of risk-taking. Yes, these resulted in the Europeans trying to convert the world to Christianity and commerce, in Russia trying to create a new man and in Germany becoming willing to annihilate what it thought of as inferior men. The Europeans are content to put all that behind them. Their great search for the holy grail is now reduced to finding a way to resume the comforts of the unexceptional. There is something to be said for the unexceptional life. But it cannot be all there is."

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Fall of Arthur is an incomplete epic poem on King Arthur. It has been edited for publication by his son, Christopher Tolkien, and has just been released. Started in the 1930's it was abandoned for The Hobbit and never resumed. It is written in Old English alliterative verse (the meter of Beowulf). It begins: "Arthur eastward in arms purposed/ his war to wage on the wild marches, / over seas sailing to Saxon lands, / from the Roman realm ruin defending." There are a lot of notes, drafts and experiments in the manuscript which might put off Tolkien fans in the book.

A company with:
-revenues of 15 million dollars is in the top 1.7% of U.S. companies
-employees of over 100 is in the top 1.8% of U.S. companies.

The Nikkei Stock Average suffered one of its worst single-day declines in decades, a 7.3% drop. Japanese stocks are up more than 60% since late November, when Shinzo Abe, now Japan's prime minister, hinted that his administration would sharply increase the money supply in a bid to restart a sputtering economy.

Illicit drug use in the workforce involved an estimated 14.1% of employed adults (17.7 million workers). Illicit drug use in the workplace involved an estimated 3.1% of employed adults (3.9 million workers). The federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration says that, of the 20.3 million adults in the U.S. classified as having substance use disorders in 2008 -- the latest year for which figures are available --15.8 million were employed either full or part-time.

"President Obama Wishes American Citizens Well"--Headline which should be from the Onion but I made it up instead.

The IRS employees have a union, the National Treasury Employees Union (NTEU). Representing 150,000 members from 31 federal agencies and departments including the Internal Revenue Service, the NTEU says it is the nation’s largest independent federal union. In 2012 the NTEU contributed $580,412 to federal candidates—94% of which were Democrats.They would like a waver to get out of Obamacare.

If currency is linked to gold, any Fed management of the money supply impossible. From what we have seen over the last two centuries, is that reasonable?

More than 8,000 French households' tax bills topped 100 percent of their income last year, the business newspaper Les Echos reported on Saturday, citing Finance Ministry data.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/what-are-people-for-wendell-berry-book.html

The Bank of Japan is engaging in almost as much quantitative easing as the US Federal Reserve but in a country 1/3 the size of the US. And the yen is falling in response. The Nihon Keizai Shimbun, the main Japanese business newspaper, has reported that every one-yen fall in the yen/dollar rate will translate into a $2.7 BILLION increase in profits for the 30 largest Japanese exporters. Those profits come from sales, sales that are in large part due to better terms of trade and lower costs. Those profits are from sales that might have gone to other companies based in other countries, which is why there are some objections to Japan's decision in other nations. Most fear that, in order to fight their own deflation, the Japanese are exporting it.



AAAAANNNNNNDDDDdddddddd..........a picture: (a Hong Kong apartment)

Doppelganger

On drones: “History will cast a harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those of us who fail to end it.”

On Gitmo: “Look at the current situation, where we are force-feeding detainees who are holding a hunger strike. Is that who we are? Is that something that our founders foresaw? Is that the America we want to leave to our children?"

Who is this speaking? An intense government opponent? A Rand conservative? A Tea Party enthusiast? No, it is Obama himself at the National Defense University in Washington, talking as if he is outside the governing process, as if he hopes to influence decisions and promote change. It is as if he keeps two intellectual books, one for the daily governing and one for some fantastic campaign he is waging in a parallel universe, and apparently the second world reads about the first in the newspaper.

This is so strange.

Medea Benjamin of Code Pink interrupted his speech. “Excuse me, President Obama, you are commander-in-chief… it’s you, sir,” she shouted.

Code Pink with a moment of clarity?

The Poetry of Benghazi

There is a moment in the film "Argo" where two officials are rushing to a meeting about the Iranian attack on the U.S. embassy. They are discussing possible responses when one realizes that military management of embassy events are under the control of the State Department, not a military or judicial arm of government. The bureaucrat looks at the other man with a puzzled expression but nothing is said.

CBS did a short article on Raymond Maxwell -- one of the four State Department officials disciplined over security lapses that led to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya, last year. (U.S. Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other Americans were killed in terrorist attacks at U.S. mission and poor security was blamed by the State Department's Accountability Review Board (ARB).) Maxwell is also a poet who has been publishing provocative verses since he was put on administrative leave December 18.

In "Trapped in a purgatory of their own deceit," Maxwell writes in part: "The web of lies they weave / gets tighter and tighter / in its deceit / until it bottoms out - / at a very low frequency - / and implodes...Yet all the while, / the more they talk, / the more they lie, / and the deeper down the hole they go... Just wait.../ just wait and feed them the rope."

In his poem entitled "Invitation," a commentary about being put on administrative leave December 18th after the ARB criticized pre-attack security in Libya, Maxwell writes: "The Queen's Henchmen / request the pleasure of your company / at a Lynching - / to be held / at 23rd and C Streets NW [State Dept. building] / on Tuesday, December 18, 2012 / just past sunset. / Dress: Formal, Masks and Hoods- / the four being lynched / must never know the identities/ of their executioners, or what/ whose sin required their sacrifice./ A blood sacrifice- / to divert the hounds- / to appease the gods- / to cleanse our filth and /satisfy our guilty consciences..."

CBS then writes: "The ARB, in essence, was seen to have cleared higher-ranking State Department officials, including then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, of direct fault on the issue of inadequate security.
It's unclear as to exactly what Maxwell and the other disciplined managers allegedly did wrong or how they were chosen for discipline."

The government sacrificing its citizens for the betterment of their betters?

Cab Thoughts 5/22/13

The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.'--Peter Lynch

Amazon's U.K. unit racked up sales of $6.5 billion last year, but only paid $3.7 million in corporate taxes (which is nearly as much as it received in government grants). Why does Amazon.co.uk pay so little? Reuters says it's because "all sales to British customers are routed through a Luxembourg affiliate, Amazon EU Sarl."

Camouflage: From a combination of the Italian word camuffare (to disguise) and the French word camouflet (puff of smoke), describing a common practice among thieves: staging an attractive woman who would blow smoke in the face of an intended target, which was both sexually suggestive at the time and distracting enough that the thief could snag the victim's wallet.

Last week, the mother of a seventh-grader in Northville, Mich., filed a complaint seeking to keep an unexpurgated version of Anne Frank's Diary off of middle school shelves because she felt a passage describing the female genitalia was "pornographic." But a review committee has decided to keep the book in the curriculum. Glen Ellyn School District 41, an Illinois school district, has banned the young adult novel The Perks of Being a Wallflower from its library and classrooms after parents complained about its discussions of sex and drug use.

Freedom of the press has emerged as the crucial individual freedom because it seems the press is the only source of information the administration has.

The American Heart Association officially announced that people who owned pets, particularly dogs, appeared to have a reduced risk of heart disease and had better survival rates than those without pets.

"An authority I respect has put it this way: China's model of growth is to spend 100 yuan to gain 10 yuan in increased GDP. Environmental degradation, moral collapse, the polarization of rich and poor, pervasive corruption -- all these things are constantly exacerbating the contradictions in Chinese society. More and more we hear of mass protests in which hundreds or even thousands of people will burst into a government compound, smashing up cars and setting fire to buildings....life in the Mao era was impoverished and restrictive, there was no widespread, cruel competition to survive, just empty class struggle, for actually there were no classes to speak of in those days and so struggle mostly took the form of sloganeering and not much else. People then were on an equal level, all alike in their frugal lifestyles; as long as you didn't stick your neck out, you could get through life quite uneventfully....In China today there have emerged real classes and real class conflict."--Yu Hua, China in Ten Words

Now this is reassuring. FirstEnergy: A lemonade pitcher containing two goldfish swimming in radioactive water was found in a steam tunnel at its Perry nuclear plant. Just two months ago, the Union of Concerned Scientists issued a report highlighting security vulnerabilities of the tunnels at FirstEnergy's Perry plant. Or this. An elderly nun and two peace activists, armed with flashlights and a bolt cutter, approached the fence at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee and cut their way through the fence, fully expecting to be arrested on the spot. Instead, they walked nearly a mile, cutting through four fences in all, breaching what was supposed to be the most tightly secured uranium processing and storage facility in the country.

Sell in May and go away: If you had invested $10,000 in the Dow in 1950 and only kept the money in stocks from November through April, you would have had $684,073 as of the end of 2011. If you reversed the strategy and invested for the May-October period, you would have lost $1,024 over the same 61-year period. The positive return is a compound ROI of 7.17%. The negative is -22%.

The psychic business is a $2 billion industry in the U.S..

Who was....... Mehmet Ali Agca?

Latin script -- the everyday alphabet of today's Western world -- evolved from Greek letters, which  themselves derived from Phoenician, as did Hebrew. British archaeologist Flinder Petrie--and more importantly his wife--found a written language in the western Sinai at Serabit el-Khadim they dated from 1400 B.C.. Egyptologist Alan Gardiner realized that the Petries had actually stumbled across the origin of the alphabet, or something very close to it. Authorities believe that the proto-Semitic inscriptions the Petries first found at Serabit derived from Egyptian hieratic or hieroglyphic writing, perhaps to communicate with non-literate miners. ("Hieratic" means "priestly" as the writing was limited to use by priests.)

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/natural-gas-leadership-test.html

A worker is about 10 times more likely to die on the job in North Dakota than in New Hampshire. North Dakota's workplace fatality rate is more than 3 times greater than the national average.

The Justice Department says Apple took the lead in an ebook price-fixing ring with five major publishing houses, according to a court filing Tuesday. The houses — Penguin, Macmillan, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster and Hachette — have all agreed to settle, but Apple is scheduled to go to trial June 3.

Hiring disabled people to pose as family members can get your kids to the front of the line at Disney. The “black-market Disney guides” run $130 an hour, or $1,040 for an eight-hour day.

"He has, acting personally and through his subordinates and agents, endeavored to ... cause, in violation of the constitutional rights of citizens, income tax audits or other income tax investigations to be initiated or conducted in a discriminatory manner."--House Judiciary Committee's Articles of Impeachment, July 29, 1074. Using the IRS for political purposes is not an embarrassment. Nor is it incompetent. It is a serious crime. The integrity of these agencies is a crucial distinction between us and the multiple creepy despotic governments that come, stay for a long time and reshuffle themselves.

Amazon debuted a virtual currency called "Amazon Coins" on Monday. The coins can be used to buy apps in Amazon's Appstore and on Kindle Fire. A dollar will get you 100 of the new coins, though the Internet retailer will discount coins bought in bulk.

A poll by the University of Michigan and Mullenberg College finds an amazing 68% support "strongly" or "somewhat" a moratorium on gas drilling in Pennsylvania. Just 25% is strongly opposed to a moratorium.

The number of new biotechnology and medical device companies receiving start-up financing has now fallen to the lowest levels in 18 years, according to PriceWaterhouseCoopers.

Floyd Mayweather Jr. is the highest-earning athlete in American sports for the second straight year. The boxer is projected to make $90 million in 2013 according to Sports Illustrated's annual list released Wednesday. Miami Heat star LeBron James is a distant second at $56.5 million.

Tamerlan Tsarnaev is being compared to the unburied Polyneices from Sophocles' Antigone. Daniel Mendelsohn in The New Yorker writes: "In the end, what entitles [Polyneices] to burial has nothing to do with what side he was on — and it's worth emphasizing the play is not at all shy about enumerating the horrors the dead man intended to perpetrate on the city, his own city, the pillage, the burning, the killing, the enslavement of the survivors — but the fact that he was a human being, anthropos." This seems to me to be an agonized answer to a question no one has asked.

Good news. The unindicted Sandlers of Golden West infamy have opened a new shop, Pro Publica. This is a non profit, NON PROFiT, organization that purports to do independent investigative journalism "in the public interest." This is a real advance because anything in the public interest would break new ground for anyone associated with Golden West. ProPublica's investigations are conducted by its staff of full-time investigative reporters and the resulting stories are given away to news 'partners' for publication or broadcast. In some cases, reporters from both ProPublica and the news partners work together on a story. ProPublica was originally funded through the astounding financial success of the heartless and abusive Golden West Financial Corporation, where Marion and Herb Sandler were co-CEOs and co-ringleaders. ProPublica still receives half of its money from Golden West plunder.

Graphite is a form of pure carbon that is one of the softest solids known, and one of the best lubricants because the six carbon atoms that link to form a ring can slide easily over adjacent rings. Yet, if the atomic structure is changed, there is another crystalline form of pure carbon, diamond, that is one of the hardest solids known.

AAAANNNNNdddddddd.....a graph:

Cutting Spending or Raising Taxes?

A significant battle has been waged along a single line: The money supply (and its cousin, debt). Should there be spending to expand the money supply or austerity to shrink the money supply. This battle is seen through two completely different cultural experiences: The Americans shrank the money supply in the thirties and exaggerated the Depression, the Europeans--i.e. Germans--raised the money supply in the thirties and hyperinflation resulted....and Hitler. The G20 in Pittsburgh several years ago was a remarkable discordant meeting of smiling and insincere politicians who, while preaching unity, completely disagreed, Europe voting for austerity, the Americans for stimulus. There is now a movement in the U.S. toward austerity.

What works?

A group led by economist Alberto Alesina analyzed the International Monetary Fund history of all the fiscal plans that 17 OECD governments enacted between 1978 and 2009, including the U.S., Canada and Japan. Together, these countries tried everything to grow their economies—raise spending, cut spending, raise taxes or cut them, in endless combinations. There were 200 separate subsets. They published their results in an August 2012 paper on "fiscal consolidations" for the National Bureau of Economic Research (The NBER is an American private nonprofit research organization for economic research. Both Krugman and Friedman have been members.). Their results? "Adjustments based upon spending cuts are much less costly in terms of output losses than tax-based ones. Spending-based adjustments"—that is, spending cuts—"have been associated with mild and short-lived recessions, in many cases with no recession at all. Tax-based adjustments"—tax increases—"have been associated with prolonged and deep recessions."

The debate over "failed austerity" (Krugman) is misleading because it emphasizes spending cuts but rarely mentions tax increases. "Austerity" plans, the Alesina studies suggest, fail to revive growth when they too heavily rely on raising taxes on income and capital—as across Europe and now in the U.S.

Spending and tax policies must be seen as separate monetary factors but rarely are. According to the study, spending cuts can positively affect economic growth and is the only historically reliable way to lower deficits and debt.

Substituting tax increases for spending cuts is a dangerous route.

Obama Wishes Americans Well

President Barack Obama took time out from his campaigning in Tennessee to wish American citizens well, it was reported today by the AP. "I hope things go well for America in the next years," Mr. Obama said.

In a expression that has become characteristic of his governing technique, Obama urged Americans to be optimistic about the future and work hard to attain it. "We must not succumb to the nay-sayers or those whose vision is clouded by pessimism," President Obama said. "We know we can do it." An adoring crowd cheered in agreement.

"We may be facing trying times," Mr. Obama said, "Times that try men's souls. But we will persevere. You know, you know there was a Powerball lottery last week where the winner could win over 460 million Euros. 600 million dollars. Thousands of Americans bought tickets. Tens of thousands. Millions. And why? Hope. Hope for the opportunity to help their community. Hope for the opportunity to help their families. Hope for the opportunity to help their friends. Hope for a better life. So I say this to the doubters: Hope is still alive in America!"

In a riveting moment, Obama bent down and marked the ground with his finger. "I am drawing a line in the sand," he intoned, "Showing nobody can shake my hope for the American people. Let those without hope throw the first stone."

"There are three great virtues possessed by the American people," he continued, "faith, hope and charity. But the greatest of these is hope."

Obama's well-wishing has emerged as a cornerstone of his presidency, in distinction to previous faith-based administrations. Spokesmen have frequently commented that faith requires something to have faith in, a notion they feel is old fashioned. Hope is more progressive and appropriate to modern times.

Cab Thoughts 5/18/13

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power--Daniel Webster

Gun murders in the U.S. are down 39% since 1993, according to a new Justice Department report. Crimes with guns are down by an even bigger 70%. Gun murders totaled 11,101 in 2011. That was a decline of 7,152 from the 1993 total of 18,253 in 1993. Does that mean anything other than the population is getting older?

Forbes.com pegged the overall effective tax rates of the Big Three oil and gas firms at 41.5% to 48.3%, depending on the company. These rates were the highest among the 25 top taxpaying companies (in terms of dollar amounts) that Forbes surveyed. The most profitable part of the oil and gas sector — drilling and exploration — stood at an 11.4% margin as of April 29.
More than three dozen other categories — such as brewers (15.2%), personal computers (20.7%) and periodical publishing (21.4%) — were ranked as more profitable.

There are 47 new or revised taxes in the ACA.

From The Difficult March To Democracy Department: Human Rights Watch reports that a video appears to show Khalid al-Hamad, aka Abbu Sakkar, cutting out the heart and liver of a dead Syrian government soldier and then biting from the heart while insulting members of the ruling Alawite sect. Abu Sakkar is the founder of the Independent Omar al-Farouq Brigade, a group of about 60 rebel fighters battling to overthrow the Bashar al-Assad regime. I really hope we are supporting that guy.

Gutenberg wanted to recreate the writings of the scribes and produced volumes identical to those the scribes had copied and illuminated for a millennium. Therefore, Gutenberg designed and manufactured 290 different and ornate typefaces of varying sizes for his Bible.
By about 1454 he had built six presses. Since each page contained approximately 2,750 characters, and at least two sides of a folio had to be set at anyone point, Gutenberg needed approximately 100,000 bits of cast type to keep the day-to-day process running smoothly. 40 vellum copies consumed about 3,200 calf hides. This was a labor intensive project, too. So, eventually, he went broke.

But his work was of very high quality and very readable. With large type, forty-two-line page, and wide margins, a Gutenberg Bible could be easily read without spectacles. These volumes soon became so treasured that an amazing 49 of the original 180 survive today, four of which are complete vellum copies.

Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, gave a speech to the KKK in Silver Lake, N.J. in 1926. 

Frédéric Brochet, who is a researcher with the oenology faculty of the University of Bordeaux, recently asked some experts to describe two wines that appeared by their labels to be a distinguished grand-cru classe and a cheap table wine -- actually, Brochet had refilled both bottles with a third, mid-level wine -- and found his subjects mightily impressed by the supposed grand cru and dismissive of the same wine when it was in the vin ordinaire bottle.
In another test he asked wine drinkers to describe what appeared to be a white wine and a red wine. They were in fact two glasses of the same white wine, one of which had been colored red with flavorless and odorless dye. The comments about the 'red' wine used what people in the trade call red-wine descriptors. 'It is a well known psychological phenomenon -- you taste what you're expecting to taste,' Brochet said in the Times. 'They were expecting to taste a red wine and so they did. About two or three per cent of people detect the white wine flavour, but invariably they have little experience of wine culture. Connoisseurs tend to fail to do so. The more training they have, the more mistakes they make because they are influenced by the color of the wine.'
Some have used this to their advantage; in China, nouveau-riche status-seekers are spending small for­tunes on counterfeit Bordeaux. And they are probably pleased with their purchases.

According to Census Bureau data, 66.2 percent of eligible African-American voters turned out to cast a ballot in the 2012 election, compared to 64.1 percent of eligible Caucasian voters, the first time on record that blacks have surpassed whites in voter turnout rate.

"Guccifer," the hacker responsible for  leaking Bush's book, appears to have leaked the opening chapters of Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell's newest novel. Guccifer has previously targeted political types.

The cost of developing a single new medicine has grown more than 10-fold, to $1.5 billion. On average, each new drug spends 15 years in development. And only two in 10 successfully commercialized medicines ever earn a return on investment.

A new poll from the Kaiser Family Foundation showed more than 4 in 10 Americans didn't know the Affordable Health Care Act was still law or was being implemented. About half feel they don't have enough information about the law to know how it will affect them.

“I’ve always said Kim Clijsters is my favorite player, so it’s kind of weird,”  Sloane Stephens said in an interview recently, debunking the story that her idol has always been Serena Williams, whom she actively dislikes. It's awkward when you have to live outside of the narrative.

SolarCity is suing the government for more of its subsidies. Department of Treasury Section 1603 data shows that SolarCity received 27 awards across 15 states amounting to $95.6 million in cash from a long-standing tax credit for renewable-energy investment turned into a direct grant in the stimulus bill. SolarCity has applied for approximately $325 million in these stimulus grants, according to the SEC filing.

Who is....Andrew Kehoe from Bath, Michigan?

Prior to 2006, the rate of colony loss for bees during a winter was 10%. But something has changed. Bee colony collapses averaged 30% from 2006 to 2012. But this past winter was even worse. Don Hopey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reports that the rate of colony collapse hit 50% this winter. Prior to 2006, when colony collapse disorder, or CCD, was first identified, commercial beekeepers could expect to lose about 1 in 10 hives over a winter.

About one-third of the nation's crops are pollinated by honeybees, producing up to $30 billion worth of food and beverages annually, said a report by the federal Department of Agriculture, the Environmental Protection Agency and a host of scientists and beekeepers
In addition to apples, Pennsylvania crops dependent on commercial honeybee pollination include pumpkins, raspberries, squash, watermelon and cucumbers. The shortage of natural bee pollination has resulted in beekeepers following the bloom from south to north, to provide pollination for many different crops, just as the combine harvesters follow the wheat harvest from Texas to Manitoba.

411 Billion dollars were distributed in 2007 under TARP; so far $414 Billion has been returned.

Unable to afford soaring charges, almost a fifth of people in Briton have given up going to their dentist. There has been a surge in sales of dental kits at pharmacies including chemicals to whiten teeth. Up to a third of adults no longer have an NHS dentist, according to the latest figures. Since a new NHS contract was introduced in 2006, the number of crowns, bridges and dentures being fitted has fallen dramatically as dentists feel they are no longer paid enough for time-consuming procedures.

Demand for natural gas in 2014 is projected by the EIA to be slightly lower than it was in 2012 as coal moves back toward a 40% of the generation market and natural gas falls to about 27%. And the displacement of gasoline and diesel by natural gas will be meaningless until the federal and state government accelerates the fueling infrastructure so that businesses and families can be assured that a CNG vehicle that they buy can be refueled at least within their home state. T. Boone Pickins who is CNG's main supporter --and investor in CLNE--says the federal government has no interest in solving this for the next year at least.

Golden Oldies:

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

The British General Sir Charles James Napier was confronted with the local Hindu practice of Sati, the custom of burning a widow alive on her husband's funeral pyre. When Hindu priests complained to him about the prohibition of Sati by British authorities, Napier replied:

"Be it so. This burning of widows is your custom; prepare the funeral pile. But my nation has also a custom. When men burn women alive we hang them, and confiscate all their property. My carpenters shall therefore erect gibbets on which to hang all concerned when the widow is consumed. Let us all act according to national customs." (Wiki)

Tesla reported $11.2 million in income including:
$10.7 million in nonrecurring gains from reversing derivative liability;
$68.0 million in nonrecurring ZEV credits; and
$6.4 million in nonrecurring foreign currency benefits.

On the surface, that looks pretty bad. This company is constantly under attack by guys who hate the support by the government and the price of the car, especially the cost-benefit. But the Tesla Motors  Model S is the first car to achieve a score as high as 99 out of 100 in detailed testing from Consumer Reports since 2007. The publication bought a car anonymously in January and went through the Tesla experience from start to finish with hardly any hitches while being thoroughly impressed by performance (like a "Porsche") and energy efficiency. And the stock is just flying. Bloomberg recently compared it to Apple.

Botanically, a tomato is a fruit because it is a seed-bearing structure growing from the flowering part of a plant. In Nix vs. Heddon, however, The United States Supreme  Court unanimously ruled the Tariff Act in dispute used the ordinary meaning of the words "fruit" and "vegetable" – where a tomato is classified as a vegetable – not the technical botanical meaning. So, in spite of scientific opinion, the government says the tomato is a vegetable. One wonders at the government's isolated silliness.

The Kewaunee, Wisconsin nuclear plant ran well from its first day of operation in 1974 to May 7, 2013, when it was  permanently shutdown.  There were no maintenance questions, no accidents. The reason is probably cost. Kewaunee is small, just 556 megawatts, and isolated so it could not share costs with other nukes. But competitive pricing is having an impact, especially influenced by gas prices that plunged below $2 in April 2012 before doubling to more than $4--still very low--in April 2013. It may not be typical, but it is startling.

AAAAAANNNNNDDDDdddddd............. a graph:

 

Night Riders of the Republic

The IRS' indiscretions in profiling audits on the basis of politics has raised some anxiety from people who generally are pretty sanguine about government action. That is because everyone fears the IRS. It is a powerful entity in people's lives and everyone knows it. More, it can be arbitrary and whimsical. If it becomes malicious it is worse. Recently the IRS has been sued by a HIPAA organization because 15 agents removed the medical histories of 10 million people included psychological counseling, gynecological counseling, sexual/drug treatment and other medical treatment data.  Many of those records were of California judges. This was done without warrant or subpoena and none of those whose records were taken were under criminal or IRS investigation.

The Independent Payment Advisory Board is the arm of the ACA that controls spending growth. It is generally characterized by its opponents as a "death panel" but this is both an exaggeration and a false target. The problem in all of these plans is cost control. All arbitrary and rigid top-down cost controls decrease availability of the thing or service being controlled. The very nature of cost control in medicine will decrease availability of medical care. The question is what and where. The what and where will be determined by the Independent Payment Advisory Board.
This is a huge responsibility and power. And it is beyond review.

The IRS and the IPAB are powerful, autonomous organizations whose restraint seems to rest on their own sense of propriety and responsibility. The question is why would a free people allow such dangerous, autonomous and threatening organizations to rise up in their midst?

"Clybourne Park": A Review

First off, the actors in this play were totally innocent. They had agents, contracts, girlfriends to impress.

That said, Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris is the single worst attempt at theater that I have ever seen perpetrated upon an optimistic and unsuspecting audience. It is not so much a drama as a discussion, like a coffee-house argument but with movement. It is set in a house that is being sold. There are two acts, fifty years apart. Yes, your suspicion is correct; the positions of those several groups in conflict in the first act change over the years, become confused and contradictory. Some groups even switch positions with each other! Clever, No?

No. Incredibly contrived. Incredibly predictable. Incredibly shallow. And staggeringly arrogant. Aeschylus would not have tried this. The topics of this mess look like the agenda of a United Nations luncheon meeting. There is race relations, prejudice, illness, suicide, war crimes, depression, congenital disabilities, acquired disabilities, hypocrisy, poverty, patriotism, marital discord, women abuse, family stability, religion, social failure in religion, integrity of communities, xenophobia, real estate...the mind swims desperately for the surface. The single funniest moment in the play occurs when a grown man verbally and obscenely abuses a pregnant deaf girl.

One of the real problems with this play is the constant intellectual distraction the audience members suffer as they search for the causes of the inexplicable praise this creation has received. This won a Pulitzer Prize. "Powerful," "energetic," "rich," "darkly funny" and "touching" are repeatedly used in this play's reviews. And, as if quality were infective, it is constantly connected to “A Raisin in the Sun” by Lorraine Hansberry. Why? Perhaps because it involves real estate and some black actors are in it. Get it? And it is loud. Really loud with fighting spouses and a missing child. Like "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf." Get it?

Loud. Missing children. Real estate. Black actors.

In the neighborhood of genius.

Cab Thoughts 5/15/13

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. --michael crichton

While the iron is really, really hot; Riverhead Books has announced a deal for a book about Boston Marathon bombing suspects Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. It will be written by Russian-American journalist Masha Gessen, author of the biography The Man Without a Face: The Unlikely Rise of Vladimir Putin.

Environmental officials are set to conduct a survey of a Central Park lake for the northern snakehead, an invasive predator fish that can live out of water for days. This is a really aggressive predator and has no natural enemies. It can completely transform the ecology. Some have been found in the Mississippi and the local game commissions hunt them with a vengeance. This fish is a real ecology destroyer. Anyone dumping one of these beast in the U.S. should be considered an environmental terrorist.

The economist Walter Williams asks a very interesting question: How was wealth amassed before capitalism? His answer? Theft, raiding and slaving. Capitalism, he says, allows the development of wealth by serving your fellow man.

In a recent editorial, the murder of the soccer referee by an angry player in Utah was attributed to "lack of sportsmanship."

There is a thesis in psychology, called by Kahleman "priming," where the brain is fertilized by an event which later grows into a narrative through which subsequent events are seen. In the shadow of Watergate, perhaps this explains why the Republicans and the Press see the Benghazi event in the frame of scandal rather than competence.

There has been a presentation of Mexican as Palestinians in the discussion of immigration. That is, the Americans stole the southern part of the country from Mexico as Israel did Palestine and the "illegals" just want it back.

In 1990, the world used virtually no wind or solar energy, and considerably fewer nuclear reactors were operating then compared to now. Today, the world has more than 100,000 megawatts of solar power and nearly 300,000 megawatts of wind--big numbers and a lot of power production. Yet the world is using more coal today than ever before.

ETH Zurich researchers have shown that exhaled human breath contains a characteristic molecular "fingerprint." The scientists want to use this finding to diagnose diseases based on the chemical analysis of a patient's exhaled breath, using highly sensitive and precise instrumental methods.

Romney received a little less than 30% of the Hispanic vote in the last election; Obama, of course, got a bit more than 70%. If those numbers were reversed and Romney out polled Obama among Hispanics 70 to 30, Romney would still have lost.

Over 20% of all the immigrants on the planet are in the U.S. The country's foreign-born population has doubled in the last two decades to 40 million. According to Numbers USA, if the immigration bill passed, it would increase the legal population of the United States by 33 million in its first decade. That figure includes 11.7 million amnestied illegals and their children, plus 17 million family members imported through chain migration.

Harper Lee is suing to recover royalties from her former literary agent, Samuel Pinkus, who she claims tricked her into signing over the copyright to her novel To Kill A Mockingbird while she was recovering from a stroke in an assisted-living facility. The 87-year-old author regained the rights in 2012, but says Pinkus has still been collecting royalties.

Before the advent of electric lighting in Europe, sleepers awoke from their "first" sleep for an hour or more during the night, before returning to their "second" sleep. NASA has been interested in sleep patterns since discovering their astronauts did not sleep well for long periods. Their studies show that some long sleep --4 to 6 hours--is necessary and that augmentation with short sleeps help some cognitive functions. Piotr Woźniak, who developed a software system to help memory called the spacing effect ("one of the most remarkable phenomena to emerge from laboratory research on learning," the psychologist Frank Dempster wrote in 1988), thinks relying on short sleeps is destructive to learning, productivity and personality.

Luci Tapahonso has been named the Navajo Nation's first poet laureate.

Physicist Lee Smolin has a new book out describing his disenchantment with the perfect and timeless world of scientific law. "I used to think my job as a theoretical physicist was to find that formula. Now I see my faith in its existence as a kind of mysticism." Ever since Newton, physicists have been developing ever-more exact laws describing the behavior of the world. These laws live outside of time because they don't change. That means these laws are more real than time. Smolin is not so sure although he admits he has no substitute.

Pope John XXXIII appointed a "blue ribbon panel" to evaluate controversies within the Church and one of their recommendations was to change the Church position on contraception. Then he died. Paul VI, who revered John, became pope and wrote Humanae Vitae which reestablished the Church's old position.

Robert Putman, a Harvard political scientist, has reported on a five year study evaluating the effect of "diversity" on a community: The greater the diversity, the greater the distrust, the more the isolation. There is less sharing, less charity and significant social and political pessimism. I'm niot sure what this means other than what a stupid and coarse measuring stick "diversity" is.

The U.S. Census Bureau says the rate of participation of people 65 and older in the workforce increased from 12.1% in 1990 to 16.1% in 2010, and was 16.2% in 2011. Surveys show a growing number of workers 40 and over are also planning to work beyond retirement age.

Who is....Joanne Chesimard, aka Assata Olugbala Shakur?

Fisher v. University of Texas at Austin is before the Supreme Court and might be interesting. The top 10% of graduating Texas high school students are automatically offered admission at UT-A--race neutral--and these students make up 80% of incoming freshmen. The remaining 20% of the slots are given to minorities. Abigal Fisher was not in the top 10% and had to go the other route but was declined because she was white. (The school admits this.) What is unusual here is that the "race neutral 80% " has more minority represented than the general population so there is no need for a "race based" pathway at all. This asks another question: How long does the race preference go on? Forever? 100 more years? How long? Because it would be nice to have the nation focus on quality again.

There was a riot in Seattle in some strange celebratory May Day event. There were signs protesting capitalism and extolling unions and immigration. This spate of demonstrations has no need for coherence; one sign said "No human is illegal."

Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution spacecraft (MAVEN) is scheduled for launch this November, to study the Red Planet's upper atmosphere; the craft will examine why Mars lost its atmosphere. Part of its publicity campaign is to hold a contest to send three haiku poems with the craft. When a tree falls....? NPR has a list of entries; they are really terrible. The cosmos should not know of our silliness.

Bon Jovi's daughter had a heroin overdose at Hamilton College.

Sen. John McCain is now proposing that the U.S. look more carefully at admitting persons "from countries that have histories such as Dagestan and Chechnya and others where there has been significant influence of radical Islamic extremism." Sometimes watching these guys is really fun. He does not mention Pakistan or Saudi Arabia. And, of course, Dagestan and Chechnya are not countries; their citizens travel on Russian passports. So Mr. McCain is suggesting....what?

The Cuban government and the Boston-based Finca Vigia Foundation are collaborating to digitize and preserve papers and records from Ernest Hemingway's estate on the outskirts of Havana, which scholars in the United States have not previously had access to. Digital images of 2,000 papers will go to John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

A new Centers For Disease Control And Prevention study points that oil and gas workers have a fatality rate that is 7 times greater than the national average. Oil and gas workers suffer 27.1 fatalities per 100,000 workers, while the US average is 3.8 fatalities, and many of the deaths are in helicopters.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/06/leaders-in-search-of-vacuum.html

Hitting the Air Traffic Controllers with the Dreaded Sequester is like the attack on 9/11: It will embitter knowledgeable people. But they may not be the people the administration is trying to impress.

From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7.

The philosopher Edmund Burke was a withering debate opponent and conversationalist. Conversing with Burke, it was said, was like being "grazed by a powerful machine." Once, when Samuel Johnson was feeling poorly, he said, "That fellow [Burke] calls forth all my powers. Were I to see Burke now, it would kill me."

AAAAaaaannnnnddddd....a picture of the snakehead: