Sunday Sermon 6/30/13

Today's Old Testament reading has Elijah calling Elisha to follow him as God's prophet but Elisha returns home first to say goodbye to his parents and to feed his friends with his own oxen, an act of kindness but finality.
 
Next Paul writes to the Galatians and contrasts the life of the flesh with that of the spirit. "For the flesh lusteth against the spirit; and the spirit against the flesh; for these are contrary to one another." Paul then list the works of the flesh and the fruits of the spirit. In a reading one can see this is a stacked deck; the fruit of the spirit could never be criticized. And, truthfully, the sins of the flesh would not be considered any sensible man's ambition.

Finally, Luke writes of Christ's "resolutely determined" journey to Jerusalem and His death. It is a difficult reading, especially in the context of the other readings. First, James and John, angry that the Samaritan village will not welcome Christ, asks
“Lord, do you want us to call down fire from heaven to consume them?” Where they got this idea, what possible history they could call on for it is not explained but, while Christ rebukes them, He must have thought they were nuts. Christ then remarks that The Son of Man has nowhere to rest His head. Then two men ask to become disciples but both, as with Elisha in the Old Testament, have human, family responsibilities--good reasons to delay:
“Lord, let me go first and bury my father.”
But he answered him, “Let the dead bury their dead.
But you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.”
And another said, “I will follow you, Lord,
but first let me say farewell to my family at home.”
To him Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow
and looks to what was left behind is fit for the kingdom of God.
So Christ seems here to dismiss man's family and human responsibilities--one could say the life of the flesh--in favor of the life of the spirit. This, in spite of the leeway Elijah gave Elisha.

I don't think so. Christ has no quarrel with the practicalities of life. He spent thirty years in the practical world. The conflict between flesh and spirit is what makes men, men. He knows who, between Martha and Mary, has chosen the better part but those parts are inseparable. But the life of the flesh is not the sin of the flesh.. 

He sits in a Samaritan village where no one will welcome Him, His goofy apostles want to obliterate the area with fire and brimstone and He can not even find a place to rest. The Old Testament is being urgently overwritten. He is turning towards Jerusalem to die; there is no time to see your parents or check your fields.

Cab Thoughts 6/28/13

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)

The retail electricity price has grown by about 40 percent over the past decade; however, after adjusting for inflation, the real annual price in 2012 was at about the same level as in 1998 and almost 30 percent lower than the real price in 1984.

I met a man who is a metaphor for our times. He went to radiology tech school, graduated and could not find a job. So he opened a pawn shop. This week he is opening his fifth pawn shop. He is making a fortune.

Options have always been a problem for homo sapiens; the more options, the more problems. Freedom to choose is hamstrung by too much to chose from. So the paralysis of decision, be it writer's block or procrastination, is improved by first winnowing down the options (or so it is theorized.) Dr. Seuss wrote The Cat in the Hat with only 236 different words; his editor bet him he couldn't write a book with only 50 different words. So Dr. Seuss won the bet with Green Eggs and Ham, one of the bestselling children's books of all time.

Who was....Edgardo Mortara?

Decoy effect: Psychologist Daniel Ariely suggests the following scenario: Someone is given a choice between two vacations -- a week in either Paris and Rome at the same price with free breakfast each day -- where they are equally likely to choose either one. Then a third choice is added -- Rome at the same price without the free breakfast. With that third choice, that same person will become much more likely to select the option of Rome with the free breakfast. That is because relativity helps us make decisions in life --"it's the same price plus I get free breakfast so it must be a good deal." This is known as the "decoy effect," and people from psychologists to marketers see it everywhere -- from buying a house to selecting someone to date. It is belief in this characteristic that causes some restaurants to include a highly expensive entree on the menu even though few will order it, simply because it results in more patrons ordering the second most expensive entree on the menu. Summary: The wingman should always be like you but slightly inferior.

According to hotel sources in Rome reported in the American press, James Gandolfini's last meal included four shots of rum, two pina coladas, two beers, two orders of fried king prawns and a “large portion” of foie gras.

aleatory \EY-lee-uh-tawr-ee, -tohr-ee, AL-ee-\, adjective: of or pertaining to accidental causes; of luck or chance; unpredictable: an aleatory element.
--from the Latin word meaning "the dice" or "chance" alea, aleatory first surfaced in English in the late seventeenth century.

Der Spiegel described the president's recent Berlin stop as a visit by "the head of the largest and most all-encompassing surveillance system ever invented" under the headline "Obama's Soft Totalitarianism".

After decades of moderate decline, intercity bus service went up from 5.1 percent growth in 2009 to 7.5 percent in 2012. During the same period, Amtrak says its ridership increased 49 percent. Meanwhile, government data shows airline boardings down significantly, growing only .6 percent, down from 5.1 percent in 2009, and the average number of miles driven per capita has fallen 6 percent since 2004. American Bus Association spokesman Dan Ronan said feedback from riders is that they're picking buses for their WifI and plugins, in particular, discount bus lines, which, according to the Chaddick Institute, saw a 30.6 surge in operations 2011-2012.

The St. Louis Cardinals, Pittsburgh Pirates and Cincinnati Reds—all of the NL Central—now hold the top three records in the majors. Since the American and National leagues split into sections in 1969, three teams from the same division have never finished a season with the top three records in Major League Baseball.

Sixty percent of the jobs lost in the last recession were middle-income, while 59 percent of the new positions during the past two years of recovery were in low-wage industries that continue to expand such as retail, food services, cleaning and health-care support. By 2020, 48 percent of jobs will be in those service sectors.

EU sources reported Germany has put forward a new proposal to weaken EU draft rules on vehicle emission limits for carbon dioxide as it struggles to persuade other nations to help it protect its car industry. CO2 principles apparently have a price.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/01/heizenberg-and-politics.html

The FBI had a file on Mexican novelist Carlos Fuentes that called him a "communist writer" and refers to a "long history of subversive connections." The dossier, which starts in the 1960s and spans decades, also reveals that the FBI had informants track his movements while in the U.S., and details the agency's attempts to delay and deny his visa applications.

Over the years our ideas of dreams have undergone constant and sometimes dramatic revision. Dreams were thought of as out of time and could be prescient. Some felt them messages from the gods. Freud moved them inside us and made them symbolic, obscure scripts of our hopes and aspirations. Now dreams meet data. A psychology professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland named Calvin Hall spent more than thirty years gathering dream reports from everyone who would share them. By the time he died in 1985, Hall had synopses of more than fifty thousand dreams from people of all age groups and nationalities. From this large database, he created a coding system that essentially treated each dream like it was a short story. Regrettably, he concluded they were quite predictable. And mundane.

An argument is emerging touting the benefits of raising the minimum wage (also highlighting the threat of growing inequality in earnings.) Economists David Card and Alan Krueger (the current chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers) have research showing that, contrary to conventional economic orthodoxy, increases in the minimum wage increase employment. The crux of the argument is that a decline in earnings result in decrease in demand. Raising minimum wages would presumably improve that trend.

Descartes felt that "wonder" was the basic human emotion. Adam Smith wrote that wonder arises ‘when something quite new and singular is presented… [and] memory cannot, from all its stores, cast up any image that nearly resembles this strange appearance’. Smith associated this quality of experience with a distinctive bodily feeling — ‘that staring, and sometimes that rolling of the eyes, that suspension of the breath, and that swelling of the heart’. This, in his "History of Astronomy" essay.

Science fiction author and screenwriter Richard Matheson died Sunday at age 87. He was the author of I Am Legend and The Shrinking Man as well as a number of Twilight Zone episodes.

AAAAnnnnnndddddd......a graph:

Blowing Smoke

A guy named Charles Blow has an article in the NYT about the immigration debate. In it he holds up a straw man opinion on the topic and says, in response, ".. .[this]..outlines the whole of the problem with conservative opposition to comprehensive immigration reform. It hearkens to ideas of nativism, racism, misogyny, elitism and inequality from which the country is moving forward, but for which some conservatives still yearn."

He then offers, for consideration of the "illegality" of the Mexican immigrants, the Tory question that arose after the American Revolution. Although opposed to the Revolution, after the eventual victory many Tories wanted to be citizens of the new country. As they opposed the nation's formation originally, many opposed their citizenship. (The Supreme Court eventually decided in favor of the Tories.) Quoting Elizabeth F. Cohen, the author of “Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics” and an associate professor at Syracuse University, Blow writes, "This and later decisions showed how, over time, the country exercised reason and consent to create citizenship — even allowing the original sin of fighting against the formation of the nation to be forgiven.”

So the opposition to the amnesty proposal is based in nativism, racism, misogyny, elitism, inequality

and cruel, merciless indifference. Is there possibly another point here that might be reasonable? Is is possible that the Unites States, with its aims and responsibilities to itself and the world, might want to evaluate what potential immigrants might offer the nation rather than just what the nation offers him? Is it reasonable in this dangerous world for America to evaluate its immigrants? Perhaps even recruit them?

Or is that the real point? Is the outrageous charge of "nativism, racism, misogyny, elitism, inequality

and cruel, merciless indifference" an effort to avoid the very basic question at stake here: Individual Distinction? Is there the fear in the university coffee house that some immigrants might be of more value to the state than others and that the mere discussion of such advantages undermines the social cohesion they envision? Is the real point the rarely articulated dream of a worldwide homogeneous people in borderless and stateless community, tribe-less and creed-less, led and directed, of course, by someone--not them, certainly, but someone else, perhaps from a university coffee house-- who sees "the bigger picture" and has the investigative and punitive means to enforce the new ideals?

A Guest Blog on Medicine and Physicians

There have been some articles here in the past on the thoughts of Leland Hood who often discusses the future of medicine, the advances he expects and the changes he sees coming, especially changes in the physician's role. For example he sees the medical office of the future as a conference room with the patient, the physician, a biologist and a statistician.
This is A Guest Blog from Ned:

The income of physicians is going to have to decrease by very, very large amounts in the future. The math just doesn't add up, and that's the lowest hanging fruit to carve out. Attendings make freakish salaries, and, as physicians get pushed towards employee-employer contracts with hospitals, the hospitals will have more negotiating leverage over their new employees. When docs start to complain that their salaries are getting cut by 25%-50%, the general public will crucify them. And physicians will lose the PR battle.

The other problem is more subtle. Currently, a physician's value comes in two main forms (1) diagnostic interpretation and (2) surgical intervention. The value of a diagnosis is decreasing. Information is everywhere, and it will only be a matter of time until a computer outperforms a physician in terms of diagnostic accuracy, volume, and speed (think Watson). If you disagree, then you are thinking like those chess aficionados in the 80s who declared that a computer algorithm could never triumph over a grand master's experience and judgement.

Except it can. In fact, the last time anyone beat a computer was in the 90s. A computer hasn't been defeated by a grand master since I was a child.

And, in truth, arriving at a diagnosis is closer to chess than most people think. And there are multiple examples where computers have outperformed physicians. would think. Both are essentially probability calculations given appropriate inputs. But while chess has only 64 squares to decide on, a diagnosis has gazillions. So computers aren't there yet. But they will be.

The other issue facing physicians is the prevalence of substitutes. Would I rather go and see a physical therapist for 30 mins of 1x1 time to help me understand my hip injury, or would I rather see an orthopedist who will make me wait for 45 minutes, make me see a clueless resident for 25, and then see me for 5 minutes? No brainer. Will my physical therapist be just as good at diagnosing me? Yes. Will it be cheaper? Yes. Will I get more out of the visit? Yes. Then how can a physician command a premium price? I don't think they can.

Another example of substitute services. Could your PA do as good of a job as you do from a diagnostic standpoint? Probably pretty close. So what if the laws were changed to allow a PA to make diagnoses? To see patients? Could you stay in business?

Final point I'll leave you with. In medicine, the coin of the realm is data. And docs don't understand data. Once upon a time, docs were in charge and told people like me what to do. Now, data scientists are the ones charting the course. And this isn't isolated to medicine. Experienced business people who go with their gut are getting outperformed by soft spoken, awkward guys who understand the data. This means that the "cowboys" of the business world who say "You know what! I know what we should do! Everyone! Follow me!" are getting fired.

Everyone cares about the next big thing to save a bunch of money, but the truth is that you could save tons of cash by making physicians wash their hands as often as they should. Infection rates would drop like crazy. But they don't do it. And this alludes to a greater point. Physicians are not really scientists. They're trained to think scientifically, sure. But they don't really understand science as intimately as TV would have you believe. This prevents them designing appropriate studies, collecting data, analyzing it appropriately, and arriving at appropriate conclusions. This is why so many studies are not reproducible. So how can you put them in charge of the next technical revolution? You can't.

Physicians are about to become dinosaurs. They're scouts in the A's clubhouse, pissed off that statisticians are doing the jobs they used to do. The times are about to change, their value is going to drop in 15 years.

CabThoughts 6/26/13

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. -Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004



The Industrial Revolution depended a good amount on child labor. Josiah Wedgwood, uncle to Charles Darwin and heir to his father's great pottery in Staffordshire, employed 387 people -- 13 under ten years old, 103 between ten and eighteen -- in such work as dipping ware in a glaze partly composed of lead oxide, a deadly poison.

Six months after Obama took office, Sen. Claire McCaskill on Tuesday endorsed Hillary Clinton for president. Now we can have two campaigns, Obama's never-ending campaign and Hillary's. You can never be too early or late for greatness.

In The Atlantic, essayist Joseph Epstein argues that Kafka is overrated: "Kafka found [life] unbearably complicated, altogether daunting, and for the most part joyless, and so described it in his fiction. This is not, let us agree, the best outlook for a great writer. Great writers are impressed by the mysteries of life; poor Franz Kafka was crushed by them."

In "The Constitution of Liberty" (1960), Friedrich Hayek wrote that families are the primary transmitters of human capital — habits, mores, education. Hence families, much more than other social institutions or programs, are determinative of academic and vocational success. If true, the efforts of government to advance individuals or groups are always "playing catchup." And, as modernity and economic advances increase new complexity, those plans and programs by nature are behind the growth.

On the international list of the world’s best universities, 14 of the top 20 are American. Four are British. Of the top 100, 4 are French and 4 are German. America has won 338 Nobel Prizes. The U.K., 119. France, 59. It has 22 Peace Prizes, 12 for literature. (T. S. Eliot is shared with the Brits.)

Rural hospitals have always been a problem in America; they serve a large area but a small group, have difficulty with capital costs and consequently have a hard time recruiting physicians and nurses. As a result they tend to get perks and subsidies that serve as baseline expenses for the general state medical overhead. Massachusetts has only one rural hospital that wags the state's medical dog: Nantucket.

Alice Munro, the fine Canadian writer, may retire from writing because, as she says, "when you're my age, you don't wish to be alone as much as a writer has to be."

California lawmakers passed a law (Senate Bill 35) requiring that voter registration be part of the health insurance exchange.

Who was.....Thomas Newcomen?

BMW has built a car that can tap into a city's traffic light system. A dashboard display lets drivers know how long they have until that green light up ahead turns red - and the legal speed required to beat the change.

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (Vhemt) is a group of individuals who have decided not to reproduce themselves so as to protect and preserve the earth. From their Q and A:

"Each time another one of us decides to not add another one of us to the burgeoning millions already squatting on this ravaged planet, another ray of hope shines through the gloom. When every human chooses to stop breeding, earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory."

So the G7 plus 1 meets in luxury in Northern Ireland to discuss the world's problems. They come out with a statement--with Syria, Libya, EU economic problems, American border problems--and declare..... what? A unified approach to tax avoidance. Heavy stuff from heavy dudes.

The US economy created about 2 million jobs in 2012, and our population rose. Despite a bigger economy, our total energy use dropped a significant 2.8%, even as the world's energy consumption increased 1.8%. This implies cheaper production costs and makes the U.S. a more attractive manufacturing country.

On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 bound from New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport to Paris exploded 12 miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 230 passengers. Millions of dollars and time with myriad experts investigated the event for four years, including rebuilding the plane from parts scattered over the ocean. A new film, titled “Flight 800,’’ features investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board, TWA and Air Line Pilots Association claiming the government ignored or covered up witness accounts and radar evidence of a missile hitting the plane. Eyewitnesses at the time reported seeing a streak that looked like a missile hitting the plane and causing it to explode

Tom Stalcup, the director of the documentary, and James Kallstrom, the former assistant director of the FBI who investigated Flight 800, were interviewed by Savannah Guthrie on TODAY.
“It may not (look like a cover-up) at first glance, but if you look at the details, it really does,’’ Stalcup said. “The radar evidence confirms their (eyewitness) accounts of a streak moving toward the aircraft. Consistent with the trajectory of that streak is a detonation that exploded out the right side of the aircraft. Not only does that confirm their accounts, it refutes the NTSB’s theory.”
“Nothing he just said is true,’’ Kallstrom countered. “That’s my reaction. We had a massive investigation. We spent a year-and-a-half with a thousand FBI agents, experts from the military on missiles. We took the missile theory extremely serious. We interviewed all the eyewitnesses, some numerous times, because we knew in the FBI that there were shoulder-fired missiles available, that they were stolen from armories, that they were left on battlefields in Afghanistan and other places. We did a massive investigation of all military assets in the area. It just didn’t happen.”
Most will recognize the pattern here of piles of information and experts, seemingly well-meaning, who completely disagree. Sometimes money is involved. It is exactly like the Kennedy assassination. Or NSA leaks. Trust cannot be commanded; it must be earned.

Deism was a logical step in the Enlightenment, a rejection of the supernatural, revelation and the intervention of God in the affairs of man. Most deists agreed on the existence of a God in one form or another--indeed the complexity of creation confirmed this to them--but they rejected supernatural revelation, and Christ, in favor of reason as the only source of true religious knowledge. William Paley argued famously, if not originally, that God is like the watchmaker (or the “Primordial Architect,” in Sir Isaac Newton's terms). As the watchmaker fashions the parts and functions of the watch, God similarly put into place the machinations of the universe, and provides the energy which sets the universe in motion. God's intervention into his creation only occurs occasionally, if at all.

Ecology is the science that examines the relationship between organisms and their environment. "Environmentalism" is a concern for the environment, a point of view that advances the state of the environment, apparently even if this means sacrificing the state of the economy.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/01/why-investing-is-so-hard-1.html

Tom Wolfe is said to be working on a book called The Kingdom of Speech. According to Publisher's Marketplace, the book is "a nonfiction account of scholarship proposing that humans are divided from animals by their power of speech."

If rates move to 5%, which seems historically reasonable, what happens to the cost of carrying a $17 trillion debt? Five % of $17 trillion is $850 billion a year and necessarily pushes deficit spending back up to well over $1 trillion a year. So, would it be to the Fed's advantage to discourage stock buying in favor of bonds? We have seen much larger and more malignant conspiracies.

When a child is born to an addicted mother, the baby suffers the same symptoms as his mother does. Moreover, as in all addicts, his brain is physiologically changed forever. Any argument over individual responsibility should begin and end with this.

Aardvark is the first word in the dictionary. What is the last? Zymurgy, the branch of chemistry dealing with fermentation, as brewing.

So the U.S. continues in Afghanistan, Libya and now starts in Syria. Can a Nobel Peace Prize be revoked? Or at least get an asterisk?

AAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd..........a story with some graphs:

The market continues to rise in the face of a number of disadvantages. We have managed one of the most impressive bull runs in history during a period where all metrics of economic health are at or near all-time worst-case scenarios. That is an incredible feat and accomplished only as a result of the most aggressive monetary and fiscal policy in history. More, the volumes have been low; the general public has not been participating. Maybe that's the reason our redistributing leaders are not trumpeting the market's success.

The Fed:

And the government:

Summer Solstice

Man has noted the regularity of nature in different ways; the order it implies is always translated provincially.

Recognition of the solstice as an important event goes back to Neolithic times. It would take some time to track the setting and rising sun on the horizon but it could be done easily enough. One can visualize the local tribal genius placing stakes on a flat plain or cliff by the ocean as he tracks the course of the sun's rising or setting. The idea that it was an important measurement seems the significant realization. When his stakes became predictive, he probably became a rock star.

The summer solstice marks the longest day of the calendar year and the beginning of the summer season in the northern hemisphere. It is the day the sun sets at its most northern point in its cycle, when the earth’s axial tilt is closest to the sun. Literally the word is from the Latin solstitium containing the Latin sol meaning “the sun” and stittium meaning “stoppage.” The term translates “point at which the sun seems to stand still.”

Historically, cultures following lunar calendars placed the beginning of the day on the previous evening at dusk at the moment when the sun had set. (Hence  A Midsummer Night’s Dream.) In a number of cultures it was the most important celebration of the year.  Ancient Rome’s festival of Vestalia, a celebration honoring the Roman Goddess of the hearth, Vesta, was the only time of the year that married women were allowed to enter the shrine of Vesta. Only the vestal virgins were permitted inside for the remaining 359 days of the year. In ancient China, the solstice was marked by honoring the earth, the feminine, and the yin forces.

In other cultures the point of the event was the turning of the sun south again. Bonfires were lit to protect against evil spirits which were believed to roam freely then and, in later years, witches were thought to be on their way to meetings with other powerful beings.

Those witches are gone now--or are in disguise.

A More Secular Europe, Divided by the Cross‏

After the feeding frenzy, the sharks, sated and relaxed, always wax philosophical.

Following the French Revolution, the French were in the market for a new, non-hierarchical hierarchy to usher in a new day. They had risen above Christianity, its divisiveness and its rules (and rulers.) With blood dripping from the chandeliers, the Cult of Reason emerged, a humanistic and abstract concept purporting to hold Reason as a sacred guiding principle. Appropriate unrestrained celebrations and parties ensued. Unreasonable behavior became the disorder of the day.

A schism developed led by Robespierre. Tiptoeing carefully through the corpses, he argued that Reason was only a means to an end, Virtue. (It is really amazing when one thinks of all this.) He proclaimed the existence of God, the immorality of the soul and the social responsibilities such beliefs implied. Robespierre declared a national celebration of the Cult of the Supreme Being and it would be held annually. No less a person than David designed the event on and around an artificial mountain. Not surprisingly, Robespierre was the chief celebrant.

Eventually the Wheel of High-minded Principle turned again. The oxymoronic Committee of Public Safety led by Robespierre was deposed, its members arrested and guillotined. This extension of The Terror is strangely pointed to as the end of The Terror.

It took the pinnacle of the Revolution, the great republican Napoleon Bonaparte, to ban the Cult officially.

Sunday Sermon 6/23/13

Today has a number of readings that individually are very interesting and provocative; together they are daunting. In the first, Zechariah writes about the coming Messiah and compares him to Josiah, a king of Judah (641–609 BC) . Josiah restructured Israel after neglect by his father and grandfather and was killed in battle "in the plain of Megiddo." He is said to have found or complied either a copy of the Book of Deuteronomy or a text that became a part of Deuteronomy.

And, of course, there is Christ's question "Who do they say I am?" and then "Who do you say I am?" as He pronounces the question that will echo through the next two thousand years of history.

But the reading, despite the gravity of the others today, that might resonate most in the modern mind is from Paul's epistle:
There is neither Jew nor Greek,
there is neither slave nor free person,
there is not male and female;
for you are all one in Christ Jesus.

Here, in one phrase, is the answer to the problem that has plagued human history: The curse of inequality. The curse of difference. It is individual uniqueness that that stimulates friction and, from that friction, creativity, development and the future. But in uniqueness there is disparity. And it is this disparity that every social movement and philosopher tries to solve.
Here, Paul has the answer hiding in plain sight.

Cab Thoughts 6/22/13

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”

– H. L. Mencken

A big Full Moon will rise at sunset on Sunday. Its exact full phase (June 23, 11:32 UT) will occur shortly before it reaches perigee, the closest point to Earth in the Moon's orbit, and make it the largest Full Moon of 2013. The full lunar phase falls near the Moon's orbit perigee about every 14 lunar months.


Current U.S. solar capacity is nearing 9,000 megawatts. This year 4,000 to 5,000 megawatts will be installed. Forbes reports, by 2016, solar will install in one year approximately 9,000 megawatts. That will produce an amount of electricity equal to about 2 new 800 megawatt nukes.

Maybe we are safer than we think. Apple vs. The Government: In the Apple price-fixing case the government doesn't stack up well in technology, despite your concerns about the IRS and NSA. According to the NYT, "Apple's legal team used a MacBook to shuffle between evidence documents, stacking them side by side in split screens and zooming in on specific paragraphs. By contrast, the Justice Department's lawyers could show only one piece of evidence at a time. One video that Mr. Buterman played as evidence failed to produce the audio commentary needed to make his point."

This week, world leaders are gathered in Northern Ireland for the G-8 conference. It is hard to believe such a thing could happen there before the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which brought Catholics and Protestants together in a new, power-sharing government. That agreement declared an official truce between the Protestant loyalists who want Northern Ireland to stay in the United Kingdom and the Catholic Republicans who want all of Ireland to be united. How things are changing. Game of Thrones is being filmed there. Sixty cruise ships will be stopping at Belfast Harbour this season. Can "Honeymoon in scenic Syria!" be far away?

Germany has agreed with 13 other European Union nations to label goods made in factories owned by Jews in Judea and Samaria. The purpose is to harm Jewish businesses that dare to locate on ground disputed by Palestinian groups. Boycotting Jewish businesses has ugly echoes. In 1933 there was a German program to boycott Jewish businesses with yellow Star of David painted on the storefronts.

The diagnosis of depression did not become popular in Japan until Glaxo-SmithKlein got approval to market Paxil in the country.

Doppelganger Alert:
"We reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals," Obama declared in his first inaugural address.
When caught with his hand on your phone data President Obama offered this defense: "You can't have 100% security and also then have 100% privacy. ... We're going to have to make some choices as a society."
Soooo......?

Coal consumption is up worldwide but down in the U.S. where consumption and production dropped 11.9% and 7.5% respectively. Globally, 2012 was coal's greatest year since 1970. Coal provided the world 29.9% of all its energy, its highest market since 1970.

Some improvements in solar panels might improve efficiency and cost. Modifications to the surface of the solar cell in order to trap more light could nearly double solar panel efficiency. Another interesting technology involves applying the anti-reflective layer to solar panels at room temperature, rather than in high-temperature furnaces. The anti-reflective layer process accounts for a significant portion of each solar panel's cost, so the savings here would be significant.

Can a country that understands mean regression believe in exceptionalism?

Police dog bites cop: The Daily Beast reports that the woman nominated to be the CIA deputy director, Avril D. Haines, owned a small bookstore in the '90s and would occasionally host erotica readings. This has sparked accusations of sexism. Laura Miller at Salon called the article "an impressively sleazy bit of reporting." In fairness, while the account is pretty racy the poor girl was between college and law school just trying to make a buck in a difficult business. Probably the only one in the White House who has ever had a real job.

In the Amazon, a single tree can serve as home to forty different species of ants, hives can number as many as a million members, and some beetles are so strong that it requires two men to pry them off a human limb.

The Oxford English Dictionary added "tweet" to its list of defined words breaking at least one OED rule, namely that a new word needs to be current for ten years before consideration for inclusion. But it seems to be catching on. Another entry is "dad dancing," which is defined as an "awkward, unfashionable, or unrestrained style of dancing to pop music, as characteristically performed by middle-aged or older men."

Who is....Craig Livingstone?

Some believe we have become an "Amusement Culture." The origin of the word is provocative.

Amuse:

To occupy in an agreeable, pleasing, or entertaining fashion; To cause to laugh or smile by giving pleasure: I was not amused by his jokes.
Origin: Middle English, from Old French amuser, to stupefy : a-, to (from Latin ad-; see ad-) + muser, to stare stupidly ; see muse

Most of "the largest and most important group of William Faulkner material ever to appear at auction" failed to sell at auction in New York earlier this week. Notably, no one bought Faulkner's Nobel Prize medal. Faulkner reportedly stuffed it in a potted plant at the American ambassador's residence in Stockholm, where it was later found by a valet.

When does an "unending campaign" stop being a campaign and become propaganda?

 

 

DeJour Magizine is writing an expose on...The National Enquirer. According to them, the Enquirer started to use targetted personalities as a source for other stories, starting with Ted Kennedy who had a liaison promise stories on Washington if they would leave Kennedy alone. Confidential sources confirmed to DuJour that celebrities were essentially blackmailed to work with the Enquirer or else risk their improprieties appearing on the front page. Ah, the essential free press.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/07/american-gigolo.html

According to CBS News spokeswoman Sonya McNair: “A cyber security firm hired by CBS News has determined through forensic analysis that Sharyl Attkisson’s computer was accessed by an unauthorized, external, unknown party on multiple occasions late in 2012. Evidence suggests this party performed all access remotely using Attkisson’s accounts. While no malicious code was found, forensic analysis revealed an intruder had executed commands that appeared to involve search and exfiltration of data."

More people bought a Tesla Model S than bought any of the similarly priced gasoline-powered cars from the top three German luxury brands, according to data from LMC Automotive. About 4,750 buyers bought a Model S while just over 3,000 people bought Mercedes' top-level sedan.

AAAAnnnnnddddd........a chart:

If Only Our Leaders Had Better Subjects to Work With

Obama said this in Northern Ireland during this year's G7 plus 1:“If towns remain divided—if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.”

Obama seems to be opposed to parochial education because it is divisive. On first blush this appears to be just another example of Obama assuming authority and pronouncing as international messiah on questions he has not been asked. What it means to the areas where he has actual influence, like the United States and its educational system, we poor working folks can only muse and wonder. Unless....

Unless you include this:
The European Commission has ordered Slovakia to remove the halos from Cyril and Methodius on a commemorative coin. The NYT comments on this as follows: "Yet at a time when Europe needs solidarity and a unified sense of purpose to grapple with its seemingly endless economic crisis, religion has instead become yet another source of discord".

In the shadows of militant Islam, militant Israel and militant Iran the powers-that-be have recognized a source of conflict among us, something they can help. Our problems are domestic! They fear uncooperative Amish, disagreeable Catholics and the subtle power of halos. Perhaps these serve as a proxy for suicide bombers and religious nuclear powers. Perhaps they hope to influence them by attacking softer, more pliant targets. Or, perhaps, they are fearful of a serious and committed danger and symbolically attack those on the periphery for their own therapy.

But what is certain is our leaders do not like our own behavior much. Our religion is unhealthy; it is bad for "cooperation" and a "unified sense of purpose." What they would substitute, they do not say.

So beneath the choppy waters of our lives, where lunatics, inflation and disease buffet us,--deep below--large and menacing forces meet and chat and swim.

 

Making National Politics Individual

Early in Obama's second term there are some fascinating problems facing the nation, many with slow-motion potential, but at least three legacies are apparent.

First is the rise of tax funded community organizers. Much of the administrative work of government projects will be outsourced to politically and socially motivated community groups. The Affordable Care Act will require an interface between the patient and the system, apparently, and that interface will not be government employees subject to citizen oversight, they will be "community organizers" with who knows what blunt ax to grind. Ditto the new and improved immigration system. This peculiar plan, which seems to solve a problem of the illegal immigrant not the legal citizens, will require another interface, again by non-government employees, again "community organizers." The public funding of political and social organizations is an astonishing step, especially when combined with legacy number two.

Second, Obama has created a huge data base of voters, including non-traditional voters. This base has refined the tendencies and preferences of these individuals so that they can be discreetly and specifically targeted in election campaigns. There is no evidence yet that his success will transcend him and his personality but the first trial run in the last election was impressive. The Obama activists were calling voters weekly, starting after the first election! Most interesting, he has not rolled this program into the DNC as is usually done with individual campaign programs; he has kept it separate, an aloofness that should worry traditional Democrats plenty.

Third, the new breakthrough in campaigning against your own policies. This allows a politician to stand outside the government and comment, much like an editorialist, on various aspects of the day as if he were independent and objective. The government thus becomes its own entity with failings and motives. And the President must work with those limitations as he tries to improve things so he is not actually responsible for anything that happens.

These unusual developments have impressive potential. An Example: The esteemed politician facing election publicly frets over current gun policy, whether his or not. He consults his data base, finds those opposed to gun ownership and has the activists call that list weekly, noting the candidate's support for gun control. He then finds gun owners with hunting dogs and the activists call them regularly about the candidate's strong support of fishing clubs and the Humane Society.

Cab Thoughts 6/19/13

"Some aliens abducted me. / I had a shark attack. / A pirate swiped my homework / and refused to give it back."---Poet Kenn Nesbitt the next "Children's Poet Laureate," from his poem "All My Great Excuses"

The owners of two nuclear stations in California announced that they would close more than 2,000 megawatts of nuclear generation that supplied about 10% of the power of California. The plants have been crippled by massive repair problems; already $700 million have been lost in a vain effort to fix them.
Aside from the economics, this has some major implications. The nukes are being replaced by mainly new natural gas plants and some renewable energy capacity. This trade puts another 8 million tons annually of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, an amount equal to adding 1.6 million cars to the road. More, it is likely these changes will not be reversed or supplanted for 20 more years. So the nuclear plant closings will raise carbon emissions by a massive 160 million tons over the next 20 years, compared to what would have happened had the plants remained open. U.S. solar capacity exceeds now 8,000 megawatts or about enough power for 1.3 to 1.6 million homes. Still, all the solar systems today in the US produce less power than the two closed California nuclear plants at San Onofre.

It could be worse; it could be replaced with coal.

The number of non-Hispanic white Americans who died in the year ended June 2012 exceeded the number who were born during that period by about 12,400, the first "natural decrease" for this group. Even during the great flu epidemic of 1918-19 which killed more than 600,000 Americans the white population grew. The fertility rate of U.S. women is about 1.9 births and a rate of 2.1 is necessary to keep the population constant

JFK was so angry with the decision of U.S. Steel to raise steel prices after what he thought was an agreement not to that he moved Defense buying to smaller steel companies and then threatened to outsource defense steel to foreign producers.

Stark: adjective:
1. extremely simple or severe: a stark interior.
2. sheer, utter, downright, or complete: stark madness.
3. harsh, grim, or desolate, as a view, place, etc.: a stark landscape
From the Proto-Indo-European root ster- meaning "stiff" or "rigid," stark entered English around the year 1000. It shares its root with the word stare.

Between 2004 and 2007, the median change in U.S. consumers' net worth was almost 18%, with the lower income households seeing the largest percentage wealth increase. Then low income, low net worth households, were encouraged to enter highly leveraged real estate transactions. A negative shock to housing prices destroyed household balance sheets, with inevitable spillover effects on the balance sheets of the lending institutions. Between 2007 and 2010, median consumer net worth declined by 39%, with low income households facing the greatest percentage decline.

Stressed, they took risks.

Is retirement reasonable? Are we hunter-gatherers and farmers who never really retire or are we victims of a more modern age who wear down with work? Keith Ambachtsheer from the University of Toronto traced the origin of retirement to the latter half of the 19^th century, when it became apparent that railroad employees could not continue working until the day they died; the number of train accidents due to mistakes made by track operators, in their advanced years, were unacceptably high.

But the circumstances do not make the man.

George W. Bush’s approval rating has climbed to its highest level since 2005 and he is now seen more positively than President Barack Obama, with 49 percent of Americans viewing the former president favorably and 46 percent viewing him unfavorably.

A copy of Action Comics No. 1, the first comic book to feature Superman, was discovered in the insulation of a Minnesota home and sold for $175,000 in an online auction. David Gonzalez discovered the comic among newspapers stuffed into the wall of a home he was restoring in Hoffman, Minn. Before it was sold, the comic was torn in a very expensive argument between Gonzales and his wife's aunt, according to The Associated Press, which notes that a pristine copy of the comic sold for $2.16 million in 2011.

Who is...General Von Kluck?

The Hispanic vote came in at only 8.4 percent of the electorate. 10 percent more blacks voted in 2012 compared to 2008, even beating white voters, the usual turnout champions. Eligible black voters turned out at rate of 66.2 percent, compared to 64.1 percent of eligible white voters. Only 48 percent of all eligible Hispanic voters went to the polls. If Mitt Romney had won 70 percent of the Hispanic vote, he still would have lost. No Republican presidential candidate in at last 50 years has won even half of the Hispanic vote. All this makes the Republican hysteria over the Hispanic vote all the more strange.

The hydrogen bomb, first tested in 1952 at Eniwetok, yielded 10.4 megatons of explosive energy, 750 times more powerful and destructive than the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki just seven years earlier. President Truman had authorized the bomb's development because the Russians had successfully tested an atomic bomb and he wanted to keep ahead. Arms Race. Operation Castle Bravo, the subsequent and more powerful 1954 test made on the Bikini atoll in the Pacific Ocean, had been planned to yield five megatons but yielded fifteen. Interestingly many who saw the American or Russian explosion were horrified. Scientist swore they would never work on such a project again. The Soviet leader, Georgy Malenkov, rejected, for a time at least, the Marxist corollary that there had to be a war with the capitalist world. Looking at Bravo, the British concluded that eight such bombs would erase England from the earth.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/05/cardiff-man.html

A little sidelight on the pros and cons of NSA spying: Project BioShield. Arestvyr (Tecovirimat) is one of the first novel drugs to be developed, procured and now delivered to the Strategic National Stockpile under the post-9/11 legislative authority known as Project BioShield. Developed to serve as a therapeutic drug for treatment of smallpox(!), whether resulting from a terrorist attack, biowarfare or a new natural outbreak, Arestvyr is an investigational new drug not yet approved or licensed as safe and effective by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The second delivery of nearly 200,000 courses of Arestvyr has been made. BARDA now has the first 500,000 courses of the 2,000,000 contracted-for courses of Arestvyr. Smallpox!

Clinton Global Initiative America (CGI America), founded by former President Bill Clinton focuses on global health and economies, and the environment.That organization is being renamed the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation.

Average reading and writing SAT scores for high school students declined to their lowest levels while math results stalled. For the class of 2012, the average critical reading score fell 1 point to 496 from a year earlier, the lowest since data became available in 1972, according to a report released today by the New York-based College Board, which administers the test. The average score for writing dropped 1 point to 488, the lowest since writing was added to the exam in 2006. Math results were unchanged at 514. The drop in scores reflect the fact that more lower-income students with less access to high-quality education are taking the test, the College Board said in a briefing. Minority students made up 45 percent of the test pool, the most diverse ever.

AAAnnnnnddddd.....a graph:
 

Morally Correct Jobs

There is a famous story about Milton Friedman who was visiting a road crew at a Chinese road construction site when he commented on how slow the work seemed to be going. He was told that the project was not as important as the work; this was a "make work" project. If that was true, Friedman replied, why not substitute  spoons for the shovels?

The Masters of Entrails when discussing economies never seem to concentrate on work done. Government money "for jobs" seems to be an end in itself. But medical care seems to be different. It is generally accepted that health care should not consume more than 10% of the gross domestic product. But why is that?  Is the work of medicine less important to the economy than that of an entertainer? A non-profit? Law? Science and technology have great respect for failed efforts, should economists? What components in the economy can we remove with impunity? Tattoo parlors? Tanning salons? Corner groceries?

The GDP is the product of an equation (GDP= Consumption + Investment + Fed Spending + Net Exports) whose factors ignore quality and success. How did some of the components of those factors suddenly come under judgment? And if subjective value is important, perhaps we should bring back the "Snookie Question."

Damn! Dam

All my life I have thought that "dam" was a peculiar spelling of "damn" and, while "I don't give a dam" was a bit obscure, it made some vague sense to me. Probably something to do with tinkers. (This was fed by the phrase "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn," where I have never seen the spelling as "dam.") But education is as long as life. There is an old Indian-English dictionary called "Hobson-Jobson" with a collection of words absorbed into English from India. It describes itself in its sub-title: "A glossary of colloquial Anglo-Indian words and phrases, and of kindred terms etymological, historical, geographical and discursive. By Colonel Henry Yule and AC Burnell." Hobson-Jonson itself is one of these: "an Anglo-Saxon version of the wailings of the Mahommedans as they beat their breasts in the procession of the Moharram - 'Ya Hasan! Ya Hosain!'"

Stoppard once wrote an exchange using such words in his play "India Ink."

Flora: "While having tiffin on the veranda of my bungalow I spilled kedgeree on my dungarees and had to go to the gymkhana in my pyjamas looking like a coolie."

Nirad: "I was buying chutney in the bazaar when a thug who had escaped from the chokey ran amok and killed a box-wallah for his loot, creating a hullabaloo and landing himself in the mulligatawny."

Back to "dam." The dictionary defines it as: "Originally an actual copper coin. Damri is a common enough expression for the infinitesimal in coin, and one has often heard a Briton in India say: 'No, I won't give a dumree!' with but a vague notion what a damri meant."
That is the etymology of "dam." But Yule and Burnell go further.
"And this leads to the suggestion that a like expression, often heard from coarse talkers in England as well as in India, originated in the latter country, and that whatever profanity there may be in the animus, there is none in the etymology, when such an one blurts out 'I don't care a dam!' in other words, 'I don't care a brass farthing!'"

50 words from India:

• A - atoll, avatar
• B - bandana, bangle, bazaar, Blighty, bungalow
• C - cashmere, catamaran, char, cheroot, cheetah, chintz, chit, chokey, chutney, cot, cummerbund, curry
• D - dinghy, doolally, dungarees
• G - guru, gymkhana
• H - hullabaloo
• J - jodhpur, jungle, juggernaut, jute
• K - khaki, kedgeree
• L - loot
• N - nirvana
• P - pariah, pashmina, polo, pukka, pundit, purdah, pyjamas
• S - sari, shampoo, shawl, swastika
• T - teak, thug, toddy, typhoon
• V - veranda
• Y - yoga

Sources: Hobson-Jobson, Oxford English Dictionary

Sunday Sermon 6/16/13

In this week's gospel Christ is invited to dinner by a Pharisee and the dinner is crashed by a woman--a known sinner--who washes Christ's feet with her tears. In the midst of this remarkably calm scene, Christ asks who of two men forgiven a debt is the most grateful, the larger or the smaller debtor. The answer is the larger. Christ then says that forgiveness inspires love in proportion to the degree forgiven. So the sinner is much more grateful to Christ than the more successful Pharisee is.

There are some important ideas in this encounter, the most being that Christ readily and publicly forgives the woman her sins, a significant assumption and statement. But this idea of forgiveness as a product is unsettling. There is a physical quality about sin and forgiveness here that has weight and volume. One can see the idea of the spiritual ledger here. But it is not in the mind of the forgiver, it is in that of the sinner. The sinner who is more righteous, more independent of the struggles in life, who is less besmirched by sin, has a frightening disadvantage. The world has made God less clear to him and he is less sensitive to God's love and forgiveness. And this is true, king or hermit.

Again, the material world hangs heavy on a man.

Cab Thoughts 6/15/13

"Any man who thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the Government take care of him had better take a closer look at the American Indian."--Henry Ford

In 1980 Shanghai had no skyscrapers. It now has at least 4,000 - more than twice as many as New York.

Louis Reard had named a new bathing suit he designed in 1946 the "bikini" in reference to earlier U.S. atomic bomb tests on the Bikini atoll -- he chose the name in reaction to a competitive French bathing suit design called the "Atome" and presumably because of the stir he thought it would create

Obama’s reputation as a purported defender of civil liberties has taken another hit. The Guardian, the British newspaper, published a top-secret court order Wednesday night that requires Verizon to provide the NSA with access to all of its phone logs. In one of the more chilling passages in the four-page document, Verizon is not allowed “to disclose to any other person that the FBI or NSA has sought or obtained tangible things under this Order.” It is difficult to find the most interesting point but one is that the revelation was not by an American paper.

New federal rules list Shari’a-compliant guidelines that federal law enforcement officials must now comply with when conducting raids related to Islamic leaders or institutions.

A new book out on language and dialect argues that regional variants of English in the U.S. are diverging and becoming more and more different. This, with T.V. and radio, is hard to believe as broadcasting homogenizes everything.

When they do approval polling for George Washington, he does far better when the economy is doing well than when it's struggling or in a recession. So, our first President, the father of our country, is judged through contemporary lenses, on what's happening currently in people's lives.

Battle lines are being drawn over ethanol this year starting in Kansas and Iowa where oil companies are trying to discourage the use of E15, 15% ethanol blends, with a lot of minor but expensive adaptations. The ethanol lobby and the oil lobby are hammers and tongs in advertising and court activity, including a suit by the oil lobby before the Supreme Court. The ethanol lobby has one high-profile ally: NASCAR, which uses E15 fuel for "every driver, every lap, every series," said Michael Lynch, managing director of green innovation at NASCAR in Daytona Beach, Florida. Ethanol is, of course, silly, ineffective, expensive and a poor substitute for oil generally but, in politics, money and influence always trumps common sense and reality.

Who is....Affirmed and Alydar?


Edward Snowden, the CIA man who revealed the NSA spying program to the Guardian, hid in Hong Kong because "they have a spirited commitment to free speech and the right of political dissent."

A local drug prosecution is winding down. Evidence has been presented that the pharmacist and his family were selling oxycodeine, 360 pills at a time, for $2700.00. This was all cash because he wanted to avoid a record of the transaction with insurance and the IRS. He was making $50,000.00 a day.
The pharmacist owned a nursing home where he had power of attorney so he used the accounts of the patients to hide the money.

"Across the globe, in Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas our diplomats are assisting local LGBT organizations and supporting local human rights advocates working to promote equality, create dialogue, and ensure protections for LGBT individuals."--U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry.

Author Jonathan Franzen, who serves on the American Bird Conservancy board says, “The bird community’s position is, we need to get rid of the feral cats, and that means cats must die.” The Bird Community. Cats must die.

Researchers found that high school graduation rates vary by race, with 91.8 percent of Asian students, 82 percent of whites, 65.9 percent of Hispanics and 63.5 percent of blacks graduating on time.

Sales of EVs has cut into the revenue collected by states on gas purchases and used to pay for highway and bridge maintenance. As a reaction, three states have enacted rules to add fees to green cars while five others are weighing legislation. But the larger question on the issue is if electric vehicles are actually to blame for the drop in gas tax revenue or if it's the better gas mileage across the automobile industry. So more efficient is not cheaper?

droll \drohl\, adjective: 1. amusing in an odd way; whimsically humorous; waggish. Droll originally comes from the Middle Dutch word drol referring to "a fat little man." The word came to English through the French droll which meant "pleasant rascal."

The NYT censors itself: The NYT editorial on the NSA scandal originally declared that the Obama “administration has lost all credibility” as a result of the recently revealed news that the National Security Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation have been secretly collecting call data from American users of Verizon under the authority of the Patriot Act. But hours later the sentence had been modified to read the Obama “administration has now lost all credibility on this issue.” (emphasis added) There are actually web sites that monitor this type of thing.

In Japan, the term Banzai! literally means “ten thousand years” and can be used to wish someone long life and happiness. But during World War II, “Banzai!”was shouted in battle. It was the Japanese equivalent of "Long live the king!" – but to soldiers on the other side it came to mean a suicidal attack.

At least one conspiracy—headed by Najibullah Zazi and intended to maim and kill New York City subway riders—was disclosed through NSA communication monitoring and headed off. Zazi, arrested in 2009, pleaded guilty and awaits sentencing.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/02/democrats-nixon-moment-2.html

In The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies in a chapter on voter suppression Jonathan Alter writes: "After five years of investigations and prosecutions, the Bush Justice Department acknowledged in 2007 that no evidence existed of a widespread problem with vote fraud. In a nation of more than 200 million citizens of voting age, fewer than fifty people were convicted of voting illegally, almost all of whom offered convincing explanations that they had done so unintentionally."

Re: the the prying government scandal, from a congressional subcommittee transcript, Sen. Mark Kirk of Illinois asks the attorney general if he's spying on members of Congress and thereby giving the executive branch leverage over the legislative branch.Eric Holder answers: "With all due respect, senator, I don't think this is an appropriate setting for me to discuss that issue."
Kirk responds: "the correct answer would be, 'No, we stayed within our lane and I'm assuring you we did not spy on members of Congress.'"

"Game of Thrones" finishing up its third and most successful season ever -- the season finale was watched by 5.5 million viewers, 1.3 million more than last year's final.


An indicator of how things have changed: The NSA's precursor was a World War I group of naval intelligence officers called the "Black Chamber" charged with intercepting diplomatic telegrams. In 1929, then Secretary of State Henry Stimson shut down the office of code breakers, famously saying "Gentlemen don't read other gentlemen's mail."

Aaaaaaannnnnnndddddd........a graph or two:

The Numbers of Japan

Japan's population is declining, its working force declining, its retirees increasing. Debt service per worker should rise, support for retirees per worker should rise, and disposable income and demand should fall. Disinflation and deflation should result.
Here is a nice summary:

"The National Institute of Population and Social Security Research projects that Japan’s working-age population will decline over the next 17 years, to 67.7 million people by 2030 from 81.7 million in 2010. We select 2030 as the endpoint of today’s discussion because almost all the people who will be in the working-age population by 2030, 17 years from now, have been born already. Immigration and emigration are trivial. The 17-per-cent decline in the working-age population is a certainty, not a forecast. It averages out to a decline of 0.9 per cent a year. In addition, these official projections show a rise in the population aged over 64 to 36.9 million in 2030 from 29.5 million in 2010. If the labour-force participation rate stays constant, we estimate the number of people seeking work in the economy will fall to 56.5 million by 2030 from 65.5 million today and 66 million in 2010.
What happens when a nation’s population declines and the proportion of working-age people decreases? In the first, simplest, level of analysis, the production potential of the economy declines: Fewer workers can produce fewer goods. This does not mean GDP must decline; productivity gains could offset a decline in the labour force. Also, an increase in the labour-force participation rate could mute the effect of a declining working-age population. However, even if the labour force participation rate were to rise to 100 per cent by 2030 from 81 per cent today (which it cannot, because some people have to care for the old and the young, and some are disabled or lack adequate skills or education), there would be fewer workers available in 2030 than there are today.
With fewer people working, the burden of servicing the public-sector debt will be higher for each individual worker. We project that the debt-to-GDP ratio and the debt-per-worker ratio will grow unabated over the next 17 years and beyond. Also, the rise of the ratio of retired workers to 32 per cent of the population from 23 per cent means that people who are still working in 2030 will have to give up a rising share of their income to support retirees. The disposable income of the declining number of workers will fall faster than the decline of production and employment. Overall demand of workers will decrease – with their disposable income – faster than output for the next 17 years at least. Demand will also fall as new retirees spend less than in their earning years.
Based on demographic factors alone, the decline of aggregate demand between now and 2030 will exceed the decline of output, creating persistent and widening excess capacity in the economy. Prices must fall in an economy where slack is steadily increasing. In addition, advancing technology will likely increase output per worker in the future. With overall demand and output falling, productivity gains will lower labour costs and add to downward pressure on prices. Disinflation and deflation are the companions of demographic decline."
(Carl Weinberg, Globe and Mail)

Fixing America

In the wake of reports that double amputee Paralympic champion Oscar Pistorius, 26, had been charged with the murder of his girlfriend Thursday, a report filed today by the Pew Research Center stated that the world is now down to just five stories that are in any way inspirational.---The Onion

Hundreds of European soccer games have been fixed. A decade of Tour de France was dominated by cheating. All of the stars of baseball's last decade have been enhanced by steroids. The thieves of Wall Street have been revealed and ignored. The Plunderers of Washington have aligned themselves with Crony "Capitalism," have been discovered and rewarded. The OIG, the Office of the Inspector General, gave awards recently to a number of the agents who investigated the "Fast and Furious" fiasco and exposed the wrongdoing, although nothing came of it. The State Department chose not to protect and/or defend its representatives in Libya. The most powerful domestic agency in the country, the IRS, has been shown to be partisan and political as an institutional policy without any consequence. The hallowed American Press has been undermined by government agencies. A gigantic enterprise has arisen in America whose sole function is to spy on its citizens.

People might become disillusioned if this keeps up.

Cab Thoughts 6/12/13

"Human misery must somewhere have a stop; there is no wind that always blows a storm; great good fortune comes to failure in the end. All is change; all yields its place and goes; to persevere, trusting in what hopes he has, is courage in a man. The coward despairs."

– Euripides

The Syrian rebels have just been driven out of Qusair, a rebel stronghold, a center for commerce with Lebanon, a linchpin in Assad's territory between Damascus and access to Russian shipping. What altered the tide of battle was outside intervention. A hardened, well-trained, well-armed Hezbollah force — from the terrorist Shiite group that dominates Lebanon and answers to Iran — crossed into Syria and drove the rebels out of Qusair, which Syrian artillery has left a smoking ruin. This is a huge setback for Obama who has been declaring Assad all but defeated.

Wait until Obama reads about this!

The psychic Sylvia Browne admits she was "mistaken" about claiming back in 2004 that she had communicated with the ghost of Amanda Berry since it has turned out that Berry wasn't dead. It probably was someone else, some confused spirit who thought she was Berry.

Eli Whitney is the inventor of the cotton gin, a great technological advance and a symbol of American ingenuity. Despite the technology, however, the business was a failure because the machine was easy to duplicate. He was saved from bankruptcy by using his facility to make guns for the government.

The latest version of psychiatry’s bible, DSM-5, has named caffeine withdrawal as an actual mental disorder.

The third and fourth Pens-Bruins game were tremendous and may change the Pens for the future. This team was built to win this and now they won't. Some changes will be made and they likely will be big. Either team could have won with pride. But it seems there was little pride in the stands. It sounds as if the crowd was really abusive and threatening to Pittsburgh fans, enough to steal a lot of enjoyment from this great competition. It is terrible when the players rise so far above the fans.

Chinese coal demand has been so strong that the world's consumption of coal has jumped from 5.3 billion tons in 2000 to 8.1 billion tons in 2011. Again nearly all of that growth is a result of exploding Chinese coal demand.

Charles Hartman wrote about the experience of being plagiarized: "The insult was partly that the plagiarist assumed my poem was too obscure for anyone to discover his theft."

Plagiarism: The Roman poet Martial who lived in first century AD had other poets of his day circulating his poems as their own. His response was to write verses admonishing and mocking the thieves. Of one rival he wrote, “The book you’re reciting, Fidentinus, is mine; but when you recite it badly it begins to be yours.” He used the Latin word plagiarius—which until then meant kidnapping—and gave it a new twist so that it was understood as literary theft. The word didn’t appear with this meaning in English until fifteen centuries later, when Richard Montagu, the highly educated bishop of Norwich, used it.

The FBI is unhappy that there are communications technologies that it cannot intercept and wants to require that software makers and communications companies create a back door so they can listen in when they desire. The argument against it is the technology would immediately go to governments and groups who could not develop this kind of technology themselves. That is, the U.S. acts as a technology incubator for its enemies.

Who was ....Alexis St. Martin?

The House Energy and Commerce Committee for some reason has a report on the cost of medical insurance next year. The report draws on data provided by 17 major insurance companies. On average, premiums in the individual market for new customers will nearly double. For some, they could surge by more than 400%. That translates to an average yearly increase of more than $1,800.
The average consumer who already has coverage will pay 73% more.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/09/too-much-ado.html

The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation has designated June as Goat Trauma Awareness Month. Throughout the month, the CGTF will sponsor programs across the country to teach people of all ages about the dangers of goat traumas. The Childhood Goat Trauma Foundation was created in 1982 by a small group that originally came together as a an informal support group for problems that were the result of traumatic experiences at petting zoos as children. Regrettably it is only a funny web page and not a tax deductible business. You know that vigilant IRS would have been scrutinizing them.

Until recently, the German language's longest "authentic" word was the 63-letter Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz, meaning "the law for the delegation of monitoring beef labeling," according to The Telegraph. But the law was recently repealed, leaving Germans with no reason to use it. The Telegraph notes that "a 39-letter word, Rechtsschutzversicherungsgesellschaften, insurance companies providing legal protection, is considered the longest German word in everyday use by the Guinness Book of World Records."

The first recorded usage of the term "deus ex machina" is widely acknowledged to have come in Horace's Ars Poetica, in which he warns aspiring poets never to use such a device to solve plot complexities. Horace makes reference to the usage of a primitive crane by which the ancient Greeks used to lower actors playing gods onto the stage at opportune moments in order to resolve situations. The technique was first used by Euripides, the third great Greek poet.

An al Qaeda terrorist stated in a recent online posting that U.S. Ambassador to Libya Chris Stevens was killed by lethal injection after plans to kidnap him during the Sept. 11, 2012 terror attack in Benghazi went bad. I wonder if that is true and, if not, why they would say it.

A.M. Homes won the prestigious Women's Prize for Fiction for her novel May We Be Forgiven. Homes beat out front-runner Hilary Mantel, as well as other prominent writers such as Zadie Smith, Barbara Kingsolver and Maria Semple.

75% of financial service workers think some people in their organizations are paid excessively, rising to 80% in the banking sector alone. 65% of employees agree that some people in their organization are still rewarded in a way that incentivizes inappropriate behavior, with little difference between the views of senior managers and those of other employees.

"Don't fight the Fed?" There is a general belief that the monetary behavior of the Fed trumps all other aspects of the economy; monetary easing is a vaccine against contraction and decline. Here are two graphs where that was not true:

The 2001-2002 market plunge went hand-in-hand with continuous and aggressive monetary easing.

Ditto for the 2008-2009 market plunge. Persistent monetary easing did nothing to prevent a 55% collapse in the S&P 500.

Thinking, Solitude and Leadership

William Deresiewicz wrote in the American Scholar on solitude and leadership. These short notes are an effort to distill what he said:


Multitasking is not only not thinking, it impairs your ability to think. Thinking means concentrating on one thing long enough to develop an idea about it.


The great German novelist Thomas Mann said that a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. The best writers write much more slowly than everyone else, and the better they are, the slower they write. James Joyce wrote Ulysses, the greatest novel of the 20th century, at the rate of about a hundred words a day for seven years. T. S. Eliot, one of the greatest poets our country has ever produced, wrote about 150 pages of poetry over the course of his entire 25-year career. That’s half a page a month.

Solitude is an important component in thinking and creating. This is what Emerson meant when he said that “he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from traveling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.”

So solitude can mean introspection, it can mean the concentration of focused work, and it can mean sustained reading. All of these help you to know yourself better. But there’s one more thing  to include as a form of solitude, and it will seem counter-intuitive: friendship. Of course friendship is the opposite of solitude; it means being with other people. But there is one kind of friendship in particular, the deep friendship of intimate conversation.

That’s what Emerson meant when he said that “the soul environs itself with friends, that it may enter into a grander self-acquaintance or solitude.” Introspection means talking to yourself, and one of the best ways of talking to yourself is by talking to another person. One other person you can trust, one other person to whom you can unfold your soul.

Nagel and Materialism

Materialism is all the rage. The world is flooded with new takes on history and psychology interpreted through the materialistic filter. This does not come from philosophy, although it is doubtful that dialectic materialism vampire will ever die, it comes from science. It seeps in to all things academic. Art is chaos theory. Fiction, serious fiction, acts like it will never be the same. Jerry Coyne wrote, “The view that all sciences are in principle reducible to the laws of physics must be true unless you’re religious.” (He is including here the so-called soft sciences of psychology and the like.)

Certainly science is presenting us with some serious problems. Time and space are tumbled and spilled like a broken kaleidoscope. In fiction this has created a world notable for its lack of depth, its arbitrariness and its juxtaposition. This often makes for difficult reading as the reader's life is not reflected in this view. The reader may be a random victim, may have life beyond his control but he is locked into certain structures and strictures. He does experience a timeline. He will be older tomorrow. He will have responsibilities, regardless of how Kafkaesque. And despite of the goofiness of life, he wants to live. The novelist's world may be an accurate reflection of current physics, it may not accurately reflect the life of the reader.

There are two curiosities here. The first is uncertainty: It cuts both ways so there should be some option for an alternative. The second is wonder. If string theory is an accurate description of the world, how can that ever be understood? When the astronomer says that the black hole NGC1365 has the mass of 2 million suns with the energy that is given off by a billion stars burning for a billion years, who would dare develop a concept to contain that?

Materialism has not become more clarifying and some are getting uncomfortable. Heisenberg-like, some uncertainty has appeared. Thomas Nagel, in his new book Mind and Cosmos writes, “It is prima facie highly implausible that life as we know it is the result of a sequence of physical accidents together with the mechanism of natural selection.” The Guardian awarded Mind and Cosmos its prize for the Most Despised Science Book of 2012. But Nagel is no fool. Nor is he a theist.

An interesting suggestion has emerged to reconcile all the problems that materialism has revealed in our age of the uncertainty principle: Faith.