Cab Thoughts 7/31/13

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

For every one yen the currency drops in value against the dollar, Toyota estimates that its profits will increase by $340 million. Those profits will come from sales. Other countries' sales.

A scene in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris used a variation on a passage from Requiem for a Nun. In the film, Owen Wilson's character says, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party." The literal Faulkner quote is "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The Faulkner estate actually sued Allen over the use. They lost last week. The judge also added, "The court has viewed Woody Allen's movie, Midnight in Paris, read the book, Requiem for a Nun, and is thankful that the parties did not ask the court to compare The Sound and the Fury with Sharknado."

 

One wonders what circumstances would now disqualify Mr. Weiner from running for office. Is there some unknown, arcane meter of depravity that is tolerable up to some certain point when, suddenly, it tips to intolerable? Is this the downside of open mindedness?

 

30 to 50 percent of bladder cancer is caused by smoking. Development of the disease is related to length of exposure. But smoking cessation causes a 40% decline of the disease in 1 to 4 years and approaches baseline in 20 to 30 years.

There are fewer small businesses starting and more failing right now than at any time in the last 40 years.

This is from a good review of Machiavelli by John Gray in The New Statesman: "...modern law is an artefact of state power. Probably nothing is more important for the protection of freedom than the independence of the judiciary from the executive; but this independence (which can never be complete) is possible only when the state is strong and secure. Western governments blunder around the world gibbering about human rights; but there can be no rights without the rule of law and no rule of law in a fractured or failed state, which is the usual result of western sponsored regime change. In many cases geopolitical calculations may lie behind the decision to intervene; yet it is a fantasy about the nature of rights that is the public rationale, and there is every sign that our leaders take the fantasy for real. The grisly fiasco that has been staged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – a larger and more dangerous version of which seems to be unfolding in Syria – testifies to the hold on western leaders of the delusion that law can supplant politics." An artefact of state power!

Jane Austen will be the new face of the 10-pound banknote, replacing Charles Darwin, the Bank of England announced Wednesday. That follows an uproar after the bank said it would replace Elizabeth Fry — the only woman to appear on a banknote other than the queen — with Winston Churchill on the 5-pound note.

The other side of pseudonyms: James Lasdun, a writer and teacher, as a young man working at a publishing house turned down a manuscript written by "Jane Somers" — who was actually the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing writing under a pseudonym.

Recent ratings sweep show tremendous strength at the Spanish language Univision. The age breakdown showed Univision as the youngest with a median age of 37 years old, ABC's average viewer is 55, CBS 58, NBC 54, and FOX 47.

William Caxton was the first printer in England. In his early life, he was a very successful overseas merchant. In 1474, he published "History of Troy" and "The Game of Chess", both printed in Cologne and sold in England. In 1476, he moved his press to Westminster and began printing in England, starting with "The Canterbury Tales." Over 100 extant editions are attributed to him.

Evaluation of risk in gas drilling/fracking has moved from investigation to disinformation. In one particular circumstance, which was prominently featured in Gasland II, a court found activists, who were working with the EPA, had hooked up a garden hose to a gas vent and not a water line and lit it on fire in an effort to give the agency a reason to act.

Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who financed major portions of the Revolutionary War, and Henry "Light-Horse" Lee, the Revolutionary War general and father of Robert E. Lee, were both in debtors prison in their lives.

The kinetic energy of an object is directly proportional to the square of its speed. KE=1/2M x V squared. M=mass, V=velocity. So a car hitting a wall at one speed will have a certain impact, at twice the speed it will have 4x the impact, at 3x the speed 9x the impact. Speed--and kinetic energy-- kills.

According to the highly regarded Hyman Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis, stability breeds instability. The balance between stability and instability is delicate and instability occurs suddenly, like an avalanche or the proverbial back-breaking straw.

Median real household income is $2,718, or 5%, lower than the $54,218 median in June 2009 when the recession officially ended. Median incomes typically fall during recessions. But the striking fact of the Obama economy is that median real household income has fallen even during the recovery.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/09/sunday-sermon-carpe-diem.html

France spends roughly 12.5 percent of its gross domestic product on pensions, more than most almost any other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member. (Germany spends about 11.4 percent of its GDP on pensions, and Japan spends roughly 8.7 percent.) Just 39.7% of those aged 55 to 64 are working, compared with 56.7% in the UK and 57.7% in Germany.

According to State Impact PA, the gas industry is currently repairing 400 miles of roads in three counties in Pennsylvania. So far the gas industry has spent $500 Million to repair roads in the state, for either damage or the prevention of damage related to their drilling.

Who are...the Lords Temporal and Spiritual? (Hint: the Lannisters are not involved.)

A recent book analyzes China's ability to innovate. It sounds much like the heuristic/algorithmic debate: China may accumulate the funding, build the laboratories and staff them, but it might not possess a 'non-hierarchical scientific culture, fertile institutional framework and critical thinking' -- the necessary soft skills... If critical thinking and social stability are seen as opposites in a zero-sum game, China will be the loser.

spoonerism: (SPOO-nuh-riz-em) noun: The transposition of (usually) the initial sounds of words producing a humorous result, after W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), English clergyman noted for such slips. For example: "It is now kisstomary to cuss the bride." (Spooner while officiating at a wedding); "Is the bean dizzy?" (Spooner questioning the secretary of his dean)

Anders Burius, a librarian at the National Library of Sweden, stole more than 50 rare and valuable books and sold them to collectors. Two of these books, worth a combined $255,000 according to the library's lawyers, were returned Wednesday at a ceremony in New York. After the thefts were discovered, Burius confessed to the crime in 2004 and committed suicide soon after. Baltimore bookstore owner Stephan Loewentheil had bought and then sold the two volumes, but he bought them back at his own expense after finding out that they were stolen.

Sunday, July 7, solar produced 20% of Germany's electricity consumption.

IPAs: When the British were colonizing India, the beers they sent down to their troops kept spoiling during the long sea voyage. With an extra healthy dose of hops and alcohol (40-65 IBU and 5% -7.5% ABV respectively), both having great preservative value, their problems were solved, and the world had another distinctive beer style.

A
AAaaaaannnnnnndddddddd......a picture of Earth (center and bright) and its moon (between 6 &7 o'clock near Earth) from Saturn

The Ruby, A Fable

A young woman I knew years ago was suddenly orphaned by an auto accident that killed both her parents. Terrified and stricken by the loss and its unpredictability, she took all of the insurance money and, after funding her education, bought gold. "And one ruby," she said. "Why the ruby?" I asked. "To pay the boatman," she answered.
Moral: Always put enough money aside to pay for essentials should the need arrive. Expect the need will arrive.  And always have enough money hidden to escape, to pay the boatman.

The Power of Free Association

The drift towards tyranny is always with us; like gravity, there is always some man or idea spreading an attracting field. Energy is always necessary to preserve a people from being pulled into the tyrant's orbit.

Anne Applebaum, the talented columnist for the Washington Post and Slate, has a new book out called "Iron Curtain." It details Stalin's dynastic efforts in Eastern Europe, first as a Nazi partner then as an independent totalitarian contractor. It contains some interesting observations on tyranny as practiced by real experts, first Hitler, then Stalin. Hidden in it is some practical advice for free people.

The historian Stuart Finkel had the startling observation that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. When Lenin launched the New Economic Plan in the 1920s, Applebaum notes, the "systematic destruction of literary, philosophical, and spiritual societies continued unabated." Similarly, in Poland under the Nazis, Germany's war aims were not completely military."The object of the German occupation of Poland," she writes, "had been to destroy Polish civilization." After signing a pact to divide up the region between them, both Hitler and Stalin invaded Poland in September 1939.  Under Hitler, much of the country's upper class was executed or sent to concentration camps. Stalin recognized a master when he saw him. The Soviets committed Nazi-style mass murders, most infamously the Katyń Forest massacre, which saw 22,000 Polish officers and other prisoners of war executed. "The Soviet Union and Nazi Germany were, for twenty-two months, real allies," Applebaum writes. At the end of the war, there was almost literally nothing left of Warsaw.

After the war, the Soviets in Poland continued this broad cultural warfare. They attacked anti-Nazi groups(!), the Polish Boy Scouts for example. Catholic Church groups were a high priority with their close knit communities and their international connections. Some organizations were absorbed. The Polish Women's League, a group of earnest volunteers set up to feed refugees in train stations, were infiltrated by Soviet bureaucrats and turned into a mouthpiece for party dogma.

What Hitler, and Stalin later, were doing in Eastern Europe was not an attempt at simple military victory. Both were attempting to destroy a people, to obliterate the social fabric, to deconstruct the very infrastructure that people used to live and work. Why? Because tyranny can be resisted by a people who see themselves as a people, as an entity. The nucleus of a "people" is hard to control.  

Finkle's observation should not be forgotten: Free association is much more dangerous to tyranny than free enterprise. Watch leaders very closely when they try to discourage cohesion in a people.

Sunday Sermon 7/28/13

Today's is the third of the "to do" trilogy in Luke that lays out what to do to live a good life. In the first, two holy men protect their cleanliness and avoid an injured man while a Samaritan, a contaminated Jew, rescues him. In the second, Martha adheres to the letter of the hospitality law while Mary opens her heart, not her house. In the Third, today, Christ teaches how to pray--using the intimate "Abba" for "Father." Then he supports this intimacy by asking what a father would do and how he would respond to requests.

All of these ideas are worth a lot of discussion but the last idea is particularly interesting because Christ introduces a remarkably modern view of a possible explanation of the relationship of man with creation: irony. He asks if a father would respond to a child's request for bread with a stone, which can look like bread, or an egg with a scorpion, which withdrawn can look like an egg. 

Christ is asking a very cynical modern question. What if the world is dispassionate, ambiguous. What if it offers life with one hand, death with the other, growth with decline, joy with sorrow--and nothing more. Worse, what if God is ironic, even spiteful, offering stone for bread. What if the search for meaning is an illusion.

Christ is raising the question to deny it. After all, even crucifixion is dwarfed by the love of God and eternal life.

Cab Thoughts 7/27/13

"I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, that he is looking to Government for the realization of them."--Bastiat


Researchers have determined that mirrors can subtly affect human behavior. Subjects tested in a room with a mirror have been found to work harder, to be more helpful and to be less inclined to cheat, compared with control groups performing the same exercises in non-mirrored settings. Reporting in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, C. Neil Macrae, Galen V. Bodenhausen, and Alan B. Milne found that people in a room with a mirror were comparatively less likely to judge others based on social stereotypes about, for example, sex, race or religion.

 

The EIA says that coal produced electricity at 40% of the U.S. total may be the new normal. The carbon activists are displeased.

 

The IRS wannabee scandal will likely fade away as the Benghazi disaster has but information this week was significant, if unreported. The chain of command over the totally unreasonable and probably felonious behavior in the IRS was extended to the Chief Counsel, William Wilkins. He is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

It is hard to believe that Mr. Weiner's silliness will not reach a point where his wife, Huma Abedin, will not fear contamination of Hillary's campaign and will not be forced to make a decision between the two. Huma as Hillary, though, is very peculiar.

solecism \SOL-uh-siz-uhm\, noun: A nonstandard usage or grammatical construction; also, a minor blunder in speech. A breach of good manners or etiquette. Any inconsistency, mistake, or impropriety. etymology: Solecism comes from Latin soloecismus, from Greek soloikizein, "to speak incorrectly," from soloikos, "speaking incorrectly," literally, "an inhabitant of Soloi," a city in ancient Cilicia where a dialect regarded as substandard was spoken.

 

The Globe Theater plans to take Hamlet on the road to 200 countries over the next two years.

 

In 1983 the Indiana University historian Robert F. Byrnes collected essays from 35 experts on the Soviet Union -- the cream of American academia -- in a book titled "After Brezhnev." The conclusion of the essays was that any U.S. thought of winning the Cold War was a pipe dream. "The Soviet Union is going to remain a stable state, with a very stable, conservative, immobile government," Byrnes said in an interview, summing up the book. "We don’t see any collapse or weakening of the Soviet system."

Piltdown Man's skull was introduced as evidence for evolution in the Scopes Trial.
 

The historian Stuart Finkel noted that communists have always acted more forcibly to undermine free association than to undermine free enterprise. This is a very provocative idea.

 

Detroit is apparently officially bankrupt. Fifty years ago, Detroit had the highest per capita income in the United States.

 

A very interesting observation by Mary Buffett (Warren's daughter-in-law) in her book about Warren Buffett and his search for companies with an inherent "competitive advantage." He prefers companies with a low R and D budget. Why? A high R and D budget implies the company has a technology or patent that it must defend against innovation. They must divert income and resources to maintain their advantage. More, they must sell their new creations like crazy. For example, Merck. Merck spends 29% of its gross profit on R and D and 49% of its gross profit on selling, general, and administrative costs (SGA), which, when combined, eat up a total 78% of its gross profit. In the background is the threat that their drug patents will expire with replacement.
Her conclusion: "Warren's rule: Companies that have to spend heavily on R and D have an inherent flaw in their competitive advantage that will always put their long-term economics at risk, which means they are not a sure thing." And Mr. Buffett dearly loves a sure thing.

 

The immigration bill states that it is illegal to forge three or more passports. One or two is OK?

 

Who is....Edmund Perry?

Brazil, now home to 194 million people, recorded 51,198 homicides, ranked seventh among the world's most violent nations after El Salvador, the US Virgin Islands, Trinidad and Tobago, Venezuela, Colombia and Guatemala.

Bell Telephone Labs was the site of the assembly of the first crystal clock in 1927. The quartz watch was first developed  by the R and D department in one of the old dominant Swiss clock and watch companies. When management first saw the watch, they openly displayed it at a trade show in 1967 as a novelty, the Beta 1 revealed by the Centre Electronique Horloger (CEH) in Neuchâtel Switzerland. It is said that a Japanese company representative saw the value in it and their innovation stole the technology but Seiko had been working on quartz clocks since 1958. The prototype of the Astron was revealed by Seiko in Japan in 1969.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2009/07/upheaval-and-investment.html 

 

Chekhov was dying in a German spa from tuberculosis. The great Russian playwright and short story writer was a doctor and the custom among German and Russian doctors attending a colleague on his deathbed was to order champagne at the very end. Before it arrived, Chekhov sat up and said, in German, "I'm dying." When offered a glass, he drank, said "I haven't had champagne for a long time," lay down on his side and died within seconds. 

Some 4000 escorting the casket on a four-mile procession across Moscow. Part of the throng of mourners became confused by another funeral, that of an army general, and marched off to the strains of a military band.

"Anton who squirmed at anything vile and vulgar" had been transported from Germany in a refrigerated railcar marked, "For Oysters." Among those who made it to the graveyard were many who "climbed trees and laughed, broke crosses and swore as they fought for a place. They asked loudly, 'Which is the wife? And the sister? Look, they're crying...." (Maxim Gorky)

Gorky was indignant but the mixture of tragedy and farce was entirely Chekhovian.

Alan Turing was a scientist instrumental, through his code breaking, of shortening the Second World War. Turing's homosexuality resulted in a criminal prosecution in 1952, when homosexual acts were still illegal in the United Kingdom. He accepted treatment with female hormones (chemical castration) as an alternative to prison. He died in 1954 at 42 from cyanide poisoning

Wind chill: The air immediately surrounding the human body is warmed by body heat and stays around the body as a sort of “air cloak”. This insulating cushion of air actually keeps people warm. When the wind blows on you, the cushion of air is blown away, and you are exposed to the true temperature, which feels much colder. This is the "wind chill" effect. A thermometer won't notice it because it does not produce heat.


AAAAAAaaaaaannnnnndddddd......a graph:

Cut Him if He Stands

What does the anti-carbon activists' war mean?

Multinational oil companies produce just 10% of the world's oil and gas reserves. State-owned companies now control more than 75% of all crude oil production. Yet private producers, not state owners, are the anti-carbon activist's target. Nor do they target customers. Coal producers, petroleum producers and natural gas producers draw all their fire while the eager consumer, the other half of the supply and demand equation, gets a pass. It is reminiscent of the pusher and his customer; the customer is a victim of the pusher's greed and irresponsibility. The hapless user, perhaps otherwise a swell guy, is accidentally locked in a self-destructive relationship with a rapacious and greedy supplier. Somehow, like the abused wife, he cannot escape his situation. He is an innocent. The availability of the carbon pushes the equation his way. He needs it but knows it's not good for him.

What the anti-carbon activist sees as an endpoint of this war against the supplier is never fully explained. Obama says as a result of his war against coal, "electricity prices will necessarily skyrocket," as if there is a more expensive substitute waiting in the wings. But coal produces 40% of our electricity. What would that substitute be? The battery has not improved much in one hundred years and cannot pick up the slack of the inefficiencies of solar and wind. Nor will nuclear be tolerated. So what, then? Will the customer, the poor sap hooked on carbon, just suffer withdrawal? Will he just have to be brave? Cold showers and walking to work? How much of the advances allowed by carbon will we have to let slide? And what about those emerging countries who have seen our success that carbon has driven? Will they just shrug, look away and passively close their carbon plants?

This, indeed, seems to be a program long on hope but not far-sighted.

It is said by some that Thomas Newcomen in 1712 produced the most important single technological advance of the industrial age. He developed a crude, inefficient steam engine to pump away seeping ground water and allow men to work there. For what? To dig coal.

After all, as England was going to the steam age, they needed something to boil the water.

20 Feet From Stardom: A Review

"20 Feet From Stardom" is a history/documentary of famous backup singers from the 1970's and '80's, a mixture of live interviews and archival footage that has received very good reviews. It was directed by veteran documentary filmmaker Morgan Neville and was produced by Gil Friesen. I liked it, although not as much as I expected.

The backup singer has always seemed the platform of rock, the stage on which the front man stands. Part choir, part Siren, the backup has always been the gospel singer in heat. The classic performance might be Merry Clayton in The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter," as chilling and primal a sound as rock can give.

There are several famous such singers, sensual women with tremendous ranging voices, featured here. There is the prototype, Darlene Love, whose voice became the iconic sound of the '60's, not just of The Blossoms but wherever high quality was needed in any group. There is Claudia Lennear, part diva, part cat, whose singing and presence was integral to the early Stones. The best may be Lisa Fischer who has traveled with the Stones for over twenty years. Fischer's voice is simply inexplicable. In the film there is a moment where she is working through a song with Sting and other backups. Sting teases her, tries to get her to do more. In a moment she flicks some inner switch into a hair-raising acapella that makes her fellow backup, Jo Lawry, turn and drop her jaw in amazement. And there is the heir presumptive, Judith Hill, a bit more exotic and silkier than the others. But also younger now.

There is a theme that laps in and out of the music: Why do some singers stay backups despite their incredible voices? Interestingly, several performances show the remarkable strength and presence of the front man, especially Bowie's "Young American" performance. And the interviews are flattering; everyone comes off as intelligent and reflective. Sting, especially, is insightful on the whimsical nature of success.

Regrettably at some point the movie goes from tribute to analysis. Victimization appears as inherent in these women's experiences; Darlene Love is simply gratuitously ruined by Phil Spector. Disrupted dreams and ambition foul the love for music that initiated so much of their success. And, of course, despite music's obvious port in the storm, the racial problems must be relived.

But worst, as the emphasis moves forward in time, away from the performances and the talent, away from the incredible energy and quality of the period, more than the music is lost for, alas, youth is not well served in retrospect.

Cab Thoughts 7/24/13

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. -Ben Hecht, screenwriter, playwright, novelist, director, and producer (1894-1964)

Real Madrid tops Forbes' list of 50 most valuable sports teams, with Manchester United and Barcelona holding the next two spots. The New York Yankees are fourth with a value of $2.3 billion and the Dallas Cowboys are fifth at $2.1 billion.

What is.....Zond 8?

Geothermal power production started in the Salton Sea field in California in 1982 and includes one of the largest and hottest geothermal wells in the world. Plants extract super-heated water from thousands of feet beneath the earth’s surface and use it to produce steam that drives turbines to generate electricity. The remaining brine is then injected back into the ground. The geothermal sites have long been known to be associated with earthquakes. In a paper authored by Emily Brodsky it was found that the earthquake rate mirrored the net extraction rate – the volume of water withdrawn minus the amount injected back into the ground.
“The net extraction…. at the Salton Sea is about half a billion gallons per month,” Brodsky said. “That results in roughly one detectable earthquake per 11 days. If you increase it, that increases the number of earthquakes."

Green, but worrisome. But green.

Iceland heats 87 percent of its homes using geothermal energy. That would be where to go if the Sun stopped glowing.

In the First World War, the Unites States suffered 53,404 deaths in battle, 63,114 in what was called "other." In the Second World War the breakdown was combat deaths, 291,557, "other," 113,842.

It has been published in several places that the Federal government intervened in the Zimmerman investigation and actually paid people to agitate for the State of Florida to bring charges. This, with the malicious doctoring of the 911 call by NBC to cast the call in a racial light, should give every citizen pause. The country is being manipulated by people who do not wish it well. One wonders which is worse, the manipulative political elite or the rapacious financial ones.

From Deen to Zimmerman the country is beginning to show inquisition-like behavior where one's inner thoughts are discoverable and, if demonstrated, criminal. In France, the land of The Terror and the Celebration of the Supreme Being, the controversial French novelist Michel Houellebecq was put on trial for saying that Islam is "the stupidest religion." Astonishingly he was found not guilty. There is no evidence that he was made to wear a scarlet "A", or any other letter, before or after the trial.

Jacobin \JAK-uh-bin\: noun: an extreme radical, especially in politics; (in the French Revolution) a member of a radical society or club of revolutionaries that promoted the Reign of Terror and other extreme measures, active chiefly from 1789 to 1794: so called from the Dominican convent in Paris, where they originally met; a Dominican friar. etymology: The Jacobins are an order of Dominican friars that have practiced in Paris since the 1300s. During the French Revolution, Parisian radicals quartered themselves in the Jacobin convent of Saint Jacques in 1789, and now Jacobin can refer to revolutionaries or extremists of any kind.


The Russians waited across the Vistula during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, while the Germans reduced the city to rubble. The Polish Home Army, the main Polish resistance, with 300,000 men under arms, offered to subordinate itself to the Soviet high command in the fight against the Nazis, but the Russians tricked, disarmed, and arrested its officers and—in many cases—sent them to the gulag. Russia was not just fighting Nazis, Russia was conquering Eastern Europe, just as the Nazis had tried.

Dog Days are typically July and August, the hot and humid days of the year in the Northern Hemisphere. Its origin as a phrase comes from the observation of Sirius, the "Dog Star" in the Canus Major (the brightest star in the constellation but also the northern sky.) The Dog Days originally were the days when Sirius rose just before or at the same time as sunrise (heliacal rising: when it first becomes visible above the eastern horizon for a brief moment just before sunrise. This is no longer true because of the precession of the equinoxes, the "wobble" of the earth on its axis.) The Romans sacrificed a brown dog at the beginning of the Dog Days to appease the rage of Sirius, believing that the star was the cause of the hot, sultry weather.

Waterspouts are tornadoes over water and winds can be up to 120 miles per hour. They are commonest off the coast of Florida and are theorized by some to be the cause of mysterious disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle.

Half of all fresh water on the planet is used for livestock. It takes 1,500 gallons of water to produce one gallon of milk, and the water necessary for one pound of steak is double that. It takes fourteen pounds of feed to produce one pound of beef. The West eats about 200 pounds of meat per person per year. United Nations forecasts that the world's population will surpass nine billion by the year 2050. With increasing modernization and population growth one could conservatively imagine that by 2050 at least five billion people will expect to eat their 200 pounds of meat per year as well. In order to feed this many people this much meat, the world would need to produce one trillion pounds of beef and pork annually, and there is not enough land or nutrients on earth to support this kind of production. Enter insect ranches. Thailand is the current world leader in insect farming, with about 15,000 farms raising locusts, grasshoppers, and mantises for human consumption. Insects also feature in the diets of rural Laos, Vietnam, Colombia, Brazil, and Mexico. It will be grand when this food and resource allocation crisis becomes popular and pious politicians begin the campaign, then the persuasion, then the laws to set this right.

Golden Oldie:

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

A new study has found that dementia rates among people 65 and older in England and Wales have dropped by 25 percent over the past two decades. Astonishingly, it was predicted by many scientists that dementia rates would fall and mental acuity improve as the population grew healthier and better educated.

The Earth’s clockwise rotation causes objects traveling in the Northern hemisphere to be deflected in a gentle clockwise direction in what is known as the Coriolis Force. As the Earth’s surface moves at a different rate relative to the atmosphere, a discrepancy between the rotation of the Earth’s and the movement of the atmosphere causes an object heading towards the north to pick up the energy of the Earth’s rotation, and begin to curve to the east. The opposite occurs in the southern hemisphere. As a result, navigation systems must compensate for the Coriolis Force to avoid deviation to the right or left of the target.

Jenny McCarthy is officially co-hosting the "The View," Barbara Walters and ABC announced Monday. The comedian/actress/host/Playboy model and best-selling author officially starts on Monday, Sept. 9, the beginning of the show's new season. Elisabeth Hasselback left last week and Walters plans to retire this fall. Her hiring raises a question regarding the connection between celebrity and profoundly idiotic propaganda. McCarthy's son was diagnosed with autism in 2005. She has claimed that it was caused by vaccines, that he has since been cured and eagerly pronounces her anti-vaccine position on any occasion. Besides anecdotal experience, her evidence is a study by former intestinal specialist Andrew Wakefield that the British Medical Journal has debunked as "an elaborate fraud," a description that, under the circumstances of the evil involved, was kind. Whether McCarthy will promote her anti-science on the show is unknown but one might wonder, in this large world, if someone else with as good a smile and figure but without the stunningly dangerous stupidity might not be available.

AAAAAaaaaannnnnddddd.....a picture of a farmer walking to his crops in China. In the middle is an empty amusement park piece, built and abandoned in a previous building frenzy:

Reinhart, Rogoff and Repudiation by Association

Reinhart and Rogoff recently published a paper that was ignored until it was refuted. Then everyone lost their minds.

The conclusion of the paper was that high levels of debt, particularly 90% of GDP, resulted in slower GDP growth. But a University of Massachusetts paper later argued that some of their formats were in error. Those errors did not reverse their conclusions--the conclusions stood--but errors in the paper did exist.

It was if a nun had been raped; part destroyed, all destroyed. People opposed to the results of the paper attacked the paper, the researchers, their integrity and their credentials. The researchers  received   hate-mail, some blaming them for layoffs of public employees, cutbacks in government services and tax increases.

Economics is a soft science at its very best. But we are not living in times of understanding and acceptance of limits.

Everything is war to the armies of the night.

The Enemy of the Good

"We have two paths: either capitalism dies, or Mother Earth dies," said Evo Morales. This is a modern man from a modern country. He is the President of Bolivia and is speaking for the new, modern victim that has to be saved from exploitation.

We have seen a lot of exploitation over the last years and have spent a lot of time, effort and lives in pursuit of the exploiters. It seems the fault, dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, but in ourselves--or, more specifically, in you.

We now know ourselves enough; it is time to put that learning to use and get ourselves some serious villains. Ever since the Enlightenment we have been searching for the prime mover, the linchpin of our discontent. And, aside from a short fling with psychiatry, it ain't us. It is you, or someone very much like you. There have been many likely suspects who have made our hearts beat fast with the anticipation of just revenge. The proletariat learned it was the middle class, the exploiting, rapacious capitalist.  Others opined that some people were just not good enough, not up to the demands of a energetic and joyful nation. Culling those less fit would free the rest for their unexploited destiny. Then there were those colonialists with their oppression of distant people; there seemed to be a lot of exploited people involved and certainly that was a likely source of our problems. Recent statements by President Obama and the EU point some accusing fingers at religion, particularly Christianity, as a spanner in our workings toward happiness and cooperation.

But it may be that these transient oppressors were too limited in scope. There are bigger fish to fry. Killing all the enemies of the proletariat did not seem to work and what emerged simply failed. Killing those not fit for the new state did not work because they fought back. The colonized people have peacefully invaded the colonizers and that is not going well. Of course the religious nut has been tough to crack. So...where to go?

Current coffee house thought points to Mother Earth. Mother Earth is being killed by everyone and she too is fighting back. Bad weather, storms, tornadoes--what could be clearer?  We are destroying ourselves with the illusion of accomplishment. The solution is to walk technology back to a level that can sustain us yet not hurt the planet. Some will not want to give what they have up. Some will see their losses as defeats. But such a decline in many nations will be rewarding for others.

The homogeneity that we have tried to create in revolution or extermination we can create in shared poverty. "Better" used to be the enemy of "good". Now anything that is an improvement is the enemy. 

Pol Pot is gone but the Year Zero is back.

Sunday Sermon 7/21/13

Today's gospel is Mary and Martha. Christ always tries to contrast the physical and the spiritual, the mundane, daily world from the world of God. Often these examples are startling--leaving one's home, selling all you own, leaving the plow. But those examples have a certain harsh context: Christ is contrasting the world of the New Testament with the older, contracted world of Israel, tribe and family. He wants to free the people's minds from the black hole of their land and history. With Mary and Martha, He places it in a softer light, a domestic setting with two devoted friends.

Martha and Mary are entertaining Christ but Mary is spending her time sitting and listening to Christ. When Martha, who has been busy with the entertaining work, complains to Christ, He says: "Martha, Martha, thou art careful, and art troubled by many things: But one thing is necessary. Mary hath chosen the best part.."

His comfort is a function of Martha's efforts. He knows and appreciates that. She is "careful and...troubled by many things." That is how we all are; that is our world. He knows that, too. He sympathizes with her.

But He will not allow her to be distracted by the world from the universal that is the world.

Cab Thoughts 7/20/13

"I'm not sure I'm ready to have fun yet."--child on sideline of tennis camp

According to a recent Rasmussen poll, 31 percent of blacks think that most blacks are racists, while 24 percent of blacks think that most whites are racist. Among whites, according to the same Rasmussen poll, 38 percent consider most blacks racist and 10 percent consider most whites racist. Just 29 percent of Americans think race relations are getting better, while 32 percent think race relations are getting worse. Polls are limited but a lot of national effort has gone into the Black community since the '60's and, if this poll is in any way representative, one wonders when exasperation will set in.

Nate Silver, the New York Times statistician who became famous for his 2008 and 2012 election predictions, has been hired by ESPN. Prior to the 2008 campaign, Silver was a baseball statistician

The Cassini–Huygens, a joint NASA-European robotic spacecraft, was launched on October 15, 1997 on a Titan IVB/Centaur and entered into orbit around Saturn on July 1, 2004. On December 25, 2004, Huygens separated from the orbiter and landed on Saturn, the first deep space landing. The Cassini orbiter, currently orbiting Saturn, will be in position to shoot a good photo of Earth this week. Because of the Earth's proximity to the Sun and its great distance, it is difficult to get a good picture of the Earth from deep in our solar system.

Reservation change charges and baggage fees accounted for greater than 6 billion dollars in airline revenue last year. Small airlines are experimenting with overhead bin charges.

When President Obama proclaimed that those who commit sexual assault in the military should be “prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court-martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged,” it  muddied legal cases across the country. Judges and defense lawyers have said that Mr. Obama’s words as commander in chief amounted to “unlawful command influence,” tainting trials as a result. “Unlawful command influence” refers to actions of commanders that could be interpreted by jurors as an attempt to influence a court-martial, in effect ordering a specific outcome. He is a lawyer, right? Or maybe just a visitor from the Land of the Righteous.

The IRS teapot scandal will likely fade away as the Benghazi disaster has but information this week was significant, if unreported. The chain of command over the totally unreasonable and probably felonious behavior in the IRS was extended to the Chief Counsel, William Wilkins. He is one of only two Obama political appointees in the IRS.

Terminator: The DARPA Virtual Robotic Challenge is a program run by DARPA to encourage the development of humanoid robots with some real-life--read military--applications. The current robot, Atlas, was developed by Boston Dynamics. It is a hydraulically powered robot in the form of an adult human, weighs 330 lbs, is 6'2", 30" width at the shoulder and has 28 hydraulic joints. It is controlled by an operator. It can adapt to irregular ground and keeps its balance with a lateral blow.

Australian PM Kevin Rudd will announce plans to scrap the carbon tax within days as he clears the decks for an election. The decision could slash electricity bills by up to $150 a year for families spending $2000 annually, assuming a floating price for carbon emissions as low as $6 per tonne.

A recent study by Purdue University has found that, contrary to popular thinking, drinking diet soda doesn’t aid in weight loss, and that its consumption can actually increase the likelihood of obesity and development of precursors to diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and other ailments.

Gossamer: n. 1. Something light, thin, or insubstantial. 2. A soft sheer gauzy fabric, used for veils, etc. a. Thin, light, or delicate. A remarkable etymology:

From goose + summer. The term is believed to have originated as a name for late autumn when geese are in season and then transferred to cobwebs seen around that time of the year. Earliest documented use: 1325

The Dogon, a tribe from Bandiagara in West Africa, have a history of fierce independence and separation. They live in towns of caves away from the Niger River to avoid the slavers and the Islamic religious press gangs. They have an inexplicably sophisticated cosmology, one that would excite von Danikin. Without the benefit of modern scientific instruments they have detailed and precise observations of the heavens, particularly Sirius, which is 8.6 light-years away and the brightest star in the sky. Somehow they have learned of the existence of a dwarf companion star to Sirius, which they named Po Tolo. Long ago they had accurately described its orbit. Telescopes described this star a century ago.

When scientists first decoded the human genome in 2003, it took them a decade of intensive work to sequence the three billion base pairs. Now, a decade later, a single facility can sequence that much DNA in a day.

Arabic script. There are a number of types of Arabic script from different times and places. These are a few of the more popular: "Kufic" script is one of the staples in architectural Arabic writing and one of the oldest. It is primarily found in stone-carved structures, and defined by its sharp angular qualities--perhaps for ease in working with stone--which differ slightly from the more popularly known modern Arabic scripts. “Naskh” script comes from the Arabic root “nasakha,” which means “to copy.” This way of writing uses thin lines and round letters, making it easier to read. It is the most widely used script among the Arabic, Persian, Pashto, and Sindhi languages. The Kufic script preceded Naskh, as this one was easier to write out. It is also the computer type on an Arabic keyboard. "Thuluth" is an older Arabic script primarily from medieval times. Like many of the older scripts, it was used on mosques and in Koran texts because of its longhand elegant appearance. This writing uses markings above and below each of the letters. These are called Harakat, and they demarcate vowel sounds.

Russia's Federal Guard Service — the rough equivalent of the Secret Service in the U.S. — is returning to typewriters in an attempt to avoid damaging leaks from computer hardware, according to a British newspaper.

The U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is said to intercept and store 1.7 billion emails, phone calls, and other communications every day, according to a Washington Post investigation in 2010. 2010. Three years before Snowden.

The FEC, The Federal Election Commission, was created in the wake of Watergate, in part to remove primary power over political actors from the Justice Department. It is balanced, with equal representation so agreement on activity is mandatory. Lois Lerner—before serving as the center of today's IRS scandal—was the senior enforcement officer at the FEC. A Christian Coalition lawyer has testified that during a FEC investigation in the 1990s—in addition to generating endless subpoenas, depositions and document requests, Ms. Lerner's staff demanded to know what Coalition members discussed at their prayer meetings and what churches they belonged to. This investigation was agreed upon by both parties on the commission.

Who is....George Pollard, Jr.?

An article in Forbes notes some surprising statistics about health care.
About one in five employees who are offered employer-provided health insurance turns it down; among workers under 30 years of age, the refusal rate is almost one in three. Since employees pay about 27% of the cost of their health insurance, on the average, millions of workers are passing up the opportunity to buy health insurance for 27 cents on the dollar.
About one in every four individuals who are eligible for Medicaid in this country has not bothered to enroll. This insurance is free.
Forbes' explanation? 1. We have made it increasingly easy in this country for the uninsured to obtain health care after they get sick. 2. We have also made it increasingly easy for people to get health insurance after they get sick.
This is particularly relevant when assessing the Affordable Care Act which was created on the assumption that many people were excluded from health care because of cost and whose success depends on low risk people signing up to support it.

Open data sources: 2009 President Obama initiated the creation of a website called data.gov, a repository of openly accessible information from the federal government. The site mushroomed from 47 datasets in 2009 to nearly 450,000 across 172 agencies by its third anniversary in July 2012.

Dominican shortstop Adrian Valerio, 16, signed with the Pirates for a $400,000 bonus, the largest bonus the Pirates have paid this year. Latin American scouting director Rene Gayo says, “He's the first guy I've ever signed more for his defensive ability than his bat. He's one of the best I've ever seen. He reminds me of Ozzie Smith — he has uncanny timing and can slow the game down. You don't see shortstops like that anymore.” Strangely, he is said to be not terribly fast.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/08/three-cups-of-tea-party.html

Thomas Sowell raises something interesting in a recent column. He says that ethnic progress to prosperity in a culture is rarely a function of ethnic leadership. He asks, how many can name Asian-American ethnic leaders or Jewish ethnic leaders? Ethnic leaders, he says, have personal motives to continue their position of leadership and might promote polarization that is counterproductive for minorities and disastrous for the country. So the question might be, does leadership engender growth within the group or only antagonism against a perceived opponent? And if that opponent is only symbolic--or, at least, not actively suppressing--does that antagonism engender nothing more than wheel-spinning stagnation?

Bert Trautmann, a former German World War II prisoner of war who became Manchester City's goalkeeper and helped the team win the FA Cup despite a broken neck for the last 17 minutes of the 1956 final, has died, the German soccer federation said. He was 89.

AAAAnnnnnndddddd...........a link to the Atlas Robot:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=zkBnFPBV3f0

Reward Limits

Behavioral scientists divide tasks--job or school--into two categories. An algorithmic task has a set of established behaviors for success. There is a sequence, or algorithm, for it. A heuristic task has no algorithm, no prescribed pattern of behavior. Often described as "trial and error," the heuristic task must be worked through, experimented with, and solved. Algorithmic work follows successful pathways, heuristic work requires innovation. Something new.

 

This academic sounding separation is becoming more important and practical. Most jobs in the United States up until the last decades have been algorithmic. Production lines, clerking, warehousing--most jobs had predictable assignments and definable paths. But the consulting firm McKinsey & Co. estimates that in the United States, only 30 percent of job growth now comes from algorithmic work, while 70 percent comes from heuristic work. It may be that the nature of modern work has changed but an easier explanation is that  routine work can be out sourced or automated while artistic, empathic, non-routine work generally cannot.

 

Which brings us to Sam Glucksberg. His work--from the 1960's--is summarized in Daniel Pink's book "Drive: Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us." Glucksberg, a psychologist now at Princeton University, took two groups and asked them to solve a puzzle. The first group was told they were being timed to establish a norm for how long the puzzle solving should take. The second group was offered incentives. The fastest 25% would get five dollars, the fastest puzzle solver would get twenty.

 

The the incentivized group took nearly three and a half minutes longer than the control group to solve the puzzle. Longer.

 

There are a lot of explanations for this but one possibility is significant: The creative forces necessary to solve the puzzle were blunted and narrowed by the demand of time created by the incentive. Rewards are helpful when the path is straight but limiting when creativity is demanded. Focus eliminates breadth of thinking, expansiveness.

 

Now, just for fun, how would you classify the American education process, algorithmic or heuristic?

Cab Thoughts 7/18/13

"What experience and history teach is this--that people and governments never have learned anything from history, or acted on principles deduced from it." - Georg Hegel


Robert Galbraith's best-selling novel, The Cuckoo's Calling, is getting great reviews for a first novel. It has been described as "a brilliant debut mystery in a classic vein." Publisher, Little, Brown and Company, provided a short biography of the author when the book was released back in April. "After several years with the Royal Military Police, Robert Galbraith was attached to the SIB (Special Investigative Branch), the plain-clothes branch of the RMP. He left the military in 2003 and has been working since then in the civilian security industry. The idea for Cormoran Strike grew directly out of his own experiences and those of his military friends who returned to the civilian world. 'Robert Galbraith' is a pseudonym."
But more a "pseudonym" than people expected.
It turns out that Robert Galbraith is the nom de plume of none other than J.K. Rowling, the famous creator of the phenomenally successful Harry Potter books.

"We have been informed that the FBI may be starting to question some of the community members about the two suspects," the email read. "Insha'Allah we want to help as much as we can, but of course not put ourselves at risk either." It continued, telling its members to get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the mosque "for other resources" if approached by law enforcement. This is an email sent out by the Islamic Society of Boston (ISB) whose mosque the Tsarnaev brothers had attended. The Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) distributed a poster which read: "Build a wall of resistance. Don't talk to the FBI." The major American Islamic organisation has consistently taken a hostile attitude towards US law enforcement, partly perhaps due to its inclusion as an unindicted co-conspirator in a major Hamas terror fundraising case a few years ago. ISB's hostility is unexplained.

A group called Judicial Watch has released information on a large and growing division within DOJ called the Community Relations Service (CRS). It describes itself as "the only Federal agency dedicated to assist State and local units of government, private and public organizations, and community groups with preventing and resolving racial and ethnic tensions, incidents, and civil disorders, and in restoring racial stability and harmony" by employing conciliators. Though CRS purports to spot and quell racial tensions nationwide before they arise, the documents obtained by Judicial Watch claim to show the group actively worked to foment unrest throughout Florida following the Martin shooting. Judicial Watch has been a conservative group acting through the courts for the last years and are opinionated, dogged and sometimes hysterical. One can only hope this is one of those times. But in this fragile world, people should not be allowed to publish such dangerous things if untrue.

Question: There are 13 ways to draw four of a kind and 40 possible straight flushes.
Why then does a straight flush beat four of a kind?
Answer below.

About one in every four individuals who are eligible for Medicaid in this country has not bothered to enroll. (It's free.)

In The Faraway Nearby, a memoir written while her mother was failing with dementia, author Rebecca Solnit describes an arctic sled made of frozen meat and bones. It falls to pieces during a sudden heat wave and the dogs devour its newly thawed parts. It is a grim metaphor, says Leslie Jamison in the New Republic, "of how suddenly a whole can dissolve into its parts, how our hungers compel us to destroy what we need, and how our most precious objects fall apart for reasons we can’t predict or forestall." Strangely. it raises the question of the stability of metaphor itself.

The Mafia was a disjointed organization for most if its existence. Migration of Italians to South America in the mid-1800's resulted in a drift north towards the port of New Orleans and there the Mafia took root first in America. Mussolini was successful in suppressing the Sicilian Mafia but, when he was killed, the Mafia became elevated in the eyes of the occupying forces because they were Mussolini's enemies and thus were given power and position by the military.

"The gaokao [college entrance exam] in China is everything. There’s a lot of politics around the college entrance exams, who gets to take what exam. The exam is not the same nationwide. It’s much more difficult in the provinces than in Shanghai. And one of the sources of great discontent in China is that migrant kids have to take the gaokao in their home town. So if they’re growing up in Shanghai, they’re not going to the same schools in any case, but they’re also not being schooled for the gaokao in their home town. And the result is, basically, that the parents are taking incredible risks by staying in the city and having their kids educated in “the wrong way.” And, of course, that’s meant to discourage them from staying in the city. It’s just one more way they make it very unpleasant for these migrant workers."--Gish Jen

GOP Colorado Senate candidate Jaxine Bubis was recently revealed to be Jaxine Daniels, author of steamy erotic novels.

Shrapnel: noun: Fragments of an exploded bomb, shell, mine, etc. etymology: After Henry Shrapnel (1761-1842), English army officer. He invented an artillery shell containing metal balls, which exploded in the air near the target. Earliest documented use: 1806.

Who are....the Sentineli?

The Amazon river system is home to more than three thousand species of freshwater fish -- more than any other river system on earth. The entire Missouri and Mississippi river system that drains much of North America has only about 375 fish species.

An insider reports that Hillary has been offered several chancellorships. He says none of the old Clinton advisers has been approached regarding a presidential run. He thinks she will not run in 2016 (but he also thought she would turn down State.)

Fundamental attribution error is a notion that observers tend to attribute behavior to innate tendencies but we tend to include situations when viewing ourselves. Edward Jones and Victor Harris (1967) asked people to assess a person’s pro- or anti-Castro feelings given an essay a person had written. Even when the people were told the person had been directed to write pro- or anti- arguments, the people still assumed the author believed what they were writing. This is frequently translated by observers as something inherent--rather than situational--to the more individualistic Western culture. Is that a fundamental attribution error?

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/08/j-edgars-revenge-and-our-puritan-roots.html

T.J. Clark on Picasso and Cubism in a historical context: Cubism was essentially "retrogressive". Bohemians like the young Picasso lived "instinctively within the limits of bourgeois society". Holed up in gloomy garrets, with wallpaper peeling and plasterwork crumbling, "they felt this society was coming to an end" and so they looked back on it, ironically, painting artifacts and personal objects — that is possessions, property. "Cubism was Bohemia's last hurrah", the last critique of the bourgeois world — that was its essential truth to tell. (Jacob Willer)

An unusually informed and informative man contrasted Egypt's current turmoil to Iran's revolution. His opinion was that the Iranian revolt against the Shah was motivated by very Western ideals and was aimed at creating a democratic system. But the overthrow of the Shah also undermined the military and, without them, the revolution was taken over by Islamists armed to the teeth. His suggestion was to encourage the democratic movement in Egypt but support the military. Pretty cynical.

Answer: The four-of-a-kind hand contains a fifth card, which can take any of 48 values. Hence there are 624 poker hands that contain four of a kind, and only 40 straight flushes.

AAAAAaaaaaannnnnddddddd......a chart:

The Filter of Memory and Motive

Suspicion and conspiracy have become a way of life. Today is the anniversary of the crash of TWA Flight 800 which, July 17, 1996, blew up over the Atlantic. Countless theories have emerged about the event and a movie was produced recently describing a popular notion that the plane was shot down by a missile and evidence actively suppressed by the government. Kennedy was killed by the CIA, the Mafia, the Cubans, by Lyndon Johnson. Black helicopters are everywhere. How could this mindset of disbelief and suspicion emerge and become mainstream? How could we have become so uncertain?

An atmosphere of mendacity. Overt mendacity by people we should trust leads to an atmosphere of distrust.

 

MSNBC is here remembering George Wallace and his symbolic stand in the doorway of the University of Alabama to prevent two young black students from attending, a great moment in the history of state's rights, constitutional denial and bigotry.

Denial and bigotry are apparently still alive. Ditto stupidity. Wallace was not a Republican. Either MSNBC is too incompetent to know that or.....

Of course the recent revelation that NBC doctored the Martin-Zimmerman 911 call for a racial effect might make one suspicious that NBC has a bigger motive, a motive perhaps obscure to us working slugs.

Do not forget, Goebbels might have been cynical about the specifics but he was dead sold on the big picture.

Sometimes sincere and greater motives must rise above Truth.

Change-up

Work fast. Throw strikes. Change speeds. This is the classic advice to major league pitchers as they try to influence the batter's accuracy in hitting his pitch. Of all these components, high speed and deceptive slower speed are the pitcher's strongest weapons. Most pitchers cannot consistently overpower a major league batter. But any pitcher who can change speeds well will confound any batter.

The change-up is a pitch that looks like a fastball coming out of the pitcher's hand but comes to the batter slower. Some change-ups are dramatically slower but most believe that too much of a difference allows the batter to adjust. Seeing both pitches tracked over time is remarkable as the separation occurs after about 30 feet in the 66 foot approach. The slower pitch drops a bit as well and some pitchers can make it fade to the left or right.

The essence of the pitch is that it is thrown with less of a strong grip. The fastball is gripped with the strong index and middle finger and comes out of the hand with the help of those fingers. But the change-up is thrown with the index and ring finger. The little finger is used sometimes too. The "circle change" is only an elaboration; the forefinger, usually off the ball, touches the thumb making a circle--like an "ok" sign.

Where the pitch is thrown is crucial. The batter moves the bat through the strike zone extremely fast with the head, the far end, moving the fastest. His hands on the handle, while driving the bat speed, are slowest. Consequently, if he is fooled and swings expecting a fast pitch, the head of the bat is committed first and goes through the zone first. If the pitch is outside, the head will miss. But if the pitch is inside, the slower handle of the bat--vulnerable to the fastball--might be slow enough it make contact with the slower pitch.

Size Matters

 

 

An aspect of the Cold War between the Russians and the Americans never discussed is the Americans' clear lack of faith in their assessments, their uncertainty over their analysis of communism. Marxism was more than viciously dictatorial and adolescently optimistic, it was self-destructively inefficient. The West believed their competitive system would consistently out produce the Russians. But they clearly did not believe that enough to allow the Russian system to complete its suicidal course unaided. The Americans opposed them at every turn, created conflict whenever it could and acted as if the Russians were a viable economic threat as well as a military one. They acted as if, allowed to grow, the Marxists would turn everyone's head and heart. More, they could win.

But the truth is that it could not win. Ever. It is inherently flawed. Even if people were magically changed to adapt to it, the economics just do not work. Even the massive and brutal Soviet central power could not keep the declining system from its demise for more than three generations.

New economic experiments will rise and their success will be measured as time goes by. Central planning of economies is the current fad but no one knows if they will be successful. (The current belief is that their secret meetings are run by smarter guys than ours are.) Indeed, the students of Russia completely missed the signs of the Soviet wreck until it was right in front of them so who knows what misery awaits the unsuspecting populous laboring under some New Great Idea. But there is a question that sits quietly at the current managed economy party: Size.

 

The trend towards smaller, manageable units of work and production is everywhere from business to the Marine Corp. Everyone is being asked to become smaller, more efficient, more adaptive. The large, unwieldy systems are being replaced internally and lean, reactive systems are emerging. These changes are not the result of theory but rather experience. Like biological evolution, success matters.

The only place where downsizing is not occurring is government. Top down central planning has one outstanding characteristic: Those in power, those "in the know," take power because they will not trust the economy to others. And they will not delegate authority. Instead they create gigantic templates for the working stiff to live by. The size of these programs flies in the face of all modern experience. Those who see value in the individual and his enterprise now act as if the size of their ideological opponents will carry the day when, if it does, it will be the only contemporary system to do so. If general contemporary observation is correct, the managed systems will fall by their own weight. Gravity matters.

The Affordable Care Act proposes to take over 16% of the United States' economy with 4.46% of the world's population (Germany, 1.1%, France and England, 0.9% each) and run it with full-time government officials, many whom have never worked in the private sector. The decision by the government to delay implementation of the employer's mandate section of the Affordable Care Act might mean a lot.

Sunday Sermon 7/14/13

Today's gospel is the Good Samaritan. A priest and a Levite pass by the damaged man and an outcast stops and saves him. Christ is delivering this story with, certainly, a wry smile. Established religion and infrastructure ignore the needy man; only the outsider helps. And he does not stay.

The ever-practical Margaret Thacher put an interesting spin on this religious proposition. She said:
"No one would remember the Good Samaritan if he'd only had good intentions; he had money as well." This is an astonishingly apt secular misreading of the parable. Results, indeed, do not matter. The end justifies nothing. Salve is applied, coins exchanged but the physical is nothing more than the three dimensions where the spiritual, like Christ and the Good Samaritan, are passing through.

Cab Thoughts 7/13/13

"Remember, it's monumentally irrelevant who's morally guilty here."--- Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz on the George Zimmerman trial

Heathrow Airport closed both its runways to incoming and outgoing flights yesterday after a fire broke out on an Ethiopian Airlines Dreamliner on the tarmac.

The largest private employer in America is Walmart. The second is Kelly Services, a temp agency.

It is a strange world when one can not tell the difference between motivated disinterest and ineptness. The "liar loans" concept, the low- or no-documentation mortgages that took borrowers at their word without checking pay stubs or W-2s, has now been extended to ObamaCare. The HHS now says it will no longer attempt to verify individual eligibility for insurance subsidies and instead will rely on self-reporting, with minimal efforts to verify if the information consumers provide is accurate. People are supposed to receive subsidies only if their employer does not provide federally approved health benefits. Since HHS now won't require business to report those benefits or enforce the standards until 2015, it says it can't ask ObamaCare's "exchange" bureaucracies to certify who qualifies either.

A recent study found that college seniors who held unpaid internships received essentially the same number of job offers as those who did not, while both groups earned far fewer offers than students who held paid internships.

A good boxing contender, Lenny Mancini, was wounded in World War II before he ever got a chance at a championship. His son, Ray Mancini, inherited his father's ring nickname — "Boom Boom" — and his championship dreams. His biographer, Mark Kriegel, said "I think it was a will to rescue a wounded father, to correct the past." In 1980, Mancini succeeded in winning the lightweight championship of the world and became a sensation. In his second title defense he fought a South Korean boxer named Duk Koo Kim. It was a brutal fight, both men talented and brave. Then, in the fourteenth, Mancini knocked him out. Four days later the South Korean died.

"After that fight, I became the poster boy for everything that was wrong with boxing," Mancini said.

Krieger's book is called "The Good Son."

The Kennedy Assassination has created a college industry of plausible explanations and conspiracies. Cubans. Russians. Organized crime. CIA. Bobby Kennedy was in love with Jackie and had an affair with her. Did anybody have a better motive?

Who is.... Leanne Edelsten?

When Venezuela ran out of toilet paper in the spring, it was the perfect metaphor for the failed state. But Mr. Maduro's foreign minister, Elias Jaua, responded by scolding Venezuelans for materialism, asking, "Do you want a fatherland or toilet paper?"

More people in the U.S. are receiving food subsidies than have full time private sector jobs.

'An attempt is being made to control my mind.' So said Boris Spassky in the fourteenth game of the greatest chess match in history, the Spassky-Fischer match in Reykjavik, Iceland for the World Championship of Chess in 1972. Fischer was savaging Spassky and Spassky was at the time the world's best player. More, when you played a Russian, you played all the Russians; not only was Spassky the best, the best players in the world were Russians and Spassky played with all of their help every day. Fischer lost the first game, did not show up for the second and still clobbered him. At the end Spassky was distraught, demanding the officials x-ray the chairs for hidden devices, worrying about being poisoned by the air, fearing that Fischer was hypnotizing him.

One of the Russians fretted about the larger picture with the brash, disrespectful American Fischer annihilating the debonair Spassky. "The Russians will take this as meaning there is something wrong with our culture."

Chavez has consistently supported the Cuban state with petrodollars of up to $3 Billion a year. As all socialist states tend to be autolytic, one wonders if such charity will continue and what it will mean to Cuba.

Dr. Shakeel Afridi, a Pakistani physician, was a CIA operative in Pakistan. He used his position as a public health vaccination volunteer to try to be admitted to bin Laden's compound. Afridi got a good enough look at the complex system of locks on the front door to help the Navy SEALs design a specialized package of explosives designed to blow the door off. He also described the voices he heard. He met with Cia about 25 times and was paid about $100,000. The Pakistanis arrested him and sentenced him to 30 years in prison. It was over 3 weeks before he was arrested but no effort to rescue him was made.

Golden Oldies:http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/02/rumors-of-war.html

Pirate pitcher Gerrit Cole throws a fastball at average 96 miles an hour. His opponents hit his fastball at a .322 average.

Atavistic: a. of, pertaining to, or characterized by atavism; reverting to or suggesting the characteristics of a remote ancestor or primitive type. eyt: Derived from the Latin atavus meaning "ancestor," atavistic gained popularity in the 1870s.

"When it comes to freedom of the press, I believe we must define a journalist and the constitutional and statutory protections those journalists should receive," Sen. Durbin of Illinois wrote recently in a column for the Chicago Sun Times. What exactly does that mean? Is he talking about freedom of speech, confidentiality of sources? Could he mean that people with public opinions should be licensed? Would freedom of speech have qualifications depending on who was exercising that right?

Many of out politicians have a very different view of the country and its future than most working guys.

Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president "shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Enforcing the laws of the land is a duty, not a discretionary power. It is part of the President's job. This has a history in the English speaking world. The duty to enforce laws was an important component of the original revolution against James ll. The very first provision of the English Bill of Rights of 1689—the most important precursor to the U.S. Constitution—declared that "the pretended power of suspending of laws, or the execution of laws, by regal authority, without consent of parliament, is illegal." In Kendall v. United States, 1838, the Supreme Court said that allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress "would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice." But they know this. Maybe the doppelganger doesn't.


AAAAAAAnnnnnnnddddd..........a graph:

An Openminded Man

"War on Terror is drawing to a close and its very legal underpinning, the September 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force, should be not just reformed but repealed to prevent "keeping America on a perpetual wartime footing."

Obama just said this last week. But how does the need for diffuse and perpetual domestic spying fit into this? And drones? And what about Syria?

Was he just kidding when he said this? Is Obama so open-minded he argues both sides?

Or was it just that pesky doppelganger again.

Computers, Writing and Phaedrus

Nothing is new under the sun. We are having discussions about the impact of computers, the availability of information and dissemination of opinions with some reasonable concern. But Plato talked about this very thing in "Phaedrus" only his concern was about writing itself. It is reminiscent of the idea that wisdom is knowledge metabolized, that some time is needed with information before it becomes meaningful. Information must be considered. Thought about. Information must become part of some thought process in the observer. So multitasking is destructive because it does not allow for one to think about the question and incorporate it. Learning something is very different from--and much inferior to--forming an idea or concept of it. More, Plato is very suspicious of art and artists here; he believes the artistic expression might have value but it does not come from wisdom because the artist himself has poor grasp of it.

From "Phaedrus:

SOCRATES: At the Egyptian city of Naucratis, there was a famous old god, whose name was Theuth; the bird which is called the Ibis is sacred to him, and he was the inventor of many arts, such as arithmetic and calculation and geometry and astronomy and draughts and dice, but his great discovery was the use of letters. Now in those days the god Thamus was the king of the whole country of Egypt; and he dwelt in that great city of Upper Egypt which the Hellenes call Egyptian Thebes, and the god himself is called by them Ammon. To him came Theuth and showed his inventions, desiring that the other Egyptians might be allowed to have the benefit of them; he enumerated them, and Thamus enquired about their several uses, and praised some of them a censured others, as he approved or disapproved of them. It would take a long time to repeat all that Thamus said to Theuth in praise or blame of the various arts. But when they came to letters, 'This,' said Theuth, 'will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories; it is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.' Thamus replied: 'O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.' ...