Cab Thoughts 4/26/14

"We human beings always seek happiness. Now there are two ways. You can make yourself happy by making other people unhappy--I call that the logic of robbery. The other way, you make yourself happy by making other people happy--that's the logic of the market. Which way do you prefer?"-- Zhang Weiying


The reddened moon at the eclipse is caused by reflected dimmed reddened light of all the sunsets and sunrises filtering around the edges of planet Earth.

Bureau of Land Management is the federal agency charged with managing federal lands. That is nearly 300 million federal acres mostly in the West. That's an area equivalent to the second and fourth largest states combined, Texas and Montana. 84% of Nevada is owned by the federal government. This Bundy guy in Nevada is confronting the Bureau and he is clearly in the wrong. He has lost all his suits, every argument. And he does not pay his taxes which usually puts everyone  off. So, why are all these people riding pickups and horses to support him?


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

How do diplomats travel great distances and across great time swaths and not get goofy. Jet lag hits everyone; how do they travel and then make diplomatic decisions? Or are the strange quilts of international relations actually a reflection of terrible jet lag.

Hong and Zhao, two Asian economics professors, wrote an article published in the U.S. about media bias in reporting global warming. In a summary they write, "This article provides a rationale for this tendency. ... We find that the information manipulation has an instrumental value." Agriculture economist Jayson Lusk last month wrote the article "raised some questions about the ultimate desirability of information manipulation." It is a terrible problem when we do not understand or believe our betters. What else are they expected to do?

7 million people who signed up for the ACA is 2% of the population.

Who was.....James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps?

Elysium Fields: n. Paradise. The Greeks did not believe in a heaven and hell per se; instead, their dead went to the realm of the god Hades and became mere "shades." Elysium, also known as "Isle of the Blessed", was where the exceptional humans were sent upon their deaths. Terrible people ended up in Tartarus, the closest equivalent to hell in Greek mythology, where they were tortured. Sisyphus, Tantalus and Ixion were in Tartarus.

Lois Lerner headed the IRS division that handles applications for tax-exempt status. She refused to testify at a May 2013 hearing before Rep. Darrell Issa’s (R-CA) House Oversight Committee, and demanded immunity concerning her role in the scandal regarding the IRS' targeting of conservative groups. An internal investigation found Lerner guilty of “neglect of duties” and was going to call for her ouster. On April 9, 2014, the Ways and Means Committee referred Lois Lerner to the DOJ for criminal prosecution. On April 10, 2014, the House Oversight Committee voted to hold Lerner in contempt of Congress. New emails have surfaced showing Lerner was in contact with the Department of Justice, inquiring how these conservative groups might be prosecuted.
“These new emails show that the day before she broke the news of the IRS scandal, Lois Lerner was talking to a top Obama Justice Department official about whether the DOJ could prosecute the very same organizations that the IRS had already improperly targeted,” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton.

While this is very partisan stuff on both sides, it is really very dangerous.


"[T]he potential of fully electric vehicles for the rest of my life and a good portion of the rest of your life will be limited,” said Steve Cannon, the head of Mercedes Benz USA in Forbes. He was criticizing Elon Musk’s electric-powered automaker Tesla.

There is talk that Chelsea Clinton is considering running for political office, possibly New York Mayor. How these things come to some one's mind is unclear. It is probably genetic. Her dad thought he should run for office. And her mom, too; that could be genetic but might be venereal.

It is estimated that 23% of income goes to regulatory costs.

Good news! There is a new economics hero, French economist Thomas Piketty. In a huge book, Capital in the Twenty-first Century, he argues that the effect of capitalism is, in its essence, unequal and, in the absence of intervention, that inequality will be self generating. Of course, there is a formula, r >g, where r stands for the average annual rate of return on capital (i.e. profits, dividends, interest, and rents) and g stands for the rate of economic growth. In other words, in a slow-growing economy, accumulated wealth grows faster than income from labor. So the rich, who already hold most of the wealth, will get richer, while everyone else, who depend mostly on income from their jobs, will be lucky to keep up with inflation.With the return of capital above the rate of economic growth--as it has been historically--the seeds of destruction are sown. In the time between 1945 and 1970, capitalism’s so-called Golden Age, the economies of Western Europe and the United States expanded and inequality declined. This period has left us with an erroneous optimism about capitalism. Marx was right about the destination, just not the journey.

What is going on between Conservatives and Progressives? Liberty preexists government is the position of the modern Conservative. Liberty is the basic. All of the substance of American government starts with the premise that liberty is the primary condition of the society; government emerges from that condition. The Progressive seems to believe that the nation was created on the basis of democracy, essentially a process of government itself; as democracy is a process of government, government must be the Progressive's "basic." So democracy--not once mentioned in the American Constitution--is the agent of American liberty where the Conservative believes that liberty is the agent of government.

A corollary of the Conservative position is that there are few liberties that the majority can take away simply because they have more votes.

In 1960, more than 76% of African-Americans and nearly 97% of whites were born to married couples. Today the percentage is 30% for blacks and 70% for whites. The out-of-wedlock birthrate for Hispanics surpassed 50% in 2006. This trend, coupled with high divorce rates, means that roughly 25% of American children now live in single-parent homes, twice the percentage in Europe (12%).


AAAAAAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnnnnn....a picture of 'My reply to the idiots who ask me to resume literary studies' … James Orchard Halliwell-Phillipps.