Cab Thoughts 7/23/14

"I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men!"--Woodrow Wilson

Managing wealth is a skill. 90% of millionaires are self-made; that means existing family wealth must somehow decline or be destroyed. The current tax on IRAs will take 45% in taxes. 50% of professional basketball players file bankruptcy within 5 years of retirement. The Vanderbilts are broke.
Managing wealth is a skill.

It was not until the 1980s that Venezuelan oil reserves were considered provable reserves.

Who was....Silas Tomkyn Comberbache?

In 1868 Louisa May Alcott's Little Women published.  Thus she made a good the vow she made
to herself early on: that, though a woman, she would make both her own and her parents' living, and
that she would do it by writing.  This vow was made necessary by her father, the Transcendentalist 
Bronson Alcott, being a madcap for schemes of high ideals, a low pay-communal farm, lecture tours,
and schools of philosophy. Its fulfillment required that Alcott set aside her aspirations for serious writing
and turn eye to the market: "I plod away," she wrote in her journal during the Little Women days, "though
I don't really enjoy this sort of thing. Never liked girls or knew many, except my sisters, but our queer 
plays and experiences may prove interesting, though I doubt it."

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/11/macbeth-review.html

Since a pair of 1938 Treasury Department Tax Rulings, and another in 1941, Social Security benefits have been explicitly excluded from federal income taxation. (A revision was issued in 1970, but it made no changes in the existing policy.) This changed for the first time with the passage of the 1983 Amendments to the Social Security Act. Beginning in 1984, a portion of Social Security benefits have been subject to federal income taxes. Now 85% of social security is subject to taxation.
Lesson: The government always changes the rules and those changes usually benefit the governing elite and their friends.

The porous border is advantageous to four groups: Drug cartels, human traffickers, business people who want cheap labor and terrorists. The failure to tighten the border encourages more of the same: drug cartels, traffickers, terrorists and cut rate labor. So, if you favor porous borders, which of those four do you particularly like? And, if you are a politician....well, one always worries that political practicalities override the interests of the state and its citizens.

In Europe, data shows that the burning coal earns companies 9.16 euros per megawatt hour, while burning natural gas nets companies a loss of 19.31 megawatts per hour. As more natural gas plants are taken offline, they have to be replaced by coal.

Jim Webb said this during his campaign for the Senate: "You do not have to occupy a country in order to fight the terrorists who are in it."

"Democracy cannot be imposed with military force." Those who say such things seem to forget what U.S. arms have done imposing democracy on countries like Germany and especially Japan.

Nathaniel Hawthorn tried a communal "Transcendental" social experiment for a while. Coleridge and Robert Southey actually planned one to be on the banks of the Susquehanna River. (Coleridge was in his early twenties and so bored he tried to enlist in the 1st Dragoons under the alias of Silas Tomkny Comberbache. They envisioned a "pantisocracy," or "equal rule by all," where twelve couples worked for three hours a day and would spend the rest of the time in nature or the library.

Paraprosdokian: a figure of speech in which the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that causes the reader or listener to re-frame or reinterpret the first part. Frequently used for humorous or dramatic effect, sometimes producing anticlimax. Examples: I used to be indecisive; now I'm not so sure; I asked God for a bike, but I know God doesn't work that way. So I stole a bike and asked for forgiveness.

AAAAaaaaaaannnnndddddd.....a picture of the dogs of war: