Cab Thought 1/31/15

"Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else." -Frederic Bastiat, 1848 

The CIA's legendary Project Blue Book is now fully declassified and available to read online. An official investigation by the CIA into the existence of UFOs, aliens and all the other eerie stuff , Project Blue Book, also known as Project Sign and Project Grudge, existed from the late 1940s through 1967. You can actually read the Book on line at the conspiracy site, The Black Vault; all of its 140,000 pages and more than 10,000 case files.

Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Martin Dempsey, according to Politico, asked The National Defense University to establish an essay and research competition focused on the Middle East in honor of Saudi Arabia’s late King Abdullah. Huh?

Who is.....Allan R. Landon?

William Wordsworth went to France to meet his illegitimate daughter, Caroline, in 1800, for the first time. She was nine. Her mother was Annette Vallon. They spent a month together in Calais and then Wordsworth returned to England and married Mary Hutchinson, as planned. This was revealed by Princeton scholar George McLean Harper in 1921. This was held in solemn regard by the students, as seen in the senior faculty song:
Harper went to France to get
The red-hot dope on dear Annette,
And there performed a deed of note,
Revealing Wordsworth's one wild oat.

I watched a clip of a woman reporter in Mariupol over the weekend chase a man in a Ukrainian military uniform down the street asking in Russian what was going on. He replied in unaccented English, "Get out of my face."

Do we have military on the ground in Ukraine? Are they wearing other country's uniforms? Are they mercs? What is going on?

Calumny: N: The making of false and defamatory statements in order to damage someone’s reputation; slander. late Middle English: from Latin calumnia. Also the base of the word "Challenge" was first recorded in the senses ‘an accusation’ and ‘to accuse’.

There is an inquiry into the death of  ex-Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko.  Litvinenko died in a London hospital nearly three weeks after he drank tea laced with radioactive polonium-210, following a meeting with two former Russian agents at the Millennium Hotel in central London. There is a lot to be interested in here--the murder, the potential for mass murder using radioactive material--but the most interesting is how international relations prevented the pursuit of the murder. The murder occurred in 2006. 
 
Obama wants to appoint Allan R. Landon, a Hawaiian "community banker," to serve on the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System. President Obama said, “Allan Landon has the proven experience, judgment and deep knowledge of the financial system to serve at the Federal Reserve during this important time for our economy.  He brings decades of leadership and expertise from various roles, particularly as a community banker.  I’m confident that he will serve our country well.”
Yet, in 2005, the Seattle Federal Home Loan Bank bank auditor, PriceWaterhouseCoopers LLP, refused to sign off on the FHLB's fourth-quarter and year-end financial statements until the board fully examined whether the three directors had access to material information that wasn't yet public ahead of the transactions. An independent-review committee determined that "there was the appearance of impropriety" and the three resigned--but, of course, no charges were filed. One if those who resigned was......Allan R. Landon!
So this guy is going to be a member of the most important governmental entity in the country, maybe the world?

Puzzle: Given a five ounce glass and a three ounce glass, measure exactly four ounces. Your water supply is limitless and you can fill and empty glasses as you please.

The Jew of Malta was an Elizabethan play written by Christopher Marlow in the late 1500s and is said to have been an inspiration to Shakespeare for his Merchant of Venice. Unlike the beautiful Tamburlaine or the philosophical Faustus, it is all action, drama and cruelty. Because of its anti-Semitic qualities it is rarely seen. But it is stimulating, parts appearing in as diverse a grouping as Neil Gaiman, Colin Dexter's Inspector Morse series and T.S. Eliot. This is a famous line:
FRIAR BARNARDINE. Thou hast committed--
BARABAS. Fornication: but that was in another country;

                   And besides, the wench is dead.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/06/blowing-smoke.html

American schools punish black students more often than white students. But schools punish white students more often than Asian students. Lenders turn down black applicants for loans more often than white applicants — but they turn down whites more often than Asians. Most statistics on such things omit Asians, presumably because they complicate a simple theme. 

True or not, like the "third base" calumny," a terribly funny line:

“There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old’s life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.”

The launch pad fire during Apollo program tests at Cape Canaveral in 1967 killed astronauts Virgil "Gus" Grissom, Edward H. White II, and Roger B. Chafee. An investigation indicated that a faulty electrical wire inside the Apollo 1 command module was the probable cause of the fire. The astronauts, the first Americans to die in a spacecraft, had been participating in a simulation of the Apollo 1 launch scheduled for the next month. It was strangely similar to a fire that killed Russian cosmonaut Valentin Bondarenko in 1961. The circumstances were so peculiar that conspiracy theorist thought it purposeful. The crucial element was the capsule environment: 100 percent oxygen. (Bondarenko's was 67%.) High O2 concentration had always been a problem in artificial environments, in diving and in flight. But the mixing of inert gases--like nitrogen used in diving was expensive, complicated and, worst, heavy.

A shadowy Bermudan company that has funneled tens of millions of dollars to anti-fracking environmentalist groups in the United States is run by executives with deep ties to Russian oil interests and offshore money laundering schemes involving members of President Vladimir Putin’s inner circle, the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee reported last year. It wrote: “This is clearly a deceitful way to hide the source of millions of dollars that are active in our system, attempting to effect political change.”

AAAaaaaannnnndddddd......a graph: