Cab Thoughts 1/10/15

"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition." --G K Chesterton


According to the Wall Street Journal, close to one-third of all Americans have a file in the FBI's master criminal database.

Sometimes referrals of problems to referees we think are grownups does not work.  An orangutan held in an Argentine zoo can be freed and transferred to a sanctuary after a court recognized the ape as a "non-human person" unlawfully deprived of its freedom, local media reported on Sunday. Animal rights campaigners filed a habeas corpus petition - a document more typically used to challenge the legality of a person's detention or imprisonment - in November on behalf of Sandra, a 29-year-old Sumatran orangutan at the Buenos Aires zoo. The zoo's head of biology, Adrian Sestelo, said, "When you don't know the biology of a species, to unjustifiably claim it suffers abuse, is stressed or depressed, is to make one of man's most common mistakes, which is to humanize animal behavior."

Venezuela hired new lobbyists as Mr. Obama signed sanctions on Venezuelan officials into law. Read that again.

The Brookings Institution scholar Ron Haskins was pivotal for President Clinton's welfare reform when his studies showed that in that era 75 percent of all new welfare cases started after new single motherhood. Only 12 percent of new cases started because of a decrease in earnings.

What are .....the Urim and Thummin?

In 1982 Larry Walters (aka Lawnchair Larry) attached 45 weather balloons to his lawn chair in his back yard in San Pedro, California. He filled them with helium, took his pellet gun, a CB radio, sandwiches, a camera and a parachute, strapped himself into the chair and, with the help of his girlfriend and some buddies, cut himself loose. He quickly rose and eventually reached 15,000 feet--15,000--and drifted into controlled airspace near LAX, reporting in to the FAA via CB radio. He shot a few balloons with the pellet gun (which, terrifyingly, he accidentally dropped), and descended into some power lines, blacking out Long Beach. He was arrested, fined and released. Larry's real-life flight was fictionalized in the much later Australian movie Danny Deckchair.

Rex Grossman has played in the NFL for 12 years.

Krugman on Russia: The kind of crisis Russia now faces is what you get when bad things happen to an economy made vulnerable by large-scale borrowing from abroad - specifically, large-scale borrowing by the private sector, with the debts denominated in foreign currency, not the currency of the debtor country.

In that situation, an adverse shock like a fall in exports can start a vicious downward spiral. When the nation's currency falls, the balance sheets of local businesses - which have assets in rubles (or pesos or rupiah) but debts in dollars or euros - implode.

The remaining staff at the Charlie Hebdo paper announced that they will release an issue next week. "Stupidity will not win," columnist Patrick Pelloux told the AFP. They are brave. John Stewart said you should not have to be brave to be a comic. The problem here is not "stupidity," however, it is force. No one was more stupid than Pol Pot but his vision of Year Zero equality in Cambodia--while , indeed, did not last forever--killed one third of the population before it was euthanized.

Right now McDonald's has 14,267 locations in the United States, but payday lenders have more than 20,000.

A rather startling assertion from Adam Tooze in his book, The Deluge. "Unless the political leaders of Europe could shake their populations out of their usual 'political thoughtlessness', Hitler warned in 1928, the 'threatened global hegemony of the North American continent' would reduce them all to the status of Switzerland or Holland."  The other Axis powers felt the same. He writes, "the future dominance of American capitalist democracy, that was the common factor impelling Hitler, Stalin, the Italian Fascists and their Japanese counterparts to such radical action. ... Whatever comforting, domesticated fantasies their followers may have projected onto them, the leaders of Fascist Italy, National Socialist Germany, Imperial Japan and the Soviet Union all saw themselves as radical insurgents against an oppressive and powerful world order."

There appears to be some antagonism toward Elizabeth Warren's opposition to the appointment of Antonio Weisse to Treasury. Her opposition, despite Weisse's impeccable liberal credentials, stems from his having worked on Wall Street. Where you work is an easier criterion than how you think, I guess.

Is that bigotry?

The new EPA regulations issued while Barack Obama has been president are 43 times as long as the entire Bible.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers -- better known as ICANN--has been hacked. This is a serious attack that shows the people involved were sophisticated, very capable and, most important, intensely malicious. ICANN is responsible for the very infrastructure of the Internet. 

Bless you. Pope Gregory I commanded that anyone who sneezed immediately be blessed out of fear that it was a sign they had contracted The Plague.

Keynes in France: Having proclaimed the creation of jobs-jobs-jobs as his mandate when elected in 2012, Francois Hollande has so far overseen the loss of nearly 600,000 French jobs. At 3.488 million, French joblessness has never been higher (and French bond yields never lower) and has been rising - practically unabated - for the 31 straight months since his 'raise taxes on the wealth' election.

A British tabloid reports a man woke from a coma after a horrific car crash thinking he was Hollywood actor Matthew McConaughey and speaking fluent French - despite only having a basic grasp from school. So French is pretty easy--maybe inside us all--and can sort of be released by a blow to the head.

An MIT research scientist is warning that if current trends continue 50 percent of all children in America will be autistic by the year 2025.

"Joseph Smith an eighteen-year-old with small hands and big feet, a quiet and "unlaughing" boy, encountered the Angel Moroni, son of Mormon, on a drumlin alongside a little road south of Palmyra [N.Y.] in 1827. . . . There he unearthed the golden plates that he said were the source of the Book of Mormon. With the aid of an ancient pair of optical instruments, the Urim and Thummin, which Smith found with the plates, he was able to translate the "revised" Egyptian hieroglyphics, although he insisted on dictating his translation to scribes from behind a curtain."--William Least Heat Moon, in  Blue Highways.

Just before the First World War in 1913, the German mark, the British shilling, the French franc, and the Italian lira were all worth about the same, and four or five of any were worth about a dollar. At the end of 1923, it would have been possible to exchange a shilling, a franc or a lira for up to 1,000,000,000,000 marks, although in practice by then no one was willing to take marks in return for anything.

Back in 1980, there were only about 3,000 SWAT raids conducted in the United States.  But today, there are more than 80,000 SWAT raids per year in this country.

Criterion: n:  A principle or standard by which something may be judged or decided. Early 17th century: from Greek kritērion 'means of judging', from kritēs. As is "crisis." At one time a crisis was specifically the turning point of a disease, a change that leads either to recovery or death. Also the root of "critic" (early 17th century), and "critical" (late 16th century.

The plural is "criteria."

"No man is an island:" Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan described efforts to promote birth control as "treason" as he addressed the bride and groom at the Istanbul wedding ceremony of the son of businessman Mustafa Kefeli, who is one of his close allies.

There are five "too big to fail" banks in the United States that each have more than 40 TRILLION dollars worth of exposure to derivatives.

When Nurse Amber Vinson's Ebola diagnosis was confirmed, Coming Attractions, the Akron bridal store visited by Amber and her bridesmaids during that fateful weekend, voluntarily shut its doors for a 21-day quarantine. Unfortunately Coming Attractions' customers never came back. And now the store is going out of business.

Curt Schilling says he was not elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame because he is a Rube-publican. Hell, 9% of the electors voted against Martinez.

Russian President Vladimir Putin has ordered his government to curb rising vodka prices. Mr. Putin, with the rouble falling, said that high prices of vodka encouraged the consumption of illegal and possibly unsafe alcohol. Inflation is at 9.4% and the price of vodka is up 30%.

False positive pregnancy tests are available on Craigslist for $20.

AAAAaaaaaannnnnndddd..........a graph: