Cab Thoughts

In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. --Michael Crichton


In South Africa in 2013, more than 6,300,000 people were living with HIV; about 200,000 South Africans died of AIDS in 2013. (The population of South Africa is about 53 million.)     

Only three candidates in the last 100 years have come back to win the presidency after losing an earlier presidential nomination: Lyndon Johnson in 1964, George Bush in 1988 and Ronald Reagan in 1980. The first two benefited from popular presidents preceding them — following Kennedy's assassination, Johnson was already president when Democrats nominated him, while Bush followed Reagan. Only Reagan did it entirely on his own.
That is a high hill for Hillary.

Who is ....Camille Paglia?

An economist posed this question: Name one deflation, one liquidity trap, where there has been food or fuel shortages. Or riots. Or that has led to a world war. Your approaches to inflation and deflation should be asymmetrical, because inflation is far more dangerous. How would he classify the 30s?

The former Colorado police chief who led the investigation into the murder of six-year-old "beauty queen"
JonBenet Ramsey recently gave an accidental interview on Reddit. His summary included:
Court documents released in 2013 showed that a grand jury recommended indictments against the Ramseys, contrary to the long-held perception that the secret panel ended their work in 1999 without deciding to charge anyone. 

The documents revealed that the parents had been indicted for felony child abuse resulting in death and accessory to the crimes of first-degree murder and child abuse resulting in death - but that then-District Attorney Alex Hunter had refused to sign the indictments.

Former District Attorney Mary Lacy cleared the Ramseys of any role in their daughter's death, based on DNA evidence that pointed to the involvement of a third party.

Investigators did not believe there was a 'legitimate point of entry' for an intruder to get into the house that night.

He said that the girl was hit hard across the head and then, after it was clear that she had not died, she was strangled between 45 minutes and two hours later, based on her brain swelling.

'The rest of the scene we believe was staged, including the vaginal trauma, to make it look like a kidnapping/assault gone bad.'

Lord Byron sent two letters about a Welsh girl he met, one to a friend, one to her. Here is an excerpt from each: "I am at present principally occupied with a fresh face & a very pretty one too," he wrote in a Christmas Day letter to a friend, "a Welsh Girl whom I lately added to the bevy, and of whom I am tolerably enamoured for the present."  And, two weeks later, when the truth about the Welsh Girl became all too clear after he intercepted a letter she sent to her new lover: "Return to your relations," Byron now wrote, "you shall be furnished with the means, but him, who now addresses you for the last time, you will never see again."

The greatest verified age for any living organism is from a Great Basin Bristlecone Pine tree in Nevada called Prometheus that was measured by a ring count to be about 4,900 years old when it was cut down in 1964.

The Sharia quotes the Prophet Mohammad from the authoritative Hadiths of Bukhari and Muslim:  “I did not hear (the Prophet) him permit untruth in anything people say, except for three things: war, settling disagreements, and a man talking with his wife.”

The fierce Camille Paglia in a recent interview: "Post-structuralism is a system of literary and social analysis that flared up and vanished in France in the 1960s but that became anachronistically entrenched in British and American academe from the 1970s on. Based on the outmoded linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure and promoted by the idolized Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, and Michel Foucault, it absurdly asserts that we experience or process reality only through language and that, because language is inherently unstable, nothing can be known. By undermining meaning, history and personal will, post-structuralism has done incalculable damage to education and contemporary thought....Post-structuralism has destroyed two generations of graduate students, who were forced to mouth its ugly jargon and empty platitudes for their foolish faculty elders. And the end result is that humanities departments everywhere, having abandoned their proper mission of defending and celebrating art, have become humiliatingly marginalized in both reputation and impact."

The benchmark 10-year Treasury note, which yielded just 1.6% at the start of this month, is now yielding 2.16% — which means it is yielding 35% more than it was a month ago. Is this a harbinger of what is to come? Most people do not think so.

The earned income tax credit (EITC), first proposed in the early 1970s, was signed by President Ford in 1975. It was later substantially expanded by President Reagan, who deemed it “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.” 
The credit underwent significant expansions in 1990 and 1993. In 2003, some 19 million taxpayers were expected to claim more than $34 billion of earned income credits, with an average credit per taxpayer of $1,784 per year (U.S. Congress 2004). In 2004, some families will be entitled to claim an earned income credit of up to $4,300 per year (IRS 2003). The Earned Income Tax Credit has grown into the largest, Federally-funded means-tested cash assistance program in the United States. Half of the states and the District of Columbia have enacted earned income tax credits (EITCs) to supplement the federal EITC. The estimated cost for the coming year, federally, is 71 billion dollars. Total "income security" costs currently are 310 billion dollars.

There is a community that argues against the relationship between HIV and AIDs. It is not insignificant. One, the magazine "Continuum," run by HIV-positive dissidents, shut down when its editors all died of AIDS-related causes. 

An observation by Robert Bork: "When an ideology is institutionalized it becomes, paradoxically, less visible – even to those who implement it.  The basic ideas are no longer apprehended or controverted, and hence it becomes easier to move further along the lines implied by those ideas.  Particular developments in the movement may be disliked and resisted, but our capacity to resist effectively is diminished if we fail to recognize that the trouble lies at the source."

With job creation rising about 2% a year while the labor supply is rising only about 0.5%, the unemployment rate is set to continue falling by about 1.5% annually. 

Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N.'s Framework Convention on Climate Change, made clear what so many already know: The goal of environmental activists is not to save the world from ecological ruin but to extinguish capitalism.
"This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution," she said. Huh?

Mo'Nique claims she was only paid $50,000 for her Oscar-winning role in Precious.

Hadith: noun: plural hadith or hadiths. 1. a narrative record of the sayings or customs of Muhammad and his companions 2: the collective body of traditions relating to Muhammad and his companion. The intended meaning of hadith in religious tradition is that of something--action or opinion--attributed to Muhammad but that is not found in the Quran, akin to the Acts of the Apostles in timing but centering upon the Prophet specifically.

In 1929, Edwin Hubble came to the conclusion that “there must have been an instant in time when the entire Universe was contained in a single point in space. The Universe must have been born in this single violent event.” This is what became known the Big Bang theory. Now that everyone has come to grips with the Big Bang, some researchers say it may not have happened. “Our theory suggests that the age of the universe could be infinite,” study co-author Saurya Das, a theoretical physicist at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada, told LiveScience.

Switzerland is experiencing deflation and yet has full employment, a balanced budget, and a positive trade balance. Switzerland runs a current account surplus, a balanced budget, and has suffered almost no unemployment, all despite the fact that nobody knows the name of a single Swiss politician or central banker. 

Chapman approached Lennon in front of The Dakota and asked him to autograph his album, "Double Fantasy." After shooting Lennon four times, Chapman sat down on the sidewalk to read the book he was carrying, Catcher in the Rye. The "Double Fantasy" album which Lennon autographed for Chapman sold for several million dollars. The Catcher in the Rye began to pop up as a metaphor for lunacy or mind control, most famously in "Conspiracy Theory" with Mel Gibson and Julia Roberts.

Researchers in China have spotted a monstrous black hole that they say is 12 billion times the size of the Sun.

Russian Ex-President Mikhail Gorbachev on the murder of Nemtsov: "The assassination of Boris Nemtsov is an attempt to complicate the situation in the country, even to destabilize it by ratcheting up tensions between the government and the opposition,” Gorbachev said. “Just who did this is hard to say, let’s not jump to any conclusions right now and give the investigators time to sort this all out,” he added.
Gorbachev did not rule out that the high-profile murder could encourage some people to urge the authorities to introduce a state of emergency, which he said would only exacerbate what is already a difficult situation. (sputniknews)

AAAAAaaannnnddddd......a graph: