Cab Thoughts

Men are equal; it is not birth but virtue that makes the difference. Voltaire (1694 - 1778)


Violet Jessop, an ocean liner stewardess and nurse, survived the disastrous sinkings of both the RMS Titanic and her sister ship, the HMHS Britannic, in 1912 and 1916 respectively. In addition, she had been on board the RMS Olympic, their other sister ship, when it collided with the cruiser HMS Hawke in 1911.

A secret Pentagon document from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) written 2012 provides extraordinary confirmation that the US-led coalition currently fighting ISIS had, three years ago, welcomed the emergence of an extremist “Salafist Principality” in the region as a way to undermine Syria's Assad, and block off the strategic expansion of Iran. Crucially, Iraq is labeled as an integral part of this “Shia expansion.” In a section titled ‘The Future Assumptions of the Crisis,’ the DIA report predicts that while Assad’s regime will survive, retaining control over Syrian territory, the crisis will continue to escalate “into proxy war.”

The document also recommends the creation of “safe havens under international sheltering, similar to what transpired in Libya when Benghazi was chosen as the command centre for the temporary government.”

In Libya, anti-Gaddafi rebels, most of whom were al-Qaeda affiliated militias, were protected by NATO ‘safe havens’ (aka ‘no fly zones’)

The Salafists are a Sunni subset and the most prominent is ISIS. ISIS. We do this stuff so well.

Who is...Uwe Reinhardt?

Y'know, the world is just not dangerous enough. Apparently the U.S. was so happy with the Russian disaster in Afghanistan they tried to recreate it in Chechnya. According to Yossef Bodansky, then Director of the US Congressional Task Force on Terrorism and Unconventional Warfare, Washington was actively involved in “another anti-Russian jihad, seeking to support and empower the most virulent anti-Western Islamist forces.”

Bodansky revealed the entire CIA Caucasus strategy in detail in his report, stating that US Government officials participated in a meeting in Azerbaijan in December 1999 "...culminating in Washington’s tacit encouragement of both Muslim allies (mainly Turkey, Jordan and Saudi Arabia) and US ‘private security companies’. . . to assist the Chechens and their Islamist allies to surge in the spring of 2000 and sustain the ensuing Jihad for a long time…Islamist Jihad in the Caucasus as a way to deprive Russia of a viable pipeline route through spiraling violence and terrorism.”

"Private security companies?" We do this stuff so well.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/03/where-is-uwe-reinhardt.html

"Graduate college" or "graduate from college?" The original phrase was "Mary was graduated from college." This is a "passive" construction and is on the decline. It is now "Mary graduated from college," an "active" construction. But, more basically, "graduate" is intransitive, that is it can not take a direct object like "hit" can. One can say "Mary hit the ball," but not "Mary slept the bed" or "Mary fell the hole." Nor can one say "Mary graduated college;" she, showing her education, says "I graduated from college."

According to the AAMC's survey of 141 U.S. medical schools, 87 percent of deans are concerned about the number of clinical training sites available for graduates, up from 72 percent in 2010. And 71 percent of deans are concerned medical school enrollment will outpace the growth in graduate medical education.  Although the number of applicants to residency programs has steadily risen, growth in PGY-1 (first-year postgraduate) positions hasn't kept up.

It is interesting that, following the recent scandals, the Catholic Church has stopped accepting homosexuals as priests while that same policy is being reversed by the Boy Scouts.

A recent article, without references, claims physicians chose less medical intervention than they advise their patients. One argument is that they have a better understanding of success of intervention than the general population. CPR is a case in point. A study in the Rochester community of 1177 out-of-hospital cardiac arrests showed a 5% survival to 1 year. The literature reports an average survival rate of 15%. At least 44% of the survivors have significant decline in functional status at the time of discharge. Improved survival rates with good functional recovery are reported with duration of CPR shorter than 5 minutes and CPR occurring in the ICU. Chronic illness, more than age, determines prognosis in the elderly; elderly with chronic illness have an average survival rate of less than 5%. For those with advanced illness, survival rates are often less than 1%.
Experts speculate that survival rate misconceptions are further complicated by the fact that 67% of resuscitations are successful on television.

Shanghai is the only city of over 24 million people.

Hardy–Ramanujan number: 1729 is known as the Hardy–Ramanujan number after a famous anecdote told by the British mathematician G. H. Hardy regarding a visit to the hospital to see the Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. In Hardy's words: "I remember once going to see him when he was ill at Putney. I had ridden in taxi cab number 1729 and remarked that the number seemed to me rather a dull one, and that I hoped it was not an unfavorable omen. "No," he replied, "it is a very interesting number; it is the smallest number expressible as the sum of two cubes in two different ways.""
The two different ways are these: 1729 = 1³ + 12³ = 9³ + 10³
Some people think like this.

HuffPo has their lead headline "Healthcare for millions hangs in the balance" over pictures of five justices, presumably the ones who are not certain to affirm the ACA. Aside from the implications that these judges are all preprogramed to vote a certain way, this question does not seem to be very complicated to these news people. It seems to be a vote for, or against, healthcare for poor people. A larger question can not fit in their small, parochial room.

The Constitution was drafted in secret by a group of mostly young men, many of whom had served together in the Continental Army, and who feared the consequences of a weak central authority.  They produced a charter that shifted power to a national government. “Anti-Federalists” opposed the Constitution. They worried, among other things, that the new government would try to disarm the thirteen state militias.  Critically, those militias were a product of a world of civic duty and governmental compulsion utterly alien to us today. Every white man age 16 to 60 was enrolled. He was required to own – and bring – a musket or other military weapon.--Michael Waldman’s The Second Amendment: A Biography

Keynes thought money a tool and that inactive money was useless. Thus “the abolition of the rich will be rather a comfort”, and those hoarders of money for its own sake referred instead to “specialists in mental disease”, like Sigmund Freud.

Commentators have been analyzing the Irish gay marriage vote and the backlash against sexual abuse in the Catholic Church comes up often as a factor. This is an interesting problem. In the 1960s and 1970s between 1.5 and 4 per cent of Roman Catholic clergy were involved directly or indirectly in the abuse of young people under their authority. The figure includes those who may not have physically abused anyone but were aware in some way of the abuse and by not stopping it enabled it and allowed the abusers to repeat the offense. The exact number of victims will never be known because not every victim has come forward. Most of the abused were boys between the ages of twelve and sixteen--an important distinction, but younger boys and girls were also molested. Now for the stunner: Clinical child psychologist Wade F. Horn wrote a report on the work of researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Public Health, where it was shown that nearly 20 per cent of low-income women in their study had experienced sexual abuse as children, mostly by family friends followed by uncles and cousins, then stepfathers, and then brothers.

In 2002, the Christian Science Monitor reported on the results of national surveys conducted by an organization called Christian Ministry Resources and stated that, "despite headlines focusing on the priest paedophile problem in the Roman Catholic Church, most American Churches being hit with child sexual-abuse allegations are Protestant, and most of the alleged abusers are not clergy or staff, but Church volunteers".

Under Clinton's leadership, the State Department approved $165 billion worth of commercial arms sales to 20 nations whose governments have given money to the Clinton Foundation, according to an IB Times analysis of State Department and foundation data.

“This is a Christian nation.”--the Supreme Court in 1892. “America was born a Christian nation.”-- Woodrow Wilson. “This is a Christian nation.”-- Harry Truman. “We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation.”-- Barack Obama.

The NYT wrote an interesting and, for them, unusual article raising questions about the propriety of the E.P.A. and certain regulations they proposed. In essence, the Times asked if the E.P.A. was "lobbying," an act illegal for the government. Here is the author's reply to the inevitable criticism he received:

"Urging the public to endorse their proposed rule — and asking people explicitly to express this support by going to an E.P.A. webpage where they could click through to get to a place to comment on the rule and also explicitly asking people to go onto social networks to proclaim their support — that is classic grass-roots lobbying. That is what grass-roots lobbying firms are hired to do. It is known as “indirect lobbying,” as it creates the appearance of a groundswell of support — which elected officials then notice and react to.

These actions took place in coordination with environmental groups, like Sierra Club and N.R.D.C., which were “Thunderous Supporters,” of the Thunderclap campaign, as well as partners in other efforts we documented. And it took place at a time when the E.P.A.’s own personnel were weighing the rule and Congress was considering legislation to block it.

This combination was not only extremely unusual, and threatened to undermine the integrity of the process, according to prominent academic experts. But in the view of certain members of Congress, and opponents of the rule, it may have violated the Anti-Lobbying Law. That is what the article said. Glad we did it."

Spain passed a law in 1999 giving workers with children younger than 7 the right to ask for reduced hours without fear of being laid off. Those who took advantage of it were nearly all women.

Over the next decade, companies were 6 percent less likely to hire women of childbearing age compared with men, 37 percent less likely to promote them and 45 percent more likely to dismiss them, according to a study led by Daniel Fernández-Kranz, an economist at IE Business School in Madrid. The probability of women of childbearing age not being employed climbed 20 percent. Another result: Women were more likely to be in less stable, short-term contract jobs, which are not required to provide such benefits.

So....when employers’ costs of employing workers rise, employers employ fewer of those workers. What an insight.

In 2013, archaeologists working in Alsace, in eastern France, uncovered something incongruous, and to the untrained eye, very strange. The researchers discovered the tomb and skull of an aristocrat, who died some 1,600 years ago. Her skull was heavily deformed, with the front flattened, and the rear rising into a cone shape. An amateur digger might have been forgiven for thinking they had found one of the “Grey aliens” that UFO-spotters regularly claim to see. 

This was an example of “artificial cranial deformation,” or in layman’s terms, the practice of altering the head’s natural shape through force. As odd as it seems, this was not a singular incident, or only representative of fifth-century practices, or something that only happened in France. Until the early 1900s, a form of artificial cranial deformation was still taking place in Western France, in Deux-Sevres. Known as the Toulouse deformity, the practice of bandeau was common amongst the French peasantry. A baby's head would be tightly bound and padded, to protect it from accidental impacts. At around the same time, the practice was still occurring in Russia and the Caucasus, as well as in Scandinavia.
Originally, head flattening was instituted to "distinguish certain groups of people from others and to indicate the social status of individuals." In Europe the practice was most popular with tribes that emigrated from the Caucasus region of Central Asia, like the Huns, Sarmatians, Avars, and the Alans. Indeed, that region is where the remains of the earliest suspected practitioners of artificial cranial deformation were discovered. It also appears in the Americas and Polynesia.
While early European observers of the practice in France and in Eastern Europe reportedly pitied children whose heads had been bound, subsequent research has led experts to believe that cranial modification has no impact on cognitive function, nor is there a difference in cranial capacity.

Deliberate modification of the skull, also called the "Toulouse deformity." (Photo: Didier Descouens/WikiCommons CC BY-SA 3.0)