Cab Thoughts 7/1/15

Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.  And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.  Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognizes infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it…. --Oscar Wilde February 1891 Forthnightly Review essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

Katherine Chappell, a film editor who worked on an Emmy winning episode of Game of Thrones and Marvel's Captain America, was on a guided tour through the popular Lion Park, near Johannesburg, on Monday when she was killed by one of the big cats. Tour guide Pierre Potgieter, who desperately tried to save her life he suffered a heart attack as he tried to stop the bleeding. The wildlife conservationist was in South Africa raising money for a charitable organization that protects animals from poachers.

If melted into liquid form, the amount of water in Mars’ southern polar cap would cover the entire planet to a depth of about 36 feet.



John Nash, he of "beautiful mind" fame, had some bad thoughts about Keynesians: "So I wish to present the argument that various interests and groups, notably including “Keynesian” economists, have sold to the public a “quasi-doctrine” which teaches, in effect, that “less is more” or that (in other words) “bad money is better than good money”. Here we can remember the classic ancient economics saying called “Gresham’s law” which was “The bad money drives out the good”. The saying of Gresham’s is mostly of interest here because it illustrates the “old” or “classical” concept of “bad money” and this can be contrasted with more recent attitudes which have been very much influenced by the Keynesians and by the results of their influence on government policies since the 30s." Continuing, "The Keynesians implicitly always have the argument that some good managers can do things of beneficial value, operating with the treasury and the central bank, and that it is not needed or appropriate for the citizenry or the “customers” of the currency supplied by the state to actually understand, while the managers are managing, what exactly they are doing and how it will affect the “pocketbook” circumstances of these customers." He concludes, "I see this as analogous to how the “Bolshevik communists” were claiming to provide something much better than the “bourgeois democracy” that they could not deny existed in some other countries. But in the end the “dictatorship of the proletariat” seemed to become rather exposed as simply the dictatorship of the regime. So there may be an analogy to this as regards those called “the Keynesians” in that while they have claimed to be operating for high and noble objectives of general welfare what is clearly true is that they have made it easier for governments to “print money”."

There has always been a Trinity problem. Miaphysitis was a doctrine which holds that in the person of Jesus there was but a single nature that merged both the human and the divine rather than a dual nature. The Emperor Flavius Basiliscus alienated his supporters by promoting it.

Simon Byrne  was an Irish bare-knuckle prize fighter and the heavyweight boxing champion of Ireland. He fought eight recorded matches, but his career is famous for the last three, against the Scottish champion Alexander McKay, the English champion Jem Ward, and James Burke for the vacant championship of England. The injuries McKay received in his fight with Byrne resulted in his death the following day. Byrne went on to lose his next match against Jem Ward, which some commentators believed he was not sufficiently in condition to fight. His final contest in May 1833 was a grueling 99 rounds against James Burke that lasted for 3 hours and 6 minutes, the longest ever recorded prize fight. Byrne died three days later as the result of damage to his brain caused by the beating he had received. Burke was arrested and tried for manslaughter but was acquitted. Byrne went down in history as one of seven boxers who both killed and were killed in the ring.

Who is...Josh Gibson?

When ethanol producers lobby for a subsidy to ethanol, they are trying to redistribute income in their favor: the benefit to the environment is just a good excuse.  They use the social argument to make it appealing.  Ideas are very powerful instruments of lobbying, and the most devastating effects of lobbying have occurred when the ideas are most appealing.--Luigi Zingales’s 2012 book, A Capitalism for the People

Christians are increasingly anxious that they are in the crosshairs of the new culture. Their positions of definitive moral structure are, of course, in opposition to the current flow.
Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet, “Blackrobe,” as he was known, was a 19th-century Jesuit missionary to Indian tribes who converted thousands. He was a friend of Sitting Bull; he spent his last years in St. Louis. There is a statue of De Smet at St. Louis University ministering to two American Indians. Last week came word St. Louis University will remove the statue from the front of Fusz Hall, where it has stood for 60 years. According to SLU Assistant Vice President for Communications Clayton Berry, “some faculty and staff ... raised questions about whether the sculpture is culturally sensitive.” Senior Ryan McKinley is more specific: “The statue of De Smet depicts a history of colonialism, imperialism, racism and of Christian and white supremacy.” 

The name "St. Louis" is probably next.

The U.S. is being quietly thanked by the international community because apparently the Americans were necessary to clean up the international soccer mess. But we plan to give up control of the internet to "international stakeholders." The plan is to hand over the stewardship of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) to a global multi-stakeholder body. Some are worried that it may allow other countries to capture control.

Uh 0h. Greece has received what The New York Times recently described as “dueling sales pitches” on two proposed natural gas pipelines, with the US pressing Athens to support The Southern Gas Corridor rather than the Russian Gazprom's Turkish Stream project. It appears Moscow may have made the more convincing case because, much to Washington's dismay, Greece is set to sign an MOU for the Greek portion of The Turkish Stream pipeline in June.

ISIS described a recent beheading as done for 'education purposes.'

In 1937, The Sporting News reports that catcher Josh Gibson of the Negro League’s Homestead Grays hit a ball two feet from the top of the façade of Yankee Stadium, 580 feet from home plate. If Negro League records were kept alongside those of the National and American Leagues, Gibson’s home run would eclipse Mickey Mantle’s record 565-foot home run hit off Chuck Stobbs in Washington’s Griffith Stadium on April 17, 1953 as the longest ever hit.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-enemy-of-good.html

ISIS has created an all-women paramilitary unit called the al-Khansa’ Brigades, who insure proper deportment in ISIS-held towns. The women are trained for a month and carry guns. Many European women are members of the al-Khansa Brigade and fight on the front line, but Arab members of the group police the streets and look after the city’s affairs. Women who were caught trying to escape would receive 60 lashes, while women who simply wore heels or were not wearing the proper Islamic dress known as the abaya, were given “the standard 40 lashes”.

Mr. Snoop Dogg called Jenner a "science project."

An article in the WashPo attacks  Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback for doing what the country was structured to do: Use the states as labs. From the article:

'“My focus is to create a red-state model that allows the Republican ticket to say, ‘See, we’ve got a different way, and it works,’ ” Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback said in 2013.
Brownback was talking about the massive supply-side tax cuts at the center of his policy agenda, which he had promised would provide “a shot of adrenaline into the heart of the Kansas economy.” Instead, it led to a deep hole in the state budget, a downgrade in the state’s credit rating and weak economic growth compared with neighboring states. As top income earners and business owners pocketed their tax cuts, Kansas’s poverty rate went up.

There is an astonishing story from Rotherham, in Northern England, concerning sexual abuse of the young over the last two decades. There is a report of over 100 pages and it makes for pretty horrifying reading. Much of the crime centers upon the local Pakistani community. Here is a significant quote:
'Offending behaviour mostly involved men operating in groups . . . The victim was being passed around and prostituted amongst many other men.' Groups.

When E. M. Forster's A Passage to India was published it was a commercial and critical success and it would confirm Forster's status as one of the 20th century's most important writers. But it was his last novel. Various reasons are given to explain why, at just forty-five years of age Forster made what appears to be an intentional decision to give up novel writing. Just after finishing A Passage to India, Forster told a friend that he planned to "never write another novel" because "my patience with ordinary people has given out"; to another, he admitted his "weariness of the only subject I can and may treat." Interpreting "ordinary people" and "only subject" to mean "straight," some conclude that Forster stopped writing novels because he couldn't voice his own homosexual reality. His only such book, the autobiographical Maurice, was published posthumously.
Conversely, Sir Vidia Naipaul disliked both the book and its author. In a 2001 interview he said the man was a "nasty homosexual" whose knowledge of India was limited to "the court, and a few middle-class Indians, and the garden boys he wished to seduce." The novel was "utter rubbish," especially those passages which made a "pretence of poetry" out of India's three religions.

Trope: n. Rhetoric. 1. any literary or rhetorical device, as metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony, that consists in the use of words in other than their literal sense; an instance of this. 2. a phrase, sentence, or verse formerly interpolated in a liturgical text to amplify or embellish. ety: 1530s, from Latin tropus "a figure of speech," from Greek tropos "turn, direction, turn or figure of speech," related to trope "a turning" and trepein "to turn," from PIE root trep- "to turn" (cf. Sanskrit trapate "is ashamed, confused," properly "turns away in shame;" Latin trepit "he turns"). Often seen in a combining form meaning “one turned toward” that specified by the initial element, for example,  heliotrope, "turning towards the sun" as a flower. Also seen as "tropism," the turning or bending movement of a living organism or part toward or away from an external stimulus, such as light, heat, or gravity. Maureen Dowd once wrote: "The traits [Judith Miller] has drive many reporters at The Times crazy: her tropism toward powerful men, her frantic intensity, and her peculiar mixture of hard work and hauteur."
   

O. Henry  checked into the hospital in 1910 for the last time. He emptied his pockets, saying, "Here I am going to die and only worth 23 cents." When, the last night, the nurse turned out the light, he had her turn it back on, saying, "I don't want to go home in the dark."

Jean Findlay has written a biography of her great-great uncle, C.K. Scott Moncrieff, the first English translator of Marcel Proust. Findlay’s biography is a reminder not only of how small and interconnected the world of letters was before World War II but also of the important part editors and critics played in modernism’s early successes.Scott Moncrieff is also a fascinating character in his own right. He was a Scottish Catholic, homosexual, friend of G.K. Chesterton and columnist for Chesterton’s The New Witness, war hero, and spy in Mussolini’s Italy. He was close to polymath Edward Marsh—Churchill’s private secretary—Wilfred Owen, T.S. Eliot, Evelyn Waugh, and many other notable figures.

He spent much of his life in Italy--whose weather and attitudes were more tolerant. He had quite an extraordinary life, productive and benign. The reviewer wrote: In all, Scott Moncrieff was a remarkable figure. He was a man of great talent and humility, devoting himself to a role that is often viewed as of secondary importance in the literary world. Yet without him, or with a less talented translator, it is likely that Proust would not have had the effect he did on modern literature. The story of great literature is more than just that of genius itself. For every Johnson, there must be a Boswell. For Proust, it was Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff.  

AAAAAaaaaannnnnndddddd.......a graph: