Cab Thoughts 7/29/15

“A law should be called good if it reflects the will of the dominant forces of the community, even if it will take us to hell.”--Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes

Does that Holmes quote sound reasonable? 

As this is its tenth anniversary, there has been some talk about Kelo v. City of New London (Conn.). In it, the local city condemned a local home and gave the land to a property developer. The Supreme Court ruled that local governments can seize property from private citizen A and give it to private citizen B if it, the government, declares publicly a belief that such seizures will create jobs and increase the amount of money--and taxes--the receivers of the property will generate. Justice O’Connor captured the extent of the problems with Kelo in her dissent, including this important point: “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property. Nothing is to prevent the State from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”

Amazingly, the Court defended its action on the basis of "judicial restraint."

Who is .....Ambrose Bierce?

On June 24, 1993, Yale University computer science professor David Gelernter was seriously injured while opening his mail when a padded envelope explodes in his hands. The attack just came two days after a University of California geneticist was injured by a similar bomb and was the latest in a string of bombings since 1978 that authorities believed to be related. This was the work of the so-called “Unabomber.” The bombings, along with 14 others since 1978 that killed 3 people and injured 23 others, were eventually linked to Theodore John Kaczynski, a former mathematician from Chicago. He developed a philosophy of radical environmentalism and militant opposition to modern technology, and tried to get academic essays on the subjects published. It was the rejection of one of his papers by two Chicago-area universities in 1978 that may have prompted him to manufacture and deliver his first mail bomb. This prompted Gelernter's book, Drawing Life. 

Kaczynski, despite his obvious homicidal madness, has been viewed very cautiously by the academic left because of his intelligence and academic background--and, perhaps, his Rousseau-like position they have sympathy for.

Approximately 90% of all cases of malaria worldwide occur in Africa, and 3,000 African children die each day from its effects.

Enthusiasm: n: strong excitement about something : a strong feeling of active interest in something that you like or enjoy: something causing a feeling of excitement and active interest : a hobby that someone feels enthusiastic about. From Greek enthousiasmos, from enthousiazein to be inspired, irregular from entheos inspired, from en- + theos god. First Known Use: 1603. This word is tinged with fanaticism when applied to religion; "enthusiasts" were seen in a negative light. There is supposed to be a church in England with a plaque in honor of a former vicar “who preached in this church for forty years without enthusiasm” (i.e., fanaticism). A search on Google reveals a reference to a similar plaque in Westminster Abbey.

The new altruistic generation, who place a lot of things before an expanded livelihood, has a new role-model: The pro football player. A recent story had Rashard Mendenhall retiring and writing for "Ballers." Mendenhall is a part of a trend of under-30 players retiring in their primes. Jake Locker, Chris Borland, Anthony Smith, Patrick Willis, Anthony Davis, and Jason Worilds all retired this offseason.

Messier 64: The enormous dust clouds obscuring the near-side of M64's central region are laced with the telltale reddish glow of hydrogen associated with star forming regions. But they are not this galaxy's only peculiar feature. Observations show that M64 is actually composed of two concentric, counter-rotating systems. While all the stars in M64 rotate in the same direction as the interstellar gas in the galaxy's central region, gas in the outer regions, extending to about 40,000 light-years, rotates in the opposite direction. The dusty eye and bizarre rotation is likely the result of a billion year old merger of two different galaxies.

The first Google storage was made from Legos. Google needed an expandable and cheap way to house 10 4GB hard drives.

Ambrose Bierce was born in Horse Cave Creek, Ohio. He was a reporter, writer and professional cynic. He is famous for his Civil War stories ("An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge," "Chickamauga," etc.) but more so for his celebrated aphorisms and definitions. This is his version of the country's unofficial national anthem:

 ... My country, 'tis of thee,
Sweet land of felony,
Of thee I sing --
Land where my fathers fried
Young witches and applied
Whips to the Quaker's hide
And made him spring. . . .

It is said he made Mencken cringe. He died mysteriously and crazily: At age seventy-one, he perhaps died while attempting to get close to Pancho Villa's army in Mexico, perhaps as a suicide in the Grand Canyon.

In 1857, Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal was published. Critics now regard it as one of the most important and influential collection of poetry to come out of the 19th century, and an essential bridge between Romanticism and Modernism. This was the review from Figaro at the time: "The book is a hospital full of all the insanities of the human mind, of all the putresence of the human heart; if only this were done to cure them it would be permissible, but they are incurable."

Sunspots are relatively cool regions where the local magnetic field pokes through the Sun's surface and inhibits heating.

Fermentation is the process by which a living cell obtains energy by breaking down simple sugars and other molecules without using oxygen. It occurs in different chemical sequences in different species of organisms. In alcoholic fermentation, known to humans for at least 7,000 years, the glucose molecule is degraded to two molecules of the two-carbon alcohol, ethanol, and to two molecules of carbon dioxide. So beer making contributes to global warming.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-filter-of-memory-and-motive.html

Contrary to common belief, the Great Wall of China cannot be seen from the moon without aid. This pervasive myth seems to have started in 1893 in the magazine The Century and then resurfaced in 1932 when Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe it Or Not claimed the Great Wall could be seen from the moon—even though space flight was decades away.

With the Obama administration only months away from releasing its “Clean Power Plan,” much debate has focused on the supposed benefits of cutting U.S. greenhouse gas emissions over the next 15 years.

The regulation — enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency — will shutter much of our existing energy grid. New facilities will necessarily cost more and also rely on more expensive energy sources. A study by the National Black Chamber of Commerce estimates this transformation will increase annual electricity costs by $565 billion in the coming years.

Ultimately, these higher costs will be passed on to families in the form of higher electricity bills and higher prices at every store.

"...under my plan ... electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket."--Obama, to the San Francisco Chronicle, 2008.
Are these guys on our side?

The mines of South Africa can descend as far as 12,000 feet and reach temperatures of 130°F. To produce an ounce of gold requires 38 man hours, 1,400 gallons of water, enough electricity to run a large house for ten days, and chemicals such as cyanide, acids, lead, borax, and lime. In order to extract South Africa’s yearly output of 500 tons of gold, nearly 70 million tons of earth are raised and milled.

According to the IG's deputy Timothy Camus, two "lower-graded" employees at the IRS center in Martinsburg, West Virginia, erased 422 computer backup tapes that contained as many as 24,000 emails to and from former IRS official Lois Lerner.  It gets better: the tapes were erased in March 2014, months after congressional investigators requested all of Lerner's emails, and months after many said to simply track down the server back ups.

Dr. Helen Caldicott is co-founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and she is author/editor of Crisis Without End: The Medical and Ecological Consequences of the Fukushima Nuclear Catastrophe, The New Press, September 2014. The highest radiation detected in the Tokyo Metro area was in Saitama with cesium radiation levels detected at 919,000 becquerel (Bq) per square meter, a level almost twice as high as Chernobyl’s “permanent dead zone evacuation limit of 500,000 Bq” (source: Radiation Defense Project). For that reason, Dr. Caldicott strongly advises against travel to Japan and recommends avoiding Japanese food. Even so, post the Fukushima disaster, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton signed an agreement with Japan that the U.S. would continue importing Japanese foodstuff. Therefore, Dr. Caldicott suggests people not vote for Hillary Clinton.

The Supreme Court's approval of the ACA is a surprise--or should be. Roberts writes that the ACA "contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting." Roberts cites a doctrine known as "Chevron deference," a doctrine that agencies charged with administering statutes are entitled to deference when they interpret ambiguous statutory language. Now the courts are obligated to do whatever is required to make a law efficient, regardless of how the law is written. That is a surprising expansion of the court's responsibilities. One gets the feeling that the Court sees itself as an agent of social momentum.

SOCIAL SECURITY: The very first check, for $22.54, was paid in 1940 to a Vermont woman who had paid $22 in Social Security taxes. By the time she died, in 1974, aged 100, she had collected $20,944.42.

One problem in debate/discussion is the vulnerability of some participants and their substitution as a generality for the whole. So the Grand Inquisitor becomes the Catholic Church, a homicidal/suicidal maniac becomes Islam. It is a tempting shorthand. There is an on-line atheist show that introduced their program by explaining the origin of the term "atheist." "Atheist" supposedly is derived from the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, after whom the city of Athens is named. Indeed there is a similarity in the words. But "atheist" stems from the Greek "atheos", meaning "without God" and composed of the privative alpha ("a") denying or lacking what follows, in this case "theos", or God.

In an essay published this month on a Washington Post education blog, a Luther Burbank High School teacher explained she does not want to teach Shakespeare’s works despite his esteemed place in American education because his perspective does not speak well to her ethnically diverse students. “What I worry about is that as long as we continue to cling to ONE (white) MAN’S view of life as he lived it so long ago, we (perhaps unwittingly) promote the notion that other cultural perspectives are less important,” Dana Dusbiber wrote.

An interesting idea from a blogger, Jim Leff, that Americans have a cultural bias that they "know better." They expect to be deferred to, they argue without facts, because they believe they are a "valued individual" from their commercial relationships with vendors. I would argue it is more political, more "equality."

AAAaaaaaannnnnnndddddd........a picture of M64, The Black Eye Galaxy: