Cab Thoughts 8/5/15

"I shot eighteen elephants one month, God save my soul."--Hemingway's son, Greg.

 

 

The National Association of Realtors that sell the homes formed a big organization called the Coalition for Sensible Housing Policy to push the noble goal of helping first-time homebuyers. The lobbying efforts paid off. The 20% down payment requirement has disappeared and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac will now guarantee some loans with down payments of as little as 3%. This selfish thinking will bring us to the same situation as occurred in 2008, all under the guise of altruism.

Good news: Insects such as termites and ants provide 10% of the protein consumed worldwide. Where insects are an integral part of a diet, they contribute as much as 40% of protein.

Twenty years ago the screwball, which broke away from the pitcher's motion (right-hander's screwball breaks to the right). You never hear of a screwball now. It is now the circle-change which does exactly the same thing.

Purity is stalking the land. It is unforgiving. And unsympathetic to context and history. Race relations so far has been dominant. The most bigoted organizations in the history of mankind would include the American armed forces and the National Baseball League. Shouldn't we just get rid of them? Or at least take their awards away?

 

We conducted two great natural experiments in the 20th century to see if geography mattered more than institutions. We took all the Germans, we divided them roughly in two, and we gave the ones in the East communism, and you see the result. Within an incredibly short period of time, people living in the German Democratic Republic produced Trabants, the Trabbi, one of the world's worst ever cars, while people in the West produced the Mercedes Benz. If you still don't believe me, we conducted the experiment also in the Korean Peninsula. And we decided we'd take Koreans in roughly the same geographical place with, notice, the same basic traditional culture, and we divided them in two, and we gave the Northerners communism. And the result is an even bigger divergence in a very short space of time than happened in Germany. Not a big divergence in terms of uniform design for border guards admittedly, but in almost every other respect, it's a huge divergence. Which leads me to think that neither geography nor national character, popular explanations for this kind of thing, are really significant. --Niall Ferguson

Who is...Tecumseh?


Not because he knows so much, but because he knows how much he would have to know in order to interfere successfully, and because he knows that he will never know all the relevant circumstances, it would seem that the economist should refrain from recommending isolated acts of interference even in conditions in which the theory tells him that they may sometimes be beneficial.--Hayek



When McDonald's opened an outlet in Kuwait shortly after the end of the Gulf War, the line of cars waiting to eat there was seven miles long.

 

In 1809, Tecumseh began a concerted campaign to persuade the Indians of the Old Northwest and Deep South to unite and resist the advances of the white Europeans in the East. By 1810, he had organized the Ohio Valley Confederacy, which united Indians from the Shawnee, Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Winnebago, Menominee, Ottawa, and Wyandot nations.When the War of 1812 began the following year, Tecumseh immediately marshaled what remained of his army to aid the British. Commissioned a brigadier general, he proved an effective ally and played a key role in the British capture of Detroit and other battles. When the tide of war turned in the American favor, Tecumseh’s fortunes went down with those of the British. On October 5, 1813, he was killed during Battle of the Thames. His Ohio Valley Confederacy and vision of Indian unity died with him.
Much of the Indian behavior in the War of 1812 stimulated the new Americans to see them as a fifth column, willing to aid foreign invaders.

 

When Hemingway died, he had not seen or spoken to his son, Greg, in ten years. In his biography, Greg writes of the time Hemingway congratulated him for his fine attempt at a short story, which Greg had cribbed word for word from Turgenev -- one of the masters his father prided himself on knowing.



Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/04/putin-redux.html

 

In Bennis vs. Michigan Chief Justice Rehnquist explains that the Constitution permits Michigan to use civil forfeiture to strip Tina Bennis of her ownership of an automobile in which her husband John had a tryst with a prostitute. Civil forfeiture allows government to take property from someone without convicting that someone of a crime. While originally prohibited by the Constitution, forfeiture of the properties of domestic citizens did not become widespread until Prohibition, when it was used to punish bootleggers smuggling alcohol.

 

The Amazon rainforest is home to one third of the planet’s land species.



School-based health clinics in at least 13 Seattle-area public high schools and middle schools offer long-acting reversible contraceptives (LARCs), including IUDs and hormonal implants, to students in sixth-grade and above at no cost, according to Washington State officials. But no candy or Coca-Cola. In an email exchange with the Washington State Health Care Authority and CNSNews.com, a Take Charge spokesperson acknowledged that underage students are eligible for a “full array of covered family planning services” at school-based clinics if their parents meet the program’s requirements. Take Charge added that “a student who does not want their parents to know they are seeking reproductive health services is allowed to apply for Take Charge using their own income, and if they are insured under their parents’ plan, the insurance would not be billed.”



There is a "sugar daddy" site that claims 4.5 million members. Since 2009, the number of student sugar babies has increased by 1,200%!: https://www.seekingarrangement.com/

 

"It is a cruel mortification, searching for what is instructive in the history of past times, to find that the exploits of conquerors who have desolated the earth, and the freaks of tyrants who have rendered nations unhappy, are recorded with minute and often disgusting accuracy, while the discovery of useful arts, and the progress of the most beneficial branches of commerce, are passed over in silence, and suffered to sink into oblivion."--John Kenyon’s 1983 volume, The History Men


In the 1950s 1 in 20 people needed occupational licenses. Now it is 1 in 3.



Mesmerism was developed by Franz Anton Mesmer.  It used hypnotic trances to heal people. In 1838 Charles Dickens attended several lectures on the subject including some by John Elliotson, the professor of clinical medicine who introduced the stethoscope to England.  He also had campaigned against corrupt medical practices.  Despite his many accomplishments Elliotson was forced to resign his teaching position in 1839 because of a scandal regarding mesmerism. In 1849 John Leech, a friend of Dickens, suffered an injury and was plagued with post-concussion type symptoms. Using mesmerism, Dickens was said to have cured him.Also said to have benefited from his mesmeric intervention was Augusta de la Rue who suffered from extreme anxiety with noticeable facial tics or spasms.



A video game advertized as "Be the Batman" is rated "M" for "Mature."

 

Lawrence Herkimer, who was frequently referred to as the grandfather of modern cheerleading or simply "Mr. Cheerleader," invented (and patented) the pompom has died. He came up with an iconic cheerleading leap, the "Herkie jump," that remains a staple of cheering squads to this day. And his camps — the first opened in Huntsville, Texas, in 1948 — train tens of thousands of would-be cheerleaders a year.



12,000 men died in the British prison ships during the Revolutionary War. Smallpox was a big factor with a 30% mortality.



AAAAaaaaannnnnndddddddd.....a graph:
The labor force participation rate for college graduates has been on a relentless downtrend.