Cab Thoughts 10/31/15

"If we do not allow free-thinking in chemistry and biology, why should we allow it in morals and politics?"--Comte

In 1943, 26-year-old poet Robert Lowell was sentenced to jail for a year for evading the draft. Lowell refused to be drafted because he objected to saturation bombing in Europe and other Allied tactics. He served the term in New York's West Street jail. He had answered earlier draft calls willingly, and had even tried to enlist; on all occasions he had been turned down because of poor eyesight. There was every reason to think that he would be turned down again at his upcoming recall examination.

The $9 trillion drop in combined market cap between the MSCI All World index and Chinese stocks, is the second highest ever, surpassed only by the $13 plunge in global market capitalization in late 2008.

Immigrant migrations have different causes and the causes in Europe are wars. The homicidal xenophobes from militant Islam are one factor. 11 million Syrians have fled or been driven from their homes in that country's civil war since it started in 2011. The French hold the Americans responsible for one element: Libya. Since the ill-advised destabilization of Libya, France has been the preferred sanctuary for refugees from the resulting Libyan chaos. The U.N. says there are 60 million people displaced worldwide - the most since the U.N. started keeping records and the most since WWII.
In the U.S. the migrations are more complex. More than half of this nation's immigrants receive some kind of government welfare, a figure that's far higher than the native-born population.

Who is...William Marshall?

The Magna Carta of 1215 was a true intellectual revolution in the relationship between leaders and citizens but it began to fade in importance and, when John died, was not a relevant document. It was rescued by none other than William the Marshall who wanted to use it to strengthen the bond between the nobles and the new young king, Henry III. The reissued Charter played a crucial part in safeguarding the throne of the young Henry III and in ensuring the survival of the Angevin dynasty itself. It became the prototype for the broader pattern of reform in England and it placed Magna Carta at the center of that process of negotiation and careful compromise. 

When the Byzantine Christian emperor Basil defeated the Bulgarians in 1014, he had fifteen thousand Bulgarian war captives blinded. He left one man out of each hundred with one eye in order that he might lead the other ninety-nine homeward and thereby spread the terror.

An interesting site: http://www.theflightdeal.com/

At 10 in the morning on February 11th, 1963, the Beatles gathered at Abbey Road studios in London to make a debut album. Twelve hours later, they'd done it. the album was Please Please Me, contained 10 songs, including some of their most indelible early performances: 'I Saw Her Standing There,' 'There's a Place,' 'Do You Want to Know a Secret,' 'Baby It's You.' The final, "Twist and Shout," was added on at the end of the day. It took 12 hours and cost about 400 pounds. It is said to be the most natural production of the Beatles, raw and talent-laden, before they became sophisticated performers.

Angelina Jolie has resigned from the landmine clearing charity made famous by Princess Diana in a row over trustees being paid as much as 500 British pounds a day.

In the founding myth of the city of Rome, the twins Romulus and Remus established the city on the banks of the Tiber River in roughly 750 BCE and invited the outcasts of society to be its first citizens. there was a certain truth there. Rome was not produced by a single ethnically homogeneous people. Over the years and then the centuries, much of Rome's population came from outside Italy -- this even included some of the later emperors, such as Hadrian, who was Spanish, and writers like Columella, Seneca, and Martial, also Spanish-born. Celts, Arabs, Jews, and Greeks, among others, were included under the wide umbrella of Romanitas. This was the inevitable result of an imperial system that constantly expanded and frequently accepted the peoples of conquered countries as Roman citizens. Not until the end of the first century B.C. with the reign of Augustus, does a distinctively 'Roman' art, an identifiable 'Roman' cultural ideal, appear.

Jejune: adj: 1. without interest or significance; dull; insipid: a jejune novel. 2. juvenile; immature; childish: jejune behavior. Jejune comes from the Latin word jējūnus meaning "empty, poor, mean."

In 1920 the Psychologist Edward Thorndike, a lecturer at the Columbia School of Education, staged an experiment in which he asked two U.S. Army Air Service commanders who had recently returned from the Great War to evaluate their platoons of airmen according to the attractiveness of their outward appearance -- neatness, voice, physique, bearing, and 'energy.' Then he asked them to assess the same set of aviators according to their 'inner' qualities of personality and character -- among which he included intellect, dependability, loyalty, selflessness, and leadership skills.
In his seminal paper ''A Constant Error in Psychological Ratings,' Thorndike reported that the aviators who were rated highly on their external qualities were 33 percent more likely to receive favorable judgments from their officers when it came to their supposed 'inner,' psychological qualities, including their potential as future leaders. Physical attractiveness, in other words, embellished these men with added credibility. 'The correlations,' wrote Thorndike, 'were too high and too even.' The psychologist called this phenomenon the halo effect.

"'Beauty is truth, truth beauty,' - that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."--Keats

Or: "What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness. -Leo Tolstoy, novelist and philosopher (1828-1910)
 
Lula Mae Wright, the mother of the legendary Motown singer and songwriter Stevie Wonder, was born in Hurtsboro, Alabama in 1930. Her teenage mother gave her away when she was six months old, and she later lived from couch to couch before marrying a man who forced her into prostitution.

September 3rd was the anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, a treaty that gave independence to the United States and defined its boundaries. You would think it would be celebrated.

It was also the anniversary of one of modern man's creepier episodes, the ending of the siege of Beslan. The Heroes of Beslan were finished off by Russian troops after the Heroes successfully attacked and captured a grade school. A grade school. In deference to one of modern society's weirder customs, Shamil Basayev, a militant Islamist and leader of the Chechen separatist movement, claimed responsibility for the Beslan school siege. 331 people were killed as a result of the siege, 186 of them children, and over 700 more individuals were injured. He did not comment on the choice of the attack target but it must have been that there was no nunnery available.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/12/bond-carol-bond.html

In the years after World War II, the Allies were concerned that the fragile economies of Germany and Japan would cause them to fall under the influence of the Soviet Union or Communist China. As a result, they took extraordinary steps to assist these economies -- for example, from 1947 to 1953, the U.S. and its Allies forgave essentially all of Germany's external debt, an amount estimated at 280% of Germany's GDP. Similarly, the U.S. gave Japan preferential status in trade and economic support, a strategy that worked so well that by 1970s, the U.S. considered Japan an economic threat and sought to open its doors to China as a counterbalance.

Any time you are overwhelmed with lawyers and juries in the world, Google "trial by ordeal," one of the precursors of modern justice.

The teachings of Confucius shape the daily lives of well over 1.6 billion people today, nearly a quarter of the world's population -- in a huge geographic swath stretching from northern Japan down to Java in Indonesia. Only Christianity can claim to hold greater sway over modern global culture. The most famous text associated with him, the Analects, consists, for the most part, of snippets of conversations he had with his students while instructing them on virtue, good government, interpersonal relations, ethics, and history. What Confucius taught was the wisdom of Chinese antiquity, a timeless code of morality and gracious vision of humanity. Many modern East Asians, exposed to Western ideas on civil liberties and political freedom, have perceived Confucius as an impediment to democracy and human rights in the region.

Humiliated repeatedly on medieval battlefields by armies from Pisa, Siena and Lucca, the Republic of Florence later employed its artist-scientists to combine with its soldiers to defeat the enemy by means of ingenious engineering. Already famous for his as yet uncompleted dome, Brunelleschi was dispatched in 1430 to Lucca, where he began to divert the River Serchio so as to flood the land around the city and force it to surrender. The still more ingenious Lucchesi, however, sallied out and breached Brunelleschi's new canal, flooding the plain in an unexpected way so that it demolished a dam built by the architect and swamped the Florentine camp. Seventy years later, a new republic tried a similar tactic, although this time the plan was to divert the River Arno away from Pisa so as to leave that city without water. The engineer employed to design the project was Leonardo da Vinci, an even more versatile figure than Brunelleschi, but his miscalculations with his canal were as embarrassing as his predecessor's. On this occasion the waterway was destroyed not by the defenders but by a storm which collapsed its walls. 

The House Agriculture Committee held a hearing on the government's official Dietary Guidelines, that decades of government warnings about whole milk may have been in error. 

"In fact, research published in recent years indicates that the opposite might be true: millions might have been better off had they stuck with whole milk. Scientists who tallied diet and health records for several thousand patients over ten years found, for example, that contrary to the government advice, people who consumed more milk fat had lower incidence of heart disease.
By warning people against full-fat dairy foods, the U.S. is "losing a huge opportunity for the prevention of disease," said Marcia Otto, an assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Texas, and the lead author of large studies published in 2012 and 2013, which were funded by government and academic institutions, not the industry. "What we have learned over the last decade is that certain foods that are high in fat seem to be beneficial." (WashPo)

AAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddd........a graph: