Cab Thoughts 2/10/16

"We are here on Earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've NO idea."--W.H. Auden

The American Thanksgiving is a remembrance of an occasion in November, 1621  in Plymouth, Massachusetts where the Pilgrims were joined by ninety Wampanoag warriors at a big harvest dinner. The event is older than that.
The term 'Thanksgiving' originally included serious religious dedication, with several hours spent in church -- and it started long before the famed feast between American Indians and colonists in Massachusetts. In 1519, at St. Augustine, Florida, the Spanish celebrated Thanksgiving with pork and chickpeas brought from the Old World. According to contemporary sources, a harvest dinner shared by Spanish settlers, missionaries, and American Indians took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1590s. At the Berkeley Hundred settlement in Virginia in 1618, the English dined on ham and gave thanks for their safety and survival.



Kim Philby was the son of the orientalist and Islamic convert H. St. John Philby. He served as a high-ranking British intelligence officer and Soviet double agent until his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. Graham Greene said of him, 'He betrayed his country'-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?" Betraying a lover is the same as giving nuclear secrets to a homicidal culture? A response that would admit anyone into the closed society of intellectuals.

Mindlessly pushing the envelope: Teddy Roosevelt went on an expedition to the River of Doubt [in the Amazonian rainforests]. It had been too much for him. Two of his party had died in the jungle, and he, delirious with a spreading infection and a 105-degree malarial fever, came within a whisker of being the third to be buried there. His health would never recover from the adventure.

Altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance or superiority. Anthropologists know it as the Potlatch Effect, named after the custom whereby rival chieftains of Pacific north-west tribes vie with each other in duels of ruinously generous feasts. In extreme cases, bouts of retaliatory entertaining continue until one side is reduced to penury, leaving the winner not much better off. So fly that bridal party to Rio.

In 1946, there were only seventy-four independent countries. Today, there are over two hundred, many of which are very small. On the eve of the First World War, imperialism had reduced the number of independent countries in the world to fifty-nine. But since the advent of decolonization there have been sustained increases in that number.

Artur Ekert, a physicist at the University of Oxford and currently the director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies, proved in 1991 that entangled par­ticles can create a communications channel so secure that not even the sneakiest government surveillance program could listen in.

Walt Whitman was one of America's greatest poets, and perhaps the first that wrote in a definitively American style, that is to say, straightforward and unadorned. At the beginning of the Civil War he was terribly depressed and felt the country--with which he so identified--was deteriorating and him with it. He never joined the army--and was criticized for it. But he visited hospitals constantly, developing a persona that was part of the country's recovery. He ended the war as 'the Good Gray Poet,' a beloved, almost mystical figure who personally embodied for millions of Americans a democratic ideal of sharing and brotherhood that remains undimmed nearly a century and a half later.
 

Days before President Obama flew to France to discuss new ways to regulate U.S. industries to death in the name of climate change, he signed a law that will let companies extract as much minerals and other materials as they want, and keep the profits, from asteroids and the moon. This led to the great line, "Obama likes free markets, so long as they're not on earth."

"Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of 15 million extra acres of forest to burn, an area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million laborers. . .. The capacity of the country's steam engines alone was equivalent to 6 million horses or 40 million men."--Matt Ridley. Imagine the achievement, the productivity, the improvement of British life.

An astonishing turn in history.Trump has not been able to substantively break 30 percent of Rube-publican support since jumping into the race. 30%. That 30 percent is a subset of Republican voters, who make up just 25 percent of the American population. I hope Trump is a tempest in a teapot. Betting sites believe so. His odds are at 8 percent, compared to 55 percent for Hillary Clinton, according to ElectionBettingOdds.com. So why the scrutiny of Trump and not Hillary? In this important election, why is Trump the story? Perhaps it's just the media defending itself.

Who is...Thomas Merton?

George Orwell said, "There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them." Some college courses: "Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dressing," Swarthmore College; "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity," University of Virginia; "Oh, Look, a Chicken!" Belmont University; "Getting Dressed," Princeton University; "Philosophy and Star Trek," Georgetown University.

ISIS is reportedly training pilots in Sirte, Libya, a city just across the Mediterranean Sea from the shores of Italy.

In 1901 Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Having been turned down by a half-dozen publishers, Potter financed this first edition herself -- 250 copies with her own black and white illustrations, given away or sold at a half-penny each because, as she put it, "little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings." Within a few weeks, another 200 copies were needed; within a year, Potter had a deal with a major publisher and orders for the entire first printing of 8,000 copies; by now, forty million copies of Peter Rabbit have been sold, in just about every language. A first edition copy of the 1902 edition can cost $20,000 today; a copy of Potter's own 1901 edition is expected to fetch upwards of $70,000 at an upcoming auction.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/10/conspiracy.html

In 1941 twenty-six-year-old Thomas Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist Order near Bardstown, Kentucky; and on the same day  in 1968 the fifty-three-year-old Merton died in Bangkok, Thailand, from accidental electrocution. Merton's first, two-week visit to the Gethsemani Trappists made an impression: "I had wondered what was holding the country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery if only this one.... This is the only real city in America -- in a desert. It is the axle around which the whole country blindly turns."

Perhaps no industry so beguiled the Civil War veterans with promises of overnight wealth than the oil industry. In astonishing numbers, a ragtag group of demobilized soldiers, many still in uniform and carrying knapsacks and rifles, migrated to northwest Pennsylvania. The potential money to be made was irresistible, whether in drilling or in auxiliary services; people could charge two or three times as mush as they dared to ask in the city. Ida Tarbell speculated that 'this little corner of Pennsylvania absorbed a larger portion of men probably than any other spot in the United States. There were lieutenants and captains and majors -- even generals -- scattered all over the field. ' --Titan by Ron Chernow

A quote from Facebook on societal lunatics: "These types of problems involve such unsystematic, infrequent, and inexplicable actions that no one can anticipate and preempt them. Lighting will strike people sometimes; nothing can be done about it except to advise people to stay inside during thunder storms and in no event to go outside carrying an iron rod."

Ulm is a city in the federal German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the River Danube. Its population is estimated at almost 120,000 (2015). Einstein was born there. In medieval times the town motto was: 'The people of Ulm are mathematicians.' 

Antebellum adj: belonging to a period before any war, but usually used in reference to the Civil War. It comes from the Latin phrase ante bellum, literally "before the war" as "bellum" means "war." Bellicose is also from Latin bellum and a near synonym is belligerent, from the same Latin noun. There can be some confusion here as "bell" has some positive connotations. You may wonder if bellum is connected to the Latin bellus meaning "pretty, handsome," which gives us the names Bella or Isabella, as well as belle "a beautiful woman" but there is no connection. Nor is there a connection to  cerebellum for here the word is the diminutive of cerebrum. "Ell" is added to cerebrum as "cerebellum,"  the same idea as "ito" in Spanish. (e.g. Tacito is a little version of a Taco)."Cerebrum" is the Latin word for brain, and so the best translation for "cerebellum" would be "little brain."
 

Whales belong to the order cetacean, meaning they are mammals that are fully adapted to aquatic life. Like dolphins and porpoises, whales are believed to have descended from land animals that returned to the water roughly 50 million years ago after living millions of years on land.

A coffle is 'a train of men or beasts fastened together,' says the Oxford English Dictionary, and indeed Louis Hughes referred to the coffle he marched in as 'a herd.' Unsurprisingly, the word comes from the Arabic qāfilah, meaning 'caravan,' recalling the overland slave trade that existed across the desert from sub-Saharan Africa to the greater Islamic world centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

AAAaaaaannnnndddddd.....a chart: (or maybe not)