Cab Thoughts 3/26/16

"Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence." -Napoleon Bonaparte

In 1728 John Gay's The Beggar's Opera opened in London. Its satire and singability made it a first-run sell-out, a cultural craze across England, the most produced play of the 18th century, and the original "ballad opera," first in the Gilbert and Sullivan line.  Brecht and Weill remade it as The Threepenny Opera, and giving Bobby Darin his signature tune: "Oh the shark has pretty teeth, dear / And he shows them pearly white. . . ." Gay was buried in Poet's Corner, Westminster Abbey, his self-written epitaph marking the spot and continuing the worldview:

Life is a jest; and all things show it.
I thought so once, but now I know it.

St. Michael's Flags in Manchester is a small park where allegedly forty thousand people, most of them cot­ton workers, lie buried in unmarked graves, one on top of the other, 'an almost industrial process of burying the dead.' Ellen Hootton was an exceptions. Unlike millions of others, she entered the histori­cal record when in June 1833 she was called before His Majesty's Factory Inquiry Commission, which was charged with investigating child labor in British textile mills. Though only ten when she appeared before the committee and frightened, she was already a seasoned worker, a two-year veteran of the cotton mill. Ellen had drawn public attention because a group of middle-class Manchester activists concerned with labor condi­tions in the factories sprouting in and around their city had sought to use her case to highlight the abuse of children. They asserted that she was a child slave, forced to work not just in metaphorical chains, but in real ones, penalized by a brutal overseer. Her testimony was riveting and pathetic. It was as if poverty had become industrialized.

Every four seconds, Lee Child (the Reacher novels) sells a book somewhere in the world. His daily regimen includes 26 cigarettes, 19 cups of coffee, and writing 2,000 words. He ranks with Stephen King, James Patterson and J.K. Rowling as one of the world’s bestselling novelists.

As in the traditional folktale, and as in the Christopher Marlowe play, Goethe’s Faust sells his soul to the Devil, Mephistopheles. But in Goethe’s version what he asks in exchange is not magic powers or supernatural knowledge. It is, rather, experience—a life lived at fever pitch, “a frenzied round of agonizing joy, / Of loving hate, of stimulating discontent.” The condition of his deal is that the Devil may take his soul whenever he grows too contented with life: “If I should bid the passing moment stay, or try / To hold its fleeting beauty, then you may / Cast me in chains and carry me away.”

The central issue of Goethe’s life and work is on what terms is life worth living? For Faust, as for Werther before him, ordinary existence is flavorless and intolerable; like an alcoholic, he demands ever-stronger draughts of emotional intoxication. Above all, he demands the intoxication of love, and he finds it with Gretchen, an innocent and virtuous young girl, whom he seduces and abandons. Not until the end of the play, when Faust returns to find Gretchen in prison for infanticide, and on the edge of madness, does he realize how selfish his quest for experience has been. A heavenly voice announces that Gretchen will be saved—Goethe, no moralist when it comes to sex, can forgive her for being carried away by passion. But there is no salvation for Faust, whose crime is the one transgression that Goethe can never forgive—solipsism, the refusal to acknowledge the full reality of other people.--Adam Kirsch in "The New Yorker"

Who is....Sherwood Anderson?

From The Horse by Wendy Williams writing on the temperature increase during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) of 56 million years ago, in which global temperatures rose at least 5°C for 200,000 years: "It's hard for us to imagine in our twenty-first-century world, where we accept the cruel reality of sweltering summers and freezing winters, but for a good deal of Earth's history, including most of the Eocene, the planet enjoyed fairly uniform temperatures. For example, during the Eocene, the world north of the Arctic Circle was so warm that crocodiles flourished there. There were no ice caps, of course, and so much freshwater flowed into the Arctic Ocean that a layer of fresh­water sat like a lens over the salt water. The freshwater Azolla fern was plentiful. Forests of redwoods and walnut trees grew there. Pale­ontologists have found the remains of giant ants usually associated with the tropics."

So is global warming mainly a risk for real estate prices?

Corn dextrin, a common thickener used in junk food, is also the glue on envelopes and postage stamps.

All this printed money from Quantitative Easing was supposed to fill the financial system and cause hyperinflation. But people did not lend because they expected rates to rise. It ended up deposited as excess reserves back at the Fed. Years later, people theorized that quantitative easing actually caused the opposite to happen: deflation. Virtually every economic model was wrong. We did not get inflation… of goods and services. Interestingly, though, we got inflation of financial asset prices. Stocks and bonds went up, as well as real estate—even art. Great, but... not everybody owns stocks, usually only people with some money to invest buy assets. So, as all the research shows, the rich have gotten richer, and the poor have gotten poorer. Because of QE. Inequality has increased, which has brought about political unrest.

Unrest has produced populism. But if Bernie Sanders were to become president, he would double the debt overnight. If it were Trump, probably the same thing—we are talking about a guy who has spent his entire career defeating creditors.

Populists are great for gold prices.

Speaking of gold, $60 million treasure of gold plundered by Coronado is believed to be buried on an 80-acre pasture at the Sems Ranch near Clyde, Texas.

Globalization is simply the name of economic competition that transcends political borders; it is economically identical, in its nature and in its effects, to competition that occurs exclusively within political borders. Unions fight Right to Work laws to limit such competition within their borders, place tariffs to fight competition outside their borders. Violence is often the result when they fail, riots within borders, war without.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/08/irony-is-overrated-claudia-black.html

Jury nullification occurs when a jury believes a defendant is guilty but renders a “not guilty” verdict because it regards the relevant law as unjust.

John Adams said about jurors, “It is not only his right, but his duty … to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court.” It has been said that such an attitude prevailed in the pre-Revolution period when English law was thwarted in the colonies because it was felt the individual was guilty of violating the law but that the law was wrong. Conscience is a difficult bellwether when the culture does not have common ground. How would someone advocating jihad vote on a matter of terrorism, for example.  

Unlike other animals, wolves have a variety of distinctive facial expressions they use to communicate and maintain pack unity.

Instead of relying on debatable surface-temperature information, consider instead readings in the free atmosphere (technically, the lower troposphere) taken by two independent sensors: satellite sounders and weather balloons. As has been shown repeatedly by University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy, since late 1978 (when the satellite record begins), the rate of warming in the satellite-sensed data is barely a third of what it was supposed to have been, according to the large family of global climate models now in existence. Balloon data, averaged over the four extant data sets, shows the same. It is therefore probably prudent to cut by 50% the modeled temperature forecasts for the rest of this century.--Michaels

When Clinton took office, he froze discretionary spending. A Democrat froze spending. When the Rube-publicans took the House, they, with Clinton, balanced the budget. (I think Kasick was the point man.) There was a lot of anxiety then about the deficit and the debt. Has anyone made that a part of their candidacy now? Is the debt and deficit less of a problem?

Bellwether: noun: a wether or other male sheep that leads the flock, usually bearing a bell; a person or thing that assumes the leadership or forefront, as of a profession or industry: "Paris is a bellwether of the fashion industry.";  person or thing that shows the existence or direction of a trend; index; a person who leads a mob, mutiny, conspiracy, or the like; ringleader. ety: Middle English belle 'bell' + wether 'castrated male sheep'

Stephen Hawking has recently commented about technology creating mass unemployment and causing dangerous degrees of economic inequality in the absence of government-enforced wealth “redistribution." This is close to asking the average guy about an event horizon. Acknowledged excellence in one field does not imply acknowledged excellence in another. This was proof of the theory.

I read the Feast of Crows. Very different than the HBO story-line. Some paths have been ignored--for focus, I believe--while others just written over. I now have parallel story lines in my head and it is very unnerving. It's like I have been experiencing several multi-universes simultaneously. I don't know how Martin keeps the story lines straight.

Toyota, the world’s largest auto maker, is hoping female manga characters will draw customers to its new Prius hybrid and update its generally conservative image. 

The Obama administration has proposed HomeReady, a new mortgage program largely targeting high-risk immigrants. Writes Investors.com: “for the first time (HomeReady) lets lenders qualify borrowers by counting income from nonborrowers living in the household." So the person counted on contributing to the mortgage payment is not responsible for the loan. It is called an "alternative mortgage." So we just change "subprime" to "alternative" and everything will be OK.

There is a book out called Dark Money, about the Koch brothers. It is a strange topic. The Kochs are pro-gay marriage. They favor liberal immigration policies. They are passionate non-interventionists when it comes to foreign policy. They are against the drug war and are spending a bundle on dismantling so-called “mass-incarceration” policies. So, how are they the Radical Right? The answer is probably they are outspoken opponents of top-down government mandated change, a real enemy of the powers-that-be. Let's call them "Elitist deniers."

A fund of investments that would profit from global warming: 

• Buying land in the upper Midwest and inland Canada (the price of which will rise significantly if global temperatures make much of the South, as well as coastal areas, quite unpleasant places to live)?

• Investing in pharmaceutical companies that own patents that extend beyond 2025 on medicines to treat illnesses that are especially prevalent in the tropics and subtropics?

• Shorting shares of companies that specialize in attracting tourists to subtropical and tropical destinations, especially those on or near seacoasts?

One popular and recurring concern is the fear that immoral people might get control of the government. The Kochs, if we agree they are bad guys, might get their evil hands on the levers and do egocentrically motivated damage to the rest of us. But isn't this a risk inherent to any government? And isn't the solution to limit the potential damage by limiting the government power in the first place, not counting on the random and unpredictable election of a good guy?

Vampires, being dead, generate no warmth. Consequently they can not activate heat sensitive sensors. So, when you see an elevator operator, be alert that he may be there because many clients in the building may not be able to activate the heat sensitive floor selectors.

An indicator of the health of the republic might be seen in the current changes in the Nigerian take of the Spanish Prisoner scam. People laugh at these letters with their misspellings and poor English but, apparently, these errors are purposeful. They are created to make obvious the scam to all but the dumbest people. Apparently so many people respond that the scammers cannot get to all of them. Consequently they try to winnow the pool of targets down to the most likely to continue.

Hemingway's first book, the story collection In Our Time, had been published by Boni Liveright the previous autumn, under a contract that granted them an option on his next three books. Hemingway was a rising star with the finished first draft of The Sun Also Rises in his pocket, along with tempting offers from other publishers -- Scribners, Knopf and Harcourt, Brace. His only way around Horace Liveright was to get him to reject his next manuscript. Hemingway's solution was to submit The Torrents of Spring, a ninety-page satire which he knocked off in eleven days. This aimed at a variety of targets, but chief among them was Sherwood Anderson and the writing style of the "Chicago School" -- in Hemingway's view, representative of the worst in puffed-up, lyrical romanticism. Anderson was a leading author for Boni & Liveright, and Hemingway knew that they wouldn't dare publish his slap at him.

Aaaaaaannnnddddd........light pillars, reflected sunlight off ice crystals:

Light Pillars over Alaska