Cab Thoughts 5/14/16

Our shouting is louder than our actions, / Our swords are taller than us, / This is our tragedy. / In short / We wear the cape of civilization / But our souls live in the stone age. -Nizar Qabbani, poet and diplomat (21 Mar 1923-1998
 

 

 

On March22, 1982, Clint Malarchuk survived a life-threatening injury during a 1989 NHL game when St. Louis Blues player Steve Tuttle's skate blade slashed his jugular vein, causing immediate massive blood loss. He was saved by the trainer, Jim Pizzutelli, a former Army medic who had served in Vietnam, who compressed the vessel until it could be controlled by a physician who somehow had the tools to do so. Eleven fans fainted, two more suffered heart attacks and three players vomited on the ice. Two men have died from on-ice injuries in NHL,  Howie Morenz (1937) and Bill Masterton (1968). 

An interesting question is that freedom allows the incompetent decision-maker to err. Should we protect him from his error? And, if he votes for a leader and protector, won't he risk the same incompetence in the voting booth as he does in his daily life?

 

The facts revealed in our study should change views. Inequality, properly measured, is extremely high, but is far lower than generally believed. The reason is that our fiscal system, properly measured, is highly progressive. And, via our high marginal taxes, we are providing significant incentives to Americans to work less and earn less than they might otherwise.--Economists Alan Auerbach and Laurence Kotlikoff 

Pictographs are pictures which resemble what they signify. Ideograms are symbols which represent ideas.

In a "No dogs allowed" sign, the dog illustration is a pictogram. The red circle and bar is an ideogram representing the idea of "no" or "not allowed".

A rebus is often seen as a puzzle or game. But the rebus is a developmental stage of written language. In essence a rebus is a message spelled out in pictures that represents sounds rather than the things they are pictures of. For example the picture of an eye, a bee, and a leaf can be put together to form the English rebus meaning “I be-lieve”, which has nothing to do with eyes, bees or leaves. In the beginning, Ancient Egyptian writing relied heavily on pictographic signs representing concrete objects. Words which cannot be represented easily by means of a picture, such as proper names, ideas and function words, were difficult to write. The rebus principle provided the means to overcome this limitation. Fully developed hieroglyphs read in rebus fashion were in use at Abydos in Ancient Egypt as early as 3400 BC.

A famous Ancient Egyptian rebus statue of Ramses II consists of three hieroglyphic elements. A large falcon representing Horus the sun god – RA, who is standing behind a sitting child – MES, and the child is holding a sedge plant stalk in his left hand – SU. Remember we are not looking at these hieroglyphs from the perspective phonograms. These three items compose the rebus RA-MES-SU or as we prefer Ramesses. (Donald Frazer)

It is interesting that this type of phonetic writing is making a comeback through, of all things, the advanced technology of messaging.

 

Louis L'Amour wrote 113 books, 260 million copies of which have been sold worldwide in dozens of languages, and thirty of which have been turned into movies.

 

One of the central tenets of existentialist thinking – especially Sartre’s – is the belief that ‘human existence [is] different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free.’ Where this freedom comes from and how it resists all the elements of daily living is a bit vague.

This episode is instructive: It is described in Carole Seymour-Jones’s A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2008), in which, during a visit to Moscow in 1962, Sartre became involved in a relationship with a KGB agent. As the agent, Lena Zonina, wrote in a report at the time, the philosopher’s visit was ‘set up in such a way as to give him a complete illusion that he meets with anyone he wants to meet, that he chooses the subjects for conversation, and that he works out his own programme rather than follows one imposed on him’. Sartre was taken in by the deception, falling in love with Zonina, an attractive and highly intelligent but ailing and vulnerable woman who was herself acting under severe constraint, proposing marriage to her and visiting the Soviet Union on no fewer than eight occasions within four years in order to be with her. With Sartre unwilling to make a decisive break with de Beauvoir and the philosopher’s usefulness to the Soviet cause waning, the relationship came to an end. But the carefully engineered romance seems to have served its purpose in bolstering Sartre’s belief that communism ‘must be judged by its intentions and not its actions’.

 

Who is...Leonard Woolf?

 

One of the clichés that has characterized Keynes is his remark to the effect that in the long run we are all dead. This may encapsulate much of modern thought. The emphasis is on the short run, today, not tomorrow.  Don’t worry about the long run. You’ll be dead then. But there is a lot more. The emphasis is upon the single individual and his life. There is no responsibility he has to anyone after his death. He brings no future to the period beyond his own existence. That is a significant aberration, unusual in history, I think. I wonder if it is a particular affliction of the childless and, as such, is much more common.

Disagreement is rising on the Fed, according to Jon Hilsenrath of the WSJ, between those on the Fed who believed that risks to the economy were materializing and those who wanted to wait and see. Either way, the Fed is confused and their 4-hikes in 2016 meme is disappearing fast. But they have models, right?

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/05/forest-and-trees-of-politics.html

The labor force participation rate for men has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded.

 

Just when it seemed that the Syria's proxy war would remain confined within the "comfortable" realm of conventional weaponry, Reuters gave the first hint of a potential, and radioactive escalation, when it reported that Iraq is searching for "highly dangerous" radioactive material stolen last year.

 

In 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used handpress; a month later, it was delivered to Hogarth House, their West London home, and the Hogarth Press was born. Over the next three decades the Woolfs would publish 525 titles, many of them by other influential modernists -- Mansfield, Forster, Eliot -- and most of them collector's items today.

 

The Pope's comment on Trump was pretty subtle for a second or third language; he turned a specific question into an aphorism. It sounded like a bon mot from the French Court. Of course it was taken at literal value by the less-than-subtle Americans and everyone lost their minds. 

 

From The American College of Pediatricians article "Gender Ideology Harms Children" :

Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health — not genetic markers of a disorder.

No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.

Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.

Reversible or not, puberty-blocking hormones induce a state of disease — the absence of puberty — and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.

According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT — affirming countries. What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health? 

Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.

Rebus: noun: A representation of a word or phrase using pictures, symbols, letters, etc., pictures that represents sounds rather than the things they are pictures of. From Latin rebus (by things), from res (thing). Earliest documented use: 1605.

use: “Daniel Clowes’s narratives are full of anagrams and rebuses, clues (a wand, an eye, a movie camera) to an underlying mystery that is never solved.”Tad Friend; Comics from Underground; The New Yorker; Jul 30, 2001.
Every bottle cap from a bottle of Lone Star beer (the National Beer of Texas) contains a rebus.

 

There is an interesting economic notion called "on the margin." For a traditional example that economists use to illustrate the concept, consider: Diamonds have a higher market price than water, even though diamonds are mostly valued because they look pretty whereas water is essential to life. The explanation is that on the margin an extra diamond brings far more satisfaction than an extra gallon of water.

 

Paul Krugman and other climate change alarmists have to walk a very fine line: On the one hand, they need to scare the heck out of Americans, warning them that utter disaster awaits if we don’t support policies to make energy more expensive. On the other hand, the climate alarmists have to be really optimistic, promising Americans that if they would just let the government get more power and more money, then all of a sudden the climate catastrophe disappears with surprisingly little pain. (from Murphy, the economist not the dog.)

 

AAAaaaaannnnnnddddddd......a picture, when galaxies attack:

2016 February 3

                       M81 versus M82