Cab Thoughts 8/13/16

One ought, every day at least, to hear a little song, read a good poem, see a fine picture and, if it were possible, speak a few reasonable words. -Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, poet, dramatist, novelist, and philosopher (1749-1832)


Judge Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District Court in Brownsville accused the Justice Department lawyers of lying to him during arguments in the case, and he barred them from appearing in his courtroom. From an article in the NYT on May, 16, 2016 titled "Federal Judges in Texas Demands Justice Dept. Lawyers Take Ethics Class." The Feds are lying to each other. Lawyers are lying to judges.

A petition has appeared at Yale exhorting the college to “decolonize” its English curriculum. Their demands: abolish the major English poets and revise the remaining requirements “to deliberately include literatures relating to gender, race, sexuality, ableism, and ethnicity.” “It is your responsibility as educators to listen to student voices,” the letter concludes. “We have spoken. We are speaking. Pay attention.”

Split infinitive aside, this is a peculiar request.  First, there are a lot of "alternative" options in the curriculum. In addition to featuring names like Elizabeth Bishop and Ralph Ellison in its survey classes, the course catalog presents such titles as “Women Writers from the Restoration to Romanticism,” “Race and Gender in American Literature,” “American Artists and the African American Book,” “The Spectacle of Disability,” “Asian American Literature,” “Chaucer and Discourses of Dissent,” “Postcolonial World Literature: 1945-present,” “Black Literature and U.S. Liberalism.” This does not include the cross listings with the comparative literature; American studies; and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies departments. But more important, the demands ask for the exclusion of accomplished poets from the English canon because of the lack of representation of others. (an exclusion they took no part of.)

One element that will never enter this debate is "quality." In these discussions quantity always trumps quality. To a certain mind, numbers always win.

Leftists are as predictably nostalgic for dying firms as they are hostile to whatever firms are today thriving and most profitable, applauding and praising only firms that are currently in decline while despising and criticizing firms that are currently at their peak. In some respects, they support inefficiency and failure and oppose efficiency and success. This strange behavior may encourage Mrs. Clinton when president to underwrite coal companies.

People have made lists of "honest national governments." Hierarchies of them. 170 countries ranked from declining honesty. Somehow the Scandinavians do well on such lists. If you take one of these lists and separate out the top 30 in perceived honesty, you would have under that group only 14% of the world's population. So 86% of the world's population is governed by people on the low side of trustworthiness. That is quite a vision of the world.

What is....gluten?

What we measure--that is, what we think is a good metric for what we want to achieve--is crucial to analysis. If we measure academic achievement by the issuance of a college degree, but the process of earning that degree does not measure real student learning, then what are we measuring with college diplomas? What we’re really measuring is the students’ ability to navigate an academic bureaucracy for four or five years. Since we’re not measuring useful learning, we have no way to hold colleges accountable for their demonstrable failure to teach useful skills. We may not be measuring what is representative of what we want to analyze, we may be analyzing what we can.

Irina Nistor has one of the most famous voices in Romania. While working as a translator of censored television programs in Romania under the Communist regime, she secretly dubbed over 3,000 banned movie titles on VHS tapes smuggled in from the West. The black market for these films flourished during the Cold War, bringing visions of life outside communism into the minds of the many. The documentary "Chuck Norris VS Communism" is about Nistor and the impact Western movies had on the imaginations of Romanians living under authoritarianism. Perhaps this is overreaching sociology but recently there have been charges by Iran's Revolutionary Guard Corps that Kim Kardashian is subverting Iranian culture.

IMF--the IMF!--authors Jonathan D. Ostry, Prakash Loungani, and Davide Furceri issued a research paper titled "Neoliberalism: Oversold?" whose theme is a stunning one: it accuses neoliberalism, (by which they mean "capitalism") and its immediate offshoot, globalization and "financial openness", for causing not only inequality, but also making capital markets unstable. The IMF!
 
Freedom of Religion update: The leader of a Pakistani Islamic council has proposed a bill that allows husbands to "lightly beat" their wives as a form of discipline. In the 75-page proposal, Mohammad Khan Sheerani suggests a light beating is acceptable should the need arise to punish a woman. The proposal bans forceful beating, saying only a small stick is necessary to instill fear. The Council of Islamic Ideology is a powerful constitutional body that advises the Pakistani legislature whether laws are in line with the teachings of Islam.

A guy named Glenn Reynolds writes for USA Today argues that power is generally accepted in government if the power is held by "your guy." George Bush never was questioned by FOX. The left has let Obama's abuses slide because he is "their guy." He writes:  It’s terrible, we’re told, that Trump is issuing veiled threats to journalists — though Obama joked about auditing his enemies, seizing journalist phone records and threatened a journalist who refused to reveal sources with imprisonment. Trump would be a warmonger, we’re told, although in fact Barack Obama has been at war longer than any other U.S. president, if without any particular success. Trump would arrogantly ride roughshod over any opposition, though Barack Obama famously used “I won” as an excuse to ignore opponents and bragged that he had a “pen and a phone” to bypass congressional disagreement. (And he’s used them a lot.)
Many of the journalists and pundits who see Trump as the next imperial president were silent over these Obama actions....Every president has some wiggle room, but white male Republicans have less in our system. So if you want the imperial presidency to wiggle less, that’s whom we should elect. And if that’s what it takes to get the press to do its job of scrutinizing and criticizing power, then that’s what we need.

There are many definitions of Populism but this is a good one: "the political doctrine that supports the rights and powers of the common people in their struggle with the privileged elite." Now that seems to be a pretty benign and positive definition. So...how come people dislike populists so much?

Vladimir Nabokov on the demon of generalities: This demon is fond of words such as “idea”, “tendency”, “influence”, “period”, and “era”. In the historian’s study this demon reductively combines in hindsight the phenomena, influences and tendencies of past ages. With this demon comes appalling tedium – the knowledge (utterly mistaken, by the way) that, however humanity plays its hand or fights back, it follows an implacable course. This demon should be feared. He is a fraud. He is a salesman of centuries, pushing his historical price list. And the most awful thing, perhaps, happens when the temptation of completely comfortable generalities seizes us in contemplation not of past, well-worn times, but of that time in which we live.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/01/american-pooka.html

Scholars Stephen Brooks and William Wohlforth point out that China is the closest the United States has to a rising rival but only on one measure, gross domestic product. A better, broader measure of economic power, Brooks and Wohlforth argue, is “inclusive wealth.” This is the sum of a nation’s “manufactured capital (roads, buildings, machines and equipment), human capital (skills, education, health) and natural capital (sub-soil resources, ecosystems, the atmosphere).” The United States’ inclusive wealth totaled almost $144 trillion in 2010 — 4½ times China’s $32 trillion.

Brooks and Wohlforth note that half of China’s exports are parts imported to China, assembled there and then exported — mostly for Western multinationals. The authors also suggest that payments for intellectual property are a key measure of technological strength. In 2013, China took in less than $1 billion, while the United States received $128 billion. In 2012, America registered seven times as many “triadic” patents — those granted in the United States, Europe and Japan.

From the WashPo: A quiz given to students at Burns Middle School in Mobile, Alabama contains a lot of questions deemed by the teacher to be relevant to modern culture. A couple included:  "Tyrone knocked up four girls in the gang... There are 20 girls in the gang. What is the exact percentage of girls that Tyrone knocked up?" and “Dwayne pimps 3 ho’s. If the price is $85 per trick, how many tricks per day must each ho turn to support Dwayne’s $800 per day crack habit?” It is always important to make lessons applicable to the lowest common denominator, isn't it?

Still today, as always, trade and betterment are threatened by the scorn of priest, knight, gentleman, poet, or thug, from Green to neo-Nazi.--McCloskey

Foods are composed of three basic elements: fat, carbohydrate, and protein. Gluten is a protein contained in wheat, rye and barley—ingredients which are common, especially in processed foods. In roughly 1% of adults and children, genetics plus gluten combine in ways that we do not completely understand to trigger a condition called celiac disease, which can damage the intestinal lining and lead to serious nutritional and gastrointestinal problems among other issues. For people with celiac disease, gluten is toxic and should be completely avoided in the diet. However, in almost all children, gluten travels through the intestine without causing disease and will never lead to problems. To date, science has not shown that there is a toxin in gluten that makes it bad for our bodies.

AAAAaaaannnnnddd.....a graph: