Cab Thought 10/13/16

‘Competition acts on our selfishness, like the automatic governor of the steam engine acts on the steam, regulating it to the ever changing needs of society.  Remove your governor (competition) and the steam (selfishness) soon jars your body politic to pieces.’--historian Frank Trentmann

 

 

Obama is on track to be the only President in U.S. history never to have a single year when the economy grew by at least 3%.

 

An asteroid named Bennu, which is around 500m in diameter at its equator and travels around the sun at 63,000 mph, can be seen from Earth as it crosses the planet's orbit every six years. It will pass between Earth and the moon in 2135.
That 2135 fly-by is going to influence Bennu’s orbit, potentially putting it on course for the Earth later that century, Dante Lauretta, professor of planetary science at Arizona University, told The Sunday Times. "It  may be destined to cause immense suffering and death,” he added. And probably stimulate a lot of conferences and good dinners.

 

Corporate bonds paying negative interest rates now account for about $512 billion of market value, bringing the world close to a total of nearly $10 trillion in securities with yields below zero. Most are government securities. This is really new territory for the government economic leaders.

 

The writer Susan Sontag was born Jan. 16, 1933, in New York City and raised in Tucson and Los Angeles, the daughter of an alcoholic schoolteacher mother and a fur trader father who died in China of tuberculosis during the Japanese invasion when Sontag was 5. She was a graduate of North Hollywood High School and attended UC Berkeley and the University of Chicago — which she entered when she was 16 — and Harvard and Oxford. In 1950 at the age of 17, while at the University of Chicago, she met and 10 days later married Philip Rieff, a 28-year-old instructor in social theory. Two years later, at age 19, she had a son, David, now a prominent writer. She was divorced in 1959 and never remarried.

While she wrote fiction, she was primarily an essayist. Writing in the 1960s about the Vietnam War she declared "the white race is the cancer of human history." Days after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, she criticized U.S. foreign policy and offered backhanded praise for the hijackers.
Smart people are not smart in everything.

She was the subject of one of Gore Vidal's vicious one-liners: "Unfortunately, Miss Sontag's intelligence is still greater than her talent," he wrote in a 1967 review of the novel "Death Kit." 

Milton Friedman long argued that political freedoms are inextricably related to economic freedom. Almost all political campaigns and proclamations attempt to separate political and economic freedom.

We as a culture, despite out access to information, just can not remember important elements in history. One is the struggle for liberty. This struggle was debated  in thought experiments by Madison and Jefferson long ago as they tried to bring the philosophy of the Enlightenment into the practical world. The essence of their concerns was the problem of the minority in a democracy. How much could the majority legislate? After all, as Jefferson said, majority rule was really mob rule. The minority had to be protected, protected by the basics of the legal structure of the state. But, as the other side of majority bullying, tolerance must walk a fine line. Most people do not want their values to be tolerated — they want their values to prevail.   

Surveys  have found a steady but noticeable jump in support for third-party candidates. The biggest beneficiary has been Libertarian Gary Johnson, who has gone up from 4.5 percent to 7.2 percent in RealClearPolitics polling averages. Green Party candidate Jill Stein has also seen an uptick since June — from 2.5 percent to 3.5 percent.
The surge in support for a third-party candidate is adding a new element of unpredictability into the presidential race. Should voters opt for a third-party candidate in large numbers, it could potentially tip the scales in crucial battleground states.

 

Who is... Lord Haw-Haw?

About 110 million citizens now receive some form of means tested benefits. When social security is included, more than 160 million citizens get checks from Washington. The total cost is now $3 trillion per year and rising rapidly. America’s entitlements sector is the sixth biggest economy in the world. Read that again.

Over the next year, the Bank of Japan is scheduled to purchase $58b in ETFs, and $116b over the next two years. By June of 2018, BoJ is likely to hold $200b in ETFs.The central bank of Japan is buying Japanese stocks. Does no one think that strange?

 

Both current candidates are opposed to free trade. Landsburg writes this, from a few years ago: "Suppose, after years of buying shampoo at your local pharmacy, you discover you can order the same shampoo for less money on the Web. Do you have an obligation to compensate your pharmacist? If you move to a cheaper apartment, should you compensate your landlord? When you eat at McDonald’s, should you compensate the owners of the diner next door? Public policy should not be designed to advance moral instincts that we all reject every day of our lives."

 

Most of the new jobs being created in the service sector pay higher wages than the manufacturing jobs being lost.

FBI agents laid out concerns that cyberhackers had used so-called spear-phishing emails as part of an attempt to penetrate the Clinton campaign’s computers, sources said. One of the sources said agents conducting a national security investigation asked the Clinton campaign to turn over internal computer logs as well as the personal email addresses of senior campaign officials. But the campaign, through its lawyers, declined to provide the data, deciding that the FBI’s request for sensitive personal and campaign information data was too broad and intrusive, the source said. The source said the campaign was already aware of attempts to penetrate its computers and had taken steps to thwart them, emphasizing that there is still no evidence that the campaign’s computers had actually been successfully penetrated. But the potential that the intruders were associated with a foreign government should have come as no surprise to the Clinton campaign, said several sources knowledgeable about the investigation. Chinese intelligence hackers were widely reported to have penetrated both the campaigns of Barack Obama and John McCain in 2008. (Yahoo)

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2010/01/political-universe.html

 

A quote from McCloskey:  "..[Adam Smith]..was reacting here against a view of society and economy entirely dominant in 1776, and still vibrant down to the present – the proposition that a law on the books can say where taxes will actually fall, or that government can pick winners, or that consumers need to be corrected in their consumption (recently revived in proposals to “nudge” people), or that natural liberty in running airplanes or grocery stores or an education in medicine needs to be closely regulated lest we fall into human sacrifice, dogs and cats living together, mass hysteria."

The Zika scare has not yet raised the obvious question: DDT? The US is very opposed to DDT use--in other countries for other countries' problems. But now that there is a domestic scare...well, we'll have to wait and see.

 

Julian Assange: "So, those Hillary Clinton emails, they connect together with the cables that we have published of Hillary Clinton, creating a rich picture of how Hillary Clinton performs in office, but, more broadly, how the U.S. Department of State operates. So, for example, the disastrous, absolutely disastrous intervention in Libya, the destruction of the Gaddafi government, which led to the occupation of ISIS of large segments of that country, weapons flows going over to Syria, being pushed by Hillary Clinton, into jihadists within Syria, including ISIS, that’s there in those emails. There’s more than 1,700 emails in Hillary Clinton’s collection, that we have released, just about Libya alone."

 

The campaign has found its natural level. The NYPost ran nude pictures of Melania for several days. So Trump gets the adolescent and porno vote?

 

William Joyce (April 24, 1906–January 3, 1946), known as Lord Haw-Haw was a fascist politician and Nazi propaganda broadcaster to the United Kingdom during World War II. He was born in New York, to Irish parents who had taken United States nationality. A few years after his birth, the family returned to Galway, Ireland. He attended St. Ignatius College, Galway, from 1915 to 1921. Though the family were Roman Catholic, they were strongly unionist. William Joyce later claimed to have aided the Black and Tans. Fearing reprisal attacks, the Joyce family left for London after the establishment of the Irish Free State, where Joyce applied to Birkbeck College of the University of London and to enter the Officer Training Corps. At Birkbeck Joyce developed an interest in fascism, and he joined the British Fascisti of Rotha Lintorn-Orman. While stewarding a Conservative Party meeting, Joyce was involved in a fight and received a deep razor slash to his cheek. Joyce joined the British Union of Fascists under Sir Oswald Mosley in 1932, and swiftly became a leading speaker, praised for his power of oratory. He was instrumental in changing the full name of the BUF to British Union of Fascists and National Socialists in 1936. He stood as a BUF candidate in the 1937 elections to the London County Council. However, when Mosley drastically reduced the BUF staff shortly after the elections (sacking Joyce), he left to form a breakaway organization, the National Socialist League, In late August 1939, shortly before World War II commenced, he and his wife, Margaret, fled to Germany. He had been tipped off, probably by Maxwell Knight of MI5, that the British authorities intended to detain him under Defence Regulation 18B. Joyce became a naturalized German in 1940.
The name 'Lord Haw-Haw of Zeesen' was coined by the pseudonymous Daily Express radio critic Jonah Barrington in 1939, but this referred initially to Wolf Mitler. When Joyce became the best-known propaganda broadcaster the nickname transferred to him. Besides broadcasting, Joyce's duties included distributing propaganda among British prisoners of war, whom he tried to recruit into the British Free Corps, as a branch of the Waffen SS. He wrote a book, Twilight over England, that was promoted by the German Ministry of Propaganda.
Joyce was tried for high treason after the war and was executed by famed hangman Albert Pierrepoint on January 3, 1946, at Wandsworth Prison. The Crown considered trying his wife, Margaret, as well, but a secret memo recommended clemency for her. (From Wiki)
"Famed hangman!"

In 1990 in Sweden, non-European immigrants accounted for only 3% of the population and any problems could be isolated and managed within the bigger framework of society. That figure has increased to some 13-14% now, and is growing at perhaps 1-2 percentage points from last year, with persistent gaps in income, unemployment and education. Diversity has become more than an interesting social seasoning in Sweden.

 

Both candidates are suspicious of free trade. There is always a bad guy to blame. But according to a recent study by the Center for Business and Economic Research at Ball State University, productivity growth caused 85% of the job losses in manufacturing from 2000 to 2010, a period that saw 5.6 million factory jobs disappear. In that same period, trade accounted for a mere 13% of job losses. In the last 20 years, which include enactment of the North American Free Trade Agreement and China’s entry into the World Trade Organization, real, inflation-adjusted U.S. manufacturing output has increased by almost 40%. Annual value added by U.S. factories has reached a record $2.4 trillion. So increase in production through training, education and innovation causes job loss--but increased production. That, of course, is a more difficult problem to solve and would require insight and effort, not simple bombastic posturing.

AAAAaaaaannnnndddd....from "bad newspaper:"