Cab Thoughts 12/10/16

"As the saying goes, if you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day, but if you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime. Community organizers like Huerta don't teach anyone how to fish: they teach activists how to steal their neighbors' fish. This is what Huerta and her ilk call social justice." --Matthew Vadum

A geoglyph, meaning “land picture,” is a large— sometimes huge— image formed on or carved into the surface of the earth. The most famous are probably the Nazca lines, the enormous figures of people, animals, plants, and geometric shapes written into the ground in southern Peru by the ancient Nazca people roughly 1,500 years ago.
Geoglyphs can be found all over the world, including in North America.  more than 5,000 geoglyphs  can be found on the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, home to the largest collection of geoglyphs in the world.

The Uffington White Horse in the parish of Uffington, in south-central England, is big, about 374 feet across. 

In his speech following his win at the Nevada caucus, Trump said,  “We won the evangelicals, we won with young. We won with old. We won with highly educated. We won with poorly educated. I love the poorly educated.”

The reporter covering the story then wrote this: "That last line was, as you might expect, the sound bite of the night. Indeed, “I love the poorly educated” was trending on Twitter early Wednesday morning, with users expressing a mix of bewilderment, consternation and other big words such supporters might not understand."
And these guys are surprised when there are pitchforks in the street.

Clinton attacked Trump for his support of the invasion of Iraq. There are a number of elements here: Do we have responsibility to Iraqi people brutalized by Saddam, can and should we try to impose a new kind of government on another country, the validity of the WMD threat--all these are reasonable questions. But Trump's opinion on Iraq--he says he was opposed to the war--was that of a private citizen reading editorials; his opinion meant nothing then and nothing now. She knows that. But Hillary was a senator  and she voted for the war; indeed her position on the war was one of Bernie Sanders' main points of attack against her. This holding Trump guilty of something she did is very bizarre thinking--like attacking him for wealth he did not earn when she has never worked a non-political job in her life and everything she owns, including the foundation worth zillions, is derived from politics.
I wonder if subtly this kind of defiant insincerity gets under people's skin.

A bear market certainly won’t be blamed on the Federal Reserve and their quantitative easing and ultra-loose monetary policy, and their inability to raise rates even with unemployment low. It won’t be blamed on providing so much liquidity for so long that even the slightest withdrawal of it causes a global recession. It will be blamed on "capitalism" and its partner-in-crime, freedom. The result will be more regulations and higher taxes on investments.

Apercu:  n: 1. a brief survey or sketch :  outline 2. an immediate impression; especially :  insight

French, aperçu is the past participle of the verb apercevoir ("to perceive" or "to comprehend"), which in turn comes from Latin percipere ("to perceive"). (The same verb also gave us apperceive, meaning "to have consciousness of oneself, and the noun apperception, meaning "introspective self-consciousness or "mental perception.") Aperçu in French is also a noun meaning "glimpse" or "outline, general idea." English speakers borrowed the noun aperçu, meaning and all, in the early 19th century.

Jemima Lewis, writing in the Telegraph: "…the Zuckerberg-Chans have the most ambitious vision yet: developing new technologies and medicines to tackle every disease ever invented. We’d better hope they don’t succeed. What would it do to the human race if we were granted eternal health, and therefore life? Without any deaths to offset all the births, we would have to make room on earth for an extra 208,400 people a day, or 76,066,000 a year – and that’s before those babies grow old enough to reproduce themselves. Within a month of Mr Zuckerberg curing mortality, the first wars over water resources would break out. Within a year, the World Health Organisation would be embarking on an emergency sterilisation programme. Give it a decade and we’d all be dead from starvation, apart from a handful of straggle-bearded tech billionaires, living in well-stocked bunkers under San Francisco.."

Intellectuals are crazy. They just say anything. Maybe "intellectual" needs redefined.

Who is....Carl Jung?

In an email obtained by Campus Reform, a Kansas University employee with the school’s student housing department writes to a resident advisor, who wishes to remain anonymous, to explain to him that he cannot use an image of a gorilla for a routine floor decoration. “I think it would be best if your floor chose a different theme animal to be more inclusive,” Assistant Complex Director Dale Morrow wrote in an email at the start of this academic year. “First, gorillas represent a very masculine image, and I feel that this would not be inclusive to all of our residents on that floor.”
Grownups. On a campus.

Nearly 1 in 5 Americans has a disability of some sort, according to a report last year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Imagine disability as a cultural norm.

The draft of 1863 allowed individuals to pay a bounty to someone else to fight in their place rather than be drafted. The usual price was $300--a fortune at the time.
"Bounty jumpers" were men who enlisted in the Union or Confederate army during the American Civil War only to collect a bounty and then leave.  

The yield on the 10-year U.S. Treasury note hit an all-time low in July, and bond yields across the developed world have plunged—with some even falling into negative territory.

Murray: "The thing about the Trump campaign that has been most disheartening has been the realisation that the electorate on the right, voting for Republicans, has many more people in it than I ever realised who don’t give a damn about freedom. They are motivated by the kinds of tribal instincts that you describe, and they are also populist in an authoritarian sense, in that they don’t want to limit government, they just want to use the powers of government for their own ends. In the short-term, then, I’m very pessimistic. I am very undecided about what will happen, but I suspect the Republican Party is going to go into serious decline. And, insofar as it does not go into decline, it is not going to represent policies that foster limited government and freedom. It will be a party that fosters a different kind of authoritarianism than the left does. The only difference will be in the type, not the authoritarian nature of the policies."

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/the-melting-pot.html

On a delicate balance:

"Scientists must be free to maintain, reject, or invent paradigms or theories according to their own largely inarticulate judgments as to what they find intellectually convincing.  They must be free to believe in ideas that they cannot fully defend.  But at the same time this freedom does not say that anything goes; it is intimately bound up with the sense of responsibility the scientist feels toward the attainment of valid meaning, and it requires a willingness on the part of each scientist to submit to the authority of specialists in areas beyond his own expertise."--Lavoie

"The sense of responsibility" is the key here, a sense that must transcend an individual or a cause. What is that responsibility to?


For Carl Jung, flying saucers were mirages of the mind, a collective disorder that indeed spoke all too sharply of the apocalyptic anxieties in the Age of the Atom. “The present world situation is calculated as never before to arouse expectations of a redeeming, supernatural event”, he wrote in his short book on this subject (translated by R. F. C. Hull in 1959). “


Wolf wrote: "The shrinking import-competing industry is not competing with imports from foreigners, but with what its own domestic export industry can pay." That is, the domestic industry can not afford to keep its workers and facilities devoted to those competitive pursuits because those assets earn more elsewhere.

Roman coins, probably Constantinian (early fourth century AD), have been found in a medieval castle in Japan. What does this imply? "Inference" is probably better than "implication." Along with the Roman coins, there were Ottoman coins of the seventeenth century. That sounds like a collector's horde, not trade.

The Census Bureau defines a family as poor if its income falls below a specified income threshold. For example, the poverty threshold for a family of four in 2015 was $24,036. But in counting family “income,” Census excludes nearly the entire welfare state.  Last year, the government spent $221 billion on cash, food and housing benefits for low-income families with children — more than twice the amount needed to end all child poverty. But the Census Bureau ignored more than 90 percent of these benefits for purposes of measuring poverty. When welfare benefits are counted, the poverty rate for children is cut by half or more.

AAAAAAAaaaaannnnnndddddddd..... a picture of The Uffington White Horse: