Reverie

What do you expect from a nation whose national anthem asks a question?--Alaric Phlogiston



The CEOs are leaving Trump's business council. I'd be more impressed if they closed their lobbying offices.

Aristotle said that talking and thinking were the same thing. Animals speak of pleasure and pain, people think of the just and unjust.

Catachresis: noun:

misuse or strained use of words, as in a mixed metaphor, occurring either in error or for rhetorical effect. ety:  Abūsiō (“abuse, misuse”) is the “pure” Latin word for “misuse of a word” in rhetoric; Latin catachrēsis is a direct borrowing from Greek katáchrēsis, which first meant “analogical extension of a term” (e.g., calling a joint of a grass or reed a “knee”). Katáchrēsis in Greek later acquired the sense “misuse of a word, misapplication of a word or phrase.” Hardly any two people agree on particular examples, one critic’s catachresis being another’s “striking” mixed metaphor. Catachresis entered English in the late 16th century.

The average age of the fathers of newborns in the United States has climbed by 3.5 years over the past 4 decades, growing from 27.4 years in 1972 to 30.9 years in 2015.

It was at Cambridge that Darwin read Alexander von Humboldt’s Personal Narrative – a book that was partly a travel account and partly a scientific treatise of the German explorer’s expedition through South America. It was this publication, Darwin said, that “determined me to travel in distant countries, and led me to volunteer as naturalist in Her Majesty’s ship Beagle”. 

He returned to England in October 1836 with more than 1,500 specimens preserved in spirits and almost 4,000 skins, bones and other items. Then the real work began: sorting, classifying, writing and thinking. He published The Voyage of the Beagle (and sent it in trepidation to his hero Humboldt, who admired it) and began to make notes on his “species theory”.

In a cave in Mexico three skeletons have been found dating to about 13,000 B.C., earlier than the freezing of the Bering Strait. They look like ethnic Indonesians.

114 thousand social security checks will be garnished this month in payment for defaulted payment of student loans the unfortunate grandmother co-signed. The "student" was not able--or willing--to pay even the interest.

What is...3122 Florence?

The investing market is fascinating. The gains in the U.S. market in dollars so far this year is 11.26%. The number of publicly traded stocks in the U.S. is shrinking. Many companies are going private to avoid the federal rules required of public companies and are being financed by venture and private equity money. The rise in the stock market over the last two years is related almost entirely to the rise of five companies. The rest of the market this year is up only 2%. And, despite the rise in the market, the relationship to currency is important; for example, if you invested in the market with euros, you would be up only 2%.

Research conducted by The Guardian has found that half of the planet's population lives in countries where there are more private security workers than police officers.

A headline from the ongoing battle against history: Immigrants Want the Cross Removed from Swiss Flag

There is indeed, as he [Reinhold Niebuhr] says elsewhere, “an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.”  To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.--Hayek

A big, bright, near-Earth asteroid, known as 3122 Florence, made a safe fly by Friday night. Florence is classified as a Potentially Hazardous Object. At its closest, it was about 7 million km (4.4 million miles) away from earth. According to NASA officials, the asteroid hasn't been this close to Earth since 1890, and it won't be this close again until 2500. "Asteroid 3122 Florence was discovered in 1981 by astronomer Schelte 'Bobby' Bus at the Siding Spring Observatory in Australia," reports Space.com. "The asteroid is named in honor of Florence Nightingale (1820-1910), who pioneered modern nursing.


Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/cab-thoughts-72713.html

Cab Thoughts 7/27/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com "I have not the pleasure of knowing my reader but I would stake ten to one that for six months he has been making Utopias, and if so, th...

Asteroidal meteorites are hundreds of millions of years older than the oldest rocks existing on Earth. They are also approximately 60 million years older than the Moon.

On this day in 1522 the Vittoria, one of Ferdinand Magellan’s five ships, arrived at SanlÚcar de Barrameda in Spain, thus completing the first circumnavigation of the world. The Vittoria was commanded by Basque navigator Juan SebastiÁn de Elcano, who took charge of the vessel after the murder of Magellan in the Philippines in April 1521.

It will be very interesting to see how the recent Trump DACA decision is discussed and debated. Essentially it reverses Obama's executive order, an act that Obama himself thought unconstitutional but did anyway. So Trump's act will be supported by the 200 or so hooded white supremacists in Alabama but also by people with concerns about the balance of power in the Federal Government and adherence to the constitutional structure. Which viewpoint will be prominent in the discussions, do ya think?

The American Pet Products Association estimates that in 2017, $69.4 billion will be spent on US pet care, up from $66.7 billion in 2016.

 

B.C. archaeologists have excavated a settlement in the area — in traditional Heiltsuk Nation territory — and dated it to 14,000 years ago, during the last ice age where glaciers covered much of North America. 

 

“It is already too late to avoid mass starvation,” declared Denis Hayes, the chief organizer for Earth Day, in the Spring 1970 issue of The Living Wilderness.

Malaria killed a 4-year-old girl in Italy, raising fears that the mosquito-borne disease has returned to the country after decades. Zero cases of home-grown malaria were reported in Europe in 2015. One suspect mentioned...global warming.

According to the Hurricane center, NOAA and Air Force hurricane hunter aircraft data indicate Hurricane Irma has intensified to a "potentially catastrophic" Category 5++ hurricane with maximum winds of 180 mph gusting to a 220 mph.

Healthy societies do not fall apart over slow, widely predicted, relatively small economic adjustments of the sort painted by climate analysis. Societies do fall apart from war, disease or chaos. Climate policy must compete with other long-term threats for always-scarce resources. (wsj)

On Alabama's undefeated 1966 team, only 21% of the players weighed more than 200 pounds. The heaviest weighed 223; the linemen averaged 194. The quarterback, who weighed 177, was Ken Stabler, who went on to a Hall of Fame NFL career — and to "moderately severe" CTE before death from cancer. Today, many high school teams are much beefier than the 1966 Crimson Tide. Of the 114 members of Alabama's 2016 squad, just 25 weighed less than 200 and 20 weighed more than 300. In 1980, only three NFL players weighed 300 or more pounds. Last season, 390 weighed 300 pounds or more, and six topped 350. (will)

Reuters (9/5, Lehman) reports that “a five-year study” suggests “the percentage of US adults under age 65 who skip essential prescription drugs because of price has declined.” However, “consistently, problems with financial access to medication were more common in cancer survivors.”
Did you ever wonder why "Bush league" was never applied to the Bush candidacy?
 
Peter Gunter, a North Texas State University professor, wrote in 1970, “Demographers agree almost unanimously on the following grim timetable: by 1975 widespread famines will begin in India; these will spread by 1990 to include all of India, Pakistan, China and the Near East, Africa. By the year 2000, or conceivably sooner, South and Central America will exist under famine conditions….By the year 2000, thirty years from now, the entire world, with the exception of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, will be in famine.”


In a new book on Darwin, the author, AN Wilson, points out that it was the Church that criticized Darwin most is based on how many of the established scientists were working at the older universities, where the fellows were clergymen. They were attacking Darwin as scientists, not as Christians, Wilson writes, so this was not so much about theology but an issue of “an academic orthodoxy under threat”.


Hackers have been burrowing their way inside the critical infrastructure of energy and other companies in the U.S. and elsewhere, warns cybersecurity giant Symantec.

The Pirates sometimes look so stupid.

The St. Louis Cardinals sent infielder Eliezer Alvarez, their 19th-ranked prospect, to the Philadelphia Phillies for Nicasio.

The Pirates lost Nicasio after putting him on waivers. They did not receive anything in return but shaved $600,000 from their payroll. They said their rationale in not trading him was a competitor would be advantaged.

Leslie Van Houten has been granted parole. Hide the women.

AAAAaaaaaannnnnnddddd.....a graph:

 

ESports

As if things were not bad enough. Professional sports leagues "officially have a millennial problem," writes VentureBeat, citing some interesting findings from L.E.K. Consulting. Some of the observations include:

• 40% of millennials prefer watching esports to traditional sports
• 26% of millennial eSports enthusiasts reported a significant uptick in eSports viewing over the past year
• 61% of esports followers said they spent less time watching TV over the past 12 months, and 45% said they had cut back on traditional sports viewing
• Together millennials -- ages 17-34 -- and Generation Z peers -- age 16 and under -- comprise 45% of America's consumer base

 

"At a certain point, this comes down to a new form of media better serving an upcoming generation of consumers," concludes VentureBeat. "Esports leagues are all online. Most matches stream for free on sites like Twitch. They are available on the web or through smartphone apps. Competitive gaming is easily accessible, and it lives where Millennials are already spending their time."

Maybe that's why Major League Baseball's video streaming company recently paid $300 million for the right to stream League of Legends through 2023.

Fertility

The Children of Men

 

Research indicates a decline in male sperm count and quality in the West.

USA Today (7/25, Weintraub) reports that research published in Human Reproduction Update indicated that “men in North America, Australia and Europe produced less than half as many sperm in 2011 compared with 1973.” The study also indicated that “the quality was worse.”

        In “To Your Health,” the Washington Post (7/25, Cha) reports that the study “appears to confirm fears that male reproductive health may be declining.” For the study, investigators looked at “data from 185 studies and 42,000 men around the world between 1973 and 2011.”

        Reuters (7/25, Kelland) reports that the researchers found “a 52.4 percent decline in sperm concentration and a 59.3 percent decline in total sperm count among North American, European, Australian and New Zealand men.”

        Newsweek (7/25, Gaffey) reports that while the investigators did not see “a similar decline in non-Western men – those from Africa, Asia and South America,” they “admitted that this absence of a trend may be due to a lack of data.”

        The New York Post (7/25, Gollayan) reports that although additional research is required “to determine causation,” investigators “think that our lifestyle choices (smoking, stress and obesity) may be to blame for the drop in sperm count.” Also covering the story are the Independent (UK) (7/25, Johnston), The Guardian (UK) (7/25, Davis), Medscape (7/25, Frellick), HealthDay (7/25, Thompson), TIME (7/25, Sifferlin), and BBC News (UK) (7/25).

​
Historically these declines were attributed to sampling errors. Note there is no indicator here in decline in fertility, but.....

Reverie

The tricky thing about separating church and state is that the state is a kind of church.--Richman 

The word "Satan" in Hebrew means "adversary."

An ice-free corridor between the Americas and Asia opened up about 12,500 years ago, allowing humans to cross over the Bering land bridge to settle what is now the United States and places beyond to the south. History books have conveyed that information for years to explain how the Americas were supposedly first settled by people, such as those from the Clovis culture. At least one part of the Americas was already occupied by humans before that time, however, says new research on the skeleton of a male youth found in Chan Hol cave near Tulum, Mexico. Dubbed the Young Man of Chan Hol, the remains date to 13,000 years ago, according to a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE. How he arrived at the location remains a great mystery given the timing and the fact that Mexico is well over 4,000 miles away from the Bering land crossing. For the new study, Gonzalez, Stinnesbeck, and their colleagues dated the Young Man of Chan Hol's remains by analyzing the bones' uranium, carbon, and oxygen isotopes, which were also found in stalagmite that had grown through the pelvic bone. The scientists believe that the resulting age of 13,000 years could apply to at least two other skeletons found in caves around Tulum: a teenage female named Naia and a 25-30-year-old female named Eve of Naharon. Gonzalez said that the shape of the skulls suggests that Eve and the others "have more of an affinity with people from Southeast Asia." He and his team further speculated that the individuals could have originated in Indonesia.

Who is....Gertrude Stein?

I sat next to her..[Stein]... and she said to me early in the afternoon, What is the answer? I was silent. In that case, she said, what is the question? Then the whole afternoon was troubled, confused and very uncertain, and later in the afternoon they took her away on a wheeled stretcher to the operating room and I never saw her again. (The last paragraph of What is Remembered, Alice B. Toklas' autobiography--and life of Gertrude Stein)



The International Sun/Earth Explorer 3, abandoned by NASA in an orbit around the Sun in 1999, was the subject of a partially successful attempt to rehabilitate it in 2014 as the first “citizen science, crowd funded, crowd sourced, interplanetary space science mission”. The project was run out of a disused McDonald’s on the campus of NASA’s Ames Research Center in California.


The two most expensive handbags in auction history were both sold at Christie’s, and are both rare diamond.

An exceptional, matte white Himalaya niloticus crocodile diamond Birkin 30 with 18k white gold & diamond hardware. Hermès, 2014. Sold for HKD 2,940,000 on 31 May 2017 at Christie’s in Hong Kong

 
Will the States Rights people of Texas decline Federal help for their flood damage?

Flood damage in Texas from Hurricane Harvey may equal that from 2005's Hurricane Katrina, the costliest natural disaster in U.S. history, said an insurance research group on Sunday. . . . Hurricane Katrina resulted in more than $15 billion in flood insurance losses in Louisiana and Mississippi that were paid by the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP), a federal program that is the only source of flood insurance for most Americans. One quarter of southeast Texas is under water. That is in the range of Lake Michigan in size.


Bill Maher is distressed at Trump's executive actions and wants strict written rules applied to the actions of the executive. Read that again.

Good news: Equality is achievable. A historian from Stanford named Walter Scheidel has written a book on inequality and its cures. The theme of his book is that the cures for social/economic inequality are war, violent savage revolution, plague and social collapse.
So egalitarianism is absolutely achievable......... 


So there are more people at a 600 student high school football game on Friday night than in the Klan and the "alt-right" white supremacist groups combined. So 200 masked morons are worth all the news time at 6:00. So, now that we have restored a good national perspective, what do you think about the shoes Melania wore to the flood?

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has sent more than 1,000 big rigs to hard-hit areas and evacuation centers, with most carrying water.

Republican plans to scale back corporate interest deductions stand to push more borrowing overseas, eroding benefits of the mammoth U.S. bond market.

Large U.S.-based companies like Apple Inc. and Microsoft Corp. routinely borrow billions in U.S. markets even as they retain billions of dollars in cash, knowing that interest payments will lower their local tax bills. Any U.S. limits on interest deductibility would break with the policies in many other rich countries and likely prompt companies to shift some borrowing to places where deductibility would still be in effect, say analysts. (wsj)

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/the-power-of-free-association.html

The Power of Free Association steeleydock.blogspot.com The drift towards tyranny is always with us; like gravity, there is always some man or idea spreading an attracting field. Energy is alw...

Ethnic cleansing, executive centralizations, and police-state impositions are part of the mix....[of fascism].... More fundamentally fascism rejects and resents the whole social trajectory of freedom, which is always about emancipation of people from all forms of power, social control, and material deprivation. Fascism is one form of revolt against laissez-faire while socialism is another. So similar are they in practice that history has given us violent hybrids such as the National Socialism of the Nazi Party itself. --Tucker
The problem here is that most people accept central power if it benefits them


Furedi is a professor emeritus in England and author of "What's Happened to the University?: A Sociological Exploration of Its Infantilization." Writing in The American Interest, he cites a warning issued to Oxford University postgraduate students about the danger of "vicarious trauma," which supposedly results from "hearing about and engaging with the traumatic experiences of others." This, Furedi says, is symptomatic of the "medicalization" of almost everything in universities that strive to be "therapeutic." Universities are "promoting theories and practices that encourage people to interpret their anxieties, distress and disappointment through the language of psychological deficits." This generates self-fulfilling diagnoses of emotionally fragile students. They demand mental-health services on campuses that are replete with "trigger warnings" and "safe spaces" to insulate students from discomforts, such as the depiction of a musket. What academics perceive as "an expanded set of problems tracks right along with the exponential growth of the 'Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.'" (will)


In 1939, Germany invaded Poland. They had signed  a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union on August 23, 1939. In a secret clause of the agreement, the "ideological enemies" agreed to divide Poland between them. But, as always, the "ideological differences" was only who had the right to kill whom.


In 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statisyics, “consumer units” (which include families, financially independent individuals, and people living in a single household who share expenses) spent more on average on federal, state and local taxes ($10,489) than they did on food ($7,203) and clothing ($1,803) combined ($9,006).
The average tax bill for American “consumer units” increased from $7,423 in 2013 to $10,489 in 2016, according to data released this week by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.


The remarkable productive achievements of the market system are the result of its ability to gather vast amounts of detailed, continually changing information and to disseminate it quickly to precisely those persons who want it.  That won’t happen unless people respond in their actions to the signals that prices emit and those prices are in turn allowed to respond to people’s actions.  The impersonality of the market system that so much disturbs us is an essential feature of that system. We cannot have the benefits of a market system if we are at the same time determined to prevent that system from operating in an impersonal manner.--Heyne
 
In 1933, Gertrude Stein published The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, her account of her salon life as seen through the devoted eyes of her companion. This ventriloquism allowed her to be Boswell to her own Johnson. (King)

Last month two of the country's biggest and best-regarded coding bootcamps closed. "Computer programming is highly specialized work; it can't be effectively taught in an intensive program," wrotes Inc. magazine's contributing editor.

 

I met a farrier recently. He works out of his truck where he has a coal forge. He has a coal forge over his gas tank. If you ever see a farrier truck, give it wide berth.

 

AAAAAaaaannnnnddddd.....a graph:

 

Markets

These are the results of the U.S. stock markets over the last time periods since the crash of 2008. At the bottom are the various treasury yields. Importantly, the generality is not necessarily indicative. (For example, all but two percent of stock market advances in the NASDAQ this year is attributable to five companies.)

Notes: All index returns (except S&P 500) exclude reinvested dividends, and the 5- year and 10-year returns are

But....

Over the five-year period, 82.38% of large-cap managers, 87.21% of mid-cap managers, and 93.83% of small-cap managers lagged their respective benchmarks. Similarly, over the 15-year investment horizon, 93.18% of large-cap managers, 94.40% of mid-cap managers, and 94.43% of small-cap managers failed to outperform on a relative basis. So managed funds underperform the general market.

Byron/Luddites

In 1812 Lord Byron spoke for the first time in the House of Lords, choosing for his topic the recent Luddite rioting. Byron was twenty-four, recently returned from the obligatory Grand Tour of Europe, and ready for a career; had his speech been the success he hoped for, there is every chance that the career might have been in politics, rather than in poetry and persecution. Byron had chosen the sensational Luddite riots as his topic mainly because it was the issue most likely to cause a stir, but his ancestral home was in Nottinghamshire, where the rioting had broken out the year before. Byron thought the speech a triumph too, based on the congratulations he received; privately his fellows were unimpressed. 
He was mentally shelved by the leader of the Whig opposition for his "fastidious and artificial taste and his over-irritable temper."

No matter. A week and a half later Childe Harold was published, turning Byron overnight into a poetic hero, and bringing such a line-up of coaches delivering social cards that there were traffic jams outside his apartment. Soon   the Nottingham estate would be sold in order to pay for his extravagances. His poetry, condemnation and self-exile dominated the next decade until his death in Greece in 1824. (from King)

Sunday/Sweeney

This is what Sweeney does best: he uses physical objects to conjure something intangible and, conversely, infuses empty space with physical presence.
In his later poem, “A Dream of Honey”, first published in the TLS of July 13, 2001, Sweeney combines this skill with what Ian Sansom described in 1992 as a “spare story-telling technique that is all his own”, moving beyond static images into a quasi-folktale tinged with a wry narrative voice. Here, we drift between two states: romanticizing the dream-like future and looking back on ourselves in the peculiar act of remembering – mourning, even – the present. Long-awaited jars of honey are “snapped up” by unseen customers, and the only individual mentioned – the “peasant woman” – disappears, leaving behind that familiar sense of vacancy. A simple first impression is, on closer inspection, as structurally intricate as a natural artefact: the architecture of the Zeppelin Hangars market stands like giant cells of honeycomb. Emails speed across the country, helicopters fly low over houses and the speaker hovers from the detached perspective of the dreamer – persistent reminders of the absent bees. And then there’s the honey itself – “fabled”, “hoarded”, rumoured, resurrected – which takes on a mythic, spiritual quality at odds with the scientifically advanced, environmentally-eroded setting. “A Dream of Honey” is unassuming in its three neat stanzas, framing itself inside its own invisible subject. (TLS)

A Dream of Honey


I dreamed that bees were extinct,
had been for decades, and honey
was a fabled memory, except for jars
hoarded by ancient, wealthy gourmets.
Honey was still on the shelves, of course –
that’s what they’d named the sweet concoction
chemists had arrived at, and it sold well,
not just to those who knew no better,
and the day was coming fast when no one
alive would be able to taste the difference.


Then one Friday morning in Riga
a peasant woman arrived by horse and cart
at the old Zeppelin Hangars market
and set up her stall with jars of honey
flavoured by the various flowers. Around her
sellers of the new honey gawped, then sniffed
as she screwed the lids off, then glared
as her jars were snapped up in minutes,
and she climbed on her cart again
and let the horse take her away.


In the dream, e-mails sped everywhere
about this resurrection of honey,
and supermarket-suppliers scoured Latvia,
knocking on every door, sending helicopters
low over houses, looking for beehives,
but after a month they gave it up,
and the woman never appeared again
though rumours of her honey-selling
came over the border from Russia
and continued beyond the dream.


MATTHEW SWEENEY (2001)

Reverie

"I have no child for whom I could wish to make a provision-no family to build in greatness upon my Country's ruins." --Washington

I am mystified by our anxiety over Nazis. Maybe Nazism is caused by the Zika virus.


And Nazis remind us of White Walkers in GoT so.....GoT's 8th season will each be shorter than “Game of Thrones” seasons were in the past — the final season will be only six episodes. It’s also expected that Season 8, like Season 7, will begin in late summer in order to allow for an increased amount of time filming in the snow.


And White Walkers remind us of the United States War Against the Dead. There were several demonstrations against statues of dead people over the weekend.

Ruth: noun 1. pity or compassion. 2. sorrow or grief.
Quote:

So, then, you would all be on the side of mad Achilles, who knows neither right nor ruth?

-- Homer (9th or 8th century b.c.), Iliad, translated by Samuel Butler, 1898

Origin: The noun ruth “pity” is to the verb rue “to feel sorrow over” as growth from grow or as death from die. The element -th forms action nouns from verbs (as growth from grow or as death from die) and nouns of quality or condition from adjectives (as length from long or as breadth from broad). The verb rue ultimately derives from the Old English verb hrēowan “to repent of, rue.” Ruth is first recorded in English during the 12th century.

We've created a generation of anger addicts who can't read past the first page of a book. This is why the howls of outrage from within the ranks of the news media about Trump's election ring a little bit false. What the hell did we expect would happen? Who did we think would rise to prominence in our rage-filled, hyper-stimulated media environment? Sensitive geniuses?--Taibbi

There are more passive ETFs than stocks. Vanguard has just launched an ETF of their ETFs. Read that again.


A college student is in class about 15 hours a week. Do they study another 25 to work 40 hours a week like their parents who are paying for it?


Here is an interesting take on the Iran Sanctions: As with many of the U.S. sanctions, the overall effect on the Iranian economy is to weaken portions of that economy that are outside the regime and to strengthen the regime's influence over other parts, including the economic activities of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

What is...the Mills and Factory Act?

On a well ordered society, by Hayek:  "A Great Society has nothing to do with, and is in fact irreconcilable with ‘solidarity’ in the true sense of unitedness in the pursuit of known common goals.  If we all occasionally feel that it is a good thing to have a common purpose with our fellows, and enjoy a sense of elation when we can act as members of a group aiming at common ends, this is an instinct which we have inherited from tribal society and which no doubt often still stands us in good stead whenever it is important that in a small group we should act in concert to meet a sudden emergency.  It shows itself conspicuously when sometimes even the outbreak of war is felt as satisfying a craving for such a common purpose; and it manifests itself most clearly in modern times in the two greatest threats to a free civilization: nationalism and socialism.
Most of the knowledge on which we rely in the pursuit of our ends is the unintended by-product of others exploring the world in different directions from those we pursue ourselves because they are impelled by different aims; it would never have become available to us if only those ends were pursued which we regarded as desirable.  To make it a condition for the membership of a society that one approved of, and deliberately supported, the concrete ends which one’s fellow members serve, would eliminate the chief factor which makes for the advancement of such a society."
This is no better shown than by science which advances in crab steps.


A Bay Area startup that promised to give music lovers state-of-the-art wireless earphones is instead closing its doors, becoming the latest in a string of crowd-funded companies to take customers' money and shut down without shipping a product. San Francisco-based Kanoa ran out of capital and shut down this week, leaving in the lurch scores of customers who paid $150 or more to pre-order high-tech earphones they never received.

"...it cannot be shown with purely conceptual analysis that markets do not handle externalities: any such assertion necessitates an assumption that the government can do better.  That this assumption is valid cannot be proved analytically, and it follows that market failure is an essentially normative judgment.--Dahlman


On August 28, 1941, SS General Franz Jaeckeln marched more than 23,000 Hungarian Jews to bomb craters at Kamenets Podolsk, ordered them to undress, and riddled them with machine-gun fire.

According to New York Magazine, the Russian subdivision of Burger King has launched its own cryptocurrency, the Whoppercoin. Reports suggest that the Whoppercoin will be accepted as payment at Burger Kings across Russia... Burger King has reportedly issued one billion Whoppercoin tokens to date, though it is possible that there will be more to come.

Very exciting but I don't see how much it differs from airline miles or green stamps.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/cab-thoughts-82113.html

Cab Thoughts 8/21/13 steeleydock.blogspot.com The big thieves hang the little ones. -Czech proverb A National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health study took 111 samples a...

With an estimated 326,000 staff, the newly created Shenhua-Guodian combined entity, will not only be the world's largest power company, with assets of $271 billion and 225GW in installed capacity, but a workforce that is four times bigger than the entire U.S. coal-fired power industry.

Colin Mcgregor invented a style/event and pushed it through personality, ferocity and promotion to a boxing match with one of history's greatest boxers. He got beat but he was not really a boxer so there is no real defeat. And he walks away with $100 million. He is athletics' Kim Kardashian.


New York’s 46 Success Academy schools are non-profit, public schools. They are Charter Schools. Students are selected by lottery — not aptitude.  With 46 schools and 15,500 students this year, the Success Academy network is now the size of the state’s 7th largest school district. On this year’s state exams, 95% of Success students passed math and 84% passed [English] — making Success #1 for student achievement in New York State. Citywide, just 29% of the kids of color (and 61% of the white kids) passed the English test — versus 83% of the kids of color at Success Academy schools.  In math, the results were even a little more dramatic.


"No more Trump,
No more wall,
No more USA at all!"

No more USA? This was the chant of masked men and women at the University of Berkley, armed with clubs, attacking people and fighting with police. These guys with intense hatred of the country lie under the radar and the rocks until a new pseudo-cause arises. The presumed cause is never the same--war, racism, equality, diversity, Wall Street--but the underlying cause is always the same: disruption of the country with some vague restructuring. The subjects here are many (if things are so bad, why are you here when there are so many options? what are your replacement plans? why the masks? are these just people with bad medical histories?...the list is endless) They got little coverage--I think because they reflect so badly on the Left--but they will have their own gravity, attracting society's loose ends and will grow like a kidney stone. This will not play well in communities with real jobs and responsibilities. It is amazing the Left survives these self-inflicted wounds. Or is the Left the new zombie?



 “There are certain harms that are nonactionable and offense is one of them. If I say something that you find duly offensive, you may protest, you may speak—but what you may not do is to sue me in order to silence me, or to get compensation from me.” Counterspeech is “the appropriate ‘remedy’ under these circumstances; suppressing speech is not.”--Richard Epstein

An anti-bullfighting activist jumped into the arena in Carcassone, southern France, on Sunday and was promptly attacked by one of the animals he wants to protect, local police said.

Two protesters, a man and a woman, were in the audience before managing to make their way into the main ring during the "novillada", a series of fights involving young bulls.

One bull charged at the man who, according to police a received "a long but not deep" injury from its horns.

The protester, in his 30s, "was very lucky" that he was not properly gored and was only lightly injured, another source said.

He was taken to Carcassone hospital for examinations. His female companion was not inured and was arrested by police. (Yahoo)

The Podesta Group belatedly filed several new disclosures with the Justice Department on Aug. 17 related to work the firm completed between 2012 and 2014 on behalf of a pro-Russia Ukrainian think tank.
Back in April, the powerful Washington lobbying firm run by Clinton ally Tony Podesta filed a document admitting its work for the pro-Russia European Centre for a Modern Ukraine may have principally benefited a foreign government. New disclosures revealed dozens of previously unreported interactions the firm made with influential government offices, including Hillary Clinton's State Department and the office of former Vice President Joe Biden, while lobbying on behalf of the center. Embattled ex-Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort failed to disclose his extensive lobbying efforts on behalf of the center at the time as well. (Wash Ex)
These people are on their own side first.


I watched Maria Sharapova win her first match in the U.S. Open. It is hard to like the dopers but, for some reason, there is something positive about her. Really quite an achievement, regardless. I hope my blanket dismissal of people like this is not like the Left's blanket dismissal of people with faults.

The film and novel titled The Year of Living Dangerously was inspired by a major 1964 speech by Indonesian Founding Father Sukarno and was drawn from Italian leader Mussolini’s slogan “Live Dangerously,” which was originally penned by 19th-century Germany philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Nazis are everywhere.


In 1833, the Mills and Factory Act was passed in England. This was one of a series of Acts passed in the 19th century to improve the "Health and Morals" of child laborers, but it was the first effective legislation in that it empowered national inspectors with unlimited, unannounced entry to the factories. The improved regulations -- no one under 9 employed, a 48-hour week for children aged 9-12, a 68-hour week for teenagers, some minimum provisions for education and health, etc. -- were largely the result of testimony given by young workers to a Parliamentary committee investigating violations of earlier Acts. (king)

AAAaaaaaannnnndddd.....a graph: