“If the world were perfect, it wouldn’t be.” --Yogi Berra
Switzerland-based Viking River Cruises, which announced in 2015 that it would be launching an American cruise business on the Mississippi River, revealed this month that it has discontinued its efforts due to the high cost of ship construction in the U.S. The Jones Act requires vessels in domestic commerce to be built in U.S. It likely would cost the company nearly twice as much to build its ships in an American shipyard and it already has a contract with a European shipbuilder. In addition, the current political climate in the U.S. makes it unlikely a variance to the Jones Act allowing Viking to use European-built vessels, would be approved.
The fact that Viking, which operates virtually world-wide with 63 cruise ships on rivers in Europe, Russia, China and Southeast Asia, was unable to successfully navigate the Jones Act and launch a river cruise operation in the U.S. demonstrates how draconian the country’s national shipping laws are.
Patrician: n: a person of noble or high rank; aristocrat; a person of very good background, education, and refinement; a member of the original senatorial aristocracy in ancient Rome.
The Latin adjective and noun patricius, patritius dates to the comedies of the Roman dramatist Plautus (c254-c184 b.c.). The word means having the rank and dignity of the patrēs (Roman senators), or a person with that dignity, a noble. According to the Roman historian Livy (59 b.c.–17 a.d.), Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, appointed the first 100 senators and named them patrēs (fathers). From the time of the reign of the emperor Constantine (288?–337 a.d.) onward, patricius was a high honorary title that entailed no specified duties and was only occasionally awarded. Patrician entered English in the 15th century.
This is from an article claiming that Christian values in France are offensive to the national secular mandate but Islamic values are not: "Meanwhile, in France, authorities were busy dismantling its Judeo-Christian heritage. A superior court recently ordered the removal of a cross from a statue of the Pope John Paul II in a town in Brittany, because the cross supposedly breached rules on secularism. The Conseil d'État, France's top administrative court, evidently decided that the cross violated a 1905 law imposing the separation of church and state. After that, the same Conseil d'État ordered a Nativity scene in the municipal hall of the town of Béziers to be torn down. Then, Macron's special envoy for heritage, Stéphane Bern, proposed charging a fee to enter French cathedrals and churches -- as if they were museums.
A few days later, however, France's Macron displayed all the double-standards and empty rhetoric of this "secularism". The French authorities allowed Muslims in the Paris suburb of Clichy La Garenne to a hold a mass prayer on the street. That is why 100 French politicians and administrators took to the streets of Paris to protest against these prayers. "Public space cannot be taken over in this way", said Valérie Pécresse, president of the Paris regional council.
That is exactly the tragic dead end of French fake "secularism": it allows public expressions of the Islamic religion in France, but prohibits the Christian ones."
Who is ...Akihito?
In 1995 a landmark study found that children whose families were on welfare heard 1,500 fewer words every hour—or eight million fewer per year—than children from professional backgrounds. Eight years later these same children performed significantly worse on vocabulary tests and language assessments than their higher-income peers did.
These findings have influenced child-rearing practices ever since, and it is now taken for granted that the more time a parent talks to an infant, the better. In subsequent studies infant-directed speech has consistently been linked to a child’s language skills, which in turn influence IQ, executive function and emotion regulation.
I wonder what else the researchers could have isolated.
A current thesis around that the radio nucleotide in the Urals are downstream processed materials, not the result of reactors.
The decline in manufacturing’s share of U.S. GDP over the last forty years is nearly identical to the decline in world manufacturing as a share of world GDP, which fell from 26.6% in 1970 to 16.2% in 2010. Therefore, we can conclude that the declining share of manufacturing’s contribution to GDP is not unique to America, but reflects a global trend as the world moves from a traditional manufacturing-intensive “Machine Age” economy to more a services-intensive “Information Age” economy.
An important reiteration:
"Just about every argument opposing the unfettered freedom to exchange goods and services across all borders rests on the failure to appreciate that, as Adam Smith put it, “consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production.”
For example, Kevin L. Kearns, president of the protectionist U.S. Business and Industry Council, says, “America must adopt new policies and strategies based upon a unified national industrial/technology strategy, one that favors producers over consumers”. These policies, according to Eamonn Fingleton’s summary, include “tariffs, quotas, domestic content requirements, government incentives for domestic production and technology development, and ‘buy American’ requirements.”
Such thinking could not more clearly embrace the mercantile system Smith demolished in The Wealth of Nations over two centuries ago — that is, the system that “seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end and object of all industry and commerce.”"--Richman
Japanese Emperor Akihito will abdicate on April 30, 2019, which will end his three-decade reign by passing the throne to his son. (wsj)
Up to 800 million people—including a third of the work force in the U.S. and Germany—will be made jobless by 2030. In the eight-month study, the McKinsey Global Institute, the firm's think tank, found that almost half of those thrown out of work—375 million people, comprising 14% of the global work force—will have to find entirely new occupations, since their old one will either no longer exist or need far fewer workers. Chinese will have the highest such absolute numbers—100 million people changing occupations, or 12% of the country's 2030 work force.
Golden oldie: http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/09/cab-thoughts-92315.html
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steeleydock.blogspot.com
"Life appears to me too short to be spent in nursing animosity, or registering wrongs." - Charlotte Bronte Chrysler, like practically a...
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From Allen: Great diversity is inherent in a university. The very word – university – suggests a fruitful bringing together of diverse elements and activities. But the latest cause of campus agitators is for still more diversity.
The agitation typically is incoherent at any level above sloganeering, but doubtless the main pressure is on race or gender. Everyone with legitimate business on a university campus agrees that it is totally reprehensible to deny faculty appointment or student admission on grounds of race and gender – or on grounds of religion, as was done in an earlier day. Should it be more acceptable to favor people on such grounds?
In the United States, 20 percent of reservation households make less than $5,000 annually, and Native Americans are more likely than non-Natives to be assaulted, incarcerated, or to commit suicide.
Uh oh:
I hope there is no push for equality here.
I watched "Blindness " last night. I really like Saramago and this story is really good in his usual simple way. Certainly more brutal than his usual, too. The clean, efficient style emphasizes the drama, both good and bad. That said, the movie was more careful than the novel. It could have been really horrific had the movie been as descriptive as the written story.
The wonderful sci-fi writer Gene Wolfe was asked once to explain the difference between a science fiction writer and a writer of "magical realism" and he said a writer of magical realism spoke Portuguese.
Epigenetics is the influence of the environment upon behavior and morphology. So, during hunger, the placid skinny and asocial grasshopper becomes a shaggy, voracious and communal locust. One wonders about these sexual abusers. They have a very similar MO, a behavior pattern that almost all men would say is not just wrong but weird.
One wonders if power and material success has its RNA influence.
The Supreme Court heard 60 minutes of speech about when, if at all, making a cake counts as constitutionally protected speech: a baker refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple for "religious reasons." (He also does not make Halloween cakes.) This will be a problem because the guy is not a bigot; the decision will not be perfect, regardless.
Pro Bakery: https://www.hoover.org/research/let-them-bake-cake
Anti Bakery: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-cake-is-food-not-speech-but-why-bully-the-baker/2017/12/01/7e05773c-d5f0-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.fc60254a3548
Pro Bakery: https://www.hoover.org/research/let-them-bake-cake
Anti Bakery: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/a-cake-is-food-not-speech-but-why-bully-the-baker/2017/12/01/7e05773c-d5f0-11e7-b62d-d9345ced896d_story.html?utm_term=.fc60254a3548
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www.washingtonpost.com
The same-sex marriage fight is over. Time for the victors to act a bit more magnanimous.
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www.hoover.org
The Supreme Court should end all totalitarian applications of state antidiscrimination law.
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The NYT story on federal funding of UFO investigation initiated by the giant brained Harry Reid included these three revelations: 1. Many high-ranking people in the federal government believe aliens have visited planet Earth. 2. Military pilots have recorded videos of UFOs with capabilities that seem to outstrip all known human aircraft, changing direction and accelerating in ways no fighter jet or helicopter could ever accomplish. 3. In a group of buildings in Las Vegas, the government stockpiles alloys and other materials believed to be associated with UFOs.
This is from a Scientific American report: "Points one and two are weird, but not all that compelling on their own: The world already knew that plenty of smart folks believe in alien visitors, and that pilots sometimes encounter strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere. Point No. 3, though -- those buildings full of alloys and other materials -- that's a little harder to hand wave away. Is there really a DOD cache full of materials from out of this world? Here's the thing, though: The chemists and metallurgists Live Science spoke to -- experts in identifying unusual alloys -- don't buy it. "I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science. "My opinion? That's quite impossible." Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common -- in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are -- and very well understood.
This is from a Scientific American report: "Points one and two are weird, but not all that compelling on their own: The world already knew that plenty of smart folks believe in alien visitors, and that pilots sometimes encounter strange phenomena in the upper atmosphere. Point No. 3, though -- those buildings full of alloys and other materials -- that's a little harder to hand wave away. Is there really a DOD cache full of materials from out of this world? Here's the thing, though: The chemists and metallurgists Live Science spoke to -- experts in identifying unusual alloys -- don't buy it. "I don't think it's plausible that there's any alloys that we can't identify," Richard Sachleben, a retired chemist and member of the American Chemical Society's panel of experts, told Live Science. "My opinion? That's quite impossible." Alloys are mixtures of different kinds of elemental metals. They're very common -- in fact, Sachleben said, they're more common on Earth than pure elemental metals are -- and very well understood.
AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd......a graph:
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