Reverie

"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition." --G K Chesterton

The Holodomor refers to a famine imposed by the Soviet regime in the early 1930s that killed millions of Ukrainians and was intended to eliminate Ukraine’s independence movement.

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Phosphorus is one of the most crucial ingredients of life, at least our kind of life. It is critical for storing and transferring energy, which means living organisms can’t really survive if this element goes missing. So if it is unevenly distributed in the universe, it may be that life's possibilities are also.
Astronomer Jane Greaves from Cardiff University set out to understand how evenly phosphorus is distributed across the cosmos.
Finding the element could be the path to alien life, but it’s not that simple. Phosphorus is extremely rare and is mainly produced from supernovae, the massive explosions in which aged stars eject most of their mass.
They used William Herschel Telescope in the Canary Islands to observe the Crab Nebula, located 6,500 light years away in constellation Taurus and compared that data with the observation of Cassiopeia A (Cas A) taken some five years ago.
The duo spotted phosphorus in both subjects of the study, but the levels varied significantly. Crab Nebula holds much less of the element than Cas A.
If some supernovae produce more phosphorus than others in the universe, as in this case, the chances of finding life could be restricted to just a few areas of our galaxy.






Female medics attempting to save the life of a Japanese mayor who collapsed in a sumo ring were ordered to get off the stage, which is considered a sacred space from which women are banned. ​
Women are traditionally barred from entering or touching the sumo ring, known as the dohy. Japan’s first female governor, Fusae Ota, repeatedly clashed with the JSA over whether she would be permitted to crown the champion of an annual tournament, a traditional responsibility of the governor of Osaka. Her requests were denied.
In recent years, women’s sumo competitions have gained popularity, but the sport’s governing body limits them to the amateur level, according to ABC.
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What is....the Zimmerman Telegram?




An equity company has given AirBnB 200 million dollars to start building freestanding apartment units to rent on part time short leases.




One of the proposed solutions to the belief in global warming is to scatter reflecting particles in the atmosphere to block and reflect sunlight. Such an act could be done by a public spirited nation or, even, a well heeled do-gooder. When discussion such as this emerges, you know the dog has slipped his leash. The decision-making process of such a suggestion has escaped any scientific evaluation and has graduated into the ether of "good ideas." We're back in the days of the Plague, killing cats.




An observation about the precedents set by the Russian indictment and their implications for the Steele dossier:

"Steele's position is far worse than that of the Russians for at a variety of reasons. One, he is easily extraditable while the Russians are not. Two, his efforts really did affect the race, given that the dossier was systematically leaked to major media and served as a basis for the U.S. government to spy on American citizens. Three, unlike with the Russians, no one disputes that American citizens — Hillary Clinton, members of the Democratic National Committee, and anti-Trump partisan Glenn Simpson and his Fusion GPS team — colluded by paying for Steele's work."

And the implications of Flynn's lying charge:

"Mueller's team has also leveraged a guilty plea from former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn for making false statements to FBI investigators. If the Flynn case is now the Mueller standard, then we know that a number of high-ranking officials are vulnerable to such legal exposure.
Department of Justice official Bruce Ohr deliberately omitted on federal disclosure forms the fact that his wife, an expert on Russia, worked on the Fusion GPS dossier.
Steele himself probably lied to the FBI went he claimed he had not leaked the dossier's contents to the media.
Hillary Clinton aides Huma Abedin and Cheryl Mills likely lied to FBI investigator Peter Strzok (who had also interviewed Flynn) when they claimed they had no idea that Clinton was using a private and illegal email server until the story went public. In fact, Abedin and Mills had communicated with Clinton over the same server — as did then-President Barack Obama, who likewise denied that he knew about the improper server.
Former FBI Director James Comey likely lied to Congress when he claimed that his exoneration of Clinton came after he had interviewed her. We now know from documents that he drafted a statement about the conclusion of the investigation even before he met with her." (Hanson)

There are a lot of "maybes" and "probablys" here but this is a real mess. And Mueller might be backed into a corner here where he must pursue the letter of the law like some Calvinist witch hunter.




An interesting disaster scenario with real implications that is getting some activity is the drop in the world's fertility. It has been believed that this is voluntary, the product of growing wealth that often is coincident with drops in fertility. But some are wondering if that is true, if perhaps there is a true drop in fertility. There is, horrifyingly, a corollary: Sperm counts are dropping, about 1% per year since the war. For some reason the association-is-causation bandwagon has not yet stopped to pick this information up. This is especially confounding when you read the scientific musings about the primary cause for such a drop: Environmental. Interestingly, there are very localized areas of depressed sperm production, an observation that should only make  the environmental groups breath harder. The lowest production in the world is among the Danes and, interestingly, they have the highest rate of testicular cancer..


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The irrational nature of the current debates over freedom and control of citizens might point to a very serious problem: The unwillingness of people to face the question squarely. The essence of the original American republic was liberty within a complex system of referred duties and responsibilities which protected the minority from majority rule. Those have broadened. Much of the unspoken foundation of the current debate is that the citizen is simply not capable of self-governance, at least not as currently structured. It is actually a very un-American position but it has far reaching consequences if adopted. While counterrevolutionary, it is not especially new in this country and is a rebirth of opinions of older times; the King or the Priest always had our best interests at heart. When Roosevelt proposed his "Second Bill of Rights" in the 40s it was a virtual admission of the individual's needing to surrender his responsibility of life to the State-- the mirror image of the original Bill of Rights. Interestingly, Roosevelt's proposal was almost entirely rejected by the public. I'm not sure it would be now.

And a different view of the minority from Heyne:

"The basic problem with democracy is that special interests have an enormous advantage in this competition.  People know and care about their own interests.  But they usually don’t pursue them successfully through the political process, because the cost to any one person of exerting influence will typically exceed by a large amount the expected benefit from acting.

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The people for whom the expected benefits exceed the costs are people who form part of a relatively small group with a relatively substantial interest.  The laws that emerge from operation of democratic processes are consequently laws that cater to an endless succession of narrow, special interests.  We are not governed by the will of the majority but by the wills of innumerable minorities.  Special preferences and restrictions multiply, and collectively make all of us ultimately worse off."

  

I thought the Penguin trade made them the favorite. Now I don't think so.

The average annual income of the average HomeAway customer is $160 K.

Intermediate goods imports account for 43 percent of US imports. For example, tariffs designed to protect the domestic steel industry may directly affect 140,000 US steel workers, but there are approximately 5.4 million workers in steel-consuming manufacturing sectors who will be hurt by higher steel prices as a result.

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Remember this guy?

An Instagram post by former Miami Dolphins player Jonathan Martin prompted a private Los Angeles area high school to shut down. Martin was detained at a Los Angeles-area hospital where he went to seek treatment Friday after his threatening Instagram post led to his former high school closing for the day.

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A Native American dreamcatcher talisman—a hoop of wood strung with net or mesh and believed to filter dreams, allowing in only good ones and keeping out the bad—is passed among schools that have suffered deadly shootings. (wsj)

Great idea that has Cabinet potential.

If one totaled black income and thought of black Americans as a separate nation with their own gross domestic product, black Americans would rank among the world's 20 richest nations.

I was sorry about the fabulous Lindsey Vonn not winning her Olympic event. She is threatening to retire but it is rare to insist on going out on top. My new hero is the fabulous Jessica Diggins, but her heroism was singular, so far anyway.

Chris and I were talking about genetic manipulation in the context of the Olympics. Interestingly, we tend to think of genetic manipulation as an effort in genetic improvement but that may not be either feasible or desired by these "leaders."  Gene editing is possible and will be done to eliminate obvious genetic errors. But our understanding is less than it sounds. Most people think these governments and companies hope to raise performance but that will be tough as there are so many elements, particularly on the level of intelligence.

Just on the basis of feasibility I think enhanced computer thinking would be easier to develop than biological improvement; and the biologic change I think would be more likely would be problem specific--actual genetic downgrades, like military or workers-slaves.

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Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/09/american-symbolism.html

Mack Beggs won a Texas girls state wrestling championship for the second year in a row with a victory that, once again, brought a mixture of cheers and boos because Beggs is a transgender athlete.

Beggs, an 18-year-old senior at Trinity High in Euless, began the transition from girl to boy a few years ago and has been taking low-level testosterone injections but is competing in the girls competition because of a decision by the University Interscholastic League after an uproar and a lawsuit last winter. Because the testosterone comes from a physician, the UIL does not regard it as a banned substance.

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In 1817, President Wilson learned of the Zimmermann Telegram. The Zimmermann Telegram was a message from German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann to the German ambassador to Mexico proposing a Mexican-German alliance in the event of a war between the U.S. and Germany. In the telegram, intercepted and deciphered by British intelligence in late January, 1917, Zimmermann instructed his ambassador, in the event of a German war with the United States, to offer significant financial aid to Mexico if it agreed to enter the conflict as a German ally. Germany also promised to restore to Mexico the lost territories of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona. The Zimmermann Telegram helped turn the U.S. public, already angered by repeated German attacks on U.S. ships, firmly against Germany. On April 2, President Wilson, who had initially sought a peaceful resolution to World War I, urged immediate U.S. entrance into the war. Four days later, Congress formally declared war against Germany.

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AAAaaaannnndddddd....a bar graph: