War Crimes

I am not young enough to know everything.--Oscar Wilde

Good morning. The Ides of March.

Mom got in to Florida easily. Saw the Stewarts last night.

The murders in New Zealand show how fragile the bonds among men are. Real danger prowls along the edge of the Bell Shaped Curve, and no one group has a monopoly on it.

The serious problem exposed by the college cheating scandal is the unclear identity of the university in America. It has become a staging area for adolescents, a pleasant holding area away from and before the arduous real world. It is a four year golf day. It is hard to defend---so it isn't. After eighteen years or so of obsessive management of our children's welfare and development, we hand them off to disinterested strangers for four years. 

From an article in "Science" on dna  from the Bronze Age in the Iberian Peninsula: Starting in about 2,500 B.C., genes associated with people from the steppes near the Black and Caspian seas, in what is now Russia, can be detected in the Iberian gene pool. And from about 2,500 B.C. much of the population’s DNA was replaced with that of steppe people.

The “Steppe Hypothesis” holds that this group spread east into Asia and west into Europe at around the same time—and the current study shows that they made it to Iberia, too. Though 60 percent of the region’s total DNA remained the same, the Y chromosomes of the inhabitants were almost entirely replaced by 2,000 B.C. That suggests a massive influx of men from the steppes, since Y chromosomes are carried only by men.  

Bordeaux on running for office: "I do understand the lust for acclaim, fame, and material wealth that often are the spoils of power. I condemn this lust as immoral, but I understand it. What I don’t understand is the lust to ‘help’ strangers by using force to prevent them from doing A, B, and C, and to compel them to do X, Y, and Z."

Gold and the Dow were both 800 in 1980. Today Gold is $1,300/ounce, the Dow is near 26k. So, Cash flows > commodities.  

Rep. Maxine Waters called for the removal of Wells Fargo CEO Tim Sloan after news that he received a $2 million bonus as part of his 2018 pay package. Waters is certainly one of the people I would pick to improve the businesses of the country.

The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Rajveer Meena as the champion memorizer of digits of pi. On March 21, 2015, at VIT University in Vellore, India, Meena recited pi to 70,000 places past the decimal point.

At the low in 2009, U.S. stocks were back to where they were in 1996.  

In 44 B.C. on this day, Julius Caesar was murdered.

                                   War Crimes

In 1942, Attorney General Francis Biddle and Secretary of War Henry Stimson said “there has been no substantial evidence of sabotage” by people of Japanese extraction living along the United States’ West Coast. But California Attorney General Earl Warren said the “very absence of sabotage” was “the most ominous sign in the whole situation”: “I believe we are just being lulled into a false sense of security.” 

So the absence of evidence proved the crime.

This kind of logic led to the Japanese internment of over 120,000--mostly American citizens.

Anyone looking for examples of the danger of government power need go no further than this.