Cab Thoughts 9/14/13

Knowledge comes, but wisdom lingers. -Alfred, Lord Tennyson, poet (1809-1892)

IG Farben was the largest chemical company in the world and the fourth largest overall industrial in the late 1920s and 30s. It was formed as a conglomeration of companies, including Bayer. The IG Farben factory in Germany produced Zyklon B, the chemical agent used to gas millions of Jews and other "undesirables" to death during the Holocaust, as well as Tabun, the first nerve gas out of the Nazi nerve gas program and the forerunner of Sarin.

It is interesting that Obama, with his philosophical background in moral relativism, is unforgiving in the Middle East and unwilling to see their problems in their religious and historical context. More, he is willing to see the United States as a moral and political leader with Bush-like evangelistic qualities when he has publicly disavowed that attitude in the past.

A look back in history: The October 2002 authorization for Bush's military force in Iraq passed by an easy 77-23 margin in the Senate and a 296-133 margin in the House.

Jesse Jackson, Jr., a 17-year veteran of the US Congress, is going to prison for 2 1/2 years. He got a "mood disorder" about the same time he learned he was to be indicted. His "mood disorder" is so severe, he has become disabled and will receive $8700 per month as a disability payment as well as $45000 a year from his congressional pension, a total of about $150K per year.
Another victory for equality: Iowa is granting permits to acquire or carry guns in public to people who are legally or completely blind.


"Stork detained as spy in Egypt found dead." This is a headline in the press as it ruminates on the chaos and madness that is Egypt. But no headline about Coptics, abuse of the press, abuse of female reporters. Always the sideshow, never the show.

tycoon: noun: A wealthy and powerful person, especially in business or politics. From Japanese taikun (great lord or prince), from Chinese ta (great) + kiun (prince). The word was used as a title for the shogun of Japan. Abraham Lincoln's aides used the word as an affectionate nickname for him.

DC Comics continues to grab far too much attention with the Catwoman controversy. The strip's writers resigned because they said the publishers would not allow the comic strip character to marry her girlfriend. The publisher said: "heroes shouldn't have happy personal lives. They are committed to being that person and committed to defending others at the sacrifice of their own personal interests." This is a comic strip character.

The single largest portion of the university budget is the maintenance of buildings and lands. Sooooo........

Who was ......Jean-François Champollion?

"From 2001–2002 to 2009–2010, the rate of emergency department visits for alcohol-related diagnoses for males increased 38%, from 68 to 94 visits per 10,000 population," reported the Center for Disease Control. "Over the same period, the visit rate for females also increased 38%, from 26 to 36 visits per 10,000 population."

George Will wrote the following about Hilary Clinton: "That contemporary feminism is thin gruel is apparent in the fact that it has found its incarnation in a woman who married her way to the upper reaches of American politics. There her wandering husband rewarded her remarkable loyalty by allowing her the injurious opportunity to produce a health-care proposal so implausible that a Democratic-controlled Congress (56 to 44 in the Senate, 256 to 178 in the House) would not bring it to a vote. Still, the world’s oldest political party might not allow a contest to mar the reverent awarding to her of its next nomination." Is that a reasonable criticism?

Does "The greatest good for the greatest number" justify the torture of an individual to gain information to protect a group?

On September 6 a Minotaur V rocket was launched from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia. It is "LADEE", the Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, and is moon-bound.

48 million Americans, 20% of the eligible population, are now on food stamps.

According to the CDC, there are 800,000 accidental needle-sticks that occur in the U.S. health system annually.

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/05/what-israel-means.html

AAAAAAAaaaaannnnnnnddddd.....a graph:

On Early Investing

There a number of "Jack and Jill" investment scenarios out there. Here is one on the influence of time and results.

Two twins, Jack and Jill, make a decision at the age of 25. Jill would invest $1200 a year at 6% interest until she is 65. Jack would spend his money without investing it until he is 45. Then he would start to invest at 6% interest, but he will invest twice as much, $2400 a year, to catch up.

On their 65^th birthday Jill will have $185,714 in her portfolio and Jack will have $88,285 even though they each invested $48,000.
By waiting until the age of 45 to start investing, Jack’s portfolio will be $97,429 less than Jill’s portfolio.



(From Kanwal Sarai's Simplyinvesting)

9/11 reflected in Boston's Broken Glass

The mom of the Boston bomber, in the middle of her ridiculously implausible "denial tour," said if her son were executed "I will say Allahu Akbar!“

Somehow this fits. In fact all of this seems a non sequitur. Nothing leads from one point to another.
A family flees to this country and is welcomed and protected. The family goes on welfare support. They become comfortable and the children pursue their educations. One marries a local girl and has a child. Then they blow up countless strangers. Afterwards they go to several social events.

Any of these episodes might be individually coherent, even reasonable. But together they are more like that charming boy on the bus trip from Florida to Washington State, Ted Bundy. Except we know Ted was quite mad and these boys are not. They are just vicious. But purposelessly so to the Western mind. Any connection to the world of politics or religion is more senile than symbolic; there just is no obvious reason, at least to us. Is there a new social madness, like the obscene phone caller, made possible only by some innocent modern circumstance?

So what is going on? Is it really beyond reason?

A great worry is the tremendous variability of social norms. American prisons, as an isolated culture, look nothing like the culture its constituents came from. Pirate ships demonstrated a democratic structure that was not present in any of the cultures the pirates left. The savagery of the western American farmer in the Indian Wars had nothing in common with the east coast of his origin. Shards from shattered societies like the Symbionese Liberation Army or Jonestown or Amish communities look fantastic to the rest of us but are, nonetheless, quite well ordered and often of great integrity.

Solzhenitsyn thought the American inclusiveness was charmingly naive on a local level and blunderingly stupid internationally. At his 1978 Commencement Address at Harvard, Solzhenitsyn said, "Every ancient and deeply rooted self-contained culture .....constitutes a self-contained world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.....But the persisting blindness of (Western) superiority continues to hold the belief that all the vast regions of our planet should develop and mature to the level of contemporary Western systems....such a conception is a fruit of Western comprehension of the essence of other worlds."

George Bush was an evangelist for democracy. Almost all Westerners believe the progress the West has made is towards a preordained ideal. Francis Fukuyama wrote about it as "The End of History." All was fulfilled in us.

Imagine, then, that all the behavior we see as so strange and inconsistent is being viewed through a distorted Western prism, that bombers are not indoctrinated or "brainwashed" but progressing along their cultural norm, that the acceptance of adult-on-children violence is not acceptance at all but rather the norm, that their connection to Western development is tangential, not incremental.

Maybe these cultural "divides" are rather ancient schisms and have more consequence than we ever thought.

(from an old post.)

Cab Thoughts 9/11/13

Few opinions are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but because they are not already common. -John Locke, philosopher (1632-1704)

 

 

Owners this year have announced the closing or closed a total of 5 nuclear plants--2 in California, 1 in Florida, and 1 in Wisconsin plus the recent Vermont Yankee closure. That is nearly 5% of the US nuclear fleet and it will have to be replaced by carbon.

 

There is a new book out reevaluating the famous Stanley Milgram shock experiments and questioning their statistical validity. Reviews from professionals in the field have been scornful.

 

A short section of Dodd-Frank requires that all public companies disclose the median pay of its employees and place it side-by-side with the CEO’s pay. Precious.

Golden Oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/02/divergent-physician-worlds-one-future.html

Sushmita Banerjee, an Indian woman who wrote a bestselling memoir about life under the Taliban, was reportedly dragged from her home in Afghanistan's Paktika province this week and shot dead. 
Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager who was shot by the Taliban because she advocated for girls' education, helped open Europe's largest public library on Tuesday with a speech claiming that "pens and books are the weapons that defeat terrorism." The new library is in Birmingham, England where she now attends school.

 

The beautiful actress, Paulette Goddard, married Charlie Chaplin and Burgess Merideth but also Erich Maria Remarque, the author of "All's Quiet on the Western Front." She then retired from acting until he died. She inherited a fortune from him.

 

Emerging markets are half the world economy, according to IMF data. Cheap money flooded into those countries; what will happen when it floods out?

 

While Tesla accounts for 1% of Ford’s U.S. monthly sales, the electric car company already has nearly a third of Ford’s $64 billion market capitalization.

 

pittance \PIT-ns\, noun: a small amount or share; a small allowance or sum, as of money for living expenses; a scanty income or remuneration. Pittance shares its root with the word pity. It entered English in the 13th century from the Latin pietatem meaning "piety," "loyalty" and "duty."

The Indian rupee has declined 23% against the dollar in the past six months. These shifts in money are now worldwide and tsunamis can cross any sea.

 

"It's estimated there are 3 million shipwrecks in the waters of the world," said James Delgado, director of maritime heritage for NOAA's office of national marine sanctuaries.

 

While the nation worries over the effects and implications of the administration's major efforts to control finance (Dodd-Frank) and health care (ACA), the government, with the bit in its teeth, plans to expand its management genius into education. A White House website titled "University of the United States (UUS)"--really unbelievable--introduces its plans with this sentence:  "Earning a postsecondary degree or credential is no longer just a pathway to opportunity for a talented few."  Some might suggest that the explosion of the educational system after the Second World War was its own revolution enabling the development of working people. But not these guys. Antagonism. Exclusion. Animosity. "The dreaded 1%." A political group with incomprehensible and inept reactions to some inarticulate resentment. Iconoclasts in search of an idol.

 

Does gay dating discriminate against straights? Does straight dating discriminate against gays? What about religious discrimination; must a Muslim consider a Baptist as a suitor?

 

Who was...Carolyn Bryant?

 

The unfortunate Karen Carpenter's brother, Richard, was said to have been a bit of a musical genius. He came upon a signature sound for the group by overdubbing their two voices to create an eight part harmony -- then tripling them in the studio to get twenty-four voices in all.  Their song "We've only just begun" was originally written by Paul Williams as an ad for The Crocker Bank:

We've only just begun to live
White lace and promises
A kiss for luck and we're on our way 

 

The British health care system, in an economy one sixth the size of the U.S., is projected to have a nearly $47 billion deficit in 2020.

Rush Limbaugh says that he is coming out with a childrens' book this October, to be titled Rush Revere and the Brave Pilgrims: Time-Travel Adventures with Exceptional Americans.

Of the 4 million public school students who entered 9th grade in the 2006-2007 school year, 78.2 percent, or 3.1 million, received high school diplomas in the 2009-2010 school year, an increase of more than two percentage points. Among racial/ethnic groups, Asian/Pacific Islander students had the highest graduation rate at 93.5 percent. The rates for other groups were 83.0 percent for White students, 71.4 percent for Hispanic students, 69.1 percent for American Indian/Alaska Native students, and 66.1 percent for Black students.

 

AAANNNNDDDDDddddd....a picture of Carolyn Bryant:

Stadial

If you walk along the beach in Cape Cod you will see gigantic boulders, detritus of the last ice age that nosed these huge rocks south and then abandoned them as the ice sheet retreated north. That Ice Age  was the most recent glacial period occurring during the last years of the Pleistocene, from approximately 110,000 to 10,000 years ago. The maximum extension of the glaciers within this last glacial period was approximately 22,000 years ago. The main mass was called the Laurentide Ice Sheet; at some places it was up to 2 miles thick.

It radically altered the geography of North America north of the Ohio River. At the height of the Wisconsin Episode glaciations, ice covered most of Canada, the Upper Midwest, New England and parts of Montana and Washington. The Great Lakes are the result of glacial scouring and pooling; Niagara Falls is also a product of the glaciations, as is the course of the Ohio River, which largely supplanted the prior Teays River.

The Earth began to warm and vegetative and animal patterns changed as the glaciers receded. Then, rather suddenly, things changed again. Between 12,800 and 11,500 years ago it got suddenly cold again and abruptly reversed climatic conditions back to near-glacial state. A short such period of lower temperatures during a warming trend is called a "stadial."  This period is called The Younger Dryas stadial, "younger" because it was more recent than the one several thousand years earlier and "Dryas" after the arctic-alpine flowering plant Dryas octopetala, whose pollen is found in cores dating from those times. (During these cold spells, Dryas octopetala was much more widely distributed than it is today as large parts of the northern hemisphere that are now covered by forests were replaced in the cold periods by tundra.)

(The Dryas)

This new period had an impressive impact in North America. The original glacier period allowed the Bering strait to freeze and thus passage of people from Asia to the area of Alaska. The bridge regressed during the warming and may have made a comeback in the Younger Dryas. But the impact further south was devastating with the extinction of big mammals including mammoths, mastodons, giant ground sloths, American camels, horses and saber-toothed cats. More, it doomed those people who hunted them, the Clovis People.

The cause of the Younger Dryas is still under debate. A cataclysm is possible but not essential. The Little Ice Age--not a true Ice Age as it was mild--is conventionally defined as the period extending from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, or alternatively, from about 1350 to about 1850--caused cultural disruption without much fanfare or notice. The relationship with CO2 is unknown.

  

Behavioral Insights

The U.S. government is getting interested in influencing the behavior of citizens in a more direct way than information management.

England has a "Behavioral Insights Team." These guys devise subtle policies to change behavior. One such policy concerns how to get British citizens with late tax filings to pay up. "Sending letters to late taxpayers that indicated a social norm -- i.e., that '9 out of 10 people in Britain paid their taxes on time' -- resulted in a 15 percent increase in response rates over a three-month period, rolling out to £30 million of extra annual revenue," a U.S. document reviewing the program reads.

Such policies --encouraging behavior subtly rather than outright requiring it -- have come to be known as "nudges," after an influential 2008 book titled "Nudge," by former Obama regulatory czar Cass Sunstein and Chicago Booth School of Business professor Richard Thaler, popularized the term. Thaler, who is also an adviser to the British Behavioral Insights Team, said that his research also supports automatically enrolling people in retirement savings plans. "Many people have struggled to save enough to provide for an adequate retirement. ... Two simple design changes can dramatically improve the situation ... automatic enrollment (default people into the plan with the option to easily opt out) and automatic escalation, where workers can sign up to have their contributions increased annually," he said. Presumably this would run in parallel to the already remarkably successful Social Security experiment.

Harvard economics professor David Laibson, who studies behavioral economics and is in touch with the people in government setting up the program, says there are very real benefits to some "nudge" policies -- such as one that increases the number of people registered as organ donors by making people decide when they apply for a drivers' license. There is no suggestion yet to incorporate subliminal suggestion.

There is a risk in government influencing social (as opposed to criminal) behavior. The government is always coming up with their own norms and encouraging them since they know so much better than we do. When these passive/aggressive approaches fail it is necessary to criminalize them. The teaching of evolution, sodomy laws, gambling and alcohol regulation, Sunday Blue Laws, trans-fats bans are all social behaviors made criminal when social pressure was seen as insufficient.

But one can have confidence in the vision and caution of this government; after all, they taught us how to sneeze.

Sunday Sermon 9/8/13

Today's gospel is one of those complex writings that can cause a bucket of harm. Christ is being followed by a lot of people as He journeys toward Jerusalem. In this gospel he distinguishes between the interested and the faithful by emphasizing the spiritual distinct from the material. Families, wives, children are all shockingly shown as material and temporal to make the point.  Taken alone, this gospel is difficult; one must see the whole. For example Christ's opinion of marriage is quite harsh and He repeats it: Marriage is an inviolable contract. Period. Marriage to Christ is repeatedly presented as sacred. So that the diminishing of marriage in this gospel must be more complex than at first blush.

A few years ago George Hensley started a movement in the Pentecostal Church that emphasized the handling of snakes. Several churches continue to handle poisonous snakes in their services to this day. This comes from several bible readings, Mark 16:17-18:
"And these signs shall follow them that believe: In my name shall they cast out devils; they shall speak with new tongues. They shall take up serpents; and if they drink any deadly thing, it shall not hurt them; they shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover" and Luke 10:19:
"Behold, I give unto you power to tread on serpents and scorpions, and over all the power of the enemy: and nothing shall by any means hurt you." 
There is also a section in Acts 28:1-6, which tells that Paul was bitten by a poisonous snake and suffered no harm.

It is doubtful that Christ was creating a religion that hinged on snake handling. Seeing Christ and the whole of His meaning is the real message here.