Cab Thoughts 3/7/15

The rich tend to get richer not just because of higher returns to capital, as the French economist Thomas Piketty has argued, but because they have superior access to the political system and can use their connections to promote their interests.--Francis Fukuyama

Enunciated by President James Monroe in 1823, the Monroe Doctrine sent a clear message to any European powers with colonial ambitions in South America that the United States would not stand idly by and allow the oppression, control, or colonization of any country in its hemisphere. On the contrary, such an act would, by definition, be considered hostile to the United States. Theodore Roosevelt agreed with the concept and added his "corollary" which he defined to Congress on December 6, 1904: 'Chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society ... may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.'

The St. Lucia's Day flood in 1287:  The North Sea had been steadily rising. On St. Lucia's Day a storm caused a particularly rough and high tide. A dike broke. By some estimates, eighty thousand people died. What had been an inland lake, formed by low altitude and human fortifications, became part of the North Sea. From then on, the area was called the Zuiderzee, the "southern sea."

In 1830 Victor Hugo's Hernani premiered in Paris. Though the play is rarely read or staged now, the opening night is regarded as one of the most momentous in French theater history as it was part of a larger and mostly theatrical conflict between the new-wave bohemians in Hugo's "Romantic Army" and the old-guard Classicists. Hugo had recently published what amounted to a Manifesto of Romanticism, calling for an end to the old rules and proprieties; the artists and bohemians saw the premiere of Hernani as an opportunity to rally behind this call, to provoke the bourgeoisie.

Horses, like camels, evolved in North America, but then became extinct there after spreading to Asia, across the Beringia land bridge. The Przewalski’s horse is the only truly wild horse species still in existence. The only wild population is in Mongolia. There are however numerous populations across the world of feral horses e.g. mustangs in North America. The fastest recorded sprinting speed of a horse was 88 kph (55 mph). 

NASA's unmanned Dawn spacecraft will soon be visiting a "planet" rarely heard of: Ceres, a dwarf planet in the asteroid belt between Jupiter and Mars. When it arrives March 6, Dawn will become the first spacecraft to visit one of the five dwarf planets, whose ranks include the former planet Pluto. Ceres was likely becoming a full-sized planet before Jupiter stunted its growth 4.6 billion years ago. It is now the largest object between Mars and Jupiter, and the largest object between the Sun and Pluto that has not yet received a visit from Earth.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/10/we-came-we-saw-he-died.html

A question posed by the economist Mark Perry on the minimum hourly wage by $2.85 (from $7.25 to $10.10): Do you believe that imposing a tax on employers for every low-skilled worker that they hire would not reduce the number of low-skilled workers hired?  Do you believe that requiring employers to pay a tax of $2.85 per hour for every low-skilled worker on their payrolls would not prompt employers over time to employ fewer such workers?  Do you suppose that firms are so inattentive to their bottom lines or so unable to figure out how to operate profitably with fewer worker that such a tax - which would be about $5,700 annually for each and every low-skilled worker employed full-time - would not reduce low-skilled workers’ employment options?

(It is my contention that support for the minimum wage comes not from the belief in its economic virtue but rather from virtue itself.)

A wine expert was asked his opinion on drinking the sweet Moscato with entrees at dinner. He said he thought you should pick what you liked. Then he said this:  "I would struggle to drink a sweet wine such as Moscato with a delicate fish dish in lemon butter, or with a richly flavored beef stew. Perhaps my personal tastes are more "conventional" in that they conform to fairly standard notions of combining tastes. History tells us, however, that such preferences change over time. At one point, and in certain cultures, it was more common to drink sweet wines with a meal than it is today, when the fashion is in favor of dry wines."

At the end of 1956, generally conceded to be the cultural birth year of rock 'n' roll, the best-selling album in America was not Elvis Presley or Elvis, it was Harry Belafonte's Calypso.

Per se: adverb: In or by itself; intrinsically. From Latin per se, translation of Greek kath auto. Earliest documented use: 1505.  The term makes an appearance in the word ampersand, the "and" sign "&",  which is a corruption of “and per se and”. 

Earlier the "&" symbol was considered the 27th letter of the alphabet. (It was eventually dropped because it did not signify a sound.) It was “A to ampersand” instead of “A to Z”. It was awkward to recite the alphabet as “... X Y Z &” (and what?), so schoolchildren reciting the alphabet would end it with “& per se and”, meaning the symbol &, by itself, is the word “and”.
The symbol & is a corruption of “et”, the Latin word for “and,” where the Latin "e" and "t" are run together. That explains why sometimes “etc.” is written as “&c”.

What is...The Laffer Curve?

The colonial expansion into the American west exploded in the middle Eighteenth Century. Some of it was demographic. Colonists had been confined to a several-hundred-mile-wide strip of territory along the Atlantic coast. Increasing population density began to be felt. Over-cultivated soil in the East was becoming depleted. Particularly in the Chesapeake areas the number of tenants was visibly growing. Older towns now seemed overcrowded, especially in New England, and young men coming of age could no longer count on obtaining pieces of land as their fathers had done. But some was a peculiar American emotion: Restlessness. One British official noted: [...the colonists were moving]... 'as their avidity and restlessness incite them. They acquire no attachment to place: but wandering about seems engrafted in their nature; and it is a weakness incident to it that they should forever imagine the lands further off are still better than those upon which they are already settled.'

A report released Monday from the Center for American Progress estimates a cost of about $50.3 billion -- about $10,070 per person -- to deport those eligible for President Barack Obama's executive actions on immigration, which are under fire from Republicans. It is interesting that an argument over the integrity of the nation would factor in the cost but, nonetheless, it looks like a bargain. Anyway, when the government spends money, isn't that a good thing?

Richard Wright's Native Son depicts a young black man trapped by his race and history. It is an unpleasant story. Bigger Thomas, the main character, is a rapist and a murderer motivated only by fear, hate and animal impulses.  Other black characters in the novel don’t fare much better — they are petty criminals or mammies or have been so ground under the heel of oppression as to be without agency or even intelligence. Wright’s is a bleak and ungenerous depiction of black life. The defenders of the novel say that Bigger is the depiction of white's racially distorted imagination of black men. If that is true, it should have been better done.

James Baldwin wrote his main objection to Native Son was that it confirmed the damning judgment on African-Americans delivered by their longstanding tormentors. Damaged by hatred and fear, Bigger Thomas tries to redeem his manhood through murder and rape. But this vengeful cruelty only validates “those brutal criteria bequeathed him at his birth,” reinforcing old degrading notions about black men. (NYT Bookends)
Art requires some revelation, some definition. A scream is not enough.

Interesting Bloomberg opinion that the Fed policy has had the “unintended consequence” of boosting the stocks of companies with heavy debt and little or no earnings. Typically after a recession, such companies lose out to firms that generate more cash and have better balance sheets; this time, no “Darwinian” shakeout happened and low-quality stocks ruled. Managers say they haven’t changed, the market has.

Clifton of Gallup thinks the U.S. is confusing innovation with business: For the first time in 35 years, American business deaths now outnumber business births. This economy is never truly coming back unless we reverse the birth and death trends of American businesses. It is catastrophic to be dead wrong on the biggest issue of the last 50 years -- the issue of where jobs come from...when small and medium-sized businesses are dying faster than they're being born, so is free enterprise. And when free enterprise dies, America dies with it.

It was routine in the 19th Century French theater for the playwright to hire claquers, or hired clappers  organized as a chef de claque to direct things, commissaries to chat up the play at intermissions, rieurs to laugh, pleurers to cry, and so on.

Zorro is a fictional character created by Johnston McCulley. The masked swordsman made his first appearance in The Curse of Capistrano, serialized in a pulp magazine in 1919. Zorro's true identity is Don Diego de la Vega, a nobleman who lives in Spanish-era California and disguises himself in a mask to protect the common people from tyrannical officials. The word "Zorro" is Spanish for "fox."

The State Department has just announced that armed Predator and Reaper drones will be available for sale to carefully vetted and selected allies around the world.  This is a market that, over the next decade, is expected to more than double in size from $5.2 billion to $11.6 billion.  However, as the Washington Post reports, this new program will build “on the Obama administration’s update last year to rules on conventional weapons transfers, which emphasize human rights protections in decisions about arms sales.” Read that again.

The German Shepherd Dog is one of the few breeds who official name includes the word “dog.” Why? So people knew when you were talking about a German shepherd human, who tends the livestock, or the dog helping him.

Despite its popularity in America, The German Shepherd Dog, as a breed, has only won the coveted Best in Show title at Westminster Dog Show once, in 1987.  The dog was Ch. Covy Tucker Hill’s Manhattan. He is also the only dog from the herding group to ever win.

There was a prohibition in the American Colonies in 1763 against settlement of Kentucky and points west. Nonetheless  hundreds of colonists and their families drifted beyond the Appalachians. During the Revolution, in 1779, Lieutenant Colonel George Rogers Clark, elder brother of explorer William Clark, believing the British were rewarding Indians for attacking local settlers, attacked  Fort Sackville at Vincennes, Indiana and took it, bluffing the commander, Hamilton, that he had a much larger force. 

AAAaaaaaannnnndddddd.......a picture of the Przewalski’s horse:

Magna Carta

At Runnymede, beside the Thames, King John on 15 June, 1215 met aggrieved English barons who had backed his failed war with the French. What resulted was  Magna Carta, a document that established a new relationship between a king and his subjects.
Its clause “to no one will we sell, to no one deny or delay right or justice” remains a touchstone for civil liberties that emerged later.

This year the British will hold the  Magna Carta Show which will hold celebrations throughout Britain. One of the stars of the show will be the Melrose Chronicle, a poem written in Latin by Cistercian monks almost 800 years ago.  It is the earliest independent account of the events at Runnymede.
It begins: “A new state of things begun in England; such a strange affair as had never been heard; for the body wishes to rule the head, and the people desired to be masters over the king.” It goes on to explain the anger at King John. “The king, it is true, had perverted the excellent institutions of the realm, and had mismanaged its laws and customs, and misgoverned his subjects. His inclination became his law; he oppressed his own subjects; he placed over them foreign mercenary soldiers, and he put to death the lawful heirs, of whom he had obtained possession as his hostages, while an alien seized their lands.”

I took a MOOC on Magna Carta prepared and delivered by members of the History Department at Royal Holloway, a college of the University of London, and will try to summarize it in the next week.

Aesop

Fables are short stories which illustrate a particular moral and teach a lesson. The characters of fables and tales are usually animals who act and talk just like people while retaining their animal traits. One of the important story tellers in history is Aesop.
It is believed that Aesop lived from about 620 to 560 B.C. in Samos, a Greek island in the eastern Aegean Sea. The name of his first owner was Xanthus. It is certain he spent much of his life living in Greece at the court of King Croesus in Athens. The name Aesop is derived from the Greek word Aethiop which means Ethiopia. It is believed that he eventually became a free man. In Aesop's biography--written over a millennium after his death--Planudes describes Aesop an ugly, deformed dwarf, and the famous marble statue at the Villa Albani in Rome depicts Aesop accordingly.
His fables were first printed in English by William Caxton in 1484, from his own translation made from the French. (William Caxton, b. 1415-d. 1492, was the first English printer and with several others created an English standard through his publishing. He printed 108 works, translated many and his choice of the Fables is significant.) Many of Aesop's fables have in fact since been found on Egyptian papyri known to date between 800 and 1000 years before Aesop's time, so he compiled as well as wrote.

Cab Thoughts 3/4/15

"Goethe says somewhere that there is no such thing as a liberal idea, that there are only liberal sentiments. This is true."--Lionel Trilling 

In 2011 the Fukushima 1 Nuclear Power Plant  was hit by a tsunami that had been triggered by the magnitude 9.0 earthquake. The following day, 12 March, substantial amounts of radioactive material began to be released. A previously unreported type of fallout from Fukushima—radioactive sulfur—reached the United States. Researchers surmise the sulfur was produced when emergency workers at Fukushima flooded the nuclear plant’s runaway reactors with seawater to cool the melting fuel rods. Neutrons emitted by the fuel rods struck chlorine atoms in the water, forming sulfur-35 that escaped from the plant in the form of steam. Sulfur-35 has a half-life of 87.5 days outside of the body, but a biological half-life of 623 days, according to Michigan State University’s Office of Radiation, Chemical & Biological Safety.

• Matthew Carney, ABC North Asia correspondent: “Sorting out Reactor No. 4 will be the easy part. Fixing Reactors No. 1, 2, and 3 will be much more difficult. They’re full of molten nuclear fuel. Humans can’t enter, it would result in instant death. And robots have yet to be invented that can withstand the massive radiation levels near the melted cores. TEPCO admits it doesn’t know the exact location and extent of the meltdowns. They claim it will take 40 years to fix, but others say centuries.”
• Kenichiro Matsui, TEPCO public affairs department: “We don’t know the exact situation in detail. Fuel has been melted down, but nobody has seen it. We need to develop technology with help from around the world to know the real situation.”  

 (TEPCO is the largest electric utility in Japan, the 4th largest electric utility in the world and the owner/operator of the Fukushima plant. The company is under serious pressure because of the apparent lack of compliance with reporting protocols at the plant.)

Who is ....Jean Harris?
 

Hart Crane was born in Garrettsville, Ohio; his father invented Life Saver candy. Harold Bloom says that his poem "The Bridge" is 'uneven certainly but beyond "The Waste Land" in aspiration and in accomplishment.' "Voyages," a poetic sequence in praise of love was described as "a celebration of the transforming power of love," the work's "metaphor is the sea, and its movement is from the lover's dedication to a human and therefore changeable lover to a beloved beyond time and change." Here the sea represents love in all its shifting complexity from calm to storm, and love, in turn, serves as the salvation of us all. (Quinn) R. W. B. Lewis wrote in The Poetry of Hart Crane that the poem was Crane's "lyrical masterpiece."
He was a tortured man. His last drunken hours before jumping from the stern of an Atlantic steamer were spent fighting with the woman he thought to marry and with the sailors he tried to seduce.

Camila Antonia Amaranta Vallejo Dowling; born 28 April 1988 in Santiago) is the representative of La Florida, Santiago in the Chilean House of Deputies and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth of Chile. Vallejo has been labeled by the media as the most important and influential Communist personality of the 21st century in Chile, and also as the symbolic successor of Gladys Marín. (an older Chilean Communist)

Camila Vallejo as Deputy (Wiki)

 She doesn't look bloodthirsty.

It was revealed by FCC commissioner Ajit Pai that the proposed Net Neutrality plan the FCC is considering is 332 pages long. It will not be released to the public until after the FCC has voted. Pai claims this regulation will give “the FCC the power to micromanage virtually every aspect of how the Internet works.”  We need to pass it so we can see what's in it. Legislation through regulation.

An element in current politics is the absence of decision-making. FOX has a uniformity from show to show, as does MSNBC. But the end-stage of the Left and the Right usually has fierce conflict and the points of contention are usually who will lead. So there is a safety in the early phase where there is a slave-like subservience to ideology that ends in ambition-led conflict.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/02/mining-and-quakes.html

The Stamp Act was introduced in 1765 as a means of raising revenue in the American colonies. It required all legal documents, licenses, commercial contracts, newspapers, pamphlets, and playing cards to carry a tax stamp. Colonial businessmen agreed to stop importing British goods until the act was repealed, and trade was substantially diminished. Refusal to use the stamps on business papers became common, and the courts would not enforce their use on legal documents. The act was repealed by the British Parliament in 1766, after the members of the House of Commons heard the arguments of Benjamin Franklin, Pennsylvania's representative in London. Repeal was accompanied by the Declaratory Act, which affirmed the right of the British government to pass acts legally binding on the colonists. The conflict over the Stamp Act contributed substantially to the rise of American nationalist sentiment and is often considered one of the chief immediate causes of the American Revolution.

Wolves do not make good guard dogs because they are naturally afraid of the unfamiliar and will hide from visitors rather than bark at them.

Nikolai Gogol died at the age of forty-two. His unique style -- most famously in stories "The Nose" and "The Overcoat," the play The Inspector General; and the novel Dead Souls -- is a comic-tragic-absurd hybrid. Gogol had always been deeply religious, but his priest convinced him that he should cleanse himself by not merely fasting, praying and reading the lives of the saints but renouncing his writing as vainglorious and unholy. In his zeal, Gogol burned all his writing, including the manuscripts of his sequels to Dead Souls, the labor of years. His doctors' last-hour attempts to save him included not just trying to hypnotize him into eating or applying blisters to his extremities but giving him hot baths while pouring ice-water on his head, or giving him ice-baths and then putting him to bed among warm loaves of bread.

Hours before the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, people reported seeing elephants and flamingos heading for higher ground. Dogs and zoo animals refused to leave their shelters. After the tsunami, very few dead animals were found.

Scott Walker was questioned at a National Governors Association meeting in Washington on Saturday. He said he didn't know whether President Barack Obama was a Christian (“I’ve actually never talked about it or I haven’t read about that”)—then turned the attention back on his questioners.
“To me, this is a classic example of why people hate Washington and, increasingly, they dislike the press,” he said, according to the Washington Post. “The things they care about don’t even remotely come close to what you’re asking about.”

Economists Jonathan Meer (of Texas A&M) and Jeremy West (of M.I.T.) wrote just last month, “[t]he voluminous literature on minimum wages offers little consensus on the extent to which a wage floor impacts employment.”  Profs. Meer and West, justly critical of the shortness of the time spans examined by ‘pro’-minimum-wage studies, then present powerful evidence that minimum wages do in fact over several years slow job growth for low-skilled workers. So there is some debate? People raising questions are not just nuts?

Grote Mandrenke is a Low German word. It means "Great Drowning of Men." In January of 1362, a storm driven by intensely high winds hit Ireland. What coastal houses the waves didn't get were blown down. As the storm moved down the coast of Europe, it coincided with an extremely high tide. The medieval town of Dunwich in England, now lies under the sea because of the Grote Mandrenke. Sixty parishes in Slesvig, Denmark disappeared. And in Holland, twenty-five thousand more people died.

Hortatory: adjective: Strongly urging. From Latin hortari (to urge). Ultimately from the Indo-European root gher- (to like or want), which also gave us yearn, charisma, greedy, and exhort. Earliest documented use: 1586.

"Plumes" have been found in the atmosphere of Mars--by amateur astronomers originally in March 2012. Possibly similar plumes have now been found on archived images as far back as 1997. Since the plumes reach 200 kilometers up, they seem too high to be related to wind-blown surface dust. Since one plume lasted for eleven days, it seemed too long lasting to be related to aurora. More of the amazing contributions of those pursuing avocations.

When the Dury Lane Theater, which Richard Sheridan co-owned, burned to the ground in 1809, Sheridan was fifty-seven years old, decades past the days when his School for Scandal was the talk of the town, and made him a fortune -- upwards of a million dollars in today's money, some historians calculate. The fire started his decline. He started to drink, was imprisoned several times for debt, and died destroyed. The best of Sheridan's glory days came from his Parliamentary career rather than Drury Lane. This was his "Begums speech" in 1787, advocating the impeachment of Warren Hastings, governor-general of India. Sheridan spoke without notes for five and a half hours, with such skill and feeling that both sides of the House, reportedly for the first time in its history, jumped to their feet with cheering and applause.

AAAAAaaaannnnnndddddd.......a graph:

 

Excess of XL

The President has vetoed the authorization of the Keystone XL pipeline. The project would build a pipe system from the Alberta tar sands in Canada to refiners on the Gulf coast. It would create 40,000 jobs in construction and pipe-fitting over the two years it would take to finish it. Unions strongly backed the Keystone XL project, while environmentalists strongly opposed it. It had bipartisan support in the Congress and in the nation. A CNN poll in January showed that 57 percent of Americans wanted it approved, while only 28 percent opposed it. The bill had majority or double-digit plurality support in almost every demographic – age, region, gender, income, education. Only among Democrats and self-described liberals did opposition exceed support, and in those cases only by single digits. For some reason the State Department saw fit to evaluate the environmental impact of the pipeline--twice--and found that the pipeline project would be neutral on climate change and would not have a serious impact on the environment.
The truth of the matter is that this is a pretty innocuous thing but nothing is small to the ideologue.

“The Price of Inequality:” A Review

Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate and a professor of economics at Columbia. His book, “The Price of Inequality,” has been called "the single most comprehensive counter­argument to both Democratic neoliberalism and Republican laissez-faire theories." (NYT) It is not uncontrollable technological and social change that has produced a two-tier society, Stiglitz argues, but the exercise of political power by moneyed interests over legislative and regulatory processes. “While there may be underlying economic forces at play,” he writes, “politics have shaped the market, and shaped it in ways that advantage the top at the expense of the rest.” But politics, he insists, is subject to change.

The argument--not limited to Stiglitz--is that inequality not only violates moral values, it also interacts with a money-driven political system to grant excessive power to the most affluent. In short, those with power use it to insulate themselves from competitive forces by winning favorable tax treatment, government-­protected market share and other forms of what economists call “rent seeking.” Power trumps the market.

Stiglitz points to four reasons why inequality is slowing economic growth: America’s middle class is too weak to support the kind of consumer spending required for a robust recovery, the middle class is too weak to invest in its future, the weak middle class means a smaller tax base and income inequality causes more intense boom and bust cycles. 

“Inequality leads to lower growth and less efficiency. Lack of opportunity means that its most valuable asset — its people — is not being fully used. Many at the bottom, or even in the middle, are not living up to their potential, because the rich, needing few public services and worried that a strong government might redistribute income, use their political influence to cut taxes and curtail government spending. This leads to underinvestment in infrastructure, education and technology, impeding the engines of growth. . . . Most importantly, America’s inequality is undermining its values and identity. With inequality reaching such extremes, it is not surprising that its effects are manifest in every public decision, from the conduct of monetary policy to budgetary allocations. America has become a country not ‘with justice for all,’ but rather with favoritism for the rich and justice for those who can afford it — so evident in the foreclosure crisis, in which the big banks believed that they were too big not only to fail, but also to be held accountable.”

This argument, regardless of its merits, might well redefine the question of inequality, but is it important? The kernel of the position, it seems to me, is not the inherent evil of inequality but rather the inherent evil of government (and financial elite) corruption. And the problem with focusing on corruption is that leaders, in thought or politics, always see themselves as the solution when, if corruption in leadership is the problem, they are not, in fact, the logical solution.

Sunday

Today is the Feast of the Transfiguration. Despite its drama, it was never formalized in the Church until after the Tenth Century. In it, Christ is transfigured on a mountaintop with Moses and Elijah while Peter, James and John watch in amazement.
It is often seen as a jumping off point in the Gospel where Christ and the apostles are both energized by this glimpse of heaven.
But it is a remarkable, almost posed, artistic and philosophical moment. A distillation of the conflicts and resolutions of the New and Old Testament, it is a powerful mixture of spirituality and humanity, Christ and the great prophets and the apostles all swirling in opposition and conformity.