The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative‏

It is not everyday one gets to sympathize with a billionaire.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook announced his plans to give away all his money--about 45 billion dollars. Yet he has been savaged recent editorials. He has revealed a lot of faults in his effort at good will.
First, his aims of his charity have been attacked as vague.
Zuckerman defined them this way:
"Advancing human potential is about pushing the boundaries on how great a human life can be.
Can you learn and experience 100 times more than we do today?
Can our generation cure disease so you live much longer and healthier lives?
Can we connect the world so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity?
Can we harness more clean energy so you can invent things we can’t conceive of today while protecting the environment?
Can we cultivate entrepreneurship so you can build any business and solve any challenge to grow peace and prosperity?"
Well, they are a little vague.
Worse, his charity is suspect because he has structured it as a limited partnership so he can control it rather than giving it to someone else:
"The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not even an actual charitable organization, but rather structured as an LLC. Unlike a charitable trust, which is compelled to spend its money on charity, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC will be able to spend its money on whatever it wants, including private, profit-generating investment," someone howled.
Apparently others are more altruistic with other people's money.
The final criticism is that he is stealing money from taxes; I guess taxation is a really efficient way to do good works.
He is now trying to defend his charity in the press.

This is a new and vengeful age of altruism. 

Sunday 12/6/15

These Evangelists were clever. And funny.
Today is the beginning of Luke's life of Christ. It starts with the time and fixes it with human power: the time of Tiberius Caesar, of Pontius Pilate the governor of Judea, Herod the tetrach, Lysanias the other tetrach, and the local high priests Annas and Ciaaphas. Finally the point of this inverted pyramid, John the Baptist.
And his message? Leveling.

Cab Thoughts 12/5/15

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be' - she always called me Elwood - 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."--Elwood P. Dowd

I am ignorant of the debate over the Import-Export Bank. The strict economists generally oppose it. Here is a quote from Paul Ryan that makes me suspicious: "Are we going to reward good work or good connections? I think there are plenty other ways to expand opportunity in this country, and corporate welfare is not one of them. The biggest beneficiaries of this bank, two-thirds of their money go to 10 companies. Forty percent goes to one company."

Everyone is excited about Trudeau's election. Aside from legalizing marijuana, Trudeau’s other concrete proposal is to intentionally run a deficit by raising taxes (on the rich) and spending even more money on infrastructure. Classic Keynesian stuff, countercyclical fiscal policy. Should be interesting to watch.

U.S. government debt now stands at 103% of GDP. If private debt is included, the ratio climbs to about 370% of GDP. Scholarly studies indicate that real per capita GDP growth should slow by about one-quarter to one-third from the long-run trend when the total debt-to-GDP ratio rises into the range between 250% and 275%. Since surpassing this level in the late 1990s, real per capita GDP has grown just 1% per annum, much less than the 1.9% pace from 1790 to 1999.
These results indicate that the relationship between debt and economic growth is non-linear, or progressively negative, as debt advances to higher levels, a pattern confirmed by academic research.

Who is....Charles M. Schulz?

John Glenn had flown nearly 150 combat missions during World War II and the Korean War. In 1957, he made the first nonstop supersonic flight across the United States, flying from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and 23 minutes. On February 20, 1962,  Glenn made the first American multiorbital flight in Friendship 7, a spacecraft that made three orbits of the Earth in five hours. In 1998, Glenn returned into space again as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery. At 77 years of age, Glenn was the oldest human ever to travel in space. During the nine-day mission, he served as part of a NASA study on health problems associated with aging.

Data never speak for themselves. Interpretation is essential. Without thoughtful, unprejudiced analysis reading numbers is no different than reading bones or Tarot cards.

Charles Schultz' son and grandson  are creating an new "Peanuts" movie. The comic strip has received intense analysis. “A cartoonist,” Schulz once said, “is someone who has to draw the same thing every day without repeating himself.” It was this “infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns,” Umberto Eco wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1985, that gave the strip its epic quality. Watching the permutations of every character working out how to get along with every other character demanded “from the reader a continuous act of empathy.” Eco! The New York Review of Books! Here is one summary analysis: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/the-exemplary-narcissism-of-snoopy/407827/ The Atlantic!

Anyone looking for an example of Rube-publican ineptness need look no further than the esteemed Benghazi Committee who, in spite of the astonishing circumstances they are investigating, are on the defensive.

Illinois State officials announced that winners who are due to receive more than $600 won’t get their money until the state’s ongoing budget impasse is resolved. Players who win up to $600 can still collect their winnings at local retailers. More than $288 million is waiting to be paid out. For now the winners just have an IOU and no interest on their money. The state delayed a $560 million payment to its pension funds for November and may have to delay or reduce another contribution due in December.

Wolves have about 200 million scent cells. Humans have only about 5 million. Wolves can smell other animals more than one mile (1.6 kilometers) away.

Perhaps the fundamental political fact – one characterized by inexpedient and untimely consequences – is the separation of cost and benefit considerations.  The fact that few persons are forced to weight them against one another before making policy choices enables and encourages people to seek additional gains at collective expense.--William Mitchell

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/zero-sum-gaming.html

When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues fell by $257 million.

Bromide: 1. a platitude or trite saying. 2. Chemistry. a. a salt of hydrobromic acid consisting of two elements, one of which is bromine, as sodium bromide, NaBr. b. a compound containing bromine, as methyl bromide. ety: Bromide is a combination of bromo- (a combining form used in the names of chemical compounds that contain bromine) and -ide, a suffix used in chemical compounds. Some bromides were used as sediatives, giving rise to the metaphorical extension of the term in the early 1900s.

Financial planning is tough on people. Governments too.  Pension managers used to think they could average 8% after inflation over two decades or more. At that rate, a million dollars invested today turns into $4.7 million in 20 years. If $4.7 million is exactly the amount you need to fund that year’s obligations, you’re in good shape. What happens if you average only 7% over that 20-year period? You’ll have $3.9 million. That is only 83% of the amount you counted on. At 6% returns you will be only 68% funded. At 5%, you have only 57% of what you need. At 4%, you will be only 47% of the way there.

There has been criticism of the post 2008 recovery with many saying that the monetary easing and the resulting buybacks have artificially raised stock prices. The decrease in available stock might increase prices but should not raise earnings, which also has happened.

The latest Producer Price Index (PPI) numbers from the Labor Department said that prices at the wholesale level actually declined by 0.5% in September. Over the last 12 months through September, the PPI has dropped by 1.1%... that’s the eighth consecutive 12-month decrease in the index. But the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation Index, which tracks the prices of key agricultural commodities that most American households use every day is up. The newest semi-annual survey of the 16 items rose to $53.37, up $1.41 or 2.7% compared with one year ago.

It is perfectly legal for some advisers to steer customers into complex financial products that will earn the highest rewards, perks and prizes for the advisers – even if they are bad options for their customers. Research suggests that this loophole costs Americans an estimated $17 billion every year.  That’s $17 billion taken out of the pockets of retirees by unscrupulous advisers who are more interested in collecting fees and prizes for themselves than helping families build real security. (From a recent Senate report)Thirteen of the 15 major annuity providers investigated acknowledged providing these incentives.

During US Military actions in southeastern Vietnam in February 1968 AP correspondent Peter Arnett quoted an unidentified Army major regarding the town of Ben Tre, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

In May of 1957, an American bomber accidentally dropped an American 42,000 pound, 10-megaton hydrogen bomb on Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Mark 17 had a yield of approximately 10-megatons. For comparison's sake, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a relatively small 16 kiloton weapon.

10 megatons = 10,000 kilotons, meaning that it would take about 625 "little boys" (the code word for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) to make only one Mark 17.

According to the investigation, Field Command, a division of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, conducted recovery and clean-up operations at the site shortly after the nonevent. What they found was a crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet in diameter, blown, fortunately, in uninhabited land owned by the University of New Mexico.
Only the bomb's conventional explosives - those necessary, but not sufficient to start the nuclear chain reaction - were triggered by the fall, and, according to the experts, no radioactivity was detected beyond the lip of the crater. Traces of a luckless cow, reportedly, were scattered over a much wider area

Texas is the largest petroleum-producing state in the U.S. and if it were an independent nation, it would rank as the world’s 5th largest petroleum-producing nation. Only 34 of Texas’ 254 counties have no known natural gas within their boundaries. However, no major wells have been discovered for a half-century or more.

AAAAAaaaaannnnnnddddd......a graph. The direction is startling but so is the history of recovery:

 

San Bernardino

"I say this every time we've got one of these mass shootings. This just doesn't happen in other countries," the president claimed recently in Paris.
He just says these thing, you know.


John Lott has done a lot of research on gun violence and his conclusions are that these incidents are very complicated and do not analyze easily. People with easy solutions are either mistaken or insincere. He has written a response to the President's statement--a statement on a national stage that puts the Americans in a most unflattering light. These are some of his observations.

The French have witnessed three mass public shootings this year. January saw two attacks, one on the Charlie Hebdo magazine and another on a Paris supermarket. In the November attacks, 129 people were killed and 352 were injured. In 2015, France suffered more casualties than the U.S. has suffered during Obama's entire presidency (508 to 394).
Obama also overlooks Norway, where Anders Behring Breivik used a gun to kill 67 people and wound 110 others. Still others were killed by bombs that Breivik detonated. Of the four worst K-12 school shootings, three have occurred in Europe. Germany had two of these — one in 2002 at Erfut and another in 2009 at Winnenden, with a total death toll of 34.
Obama isn't correct even if he meant the frequency of fatalities or attacks. Many European countries actually have higher rates of death from public shootings that resulted in four or more murders. It's simply a matter of adjusting for America's much larger population. (The larger population is a very important element, again requiring care in analysis.)
Norway had the highest annual death rate, with two mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Macedonia had a rate of 0.38, Serbia 0.28, Slovakia 0.20, Finland 0.14, Belgium 0.14 and the Czech Republic 0.13. The U.S. comes in eighth with 0.095 mass public shooting fatalities per million people. Austria and Switzerland are close behind.
In terms of the frequency of attacks, the U.S. ranks ninth, with 0.09 attacks per million people. Macedonia, Serbia, Switzerland, Norway, Slovakia, Finland, Belgium and the Czech Republic all had higher rates.

Underlying all this misinformation--and Obama's willingness to embarrass the U.S.--is the administration's diagnosis and proposed solutions. Gun control. I have no problem with a careful look at gun accessibility. But the problem, found over and over, is that gun control does not correlate with violence. It is a placebo for administrators. The background checks ubiquitous in Europe and the U.S. always failed. So too did France and Belgium's complete bans on the weapons used in those attacks. The terrorists who attacked those countries still got the weapons that they wanted.
There is information out there, much of it the government's. And it is interesting stuff:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/01/fun-with-numbers.html
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2015/10/guns.html
The question should be, why do these people insist on this mythology?

Cab Thought 12/3/15

"For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong." - H. L. Mencken

 

 

There is some serious Western arrogance and assumption of power on display in Paris this week. Almost 150 heads of state, including David Cameron, Barack Obama and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, are heading to Paris for the start of what many call the most important environmental meeting for decades. Ahead of the summit, more than 175 countries have tabled pledges (known as intended nationally determined contributions, or INDCs) to cut their carbon emissions which, if enacted, would be enough to limit global warming to 2.7C. But the United Nations has pledged to limit climate change to 2C – and would much prefer it to be 1.5C. There will be a lot of posturing but the target will, necessarily, be emerging nations. And the solution will likely be a bribe of those nations using the Western workers' money.

 

A study, "The Impact of Rudeness on Medical Team Performance: A Randomized Trial," which was published in the September issue of Pediatrics, shows that a rude comment from a third-party doctor decreased performance among doctors and nurses by more than 50 percent in an exercise involving a hypothetical life-or-death situation. “We found that rudeness damages your ability to think, manage information, and make decisions,” said Amir Erez, an author on the study and a Huber Hurst professor of management at the University of Florida.

 

Whenever any activity that links neurons is repeated, those neurons fire faster, stronger, sharper signals together, and the circuit gets more efficient and better at helping to perform the skill. "The converse is also true. When a person stops performing an activity for an extended period, those connections are weakened, and over time many are lost. Also,  the more often a person feels twinges of neck pain, the more easily his brain's neurons recognized it, and the more intense it got.

 

Who is....Jared Diamond?

 

Václav (in English, Wenceslas), a devout Bohemian Christian king,  incurred resentment among the pagan nobility due to his kindness toward the poor. In search of allies, Václav made peace with German Saxony and, in return for protection, paid an annual tribute of silver and oxen. The king was beloved by his people but envied by his treacherous brother Boleslav, whose minions murdered the young monarch while he was on his way to mass.

 

As willpower seems to be an exhaustible resource, it needs, in a civilized culture, to be protected and conserved. Perhaps habit and manners defuse the need for willpower. Respecting its limits means one should be on guard that one's usual personal strength may not always be available.

 

St. Hubert's Church in Idsworth was built in the ninth century but the town might have been occupied as far back as Roman times. Wall paintings covered during the Reformation have been restored. This ancient church stands alone. The ancient town has long been plowed under.

 

Jared Diamond argues that history followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves. Those who domesticated plants and animals early got a head start on developing writing, government, technology, weapons of war, and immunity to deadly germs. Crucial distinctions that lead to success of cultures vary from grain size to the length of usable shorelines.

 

Salacious: adjective: 1. Obscene. 2. Lustful.  ety: From Latin salax (lustful, fond of leaping), from salire (to leap). Ultimately from the Indo-European root sel- (to jump), which also gave us salient, sally, sautssail, assault, exult, insult, result, somersault. Earliest documented use: 1661.

 

Tough love. The London Society for Bettering the Condition and Increasing the Comforts of the Poor was founded early in the nineteenth century with a rather remarkable premise. The London Society did not distribute charity but specialized in cutting off funds for social welfare. Malthus, Bentham, and Colquhoun believed that a distinct line must be drawn between the 'deserving poor' (those facing hard times as a result of unfortunate histories) and 'undeserving paupers,' namely, the drunk, the lazy, and the whorish members of society for whom aid was considered a reprehensible act of facilitation. For decades the London Society remained influential in the development and spread of such institutions as workhouses and debtors prisons. It was also influential, through its example, in New York and other American cities. By the end of 1817, Clinton, Eddy, and Griscom, joined by hundreds of other New Yorkers, had formed a clone organization on the banks of the Hudson: the Society for the Prevention of Pauperism

 

To say, as John Dewey did, that there must be “social control of economic forces” sounds good in a vague sort of way, until that is translated into specifics as the holders of political power forbidding voluntary transactions among the citizenry.--Sowell

 

Corn dextrin, a common thickener used in junk food, is also the glue on envelopes and postage stamps. Yuck.

 

Golden oldie:

 http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/07/computers-writing-and-phaedrus.html

 

Within eight years of discovering the New World, Chrisatopher Columbus, found himself summarily relieved of his post as Admiral of the Ocean Sea, returned to Spain in chains, and allowed to sink into such profound obscurity that we don't know for sure where he is buried.

 

Even though the U.S. government didn't grant Native Americans citizenship until 1924, nearly 13,000 of them served in WWI.

 

A group of Italian researchers have found that the 14-foot-long garment Shroud of Turin -- believed by some to be the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, even though science has proven that's not the case -- contains DNA from plants found all over Earth. Researchers discovered several plant groups native to the Mediterranean, RealClearScience.com reported. Other groups were linked to Asia, the Middle East, or the Americas, but must have been introduced at a time later than the Medieval period, according to the researchers. The article in the journal Scientific Reports on Oct. 5, suggest that the cloth may have been manufactured in India and then was transported from the Near East to its current home in Turin, Italy.The linen shroud appears to show a double image of a bearded man "who suffered physical trauma in a manner consistent with crucifixion after being beaten, scourged and crowned with thorns," the researchers wrote. In 1988, carbon-14 testing performed on the cloth by an international team of researchers, dated shroud fibers back to between 1260 and 1390.

 

The Vegan Society and the American Vegan Society do not consider honey appropriate because it comes from an animal.

 

The Mets have been in a class of their own all season long. They threw 22% of their pitches during the regular season at 95 mph or above, according to Baseball Savant. No other team in the majors threw more than 15%.

 

J. Dennis Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the House, intends to plead guilty as part of an agreement in a case where he is accused of skirting banking laws and lying to the federal investigators, according to proceedings Thursday in Federal District Court here. Apparently one of the most important men in the country was being blackmailed for years. The decision will be sealed because we don't have to know.

But don't worry. The government security guys are on the lookout for us. Wayne Simmons, a 62-year-old who lives in Annapolis, Maryland, was arrested by federal authorities following his indictment by a federal grand jury for allegedly committing major fraud, wire fraud, and making false statements to the government. Simmons claims to have worked for the CIA from 1973 to 2000, and "used that false claim in an attempt to obtain government security clearances and work as a defense contractor, including at one point successfully getting deployed overseas as an intelligence advisor to senior military personnel," according to a press release from the U.S. Attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. In court documents, federal prosecutors alleged that Simmons had a "significant criminal history, including convictions for a crime of violence and firearms offenses, and is believed to have had an ongoing association with firearms notwithstanding those felony convictions." They successfully petitioned a judge to keep Simmons' indictment sealed until his arrest today, noting that Simmons "has a history of acting in an aggressive manner, and is likely aware of the imminent nature of the charges in this case."  This citizen is a contributor to FOX, in addition to his imaginary derring-do.

 

U.S. government is so unwieldy and dysfunctional because....... the framers intentionally designed it that way.

 

Daniel Goleman's 1995 book Emotional Intelligence surprised a world focused solely on IQ. His book is a survey of the research on emotions, and he argues  that emotional intelligence is in many respects a more important form of intelligence and a more important determinant of a the outcomes in a person's life. His follow up book was Social Intelligence.

AAAAaaaaaannnnnnndddddd...a picture of St. Hubert's Church, Idsworth:

 

Freedom and Safety

“I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.” --Thomas Jefferson


This Planned Parenthood atrocity will confuse everyone. First, it is another example of one man's vision, essentially the tyranny of one. It underlies philosophies, revolutions, religions and art. It is the hallmark of the seeker of truth, from the hermit to the zealot. This has always been a problem in the world and especially in this nation which has been created to protect the minority from the majority. (Jefferson said a democracy was mob rule.) Second, it raises the problem of freedom vs. security, the essence of the justification for autocracies and monarchies.
Obama said immediately "Enough is enough" and launched on gun ownership. So constitutional guarantees have to be withdrawn. This is in opposition to the freedom of strangers to come to this country--at some at least theoretical risk to its citizens-- which apparently is sacrosanct and  cannot be challenged. While this is clearly inconsistent and irrational, that is not an unusual position for Obama.

But it is also beside the point. The point is freedom, an inalienable right. Regrettably security is not, it is only an effort and a hope. It is a desire where freedom is a fact. Freedom is the national agent, security is a hoped for effect.
Andrew P. Napolitano, a former judge of the Superior Court of New Jersey, wrote, "They have elevated safety -- which is a goal of government -- to the level of freedom -- which created the government. This common and pedestrian argument makes the creature -- safety -- equal its creator -- freedom. That is a metaphysical impossibility because it presumes that the good to be purchased is somehow equal to the free choices of the purchaser.
Liberty is the default position. Liberty is the essence of our natural state. Liberty cannot possibly be equal to a good we have instructed the government to obtain.
It cannot be balance, because liberty and safety are not equals, as one created the other. It can only be bias -- a continual predisposition toward and preference for freedom.
Every conceivable clash between the free choices of persons and their instructions to their government to safeguard freedom must favor the free choices because freedom is inalienable. Just as I cannot authorize the government to take away your freedom any more than you can authorize it to take away mine, a majority of all but one cannot authorize the government in a free society to take freedom from that one individual. So if somehow freedom and safety do clash, it is the free choice of each person to resolve that clash for himself, and not one the government can morally make."

Vasili Arkhipov

Another reason to give thanks:

At the height of the Cold War with America, the Russians began to fear the gap developing between the two powers' submarine fleets. The Russians eventually rushed the development and construction of the K-19, the first of two new Hotel-class ballistic missile submarines. As with much of the Russian development and manufacturing, there was a lot wrong with the K-19. Harrison Ford played the part of a real Russian sub commander in 1961 who managed a real on-board accident in a K-19 cooling system that threatened a meltdown. As in Chernobyl, individuals accepted their radiation deaths as they went into the reactor on the K-19 and Jerry-rigged an alternative cooling system. Many died, the commander played by Ford years later died of complication of radiation exposure.



His name was Vasili Arkhipov. There should be a world holiday for him.



The following year, in July of 1962, Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev agreed to Cuba’s request to place nuclear missiles in Cuba as a deterrent to future US interference after the Bay of Pigs invasion debacle a few years earlier. In mid-October, a U.S. reconnaissance airplane produced evidence of medium and long range Soviet ballistic missiles in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy promptly established a military blockade to prevent further missiles from entering Cuba and demanded that the missiles be dismantled and returned to the Soviet Union.

The two great powers faced off. It is important to know that Kennedy was being advised to launch a first strike against the Russians with the logic that the Russian retaliatory ability was limited and would cause 30 million civilian deaths at the most. The military thought that a bargain. At the same time Castro was campaigning Khrushchev for a first strike against the U.S., knowing full well Cuba as an entity would not exist afterwards. (See The Armageddon Letter.) These people were the world leaders whose decisions were going to determine the future of the world. And those who were democratically elected did not seem to be getting any less crazy advice.



The K-19 hero Vasili Arkhipov was second-in-command in the nuclear-armed Foxtrot-class submarine B-59, part of a flotilla of four submarines protecting Soviet ships on their way to Cuba. On October 27, as they approached the US imposed quarantine line, US Navy ships in pursuit started dropping depth charges to force the B-59 to surface for identification – completely unaware that it was carrying nuclear weapons.
The explosions rocked the submarine which went dark except for emergency lights. With the air-conditioning down, temperature and carbon dioxide levels rose sharply. The crew was hardly able to breathe.
Unable to contact Moscow and under pressure from the Americans for several hours, Captain Valentin Savitsky finally began to crack. He assumed that war had broken out between the two countries and decided to launch a nuclear torpedo. He would not go down without a fight.
However, unlike the other submarines in the flotilla, the three officers on-board the B-59 had to agree unanimously to launch the nuclear torpedo. As the other officer sided with Savitsky, only Arkhipov stood in the way of launching World War III.
An argument broke out between the three, but Arkhipov was able to convince the Captain not to launch the torpedo. How was he able to prevail under such stressful conditions? He was actually in charge of the entire flotilla and as such was equal in rank to Savitsky. But the reputation he had gained during the K-19 incident may have been the decisive factor in convincing the other officers to abort the launch. That detail may have made all the difference.

The submarine eventually surfaced and awaited orders from Moscow, averting what would have been a nuclear holocaust. The Cuban Missile Crisis ended a few days later.
This crucial episode of the Cold War only became known to the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union many years later.