Sunday 2/14/16

The Temptation in the Desert: Christ is asked by the Devil to change stone into bread, is offered dominion over the earth, and is offered the opportunity to summon angels. The temptation of God is unsettling even if we can rationalize it under Christ's duality. This event has been translated as the temptation of Israel but there is a peculiarity here that does not go away: Who is Christ proving Himself to? He is not being asked to change stone to bread because He is hungry but to prove He can do it. Ditto the display of throwing Himself from the precipice. These are displays of proof, confirmation of His divinity. Only the opportunity of dominion is the Devil really a factor and, as Christ does not need the Devil for dominion, one thinks the Devil is superfluous.
What this really looks like is a heavenly internal debate: "I could do it this way but won't. This way but won't. Nor this way."
What the devil is doing there must be a joy to the Manichees.


'Hunger' by Robert Laurence Binyon

I come among the peoples like a shadow.
I sit down by each man's side.

None sees me, but they look on one another,
And know that I am there.
My silence is like the silence of the tide
That buries the playground of children;
Like the deepening of frost in the slow night,
When birds are dead in the morning.
Armies trample, invade, destroy,
With guns roaring from earth and air.
I am more terrible than armies,
I am more feared than the cannon.
Kings and chancellors give commands;
I give no command to any;
But I am listened to more than kings
And more than passionate orators.
I unswear words, and undo deeds.
Naked things know me.
I am first and last to be felt of the living.
I am Hunger

Cab Thoughts 2/13/16

A thing is not necessarily true because a man dies for it. -Oscar Wilde, writer (1854-1900)

 

All inequities are avenged. The American Indian has been pushed to virtual extinction by military action and disease. Decades later the Indian gift to the European, tobacco, is beginning to kill the invading Europeans. The European nations invaded and exploited countless third world countries. Now those third world countries are moving to those exploiting nations and burdening them to the point of collapse. All inequities are avenged.

 

The ultimate in epigenetics: A male emperor angelfish lives together with up to five female mates. If the emperor angelfish dies, one of the females turns into a male fish and becomes the leader of the group. Again, the slippery slope.

 

Eudemonic: adj. 1. pertaining or conducive to happiness. 2. pertaining to eudemonics or eudemonism. (vs: "hedonic,' or merely pleasurable--as in hedonism).  Eudemonic stems from the Greek word eudaímōn meaning "fortunate, happy." It entered English in the early 1800s. Philosophers have long held that we can distinguish between eudemonic experience, or a striving towards meaning and purpose that underlies human beings' capacity to engage in complex social and cultural behavior, in contrast to the striving for more hedonic or simply pleasurable experience. (Friedman)

 

Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian vegetable peddler set himself ablaze in the town of Sidi Bouzid after his cart was confiscated by a policewoman who slapped him and spat in his face. The incident causes long-simmering frustrations over injustice, poverty and the greed of the political elite to spill over into protests, which are brutally subdued. Bouazizi died, but in his act of self-immolation, the Arab Spring was born. Faida Hamdy was the council inspector who confiscated the vegetable stall and now in interviews is filled with regret. “Mohammed Bouazizi and I are both victims,” Mrs Hamdy said. “He lost his life and my life is not the same any more. When I look at the region and my country, I regret it all. Death everywhere and extremism blooming, and killing beautiful souls.”

 

Damon Runyon wrote imaginative stories about a threepenny operatic subset in life. How could he be so creative? He lived it. Runyon's wife of fourteen years left him. She formerly was a Spanish dancer at the Silver Slipper; they first met at a Mexican racetrack when she was a kid running messages for Pancho Villa when Runyon was a reporter running Villa to ground.

 

On the mysterious Easter Islands where the moai stands, a set of glyphs have been discovered, called the Rongorongo. These glyphs have never been deciphered.

 

Steve Wozniak buys sheets of $2 bills from the US Treasury and has a local printing company glue them together like a notepad and perforate the bills.  Each $2 bill costs him about $3 to make. He then pays bills by tearing them off. People usually are suspicious.

He's been stopped by the Secret Service multiple times, one of the times even being read his Miranda rights.

Why does he do it?  Entirely to confuse people and entertain himself. (Quora)

 

The U.S. assumes how incompetent at business the French are. If only they could get over their state socialism and their acute Eurosclerosis. Yet look at what has actually happened to France’s median hourly wage. It has gone from 100 to 280. Up 180% in 45 years! Japan is up 140% and even the often sluggish Brits are up 60%. But the killer is the U.S. median wage. It has been dead flat for 45 years. The French look a lot better than we generally think and our economy a lot worse.

 

Who is....Loretta Lynch?

 

The EU has made borders unimportant in Europe. This is very new. Is there uncertainty over whether or not a nation has the right to control its own border? I know the Aussies are tough about immigration, insisting on employable citizens.  There have been 500,000 signatures in Great Britain urging that the U.K. ban Trump from traveling there. So, does that mean that the U.K. has the right to make requirements and judgments on immigrants? According to The Guardian, "The home secretary can decide to exclude a person from the UK if it is believed that an “individual’s presence in the UK would not be conducive to the public good”, according to government guidance." So a country can pick who they will admit?

What exactly is the right of a person external to a nation to be protected under the laws of that nation? Isn't that what people have resisted all though history, the imposition of some national rule or vision from the outside?

 

Just three months ago, the world's greatest carbon emitter, China, admitted to having underreported its burning of coal by 17%, a staggering error (assuming it wasn't a deliberate deception) equal to the entire coal consumption of Germany. China promises to begin reducing carbon emissions 15 years from now. India announced it will be tripling its coal-fired electricity capacity by 2030. Meanwhile, the Obama administration is effectively dismantling America's entire coal industry.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/10/monsters.html

Following Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s recent announcement that all combat jobs would now be open to women, results of a survey given to more than 7,600 of America’s special ops forces have been released, showing an overwhelming majority of male commandos are opposed to the decision. More than 80 percent said women aren’t strong enough and can’t handle the demands of the job while 64 percent believe they aren’t mentally tough enough. Other factors were apparent, too, including the fear of harassment charges.

 

On December 18, 1620, the British ship Mayflower docked at modern-day Plymouth, Massachusetts, and its passengers prepared to begin their new settlement, Plymouth Colony.
The famous Mayflower story began in 1606, when a group of reform-minded Puritans in Nottinghamshire, England, founded their own church, separate from the state-sanctioned Church of England. Accused of treason, they were forced to leave the country and settle in the more tolerant Netherlands. After 12 years of struggling to adapt and make a decent living, the group sought financial backing from some London merchants to set up a colony in America. On September 6, 1620, 102 passengers–dubbed Pilgrims by William Bradford, a passenger who would become the first governor of Plymouth Colony–crowded on the Mayflower to begin the long, hard journey to a new life in the New World.
On November 11, 1620, the Mayflower anchored at what is now Provincetown Harbor, Cape Cod. Before going ashore, 41 male passengers–heads of families, single men and three male servants–signed the famous Mayflower Compact, agreeing to submit to a government chosen by common consent and to obey all laws made for the good of the colony. Over the next month, several small scouting groups were sent ashore to collect firewood and scout out a good place to build a settlement. Around December 10, one of these groups found a harbor they liked on the western side of Cape Cod Bay. They returned to the Mayflower to tell the other passengers, but bad weather prevented them from docking until December 18. After exploring the region, the settlers chose a cleared area previously occupied by members of a local Native American tribe, the Wampanoag. The tribe had abandoned the village several years earlier, after an outbreak of European disease. That winter of 1620-1621 was brutal, as the Pilgrims struggled to build their settlement, find food and ward off sickness. By spring, 50 of the original 102 Mayflower passengers were dead. The remaining settlers made contact with returning members of the Wampanoag tribe and in March they signed a peace treaty with a tribal chief, Massasoit. Aided by the Wampanoag, especially the English-speaking Squanto, the Pilgrims were able to plant crops–especially corn and beans–that were vital to their survival. The Mayflower and its crew left Plymouth to return to England on April 5, 1621.
Over the next several decades, more and more settlers made the trek across the Atlantic to Plymouth, which gradually grew into a prosperous shipbuilding and fishing center. In 1691, Plymouth was incorporated into the new Massachusetts Bay Association, ending its history as an independent colony. (From the History site)

Two days after the San Bernardino atrocity Attorney General Loretta Lynch said her "greatest fear" is the "incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric" in America and vowed to prosecute any guilty of what she deemed violence-inspiring speech. That's pretty crazy. Is it as crazy as Trump? Yes. After strong backlash against her comments on speech that "edges toward violence," Lynch seemed to, as Politico puts it, "recalibrate" her language in a press conference Monday, underscoring that her department would only prosecute "deeds not words." Actually prosecuting words may be too late as the damage may already be done. Perhaps prosecuting thought.

 

Something I just across on the Internet and never thought of: Dynamic pricing allows for airfares to go up when you visit or refresh a page multiple times. This increase is based on demand, which you are technically increasing with multiple page views. To avoid this, clear your cookies and check prices to see if they change.

 

AAAAAAaaaannnnnnndddddddd..........a picture of merging galaxies. Galaxies! A cosmic bridge of stars, gas, and dust currently stretches over 75,000 light-years and joins them, implying gravitational interaction.

Arp 87: Merging Galaxies from Hubble

The Wisdom of Crowds?

Election time is always a worry. Can we, the Democracy, do it? Can we live up to Madison's expectations? After all, the alarming choices we have did not come from nowhere.
In 1906 the British statistician Francis Galton was at a fair where about 800 people tried to guess the weight of a dead ox. Galton collected all the guesses so he could figure out how far off the mark the average guess was. The guesses were wide ranging, most much too high or low, but the average of the guesses stunned him:  The dead ox weighed 1,198 pounds, the crowd's average, 1,197. Thus was born the concept of the "Wisdom of Crowds." Individuals might be wildly wrong but, as a group, they were reliable and accurate.

Warmth swept through the democracy. Collective decisions were dependable, regardless of how many goofy outliers there were. And aristocracy was risky. Small groups of decision makers meant small samples of input. We should expand the franchise. Long Term Capital Management was doomed despite the accepted genius of its two creators; a group of guys in a bar could tell you their plan would not work.

Very inspiring and reassuring----until you run across this observation of an admittedly limited, single (white) man:  "Democracy is the pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." - H. L. Mencken 

The Cauldron of Success

Edison famously said that he did not have 1000 failures to construct a usable light bulb, he discovered 1000 ways not to make one. This implies a progress in failure.
One hears this often. So many people with eventual success worked their way through failure, sometimes significant failure. This implies that failure may be part of the process of success, as if failure in business or life was like a science lab where each setback purified the vision, clarified the next step and allowed for eventual success.
Failure as the co-enzyme of success.
But is that true? Is the real success a product of bad experiences or is it a combination of great energy, fortitude and vision overcoming the temporary? Everyone has failures. Is failure really a process or is success a function of the individual's ability to make it a process so that eventual success only heightens the appearance of the earlier drawback?
Are all failures opportunities to learn?

Cab Thoughts 2/10/16

"We are here on Earth to help others. What the others are here for, I've NO idea."--W.H. Auden

The American Thanksgiving is a remembrance of an occasion in November, 1621  in Plymouth, Massachusetts where the Pilgrims were joined by ninety Wampanoag warriors at a big harvest dinner. The event is older than that.
The term 'Thanksgiving' originally included serious religious dedication, with several hours spent in church -- and it started long before the famed feast between American Indians and colonists in Massachusetts. In 1519, at St. Augustine, Florida, the Spanish celebrated Thanksgiving with pork and chickpeas brought from the Old World. According to contemporary sources, a harvest dinner shared by Spanish settlers, missionaries, and American Indians took place in Santa Fe, New Mexico, in the 1590s. At the Berkeley Hundred settlement in Virginia in 1618, the English dined on ham and gave thanks for their safety and survival.



Kim Philby was the son of the orientalist and Islamic convert H. St. John Philby. He served as a high-ranking British intelligence officer and Soviet double agent until his defection to the Soviet Union in 1963. Graham Greene said of him, 'He betrayed his country'-yes, perhaps he did, but who among us has not committed treason to something or someone more important than a country?" Betraying a lover is the same as giving nuclear secrets to a homicidal culture? A response that would admit anyone into the closed society of intellectuals.

Mindlessly pushing the envelope: Teddy Roosevelt went on an expedition to the River of Doubt [in the Amazonian rainforests]. It had been too much for him. Two of his party had died in the jungle, and he, delirious with a spreading infection and a 105-degree malarial fever, came within a whisker of being the third to be buried there. His health would never recover from the adventure.

Altruistic giving may be an advertisement of dominance or superiority. Anthropologists know it as the Potlatch Effect, named after the custom whereby rival chieftains of Pacific north-west tribes vie with each other in duels of ruinously generous feasts. In extreme cases, bouts of retaliatory entertaining continue until one side is reduced to penury, leaving the winner not much better off. So fly that bridal party to Rio.

In 1946, there were only seventy-four independent countries. Today, there are over two hundred, many of which are very small. On the eve of the First World War, imperialism had reduced the number of independent countries in the world to fifty-nine. But since the advent of decolonization there have been sustained increases in that number.

Artur Ekert, a physicist at the University of Oxford and currently the director of the Centre for Quantum Technologies, proved in 1991 that entangled par­ticles can create a communications channel so secure that not even the sneakiest government surveillance program could listen in.

Walt Whitman was one of America's greatest poets, and perhaps the first that wrote in a definitively American style, that is to say, straightforward and unadorned. At the beginning of the Civil War he was terribly depressed and felt the country--with which he so identified--was deteriorating and him with it. He never joined the army--and was criticized for it. But he visited hospitals constantly, developing a persona that was part of the country's recovery. He ended the war as 'the Good Gray Poet,' a beloved, almost mystical figure who personally embodied for millions of Americans a democratic ideal of sharing and brotherhood that remains undimmed nearly a century and a half later.
 

Days before President Obama flew to France to discuss new ways to regulate U.S. industries to death in the name of climate change, he signed a law that will let companies extract as much minerals and other materials as they want, and keep the profits, from asteroids and the moon. This led to the great line, "Obama likes free markets, so long as they're not on earth."

"Coal gave Britain fuel equivalent to the output of 15 million extra acres of forest to burn, an area nearly the size of Scotland. By 1870, the burning of coal in Britain was generating as many calories as would have been expended by 850 million laborers. . .. The capacity of the country's steam engines alone was equivalent to 6 million horses or 40 million men."--Matt Ridley. Imagine the achievement, the productivity, the improvement of British life.

An astonishing turn in history.Trump has not been able to substantively break 30 percent of Rube-publican support since jumping into the race. 30%. That 30 percent is a subset of Republican voters, who make up just 25 percent of the American population. I hope Trump is a tempest in a teapot. Betting sites believe so. His odds are at 8 percent, compared to 55 percent for Hillary Clinton, according to ElectionBettingOdds.com. So why the scrutiny of Trump and not Hillary? In this important election, why is Trump the story? Perhaps it's just the media defending itself.

Who is...Thomas Merton?

George Orwell said, "There are notions so foolish that only an intellectual will believe them." Some college courses: "Interrogating Gender: Centuries of Dramatic Cross-Dressing," Swarthmore College; "GaGa for Gaga: Sex, Gender, and Identity," University of Virginia; "Oh, Look, a Chicken!" Belmont University; "Getting Dressed," Princeton University; "Philosophy and Star Trek," Georgetown University.

ISIS is reportedly training pilots in Sirte, Libya, a city just across the Mediterranean Sea from the shores of Italy.

In 1901 Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Having been turned down by a half-dozen publishers, Potter financed this first edition herself -- 250 copies with her own black and white illustrations, given away or sold at a half-penny each because, as she put it, "little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings." Within a few weeks, another 200 copies were needed; within a year, Potter had a deal with a major publisher and orders for the entire first printing of 8,000 copies; by now, forty million copies of Peter Rabbit have been sold, in just about every language. A first edition copy of the 1902 edition can cost $20,000 today; a copy of Potter's own 1901 edition is expected to fetch upwards of $70,000 at an upcoming auction.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/10/conspiracy.html

In 1941 twenty-six-year-old Thomas Merton entered the Abbey of Gethsemani, a Trappist Order near Bardstown, Kentucky; and on the same day  in 1968 the fifty-three-year-old Merton died in Bangkok, Thailand, from accidental electrocution. Merton's first, two-week visit to the Gethsemani Trappists made an impression: "I had wondered what was holding the country together, what has been keeping the universe from cracking in pieces and falling apart. It is this monastery if only this one.... This is the only real city in America -- in a desert. It is the axle around which the whole country blindly turns."

Perhaps no industry so beguiled the Civil War veterans with promises of overnight wealth than the oil industry. In astonishing numbers, a ragtag group of demobilized soldiers, many still in uniform and carrying knapsacks and rifles, migrated to northwest Pennsylvania. The potential money to be made was irresistible, whether in drilling or in auxiliary services; people could charge two or three times as mush as they dared to ask in the city. Ida Tarbell speculated that 'this little corner of Pennsylvania absorbed a larger portion of men probably than any other spot in the United States. There were lieutenants and captains and majors -- even generals -- scattered all over the field. ' --Titan by Ron Chernow

A quote from Facebook on societal lunatics: "These types of problems involve such unsystematic, infrequent, and inexplicable actions that no one can anticipate and preempt them. Lighting will strike people sometimes; nothing can be done about it except to advise people to stay inside during thunder storms and in no event to go outside carrying an iron rod."

Ulm is a city in the federal German state of Baden-Württemberg, situated on the River Danube. Its population is estimated at almost 120,000 (2015). Einstein was born there. In medieval times the town motto was: 'The people of Ulm are mathematicians.' 

Antebellum adj: belonging to a period before any war, but usually used in reference to the Civil War. It comes from the Latin phrase ante bellum, literally "before the war" as "bellum" means "war." Bellicose is also from Latin bellum and a near synonym is belligerent, from the same Latin noun. There can be some confusion here as "bell" has some positive connotations. You may wonder if bellum is connected to the Latin bellus meaning "pretty, handsome," which gives us the names Bella or Isabella, as well as belle "a beautiful woman" but there is no connection. Nor is there a connection to  cerebellum for here the word is the diminutive of cerebrum. "Ell" is added to cerebrum as "cerebellum,"  the same idea as "ito" in Spanish. (e.g. Tacito is a little version of a Taco)."Cerebrum" is the Latin word for brain, and so the best translation for "cerebellum" would be "little brain."
 

Whales belong to the order cetacean, meaning they are mammals that are fully adapted to aquatic life. Like dolphins and porpoises, whales are believed to have descended from land animals that returned to the water roughly 50 million years ago after living millions of years on land.

A coffle is 'a train of men or beasts fastened together,' says the Oxford English Dictionary, and indeed Louis Hughes referred to the coffle he marched in as 'a herd.' Unsurprisingly, the word comes from the Arabic qāfilah, meaning 'caravan,' recalling the overland slave trade that existed across the desert from sub-Saharan Africa to the greater Islamic world centuries before Columbus crossed the Atlantic.

AAAaaaaannnnndddddd.....a chart: (or maybe not)

Jefferson, Hemmings, Hamilton and Callender

In 1796, an essay appeared in the Gazette of the United States in which a anonymous writer, named “Phocion,” attacked presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson. Phocion turned out to be former Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. The essay typified the nasty, personal nature of political attacks in late 18th-century America. When the article appeared, Jefferson was running against presidential incumbent John Adams, in an acrimonious campaign. The highly influential Hamilton, also a Federalist, supported Adams over Jefferson, one of Hamilton’s political rivals since the two men served together in George Washington’s first cabinet. According to Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow, Hamilton wrote 25 essays under the name Phocion for the Gazette between October 15 and November 24, lambasting Jefferson and Jeffersonian republicanism. On October 19, Hamilton went further, accusing Jefferson of carrying on an affair with one of his slaves.

There was some serious bad blood between Hamilton and Jefferson.

In 1792, publisher James Callendar—then a supporter of Jefferson’s whose paper was secretly funded by Jefferson and his Republican allies–published a report of Alexander Hamilton’s adulterous affair with a colleague’s wife, to which Hamilton later confessed. (The woman was Maria Reynolds and the story is quite remarkable. http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/08/cab-thoughts-82413.html )

However, in 1802, when then-President Jefferson snubbed Callendar’s request for a political appointment, Callendar retaliated with an expose on Jefferson’s “concubine.” He is believed to have been referring to Sally Hemings, who was part black and, creepily, the half-sister of Jefferson’s deceased wife, Martha. Further, the article alleged that Sally’s son, John, bore a “striking…resemblance to those of the President himself.” Jefferson chose not to respond to the allegations.

Callender was born in Scotland eventually publishing satirical attacks on writer Samuel Johnson and pointed commentary on King George III’s policies. He wrote a pamphlet called Political Progress of Britain (1792), which led to his indictment for sedition in 1793.  He fled to America and published vicious attacks on George Washington, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton, and other leading political figures.

Sally Hemings' mother had been impregnated by her master, John Wayles, the father of Martha Jefferson. Sally Hemings herself bore five mulatto children out of wedlock. Callender insisted that Jefferson fathered the children. Jefferson's defenders denied this. In all the voluminous correspondence he left behind, Jefferson left not one statement, not even in his private journals, that directly confirmed his relationship with Sally Hemings—an omission that has enabled his defenders to claim the love affair never happened.
Dumas Malone, Jefferson's famous biographer, gave little credence to the charges.

Envy

Thomas Aquinas defined Envy as "sadness on account of the goods possessed by others." Envy is sadness! It turns inward. How is it different from jealousy?
Envy 's subject is removed from the envious; the envious man knows he has no claim upon the envied subject. He may covet another's property but he knows it is not his. To attain it he would have to steal it. Jealousy is a different matter. Unlike envy, jealousy presupposes the right to what the other has. Othello was jealous of his wife's imagined affections for another; he felt, justly, those affections should be his.
So envy is sadness of the attainments of another, jealousy is outrage over something misappropriated. The jealous man feels that something he might never have had has been lost to another.
In the redistribution world, wanting another's productivity--or the rewards of that productivity--is envy as the envious man has no legitimate claim to it. Taking it away from its rightful owner is a step away from envy as the sadness of envy is passive. And to take someone's production requires some kind of force.
So, what to do? A recent enhancement of envy politics is the transformation of envy into jealousy, the declaration of  the production of another as actually rightfully belonging to someone else. So taking it is less theft. And, of course, as with Desdemona, sometimes accidents happen.