Cab Thoughts 5/14/16

Our shouting is louder than our actions, / Our swords are taller than us, / This is our tragedy. / In short / We wear the cape of civilization / But our souls live in the stone age. -Nizar Qabbani, poet and diplomat (21 Mar 1923-1998
 

 

 

On March22, 1982, Clint Malarchuk survived a life-threatening injury during a 1989 NHL game when St. Louis Blues player Steve Tuttle's skate blade slashed his jugular vein, causing immediate massive blood loss. He was saved by the trainer, Jim Pizzutelli, a former Army medic who had served in Vietnam, who compressed the vessel until it could be controlled by a physician who somehow had the tools to do so. Eleven fans fainted, two more suffered heart attacks and three players vomited on the ice. Two men have died from on-ice injuries in NHL,  Howie Morenz (1937) and Bill Masterton (1968). 

An interesting question is that freedom allows the incompetent decision-maker to err. Should we protect him from his error? And, if he votes for a leader and protector, won't he risk the same incompetence in the voting booth as he does in his daily life?

 

The facts revealed in our study should change views. Inequality, properly measured, is extremely high, but is far lower than generally believed. The reason is that our fiscal system, properly measured, is highly progressive. And, via our high marginal taxes, we are providing significant incentives to Americans to work less and earn less than they might otherwise.--Economists Alan Auerbach and Laurence Kotlikoff 

Pictographs are pictures which resemble what they signify. Ideograms are symbols which represent ideas.

In a "No dogs allowed" sign, the dog illustration is a pictogram. The red circle and bar is an ideogram representing the idea of "no" or "not allowed".

A rebus is often seen as a puzzle or game. But the rebus is a developmental stage of written language. In essence a rebus is a message spelled out in pictures that represents sounds rather than the things they are pictures of. For example the picture of an eye, a bee, and a leaf can be put together to form the English rebus meaning “I be-lieve”, which has nothing to do with eyes, bees or leaves. In the beginning, Ancient Egyptian writing relied heavily on pictographic signs representing concrete objects. Words which cannot be represented easily by means of a picture, such as proper names, ideas and function words, were difficult to write. The rebus principle provided the means to overcome this limitation. Fully developed hieroglyphs read in rebus fashion were in use at Abydos in Ancient Egypt as early as 3400 BC.

A famous Ancient Egyptian rebus statue of Ramses II consists of three hieroglyphic elements. A large falcon representing Horus the sun god – RA, who is standing behind a sitting child – MES, and the child is holding a sedge plant stalk in his left hand – SU. Remember we are not looking at these hieroglyphs from the perspective phonograms. These three items compose the rebus RA-MES-SU or as we prefer Ramesses. (Donald Frazer)

It is interesting that this type of phonetic writing is making a comeback through, of all things, the advanced technology of messaging.

 

Louis L'Amour wrote 113 books, 260 million copies of which have been sold worldwide in dozens of languages, and thirty of which have been turned into movies.

 

One of the central tenets of existentialist thinking – especially Sartre’s – is the belief that ‘human existence [is] different from the kind of being other things have. Other entities are what they are, but as a human I am whatever I choose to make of myself at every moment. I am free.’ Where this freedom comes from and how it resists all the elements of daily living is a bit vague.

This episode is instructive: It is described in Carole Seymour-Jones’s A Dangerous Liaison: Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre (2008), in which, during a visit to Moscow in 1962, Sartre became involved in a relationship with a KGB agent. As the agent, Lena Zonina, wrote in a report at the time, the philosopher’s visit was ‘set up in such a way as to give him a complete illusion that he meets with anyone he wants to meet, that he chooses the subjects for conversation, and that he works out his own programme rather than follows one imposed on him’. Sartre was taken in by the deception, falling in love with Zonina, an attractive and highly intelligent but ailing and vulnerable woman who was herself acting under severe constraint, proposing marriage to her and visiting the Soviet Union on no fewer than eight occasions within four years in order to be with her. With Sartre unwilling to make a decisive break with de Beauvoir and the philosopher’s usefulness to the Soviet cause waning, the relationship came to an end. But the carefully engineered romance seems to have served its purpose in bolstering Sartre’s belief that communism ‘must be judged by its intentions and not its actions’.

 

Who is...Leonard Woolf?

 

One of the clichés that has characterized Keynes is his remark to the effect that in the long run we are all dead. This may encapsulate much of modern thought. The emphasis is on the short run, today, not tomorrow.  Don’t worry about the long run. You’ll be dead then. But there is a lot more. The emphasis is upon the single individual and his life. There is no responsibility he has to anyone after his death. He brings no future to the period beyond his own existence. That is a significant aberration, unusual in history, I think. I wonder if it is a particular affliction of the childless and, as such, is much more common.

Disagreement is rising on the Fed, according to Jon Hilsenrath of the WSJ, between those on the Fed who believed that risks to the economy were materializing and those who wanted to wait and see. Either way, the Fed is confused and their 4-hikes in 2016 meme is disappearing fast. But they have models, right?

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/05/forest-and-trees-of-politics.html

The labor force participation rate for men has fallen to the lowest level ever recorded.

 

Just when it seemed that the Syria's proxy war would remain confined within the "comfortable" realm of conventional weaponry, Reuters gave the first hint of a potential, and radioactive escalation, when it reported that Iraq is searching for "highly dangerous" radioactive material stolen last year.

 

In 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used handpress; a month later, it was delivered to Hogarth House, their West London home, and the Hogarth Press was born. Over the next three decades the Woolfs would publish 525 titles, many of them by other influential modernists -- Mansfield, Forster, Eliot -- and most of them collector's items today.

 

The Pope's comment on Trump was pretty subtle for a second or third language; he turned a specific question into an aphorism. It sounded like a bon mot from the French Court. Of course it was taken at literal value by the less-than-subtle Americans and everyone lost their minds. 

 

From The American College of Pediatricians article "Gender Ideology Harms Children" :

Human sexuality is an objective biological binary trait: “XY” and “XX” are genetic markers of health — not genetic markers of a disorder.

No one is born with a gender. Everyone is born with a biological sex. Gender (an awareness and sense of oneself as male or female) is a sociological and psychological concept; not an objective biological one.

Gender dysphoria (GD), formerly listed as Gender Identity Disorder (GID), is a recognized mental disorder in the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association (DSM-V). The psychodynamic and social learning theories of GD/GID have never been disproved.

Reversible or not, puberty-blocking hormones induce a state of disease — the absence of puberty — and inhibit growth and fertility in a previously biologically healthy child.

According to the DSM-V, as many as 98% of gender confused boys and 88% of gender confused girls eventually accept their biological sex after naturally passing through puberty.

Rates of suicide are twenty times greater among adults who use cross-sex hormones and undergo sex reassignment surgery, even in Sweden which is among the most LGBQT — affirming countries. What compassionate and reasonable person would condemn young children to this fate knowing that after puberty as many as 88% of girls and 98% of boys will eventually accept reality and achieve a state of mental and physical health? 

Conditioning children into believing a lifetime of chemical and surgical impersonation of the opposite sex is normal and healthful is child abuse.

Rebus: noun: A representation of a word or phrase using pictures, symbols, letters, etc., pictures that represents sounds rather than the things they are pictures of. From Latin rebus (by things), from res (thing). Earliest documented use: 1605.

use: “Daniel Clowes’s narratives are full of anagrams and rebuses, clues (a wand, an eye, a movie camera) to an underlying mystery that is never solved.”Tad Friend; Comics from Underground; The New Yorker; Jul 30, 2001.
Every bottle cap from a bottle of Lone Star beer (the National Beer of Texas) contains a rebus.

 

There is an interesting economic notion called "on the margin." For a traditional example that economists use to illustrate the concept, consider: Diamonds have a higher market price than water, even though diamonds are mostly valued because they look pretty whereas water is essential to life. The explanation is that on the margin an extra diamond brings far more satisfaction than an extra gallon of water.

 

Paul Krugman and other climate change alarmists have to walk a very fine line: On the one hand, they need to scare the heck out of Americans, warning them that utter disaster awaits if we don’t support policies to make energy more expensive. On the other hand, the climate alarmists have to be really optimistic, promising Americans that if they would just let the government get more power and more money, then all of a sudden the climate catastrophe disappears with surprisingly little pain. (from Murphy, the economist not the dog.)

 

AAAaaaaannnnnnddddddd......a picture, when galaxies attack:

2016 February 3

                       M81 versus M82 

 

 

The Origin of Dogs

In one of the largest studies of its kind Professor Peter Savolainen and colleagues sequenced the genomes of 58 members of the dog family including grey wolves, indigenous dogs from south-east and north-east Asia, village dogs from Nigeria, and a collection of breeds from the rest of the world, such as the Afghan Hound and Siberian Husky. The DNA analysis published in Cell Research found those from south-east Asia had a higher degree of genetic diversity, and were most closely related to grey wolves from which domestic dogs evolved.
Prof Savolainen, of the Royal Institute of Technology, Solna, Sweden, said this indicates "an ancient origin of domestic dogs in southern East Asia 33,000 years ago."
Prof Savolainen said: "The mild population bottleneck in dogs suggests dog domestication may have been a long process that started from a group of wolves that became loosely associated and scavenged with humans, before experiencing waves of selection for phenotypes (mutations) that gradually favoured stronger bonding with humans, a process called self-domestication." So the history of dogs may involve three major stages including loosely engaged pre-domesticated scavengers, domesticated non-breed dogs with close human-dog interactions, and breed formation following intense human selection for diverse sets of traits.
Prof Savolainen said: "The study of Chinese indigenous dogs thus provide missing links that connect these three major stages."

Minimum Thinking

"Economists have written scores of papers on the topic dating back 100 years, and the vast majority of these studies point to job losses for the least-skilled. They are based on fundamental economic reasoning—that when you raise the price of something, in this case labor, less of it will be demanded, or in this case hired.
Among the many studies supporting this conclusion is one completed earlier this year by Texas A&M’s Jonathan Meer and MIT’s Jeremy West, which reaffirmed that “the minimum wage reduces job growth over a period of several years” and that “industries that tend to have a higher concentration of low-wage jobs show more deleterious effects on job growth from higher minimum wages.”
The broader research confirms this. An extensive survey of decades of minimum-wage research, published by William Wascher of the Federal Reserve Board and me in a 2008 book titled “Minimum Wages,” generally found a 1% or 2% reduction for teenage or very low-skill employment for each 10% minimum-wage increase."
All this from econometrician and economist David Neumark in an essay in the WSJ
None the less  President Obama says “there is no solid evidence that a higher minimum wage costs jobs.” His probably being wrong is not as important as his certainty and his eagerness to vilify people who do not agree with him. There is a lot of uncertainty in life and it should be recognized and taken seriously. But in this partisan world of ideologues, open-mindedness and honesty is a separate enemy. And Manichaeism allows for no compromise. 

Cab Thoughts 5/11/16

Is Kim Kardashian the David Bowie of pornography?--Aleric Phlogiston

Poet laureate Colley Cibber was a well-known but second-rate writer and actor in London, most famous for his adaptation of Shakespeare's Richard III, in which there were such Cibberisms as "Off with his head -- so much for Buckingham!" Despite his  reputation, his was the only version of the play acted in England for over 150 years, so popular that attempts to do Shakespeare's original were booed off the stage.

In 1740, writing as Captain Hercules Vinegar, satiric playwright and novelist (and also a lawyer) Henry Fielding summoned poet laureate Colley Cibber to court, charged with the murder of the English language.


Mohamed El-Erian, the former CEO of the Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO) and current chief economic adviser to Allianz, predicts within the next three years, the global economy will hit a "T-junction." Policymakers will either watch helplessly as the world sinks into a mire of financial volatility and political collapse, or they'll find a way to unlock the piles of corporate cash sitting on the sidelines, reinvigorating growth.

 

Who is...Nikos Kazantzakis?

 

"Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man. We shall this day light such a candle, by God's grace, in England, as I trust shall never be put out." These are the last words of  Hugh Latimer (Bishop of Worcester). He, with Nicholas Ridley (Bishop of Rochester) and Cranmer were the "Oxford Martyrs," three Protestant churchmen caught up in Bloody Mary's reaction to the Reformation. He and Ridley were burned at the stake with the mercy of a bag of gunpowder around their necks. All three had been arrested by Mary, and imprisoned together at Oxford. Bradbury quotes these words in Fahrenheit 451 and has his hero, Guy Montag, resist all persuasions to recant a belief in books.

 

Palodar is the name for an apartment/home in which the occupants have turned into a “restaurant.” I say restaurant in quotations because only 12 seats are allowed or else the government considers it a private business/free enterprise. On top of the limited 12 seats, there is a strict menu on what can be served and how. If that is not enough limitations, the government requires only family members to operate/work in the palodar. There are restaurants throughout the country, other than Palodares. But, although they’re cheaper the food is awful. The government restaurant food gave me food poisoning along with many others.--letter from a tourist in Cuba

This O.J. Simpson replay is pretty horrifying. The assessments of this country in the future might well include it as important. Surprising that Simpson hasn't cried post-concussion syndrome.

The federal government traditionally bound the people only through acts of Congress and judgments of the courts.  In other words, to constrain liberty, the executive ordinarily had to rely on the other branches of government – it had to persuade the representatives of the people to enact a rule, and it had to persuade independent judges and juries to apply the rule. Nowadays, however, the executive acts against Americans through its own legislation and adjudication. This administrative action, whether legislative or judicial, is known as “administrative law,” and the executive relies on it to constrain Americans in all aspects of their lives, political, economic, social, and personal. Administrative law thereby has transformed American government and society.  Although this mode of power is unrecognized by the Constitution, it has become the government’s primary mode of controlling Americans, and it increasingly imposes profound restrictions on their liberty.  It therefore is time to reconsider the lawfulness of administrative law.--Philip Hamburger

According to Japan’s Justice Ministry, the country accepted less than 1 percent of refugees in 2015. Out of 7,586 applicants, only 27 were accepted.

One of the problems in analyzing Trump is how self-conflicting he appears. Sort of his own oxymoron. Here is something on the "homeopathic(!)" Trump: Donald Trump is the face of that insalubrious relationship, a lifelong crony capitalist who brags about buying political favors. But his enthusiasts, devoid as they are of a literate politics capable of thinking about all three sides of a triangle at the same time, take a kind of homeopathic view of Trump, believing that they can dispatch a crony capitalist to undo crony capitalism in the same way that New Age healers believe that a little bit of diluted poison chases away similar toxins.--Williamson. The complete article which is unkind to Trump and modern conservatives is here: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/430227/donald-trump-supporters-establishment-books

 

The Central Intelligence Agency three-year “Diversity and Inclusion Strategy” includes a dedicated program to recruit transgender individuals and agency-wide “unconscious bias” training. The plan, released by the CIA’s Diversity and Inclusion Office last week, lays out several goals for “weaving diversity and inclusion throughout the talent cycle.” This is a remarkable barometer as this population historically was the most vulnerable to compromise. The ultimate double agent?

 

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/05/harper-and-promise.html

Before the bureaucracy can rule, ownership must lose its significance. (Jasay) One way to strip ownership of its significance is to perpetuate the fallacy that property and law are creations of the state, and that each of us holds our property only by the grace of the state – as if we merely lease it from our kindly and provisioning overlords, in exchange for our obedience and regular tax payments. And to help ensure that we serfs do not start fancying that our property is really ours – fancying that we created it and, therefore, have original title to it – our overlords scold us regularly with a non sequitur, telling each of us, as individual owners of property, that “you didn’t build” individually and from scratch any of the social, legal, or physical institutions that make the creation and security of property possible.
In short, and from another work by Jasay, it’s as if your dog owns your house. (Bordeaux)

 

Nikos Kazantzakis was born, in Heraklion, Crete. Kazantzakis was a philosopher, a doctor of laws, a politician, a translator of Dante, and a prolific writer in all genres (including a 33,333 line sequel to the Odyssey) but his greatest fame comes from Zorba the Greek, a novel which rejects intellectualism for the simple life.

 

Tutankhamun died aged 19 in 1324 BC after just nine years on the throne. His final resting place was discovered by another British Egyptologist, Howard Carter, in 1922. Radar scans of the tomb of pharaoh Tutankhamun in the ancient necropolis of Luxor showed a "90 percent" chance of two hidden chambers, possibly containing organic material, Egypt's antiquities minister said Thursday. Experts had scanned the tomb to find what a British archaeologist believes could be the resting place of Queen Nefertiti, the legendary beauty and wife of Tutankhamun's father whose mummy has never been found.

From the WashPo: "What worries the smartest people on the left is that McConnell will shepherd Garland’s confirmation through during the lame-duck session if Clinton wins, depriving the first woman president of her ability to pick a more progressive alternative. While Garland is 63, which means he has a relatively shorter shelf life on the bench, Hillary could pick someone who is still in her 40s."

So Obama's nominee is not a sincere one, it is politically calculated to embarrass the Rube-publicans and influence the national vote? They have no intention of having this guy chosen? And all the preemptive outrage is just manipulated nonsense? Don't throw me into the briar patch?

Monger: The word monger means "a dealer in or trader of a commodity" or "a person who is involved with something in a petty or contemptible way" and it is frequently used in combination, as in the terms fishmonger, wordmonger and gossipmonger.

 

Trade is never a zero sum game. If trade were a zero sum game, it would never happen.  Two people trade because each expects to gain from the exchange. If I shine your shoes for $5, it’s because you value shiny shoes more than you value $5 and I value $5 more than the time, materials, and effort I expended.--Ikenson

 

Half of the 800,000 missing-juvenile cases reported each year are runaways. One quarter of missing-children cases are abductions committed by family members, often as a result of custody disputes. Approximately 100 are kidnappings by strangers. Of these, most of the victims are between 12 and 17, 80% are white, and 90% of the kidnappers are men. In more than half the cases, the victims are sexually assaulted.

 

Every member of President Teddy Roosevelt’s family owned a pair of stilts, including the first lady.

 

"As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him.  This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races." That was written by Charles Darwin in Descent of Man. It is a provocative line. I assume that “artificial barrier” is nationalism, or a religious variation thereof. But why does the agent of competition have to be solely individual?

 

AAAaaaaaannnnndddddd....a news story from Bad Newspaper:

 

The Complexities of Willa Cather

Confirmation bias sometimes creates wonderful Procrustean distortions. One of the American literary mysteries, for some reason, has been the sexual orientation of Willa Cather, the exceptional American novelist. She made an effort to destroy her letters and, to many, that is smoke of a bigger fire. Here is a funny segment from a book by Joan Acocella analyzing a presumed insight to Cather revealed in her book "The Professor's House:"

In a 1989 essay Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, pioneer of “queer theory,” writes that “The Professor’s House” might seem, on the surface, “hererosexist,” but that its underlying rebellion against heterosexism can be discovered by deconstructing the last sentence of the book—specifically, one word in that sentence, “Berengaria,” the name of the ship on which the professor’s wife and daughter are sailing home for Europe. Here is Sedwick’s analysis of that word:
“Berengaria, ship of women: the {green} {aria}, the {eager}{brain}, the {bearing} and the {bairn}, the {raring}{engine}, the {bargain} {binge}, the {ban} and {bar}, the {garbage}, the {barrage} of {anger}, the {bare} {grin}, the {rage} to {err}, the {rare} {grab} for {being}, the {begin} and {rebegin} {again}.”

This list of anagrams, which must have taken a while to work out, supposedly reveals the maelstrom of lesbian energies churning beneath the surface of “The Professor’s House,” energies that Cather was venting when she gave the ship that strange name. Yes, Sedgwick says, the name has a historical meaning—Berengaria was the wife of Richard the Lion-Hearted—but otherwise it is a “nonsense word.” She apparently does not know that it was the name of a real ship, a famous Cunard ocean liner, on which Cather had returned from Europe immediately before starting work on “The Professor’s House”

And her not-so-funny conclusion, in an article in "The New Yorker:"
...this woman, because she was supposedly a lesbian and because, therefore, all her work was considered encoded, full of secrets, was made the sport of literary theorists. And while they were snuffling about in her presumed recesses, all the great things about her—her profundity, her stern tragic sense, her grand, unshowy musical prose (she may have had a better ear than any other American novelist)—all these were ignored.

Genetic Bottlenecks

A bottleneck can reduce a population's genetic variation by a lot, even if the bottleneck doesn't last for very many generations.
A founder effect occurs when a new colony is started by a few members of the original population, sort of an artificial bottleneck.This small population size means that the colony may have:

• reduced genetic variation from the original population.
• a non-random sample of the genes in the original population.

For example, the Afrikaner population of Dutch settlers in South Africa is descended mainly from a few colonists. Today, the Afrikaner population has an unusually high frequency of the gene that causes Huntington's disease, because those original Dutch colonists just happened to carry that gene with unusually high frequency. This effect is easy to recognize in genetic diseases, but of course, the frequencies of all sorts of genes are affected by founder events.

Bags of marbles where, in generation 2, an unusually small draw creates a bottleneck.

Sunday 5/8/16

"Intimations of Immortality" is a lyric poem in the form of an ode. Wordsworth completed it in 1804 and describes his feelings as he moves from childhood to adulthood. He believes each man has a soul which is infused with the spiritual memory of heaven and we lose some of that spirituality as time passes as the earth provides its own glories.

 
"THERE was a time when meadow, grove, and stream,
The earth, and every common sight,
To me did seem
Apparelled in celestial light,
The glory and the freshness of a dream.
It is not now as it hath been of yore;--
Turn wheresoe'er I may,
By night or day,
The things which I have seen I now can see no more.

                                    

The Rainbow comes and goes,
And lovely is the Rose,
The Moon doth with delight

Look round her when the heavens are bare,
Waters on a starry night
Are beautiful and fair;
The sunshine is a glorious birth;
But yet I know, where'er I go,
That there hath past away a glory from the earth."

Yet now those earthly glories remind the soul of its past, and promises its future.  

“Though nothing can bring back the hour
Of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower,
We will grieve not, rather find
Strength in what remains behind,
In the primal sympathy
Which having been must ever be,
In the soothing thoughts that spring
Out of human suffering,
In the faith that looks through death,
In years that bring the philosophic mind.”