Sunday 8/7/16

The problems of the material world are integral with human reflection. And often the solutions have spiritual elements despite the formulas and graphs. Dialectics. Invisible hands. Nagel's direction of Nature. These problems are more than practical, they compete for our time, energy and devotion with the spiritual. The New Testament is filled with disturbing choices Christ asks His followers to consider.
Early Christians developed a number of solutions to the problem of work, property and the material world that Christ so carefully counter-pointed with the spiritual world. Early and influential was a communist Christian heretic in the late 12th-century, the Calabrian abbot and hermit, Joachim of Fiore. Joachim, who almost managed to convert three popes to his heresy, adopted the thesis that there are destined to be in history, not just two Ages (pre- and post-Christian) as orthodox Christians believe, but a Third Age aborning, of which he was the prophet. The pre-Christian era was the age of the Father, of the Old Testament; the Christian era the age of the Son, the New Testament. Arriving was the third apocalyptic age of the Holy Spirit, to be ushered in during the next half-century, an age of pure love and freedom, in which history was to come to an end. The Church, the Bible, and the State would be swept away, and man would live in a free, communist community without work or property. Father. Son Holy Spirit. Very poetic and symmetrical.
Joachim dispensed with the problem of production and allocation under this communism very neatly and effectively, more so than any communist successor. In the Third Age, he declared, man's material body will disappear, and man will be pure spirit, free to spend all of his days in mystical ecstasy chanting praises to God for a thousand years until the Day of Judgment. Without physical bodies, there is of course precious little need for production.
Joachim was of the apocalyptic tradition of John, perhaps second in importance only to him. He offered a view of Revelations distinct from Augustine and his symbolic translations: He saw events in the context of Revelation literally. The sixth head of the seven-headed Dragon of Revelations he thought was Saladin. He was very influential--especially for a hermit--and was consulted by King Richard the Lion Hearted on his way to the Third Crusade.
A drawing of Joachim, the Dragon of Revelations
 

Hiroshima aug 6 1945

On August 6, 1945, the Americans attacked the city of Hiroshima with an atomic bomb, the first such attack ever. Interestingly, its anniversary is not well remembered. At least 140,000 people were killed in the initial attack; the lingering effects are myriad.

There are countless topics that can be derived from this event but there is a specific modern American peculiarity whose origins I have always pondered: The reluctance to fight wars seriously. Since the Second World War the United States has gone out of its way to sanitize combat. It fights wars as a community effort--as part of coalitions or the United Nations--as if there is "nothing personal". They place limits on objectives, they never participate in the time honored purposes of war--slaves and booty--and often will compensate or rebuild the enemy after the fact. Most significantly, they try to distance their own citizenry from the combat. From a volunteer military to the creepy draft lottery the average citizen is moved as far as possible from the war. Indeed this compartmentalizing of combat seems to dictate policy as the government limits action and objectives to limit domestic impact.

The attempt to isolate foreign war as a domestic policy is, of course, impossible. The American inflation chart follows the war chart point by point. Worse, the people become inured to the violence and destruction, like the gradual therapeutic desensitizing to an allergy. But the worst point is the nation's military purpose and its domestic purpose are allowed to diverge. In the Vietnam War American troops were under a greater threat because several sites of enemy troop operations could not be violated for diplomatic reasons, because the war might expand and become a risk to the citizens at home. No nation should allow its sons to be under fire without being willing to commit completely to their defense and well being. That is, no nation should allow its sons to be under fire without risk to itself.

War is too terrible to be dabbled in. The soldier is immersed in total war; his society should be too. That the soldier is a volunteer is no excuse. If every action was supported with a war tax, if gasoline was diverted or food sold for the expressed purpose of troop support, if the citizen were made to suffer, to participate in the actions of their military children in some--even symbolic--way there would only be serious efforts undertaken.

War is an active, inevitable evil. Yet it cannot be softened or cleaned up. No politician can tweak it to make it more gentle. It is vicious and lethal. Even in the strange Aztec "Flower Wars" everyone died in the end. The citizens of Hiroshima knew this. They lived and died it. It may be that their lesson is too hard for us to face.

Cab Thoughts 8/5/16

 Nothing is more suicidal than a rational investment strategy in an irrational world.

~John Maynard Keynes

 

 

When a snake strikes, it moves so fast it could hit you four times within the space of one eyeblink. If a human moved that fast they would lose consciousness. According to research, an average "snake strike" lasts somewhere between 44 and 70 milliseconds. To put that in perspective, it takes humans around 200ms to blink an eye. In the same time, the most ruthless snake could theoretically have carried out four strikes.

 

Medical school applicants generally have to complete a series of basic science courses, including biology, chemistry, organic chemistry, and physics. These requirements came to be after 1910, when the educator Abraham Flexner wrote a report on medical education for the Carnegie Foundation. Back then, medical schools had lax admissions standards and inconsistent, nonscientific curricula. But Flexner argued that medical training should be science-based and that applicants should complete undergraduate coursework in basic sciences in order to apply. His recommendations were transformative. Since Flexner’s report, basic science classes have formed the foundation of how we screen aspiring doctors in the United States.
Since 1987, the Icahn School of Medicine at Mt. Sinai has run a Humanities and Medicine Program (HuMed) that admits non-traditional applicants who haven’t taken the usual pre-med requirements. In 2010, faculty there published a study of hundreds of students and found HuMed students and traditional pre-med students performed at virtually the same level in medical school.
 

Who is....Maria Cosway?

 

The Peace of Westphalia, was the beginning of the European nation-state where the individual subsets, ethnicities and loners were all, arbitrarily, organized as nations. There are some very interesting notions about this. Nations may not be natural; the tribe might be. The nation may be the result of industrialization and its demands for norms; agricultural communities may not fit nations. Most interestingly, the state is a practical legal administrating entity, the nation demands a spiritual sense of self.

 

In May of 2016, Dr. Lawrence Wyner, of Huntington, WV,  presented a paper on the urologic hazards of the zipper. Nearly 100 years ago, Swedish-American engineer Gideon Sundback received a patent for major improvements he made to the clasp locker, Whitcomb Judson's unreliable boot-lacing mechanism. Sundback called his invention the "separable fastener," but it remained virtually unnoticed until B.F. Goodrich president Bertram Work decided to put it on rubber galoshes in 1923, and also had the foresight to give his product the catchy onomatopoetic name "zippers." For about 10 years, the device was relegated only to footwear and tobacco pouches. Although fashion designers saw the zipper's potential for clothing, the device was slow to catch on for both sexes, and was irreverently satirized in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World.   While slow to "catch on," in the mid-1930s, as British royalty began wearing zippered trousers, this new device for fastening one's fly suddenly became the rage. The first report of a zipper-related penile injury (ZIRPI) appeared in JAMA in 1936. It is estimated that about 2,000 of these occur  annually in the U.S. alone. 

Personally, I feel that the decline of the U.S. and the loss of the zipper patent occurred about the same time. That may not be a coincidence; the cheaper, less reliable modern zipper has made all of life less reliable and may have infiltrated unreliability into our very psyche. But Dr. Wyner paper raises another concern: How can the people of this great nation allow the potential hazards to innocent citizens by this product to exist? Certain the risks--especially now with the inferior products loosed upon us--merits a conference, a committee or even a bureau to assess the risks and possible regulatory solutions.

I would like to be part--i.e. president-- of an advocacy group.

The Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a group that tracks human rights and political repression in Cuba, reported more than 8,600 politically motivated detentions in 2015, a 315 percent increase from five years ago. In the first two months of this year, there had already been more than 2,500 arrests.

 

O)n the California drought: Droughts are defined by reduced precipitation and increased evaporation, and California’s 2011-2015 drought had both. What happened over the last three winters was a major reduction in precipitation (a reduction of 0.9 mm per day) with only a minor increase in evaporation (less than 0.1 mm per day). In short, the reduction in precipitation was an order of magnitude more than the increase in evaporation. “California lost essentially one full year of precipitation,” according to Richard Seager, a climate model specialist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. “The [reduced] precipitation was the essence of this drought,” added Marty Hoerling, a meteorologist at the NOAA Earth System Research Lab: "Farmers were praying for rain, not cooler temperatures." According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA),“The current drought is not part of a long-term change in California precipitation, which exhibits no appreciable trend since 1895.”.

 

 

Hillary wants to end the disabled-workers’ exemption from the minimum-wage requirement. This symbolic act will certainly make almost all of them unemployable. If almost none of the workers who are today classified as disabled are capable of producing $7.25 per hour of value for employers, who will hire them for more?

But form triumphs over substance.

 

The use of the corpses of criminals to discover the secrets of human anatomy dates back to the 4th century BC, when Herophilos and Erasistratus  of Alexandria were given permission to perform live vivisections. Live. The times, however, had changed and criminals were now only dissected after execution. Families who wanted to protect their loved one from vivisectionists turned to innovators and thus emerged the "mortsafe." The mortsafe was ingenious: a complex of iron rods and plates descending in to the ground and rising above it. Above the ground they were weighted either with stone or iron.

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they went bankrupt.

47% of all Americans do not put a single penny out of their paychecks into savings.

 

Dierdre Mcclloskey is getting more and more interesting. She is a professor of economics, history and English, has written on a number of topics in all areas, has a huge reservoir of thought and ideas, is an expert on Jane Austin, has a gargantuan trilogy of books out trying to explain the explosive growth in wealth in the 17th Century.

She used to be named Donald, is a father of two and – in 1995 at the age of 53 – decided to become a woman. McCloskey is also an award-winning author and economist, a former “Chicago Boy” who worked for several years alongside the famous free-market guru Milton Friedman.
The professor has since written a book on her experience. Crossing: A Memoir was cited as the "Notable Book of the Year" by the New York Times. Although her sex change did not affect her career, McCloskey writes about how it did end up separating her from her family. Her recent trilogy,  Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions Enriched the World, threatens to be a significant work of the early century.

Edward Albee was inspired to write "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" after seeing the line scrawled in soap on a graffiti mirror in a Greenwich Village hangout called "College of the Complexes."

 

At age seven, George Ruth's truancy from school led his parents to declare him incorrigible, and he was sent to an orphanage, St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys. Ruth lived there until he was 19 in 1914, when he was signed as a pitcher by the Baltimore Orioles. That same summer, Ruth was sold to the Boston Red Sox. His teammates called him “Babe,” short for baby, for his naiveté, but his talent was already mature, and he was almost immediately recognized as the best pitcher on one of the great teams of the 1910s. He set a record between 1916 and 1918 with 29 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings in World Series play, including a 14-inning game in 1916 in which he pitched every inning, giving up only a run in the first.To the great dismay of Boston fans, Ruth was sold by the Red Sox to the New York Yankees before the 1920 season by Red Sox owner Harry Frazee, so that Frazee could finance the musical No, No, Nanette. Ruth switched to the outfield with the Yankees, and hit more home runs than the entire Red Sox team in 10 of the next 12 seasons.

 

Surly: adj: 1. churlishly rude or bad-tempered: a surly waiter. 2. unfriendly or hostile; menacingly irritable: a surly old lion. 3. dark or dismal; menacing; threatening: a surly sky. Interesting ety: 1560-70; spelling variant of obsolete sirly or lordly, arrogant, equivalent to sir + -ly . So churlish from lordly.

 
Former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and his wife Maureen were convicted of accepting over $150,000 in gifts while in office from a businessman.The Clintons raked in seven hundred times that amount — $105 million—  under the pretext of speaking fees while Hillary Clinton was in public office. Yet the McDonnells face time in prison, while the Clintons are aiming for the White House.

 

In 1786, a widowed Thomas Jefferson met Maria (pronounced Mariah) Cosway in Paris while he was serving as the U.S. minister to France. Cosway was born to English parents in Italy and, by the time she met Jefferson, had become an accomplished painter and musician. She was also married. The two developed a deep friendship. The usually self-contained Jefferson acted like a giddy schoolboy with Cosway, at one point leaping over a stone fountain while the two were out walking and falling and breaking his right wrist. After the wrist healed, a chagrined Jefferson wrote his famous Head and Heart Letter to Cosway in October 1876, just after she left for London with her husband for an undetermined period of time. The letter reveals him to have been a lovesick man whose intellect battled with a heart aching for a woman he could not have.

 

Golden Oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/04/blue-velvet-tattoo.html

 

"In a nationally-televised debate among three of the Libertarian candidates for President a highly unlikely hypothetical question was raised about whether a Jewish baker has the right to refuse to serve a Nazi sympathizer asking for a "Nazi cake". I responded to that question in the legal context of whether a public business has the right to refuse to serve a member of the public, as distasteful as it might be. The simple answer to that question is, whether all like it or not, U.S. law has recognized the principle of public accommodation for more than 100 years: The principle that, when a business opens its doors to the public, that business enters into an implied contract to serve ALL of the public. Further, when that business voluntarily opens its doors, the owners voluntarily agree to adhere to applicable laws and regulations -- whether they like those laws or not."

This comes from a Facebook post by Former New Mexico governor Gary Johnson, running for the Presidential nomination of the Libertarian Party. Is what he says true? Or right?

 

AAAAaaaaannnnndddddd..........a chart:

The Difference Between a Life Lesson and Life

Madame de La Tour du Pin is the author of a famous autobiography that encompasses the time of the Terror in France through much of Napoleon and the Restoration. Her son, Humbert, was a solid young man of honor and duty. He was offended by a man and approached his father with the theoretical question of what a man in the situation might do. His father fell into the horrible trap of abstractness, giving a theoretical answer that would have been completely different had he known the circumstances. His advice--and his refusal to see life in context--should haunt every father forever.

This is excerpted from a postscript in Madame de La Tour du Pin's book. 

There is another, much more dramatic, I can not find to reproduce.

Humbert de La Tour du Pin was born at Paris the 
nineteenth of May, 1790. During the last years of 
the Empire he was Sous-Prefet at Florence and 

later at Sens. At the time of the First Restora- 
tion he was appointed officer in the corps of the 
Mousquetaires Noirs and became later aide de 
camp of Marechal Victor, Due de Bellune. He died 
under circumstances which were very sad and very 
dramatic. 

At the time of his appointment to the Military 
Household of the Due de Bellune, among the aides 
de camp of the Marechal was the Commandant 
Malandin, an officer who had risen from the ranks. 
He was rough and uneducated, but audacious and 
courageous, with an open and loyal heart, but very 
susceptible upon the point of honor. He had won 
every one of his grades upon the different fields of 
battle of the Empire. 

The very day that Humbert took up for the first 
time his service with the Marechal, on entering the 
quarters of the aides de camp, he encountered the 
Commandant Malandin. The latter addressed him in 
a vein of pleasantry, regarding some unimportant 
detail of his uniform, but in terms which were coarse 
and unbecoming. 

Before Humbert could make any reply, the 
Marechal entered, upon a tour of inspection, and, 
while there, gave the Commandant a mission to the 
Minister of War. 

As soon as Humbert was able to leave, he went im- 
mediately to the hotel occupied by his family and 
entered the cabinet of his father. Here he recounted 
the incident, without omitting any of the details, 
except that he stated that the person involved was 
not himself, but one of his friends. He then asked 

his father what "his friend" ought to do. His father 
replied : 

"Challenge the aggressor." 

"And if apologies are offered?" 

"Refuse them." 

That evening Humbert sent a challenge to Ma- 
land in. The meeting was arranged for the following 
morning in the Bois de Boulogne. The weapons selected 
were pistols and the distance was twenty-five paces. 

The duel took place the following morning in a 
clearing in the Bois de Boulogne. 

When the distance had been measured off and the 
adversaries had been placed in position, before the 
signal had been given, the Commandant Malandin 
gave a sign that he wished to speak, and in a loud 
tone he pronounced these words : 

"Monsieur de La Tour du Pin, in the presence of 
these gentlemen, I think that I ought once more to 
declare to you that I regret my wretched pleasantry. 
Two good fellows ought not to kill each other for 
that." 

Humbert hesitated a moment and then walked 
slowly towards the Commandant. All the assistants 
had a feeling of secret relief at seeing the favorable 
turn which the affair had taken. But when the young 
man arrived close to his adversary, instead of offer- 
ing him his hand, he raised his arm and with the 
butt of his pistol struck Malandin on the forehead. 

"Monsieur," he said, "I think that now you will 
not refuse to fight!" and he returned to his place. 

After such a scene, only one denouement was 
possible. The signal was given; Monsieur de La Tour 

du Pin fired first and missed. His adversary, the 
Commandant, then fired in turn and shot Humbert 
through the heart. 

Cab Thoughts 8/3/16

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

 

 

In 1806 Napoleon made Jews full citizens of France, but two years later he issued the 'Infa­mous Decrees' ordering them to take French names, privatize their faith, and ensure that at least one in every three marriages per family was with a gentile.
That is more than integration, it is gradual extinction. So is that homogenization worthwhile?

What allows for freedom from those ever-grasping for power over us?  Voting? A free press? The classical-liberal conception of rights is likely to be discomforting to any ruling class, no matter how constituted, because it reliably subtracts power from those who rule, or hope to, and distributes it among the people.  Decentralized private property has had precisely that effect. Private property and the right of assembly. The right to form groups.

 

Archaeologists have determined that by 1900 BC, the ancient Assyrians had established one of the first postal services. Merchants used it to exchange messages written in cuneiform on tablets sealed in clay envelopes, and they trusted it enough to send each other currency. 'I provided your agents with three minas of silver for the purchase of lead,' one businessman wrote to another. 'Now, if you are still my brother, let me have my money by courier.' Typically, however, ancient rulers didn't allow commoners to use their postal services. They reserved the post for their own use as a tool for controlling their subjects and consolidating their power. Two centuries later, the Egyptian pharaohs created a network of postal routes traveled by horsemen who carried messages written in hieroglyphs on papyrus to their princes and military leaders. Only the most highly born Egyptians could send mail through the official post. Merchants had to use slaves to deliver their messages.

 

Japan's Emperor Akihito, like his father before him, is a scientist with a passion for studying marine life. Although he was never able to pursue a doctorate in the field, Akihito has continued his studies and research throughout his life.
He's published extensively in ichthyology and genetics. Akihito's most recent article is titled "Speciation of two gobioid species, Pterogobius elapoides and Pterogobius zonoleucus revealed by multi-locus nuclear and mitochondrial DNA analyses."

 

Eisenhower became the first president ever to be baptized while in office, taking the rite before the congregation of National Presbyterian Church. It was at Eisenhower's urging that the words "under God" were added to the pledge of allegiance, and it was during his second term that the words "In God We Trust" were added to paper currency.

In 1593 Queen Elizabeth's Privy Council issued a warrant for the arrest of Christopher Marlowe on charges of spreading "blasphemous and damnable opinions." Five days earlier Marlowe's roommate and fellow playwright, Thomas Kyd, had also been arrested on similar charges; under torture (apparently a set piece on the rack called "scraping the conscience"), Kyd had claimed that the offending documents in his possession were in fact Marlowe's. While prosecutors prepared for trial Marlowe was allowed out on bail; the day before his scheduled court appearance, and at just twenty-nine years of age, Marlowe was killed in a drunken brawl in Deptford, a dagger through his eye. But times change. It seems now that Marlowe was actually a spy for the Crown, that Marlowe died not in a tavern but in a government safe house, in the company of other spies and spy-runners, some of whom had the personality and perhaps the motive to kill him. And it gets more exciting. Marlowe was felt by many to be as talented as Shakespeare. A more recent theory that Marlowe's secret burial in an unmarked grave was a ruse, and that Marlowe was in a group of spies conducted across the Channel the day after his faked murder, and that he went on to not only write as well as Shakespeare but to become "Shakespeare." 

 

Who is.... Lord Acton?

 

From Aagam Shah:

In 1998, Kodak had 170,000 employees and sold 85% of all photo paper worldwide. Within just a few years, their business model disappeared and they got bankrupt.What happened to Kodak will happen in a lot of industries in the next 10 years – and most people don’t see it coming. Did you think in 1998 that 3 years later you would never take pictures on paper film again?Yet digital cameras were invented in 1975. The first ones only had 10,000 pixels, but followed Moore’s law. So as with all exponential technologies, it was a disappointment for a long time, before it became way superior and got mainstream in only a few short years. It will now happen with Artificial Intelligence, health, autonomous and electric cars, education, 3D printing, agriculture and jobs. Welcome to the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Welcome to the Exponential Age. Software will disrupt most traditional industries in the next 5-10 years.
 

Uber is just a software tool, they don’t own any cars, and are now the biggest taxi company in the world.

Airbnb is now the biggest hotel company in the world, although they don’t own any properties.

 

If you seriously want to monetize the debt, you'd have to buy back the debt held by the public, with newly issued base money. There are two data points that suggest this will lead to hyperinflation:
1. Currency in circulation is about 8% of GDP
2. Treasury debt held by the public is about 80% of GDP

 

A point de Jasay raises concerns a moral diminishing returns argument. When does the state stop in pursuing worthy goals?  If cancer research deserves state support, what about psoriasis? Depression? Low self esteem? Homelessness? It is easy to visualize the rise of successive pressure groups for research, culture, sport, while an avowedly anti-culture or anti-sport pressure group seems simply unthinkable. So, given the worthiness of the project, what is not in the state's purview?

An interesting observation: The eminent historian Robert R. Palmer has offered a critically important comparison of the degree of radicalism in the American and French revolutions: the number of emigres who felt compelled to flee the country during the revolution.  The French Revolution created 129,000 exiles out of a total population of about 25 million: an emigre ratio of 5 per 1000.  The American Tory emigres amounted to what Palmer very conservatively sets at 60,000 in a population of about 2.5 million: 24 emigres per 1,000.  But at least half a million of the American population were slaves, who could hardly be considered in the same category as other inhabitants of the colonies.  A more likely estimate for Tory emigration in the Revolution is 100,000.  At this corrected rate, 50 Americans out of every 1,000 were emigres during the Revolution, a rate fully tenfold of the exile rate in the supposedly more radical French Revolution.
So was this flight because of philosophical incompatibility, easy access and transportation to Canada or real fear?

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/01/girl-with-dragon-tattoo-short-review.html

 

Eating Local has become more than an interesting diversion; it has become a thesis for restoring person-to-person commerce and intimacy. This would oppose the growing impersonal corporate world, a la Wendell Berry.  As Robert Wuetherick asks, “What will be next?  100-mile-sourced medicines?  100-mile-sourced ideas?  100-mile-sourced economic history?”

 

 The Hôpital des Enfants-Trouvés allowed Parisian citizens to come directly to the hospital and hand over a child of any age. The hospital encour­aged families to register and mark the children they were leaving so they might reclaim them at a later date, but the families who chose to do so were few. In fact, the vast majority of the children there had arrived via le tour.

"Le tour d'abandon ('the desertion tower') was merely a box attached to the hospital, constructed with two sliding doors and a small, loud bell. An in­fant was unceremoniously placed in the box, the door firmly closed behind it, and the bell was rung. Upon hearing the bell, the nurses on duty would go to le tour to remove the infant, replace the box to its original position, and wait. Every night, a dozen or so infants were received in precisely this way.

 

Factious: adjective: Divisive; seditious; relating to or arising from faction. ETYMOLOGY: From French factieux (seditious) and Latin factiosus (partisan), from facere (to do). Ultimately from the Indo-European root dhe- (to set or put), which is also the source of do, deed, factory, fashion, face, rectify, defeat, sacrifice, satisfy, Sanskrit sandhi (joining), Urdu purdah (veil, curtain), and Russian duma (council). Earliest documented use: 1527. 

USAGE: “The agreement last month of Syria’s traditionally factious and fractious three million Kurds to put aside their differences and form the Kurdish National Council has alarmed neighbouring Turkey.” Jonathan Manthorpe; Arab Spring Awakens Kurdish Dreams of Autonomy; The Vancouver Sun (Canada); Aug 3, 2012.

 

It is a mistaken notion in government, that the interest of the majority is only to be consulted, since in society every man has a right to every man’s assistance in the enjoyment and defense of his private property; otherwise the greater number may sell the lesser, and divide their estates amongst themselves; and so, instead of a society, where all peaceable men are protected, become a conspiracy of the many against the minority. With as much equity may one man wantonly dispose of all, and violence may be sanctified by mere power.--Cato

 

The English historian Lord Acton (1834-1902) deplored the notion of nationality, fearing that the 'fictitious' general will of the people that it promoted would crush 'all natural rights and all estab­lished liberties for the purpose of vindicating itself.' He could see that the desire to preserve the nation could become an absolute used to justify the most inhumane policies. "By making the State and the nation commensurate with each other in theory, [nationality] reduces practically to a subject condition all other nationalities that may be within the boundary .... According, therefore, to the degree of humanity and civilization in that domi­nant body which claims all the rights of the community, the inferior races are exterminated or reduced to servitude, or put in a condition of dependence." There was a real conflict here. The new nation-state would labor under a fundamental contradic­tion: the state (the governmental apparatus) was supposed to be secu­lar, but the nation ( 'the people') aroused quasi-religious emotions. In 1807-08, while Napoleon was conquering Prussia, the German phi­losopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte had delivered a series of lectures in Ber­lin, looking forward to the time when the forty-one separate German principalities would become a unified nation-state. The Fatherland, he claimed, was a manifestation of the divine, the repository of the spiri­tual essence of the Volk and therefore eternal. (from Armstrong)

 

The nation's weather satellite program over the course of a year suffered 10 data security incidents, including unauthorized access and probes by adversaries, according to a congressional auditor. The ground system is highly susceptible to compromise because, among other things, the agency has not executed nearly half of the recommended standard security controls and has not patched key vulnerabilities, the audit states.

Compromising weather satellites. Now who would want to do that?

 

Aaaaaannnnndddddd.....a picture of something: 

Some Graphs on Debt and Deficits‏

A common theme among conservative talkshow guys and gold salesmen has been the Federal Debt. The debt is the accumulation of annual Federal deficits, the amount the government spends minus what the government takes in. Given the disaster of 2008, the recent administration has not been terrible year to year. The crucial problem is that such annual debts are added onto total deficits, year by year. These astonishing graphs are from http://www.usgovernmentspending.com/

Sometime they load, sometimes they don't.

Here is the recent deficit history, remembering the national earnings are a factor in addition to government spending:

Here is the deficit as a percentage of Gross Domestic Product:

And a broader time chart of percentage of GDP:

Gross public debt is the sum of all sources of U.S. debt:

And this is the total Federal debt over the years as a percentage of GDP:

These last two show Monetized debt (blue), i.e., federal debt bought by the Federal Reserve System,  debt held by the federal government (red) e.g., as IOUs for Social Security, and other debt (green), i.e., debt in public hands, including foreign governments.

Chart D.11f: Recent US Federal Debt

"Mrs Miniver"

I saw "Mrs Miniver" recently.
Mrs. Miniver was originally a fictional character created by Jan Struther  in 1937 for a series of newspaper columns for The Times; it was later adapted into a movie of the same name. The Times columns were short reflections on everyday life, based in part on Struther's own family and experiences and gradually expanded to weightier subjects as WWII developed.
The movie itself is sentimental and dramatic. Because it has a religious element to it, it is not retrospectively well loved by modern critics but continues to be popular among real people.
The final scene is a remembrance service for several people killed in a bombing raid on the local small town. The director and the actor who plays the Episcopal priest re-wrote the scene the night before it was shot. The priest is a strong presence standing as he does in the church pulpit before a back wall shattered by the bombs. His speech meanders into the senselessness of the deaths of the civilians, one a child, one an old man and one a new bride. Just when you think the direction is to question how God can allow this, the priest challenges the audience. He says that this war is so important, everyone is involved, everyone is a combatant. The camera climbs his form to the hole in the roof above him as the congregation sings "Onward Christian Soldiers."
You can imagine how modern critics rise above it.
It is said--confirmed by Roosevelt and Churchill--that the movie strengthened America's interest in entering the war.
This is a revealing comment from Goebbels:  ...[Mrs.Miniver]... “shows the destiny of a family during the current war, and its refined powerful propagandistic tendency has up to now only been dreamed of. There is not a single angry word spoken against Germany; nevertheless the anti-German tendency is perfectly accomplished.”