Reverie

"The business of Progressives is to go on making mistakes. The business of Conservatives is to prevent mistakes from being corrected. Even when the revolutionist might himself repent of his revolution, the traditionalist is already defending it as part of his tradition." --G K Chesterton



The Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development analyzed almost all aid from the United States and other rich nations and found that about one-third is climate-related aid.
This is immoral when 2 billion people suffer from malnutrition, 700 million live in extreme poverty and 2.4 billion are without clean drinking water and sanitation. These problems can be tackled effectively today, helping many more people more dramatically than “climate aid” could.--Lomberg
 
A guy named Noah Smith argues that there is no global war against militant Islam. Compare, he says, deaths in the West to these parochial numbers:
Let's look at the main wars currently being fought by radical Islamic forces. These are:

Syrian Civil War (~470,000 dead)
2nd Iraqi Civil War (~56,000 dead)
Boko Haram Insurgency (~28,000 dead)
War in Afghanistan (126,000 dead)
Somali Civil War (~500,000 dead)
War in Northwest Pakistan (~60,000 dead)
Libyan Civil War (~14,000 dead)
Yemeni Civil War (~11,000 dead)
Sinai Insurgency (~4,500 dead)

When Bogle started the first index fund in 1976, his goal was capturing the overall market’s return at much lower costs than the stockpicking fund managers who so often failed to match it. The wisdom of this passive approach has become so conventional that Vanguard’s assets under management have swollen to $3.5 trillion, mostly in index funds.

 

Who is....Kissinger?

According to the NY Post, the president-elect’s 46-year-old wife and their 10-year-old son are staying put at the family’s Trump Tower penthouse so that Barron can continue attending his Upper West Side private school. That source said also that there is a possibility that Melania and Barron may move to the White House at the end of the school year, but no plans are in place. A shift from Washington to New York, that would be a big deal. (Traffic aside.)

"This president-elect is the most unique that I have experienced in one respect: No baggage. He has no obligation to any particular group because he has become a president on the basis of his own strategy and a program he put before the American public that his competitors did not present. So that is a unique situation.”--Kissinger on Trump

"Slate" has an article on Hitler couched in ambiguous Trump-like terms. One of the difficulties in this culture is its omnipresent hyperbole; everything is exaggerated. This is fine if you are Flannery O'Connor but most of these writers are only hysterical. It undermines their points, it compromises the value of their estimates. and generally enervates the reader who should be invigorated.

Since Sputnik 1,  NASA estimates that more than a half-million fragments of space junk are orbiting the earth, some the husks of satellites, some tiny flecks of paint. The estimated weight is 7,000 tons. There are all sorts of ideas about what to do with the junk from harvesting it to destroying it.

In 2004, 30,711 deaths were drug related compared to 42,836 in motor vehicle accidents. A decade later, drug-induced deaths reached 49,714 while road crash deaths fell to 32,675.

We are a fickle crowd--or maybe just hopeful. Donald Trump’s popularity is rising in the days since his election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll of registered voters. Forty-six percent of voters now have a very favorable or somewhat favorable opinion of the president-elect. Twelve percent have a somewhat unfavorable opinion and 34 percent have a very unfavorable opinion of him. Since the election, Trump’s favorability has grown 9 points, 37 percent to 46 percent, compared to a Morning Consult poll right before the election -- while his unfavorability has dropped 15 points, from 61 percent to 46 percent.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/10/the-el-dorado-of-unearned-wealth.html

"The El Dorado of Unearned Wealth" steeleydock.blogspot.com A well regarded commentator was writing an article opposing fracking. Because the technology has been investigated to death and found in...

“Rust Belt Dems broke for Trump because they thought Clinton cared more about bathrooms than jobs.” That's a headline in the WashPo.


Obama said something interesting recently. He said he could not pardon Snowden without a conviction. That is, he could not pre-emptively pardon a guy for a process that had not yet run its course. He did not say it, but that applies to Hillary too. And to illegal immigrants.


"Liberals work very hard to advocate for tolerance and respect for people who look differently, or love differently, or pray differently. If I had an extra genie wish, I'd use it to help liberals invest some of that same passion into tolerating and respecting people who think differently."--Leff


Some 400 protesters, opposed to a North Dakota oil pipeline project they say threatens water resources and sacred tribal lands, clashed with police who fired tear gas at the scene of a similar confrontation last month. A total of 167 demonstrators have been injured according to a medic on site while 7 people have been hospitalized for severe head injuries. Three of those injured are reportedly elders of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

A new study found that the dementia rate in Americans 65 and older fell by 24 percent over 12 years, to 8.8 percent in 2012 from 11.6 percent in 2000. That trend is “statistically significant and impressive,” said Samuel Preston, a demographer at the University of Pennsylvania who was not associated with the study. Overweight people and obese people had a 30 percent lower risk of dementia, the study found. Years of education were associated with decreased dementia risk in this study, as in many others.

From a friend traveling in India: "Our ongoing problem is the lack of local money, because Pakistan has been dumping large amounts of counterfeit money into India and the black economy is vast. The gov has changed the currency and the banks and ATM's are all blocked /non functional or have massive lines of locals trying to change to the new cash."

Remember the experts and "peak oil?" Remember the end of the West, freezing in the dark? Remember when alternative energy was not just a good idea, it was necessary for industry?

Geologists say a new survey shows an oilfield in west Texas dwarfs others found so far in the United States, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. (USGS)

The Midland Basin of the Wolfcamp Shale area in the Permian Basin is now estimated to have 20 billion barrels of oil and 1.6 billion barrels of natural gas, according to the USGS. 

That makes it three times larger than the assessment of the oil in the mammoth Bakken formation in North Dakota. Three times larger!

The estimate would make the oilfield, which encompasses the cities of Lubbock and Midland -- 118 miles apart -- the largest "continuous oil" discovery in the United States. I wonder if the locals are mobilizing against developing it.

 

AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd.......a graph:

The Market

One always wonders what to do in The Market. Especially now with so much confusion, so many factors. Buy? Sell? Stand aside? There are some statistical generalities.

 

The Dow Jones Industrial Average experiences a bull market correction on average roughly every 12 months, according to the WSJ . The Dow is now up approximately 59% from its last correction low on October 3, 2011 and is on its 32nd month without a 10% pullback.

Still a bull market can run for quite a long time without a pause. The longest period without at least a 10% pullback was during the 1990-1997 run, at 82 months, according to the WSJ’s data group. The usually decline of 10% or more has had an averages of 18 months since 1945.

Since the end of World War II (1945), there have been 27 corrections of 10% or more, versus only 12 full-blown bear markets (with losses of 20% +). This equates to one correction roughly every 20 months, according to John Prestbo. The average decline during these 27 episodes has been 13.3% and they’ve taken an average of 71 days to play out.

Since the stock market’s bottom in March of 2009, there have been only 3 corrections: In the spring of 2010 the S&P 500 began a 69-day drop of roughly 16%. The widely referenced summer correction of 2011 lasted for about 154 days and almost became a bear market. The correction during the spring of 2012 set up one of the greatest rallies of all time, although it was barely a real correction, sporting a peak-to-trough drop of just 9.9% in just under 60 days.

Bull market rallies in between corrections – and there have been 58 in the post-war period – tend to run for an average of 221 trading days before being interrupted and gaining an average of 32%.

But remember, most corrections do not become crashes, and every single one of them have turned out to have been great buying opportunities in the fullness of time.

Disinformation

I am shocked, shocked, that the Russians would try to influence our elections and opinions.


Somebody named Dov Levin wrote his thesis on the post war interventions by the major powers in foreign elections This is from his introduction:

Since World War II electoral interventions have become quite common: a dataset I constructed of U.S. and Soviet/Russian electoral interventions between 1946 and 2000 finds that there were such interventions in approximately one of every nine competitive national level executive elections during this period. In today’s world, in which competitive national level elections are a significant feature of domestic politics in more than half of the states in the international system, partisan electoral interventions will likely become an even more prominent tool in the great powers’ arsenal.  Nevertheless, there has been little scholarly research on this topic. In my dissertation I examined these two questions through a combination of statistical and qualitative methods. Among other things, I did a statistical analysis of the above noted  electoral intervention dataset  as well as of  election surveys done prior to particular cases of electoral  intervention (with relevant questions). I also did archival research on four cases in which electoral interventions were seriously considered by great power interveners. I find, for example, that electoral interventions are usually a quite effective tool for influencing elections, increasing the vote share of the preferred candidate/party by 3% on average- enough in many cases to determine the result. 

Some of his allegations:
Together Russia and the U.S. interfered in 117 elections in the second half the 20th century. Even worse is what happened when the CIA’s chosen candidates lost.


In Iran, when elected leader Mohammad Mossadegh tried to nationalize the country’s BP-held oil reserves, CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt led an operation to oust Mossadegh in favor of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. The shah’s secret police tortured dissidents by the thousands, leading directly to the Islamic Revolution in 1979.


In Guatemala, when the democratically elected Jacobo Arbez tried to loosen the U.S.-based United Fruit company’s grip on Guatemalan land, the CIA backed a coup against him. In the decades of civil war that followed, U.S.-backed security forces were accused of carrying out a genocide against indigenous Guatemalans.


In Chile, after voters elected the socialist Salvador Allende, the CIA spearheaded a bloody coup to install the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who went on to torture and murder tens of thousands of Chileans. "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people.," U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger said about the coup he helped orchestrate there. (Meeting of the "40 Committee" on covert action in Chile (27 June 1970) quoted in The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (1974); the quotation was censored prior to publication due to legal action by the government--Wiki)

Reverie

Science is built with facts as a house is with stones, but a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house. -Jules Henri Poincaré, mathematician, physicist, and philosopher

Bryan Caplan argues that Americans are not racist but they are xenophobic. In the United States in recent decades, race has minimal effect on earnings once you correct for obvious measures of worker productivity. But they are so protective of U.S. borders they will not even let Canadians in.

There is an article written by Peter Boettke that notes obviously the election was misjudged by experts.

What if experts are wrong in areas we think them experts in? What recent event should make us more suspicious of the judgment of these people? Every single expert in government, politics and media called this election for Clinton easily. The uniformity of their wrong opinion might have distorted how the Clinton campaign managed their resources, indirectly leading to failure.

Is there a metaphor here? And are we this hard to teach?

Although the United States maintains a relatively low average import tariff of around 3 percent, it also applies high tariffs on a wide array of “politically-sensitive” (read: highly lobbied) products: 131.8% on peanuts; 35% on tuna; 20% on various dairy products; 25% on light trucks; 16% on wool sweaters, just to name a few.  (Agriculture is particularly bad in this regard.)  We also maintain a long list of restrictive quotas on products like sugar, cheese, canned tuna, brooms, cotton, and baby formula.  And although the U.S. has 14 free trade agreements (FTAs) with 20 different countries and is a longstanding member of the World Trade Organization (WTO), many of these same “sensitive” products have been exempted from the agreements’ trade liberalization commitments.  Free trade for thee, but not for me.

While America’s tariffs and other “formal” trade barriers have indeed been declining for decades, they are only a small part of the overall story.  U.S. non-tariff barriers – export subsidies, discriminatory regulations, “buy local” rules, “fair trade” duties, etc. – have exploded in recent years.  In fact, according to a recent analysis by Credit Suisse, when you add up all forms of trade barriers imposed between 1990 and 2013, the biggest protectionist in the world isn’t China or Mexico but none other than… the United States. (from an article by Scott Lincicome)

Voltaire was a parent's nightmare. He was pulled out of French schools, sent to The Netherlands and his father eventually threatened to send him to the Caribbean--then threatened him with prison. Nothing, not even a short try at law school worked. Voltaire simply was a wonderful writer with an excoriating and challenging style that drove everyone nuts. At age twenty-one he was exiled from Paris for five months, having stepped on the wrong toes with some satiric verses about the decadent life at Versailles. Six months later he was arrested again for similar offenses, this time put in the Bastille.

In 542, the Plague of Justinian swept through Italy. This plague was caused by a now-extinct strain of Yersinia Pestis, more commonly known as the Black Death. The plague was the most severe outbreak of deadly disease the world had ever known and remained the worst such incident until the Black Death in the 14th century. About a third of the population in Italy was wiped out by the disease.

The choice a patient makes between therapies (with the help of his agent, the doctor) is based on many variables: efficacy, tolerability, side effects, riskiness, monetary cost, nonmonetary cost (e.g., hassle), speed of action. These drug costs and benefits must be judged within the context of many personal values and tradeoffs: the fear of death, the fear of surgery, the fear of the hospital, potential pain, and the individual's health profile, financial status, value of time, value of health, and risk tolerance. For the FDA to decide what compounds pass this complex tradeoff is preposterous, given that the FDA can never frame the problem from the individual patient's perspective. One individual's best alternative could be another's worst. We have seen this with AIDS patients: "I don't care if I develop cancer and this costs me $20,000 a year because without it I'm dead in 6 months." If, instead of medical therapies, they were telling us what kind of washing machines to buy or where to go on vacation, we would consider it laughable. This is what von Mises [Ludwig von Mises, the noted Austrian economist who showed that information problems would prevent socialism from working] said. Centralized bureaucrats cannot make the proper decisions for individuals because they lack the requisite information.--Hooper

But they are telling us which kinds of washing machines to buy.

Who is...Shikha Dalmia?

Two months ago, Charlotte police confirmed that 70% of those arrested during the riots were from out-of-state. Station HGW reported that more than half of the anti-Trump protesters arrested in Portland were from out of state. That takes some investment.  I wonder who could be funding this? And why?

Sen. Warren is complaining about lobbyists being on Trump's transition team. "For Sen. Warren to be upset that Trump’s transition team is filled with hordes of corporate lobbyists panting for political favors is akin to a Madam being upset that her bawdyhouse is filled with hordes of men panting for female favors."--letter to WSJ. The root of this silliness is that the politician somehow sees his action as pure and the courtier as corrupt when, in fact, it is a two way street and both are corrupt.


The three companies created by Musk, viewed as long-shot start-ups, have received more than $4.9 billion in federal subsidies combined, the Los Angeles Times reports, including about $2.5 billion for SolarCity alone. SolarCity is run by his cousins. BILLION! It better work.

Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/01/the-right-to-health-care.html

The Right to Health Care steeleydock.blogspot.com The country is beginning to descend into the morass known as the Affordable Care Act. This program insincerely purports to be a health care...

Personal affirmation has arisen through media outlets like Facebook. One can get approval on something--anything--with a click and a "like." Instant applause.


Societies can be malleable, maybe more than we think. Brigham Young revolutionized Mormon family structure for six decades; he personally married fifty-five women and fathered fifty-nine children. Polygamy was a radical break with 19th Century convention. How susceptible are we to change? One writer asks, "Can our commitment to college really be more rigid than 19th-century Americans' commitment to monogamy?" The fluidity of our current culture--look at the dramatic change in public attitude toward gay marriage over the last decade--makes you wonder how the modern communication structures destabilize tradition and custom. There will always be the battle between fluidity and shallowness, recalibration and stability but one wonders if communication has made these questions more frantic. And the new normal more vulnerable.

What tipped the election was about 100,000 votes spread across just three states: Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Trump won these states by 1, 0.3, and 1.2 points respectively.

Adm. Michael Rogers, head of the National Security Agency and the U.S. Cyber Command, spoke at a Wall Street Journal forum on Tuesday. He said, the number of hackers is "so large and diverse" that it's difficult to identify the perpetrators but roughly two-thirds of them are criminals looking to earn money from stealing personal information, and the remaining third are state-sponsored hackers. Regarding the Wikileaks e-mail revelations he said,  "This was a conscious effort by a nation state to attempt to achieve a specific effect." The "nation state" in question is almost certainly Russia, which the U.S. intelligence community blames for the political hacking and distribution of internal Democratic emails throughout the campaign, evidently aimed at harming Clinton and by extension helping Donald Trump. And Rogers is talking about his next boss.

Progressives are interesting in how they view the culture. If a vote goes against them, they immediately go to an alternative decision making process, the courts or changing the Electoral College. It is almost as if they want decisions separate from the decisions the culture reaches through law, history and deliberation. Maybe they just know better.

 .

According to a recent analysis by Credit Suisse, when you add up all forms of trade barriers imposed between 1990 and 2013, the biggest protectionist in the world isn’t China or Mexico but none other than… the United States.

Shikha Dalmia writes for "Reason" and is involved in off-and-on fights over conservatism. She has an interesting column arguing against the opinion that America depends upon western European tradition to protect liberty. Why, she asks, do the minorities who heavily voted against Trump state they did so because they fear for their liberties? She writes the American idea depends upon this very point and this very group. "The whole purpose of the constitution is to protect the most vulnerable groups from tyranny. The only foolishness is the right-wing fairytale that the abstract commitments of the white majority alone today could be a reliable custodian of America's freedoms."

President-elect Donald Trump has pledged a $1 trillion infrastructure spending program to help jump-start an economy that he said during the campaign was in terrible shape. Speaking on Capitol Hill Thursday, Federal Reserve Board Chair Janet Yellen warned lawmakers that as they consider such spending, they should keep an eye on the national debt. Yellen also said that while the economy needed a big boost with fiscal stimulus after the financial crisis, that's not the case now. Now, 20 trillion dollars later for some reason, they are interested in the national debt.

3-D printing has not yet reached the level of organic copying but it is likely a matter of time. Copying organs sound reasonable for purposes like transplantation. But what about academic copying? What about copying parts or segments or bodies themselves for scientific teaching purposes? And imagine a competitive market developing.

The HMS Exeter, a heavy cruiser in the Royal Navy, weighed nearly 10,000 imperial tons. The slightly smaller HMS Encounter and the destroyer HMS Electra flanked the great beast of a ship as the trio sailed near Indonesia. On Feb. 27, 1942, they entered the Java Sea, which slices through the Indonesian islands of Java and Kalimantan. Along with them were Dutch ships HNLMS De Ruyter, HNLMS Java and HNLMS Kortenaer and many, many others.

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inRead invented by Teads

These six ships - along with those of other Allied Forces, including Americans - engaged in a long and grueling battle with a Japanese fleet. According to the Guardian, it was one of the "costliest sea skirmishes for the allies" and was the catalyst for the Japanese gaining occupation of the Dutch East Indies.
Those six ships were sunk to the bottom of the sea. Dying along with their vessel were some 2,200 people, Dutch News reported.

The ships lay in their watery graves, about 230 feet deep, for many years before human eyes witnessed them again. In 2002, a group of amateur divers discovered the wreckage resting peacefully at the bottom of the sea.
The area was declared a sacred war grave, Time reported.
"The Battle for Java Sea is part of our collective memory," Dutch defense minister Jeanine Hennis said, according to the Dutch News. "The wrecks bear silent witness to the tragic events and form a backdrop to the many stories about the terrors of war and the comradeship between crew."
With the battle's 75th anniversary quickly approaching, a new expedition of divers set out to film the missing ships for a commemoration of the historic day.

When they reached the spot, though, researchers were shocked at what they found. Rather, they were shocked at what they didn't find.
The ships were almost entirely gone.
The assumption is that they were looted by scavengers but that water is terribly deep for that kind of work.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/world/article116115893.html#storylink=cpy

AAAAnnnnndddddd......a picture of candidates' pre-election vision:

Hacking

There is a lot about the Russian hacking into the Democrats that troubles me. I am surprised the Russians were so bold. Perhaps they are just so used to the U.S. ignoring their intrusions. I remember how they set up the "burning black churches" narrative through their U.S. church front during the Clinton administration and, while everyone knew it was untrue and it gave a black eye to the U.S. in the world, we ignored it. Clinton even joined in with the guilt and apologized for it. So maybe they have had such a charmed life with us it was too tempting. And, of course, the information they "leaked" was true; perhaps they thought it would be forgiven.

I am surprised about the press response as well. This is not news to them. Their approach--that this influenced the election--is predictable enough despite the report saying there was no evidence of it. (although I can not imagine how it did not. It did not influence my vote because I could not vote for either of them but the stuff in Podesta's notes was really offensive and I can not imagine it did not bother people. The problem is: It was true. So perhaps it should influence people. The popular notion seems to be that the intrusion was one -sided and somehow that disturbs our view of "fair play." Or maybe the Russians had a horse in the race. So the Rube-publicans are at fault because their security was better?) The main presentation --that the Russians actually interfered with the mechanics of the election through vote counting and preference--while untrue--continues through innuendo, at least, and, while it is a great disservice to the country, I do not think the powers that be will allow Trump to be a legitimate President.

This last point explains the Democrat's persistent complaints. They do not deny the truth of the info, only that we now know it. Somehow this helps in their diminishing Trump, who does not need any help in doing it himself, from all I can see.

I am astonished by Trump's response. If the Russians wanted to disrupt American intel, they could not do anything better than have the exec. and intel. at each other's throats. And for Trump to do it in public is even worse. I fear that he is un-teachable on this point and we may have to suffer though this reprehensible behavior for the length of his presidency.

It is curious that people have decided on Putin's motive here. There is no clear motive. From Forbes:

"An article in the Russian language publication, Regnum, entitled “Why Hillary Clinton may turn out to be better for Russia than Trump,” explains how the Kremlin planned to exploit a scandal-prone Clinton as President: First, Hillary as President would destroy the myth of the perfection of US democracy. Second, the wheelings and dealings of the Clinton Foundation would destroy the myth of transparency of the U.S. government. Third, the election of the 69-year-old Clinton would be a blow to the image of America as a youthful, vibrant nation. For Russians, it would bring to mind the era of decrepit Soviet party leaders like Leonid Brezhnev. Fourth, a Clinton presidency would be less likely to spark World War III than a Trump Presidency."
This theme, possibly false, that the Russians thought Clinton would win and their efforts were to delegitimize her administration is interesting, disturbing and largely ignored.

 

I think that ambition, the success they have had and their ability to get an even-handed hearing in the public space are the truly worrisome consequences of this event. We're easy. The argument that Podesta's notes are true and offensive also underestimates the potential here. What if the Russians chose to change something? Clearly they thought the info so damning they did not want to taint it with editing it--an amazing thing in itself-- but they have had a tremendous impact with the true info, one can only imagine what would happen with altered info.

I wish Obama were a stronger guy. I have always thought he excused inaction with abstraction. But this is a dangerous world and it is worse when you think everything can be managed reasonably and with negotiations. I think they were and are stunned that they could not broker a deal in Syria, even when Putin saw he could win. He's an attack dog; you can put antlers and bells on him and he still is an attack dog.

I hope we learn from this but, so far, I am not optimistic.

Fake News

A new term has arisen in our daily conversation: "Fake news."  Regrettably, the term itself is meant to deflect its true meaning; its true nature is "Lying." Lying has some shades like "disinformation," "white lies," and "propaganda" but that is what adjectives are for: state lying, political lying, commercial lying, social lying are perfectly acceptable refinements.

One problem is the political element; people are willing to accept a lie that is advantageous to their own political point of view. “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.” (Zito on Trump) Clinton's insincerity was laughable in its volume and almost never noted by her cheer-leading press. More, we are swamped by information of uncertain accuracy and that requires a certain amount of mental censorship.

And there is another element: The Sacred Narrative. Fiction is essentially a lie, but as a representation of life, it is, in essence, true. So in popular discourse, something untrue but representative of a larger, true theme is generally accepted by its proponents.

And the post modern world is nothing if not broadminded.

But we have seen some serious advances in the realm of lying; people are getting really good at it. Lying by states has become remarkably common and effective. (Googling Russia's disinformation programs over the last few decades reveals quite astonishing depth and breadth of planned lying.) But until we start taking such mendacity seriously--until we can actually call it by its real name--we are going to be stuck with it.

Sunday

In today's gospel, the Magi visit Christ. They are following prophesies and celestial innuendo and their appearance is another of the astonishing meaningful visions of the Bible. While seeming to fulfill the Old Testament, it shatters it.

The Greek word Epiphany means appearance or manifestation or showing forth. It is an older celebration than the feast of Christmas.
The Magi were not Kings, but a caste of Persian priests who served Kings using their skills in interpreting dreams and watching movements of stars. The sixth century Italian tradition that there were three Magi, Casper, Balthazar, and Melchior, is based on the fact that three gifts are mentioned in Matthew’s Gospel:  gold, frankincense and myrrh. The Magi may actually have been Persian priests or Babylonian astronomers or Nabataean spice-traders. Eventually, however, they were pictured as representatives of different peoples and races. The Orthodox Church holds that the Magi consisted of twelve Kings, corresponding in number to the twelve tribes of Israel. 

They are the second group of visitors behind the shepherds. This Epiphany, this manifestation, marks Christ's first appearance to the Gentiles. And, unlike the shepherds, these men are rich and educated. Several preconceptions are put to rest here. The Old Testaments exclusivity of God as a racial, political or geographic being is over; this Christ will be the savior of all men rich and poor, men outside the tribe of the Jews, the confines of Israel, the history of the Chosen People.

This Christ is transcendent, eclipsing the Old Testament, escaping history.