Drake Equation

Sometimes the probability of the existence of an alien society with which we might make contact is discussed in terms of something called "The Drake Equation."

 

In 1961, the National Academy of Sciences asked the astronomer Frank Drake to host a scientific meeting on the possibilities of “interstellar communication.” Since the odds of contact with alien life depended on how many advanced extraterrestrial civilizations existed in the galaxy, Drake identified seven factors on which that number would depend, and incorporated them into an equation.

The first factor was the number of stars born each year. The second was the fraction of stars that had planets. After that came the number of planets per star that traveled in orbits in the right locations for life to form (assuming life requires liquid water). The next factor was the fraction of such planets where life actually got started. Then came factors for the fraction of life-bearing planets on which intelligence and advanced civilizations (meaning radio signal-emitting) evolved. The final factor was the average lifetime of a technological civilization.

 

Sometimes this kind of wild speculation and guesswork is called "science."

Postrel

There is a subtle change that seems to be developing in political thinking. It is becoming more noticeable as the political positions begin to spread and harden. Showing nothing is new under the sun, one is a Rousseau-like anxiety in the face of development and the other is its optimistic determinist obverse that believes that development progresses--Marx-like or Nagel-like--to an inevitable positive.
There is a nice summary of this conflict on Virginia Postrel's website that I have taken from a review of her book, The Future and Its Enemies: The Growing Conflict Over Creativity, Enterprise, and Progress. I have not read the book but the thesis is interesting as it puts political thinking in a very different light from the usual.

Today we have greater wealth, health, opportunity, and choice than at any time in history - the fruits of human ingenuity, curiosity, and perseverance. Yet a chorus of intellectuals and politicians loudly laments our condition. Technology, they say, enslaves us. Economic change makes us insecure. Popular culture coarsens and brutalizes us. Consumerism despoils the environment. The future, they say, is dangerously out of control, and unless we rein in these forces of change and guide them closely, we risk disaster.

Virginia Postrel explodes this myth, embarking on a bold exploration of how progress really occurs. In areas of endeavor ranging from fashion to fisheries, from movies to medicine, from contact lenses to computers, she shows how and why unplanned, open-ended trial and error - not conformity to one central vision - is the key to human betterment. Thus, the true enemies of humanity's future are those who insist on prescribing outcomes in advance, circumventing the process of competition and experiment in favor of their own preconceptions and prejudices.

Postrel argues that these conflicting views of progress, rather than the traditional left and right, increasingly define our political and cultural debate. On one side, she identifies a collection of strange bedfellows: Pat Buchanan and Ralph Nader standing shoulder to shoulder against international trade; "right-wing" nativists and "left-wing" environmentalists opposing immigration; traditionalists and technocrats denouncing Wal-Mart, biotechnology, the Internet, and suburban "sprawl." Some prefer a pre-industrial past, while others envision a bureaucratically engineered future, but all share a devotion to what she calls "stasis," a controlled, uniform society that changes only with permission from some central authority.

On the other side is an emerging coalition in support of what Postrel calls "dynamism": an open-ended society where creativity and enterprise, operating under predictable rules, generate progress in unpredictable ways. Dynamists are united not by a single political agenda but by an appreciation for such complex evolutionary processes as scientific inquiry, market competition, artistic development, and technological invention. Entrepreneurs and artists, scientists and legal theorists, cultural analysts and computer programmers, dynamists are, says Postrel, "the party of life."

The Future and Its Enemies is a vigorous manifesto for the dynamist world view, as well as a penetrating analysis of how our beliefs about personal knowledge, nature, virtue, and even the relation between work and play shape the way we run our businesses, make public policy, and search for truth and beauty. Controversial and provocative, Virginia Postrel's thesis heralds a fundamental shift in the way we view politics, culture, and society as we face an unknown—and thus invigorating—future.
 

Sunday

Tennyson wrote a poem called "The Brook" about a small stream in his village Somersby, the village in Lincolnshire where Tennyson grew up. The brook is the little river Lymn. The recurring line is its theme:

"For men may come and men may go,
But I go on for ever."

 

This poem by R. S. Thomas is something of a comment on Tennyson's poem, starting out unimpressed with the stream but progressing to an appreciation of the breadth of natural wonders and, more importantly, the creative power of the imagination.

Somersby Brook

This brook was the pulse of his being;I know;
I have seen it,
An insignificant affair, stroking the grasses
In the drab fields.
But when the land is flat and there is nowhere to go,
No hill steep enough to sharpen the mind,
No wood darkening to an old legend,
One ignores the whole and prizes the parts,
Making a forest of the green cress,
A town of the trees’ roots.

So it was then in his young life
Beginning at Somersby;
His thoughts were attuned to the brook’s rhythm;
Its lithe movements, scaly with sunlight,
Startled his mind with a new joy.
And in the dark, if he leaned from his window,
It was as if the night spokeIn shrewd whispers –
And all because of this mean runnel,
Toying idly with a few stones,
Stones that became words in his verse,
Poised and polished in the mind’s stream.
R. S. THOMAS (1954)

Reverie

Stricken while journeying
my dreams still wander about
but on withered fields. ---Basho

President Trump??!!
 

Sowell on disparities vs. discrimination: It was fourth down in a National Football League game, and the punting team came onto the field. The other team went into their formation to defend against the punt. Then somebody noticed that the man set to kick the punt was black. "Fake!" one of the defenders cried out. That cry was immediately echoed by others, and the defending team changed their formation, to guard against the kicker either running with the ball or throwing it. But in fact he punted. Sowell notes that there are remarkable racial disparities in professional football punters but asks, is it discrimination? 

The custom of using oak to ferment and age Chardonnay-based wines was developed in Burgundy, home of this grape variety. It is difficult to know precisely when barrels came into use in this region, but it certainly has been common practice for centuries. At first, a watertight wood barrel, in a size one person could manage to roll and tilt, was simply a practical choice. Gradually, techniques were developed, most likely by trial and error, to magnify the contribution of barrel fermentation and maturation. For Chardonnay in Burgundy, this included stirring the lees (bâtonnage in French) to enrich the wine. For most of history, wood vats and barrels were reused for many years; now, it is the norm to have a proportion of new wood for every vintage of a premium Chardonnay. Modern winemakers agree as a rule that Chardonnay, which is comparatively neutral in flavor, benefits from contact with wood. At the same time, some producers - by personal choice or to reduce cost - prefer to limit the percentage of new oak, or, in some cases, to avoid it altogether. Fermentation in inert tank is a widespread technique, although a wood imprint may still be obtained with chips or staves. Limiting the added flavors of oak also mimics a particular style of Burgundy Chardonnay, the one associated with Chablis (even there, however, a degree of new oak is now in favor for premier and grand cru wines). The barrel production regime which evolved in Burgundy for Chardonnay is the one normally favored all around the world for this variety, complemented by a handful of "no-oak" styles. -- Bohmrich

Who is....Yoenis Cespedes?

There is a strong argument--in opposition to the Trump declaration--that imports are good for employment, not bad. The increased economic activity associated with every stage of the import process helps support millions of jobs in the U.S.. A Heritage Foundation analysis shows that over half a million American jobs are supported by imports of clothes and toys from China alone.

I recently spoke with an articulate and thoughtful representative of what I see as the Young Left in an effort to assess our divergent views. I was concerned about the increasingly complex society and the government's increasingly obvious difficulty in managing it, the risks to the citizenry engendered by the government's errors, and the value of institutions in sheltering individuals from those errors. She was concerned with the individuals who were vulnerable in society--immigrants, prisoners, gays, the poor--with little voice, great individual risk and few champions. She was willing to trade the theoretical risk for whatever advantage those groups could obtain.

That may just sum it all up.

Good news: Castro is getting a closer, kinder look.

The authoritative Black Book of Communism blames him for 15-17,000 executions. ("Blames" might be a bit too harsh and judgmental.) More speculative estimates put the blood of another 80,000 Cubans on his hands. But these numbers are being prefaced now by "only." Compared to Stalin or Pol Pot, Castro did not kill so many. Now that we have crossed that contextual hurdle, Ted Bundy was a piker.
Remember, we will have no generalities here. Generalities are the root of bigotry. Not all mass murderers are alike; each must be seen and understood as an individual. Each has his very own story.

The “horizon problem”  states that the universe reached a uniform temperature long before energy-carrying photons traveling at constant speed could have had the time to reach all corners of the expanding universe. One solution is that light at the beginning of the universe traveled faster than gravity to distribute the temperature. So light speed would not be a constant.
So...that should give you a headache.


From the LT:

The world has been a disappointment to Mr Obama. When Vladimir Putin’s Russia annexed Crimea in 2014, John Kerry, the outgoing secretary of state, said: “You just don’t in the 21st century behave in a 19th-century fashion by invading another country on [a] completely trumped up pretext.”

But that is how the world often operates. The U.S. had done just that to Iraq in the 21st century.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/04/natural-gas-leadership-test.html

Natural Gas Leadership Test steeleydock.blogspot.com Natural gas is plentiful and cheap. We are now able to recover gas from areas previously unapproachable. The availability has suppressed pri...

In 1947, after Britain, unable to find a solution in the combat between Jewish and Arab forces in Palestine, referred the problem to the United Nations, the U.N. voted to partition Palestine. These world powers thought they were solving the problem. And certainly the British thought they were ducking it.

The Brewers have decided to non-tender power-hitting first baseman Chris Carter rather than take him through his third year of arbitration eligibility. Carter is now a free agent. His is a story of the rising statistical evaluation of players in the Major Leagues. Carter, 29, hit an NL-best 41 home runs this past season while knocking in 94 runs and hitting .222/.321/.499 in 644 plate appearances. However, he was only worth 0.9 Wins Above Replacement according to Baseball Reference because he provided little offensive value outside of his ability to hit home runs and he was not a great defender at first base. Carter also led the league with 206 strikeouts.
Carter earned $2.5 million in 2016. It is said that Carter was looking at $9-10 million if he went through the arbitration process with the Brewers.

There is a simple solution for anybody upset over Trump's election: Vote to decrease the size and impact of government. The less power in the office, the less a bad guy can hurt us.


McCloskey on Marx: For example, his foundational labor theory of value was wrong, as every serious student of the matter has agreed for the past century and a half. The Blessed Smith himself had introduced the notion, and it was still believed by such splendid figures as David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, Mill being a contemporary of Marx. But neither Mill nor Marx had the benefit of the Neoclassical Revolution in the history of economic thought during the 1870s. It developed in the works of Walras, Jevons, and Menger the correct view, confirmed thereafter in a thousand scientific studies, that value is determined by how much people want things, considering the income available, not by how much effort the seller put into the things, and that the wage is determined not by bargaining strength but by the market value of what the last worker produces, considering that free labor is a little mobile.


Speaking on the Portuguese TV network RTP on November 22, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi affirmed his support for the forces of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Come, let us reason together.


On infrastructure projects, Economist Robert Krol writes:  “Research shows that transportation project costs are significantly underestimated and traffic flows tend to be overestimated.  These errors are large and are not random, suggesting they are deliberate in order to get projects started."


Stanley Druckenmiller spoke at the Robin Hood Investors Conference where he repeated he is bullish on the American economy following Trump's victory, anticipates a much stronger dollar and higher bond yields. Notably, he joined Gundlach in predicting 10 Year yields would rise to 6% over the next year or two, a process which would lead to an equity market selloff.

 

For anyone wondering how small market baseball teams are pressured:  The Mets have re-signed Yoenis Cespedes. The deal is reported to be worth four years and $110 million. It is the largest free agent deal ever handed out by the Mets. Cespedes’ $27.5 million annual average salary is the highest ever for an outfielder on a multi-year deal. Only Miguel Caberea, who averages $31 million a year, has a higher average annual salary than Cespedes will.

Bordeaux commenting on the Left's fondly remembering the legacy of Castro: "It is a perverted code of ethics that causes those who fondly remember the “accomplishments” of blood-thirsty brutes such as Fidel Castro to burst into paroxysms of anger over the alleged evil of off-shoring the production of automobile tires or of accumulating unusually large sums of financial wealth by making entrepreneurial advances in retailing."

“It is with deep sorrow that I learned today of the death of Cuba’s longest serving President.  Fidel Castro was a larger than life leader who served his people for almost half a century ... While a controversial figure, both Mr. Castro’s supporters and detractors recognized his tremendous dedication and love for the Cuban people who had a deep and lasting affection for ‘el Comandante.’ ” This was released by Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. Is it possible he believes this or is this simply the idiotic, routine public mendacity? And are public lies like this good for popular thinking?

The Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) is concerned over a missing radioactive device from Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactor, a Saudi paper reported.

In  almost a parody of what is wrong with the culture and the intrusion of unasked opinions of pompous amateurs into our lives, Rosie O'Donnell has diagnosed Barron Trump with autism. In a similar vein, NYU Professor Greg Grandin, in an article in "The Nation," suggests that Fidel Castro was a better man than Donald Trump and "was a full man of the Enlightenment." Now, I'm no fan of Trump but doesn't this mean that the horrors we know Castro created were not as serious as what Trump might do? Isn't that sort of stupid--even for a professor?

Reflecting on the recount demands, I cannot assess it, aside from the innate drive of these people to continue animosity and division. Even Nixon.....


California State – Northridge economist Robert Krol: “Research shows that transportation project costs are significantly underestimated and traffic flows tend to be overestimated.  These errors are large and are not random, suggesting they are deliberate in order to get projects started. Furthermore, federal highway funding is excessive and misallocated across states.  Project benefits are concentrated in a state or district whereas tax costs are spread out nationwide.  As a result, legislators embrace inefficient transportation projects because district or state voters do not pay the full project cost.  Projects move forward even when the total cost of the project exceeds total benefits.  Also, funding committee membership and vote trading distorts decisions.  Finally, government barriers slow the adoption of new technologies.”
Probably should read that again.

AAAAaaaaannnnnnddddddd........a graph:

Poe

From Michael Dirda's review of The Annotated Poe, in the Weekly Standard:


France's three greatest poets of the 19th and early-20th centuries revered him: Baudelaire translated his stories; Mallarmé composed one of his best poems, "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe," for the dedication of the writer's memorial in Baltimore; and Valéry insisted that the American was "the only impeccable writer." Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—a combination of nautical adventure story, racial allegory, and fictionalized speculations about the Antarctic, as well as his only novel—so impressed Jules Verne that he produced a sequel to it: The Sphinx of the Ice Fields.

In fact, Poe's admirers were legion. Many scholars speculate that Pym influenced Moby-Dick. Abraham Lincoln, it was once reported, "suffers no year to pass without a perusal of this author." Dostoyevsky himself introduced Russian translations of "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," and "The Devil in the Belfry"—and surely, his Underground Man is a cousin to Poe's soul-baring monomaniacs. To the creator of Sherlock Holmes, Poe was nothing less than "the supreme original short story writer of all time." The usually prickly Bernard Shaw agreed with Conan Doyle, adding, "The story of the Lady Ligeia is not merely one of the wonders of literature; it is unparalleled and unapproached. There is really nothing to be said about it: we others simply take off our hats and let Mr. Poe go first." Tennyson, Hardy, and Yeats regarded that same Mr. Poe as the finest of American poets.

By the same token, H. P. Lovecraft deemed Poe the premier exponent of the modern weird tale, the first writer to understand perfectly "the very mechanics and physiology of fear and strangeness." Reconfiguring the trappings of the Gothic romance—the crumbling Bavarian castle, the insidious villain, the frightened heroine—Poe asserted that "terror is not of Germany but of the soul." In their turn, his five "tales of ratiocination"—the three investigations featuring Dupin but also, to some extent, the cryptographic treasure story "The Gold Bug" and the ballistics-oriented "Thou Art the Man"—established virtually all the elements of the classic detective story.

As Howard Haycraft observed in Murder for Pleasure, Poe more or less invented "the transcendent and eccentric detective; the admiring and slightly stupid foil; the well-intentioned blundering and unimaginativeness of the official guardians of the law; the locked-room convention; the pointing finger of unjust suspicion; the solution by surprise"—and much else. In effect, he turned reasoning into a source of narrative excitement.

If, in the weird tale and the detective story, Poe is both pioneering and exemplary, he is only slightly less so in science fiction. His sense of wonder led him to extrapolate (some would say fool the public) with "The Balloon-Hoax," a proto-Verne voyage extraordinaire about the supposed crossing of the Atlantic, and "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall," a significant contribution to the long literature of journeys to the moon. In "The Man That Was Used Up," Poe describes a steampunk version of a cyborg, half-human, half-machine, while "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar" focuses on a corpse preserved and kept sentient through the power of mesmerism. Even the innocuous-sounding "Conversation of Eiros and Charmion" relates Earth's collision with a comet, leading to fiery global apocalypse: "For a moment there was a wild lurid light alone, visiting and penetrating all things. Then . . . the whole incumbent mass of ether in which we existed, burst at once into a species of intense flame. .  .  . Thus ended all."

Though "The Raven" did make him famous—the poem was quickly reprinted in 11 different periodicals—Poe was best known in his lifetime as a literary journalist. He began his career by submitting "Metzengerstein"—a gothicky revenge tale, featuring a spectral horse—for a prize awarded by the Saturday Courier of Philadelphia.

Edmund Wilson contended that Poe's was "the most remarkable body of criticism ever produced in the United States." Wilson added that, with his knowledge of Latin, Greek, Spanish, Italian, French, and German, and possibly a smattering of Hebrew, Poe stood intellectually "on higher ground than any other American writer of his time."

Extinctions

This living world has had its times of stress. It is interesting that one of the significant events in Greek philosophy was the recognition that the world was not static, but constantly was changing. There have been several times in history where major changes occurred with loss of life, species and the creation of new directions in life.
Here is a timeline with markings where major extinction events occurred:

• the end of the Tertiary Period, 1.6 million years (m.y.) ago.
• the end of the Cretaceous Period, marking the boundary between the Cretaceous and Tertiary periods 65 m.y. ago. (Geologists use the letter K to stand for Cretaceous Period and the letter T for the Tertiary Period. Thus this boundary is commonly called the K-T boundary): Dinosaurs. Believed from a drop in seas and a massive asteroid that hit the Yucatan Peninsula.
• the end of the Triassic, 208 m.y. ago. No explanation but countless theories.
• the end of the Permian, 245 m.y. ago (estimated that over 96% of the species alive at the time became extinct). All of current species descended from that 4%. Cause unknown.
• the end of the Devonian, 360 m.y. ago
• the end of Ordovician, 438 m.y.: ago 85% of sea life
• the end of the Cambrian period, 505 m.y. ago

Reverie

"'Objectivity' is teaching without regard for the truth."--Wendell Berry

In 1975, the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities found that the CIA submitted stories to the American press, and that as part of the CIA's playbook was the usage of disinformation tactics against America's own population: (  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ED63A_hcd0 )

CIA Admits Using News To Manipulate the USA (1975) www.youtube.com This is an old clip showing admittance of the CIA that they use the mainstream media to manipulate the thoughts and ideas of American citizens in the USA. This has ...

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Question: "Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to a major circulation — American journal?"
Answer: "We do have people who submit pieces to American journals."
Question: "Do you have any people paid by the CIA who are working for television networks?"
Answer: "This I think gets into the kind of uh, getting into the details Mr. Chairman that I'd like to get into in executive session."

(later)

Question: "Do you have any people being paid by the CIA who are contributing to the national news services — AP and UPI?"
Answer: "Well again, I think we're getting into the kind of detail Mr. Chairman that I'd prefer to handle at executive session."

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ETFs are beginning to dominate investing. Part is cynicism; people do not believe in experts much any more. And this looks to be true if one follows the performance of individuals who pick individual investments.
ETFs hold baskets of underlying securities and trade throughout the day like a stock. Most track an index and stray little from their net-asset value, or NAV. But heavy trading and market volatility can compromise that consistency.
Recently, as trading in the three biggest credit ETFs approached record levels amid the market’s biggest losses since 2008, the ETFs’ shares dropped as much as 1.1 percentage point more than the net value of the securities they hold. During that period the two largest high-yield bond ETFs lost about 6 percent—2 percentage points more than the loss for the Bank of America Merrill Lynch U.S. High Yield Index that they’re supposed to track.

In fast-moving markets, the price of your ETF may disconnect from the price of the assets it holds.

I still am confused about the election. Does the success of the Rube-publicans mean anything? Have the Dems turned into an inner city party with extensions in California and up and down the Northeast coast. Or is this a simple reaction that will normalize after a while?


Who is...Wendell Berry?


A creepy story. An American satellite abandoned in 1967 suddenly came back online and began transmitting again for the first time in 50 years.

The satellite, dubbed LES1, was built by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and launched into space in 1965. A mistake in the satellite’s circuitry caused it to never leave its circular orbit, and it eventually stop transmitting in 1967.
Sounds like the opening of a sci-fi story.

In 2016, 3.5 billion adults, or 73% of total, had wealth under $10,000 accounting for 2.4% of global wealth. In contrast, the 33 million millionaires comprise 0.7% of the adult population, but own 46% of household wealth. And the, at the very top, 50,800 are worth at least $100 million, and 5,200 have assets above $500 million.
Which is to say, someone has mine.

Kaepernick has become a national symbol of newspaper focus. Every story has some outlier that become the center of attention, as if it is somehow representative. Some group called "alt-right" is getting a lot of attention and they are so small a group even they don't know who they are.


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Golden oldie:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/01/arresting-culture.html
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Arresting a Culture steeleydock.blogspot.com The recent effort to Bowdlerize Huck Finn should be a warning to all that nothing is safe from overprotective sanitation. However, the recen...

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Thinking of awards and popular music as the new, modern art: If Bob Dylan is given the Nobel Prize, how can you not give it to The Beatles?

Technology’s heightening of society’s complexity outstrips its heightening of the social planner’s informational capabilities.  Hayek, like [Adam] Smith, drew a lesson for policy: Except in the most clear-cut cases of systemic harm, like air pollution, the supposition that government officials can figure out how to improve the results of decentralized (i.e., voluntary) decision making becomes more and more outlandish.  In his Nobel lecture, Hayek called that supposition the pretense of knowledge. As intellectuals who ponder the complex workings of the social world, we really know little aside from one hardy fact: If those who participate in an activity do so voluntarily, each is probably bettering his or her own condition.  The more complex the system is, the more skeptical we ought to be about claims to knowledge that go beyond and against that hardy fact.--Klein

 

Recently, fashion designer Sophie Theallet announced she would refuse to sell or donate clothes to the next first lady, Melania Trump. So....is that discriminatory? And what did Melania do to deserve her criticism?

In a letter written on March 19, 1944, Ayn Rand wrote: “Fascism, Nazism, Communism and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme—collectivism.” Her point was that there is no traditional left-right dichotomy between socialism (or communism) and fascism, according to which socialism is the extreme version of left-ideology and fascism is the extreme version of right-ideology (i.e., capitalism). Both are variants of statism.  She wrote,  "both “socialism” and “fascism” involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories: socialism negates private property rights altogether, and advocates “the vesting of ownership and control” in the community as a whole, i.e., in the state; fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals, but transfers control of the property to the government."  Fascism, she said, was “socialism for big business.”

I wonder if her single-minded passion is a good fit for the modern young voter.

 

Vanguard’s assets under management have swollen to $3.5 trillion, mostly in index funds.

Astronomers have spotted one of the largest known structures in the universe. Called the Vela supercluster, the newly discovered object is a massive group of several galaxy clusters, each one containing hundreds or thousands of galaxies.

A summary of current politics from Krauthammer:

"This doctrine of global consciousness found its photographic expression just two weeks ago. There was parka-bundled John Kerry on a visit to the Antarctic, to which he had dropped in to make a point about global warming. Three days later, Vladimir Putin, thinking tribally, renewed the savage bombing of Aleppo and then moved nuclear-capable missiles into Kaliningrad to remind Europeans of the perils of defying the regional strongman.

Putin is quite prepared to leave the Antarctic ice sheets to Kerry while he sets his sights on Eastern Europe and the Levant. Our allies, meanwhile, remain amazed that Obama still believes the kinds of things he said in his maiden U.N. address about the obsolescence of power politics and national domination — and acts accordingly as if his brave new world of shared universal values had already arrived."

Ross Pearson is a MMA fighter who, when asked to comment on the rash of injuries the AKA guys were getting in training, said, of the American Kickboxing Academy, said, “They’re a gym full of killers.”

With Castro's death, another mysteriously magnetic mass murderer, like his henchman Guevara, has shuffled off his mortal coil and ascended to a higher plane of immortal damnation. They have t-shirts with their images on them. Imagine t-shirts with Richard Speck or Ted Bundy. Of course, it is not the same; their twisted sadistic homicidal rage was noble, fueled by class anger, the holy Dialectic and ambition; Ted Bundy had no such higher motives. World leaders including Russian president Putin, South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and several Latin American politicians issued statements and tweets highlighting Castro’s achievements and extolling his virtues.

After the European Parliament called for a pause in Turkey’s EU accession talks in protest at Ankara’s “repressive” and “disproportionate” response to a violent coup attempt earlier this year an angry Erdogan said, "We are the ones who feed 3m-3.5m refugees in this country. You have betrayed your promises. If you go any further those border gates will be opened."
Poor people have become weapons.

A lot of power in what seems small. Border checks. Drug approval. In India the government has changed the money and caused all sorts of disruption. Governments can weaponize anything. Here the Indian Government has attacked it own people.

After contributing $88mm to the Clinton Foundation over the past 10 years, making them one of the Foundation's largest contributors, Australia has decided to pull all future donations. One can only wonder why the Australians would not want to contribute to the noble work any more.

AAAAAAaaannnnnnndddddd......a graph:

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