Obama 1

"What we need isn't a three-month plan, or even a three-year plan, but a long-term American strategy, based on steady, persistent effort, to reverse the forces that have conspired against the middle class for decades."

This is Obama in his recent speech offensive. One would like some specifics here. One would assume he is being rhetorical, that the "forces that have conspired against the middle class" are figurative and circumstance, not individuals or groups. That uncertainty should be clarified. We certainly would not the President to be accused of being divisive. Then the forces should be named. Do the "forces" include inflation? What about taxes? Would he repeal NAFTA? Are education costs reasonable? What about the family structure; is that a factor in middle class distress? Can the middle class afford energy costs that "would necessarily skyrocket?"

A leader is more than a facilitator, more than a moderator. Leadership implies more than just opening a topic for discussion.

Class

Recent conversation with some British about Kate Middleton revealed some interesting observations. She was universally admired as an able woman stepping in to a difficult role, especially with the backdrop of the Diana disaster, but she was also seen wryly as "not a royal." She was a commoner, her parents were merchants, her mother chewed gum and was simply not up to royal snuff. Someone said she spoke like a royal; the Brit answered "She was taught that." It was not her nature.

The "nature" of people is always under discussion. Are the Irish, by nature, drunks? Are Blacks lazy? Are Asian girls bad drivers? These are classic examples of small sample prejudice, that is, bad thinking. But the notion of a "royal" is larger; it implies some selective process over time that has created a different sort of person. Does injection of common genes into the family contaminate that specialness? Invalidate it, even? (The Chinese royals used to do that on purpose, to keep the line from getting "thin blood.") Or can that only be done with the guillotine? This is the basis of the royal family: they are seen as a different "class" of person.

This appears everywhere, sometimes with a vengeance. Middleton can cross that class barrier, a woman of the untouchable cast in India may not. Advance in the French bureaucracy is difficult if you are not from the correct educational institution.

The Americans have always prided themselves as being without class distinction. De Tocqueville marveled that this was a land where no man called another "master." But distinction--physical and educational--is making an appearance, politically at least. The racial prism is present in every encounter, every discussion. The "1%" tarring threatens an economic distinction. Politicians and entrepreneurs seem to be willing to drive this early wedge despite the eventual cost.

John Adams said in 1805: 'The rewards ... in this life are esteem and admiration of others -- the punishments are neglect and contempt. . . . The desire of the esteem of others is as real a want of nature as hunger -- and the neglect and contempt of the world as severe a pain as the gout or stone. ...'

Perhaps as Americans deny class they would admit to the hierarchy of materialism: Status.

Sunday Sermon 8/4/13

Today's gospel is a classic in tone and message. Christ is first asked to help adjudicate an inheritance and Christ asks, "Man, who has appointed me judge, or divider, over you?" This, of course, is exactly what Christ is; He is the eventual judge. But He is driving a gigantic wedge between the physical and the spiritual. Christ recognizes the importance of the physical to humans, He just does not judge on that basis.

Then He creates a parable about the man with a growing storehouse of "fruits." He builds a bigger barn and tells his soul, "Soul, though hast many goods laid up for many years, take thy rest; eat, drink and make good cheer." This is difficult because it is mixed, physical and spiritual, and is culturally mixed with reflections of the following:
"In the entertainments of the rich among them, when they have finished eating, a man bears round a wooden figure of a dead body in a coffin, made as like the reality as may be both by painting and carving, and measuring about a cubit or two cubits each way; and this he shows to each of those who are drinking together, saying: "When thou lookest upon this, drink and be merry, for thou shalt be such as this when thou art dead." Thus they do at their carousals."

This creepy passage is from Herodotus, in his description of Egyptian parties. (It is sometimes attributed to the physician and architect Imhotep who was worshiped as a god and healer from approximately 2850 B.C. to 525 B.C., and as a full deity from 525 B.C. to 550 A.D.. Imhotep was a known scribe, priest, architect and astronomer. It is Imhotep says Sir William Osler, who was the real Father of Medicine, not Hippocrates, who came 2000 years after him.)

The Egyptian take is straight materialism; the physical is all. But Christ takes the physical image--and the physical history amongst the Egyptians--and complicates it. In Christ's parable, it is the Soul that is indulging itself. But Christ is saying that there is no spiritual bank, no spiritual savings plan.

Virtue is is an element in us. It does not rest. It does not retire.

Cab Thoughts 8/3/13

Every debt is ultimately paid, if not by the debtor, then eventually by the creditor.

~Jim Grant

 

 

 

While the addition of iodine to salt originally was intended to eliminate goiters caused by iodine deficiencies, a new study suggests it had an unexpected consequence: Americans gained up to 15 IQ points after iodized salt became mandatory in 1924. (This was also the period of wide spread ownership of the Model T but the Model T was not mentioned in the IQ improvement.) This "study "appeared in The National Bureau of Economic Research, an American private nonprofit research organization and the largest economics research organization in the United States. I hope this study was federally funded.

 

Natural gas-fired generation is down 13.4% in the first 5 months of 2013, compared to the same period in 2012 and coal generation is up 11%. 

 

The manager of an Illinois restaurant, 26-year-old Alexander Pera, is accused of stealing the IDs of 50 employees and customers in order to finance 15 trips to Disney World and two Disney cruises, all within a five-month period.

 

Jonathan Tepper and John Mauldin have a paper coming out that includes a savaging of economist, their forecasts and their confidence. Here are three smidgens: 1. In November of 2008, as stock markets crashed around the world, the Queen of England visited the London School of Economics to open the New Academic Building. While she was there, she listened in on academic lectures. The Queen, who studiously avoids controversy and almost never lets people know what she's actually thinking, finally asked a simple question about the financial crisis: "How come nobody could foresee it?" No one could answer her. 2. The complete minutes of the Fed's October 2007 meeting were released. Keep in mind that the recession started two months later, in December. The word recession does not appear once in the entire transcript. 3. The month the recession started, Dr. David Stockton, the Federal Reserve chief economist, presented his views to Chairman Bernanke and the meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee on December 11, 2007. "Overall, our forecast could admittedly be read as still painting a pretty benign picture: Despite all the financial turmoil, the economy avoids recession and, even with steeply higher prices for food and energy and a lower exchange value of the dollar, we achieve some modest edging-off of inflation."

 

“The EPR (Enhanced Performance Round)replaces the lead slug with a copper slug,” said Lt. Col. Phil Clark, product manager for small caliber ammunition in the Program Executive Officer Ammunition. “This makes the projectile environmentally-friendly..." (from the Daily Caller, on the Army's effort to make a more "green" bullet. Could these people possibly be crazier.)

 

Who was....Dimitri Mendeleev?

Higher taxation today allocates pain to wage earners now. Borrowing is a tax on future wage earners. Increasing the money supply undermines the value of debt, essentially allowing the government to renegotiate its borrowing terms without legislation or supervision.

 

Virginia Johnson has died. In the 1970's she, with her collaborator and then husband, William Masters, did basic research into sexuality and became quite well known. There techniques of investigation were always suspect--they used patients with prostitutes and evaluated sex in a lab--but, in our functional world, they did learn some things.  Of course they also had their mistakes including views that homosexual conversion therapy had a high success rate and AIDS could be contracted from toilet seats. But their real significance was in breaking moral and ethical boundaries to generate data.

hagiarchy:
(HAG-ee-ar-kee, HAY-jee-) noun: A government by holy persons. Also a place thus governed.
From Greek hagi- (holy) + -archy (rule). Earliest documented use: 1826.


If the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) had not fallen from October 2009, when unemployment hit its Great Recession peak of 10 percent, unemployment would today still be around 10 percent. Moreover, if the LFPR were held constant from its highest pre-recession level of 66.40 percent in January 2007 (when unemployment was 4.6 percent), the unemployment rate would be nearly 12 percent today.

 

Louis Pasteur, the great French chemist and bacteriologist, became so preoccupied with microbes that he examined every dish placed before him with a magnifying glass.

For the first time since 1975, the number of white single-mother households who were living in poverty with children surpassed or equaled black ones in the past decade, spurred by job losses and faster rates of out-of-wedlock births among whites. (Number, not percent.)

 

Golden Oldies:
http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/12/unasked-question-from-iraq.html

 

 

While 88% of all humans are right handed, 65% of those with autism are left handed.

 

Amy Johnson was an English aviator (1903-1941). One of the first women to gain a pilot's licence, Johnson won fame when she flew solo from Britain to Australia in 1930. Her dangerous flight took 17 days. Later she flew solo to India and Japan and became the first woman to fly across the Atlantic East to West. She volunteered to fly for The Women's Auxiliary Air Force in WW2, but her plane was shot down over the River Thames and she was killed.

 

In the late 19^th century, the French mathematical economist Léon Walras aspired to invent a physics of social behaviour that would be comparable to Isaac Newton’s laws of motion, but aimed at an economic model with evolutionary qualities. The model was complicated, assumption-heavy and purported to reach a point of unregulated equilibrium in an economic system. The problem is, of course, that these theories include elements that have not yet been discovered. Many nations include in their economies financial investments in industries whose purpose is destroying their neighbors. How does that fit into the universal stable economic system? Significant problems exist when trying to adapt evolution to other disciplines including the fact that only results matter in evolution, the dreaded competition is involved and usually exploiting a niche is ruthless.

About half of the jobs created during the first half of 2013, and a large majority of the jobs created in Q2 2013, have been part-time jobs that offer employees as little as one hour of work per week, and up to 35 hours of work.

 

China gets just 5% of its total energy from natural gas. The USA is the world's number 1 gas producer and gets 26% of its total energy from gas. Yet, China already has 1.5 million vehicles operating on natural gas, while the US has only 250,000.

 

A 12-member team has discovered a bacterium that can use arsenic to live in place of phosphorus. There are six elements associated with life in addition to phosphorus,  carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen and sulfur.

 

AAAAAAaaaaaaannnnnnndddddd.......a graph:

Quick Reviews: Dr. Sleep, Camp of the Saints and Vengeance

"Dr. Sleep" by the well regarded Madison Smartt Bell  is a novel about a sleepless hypnotist. Strugglingwith the present and his past, freed yet burdened, the main character walks through London encountering and initiating conflicts that are personal and universal. It is a detective story where too many things are sought: a child killer, the author's self, the author's relationship with his lover, the conflict between mystery and reality, a resolution with true evil. But in the stew are some lovely isolated segments, thought provoking and well worth the read. An interest in Giordano Bruno and Frances Yates will help.

"Camp of the Saints" by Jean Raspail is a notorious book ostensibly about the West and its conflict with the undeveloped world. (It is usually dismissed as nothing more than a racist screed.) One day the undeveloped world wakes up and decides to participate in the developed one. The question the author asks is, "In a world of limited resources, what are the West's responsibilities to these people and does the West have the responsibility--and the will-- to protect itself?"
This is an ugly story. If you Google it you will get racist and skinhead sites and little else. That is a shame because the question is not a stupid one, it is asked and ignored by every thinking person every day. It is just more fit for an editorial than a novel. The preface makes the real point, though. "..[this book raises]..a problem absolutely insolvable by our present moral standards." "To let them in will destroy us, to reject them will destroy us." Not for the faint of heart. And should be read with a fake book jacket on it.

"Vengeance" is by John Banville, the Booker Prize winner who here is moonlighting as a detective writer, Benjamin Black. The major character is the recurring Pathologist Quirke, the scene is Ireland. This is simply a better written mystery than one usually sees, with good characters, a complex plot (that takes over 100 pages to start) and good setting. The story seems less important to the writer; the mystery is pretty transparent from early on. But there is a claustrophobic closeness of the writer's lens on the characters that somehow provides tension and unease. And in this postmodern world everyone brings their own false flag memories or perceptions. Very worthwhile.

Philosophers and their Discontents

The Philosophy Department at San Jose State University has written an angry open letter to Michael Sandel, a Harvard teacher of government and a well regarded lecturer. The philosophers' unhappiness stems from a massive open online course (MOOC) Sandel  teaches.

“The move to MOOCs comes at great peril to our university,” the letter said, “We regard such courses as a serious compromise of quality of education and, ironically for a social justice course, a case of social injustice.”
While expressing respect for Dr. Sandel’s scholarship and teaching, it also chided him, saying, “Professors who care about public education should not produce products that will replace professors, dismantle departments and provide a diminished education for student in public universities.” (NYT)

So, teaching Philosophy at San Jose State is a make-work program vulnerable to an Internet course?

Recipe for success: Take self interest. Boil with outrage. Add "social justice." Mix well

Cab Thoughts 7/31/13

I have naturally expressed my statements so that I am also right if the opposite thing happens.-- Marx

For every one yen the currency drops in value against the dollar, Toyota estimates that its profits will increase by $340 million. Those profits will come from sales. Other countries' sales.

A scene in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris used a variation on a passage from Requiem for a Nun. In the film, Owen Wilson's character says, "The past is not dead! Actually, it's not even past. You know who said that? Faulkner. And he was right. And I met him, too. I ran into him at a dinner party." The literal Faulkner quote is "The past is never dead. It's not even past." The Faulkner estate actually sued Allen over the use. They lost last week. The judge also added, "The court has viewed Woody Allen's movie, Midnight in Paris, read the book, Requiem for a Nun, and is thankful that the parties did not ask the court to compare The Sound and the Fury with Sharknado."

 

One wonders what circumstances would now disqualify Mr. Weiner from running for office. Is there some unknown, arcane meter of depravity that is tolerable up to some certain point when, suddenly, it tips to intolerable? Is this the downside of open mindedness?

 

30 to 50 percent of bladder cancer is caused by smoking. Development of the disease is related to length of exposure. But smoking cessation causes a 40% decline of the disease in 1 to 4 years and approaches baseline in 20 to 30 years.

There are fewer small businesses starting and more failing right now than at any time in the last 40 years.

This is from a good review of Machiavelli by John Gray in The New Statesman: "...modern law is an artefact of state power. Probably nothing is more important for the protection of freedom than the independence of the judiciary from the executive; but this independence (which can never be complete) is possible only when the state is strong and secure. Western governments blunder around the world gibbering about human rights; but there can be no rights without the rule of law and no rule of law in a fractured or failed state, which is the usual result of western sponsored regime change. In many cases geopolitical calculations may lie behind the decision to intervene; yet it is a fantasy about the nature of rights that is the public rationale, and there is every sign that our leaders take the fantasy for real. The grisly fiasco that has been staged in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya – a larger and more dangerous version of which seems to be unfolding in Syria – testifies to the hold on western leaders of the delusion that law can supplant politics." An artefact of state power!

Jane Austen will be the new face of the 10-pound banknote, replacing Charles Darwin, the Bank of England announced Wednesday. That follows an uproar after the bank said it would replace Elizabeth Fry — the only woman to appear on a banknote other than the queen — with Winston Churchill on the 5-pound note.

The other side of pseudonyms: James Lasdun, a writer and teacher, as a young man working at a publishing house turned down a manuscript written by "Jane Somers" — who was actually the Nobel laureate Doris Lessing writing under a pseudonym.

Recent ratings sweep show tremendous strength at the Spanish language Univision. The age breakdown showed Univision as the youngest with a median age of 37 years old, ABC's average viewer is 55, CBS 58, NBC 54, and FOX 47.

William Caxton was the first printer in England. In his early life, he was a very successful overseas merchant. In 1474, he published "History of Troy" and "The Game of Chess", both printed in Cologne and sold in England. In 1476, he moved his press to Westminster and began printing in England, starting with "The Canterbury Tales." Over 100 extant editions are attributed to him.

Evaluation of risk in gas drilling/fracking has moved from investigation to disinformation. In one particular circumstance, which was prominently featured in Gasland II, a court found activists, who were working with the EPA, had hooked up a garden hose to a gas vent and not a water line and lit it on fire in an effort to give the agency a reason to act.

Robert Morris, the Philadelphia merchant who financed major portions of the Revolutionary War, and Henry "Light-Horse" Lee, the Revolutionary War general and father of Robert E. Lee, were both in debtors prison in their lives.

The kinetic energy of an object is directly proportional to the square of its speed. KE=1/2M x V squared. M=mass, V=velocity. So a car hitting a wall at one speed will have a certain impact, at twice the speed it will have 4x the impact, at 3x the speed 9x the impact. Speed--and kinetic energy-- kills.

According to the highly regarded Hyman Minsky’s financial-instability hypothesis, stability breeds instability. The balance between stability and instability is delicate and instability occurs suddenly, like an avalanche or the proverbial back-breaking straw.

Median real household income is $2,718, or 5%, lower than the $54,218 median in June 2009 when the recession officially ended. Median incomes typically fall during recessions. But the striking fact of the Obama economy is that median real household income has fallen even during the recovery.

Golden Oldies:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2011/09/sunday-sermon-carpe-diem.html

France spends roughly 12.5 percent of its gross domestic product on pensions, more than most almost any other Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development member. (Germany spends about 11.4 percent of its GDP on pensions, and Japan spends roughly 8.7 percent.) Just 39.7% of those aged 55 to 64 are working, compared with 56.7% in the UK and 57.7% in Germany.

According to State Impact PA, the gas industry is currently repairing 400 miles of roads in three counties in Pennsylvania. So far the gas industry has spent $500 Million to repair roads in the state, for either damage or the prevention of damage related to their drilling.

Who are...the Lords Temporal and Spiritual? (Hint: the Lannisters are not involved.)

A recent book analyzes China's ability to innovate. It sounds much like the heuristic/algorithmic debate: China may accumulate the funding, build the laboratories and staff them, but it might not possess a 'non-hierarchical scientific culture, fertile institutional framework and critical thinking' -- the necessary soft skills... If critical thinking and social stability are seen as opposites in a zero-sum game, China will be the loser.

spoonerism: (SPOO-nuh-riz-em) noun: The transposition of (usually) the initial sounds of words producing a humorous result, after W. A. Spooner (1844–1930), English clergyman noted for such slips. For example: "It is now kisstomary to cuss the bride." (Spooner while officiating at a wedding); "Is the bean dizzy?" (Spooner questioning the secretary of his dean)

Anders Burius, a librarian at the National Library of Sweden, stole more than 50 rare and valuable books and sold them to collectors. Two of these books, worth a combined $255,000 according to the library's lawyers, were returned Wednesday at a ceremony in New York. After the thefts were discovered, Burius confessed to the crime in 2004 and committed suicide soon after. Baltimore bookstore owner Stephan Loewentheil had bought and then sold the two volumes, but he bought them back at his own expense after finding out that they were stolen.

Sunday, July 7, solar produced 20% of Germany's electricity consumption.

IPAs: When the British were colonizing India, the beers they sent down to their troops kept spoiling during the long sea voyage. With an extra healthy dose of hops and alcohol (40-65 IBU and 5% -7.5% ABV respectively), both having great preservative value, their problems were solved, and the world had another distinctive beer style.

A
AAaaaaannnnnnndddddddd......a picture of Earth (center and bright) and its moon (between 6 &7 o'clock near Earth) from Saturn