Principles in the Middle East

The 700-year-old tomb of Suleyman Shah, grandfather of the founder of the Ottoman Empire, is in a Turkish enclave in northern Syria  guarded by several dozen Turkish soldiers and perched on a manicured lawn under a Turkish flag on the banks of the Euphrates. The tomb was made Turkish territory under a treaty signed with France in 1921, when France ruled Syria. Islamic State and other Islamist groups, whose strict Salafi interpretation of Islam deems the veneration of tombs to be idolatrous, have destroyed several tombs and mosques in Syria. Ankara regards the tomb as sovereign territory and has repeatedly made clear that it will defend the mausoleum if it is attacked. So Turkey's position with the homicidal maniacs might hinge on their ancient tomb, the maniacs' disregard for the dead apparently being more important than their disregard for the living.

Cab Thoughts 10/2/14

The contest for ages has been to rescue liberty from the grasp of executive power--Daniel Webster

 

 

From the "I've read it but I'm not sure" files: Saul Alinsky is said to have been a criminology student who admired the gangster Frank Nitti and how he was able to bully money from his victims. 

Another, from the same file: China will never let Bashar al-Assad lose the civil war because China's economy depends on Syria's oil production. If that is true, will they support us in our anti-lunatic military action?

 

An estimated 3,000 European citizens — about 930 from France — have left to join the ranks of jihadist groups in Syria, often using Turkey as a transit point. That would be our NATO ally, Turkey.

 

Report: Many U.S. Schools Can’t Afford Mannequins, Human Urine For Art Classes---The Onion

 

The new poll shows that six in 10 respondents disapprove of Obama's handling of the immigration issue, a nearly 20-point drop from early 2013, when a comprehensive overhaul was widely seen as a political imperative for both parties. Now, the poll indicates that the centerpiece of that effort — a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants — is a losing campaign proposition, with 39 percent saying they would be less likely to vote for a candidate who supported such an approach, compared with 30 percent who called it a positive factor.

 

In 1913, 300 of every 1,000 coal miners died on the job each year.

 

One-fifth of Russian oil production is at risk due to sanctions, according to a report. Global investors are fleeing Russia. However, an Israeli minister said exports to Russia will continue regardless of sanctions.

 

A new vision in the minds of anti-fracking crowd: There is not any oil and gas there. This despite the fact that oil production per rig in the Bakken oil field of North Dakota has increased fivefold since the shale revolution started there in 2007, and oil output per rig in the prolific Eagle Ford region of south-central Texas has doubled in just the last two years.

 

What is....Quinto Real?

 

Here is another result from some unexplained model: The number of Ebola cases in Liberia and Sierra Leone could rise to between 550,000 and 1.4 million by January if there are no "additional interventions or changes in community behavior," the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said in a report Tuesday. The estimate was derived from a new forecasting tool developed by the CDC. Interestingly, Obama's "plan" for Ebola is to give a lot of money to Liberia for housing the sick rather than simple preventative methods like gloves and clean needles.



A big wind project in California uses batteries from LG Chem based in Korea, one of the world’s largest producers of lithium-ion batteries. ABB is making the inverters. The $50 million project was paid for by SCE and federal stimulus funding. Fed stimulus money for Korea.

 

The Liberian Daily Observer, the largest newspaper in Liberia, just published an article on their front page with the headline, “Ebola, AIDS Manufactured By Western Pharmaceuticals, US DoD?” The article accuses the US of manufacturing the Ebola outbreak in a scheme to use Africa as a testing ground for bioweapons.

 

Holy smokes! William H. Gross appears to have jumped before he could be pushed out at Pimco, the big money management firm he helped build from scratch.

The decision on Friday by Mr. Gross, who has been called the Bond King, to quit the firm he founded and join Janus Capital comes after weeks of behind-the-scenes discussions to replace him.

 

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-academic-political-dmz.html

 

Almost 8,000 cases of whooping cough have been reported to California's Public Health Department so far this year. More than 250 patients have been hospitalized, nearly all of them infants and young children, and 58 have required intensive care. In the first half of 2012, Washington suffered 2,520 cases of whooping cough, a 1,300% increase from the previous year and the largest outbreak in the state since 1942. A 2006 study in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that between 1991 and 2004, the percentage of children whose parents had chosen to opt out of vaccines increased by 6% a year.

A woman, Major Mariam al-Mansouri, 35, "led the squadron" of UAE fighter jets that participated in raids against the lunatic extremists, an Emirati source familiar with the matter said. This inclusion of a Barr Body positive individual in the killing and maiming is seen by many as an advance.



Supperannuate: v: (1) To make or become antiquated or obsolete. (2) To retire because of incapacity. From Medieval Latin superannuatus, past participle of superannuari "to be too old", in turn from super "over, above" and annus "year", from which we also get "annual" and "anniversary".


Boys Latin School is a private inner-city charter school set up in Philadelphia by a guy named David Hardy. They are in their third year of graduates. They did poorly on the state Keystone Exams and Hardy is furious, saying the exam was sprung on them at the last minute. National clearinghouse data show that more than 80 percent of the young men in Boys' Latin first two graduating classes enrolled in college and 61 percent returned.



The despair over growth and people getting rich continues outside the Marcellus Shale fields. This weird sentiment was reflected in New York where Obama rang the alarm bells at a U.N. climate change conference (not attended by the world's most important national leaders). But there was only one conference on Middle East homicidal maniacs and there were no conferences on the dangerous world economic climate, the failure of the economy last decade, the Russian hostility, nuclear Iran or the Chinese harassment of Japan.

 

AAAAAnnnnnnnddddd......a map:

Mistaking Defiance for Principle

Apparently there will be some debate over the legacy of Eric Holder at Justice. This goes to show how wonderfully diverse our community thinking has become; some people actually think his tenure has been reasonable.  As a deputy attorney general in 1999, he recommended pardons for 14 Puerto Rican terrorists. A year later, he did the same for fugitive financier Marc Rich. Marc Rich! He then, as AG, created the Fast and Furious program that provided weapons for drug cartels for some still unexplained reason, ignored the IRS abuse and political targeting, developed a program for dealing with illegal immigrants that can only be called a non-program, created a similar non-policy toward the perpetrators of the sub-prime crash, became the first AG in the history of the nation to be held in criminal contempt of Congress and somehow, aided and abetted by the President of the United States, turned race into the prime focus of the country's legal system.

In a society that mistakes defiance for principle, Holder has found a niche.
The debate should not be over the quality of his leadership but rather whether or not the disasters he created were criminal or just stupid.

Counterfeit Wine

The issue of counterfeit wine is very much in the news these days, and it is certainly a real concern - especially for French brands - in China.
It actually has a long history. The currently esteemed Bordeaux reds were rather pale and delicate for a very long time compared to the modern versions and it was common and accepted practice in the 19th century to blend more powerful Northern Rhône wine into the comparatively lighter reds of Bordeaux to give them more color and strength.. The resulting blend was described as "hermitagé" in keeping with the origin of the Syrah-based addition. There is evidence that, for the same reason, more potent, darkly colored wines from southern France and Algeria were also used in Bordeaux and Burgundy. In some cases, the aim was simply to sell something ordinary under a famous name. Banning such practices and assuring true authenticity of origin were the main motivations behind the laws known as Appellation d’Origine Contrôlée introduced in the 1930s. Nonetheless, there are revelations periodically of a producer who sells wine of a lesser rank as a prestigious grand cru, or uses grapes which are not permitted by the appellation laws. There are recent examples from the mid-1990's involving a famous Margaux, and, in 2006, Les Vins Georges Duboeuf, the prominent Beaujolais producer, was found to have improperly blended lesser grapes into its top wines.

Tuscan authorities accused well-known producers of violating laws that let them use the prestigious “Brunello di Montalcino” appellation, mainly by using unapproved, non- 100 percent sangiovese, grapes.

 

Interestingly, a high-status category already exists for wines made with unsanctioned grapes: Super Tuscan.

Student Loan Support

The “Bank on Students Emergency Refinancing Act” in Congress would drop the rate on existing college loans to the current rate on federal loans, roughly 4 percent — a large reduction for students who took out loans for around 7 percent before the 2008 recession.
“Homeowners and businesses are often able to refinance their debts. Students should be able to do the same,” according to Representative John Tierney, a sponsor of the House version of the bill. “It is outrageous that students can’t refinance at these historically low interest rates,” said Senator Barbara Boxer. “This legislation gives students the same fair shot as other borrowers have when interest rates decline.”
Except for one thing. Students can already refinance their loans. Most of the existing loans are federal-direct or federally guaranteed. Students can take them to any bank of their choosing and ask for a lower interest rate, just as homeowners and businesses can. Why don't they? No private-sector bank is willing to take full responsibility for those loans at a lower rate — or even at the existing rate. The loans are not profitable for private lenders without taxpayer money to support them. In other words, students are already getting a great deal on federal loans because, as a group, they are terrible risks and need taxpayers to subsidize them.
The current bill is just more of the subsidy. I.E. it's a sub-prime loan. Remember them?

Sunday Sermon 9/28/14

Today's gospel is of the two sons who are asked by their father to go into the fields to work. The one who agrees does not go, the one who declines, goes. Christ then tells the priests and the elders that tax collectors and prostitutes will enter heaven before them. He the scolds them for rejecting John the Baptist.
Sometimes these gospels are simple too much. They are too concentrated--tiny with so much mass--to be fairly analyzed.This gospel is from Holy Week. Christ is in Jerusalem speaking to the hierarchy and stimulating more and more animosity. In a week He will be dead.
In some respects, this is a wandering gospel. Christ is making a lot of points and they are not all the same. The two sons, so often used by Christ in His parables, are reversed; the older rebels, the younger acquiesces, albeit grudgingly. But Christ has made this debate with great understanding and sympathy to the participants. This is not a conflict between lord and subject, leader and follower. It is family with all the hopes, ambitions and complexities one could imagine. Yet, having set that tone, Christ is withering in His judgment. The heart will trump history and behavior and the hierarchy will trail behind prostitutes.
He then raises John as the tipping point. Everyone saw him. Everyone knew he was a good man. Yet only the dispossessed followed him. The hierarchy will pay for that.
The earlier question of how John got his power, from God or man, again goes unanswered.

Cab Thoughts 9/27/14

It seems to me that this failure of the economists to guide policy more successfully is closely connected with their propensity to imitate as closely as possible the procedures of the brilliantly successful physical sciences.--Friedrich Hayek, from the introduction to his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1974.




There's water on moons. The Galileo mission to Jupiter discovered Europa's global subsurface ocean of liquid water and indications of Ganymede's interior seas. At Saturn, the Cassini probe detected erupting fountains of water ice from Enceladus indicating warmer subsurface water on even that small moon, while finding surface lakes of frigid but still liquid hydrocarbons beneath the dense atmosphere of large moon Titan.

There is a Scotland-like independence movement in Catalonia against the greater Spain and a referendum is planned. Unlike the UK, the Spanish government considers Catalonia's referendum illegal.

New home sales are 10% of all home sales.

There are no cases in modern history where an economy has managed to avoid an outright bust after experiencing rapid lending growth anywhere in the neighborhood of China’s ongoing credit boom. (MF economists Giovanni Dell’Ariccia, Deniz Igan, and Luc Laeven)

Who was....David John Moore Cornwall?

According a Politico article by  E. Dovere, the tension between Obama and Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Wasserman Schultz got bad enough that his inner circle considered replacing her as head of the DNC. Dovere said this plan was abandoned because "there was nervousness about the optics of Obama dropping a woman from the party leadership." Those pesky optics again.


There is a new battle over the economy: What constitutes it? Adam Smith said production, Keynes said consumption, in defiance of Say's law that the failure of demand could not cause an economic slump. Now there is a lot of talk about "gross output" which includes investment. Although consumer spending accounts for about 70% of GDP, if you use gross output as a broader measure of total sales or spending, it represents less than 40% of the economy. The reality is that business outlays – adding capital investment and all business spending in intermediate stages of the supply chain – are substantially larger than consumer spending in the economy. They make up more than 50% of economic activity.

George Lauer invented the bar code. A Wrigley Gum pack was the first item ever scanned.

Throughout West Africa and in Guinea, specifically, some villagers have reacted negatively to health workers because they doubt Ebola is real. Some evidence of this might be that eight Ebola health officials in Guinea—five health workers and three journalists—were found dead recently in a village latrine.  Damantang Camara, a spokesman for Guinea's government, told Reuters, "Three of them had their throats slit." Helping people against their will is difficult and may be proof enough that it should not be done.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2014/02/antebellum-america.html

The wife of the late writer Tom Clancy is in a dispute with his children from a former marriage over who should pay taxes on his estate. The Wall Street Journal notes that his $83 million estate includes a 12 percent stake in the Baltimore Orioles and a World War II tank.


This is casually discussed but is quite shocking. MIT Professor Robert Solow's work on the US economy explains that innovation has accounted for more than 80% of the long-term growth in US per capita income, with capital investments accounting for only 20% of per capita income growth. In other words, the United States and the rest of the post-industrial, developed world owe their epic rise in living standards to the underlying “social capital” that properly incentivized innovation, entrepreneurship, and thus technological transformation over the last two centuries.
This idea is being used to analyze the China economy as a danger in the world economy, not a support. But it also means something in the "gross output" discussion mentioned above.

Nocebo (no-SEE-bo): noun: A substance producing harmful effects in someone because it is believed to be harmful, but which in reality is harmless.[From Latin nocebo (I will harm), from nocere (to harm).
Modeled after placebo (I will please).]

Mysterious “interceptor” cellphone towers that can listen in someone’s phone call despite not being part of any phone networks have turned up near the White House and Senate.
“It’s highly unlikely that federal law enforcement would be using mobile interceptors near the Senate,” ESD America CEO Les Goldsmith told the technology website Venture Beat on Thursday. “My suspicion is that it is a foreign entity,” he said. You would think this would be a bigger story.

There are 23.7 Trillion dollars in retirement plans.

The Swedish Armed Forces confirmed on Friday afternoon that two Russian SU24 fighter-bombers had been detected flying over the country. This is the kind of threatening, bullying behavior that presupposes civilized and measured behavior on the part of the victim. It is the classic behavior of bad guys. Nuclear chicken is the worst, though.

One of the arguments that QE has been a failure is the bond-buying strategy that was part of QE known as “Operation Twist.” The Fed traditionally expands the monetary base by buying short-term Treasuries from financial institutions.  Banks then turn around and make short-term loans to those businesses that are the economy’s main job creators. But QE’s Operation Twist focused on buying long-term Treasuries and mortgage-backed securities. This meant that instead of going to the entrepreneurial job creators, loans went primarily to large corporations and to the government itself.

What lobby group has been the most tenacious opposition to lowering estate taxes? The insurance industry.

I wish I could understand what we are doing in the Middle East. ISIS is said to be made up of 30,000 or so people, a good baseball crowd. Their fight is primarily with their competitors in the wacko market. The beheading videos are gruesome and nuts but should they determine national policy? A few weeks before Obama took the position that ISIS was worth focusing on he called them "the JV." Now they are the main target. How is that?

AAAAAaaaannnnndddddd......heeeeerrreee's Gaia!