Shadwell and Dryden

British poet and playwright Thomas Shadwell died in 1692. Shadwell wrote eighteen plays and became poet laureate but, as the Columbia History of English Literature puts it, "he enjoyed a popularity in his own day which is not easily explicable in ours," as literary skill "was not among the gifts of his mind."
This description is a kindness compared to the attacks suffered by Shadwell from contemporary John Dryden. For it is as loser in their satire war that Shadwell is now remembered, his three written about Dryden being no match for Dryden's three about him. In Mac Flecknoe, or a Satire on the True Blue Protestant Poet, T.S., Dryden has Flecknoe, the King of Dullness, give his crown to Shadwell, the son with the most suitable genes and talent:


...And pond'ring which of all his sons was fit
To reign, and wage immortal war with wit;
Cry'd, 'tis resolv'd; for nature pleads that he
Should only rule, who most resembles me:
Shadwell alone my perfect image bears,
Mature in dullness from his tender years.
Shadwell alone, of all my sons, is he
Who stands confirm'd in full stupidity.
The rest to some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense....


Much of this was sniping along Whig vs. Tory and Protestant vs. Catholic lines. Judging by talent rather than partisanship, modern literary historians label the second half of the 17th century the 'Age of Dryden' and barely give Shadwell an anthology page.


When James II abdicated in 1688, and it was once again open season on Catholics. Dryden had his poet laureateship -- he was Britain's first -- taken from him, and given to Thomas Shadwell. Thus the butt of Dryden's enthronement joke in Mac Flecknoe now got from the real King the poetic crown, the pension, and a "butt of Canary wine." Shadwell was a heavy drinker, and opium taker; most accounts of his death in 1692 attribute it to an opium overdose.

The State of the State of Delaware

On the 150th anniversary of the December 6, 1865, ratification of the 13th Amendment—which abolished slavery in the United States—the State of Delaware announced plans to apologize formally for the role it played in the slave trade. There is no word from those Delaware Civil War veterans who were killed in ending slavery. 

What it is about responsibility these politicians seem to be missing?

One is responsible for what he can influence, something over which he has some element of control. But there seems to be a lot of Old Religion going around. Inherited guilt is a leftover from the Old Testament, a notion we, until recently, have been liberated from. Guilt is hard to assign and impossible to inherit.
Guilt is a profound emotion resulting from significant self-assessment and measurement of oneself against some accepted ideal. Guilt is not something to be careless with. And its inappropriate assignation is invariably met with resentment.
And the trivializing of guilt does more than allow for superior criticism, it trivializes responsibility itself. One might wonder if that is not the aim.

 

Cab Thoughts 12/9/15

When I feed the hungry, they call me a saint. When I ask why people are hungry, they call me a communist. -Helder Camara, archbishop (1909-1999)


Factory hours at Thomas Edison were 6:00 A.M. to 6:00 P.M.; in the winter, it was dark when workers went in and dark when they came out. Twenty-two saloons and bars lined the street that faced the main plant, and they opened at 5:00 A.M. for workers who had difficulty facing the grimness of the workday. When Thomas Edison departed for Washington to aid the war effort in 1917, Charles Edison, Thomas' son recently raised to the position of CEO,  got the chance to make changes at Thomas A. Edison, Inc., that made life for factory workers less harsh and dangerous. Charles shortened the workday to ten hours; put in a dispensary staffed with a nurse or doctor on duty; and subscribed to the state's workmen's compensation plan, even though other managers were convinced it would bankrupt the company. When Tomas returned he reversed or cancelled all of his son's new policies.


In the President's speech he said that Tashfeen Malik, one of the perpetrators of the San Bernardino, California, attack, arrived in the US as part of the US's visa waver program. The entire world--except for him--knows she came on a fiancé visa. That is at least strange.


China will allow two children for every couple, China's state-run Xinhua news agency reported. China, now a nation of more than 1.3 billion people, instituted a policy of one child per couple to control population growth in the 1970s. The policy eased over the years: In late 2013, the country announced couples could have two children if one of the parents was an only child.

Satellite temperature readings have shown no warming trend for the last 18 years, 8 months and counting. None.
Satellite temperature readings are supposed to be the most comprehensive and thus the most accurate. And, of course, the pause in warming since 1998 undercuts the entire global warming argument of the environmental movement and its allies. Now the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists took part in a study that found  that the "pause" in global warming from 1998 to 2013 didn't exist. Instead of a pause, they found a surge. Huh? The House Science Committee subpoenaed NOAA for research documents related to the study. NOAA refused to hand them over. Huh?

Rectitude: n: 1. Moral uprightness. 2. Correctness. 3. Straightness. ety: From Latin rectus (right, straight). Ultimately from the Indo-European root reg- (to move in a straight line, to lead or rule) that also gave us regime, direct, rectangle, erect, alert, source, surge

Thomas Carlyle was a Scottish philosopher whose famous work was On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and The Heroic in History.  He argues that the key role in history lies in the actions of the "Great Man", claiming that "History is nothing but the biography of the Great Man". Is this a worse position than history's invisible materialistic hand?

Who is....Arthur Rimbaud?

Crowdsourcing: In December 2009, DARPA offered $40,000 to anyone who could locate ten balloons that they had placed in plain sight around the continental United States. On a predesignated day, DARPA hid ten large, red weather balloons, eight feet in diameter, in various places around the country. The $40,000 prize would be awarded to the first person or team anywhere in the world who could correctly identify the precise location of all ten balloons. When the contest was first announced, experts pointed out that the problem would be impossible to solve using traditional intelligence-gathering techniques. The contest was entered by 53 teams totaling 4,300 volunteers. The winning team, a group of researchers from MIT, solved the problem in just under nine hours. How did they do it? Not via the kinds of high-tech satellite imaging or reconnaissance that many imagined, but -- as you may have guessed -- by constructing a massive, ad hoc social network of collaborators and spotters -- in short, by crowdsourcing. The MIT team allocated $4,000 to finding each balloon. If you happened to spot the balloon in your neighborhood and provided them with the correct location, you'd get $2,000. If a friend of yours whom you recruited found it, your friend would get the $2,000 and you'd get $1,000 simply for encouraging your friend to join the effort. If a friend of your friend found the balloon, you'd get $500 for this third-level referral, and so on. The likelihood of anyone person spotting a balloon is infinitesimally small. But if everyone you know recruits everyone they know, and each of them recruits everyone they know, you build a network of eyes on the ground that theoretically can cover the entire country.

One third of the people identified in police lineups by eyewitnesses to crimes are fillers for the lineup picked randomly out of people at the police station.

During the 1880s Chicago's total population increased by 118 percent -- a rate of growth five times faster than that of New York City. The city's foreign-born population doubled, reaching 450,000, a total that made immigrant Chicago larger than the total population of St. Louis or any other city in the Midwest, a total swollen by thousands of impoverished Polish Catholic peasants and Jewish refugees from the ghettos of Russia.

Gravity Payment's CEO Dan Price announced on April 13 that he would raise the minimum wage of his staff to $70,000 a year; the story went beyond viral: it took the media, especially the part of it which has been obsessing with income and wealth inequality which in the aftermath of Piketty would be most of it, by meteoric storm. Not only that, but the soon to be lionized young chief executive doubled down on this story of "purest of corporate nobility" by announcing he would cut his own compensation of $1.1 million to offset the cost. Well, it looks as if this altruism was a lot more complicated. http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2015-gravity-ceo-dan-price/

In the early 1930s, Soviet leader Josef Stalin extracted as much grain as possible from the farmers of the Soviet Union, especially those in the Ukraine, resulting in a forced famine with an estimated 7,000,000 deaths. The main purpose was to fund his country's rapid industrialization projects, but he also wanted to force the "kulaks" (formerly wealthy farmers that had owned 24 or more acres) into submission and bring about the "collectivization" of privately held lands. In the Ukraine, he also wanted to stave off the stirrings of an independence movement.

The Depression of the 30s was filled with recriminations towards various groups. One specific problem was said to be "profit." Yet 18 of 19 businesses went bankrupt during the period.

In Georgia Catholics were expressly banned, along with rum, lawyers, and blacks, under the original Georgia Trust in 1733. While that law had long ago been overwritten, and waves of Irish immigrants arrived during the potato famines of the 1840s, an anti-Catholic law was still on the books when Flannery O'Connor's was born: the Convent Inspection Bill became Georgia law in 1916. Under this weird legislation, grand juries were charged with inspecting Catholic convents, monasteries, and orphanages, to search for evidence of sexual immorality and to question all the 'inmates,' ensuring that they were not held involuntarily. Tom Watson, elected U.S. senator from Georgia in 1920, went so far as to accuse the bishop of Savannah of keeping 'white slave pens' of missing girls.

London boasts the world’s oldest underground train network (opened in 1863) and Boston built the first subway in the United States in 1897, the New York City subway became the largest American system. Every day, some 4.5 million passengers take the subway in New York. With the exception of the PATH train connecting New York with New Jersey and some parts of Chicago’s elevated train system, New York’s subway is the only rapid transit system in the world that runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

In 1885, the poet Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to become a gun-runner in Ethiopia. This was the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life. By the age of twenty-one, Rimbaud had renounced his lover Paul Verlaine and poetry for a vagabond tour of Europe -- tutor, beggar, docker, factory worker, soldier, thief, and more. By the age of twenty-five, he had renounced Europe for Africa, becoming at first a coffee trader and then turning to gun-running (and possibly slave-trading) as a get-rich scheme. Thus he proved that poets could not just have crazy tendencies, crazy people could have poetic tendencies.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/income-disparity-among-people-and.html

The largest number of fatalities ever in a production of a film occurred during the shooting of the 1931 film Viking. Twenty-seven people died, including the director and cinematographer, when a ship they were shooting from exploded in the ice off the coast of Newfoundland.

If scientific principles can be applied to spiritual questions, should other principles apply? Should logistical concepts apply to the spiritual? Or economic ideas? And can scientific--or logistical or economic--concepts be applied to other areas like reproduction or marriage?

"I was working for Ross Perot during the 1992 presidential campaign. I had three videos to test: a) a Perot biography; b) testimonials of various people praising Perot; and c) Perot himself delivering a speech. Without giving it much thought, I'd been showing the videos to various focus groups of independent voters in that order-until, at the beginning of one session, I realized to my horror that I'd failed to rewind the first two videotapes. So, I was forced to begin the focus group with the tape of Perot himself talking.

The results were stunning.

 In every previous focus group, the participants had fallen in love with Perot by the time they'd seen all three tapes in their particular order. No matter what the negative information I threw at them, they could not be moved off their support. But now, when people were seeing the tapes in the opposite order, they were immediately skeptical of Perot's capabilities and claims, and abandoned him at the first negative information they heard. ... I repeated this experiment several times, reversing the order, and watched as the same phenomenon took place. Demographically identical focus groups in the same cities had radically different reactions -- all based on whether or not they saw Perot's biographical video first  and the third-party testimonials second (and were therefore predisposed and conditioned to like him) before or after the candidate spoke for himself.

The language lesson: A+B+C does not necessarily equal C+B+A. The order of presentation determines the reaction."-- Frank Luntz

AAAAAAaaaaaaaaannnnnnnnddddddd.........a graph on foreign vs. native American workers:

Altruism in America‏

This Zuckenberg thing is telling. People are outraged over how the guy is going to give his own money away. Political correctness has become more than an shallow attitude, it is a movement. Teach for America is a common option for college graduates, nonprofits have gone from make-work projects for the wealthy to aspirations for all, comics avoid campuses for fear of drifting outside the tight circle of approval. People can get their college loans forgiven if they work for non-profits. (And government.)

And righteousness has birthed a militant arm, the  cultural vigilantes. Some might argue it is too selective to be either spontaneous or genuine: The Mozilla CEO is hounded out of office for mainstream and legal opinions, Romney vilified for completely fabricated bullying charges decades ago in high school, a young woman is offended by the lyrics of the nation's best selling song being played in a bar and initiates a petition that gets the DJ fired for playing it. But results matter.

De Tocqueville described America as a country that had coalesced around the notion of individual liberty. It, liberty, was the social bond that cut across and united all groups. But liberty has a serious downside: Inequity. De Tocqueville said that equality was achievable only through tyranny and that the American knowingly rejected it. Liberty solved a lot of problems in the democracy. It unified the most disparate groups, withheld judgment from all, respected failure and was self justifying; it could exist with religion but did not require it. But we may be changing. And liberty, as a unifying principle, might be very hard to replace with a satisfactory substitute because liberty is, it can not be granted or imposed.

Inequality might become a problem the young are unwilling to live with. And, as the country becomes more diverse, fewer things are held in common. If the concept of liberty is insufficient as a bond, we may need to seek something else. Historically those unifying elements have not been good as all cultures seek themselves and mark The Other. Perhaps we will fall back on some poorly defined good will. But that likely will eventually be shown as too weak and in need of some stronger and more aggressive administration. Some unifying principle will have to be imposed, as de Tocqueville predicted.

The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative‏

It is not everyday one gets to sympathize with a billionaire.
Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook announced his plans to give away all his money--about 45 billion dollars. Yet he has been savaged recent editorials. He has revealed a lot of faults in his effort at good will.
First, his aims of his charity have been attacked as vague.
Zuckerman defined them this way:
"Advancing human potential is about pushing the boundaries on how great a human life can be.
Can you learn and experience 100 times more than we do today?
Can our generation cure disease so you live much longer and healthier lives?
Can we connect the world so you have access to every idea, person and opportunity?
Can we harness more clean energy so you can invent things we can’t conceive of today while protecting the environment?
Can we cultivate entrepreneurship so you can build any business and solve any challenge to grow peace and prosperity?"
Well, they are a little vague.
Worse, his charity is suspect because he has structured it as a limited partnership so he can control it rather than giving it to someone else:
"The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative is not even an actual charitable organization, but rather structured as an LLC. Unlike a charitable trust, which is compelled to spend its money on charity, Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, LLC will be able to spend its money on whatever it wants, including private, profit-generating investment," someone howled.
Apparently others are more altruistic with other people's money.
The final criticism is that he is stealing money from taxes; I guess taxation is a really efficient way to do good works.
He is now trying to defend his charity in the press.

This is a new and vengeful age of altruism. 

Sunday 12/6/15

These Evangelists were clever. And funny.
Today is the beginning of Luke's life of Christ. It starts with the time and fixes it with human power: the time of Tiberius Caesar, of Pontius Pilate the governor of Judea, Herod the tetrach, Lysanias the other tetrach, and the local high priests Annas and Ciaaphas. Finally the point of this inverted pyramid, John the Baptist.
And his message? Leveling.

Cab Thoughts 12/5/15

"Years ago my mother used to say to me, she'd say, 'In this world, Elwood, you must be' - she always called me Elwood - 'In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.' Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant. You may quote me."--Elwood P. Dowd

I am ignorant of the debate over the Import-Export Bank. The strict economists generally oppose it. Here is a quote from Paul Ryan that makes me suspicious: "Are we going to reward good work or good connections? I think there are plenty other ways to expand opportunity in this country, and corporate welfare is not one of them. The biggest beneficiaries of this bank, two-thirds of their money go to 10 companies. Forty percent goes to one company."

Everyone is excited about Trudeau's election. Aside from legalizing marijuana, Trudeau’s other concrete proposal is to intentionally run a deficit by raising taxes (on the rich) and spending even more money on infrastructure. Classic Keynesian stuff, countercyclical fiscal policy. Should be interesting to watch.

U.S. government debt now stands at 103% of GDP. If private debt is included, the ratio climbs to about 370% of GDP. Scholarly studies indicate that real per capita GDP growth should slow by about one-quarter to one-third from the long-run trend when the total debt-to-GDP ratio rises into the range between 250% and 275%. Since surpassing this level in the late 1990s, real per capita GDP has grown just 1% per annum, much less than the 1.9% pace from 1790 to 1999.
These results indicate that the relationship between debt and economic growth is non-linear, or progressively negative, as debt advances to higher levels, a pattern confirmed by academic research.

Who is....Charles M. Schulz?

John Glenn had flown nearly 150 combat missions during World War II and the Korean War. In 1957, he made the first nonstop supersonic flight across the United States, flying from Los Angeles to New York in three hours and 23 minutes. On February 20, 1962,  Glenn made the first American multiorbital flight in Friendship 7, a spacecraft that made three orbits of the Earth in five hours. In 1998, Glenn returned into space again as a payload specialist aboard the space shuttle Discovery. At 77 years of age, Glenn was the oldest human ever to travel in space. During the nine-day mission, he served as part of a NASA study on health problems associated with aging.

Data never speak for themselves. Interpretation is essential. Without thoughtful, unprejudiced analysis reading numbers is no different than reading bones or Tarot cards.

Charles Schultz' son and grandson  are creating an new "Peanuts" movie. The comic strip has received intense analysis. “A cartoonist,” Schulz once said, “is someone who has to draw the same thing every day without repeating himself.” It was this “infinitely shifting repetition of the patterns,” Umberto Eco wrote in The New York Review of Books in 1985, that gave the strip its epic quality. Watching the permutations of every character working out how to get along with every other character demanded “from the reader a continuous act of empathy.” Eco! The New York Review of Books! Here is one summary analysis: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/11/the-exemplary-narcissism-of-snoopy/407827/ The Atlantic!

Anyone looking for an example of Rube-publican ineptness need look no further than the esteemed Benghazi Committee who, in spite of the astonishing circumstances they are investigating, are on the defensive.

Illinois State officials announced that winners who are due to receive more than $600 won’t get their money until the state’s ongoing budget impasse is resolved. Players who win up to $600 can still collect their winnings at local retailers. More than $288 million is waiting to be paid out. For now the winners just have an IOU and no interest on their money. The state delayed a $560 million payment to its pension funds for November and may have to delay or reduce another contribution due in December.

Wolves have about 200 million scent cells. Humans have only about 5 million. Wolves can smell other animals more than one mile (1.6 kilometers) away.

Perhaps the fundamental political fact – one characterized by inexpedient and untimely consequences – is the separation of cost and benefit considerations.  The fact that few persons are forced to weight them against one another before making policy choices enables and encourages people to seek additional gains at collective expense.--William Mitchell

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/zero-sum-gaming.html

When the state of Maryland raised its tax rate on people with incomes of a million dollars a year or more, the number of such people living in Maryland fell from nearly 8,000 to fewer than 6,000. Although it had been projected that the tax revenue collected from such people in Maryland would rise by $106 million, instead these revenues fell by $257 million.

Bromide: 1. a platitude or trite saying. 2. Chemistry. a. a salt of hydrobromic acid consisting of two elements, one of which is bromine, as sodium bromide, NaBr. b. a compound containing bromine, as methyl bromide. ety: Bromide is a combination of bromo- (a combining form used in the names of chemical compounds that contain bromine) and -ide, a suffix used in chemical compounds. Some bromides were used as sediatives, giving rise to the metaphorical extension of the term in the early 1900s.

Financial planning is tough on people. Governments too.  Pension managers used to think they could average 8% after inflation over two decades or more. At that rate, a million dollars invested today turns into $4.7 million in 20 years. If $4.7 million is exactly the amount you need to fund that year’s obligations, you’re in good shape. What happens if you average only 7% over that 20-year period? You’ll have $3.9 million. That is only 83% of the amount you counted on. At 6% returns you will be only 68% funded. At 5%, you have only 57% of what you need. At 4%, you will be only 47% of the way there.

There has been criticism of the post 2008 recovery with many saying that the monetary easing and the resulting buybacks have artificially raised stock prices. The decrease in available stock might increase prices but should not raise earnings, which also has happened.

The latest Producer Price Index (PPI) numbers from the Labor Department said that prices at the wholesale level actually declined by 0.5% in September. Over the last 12 months through September, the PPI has dropped by 1.1%... that’s the eighth consecutive 12-month decrease in the index. But the Wisconsin Farm Bureau Federation Index, which tracks the prices of key agricultural commodities that most American households use every day is up. The newest semi-annual survey of the 16 items rose to $53.37, up $1.41 or 2.7% compared with one year ago.

It is perfectly legal for some advisers to steer customers into complex financial products that will earn the highest rewards, perks and prizes for the advisers – even if they are bad options for their customers. Research suggests that this loophole costs Americans an estimated $17 billion every year.  That’s $17 billion taken out of the pockets of retirees by unscrupulous advisers who are more interested in collecting fees and prizes for themselves than helping families build real security. (From a recent Senate report)Thirteen of the 15 major annuity providers investigated acknowledged providing these incentives.

During US Military actions in southeastern Vietnam in February 1968 AP correspondent Peter Arnett quoted an unidentified Army major regarding the town of Ben Tre, "It became necessary to destroy the town to save it."

In May of 1957, an American bomber accidentally dropped an American 42,000 pound, 10-megaton hydrogen bomb on Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Mark 17 had a yield of approximately 10-megatons. For comparison's sake, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was a relatively small 16 kiloton weapon.

10 megatons = 10,000 kilotons, meaning that it would take about 625 "little boys" (the code word for the bomb dropped on Hiroshima) to make only one Mark 17.

According to the investigation, Field Command, a division of the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, conducted recovery and clean-up operations at the site shortly after the nonevent. What they found was a crater 12 feet deep and 25 feet in diameter, blown, fortunately, in uninhabited land owned by the University of New Mexico.
Only the bomb's conventional explosives - those necessary, but not sufficient to start the nuclear chain reaction - were triggered by the fall, and, according to the experts, no radioactivity was detected beyond the lip of the crater. Traces of a luckless cow, reportedly, were scattered over a much wider area

Texas is the largest petroleum-producing state in the U.S. and if it were an independent nation, it would rank as the world’s 5th largest petroleum-producing nation. Only 34 of Texas’ 254 counties have no known natural gas within their boundaries. However, no major wells have been discovered for a half-century or more.

AAAAAaaaaannnnnnddddd......a graph. The direction is startling but so is the history of recovery: