Cernan

Eugene Andrew "Gene" Cernan has died. He was an American astronaut, naval aviator, electrical engineer, aeronautical engineer, and fighter pilot and the last man to walk on the moon.
A story:

A young woman in a physics program was working on a physics problem assigned to her at school. She was struggling with it as were the others in her class. She approached her father, a mathematician, with it and he, after struggling with it himself, called a physicist friend and they began to discuss it over the phone. A third voice was heard in the background commenting: It was Cernan, who was visiting his friend. He suggested the problem itself was wrong, reconfigured it, then solved it.
The girl brought the solution to class the next day and it was revealed that the problem was indeed posed in error.
My God," said the professor, "Did Cernan know I was involved?"

Green Book

Milton Friedman had a lot of respect for liberty. He thought that political freedoms were inextricably related to economic freedom. Put another way, he thought economic freedom could influence political freedom.

"See the USA in your Chevrolet, America is asking you to call." This was the heart of a Chevrolet ad campaign in the late 1900s. The cars were cheap, reliable, ran on cheap gas and the Eisenhower administration had financed huge, wide roads that connected the Atlantic to the Pacific.  Americans were on the move.

But there was an exception. Black people. Blacks of any economic status worried abut Jim Crow laws that legally enforced racial segregation in certain states. A Black driver or family could get caught in some place where no hotels or restaurants or repair shops were available to them. So they did not travel much, or they made wild efforts to avoid stopping in suspect areas and would drive all night with all sorts of contrivances to avoid stopping. But in 1936, a man named Victor Hugo Green started a travel guide to make life on the road easier and safer for black motorists. The guide listed, state by state, the restaurants, hotels, service stations, and other businesses that would welcome African-American travelers. Green called it “The Negro Motorist Green Book,” or “The Green Book,” for short.

Green was a mailman in Hackensack, New Jersey, who kept hearing stories about discrimination on the road. Jewish tourists, who also faced discrimination while traveling, had relied on similar guides to steer them away from hotels with a “Gentiles Only” policy. In the Green Book’s early days, it wasn’t easy to compile listings from across the country, says playwright, author, and filmmaker Calvin Alexander Ramsey, who has researched the history of the guide. So Ramsey says Green tapped into a nationwide network of African-American letter carriers. These postal workers, familiar with their local communities, were ideally suited to help fill in the gaps from state to state.

Distribution of the guide remained a challenge, says Ramsey, and Green relied on informal networks like the National Urban League, the NAACP, masonic lodges, and churches around the country.
There was also a big corporate sponsor that helped the guide expand its reach: Esso, also known as Standard Oil, and now known as ExxonMobil.

The Green Book would come to feature listings across all 50 states as well as locations in Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. About 15,000 copies were printed each year.

As the Green Book caught on, businesses began to get in touch, asking to be listed. Black newspapers signed on as sponsors. The United States Travel Bureau helped spread the word about the guide. Eventually, Green retired from mail delivery to work full-time on the guide and to open a travel agency.

The Black traveler became a key example in Congressional debate over The Civil Rights Act.
After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 the laws improved. The last edition of the book was published in 1966.

Sunday

Who trusted God was love indeed

And love Creation’s final law–

Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw

With ravine, shriek’d against his creed–

In 1833 Arthur Henry Hallam died suddenly at the age of twenty-two, while on a trip to Vienna. Although a promising poet and essayist, Hallam is chiefly remembered as the one eulogized in Tennyson's In Memoriam. The two first met at Cambridge, where they became members of the legendary intellectual club, the "Apostles," and best friends.

For sixteen years after Hallam's death Tennyson wrote his series of poems, eventually collecting them as In Memoriam.

On June 1^st, 1850, In Memoriam was published and was soon regarded as a monument not just to Hallam but to the Victorian Age.

Within two weeks of publication, Tennyson and Emily Sellwood married, she and her family now having overcome their own doubts about Tennyson's religious faith. On their honeymoon they visited Arthur Hallam's grave, "a kind of consecration" of their vows; in time they would name their first son "Hallam," and Tennyson would conclude that "The peace of God entered into my life when I married her."
Soon Tennyson became the poet laureate, replacing Wordsworth who had recently died. And replacing the Romantic Wordsworth who saw "Nature's holy plan," while the Victorian Tennyson saw "Nature, red in tooth and claw"

According to his grandson, "And something else had happened, the significance of which he [Tennyson] was beginning dimly to realize. Marriage, In Memoriam and the Laureateship had broken down his last defences against the stream of life. The days of musing and brooding were over. The recluse of Somersby had become a National Institution."

Tennyson regarded his poem as a response to the challenges of Darwinian science and industrialization, "a kind of Divina Commedia" spoken by "the voice of the human race" and expressing "my conviction that fear, doubt and suffering will find answer and relief only through Faith in a God of Love." Or as the poem's concluding lines express it, "One God, one law, one element, / And one far-off divine event / To which the whole creation moves."

Some find the poem's doubts and grief more telling than its faith, or prefer the famous lines on human love:

I envy not in any moods
The captive void of noble rage,
The linnet born within the cage,
That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes
His license in the field of time,
Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,
To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,
The heart that never plighted troth
But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;
Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
'Tis better to have loved and lost
Than never to have loved at all.

(after steve king)

http://www.theotherpages.org/poems/books/tennyson/tennyson04.html

Reverie

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



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

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

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

 

Who is....Kissinger?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Golden oldie:

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

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

AAAAaaaaaaaannnnnnnddddddd.......a graph:

The Market

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Disinformation

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


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

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

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


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


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


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

Reverie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who is...Shikha Dalmia?

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

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


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

 .

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

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

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

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

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

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inRead invented by Teads

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

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

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

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

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