Month: February 2018

Famous geniuses never said these things

UncleScoopy

Thomas Jefferson never said any of these things!
It has long been a technique of the unethical and/or the downright stupid to add gravitas to their pronouncements by claiming an origin from an acknowledged genius. Before the internet and cable television, such misinformation was generally confined to discussions between individuals, and it was difficult back then for one person to publish or broadcast misquotations without somebody else fact-checking the claims. The self-publishing capability of the internet, however, has made it a simple matter for a person to promote a personal agenda by merely typing an opinion beneath the solemn visage of an acknowledged sage, then posting the .jpg on a social media site or a blog. Sometimes these misquotations go viral. I hate the word “viral” in this context. It’s actually more of a plague than a virus.

Here are some other examples:

Confucius never said: “Choose a job you love and you will never have to work a day in your life.” How could he? Very few people got to “choose” a profession in China 500 years before Christ. In fact, Confucius did say almost the opposite. He argued that the enlightened master should be wise in choosing our work for us! “When the person in authority makes more beneficial to the people the things from which they naturally derive benefit;– is not this being beneficent without great expenditure? When he chooses the labors which are proper, and makes them labor on them, who will repine?”

Benjamin Franklin did not say, “He who sacrifices freedom for security deserves neither,” mainly because he was a genius, not an idiot. The very essence of “civilization” involves people banding together and surrendering absolute liberty to create mutual security. Before the dawn of civilization, our cave-dwelling ancestors discovered that absolute freedom is not such a good thing, except for the strongest and most violent among us. Franklin did say, “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety.” With those essential qualifiers, the statement becomes indisputable. Without them, it is gibberish.

John Stuart Mill did not say “Conservatives are not necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives,” again because he was not a fool. In fact, the LEAST-educated people, high school dropouts, vote overwhelmingly for liberals. Among those with no high school diploma, President Obama beat Governor Romney 64-35. On the other hand, the MOST-educated people also vote overwhelmingly for liberals (55-42 Obama). Using educational achievement as a reasonable surrogate for intellectual capability, it can fairly be argued, at least in the context of modern American politics, that most stupid people are liberals and that most smart people are liberals. (That reality renders the liberal coalition highly fragile.) Everyone in the middle tends to be conservative. Here is what Mill actually said: “I never meant to say that the Conservatives are generally stupid. I meant to say that stupid people are generally Conservative.” Get it? Not “conservatives,” but “THE Conservatives” with a capital “C.” He is not referring to “conservative” with a lower-case “c” as a general political philosophy, but with an upper-case “C” as a specific political bloc in 19th century England whose members were, in Mill’s esteemed but pompous judgment, chowderheads, presumably because they often disagreed with him, thus failing to suitably acknowledge his genius to his satisfaction.

Einstein never said, “I fear the day that technology will surpass our human interaction. The world will have a generation of idiots.” If he had said it, an editor would probably have re-worded it to employ a more suitable verb than “surpass” (“suppress,” perhaps?). A movie called “Powder” claimed (fictionally) that the great physicist once said, “It’s become appallingly clear that our technology has surpassed our humanity.” The movie’s version at least includes proper grammatical parallelism, and may even be a wise observation, but I can’t give you a link to the real quote because the real Einstein never said that or anything like it.

Pretty much every aphorism attributed to Mark Twain is spurious.

U.S. Presidential IQ hoax

UncleScoopy

The U.S. Presidential IQ hoax was a mid-2001 e-mail and internet hoax that purported to provide a list of estimated IQs of the U.S. Presidents from Franklin D. Roosevelt to George W. Bush.

It was reprinted as if factual by the ever-gullible Guardian, and was cited in a Doonesbury cartoon as if it represented reality.

In reality, we have a good handle on only three Presidential IQs.

JFK was tested at 119 by his prep school.

President Bush the Younger scored 1206 on the pre-1974 SAT, which converts to an IQ of about 129 on the Otis scale. (There was a close correlation between SAT and IQ in those days. The correlation was dependable enough that MENSA accepted a 1250 score for membership at that time. Over the years the tests have been revised, the correlation no longer exists, and MENSA no longer accepts SAT scores in its admission process.)

Richard Nixon was one of the gifted students studied by Terman in his longtitudinal study. Nixon biographer Roger Morris says RMN tested at 143 when he was in Fullerton High School in California.

Al Gore was never elected President (or was he?), but we also have a pre-1974 SAT score for him. He scored 1355, which is equivalent to about 137-138 on the Otis scale, and would place him in the upper 1%, about in the same league as Nixon.

Once-great locales in decrepitude

UncleScoopy

Abandoned States: Places In Idyllic 1960s Postcards Have Transformed Into Scenes Of Abandonment

The author did a wonderful job of morphing the old images with his own modern ones, thus truly bringing the transformation to life.

If you grew up in NY or the surrounding states, you may have spent a summer or two in the Poconos or The Catskills, particularly if your family was Jewish. The resorts there were places where entire families took long summer vacations together. They featured modern facilities, good food, top-drawer entertainment (this was the famed “Borsch Belt”), and all sorts of healthy recreation. It was that era’s version of a Caribbean cruise, with just a hint of today’s Las Vegas.

I never spent a summer at any of these places, but my family always stopped to eat some of the famed deli cuisine when we traveled from Lake Ontario to the urban caverns of The City. Route 17 was our Yellow Brick Road even if The City boasted no emerald glow.

Nobody from upstate called that city “New York” then, because we were all from New York, even the upstate rubes. One simply said “The City,” and the meaning was clear to everyone. Boston and Detroit were cities, and I lived in a city, but those in the center of the world lived in THE City. Some of my teachers were from The City, and they felt it cast them in a superior mold to that which formed us locals because their city was tougher, smarter, and more energetic than any experience we or any outsider had known. The City was coarser, yet somehow also more refined, than our humble origins. Some of those men bragged of hard childhoods in Hell’s Kitchen or comfy ones on the Upper East Side, but most of those tough, quick-tempered grandsons of Erin were forged in the fires of the Outer Boroughs.

That yellow brick road of my childhood is brown and crumbling today. The most imposing resorts were shuttered long ago, but they were glorious in their day. Grossinger’s, the most famous resort in the area, and supposedly the inspiration for “Dirty Dancing,” had its own golf course, many tennis courts, a ski area with a snow-making machine, indoor and outdoor pools, and a massive theater. Elizabeth Taylor married Eddie Fisher there; Jerry Lewis performed there; Jackie Robinson went there to relax.

Today? The reflective moments of “Dirty Dancing” accurately predicted the demise of the Catskill family resorts:

“It’s not the changes so much this time. It’s that it all seems to be ending. You think kids want to come with their parents and take fox-trot lessons? It feels like it’s all slipping away.”

And slip away it did. Like the resorts, that “way of life is fall’n into the sere.”

The Grossinger golf course is still functioning, but …

Gothamist explains:

“Today, Grossinger’s still has everything you’re looking for—if what you’re looking for is exquisite decay.

The drive there is is a beautiful, albeit sad, experience. State route 17 winds through the Catskills, past boarded up summer camps, through predominantly Orthodox Jewish communities and down near-abandoned main streets. Up a hill and past a guard shack plastered with “no trespassing” signs, Grossinger’s appears on the horizon.

Much of the resort has been demolished; what’s left has been thoroughly picked through over the years. The cabins and cottages that dot the grounds are unsafe to enter, their floors badly rotted, their roofs a deluge of splintered wood. Nobody is home at the Jennie J hotel, which has been thoroughly torn apart. Every bit of copper and steel plucked from its walls, every bathroom smashed apart.”

(That article in Gothamist has many pictures of the former resort’s current state of decrepitude.)

Catholic church gives blessing to iPhone confession app

UncleScoopy

Catholic church gives blessing to iPhone confession app

I predicted this 25 years ago with my “Saintly Father Greg” sketch. Referenced here. Saintly Father Greg was a hip priest who was trying to reverse his parish’s sagging attendance trends by making Catholic rites “more dang fun.” I didn’t get into trouble for the computerized confession joke, which was obviously tame enough that real priests thought, two decades later, that it wasn’t a joke at all! I did get several angry calls and letters about my proposal for a new all-you-can-eat communion buffet, “including both traditional liturgical entrees and now – new Mexican style!”

That was actually based upon a joke I used to tell the family about my Incredibly Rich and Saintly Admiral Uncle Dick, who was “so holy he went back for seconds on communion.”

Incredibly Rich Admiral Uncle Dick was a Navy guy. Sort of. His entire naval career consisted of two weeks in the Philippines. He went to Cornell in a special accelerated ROTC program that was meant to assure a steady supply of young officers during WW2, because Annapolis couldn’t turn them out fast enough. At that time the high command thought the Pacific war would go on forever, which it might have, if not for the atomic bomb. At any rate, Uncle Dick was pushed through Cornell in three years by attending classes non-stop, including summers. A 20-year-old Not Yet Rich Ensign Uncle Dick graduated in June of 1945, took a brief home leave, then got shipped out to Manila just about in time for the war to end. Given that he flew to Manila, I don’t know if he was ever on a boat, but in his mind he was Admiral Fucking Nelson, and a distinguished hero who fought in “the big one.” Of course his brothers ridiculed him, especially my Uncle John, a likable, reckless, down-to-earth guy who had lied about his age to enlist, then volunteered for the most bad-ass combat he could think of – jumping out of airplanes in enemy territory. Since Admiral Uncle Dick couldn’t impress any adults with his tales, especially with Uncle John around, and since he was my godfather and I his only nephew, and since he had no children of his own, I was his designated audience at family gatherings. Needless to say, his stories and photos were the bane of my existence.

Uncle John, who was a real war hero and might actually have had interesting stories, never told any stories at all. He was embarrassed about some of the things he did when he was in the service, although those things actually made him seem like more of a bad-ass to me. For example, my dad told me that Uncle John liked jumping out of planes so much that he actually turned WW2 into an entrepreneurial enterprise, by taking other guys’ jumps for them during the training period, and getting paid handsomely for that by the other guys who really didn’t want to do any crazy shit until they actually had to.

Anyway, that’s not the end of the Uncle Dick story. Those two weeks in Manila were his only active duty, but his nifty free Cornell degree required him to spend many years in the Naval Reserve, which he actually enjoyed. Unmarried and childless, with no girlfriends or hobbies that we knew of, Uncle Dick had only one source of pride – being in the navy. He never got called up for service during the Korean conflict, for reasons not known to me or my dad. By the time Vietnam came along, Saintly Uncle Dick had been promoted several times just from his reserve service, and when he put on his dress uniform he had more ribbons than Patton. Of course, they were things like the “naval reserve meritorious service medal,” which he got for perfect attendance at reserve meetings and summer camp, and the “good conduct medal,” which he got for not asking any embarrassing questions at those meetings. I think he had about 20 of each of those medals. And he also had the “ww2 victory medal,” which he got for his two weeks in Manila.

In 1961 JFK tripled our military presence in Vietnam. In 1962 he tripled it again. At this time, well, Uncle Dick wasn’t actually an admiral, of course, but I think he was a lt. commander, which might actually have put him in a position of moderate responsibility somewhere. He was still in his mid-thirties then, so the navy might well have called him up and assigned him somewhere. Fortunately for America, the U.S. Navy was able to see what was also obvious to our family, that Incredibly Rich and Saintly Admiral Uncle Dick, although quite intelligent, was a total dickhead.

The Hillary Clinton Russia Uranium One Conspiracy Theory (Doesn’t Make Any Sense)

UncleScoopy

The Hillary Clinton Russia Uranium One Conspiracy Theory (Doesn’t Make Any Sense)

It’s hard to believe anybody thinks there is anything there, but research is difficult and requires sober, rational thinking. As Mencken noted, one thing is always lucrative, and that is “underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” If you throw something out and defend it with a straight face, no matter how silly it is, there will always be people who believe it. The Pyramids were built for grain storage? The world is flat? The universe is 6000 years old? Sure, tell me more.

The whole case against Hillary is preposterous, but the right-wing spin doctors have thrown it out, and people will believe it, so let’s review the case again, shall we?

First I’m going to give you a very quick summary of the uranium market, because it is important to understand it, and very few reporters enjoy mathematical analysis, so they have generally concentrated on Clinton’s involvement in the deal:

1. How big is the deal itself?

It is so small as to be virtually non-existent. The entire commercial uranium market in the USA is 25,300 tons per year. Of that, only 2,800 tons are mined in the United States. Of that, Uranium One, the controversial Canadian company owned by Russian state mining interests, only constitutes 300 tons of that market. That’s it. A whopping 11% of the domestic market, therefore 1% of the total market.

As Clinton’s opponents have stated, Uranium One has 20% of the commercial, domestic uranium mining capacity, but those opponents fail to note that the actual production of the company is less, only 11% of the uranium mined in the USA. But even if they produced ALL of it, it would STILL be insignificant, because 89% of America’s commercial uranium is mined overseas.

2. But can’t they just give all of our uranium to Russia?

First of all, they can’t even sell that uranium to Canada, even though they are theoretically a Canadian company. Their charter forbids them to export uranium mined in the USA.

Second and perhaps more important, what the hell would Russia do with it? They don’t know what to do with all the uranium they have now, except sell it to us. Russia, along with its buddies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, currently accounts for 38% of the uranium purchased in the United States. If they wanted to tighten the screws on us, they would do it with that 38% from their mines, not the other 1% from ours.

3. Does Uranium One have any power at all?

Not a lick. In fact the opposite is true. The USA holds all the cards. Since they are such a tiny portion of the market, our commercial users of uranium could easily stop buying from them completely and fill that 1% elsewhere. Since Uranium One can’t export the uranium, if we stopped buying from them, they would essentially have no business at all. They have to sell to us or close the mines. Why do you think those mining assets were for sale in the first place? They are in a very vulnerable position, completely at our mercy.

Most mainstream sources have covered the political side of the deal, and I’ve already noted that the deal is insignificant to begin with, so I’ll just give a top-line summary.

A Russian company paid money to purchase controlling interest in a Canadian company which owned mining assets in the USA. Because of US laws involving strategic assets, a nine-person panel, consisting of representatives from nine different US agencies, had to approve the sale. None of them objected. One of the agencies is the Department of State.

The State Department was represented on the matter by the Assistant Secretary assigned to the Foreign Investment Committee, Jose Fernandez. He made the decision not to object to the sale. Hillary Clinton never got involved in any way. (It’s not clear whether she even knew about it, except as another matter in a very large in-box. We presume that Fernandez filed a written report to Clinton, and that she chose not to override him, but he pointed out that she never weighed in with him at all, so his decision stood.)

In other words:

1. The whole matter is insignificant.

2. Hillary had only 1/9 of the power to approve. It was approved unanimously.

3. Hillary did not even exercise her 1/9 to influence the decision. One of her subordinates, the one with specific expertise in that field, made the decision. Mrs. Clinton had no specific knowledge in this area, and presumably had actual significant matters to occupy her time.

Did the Clinton Foundation get a massive donation ($131 million) from one of the former owners of Uranium One?

Sure, but it was before Clinton was Secretary of State.

And, equally important, by the time the deal happened, in fact 18 months before Hillary became Secretary of State, that guy (Frank Giustra) had already sold his stock in Uranium One!

Moreover, it’s not surprising that Giustra contributed so much, considering that the donation specifically went to “The Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership,” which is a specific initiative within the Clinton Foundation. I hear that guys tend to support causes named after themselves.

Or to word it another way, his donation to the Clinton Foundation had nothing to do with the sale of Uranium One, nor could it have, given the timing.

But even if it had, Clinton did not get involved in that decision.

But even if she had, there was nothing wrong with the decision

And even if it had been a bad decision, the deal was insignificant to the uranium market.