The horizon is not so far as we can see, but as far as we can imagine

Month: July 2014

Yellen tells American Industry not to produce jobs or good wages

There is no other way to read this:

Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said U.S. labor markets are far from healthy and signaled the Fed will keep monetary policy loose until hiring and wage data show the effects of the financial crisis are “completely gone.”

Look, why would those who hire people want easy money to go away?  They don’t.  So if giving people good wages and employment will mean the Fed tightening, they have every incentive not to do so.

The actual way to do it is to say “this policy is not working.  If it does not show progress, we will cancel it.”

If what you wanted was high wages and low actual unemployment.

Which isn’t what Yellen wants.

Why Bookstores live or die

In my experience, this is why they live, if they do:

Munro has since bought the building, which Walker described as an astute move that has provided various options for managing its future.

Bookstores almost always fail not because of e-books, but because of rent increases.  This is true of a lot of interesting, marginal businesses, especially in cities with housing bubbles (and Victoria is not cheap.)  Prices go out of line with income, rents follow, and interesting stores which need low rent die. So you wind up with a whole bunch of chain stores or boutiques operations selling overpriced goods and services who can make the rent.

I shopped at Munro’s many times over the years, as an aside, since my parents lived in Victoria during their retirement, and my grandmother in hers.  A great bookstore, with a good selection, knowledgeable and friendly staff.

But all those things aren’t enough when the rent goes up, and rent is set, in effect, by the value of the lot of land if turned into overpriced condos.

In general bubbles are bad for everyone who isn’t in on the bubble.  If you are winning, they’re great, but the people who don’t participate are screwed.

And bookstores are, somehow, never participants.

Drive enough similar business out, because they can’t make the rent, and soon the great neighbourhood you moved into isn’t, it’s an overpriced condo hell of glass and concrete and soulless chain stores.


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A Transcript of Abu Bakr’s Speech

Can be found here.

It’s an interesting document, and worth reading yourself.  Contrary to media intimations of evil, and raving, it’s a pretty sane document.

I’ll highlight this bit:

Terrorism is to refuse humiliation, subjugation, and subordination [to the kuffār – infidels]. Terrorism is for the Muslim to live as a Muslim, honorably with might and freedom. Terrorism is to insist upon your rights and not give them up.

But terrorism does not include the killing of Muslims in Burma and the burning of their homes. Terrorism does not include the dismembering and disemboweling of the Muslims in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Kashmir. Terrorism does not include the killing of Muslims in the Caucasus and expelling them from their lands. Terrorism does not include making mass graves for the Muslims in Bosnia and Herzegovina, and the slaughtering of their children. Terrorism does not include the destruction of Muslims’ homes in Palestine, the seizing of their lands, and the violation and desecration of their sanctuaries and families.

Terrorism does not include the burning of masājid in Egypt, the destruction of the Muslims’ homes there, the rape of their chaste women, and the oppression of the mujahidin in the Sinai Peninsula and elsewhere. Terrorism does not include the extreme torture and degradation of Muslims in East Turkistan and Iran [by the rāfidah], as well as preventing them from receiving their most basic rights. Terrorism does not include the filling of prisons everywhere with Muslim captives. Terrorism does not include the waging of war against chastity and hijab (Muslim women’s clothing) in France and Tunis. It does not include the propagation of betrayal, prostitution, and adultery.

It sort of speaks for itself, in the “you call me a monster?  Look in the fucking mirror” vein that is rather hard to argue against when your leaders have just invaded multiple countries on flimsy pretext leading to the deaths of hundreds of thousands, minimum and the creation of millions of refugees, the vast majority of whom just happen to be Muslim. And when the leader of the “free” world brags about how great he is at killing, while he force feeds men who, in many cases, haven’t been convicted of a damn thing.

I despise everything ISIS stands for.  But it’s simply impossible to defend what the West has been doing to Muslims for the past 20 years, or to note that ISIS doesn’t exist as a force worth worrying about with George Bush’s illegal invasion of the Middle East.

You look back to the 50s and 60s, to Iraq and Iran, and you see states trying to be democratic, whose version of Islam is mild and moderating; whose women are becoming more and more free and educated (the same is generally true of Afghanistan, and Pakistan. Pakistan goes really off the rails when it starts being used as a throughfare for arms and money to Afghan Mujahadin.)

Prosperity, and democracy, and hope of a better future.  A belief in truly universal human rights, and that Muslims get to have elections and keep the results of them too.  Or that if they have democratic elections and do manage to keep the results (Iran), that they won’t be enbargoed so their children die due to lack of medicine.

If you won’t offer people freedom and prosperity and autonomy; if you won’t respect their democratic decision-making, why would you be surprised if, after bombing them into the ground, they become unpleasant people?  They are only learning the lessons you have taught them, that might makes right, that there are no “human rights” that apply to Muslims which aren’t bought at the end of a gun (perhaps there aren’t any for anyone, but there certainly aren’t for Muslims.)

Abu Bakr is Bush and Blair’s love child. He is the the great grandchild of the CIA spooks who overthrew democratic elections in the middle East.  He is the step-child of the Egyptian police state, which has proved over and over again that Islamists can”t take power peacefully, because the people with guns won’t allow it.  He is the grandchild of Madeline Albright, who throught that half a million Iraqi children were “worth it.”

An evil man, to be sure, Abu Bakr. But a man who does not exist absent the great and extended efforts of men who were, judged by the number of dead and wounded and dispossessed, even more evil than he.


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The Ubiquity and Importance of Operant Conditioning

As you may know, dogs salivate when presented with food.

A man named Pavlov used to ring a bell when he fed his dogs.

Then he stopped presenting food, and just rang the bell: the dogs salivated, even though no food was present.

The dogs had been conditioned.

Behavioralism, the psychology of operant conditioning, famously did not deal with the contents of our minds: only with behavior.

This was a mistake, not just because the content of our minds matter, but because operant conditioning can explain a lot of mental activity.

In my childhood there was an advertising jingle which ran as follows “butter tastes better, naturally.”

Almost 40 years later, when I see butter or even think about butter, odds are high that jingle will run through my mind.

Conditioning can be very mild, and work.  Simply repeat the same two words together often enough, and most people will think the second word when they hear the first one.  Give people story scripts “the princess, the square jawed hero, the dark hero, the sage” and they will fill in the lines without you having to tell them, which is why most of us are so very good at figuring out the plots of stories.

To this day, certain smells remind me of my grandmother.  Because I loved my grandmother, and because she gave me the best couple years of my childhood in her house on the beach, those smells are good ones for me, even if “dry old lady wearing rose-water” isn’t a good smell for other people, it is for me.

Call these triggers: upon seeing something, thinking about something, smelling something,  hearing a word or phrase used, or sme we are likely to trigger some specific responses ourselves.  We need not even necessarily remember the original operant conditioning: mental patients who have lost all long term memory, still form associations.  Likewise events in our childhood, long forgotten, can leave triggers.

Some conditining is mild: the jingle with pleasing music, the constant repitition of words together to create associations, the standard tropes of the heroes journey tapping into the universal human need to fit the world into story structures.

Others are primal, they become attached to fear or terror; to pain or lust; to love or hate; to a sense of belonging or to the human horror of being outcast from the group and the shame which comes with it.

Whatever causes your first strong sexual arousal will condition you strongly; the first time that you have fear that makes the world turn into a tunnel and your ears roar will brand you.  But day to day fears can do you in, too: scurrying around to avoid the feral neighbourhood dog-pack.  Words you can’t say without mom or dad getting angry, or sad, or drinking.  Words that if your parents say them mean you’re in for it.  Acting gay, or nerdy, or whatever else will get you ostracized from your peer group.  You can gain these conditions without even consciously realizing it, avoiding what you see causes others to get ostracized or beaten up.

This conditioning extends right down to the level of thought.  When I need to move quickly, I think certain predetermined thoughts “ass-gear-go”.  When I need to clean up, others “Shit/shower/shave”, when I listen to certain songs I start writing stories about certain characters in my head.  When I see an oak tree, I think of a story my father told me about oak trees.  And once the thoughts start flowing, certain throughts trigger other thoughts in very conditioned rotes. This is especially noticeable to me in fields I’m familiar with: start me on what money is, say, and the journey is tediously familiar: but start me anywhere on various economic subjects and I’ll loop to the others in time and in predicable ways.

Much of what we think we are has been conditioned, often by events we don’t manage or in ways we don’t consider conditioning.  Most of our complex of assocations, of triggers, or positive and negative attachments was not consciously chosen, but is state dependent on our start position (who our parents were, where we born) and to what amounts to random chance. Combined with our genetic endowment, this determines our personality.

When you think of it this way, or experience it (through meditation or certain types of psychotherapy), you start to disconnect from your thoughts, your habits, even your personality as who you are, because you can see that there are millions of different “yous” that could have occurred with different events.  And you ask, “if I’m not my thoughts, who am I?’

There are a few great mysteries of life.  “Why is there anything?”  “If anything, why this?  And, “what is consciousness.”  Do thoughts make us conscious?  Or is it that which apprehends the thoughts which is consciousness?

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