WHO ARE THE BARBARIANS?

Waiting for the Barbarians BY C. P. CAVAFY TRANSLATED BY EDMUND KEELEY AND PHILIP SHERRARD What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum? The barbarians are due here today. Why isn’t anything going on in the senate? Why are the senators sitting there without legislating? Because the barbarians are coming today. What’s the point of senators making laws now? Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating. Why did our emperor get up so early, and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate, in state, wearing the crown? Because the barbarians are coming today and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader. He’s even got a scroll to give him, loaded with titles, with imposing names. Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas? Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts, rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds? Why are they carrying elegant canes beautifully worked in silver and gold? Because the barbarians are coming today and things like that dazzle the barbarians. Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual to make their speeches, say what they have to say? Because the barbarians are coming today and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking. Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion? (How serious people’s faces have become.) Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly, everyone going home lost in thought? Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come. And some of our men just in from the border say there are no barbarians any longer. Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians? Those people were a kind of solution.

C.P. Cavafy: Collected Poems Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Translation Copyright © 1975, 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard Reproduced with permission of Princeton University Press

Pressing Issues: Mr. President, Just Watch This

Pressing Issues: Mr. President, Just Watch This: Perhaps all Obama needs to do before the next debate is to watch this 60-second spot, starring FDR, about a million times (and then run it a...

Sagan's Small Blue Dot Video

Discrimination

A recent issue of the American Psychological Association's publication, the APA Monitor, reported a news brief related to a recent publication in the May issue of Developmental Science, a psychology journal. The report indicated that by age 9 months, babies are better at recognizing faces and emotional expressions of people of their own rase. The research had been conducted by psychologists at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and involved placing EEG recording sensors on the infant's head to record brain activity as they viewed happy and sad people of their own and of unfamiliar races. There were 48 infants involved in the study. Age turned out to be an important factor. Five month old infants were able to distinguish faces from both races. However, nine month olds where able to tell two faces apart within their own race. They had more difficulty with distinguishing individual face differences from pictures of faces from races other than their own.

Most people are familiar with the image of professor Conrad Lorenz, a pioneer of developmental ethology and Nobel Prize winner, showed that ducklings follow their mothers around shortly after hatching. He recognized this to reflect a species recognition process he called imprinting. This led to the documentation of a sensitive period of time during early development in which important learning is established in many species. Since that time many have pointed to imprinting--like phenomena as a typical mechanism for species recognition and the later identification of appropriate mates. Certainly work in autism and other fields of human development have demonstrated particular sensitivities for important kinds of learning during early human development. Most researchers believe that the evidence points to a sensitive period for the acquisition of human language during early childhood. Acquisition of a second language  during adulthood appears to be more difficult, and perfecting a native accent from a language learned later in life proves most often to be extremely difficult. This has led to many kinds of early intervention projects, and to early immersion language learning experiences being offered at fairly early agents.

So, now we learn that human babies learn to discriminate fine-grained differences in human faces before their first year of life is over. This would lead one to speculate that this quasi-imprinting phenomenon might have something to do with later kin recognition, ideals of beauty, mate selection, and even evolutionary adaptations such as selection and pressure for skin color in humans. The obvious implication is that it forms one aspect of what will later be called racial discrimination.

Certainly racial discrimination, both overt and nonconscious, leads to all sorts of social difficulty in inclusive modern societies. It is also clear that making fine discriminations among one's own tribe or clan would be important in facilitating social organization and communication in the long prehistoric evolution and adaptation of our species. However, a sense of group identity can lead people to make unfortunate choices in modern society where we all hope that merit will determine advancement as opposed to mere perceptual familiarity.

If the foregoing it is true, it does appear that other aspects of modern life might be at work in undermining some of this nonconscious  influence of early learning on the later social choices. In Western societies, not only are infants exposed routinely to a much greater variety of facial and physical variation in human form and color, but this diversity is now brought directly into the home via television and other forms of electronic and information technology. Of course, babies do tend to be nearsighted and best able to see the faces of those who hold them, feed them, and nurture them. Perhaps new mothers with smart phones and tablet computers should regularly share media with babies with the aim of exposure to new faces in entertainment and during communication with other smart-device using friends and associates.

As world population and human mobility grow and we find ourselves more and more leaving rural settings for our ever growing cities, anything we can do to emphasize the positive aspects of diversity and cooperation will be of benefit to everyone. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but familiarity, it seems, trains the eye.

Twitter / @justinwolfers: Growth in real government ...

Twitter / @justinwolfers: Growth in real government ...: "Growth in real government spending per capita over the first Presidential term. Facts are stubborn things. pic.twitter.com/bLXgIJur
"

'via Blog this'

How Long Can Limbaugh Spew Without Advertisers?

ThinkProgress has reported that 50 companies requested their advertising be pulled from the Rush Limbaugh show following his sexist attacks on Sandra Fluke. The publication of the memo adds an additional 90 companies to the list of companies that have dropped Limbaugh:

21st Century Insurance • Hotels.com • Rite Aid • Ace Hardware • Honda • Robitussin • Acura • IBM • Sam Adams • Advance Auto Parts • Icy Hot • Sam’s Club • Advil (All products) • Intuit/Small Business • Schiff – Digestive Advantage • Alacer/Emergen-C • Schiff – Mega Red • Allegra (all products) • Johnson & Johnson (All Brands) • Schiff – Move Free • Kohl’s • Schiff – Sustenex • Ally Bank • La Quinta • Scotts Miracle-Gro (all products) • American Express • Lifetime • Autozone • Little Caesars • Sony • Lowe’s • State Farm • British Petroleum • Luxottica • Staples • Bullfrog Sunblock • Macy’s • Sterling/Kay Jared Jewelers • Caltrate • MasterCard • Subway • Centrum • McDonalds • Takeda Uloric • Chapstick • Midas • The Home Depot • Clorox (Pinesol/Homecare) • Napa Auto Parts • ThermaCare • Cortizone • National Realtor • Toyota • DeVry • NBC-TV • Discover Card • Office Depot • Twinings of London • Domino’s Pizza • Office Max • Tyson/Wright Brand Bacon • Exxon/Exxon Mobil • One Main Financial • Unisom • Farmers Insurance • United Healthcare • Ford • Orkin • U.S. Army • Outback • U. S. Postal Service • General Motors (All products -GM Certified Service • Chevy • Onstar • Cadillac • etc) • Preparation H • Visa • Gold Bond (all products • ProNutrients (all products) • Walgreens • Grainger • Progressive Insurance • Wal-Mart • Green Mountain Coffee • Prudential • Wells Fargo • Hallmark • Radio Shack • Wrigley • H&R Block • Rent-A-Center • Yahoo!

Check out all 140 companies (plus their statements, when available) on our Pinterest.

Friendly modern banking.

http://twitter.com/Arasmus/status/158241839709814787/photo/1

2011, A YEAR WITHOUT PITY

Corruption by money (read easy credit) is the way of the world at this point in history. The question is, from whence came the money to be borrowed and from whom were the bribes offered. It is easy to see the sources in the US. Credit comes from banks (e.g., credit cards and home loans and second home loans and so on until there is no equity left). Credit terms started easy, and Americans learned to charge the purchases with no thought for tomorrow when even credit card debt was tax deductible. This ended about 25 years ago when the tax law was changed. By then it was too late.

People were used to credit card purchases, and even young people who had never experienced the previous generous government subsidy of borrowing saw their elders doing it and figured it must be OK because nobody seemed upset by the terms of use of credit cards. They mistook habit for wisdom. More recently additional changes to the laws and terms of lending by banks resulted in consumer credit becoming a life long encumbrance because the credit card debt would remain even after bankruptcy, and penalties and fees were added for almost anything the banks could think of.

Of course, banks are run by people. These people and their stockholders were given additional freedom to gamble with the guaranteed profits they derived from the debts of the people. Laws were changed that would permit banks to play the market with paper profits and very little cash on hand. The people running the banks, of course, were granted rich bonuses for the clever ways they manipulated money and sold worthless bonds to nation states (like Greece). These bank and investment house mamagers, whom we can call capitalists or the 1%, knew where to put their personal funds in the markets they created; boy did they ever. Among the most egregious investment strategies was the default swap option, in which one could bet that the securities sold to others would defalt and reap even larger gains (again guaranteed gains because the banks knew the securities they were selling were actually worthless because they made them that way). This is the recent sad story of debt. The story is even worse than this, of course, because with people and nation states forced to pay down debt, there is no money to invest in the infrastructure that would generate recovery, provide paychecks for workers to buy things, and last but not least, increase tax collections so that the nations could pay down the sovereign debt.

So, as Polonius said, "neither a lender nor a borrower be," right? Alas no, there is only one way to decrease debt AND produce economic recovery at the same time, and that is for public debt to be allowed to increase even further to create infrastructure jobs that will float the increased economic activity that can fund paying down debts. Then, a little planned inflation could lift some of the burden of the debt by paying it off with cheaper money. The alternative is to squeeze it out of the few who continue to work, and that takes a very very long time to result in a sufficiently large decrease in public debt that renewed infrastructure investment becomes attractive to both government and the private sector. The collateral effect of national austerity is pain for the working segment and much much worse for the unemployed.