The Immediate Object of Life

Smugglers are exploiting the political vacuum in Libya to transport Africans across the Mediterranean to Italy. Refugees from Syria’s civil war clamber into rubber dinghies at Turkish ports to reach Greek islands. Then they traverse the continent by the thousand, causing havoc at borders and leaving officials to choose between haplessness and brutality. Migrants who have endured the savagery of the Islamic State or the caprice of Eritrea’s police state find themselves tear-gassed by Macedonian police or evading the clutches of French security guards.

"Migration in Europe: Looking for a home," The Economist, Volume 416 Number 8953, August 29th-September 4th 2015, 41.

***

Unless suffering is the direct and immediate object of life, our existence must entirely fail of its aim. It is absurd to look upon the enormous amount of pain that abounds everywhere in the world, and originates in needs and necessities inseparable from life itself, as serving no purpose at all and the result of mere chance. Each separate misfortune, as it comes, seems, no doubt, to be something exceptional; but misfortune in general is the rule.

Schopenhauer, Arthur translated by Saunders, Thomas Bailey. Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1908, 11.

Just Ask Two Animals

The pleasure in this world, it has been said, outweighs the pain; or, at any rate, there is an even balance between the two. If the reader wishes to see shortly whether this statement is true, let him compare the respective feelings of two animals, one of which is engaged in eating the other.

Schopenhauer, Arthur translated by Saunders, Thomas Bailey. Studies in Pessimism: A Series of Essays. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1908, 12. 

Truth in Fiction

Some truths cannot be told except as fiction.

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002, 131.

I May Have Not Posted This (Or, Did Lord Jim Really Jump?)

These are strong arguments against free will; but recent scientific research has weakened it even more. In Benjamin Libet's work on 'the half-second delay', it has been shown that the electrical impulse that initiates action occurs half a second before we take the conscious decision to act. We think of ourselves as deliberating what to do, then doing it. In fact, in nearly the whole of our lives, our actions are initiated unconsciously: the brain makes us ready for action, then we have the experience of acting. As Libet and his colleagues put it:

" . . . the brain evidently 'decides' to initiate, or, at the least, prepare to initiate the act at a time before there is any reportable subjective awareness that such a decision has taken place . . . cerebral initiation even of a spontaneous voluntary act . . . can and usually does being unconsciously."

If we do not act in the way we think we do, the reason is partly to do with the bandwidth of consciousness - its ability to transmit information in terms of bits per second. This is much too narrow to be able to register the information we routinely receive and act on. As organisms active in the world, we process perhaps 14 million bits of information per second. The bandwidth of consciousness is around eighteen bits. This means we have conscious access to about a millionth of the information we daily use to survive.

The upshot of neuroscientific research is that we cannot be the authors of our own acts. Libet does retain a faint shadow of free will in his notion of the veto - the capacity of consciousness to stall or abort an act that the brain has initiated. The trouble is that we can never know when - of if - we have exercised the veto. Our subjective experience is frequently, perhaps always, ambiguous.

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002, 66-67.

An Irrational World and the Normal Madness

It is a strange fancy to suppose that science can bring reason to an irrational world, when all it can ever do is give another twist to the normal madness.

Gray, John. Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 2002, 28.

Ouch

Since Aug. 17, more than $2 trillion in market value has been wiped out of U.S. stocks.

Wei, Lingling and Iosebashvili, Ira. "Late Tumble Dashes Hope for Rebound" The Wall Street Journal., Wednesday, August 26, 2015, A1, Accessed on August 26, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/late-tumble-in-u-s-stocks-dashes-hopes-for-rebound-1440546405

Hatred is a Leech

Hatred is a leech:

The thing that sticks to a person's skin; that feeds off them and drains the sap out of one's spirit. It changes a person, and does not leave until it has sucked the last drop of peace from them. It clings to one's skin, the way a leech does, burrowing deeper and deeper into the epidermis, so that to pull the parasite off is to tear out that part of the flesh, and to kill it is self-flagellating.

Obioma, Chigozie. The Fishermen. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015, 207.

The Problem with Complex Systems

The expected move to free up more funds for lending—by reducing the deposits banks must hold in reserve—is directly aimed at countering the effects of a weaker currency, which could send more funds away from Beijing’s shores. The moves reflect an economy increasingly failing to cooperate with Chinese leaders’ playbook to control the world’s No. 2 economy.

Wei, Lingling and Magnier, Mark. "China's Economic Turmoil Spreads" The Wall Street Journal. Monday, August 24, 2015, A1, Accessed on August 24, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/china-to-flood-economy-with-cash-as-global-markets-lose-faith-1440380912

For decades now Beijing has been lauded for its management of the Chinese economy. But economies, as Taleb reminds us, aren't that amenable to being managed. They often fail to cooperate. In fact, the heavy hand of direction in any complex system seems to cause unforeseeable problems which we're only starting to see again in the world economy this week:

Evolution proceeds by undirected, convex bricolage or tinkering, inherently robust, i.e., with the achievement of potential stochastic gains thanks to continuous, repetitive, small, localized mistakes. What men have done with top-down, command-and-control science has been exactly the reverse: interventions with negative convexity effects, i.e., the achievement of small certain gains through exposure to massive potential mistakes. Our record of understanding risks in complex systems (biology, economics, climate) has been pitiful, marred with retrospective distortions (we only understand the risks after the damage takes place, yet we keep making the mistake), and there is nothing to convince me that we have gotten better at risk management.

Taleb, Nassim Nicholas. Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder. New York: Random House, 2012, 348.

It Was the Stupidest of Times

We may not be living in the worst of times, although a case might very well be made for it, but anyone with a thought in their head would be entitled to say that we’re living in the stupidest.

Haverty, Anne. "Book Review: 'Notes on the Death of Culture' by Mario Vargas Llosa" The Irish Times, Saturday, August 8, 2015, Accessed on August 20, 2015, http://www.irishtimes.com/culture/books/book-review-notes-on-the-death-of-culture-by-mario-vargas-llosa-1.2308929

A Short Introduction to Capital-Relief Trades

Capital-relief trades are opaque, little-disclosed transactions that make a bank look stronger by reducing its “risk-weighted” assets. That boosts key ratios that measure the bank’s capital as a percentage of those assets, even as capital itself stays at the same level.

In a capital-relief trade, a bank can keep a risky asset on the balance sheet, using credit derivatives or securitizations to transfer some of the risk to a hedge fund or other investor. The investor potentially gets extra yield and the credit risk of smaller borrowers in a way it would be hard for them to get otherwise, while the bank gets to remove part of the asset’s value from its closely watched “risk-weighted asset” count.

Banks say the trades help them manage their risk, even if they don’t go as far as a bona fide asset sale, and are just one tool among many they are using to meet new capital requirements.

[...]

Critics fear the trades can spread risk to unregulated parts of the financial system—just as similar trades did before the financial crisis.

Rapoport, Michael and Tracy, Ryan. "The Hot Thing for Wall Street Banks: Capital-Relief Trades" The Wall Street Journal., Tuesday, August 18, 2015, C1, Accessed on August 18, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hot-thing-for-wall-street-banks-capital-relief-trades-1439852844

Most Peculiar

To be the best Amazonians they can be, they should be guided by the leadership principles, 14 rules inscribed on handy laminated cards. When quizzed days later, those with perfect scores earn a virtual award proclaiming, “I’m Peculiar” — the company’s proud phrase for overturning workplace conventions.

Kantor, Jodie and Streitfeld, David. "Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace" The New York Times, August 15, 2015, Accessed on August 17, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/16/technology/inside-amazon-wrestling-big-ideas-in-a-bruising-workplace.html?_r=1

Same Sex Divorce

One Louisiana court processed a same-sex divorce before marrying its first same-sex couple. 

Ellis, Lindsay. "Supreme Court's Gay-Marriage Ruling Allows Something Else: Gay Divorce" The Wall Street Journal. Saturday, August 15, 2015, A3, Accessed on August 15, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/supreme-courts-gay-marriage-ruling-allows-something-else-gay-divorce-1439583846

A Feast of Blood Bread

The following is about the Arab conquest of northern Iran in the early eighth century. It relates the story of the proud, recalcitrant Turkish Chol dynasty who consistently reneged on their treaty obligations with the Arabs. So the Arabs had to forcefully subjugate them:

The region was left alone until the reign of Sulayman (715-17), who dispatched the redoubtable general Yazid ibn al-Muhallab to seek its submission. He besieged the incumbent monarch for several months, but was not able to obtain his surrender and agreed to leave on condition of payment of tribute. As soon as he had gone, the locals threw off their allegiance and killed the agent of the government who had been left behind. This provoked a furious reaction from Yazid, who fought them for months until they finally surrendered, and this time "he gibbeted their warriors" and, in fulfillment of an earlier threat, he made bread from their blood and ate it. Thus this country became part of the Arab Empire.

Hoyland, Robert G. In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford University Press, 2015, 118.

A War on Women

In the moments before he raped the 12-year-old girl, the Islamic State fighter took the time to explain that what he was about to do was not a sin. Because the preteen girl practiced a religion other than Islam, the Quran not only gave him the right to rape her — it condoned and encouraged it, he insisted.

He bound her hands and gagged her. Then he knelt beside the bed and prostrated himself in prayer before getting on top of her.

When it was over, he knelt to pray again, bookending the rape with acts of religious devotion.

“I kept telling him it hurts — please stop,” said the girl, whose body is so small an adult could circle her waist with two hands. “He told me that according to Islam he is allowed to rape an unbeliever. He said that by raping me, he is drawing closer to God,” she said in an interview alongside her family in a refugee camp here, to which she escaped after 11 months of captivity.

The systematic rape of women and girls from the Yazidi religious minority has become deeply enmeshed in the organization and the radical theology of the Islamic State in the year since the group announced it was reviving slavery as an institution. Interviews with 21 women and girls who recently escaped the Islamic State, as well as an examination of the group’s official communications, illuminate how the practice has been enshrined in the group’s core tenets.

Callimachi, Rukmini. "ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape" The New York Times. August 13, 2015, Accessed on August 13, 2015, http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/14/world/middleeast/isis-enshrines-a-theology-of-rape.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0

The Economist on Inversions

That giant sucking sound is the noise of American companies realising tax savings by redomiciling abroad. Terex, a cranemaker, is merging with Konecranes and moving its headquarters to Finland. CF Industries, a fertiliser-maker, and Coca-Cola Enterprises, a bottler, announced deals this month which redomicile them in Britain. American policymakers tried to stamp out such “inversions” last year, but firms still yearn to escape a combined federal and state corporate-tax rate of 39%, the OECD’s highest, and a worldwide tax net that scoops up foreign earnings when they are repatriated. (Most rich countries tax only domestic earnings.) Even if the rules are now tightened further, foreign companies still have every incentive to buy American targets and reap the same tax advantages by changing their domicile. Already this year foreign firms have shelled out $315 billion on such deals; the annual record, set in 2007, is $325 billion.

The Economist Espresso App, "Inverted reality: America's firms flee" Wednesday, August, 12, 2015, Accessed on August 12, 2015, https://espresso.economist.com/2fd5e234bd8230eaa4b1769f39d74864

Robert G. Hoyland on the Pre-Conquest Arab Peoples

They are very difficult to write about because the term the term "Arab" has, as one would expect, meant different things to different people at different times since it was first introduced into the historical record almost three millennia ago. A recent academic study into the nature of pre-Islamic Arabs concluded that they were nomadic, camel-rearing, religiously fanatical desert warriors, essentially lumping together all the stereotypes about them held by settled peoples, on whose writings the author had relied for his data. These stereotypes have endured into our age, reinforced by films such as Lawrence of Arabia, and so it is immensely difficult to persuade even educated people that Arabs were not all nomadic desert-dwellers, and indeed that some were sedentary and even members of the imperial elite. The idea of Arabia as a harsh unchanging desert world populated by only heroic, martial Bedouin has a romantic fascination for Western culture - and for many Middle Eastern societies too, which have regarded the Arabian deserts and their denizens as the source from whence they all hailed. In reality, Arabia has harbored a number of different peoples, some of which did not define themselves as Arabs, and some of which possessed advanced and complex cultures. It was also not as remote as is generally assumed, but was heavily exposed to the influences and machinations of empires and enjoyed mercantile contacts with other polities such as Ethiopia and India.

Hoyland, Robert G. In God's Hands: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. Oxford University Press, 2015, 21-22. 

Better to Be Lucky Than Right

Democrats cannot believe their luck.

The Economist Espresso App, "Life Imitates Satire: Donald Trump's Campaign" Monday, August 10, 2015, Accessed on August 10, 2015, https://espresso.economist.com/254e1e1ff2da526bc9a17e5f6b70d9df

Trump Carnivals

[T]he carnival atmosphere Mr. Trump has brought to the race.

O'Conner, Patrick, Hook, Janet & Ballhaus, Rebecca. "GOP Candidates Hold Raucous Debate" The Wall Street Journal. Friday, August 7, 2015, A1, Accessed on August 7, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/gop-candidates-hold-raucous-debate-1438914703

Deo volente there will be more. I'm going long on popcorn futures.

From Conquest

This book tells how a small party of well-led adventurers fought against a large static monarchy. It is also a study of a clash between two empires. Both were imaginative and inventive. Though different, they had some things in common: they held many things sacred, they had conquered others, they loved ceremonial. Both were by most standards cruel, but cultivated. Both intermittently dreamed of conquering what they thought of as "the world". Both were possessed of powerful beliefs which their leaders looked on as complete explanations of human life.

Thomas, Hugh. Conquest: Montezuma, Cortés, and the Fall of Old Mexico. New York: Simon & Shuster, 1993, xi.

That's the opening paragraph from Hugh Thomas's book on the conquest of Mexico. It pretty much sums up succinctly exactly why I find the subject of those wars so fascinating. A few years ago I read the accounts of the conquistadors and some other Hugh Thomas books. I plan on reading this one soon. After, of course, In God's Path: The Arab Conquests and the Creation of an Islamic Empire. 

I guess I like empire. 

A Taxing Problem

Also remember last year when Burger King, financed in part by Warren Buffett, said that its deal to buy donut-chain Tim Hortons and relocate to Canada wasn’t driven by lower taxes? Senate investigators, drawing on internal Burger King documents, report that while the merger was motivated by business considerations, the decision on where to locate the combined company’s headquarters had a lot to do with minimizing future tax bills. 

“Burger King calculated that pulling Tim Hortons into the worldwide U.S. tax net, rather than relocating to Canada, would destroy up to $5.5 billion in value over just five years,” according to the report. The company says that was merely a rough estimate, but that’s still enough to deter management from subjecting Hortons’s non-U.S. income to the U.S. tax code. 

Shareholders deserve nothing less from management than the Warren Buffett approach of paying the lowest possible legal tax rate. And shareholders demand it, which absent American tax reform will end up pushing more U.S. companies into foreign hands. 

[...] 

The ultimate losers in all of this aren’t so much the owners as American workers, who often lose their jobs when a company moves abroad. Sometimes layoffs are necessary, no matter who’s in charge. But job losses are greater when the company is run—not by the most competent manager—but by the one most able to exploit a government-created advantage. It’s well past time for our government to stop creating advantages for foreign competitors.

The Wall Street Journal. "Abetting a Foreign Takeover" Wednesday, August 5, 2015, Accessed on August 5, 2015, http://www.wsj.com/articles/abetting-foreign-takeovers-1438732072

Neither a Borrower Nor a Lender Be

"Invest portable property in a friend?" said Wemmick. "Certainly he should not. Unless he wants rid of the friend - and then it becomes a question how much portable property it may be worth to get rid of him."

Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. Oxford University Press: Oxford World's Classics, 2008, 266.