Christmas Music

I absolutely hate the kind of Christmas music they play in stores.  The music, and decorations, and general atmosphere are so obnoxious that I always try to avoid setting foot in any retail establishment after Thanskgiving.

 

As I was walking back from the library today, I stopped inside a Dollar General, more out of anthropological curiousity than anything else.  I wanted to see wkat kind of things they would be selling.  Unfortnately, they were already playing Christmas music.  As I left, I heard the cashier talking to another customer.  The cashier was complaining about having to play the music, and wanted to play something else.  The customer agreed, and said that her six-year-old son also hated Christmas music in stores, and had specifically complained about it earlier.

 

I have never met anyone who likes this music.  Everyone I have ever talked to either hates it or finds it mildly distasteful.  So why do the stores keep playing it?  Some people might claim that the management is just being stupid, but any practice that survives for a long time in a competive industry must have some benefit.

 

Maybe the music actually is effective at getting a certain type of person to spend more money.  Maybe there are a sufficuent number of people out there who like it and enjoy the experience of shopping in stores that play it.  Maybe it works like advertising: people think they hate it, but it affects them subconsciously and gets them to spend money.  Maybe the fact that people hate it is what gives the benefits, and that their rush to get away from the insipid noise causes them to spend less time comparing prices or looking for good deals.

 

I wonder if any stores have actually done randomized controlled trials to see what kind of music boosts sales the most.  This library does not have the journal subscriptions the university does, so Google Scholar is mush less useful than normal, but a quick search and a look at abstracts seems to indicate that there is a little bit of academic research showing it works to boost sales.

 

What Would Jesus Buy?

Here's a good article that resists quoting and summarizing.  It discusses, among other things, the history of Christmas, burning Santa in effigy, and 'chav bling'.

Quick Observation

A slice of life in the USA: After a group of White and Black people finished their martial arts practice this afternoon, a group of Asians came into the gym and started playing badminton.

Dream Movie

I rarely remember my dreams.  Most of the ones I do recall are the 'normal' ones where I am doing something and interacting with the world.  But sometimes I have 'watching dreams' where I am doing nothing except watching events unfold.  In the dream, I usually feel like I am watching a movie.  I do not see any television set or screen or other spectators, but I am definitely watching something I know I am not a part of.  It is like I am a disembodied spirit just observing things, or like I am the only spectator in a large IMAX theater.

Last night, I was watching the part of 'The Return of the King' where Bilbo gets to Mount Doom and is attacked by Gollum.  In my dream version, Gollum got the ring away from Frodo, put it on, and was heading out the door.  I do not remember seeing Sam anywhere.

Then Gandalf showed up.  He could not see or stop Gollum, and tried to close the door to the cave ( There was no door in the movie but there was in the dream ).  He failed; Gollum managed to get there in time and stop the door from closing.  Then Gimli showed up, standing outside the door looking in.  He could not see Gollum, but he could talk to him.  

In my dream, Gollum was apparently a fallen goblin rather than a fallen Hobbit.  Gimli proceeds to give a talk that builds on the shared heritage of mountain-dwelling races, and convinces Gollum that his actions are misguided and wrong.  Gimli reminds Gollum of the joys of his former life in the sunlight with his family, comparing that to the state he has been reduced to by the Ring.  It went on for a while, and at the end, stricken with grief, Gollum jumps into the lava with the Ring.

I remember thinking "This is not what happened in the book.  But I am glad they gave Gimli this chance to shine, to make up for making him look bad in the rest of the movie."

I have no idea why my subconscious decided to rewrite the movie so that Gimli saves the day by delivering a Hannibal Lecture.

Criminal Justice Failures

When Obama was elected, I signed up for Change.org so I could sign all the libertarian petitions.  I still receive their weekly bulletin; it is a good look at the things that liberals consider to be the important issues of the day.  The last bulletin was noteworthy in that its top three stories were about how our criminal justice system is ruining lives:

Free Sex Trafficking Victim Sara Kruzan

At Change.org, we encounter a lot of stories of tragedy, injustice and triumph. None is more heart-wrenching than the story of Sara Kruzan.

Sara, who was once her elementary school's student body president, met the man who would become her pimp when she was just 11. After acting as the father figure she never had for two years, he raped Sara at age 13 and trafficked her into the commercial sex trade.

For the next 3 years, from 6pm to 6am, strangers would pay Sara's pimp to rape her and other adolescent girls he recruited and preyed upon.

Finally, physically and psychologically traumatized, Sara snapped. She shot and killed her pimp.

Her punishment? Life in prison without the possibility of parole.

The sentence was handed down by a judge in 1994 against the recommendation of the California Youth Authority, and before there was much awareness about the violence of child trafficking or an appreciation for the trauma of adolescent sexual and physical abuse.

More Here 

There is a constant joke about the Deep South, that it is a place where "He needed killin'." is a valid defense.  Well, sometimes it is.  Any sane criminal justice system would call this 'self defense' and release her, perhaps after a period of counseling and psychological evaluation.  She is not a threat to any law-abiding citizen.

Recovering from Wrongful Imprisonment

Gloria Killian spent more than 16 years behind bars for a murder she didn't commit, a victim of prosecutorial misconduct and admittedly false testimony from a man who had struck a deal with the state for a shorter sentence. Her conviction overturned in 2002, Killian has gone on to campaign on behalf of other women unjustly imprisoned.

This kind of thing is far too common.  The incentives for prosecutors are horrible: there is a constant pressure to convict, no good oversight, and no punishment for actions that would constitute perjury and criminal misconduct if committed by any other person.

Police Threaten Rape Victim

A South Carolina woman who reported being raped by a Marion police officer was subject to another assault when the officers who responded to her call threatened to put her in jail if she didn't recant her story. Instead, they forced her to write the following: "Though I didn't agree or consent to it (it) was not rape." Non-consensual sex is rape - there's no getting around it. And while the accused rapist has thankfully been sent on leave, the two officers who threatened to throw the victim in jail are sitting pretty. These officers need to be suspended for gross police misconduct pending investigation before they harass any other victims. 

Full Story 

This is the kind of thing that you would expect to see in a third world country.  It is clear that something is very wrong in the institutional structure of this police department.  American citizens simply should not be subjected to this kind of thuggish savagery from our police officers.

Sooner or later the liberals and progressives who follow these issues will realize that government is the problem, not the solution.  No matter how evil or corrupt they might be, businesses do not have access to violence and the power of the state.  True threats to liberty come from the corruption of people within the government.

But it may take a while.  People who get emotional involved in these kinds of issues often have no sense of perspective at all.  All too often, they utterly lack the ability to prioritize and focus on important things.  Here is another story from that same email:

Fighting Racist Mascots

 

The University of Illinois retired Chief Illiniwek, the college's costumed, dancing Native American mascot, in 2007 after pressure from the NCAA. But more than three years later, his ghost remains on campus. The administration has not named a new mascot and students still stage unofficial "chief" rallies, resurrecting a caricature that Native American groups have found offensive, racist and misleading. A coalition of student and community groups is pushing for a new mascot, saying this will help heal racial tensions and allow the campus to move on.

Seriously?  In the same email in which you bring serious abuses to light, you complain about a few college kids showing loyalty to an old mascot that some people find offensive?  This juxtaposition is an insult to the three women victimized by state power.  You will never get anything done if you waste time, attention, and moral authority with irrelevant things like this.

Momentous Fact

In Mexico, for instance, the fertility rate was 6.82 in 1970. It dropped to 5.3 in 1980, 3.61 in 1990, and 2.75 in 2000. It now sits at 2.1

Source

The Mexican fertility rate has fallen to the replacement level.  Think about that for a moment.  An important driving force behind a lot of issues, like illegal immigration, has stopped.  Assuming that the Mexican economy does not actually start to contract, there will be enough jobs for everyone and no supply of excess workers.

Actually, there have been relatively few Mexican immigrants for some time.  Most illegals come from much poorer, higher-fertility countries in Central America, and they just pass through Mexico.

I was quite surprised when I read this.  Most of my core knowledge about the world was formed sometime between 1990 and 2000, when I was in middle and high school.  I had internalized the idea that the Mexican fertility rate was between 3 and 4, and nothing had caused me to update those beliefs until now.

Bread Machine

I bought a bread machine on Saturday.  I got it at the thrift store for $5.  Then I bought about $40 worth of flour and yeast and other ingredients to make the bread.  My main goal with the bread machine was to get more sleep.  Instead of getting up at 6:00 to make oatmeal, eat it, and wash the pot, I could get up at 6:50, grab a fresh loaf of bread, and eat it in the car or my office. ( I am, in fact, still munching the bread as I write this.  Not even I can eat a 2 pound loaf of bread in one sitting. )

I know how to use a bread machine because I got one for my mother one for Christmas in 2005.  The one I got her was a really nice two-paddle machine that cost significantly more than $5.  It is quiet, reliable, and makes things that look like a real loaf of bread.  After experimenting with it, I developed a real taste for fresh bread.  The nice thing about bread machines is that you can make bread exactly the way you want it.  I usually make a dense, German-style loaf full of fruit and nuts, like the kind of artisanal breads that cost $5 a loaf

Mine is a one-paddle machine, which means that it makes a 'loaf' of bread that looks like a massive mutant muffin.  I tested the machine Saturday night, putting it on my kitchen table and setting it to finish making the bread at 9:00 AM Sunday.  But at 6:00 Sunday morning, I was awakened by a horrible racket in the kitchen.  It sounded like a cudgel-wielding dwarf barbarian locked in mortal combat with a steam-powered mechanical spider.  The noise was, of course, generated by the high-torque motor of the machine kneading the bread, which caused the machine to rock like an unbalanced washing machine.

The loaf of bread it produced in the end was perfectly good.  The appearance did not bother me and it tasted just like the bread from my mother's machine.  It was also much easier to get the loaf out of this machine than my mother's.  Because of the geometry, with more weight and less surface area, it slid right out, whereas with my mother's you sometimes have to bang the bread pan down to get the loaf out.  It also may have helped that this machine was very new; the previous owner had obviously used it very few times.

I am fairly sure that the noise was not due to a flaw of any kind; cheaper bread machines are usually loud like that.  If you had two closed doors and most of a house between your bed and the kitchen, it would not be a problem.  But I live in a one-bedroom apartment with no door, and maybe ten feet of distance, between my bed and the kitchen table.  Running the bread machine on the table every night would not have helped my goal of getting more sleep.

So I put the bread machine in my refrigerator.  This is not as crazy as it sounds.  I do not keep my refrigerator running; I have found that the noise and power consumption are not worth the benefits.  I do most of my cooking with nonperishable items, supplemented with the occasional trip to the store for the kind of fresh veggies that can be left out a few days.

This worked great.  The refrigerator muffled almost all of the noise, I did not lose any sleep, and I got a nice loaf of bread at 6:50.  When I opened the refrigerator door, a blast of hot, moist air fogged my glasses, but I did not notice any kind of condensation on the machine or the bread.

So my apartment now features a refrigerator that is not plugged in, with an extension cord running from behind the refrigerator and plugged into a smaller white power cord that disappears into the fridge door.  The vegetable drawer unit from the bottom of the fridge is sitting on top if the fridge; I had to remove it in order to make the bread machine fit.

The bread machine reinforces my decision not to run the fridge, because its function as a noise muffler is far more valuable than its function as a way to keep food cool.