The ACA Reconsidered‏

The estimated "tax penalty" for not having insurance under the ACA in 2016 will be $1450.

Several articles have been discussing the status of Obamacare, the Affordable Care Act (ACA)

The fact is that Obamacare has fallen apart without Republicans’ dismantling it. Almost all of its basic promises have failed, it is an economic shambles, and it is a political mess.

The ACA combines compulsory coverage of pre-existing conditions with a weak mandate that healthier people subsidize those conditions. But that mandate is self-defeating, guaranteeing coverage whenever the patient is afflicted. So not signing up has no risk.
As James Freeman reports in the Wall Street Journal, the ACA’s plethora of exemptions — there are at least 30 of them — ensure that a great many people — 12 million last year — will simply opt out. “It is easy to avoid or limit exposure to the penalty with some simple tax planning,” he writes. In 2016, there were supposed to be 21 million people enrolled in ACA programs; the Obama administration currently predicts that the actual number will be somewhat less than half of that.

Co-ops were created to avoid those insurers afflicted with the dreaded profit motive. Half of the co-ops have gone belly-up already, including large, prominent, splendidly subsidized ones in Kentucky, New York, Louisiana, and South Carolina. Hundreds of thousands of customers have lost their coverage as a result. Hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayers’ money has been poured into these enterprises, to no avail.
Kevin D. Williamson writes, "markets work for most people, and of course there are exceptions to that. For 93 percent of the population, the solution to health-care reform is: Let markets do their thing. The only real argument is how big a check to write to those looking after the other 7 percent, and how to structure the payments."

Is There Anyone Less Like the Average Person Than a Fashon Model?

For some reason we are enamored with "models" as a new "conceptual framework." The prominent model is the Climate Change Model where numbers are collected and put into a software program which extrapolates temperatures into the future. Brave stuff, picking a few decades of arbitrary measurements in a history of billions of years and concluding that we must deconstruct all the successful economies and stunt the growing ones to Lord-knows-what deprivation.
It must be the software; the software must give people confidence. After all we have had a zillion models in the past: Heliocentric Universe Models, Ptolemaic Models, Divine Right of Rule Models, Imitative Magic Models, Newtonian Gravitational Model, Alchemy Models, Recapitulation (Biogenetic Law) Model, Lamarckian Model, Phlogiston Model, the Miasma Model, Dalton's Atomic Model, Preformation Models, the Classical Elements Model, Geocentric Universe Model, Steady State Model, the Freudian Model, Phrenology Models, Flat Earth Model, Dialectic Materialism Models, QE/Inflation model, Expanding Earth Model......
It must be the software.

Cab Thoughts 12/16/15

The greatest obstacle to discovering the shape of the earth, the continents, and the oceans was not ignorance but the illusion of knowledge. -Daniel J. Boorstin, historian, professor, attorney, and writer (1914-2004)


Pfizer, one of America's largest pharmaceutical companies, is in talks to acquire Ireland's Allergan and cease being a U.S.-based company. According to the Wall Street Journal, Pfizer CEO Ian Read was "unapologetic about his desire to reduce Pfizer's tax rate, saying Thursday that U.S. corporate tax rates have put the company at a disadvantage with its foreign rivals."
Our 35% corporate rate (39.1% including state taxes) is the highest of any industrialized nation and third highest in the world.
Only Chad and the United Arab Emirates levy higher tax rates on corporations. 

Is there anybody who does not think such a situation will cause a reaction in those affected.

 

A book called "Mudslingers" by Kevin Swint reports that, something like 65 years ago, a politician attacked his campaign opponent as an "extrovert" with a "homo sapiens" brother and a "thespian" sister. The point seems to have been to appeal to ugly prejudices of voters who were sufficiently uneducated to know what the words meant. And apparently some voters didn't.

Who is....Norman Borlaug?

 

Mt Everest:  29,029 feet. More than 5,000 people have climbed Everest and 219 have died trying. About 77 percent of those ascents have been accomplished since 2000. In 2007, a record number of 633 ascents were recorded.  Mount Everest has two main climbing routes, the southeast ridge from Nepal and the north ridge from Tibet. Today, the southeast ridge route, which is technically easier, is more frequently used.
The northern approach was discovered in 1921 by George Mallory during the British Reconnaissance Expedition, which was an exploratory expedition, not intended to attempt the summit. Mallory was famously, perhaps apocryphally, quoted as answering the question "Why do you want to climb Mount Everest?" with the reply "Because it's there."
Mariana Trench is the deepest point on earth's surface, this trench lies in Pacific Ocean, at Challenger Deep. Located at a depth of about 10.91 km or 11,033 meter below sea level, deeper than Everest is high.

Minimum wage legislation has a twisted history. For example, there is debate over the effect of such laws on low wage earners. Yet it is generally agreed upon that the Davis-Bacon Act-the first federal minimum-wage law-was passed in part to prevent southern black workers from taking construction jobs from unionized white workers up north, that is to limit employment opportunities by lower wage competitors.

 
Desultory: adj:1. digressing from or unconnected with the main subject; random: a desultory remark. 2. lacking in consistency, constancy, or visible order, disconnected; fitful: desultory conversation. ety: Desultory finds its roots in the Latin word dēsultor, a term referring to a circus rider who jumps from one horse to another. It entered English in the mid-1500s.

 

Here's a creepy sign. Pension advances are complex products that offer retirees a lump-sum cash advance in exchange for all, or part, of their future pension payments. Consumer groups say they are pitched disproportionately to retired military members and federal retirees. Future Income Payments is just one of the companies that offer such products. In a 2014 report, the Government Accountability Office identified 38 companies that had recently offered pension advances. At least 30 of the 38 companies were affiliated with one another in some way, sharing a parent company, a broker or another business relationship. One company offers you an advance on your pension then charges you over 500% interest on the advance.

 

Good news. The world is falling apart but the two democrat candidates for president have declared their opposition to high ATM fees. The Rube-publicans probably have a plan they will probably discuss later, maybe.

 

The Antikythera mechanism  is not an isolated miracle. One of the most prolific inventors of Hellenistic times was Ctesibius of Alexandria who lived during the 3rd century BC. He worked on pneumatics and hydraulics. The 'Ctesibius pump' is a hand-operated pressure pump that used air pressure to raise water within a system of two cylinders, then forcing it out. The pump worked with levers moved from the outside: the levers were connected with non-return valves (pistons) that sealed perfectly at the inside of each cylinder. On the upstroke, vacuum and suction of the water were produced; on the downstroke, water was sent up through the second pipe, causing its continuous outflow with force.This was, exactly, the principle on which 18th-century double water pumps were based. These principles led to a hydraulic pipe-organ and "Hero's engine," an actual steam engine that was used in Alexandria--I believe it could open and close doors.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2012/07/violence-and-immitative-magic.html

 

 

The general lesson is that if some part of government fails in its function, it will most likely be given greater funding and power.  Of course, the purpose of this is not to reward failure; the thinking would be that more money and power will enable the agency to solve the problem.  But the effect is that government grows when social problems grow, and thus it is not in the government's interests to solve society's problems.--Michael Huemer

 

Sunday evening on October 30, 1938 was prime-time in the golden age of radio, and millions of Americans had their radios turned on. But most of these Americans were listening to ventriloquist Edgar Bergen and his dummy "Charlie McCarthy" on NBC and only turned to CBS at 8:12 p.m. after the comedy sketch ended and a little-known singer went on. So they missed the introduction to the CBS program that started at 8. It went:  "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater on the air in 'War of the Worlds' by H.G. Wells." The story of the invasion from Mars started as interruptions in a regular sounding evening music show. Perhaps as many as a million radio listeners believed that a real Martian invasion was underway. Panic broke out across the country. In New Jersey, terrified civilians jammed highways seeking to escape the alien marauders. People begged police for gas masks to save them from the toxic gas and asked electric companies to turn off the power so that the Martians wouldn't see their lights.

 

Changes in the tax laws have encouraged people to report income as personal rather than corporate income.  Their incomes haven't really changed; it just looks to policymakers like they have.

 

In 1325, Ibn Battuta embarked on an extraordinary 75,000-mile (120,675-km) journey via Mecca to Egypt, East Africa, India, and China. He set out at age 21 and returned home some 30 years later. No other medieval traveler is known to have journeyed so extensively. The details of his travels are recorded in a narrative titled The Adventures of Ibn Battuta. His inventions and academic work are also renowned. His writings, translated of course, are a bit mundane bit this is what he wrote of the Plague of 1348 (he was in Damascus during a fast proclaimed to protect the city from the plague): "They then returned to the city and held the Friday service, and God lightened their affliction; for the number of deaths in a single day at Damascus did not attain two thousand, while in Cairo and Old Cairo it reached the figure of twenty-four thousand a day."

 

Norman Borlaug - a man whose name is barely known - used genetic engineering to help make wheat sturdier and more resistant to disease, thereby affording far more to eat and counteracting famine in developing countries. It is said he saved as many as a billion lives.
 

According to the study, by University of Chicago researchers Bruce Meyer and Nikolas Mittag, survey respondents in deep poverty reported only 52 percent of government resources they received. Considering all people in poverty, survey data captured only 46 percent of government assistance. The implication was that poverty researchers - who often recalculate the poverty rate to include income from programs that the official metric ignores - have been reporting bad numbers.

 

Affect and effect: Most of the time, you'll want affect as a verb meaning to influence something and effect for the something that was influenced.  A trick is to remember that affect comes first alphabetically, and an action (to affect) has to occur before you can have a result (an effect).

 

AAaaaaaannnnnddddd.... a picture of the crowd climbing Everest in 2013:

Henhouse Foxes‏

Reuters has an article on the difficulty in regulating anything. The concern over the chickens' safety always seems to attract thoughtful, ideological foxes who are eager to staff the ad hoc committees. Here is a segment:


This spring, traders and analysts working deep in the global swaps markets began picking up peculiar readings: Hundreds of billions of dollars of trades by U.S. banks had seemingly vanished.

The vanishing of the trades was little noted outside a circle of specialists. But the implications were big. The missing transactions reflected an effort by some of the largest U.S. banks — including Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Citigroup, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley — to get around new regulations on derivatives enacted in the wake of the financial crisis, say current and former financial regulators.

The trades hadn’t really disappeared. Instead, the major banks had tweaked a few key words in swaps contracts and shifted some other  trades to affiliates in London, where regulations are far more lenient. Those affiliates remain largely outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators, thanks to a loophole in swaps rules that banks successfully won from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) in 2013.

Many of the CFTC employees who were lobbied in these meetings went on to work for banks. Between 2010 and 2013, there were 50 CFTC staffers who met with the top five U.S. banks 10 or more times. Of those 50 staffers, at least 25 now work for the big five or other top swaps-dealing banks, or for law firms and lobbyists representing these banks.

The lobbying blitz helped win a ruling from the CFTC that left U.S. banks’ overseas operations largely outside the jurisdiction of U.S. regulators. After that rule passed, U.S. banks simply shipped more trades overseas. By December of 2014, certain U.S. swaps markets had seen 95 percent of their trading volume disappear in less than two years.
......



After the crisis, Congress and regulators sought to rein in this risk, and the banks fought back. From 2010 to 2013, when the CFTC was drafting new rules, representatives of the five largest U.S. banks met with the regulator more than 300 times, according to CFTC records. Goldman Sachs attended at least 160 of those meetings.

Many of the CFTC employees who were lobbied in these meetings went on to work for banks. Between 2010 and 2013, there were 50 CFTC staffers who met with the top five U.S. banks 10 or more times. Of those 50 staffers, at least 25 now work for the big five or other top swaps-dealing banks, or for law firms and lobbyists representing these banks.


......



The U.S. derivatives market has shrunk but remains large, with outstanding contracts worth $220 trillion at face value. And the top five top banks account for 92 percent of that.

In 2009, President Barack Obama tapped Gary Gensler, then 51 years old, to chair the CFTC. Liberals grumbled about Gensler’s résumé. The son of a cigarette and pinball-machine salesman in working class Baltimore, Gensler, at 30, had become the youngest banker ever to make partner at Goldman Sachs.

Among other jobs, he oversaw the bank’s derivatives trading in Asia. Later, as an undersecretary of the Treasury, Gensler helped push through the 2000 law that had banned regulation of derivatives markets.

Kenneth Raisler, a former Enron lobbyist representing JP Morgan, Citigroup, and Bank of America, argued in a letter that the CFTC should allow U.S. banks to do things overseas “even if those activities were not permissible for a U.S. bank domestically.”


--From the Reuters article: "U.S. Banks Moved Billions of Dollars in Trades beyond Washington's Reach" 

Student Loans

In 2010, Obama signed a law federalizing the student loan program, claiming that the banks were needless middlemen and that the government could just lend the money directly and save truckloads of money. Critics said that the Education Department is ill-equipped to identify risks when making loans. Easy terms and high default rates forced the Congressional Budget Office recently to increase the program's cost by 7 billion — a 30% jump. The New York Fed reports that 11.5% of student loan debt was more than three months past due in Q2 of this year, which was up from Q1. By comparison, the 90-day delinquency rate on credit card debt is just 8.4%. The Department of Education that 6.9 million people haven't made a student loan payment in more than 360 days, which is up 6% from the year before.
Enrollment in income-based loan programs — which base monthly payments on current income and forgive any remaining debt after 20 years — exploded 56% in just the past year. The amount of direct federal student loan debt has climbed more than 600%. The Department of Education now manages a loan portfolio bigger than the entire loan business of JPMorgan Chase.

Sunday 12/13/15

Today's gospel is one of those rare events where Christ does not appear. Instead there are interchanges between the people and John the Baptist:

The crowds asked John the Baptist,
“What should we do?”
He said to them in reply,
“Whoever has two cloaks
should share with the person who has none.
And whoever has food should do likewise.”
Even tax collectors came to be baptized and they said to him,
“Teacher, what should we do?”
He answered them,
“Stop collecting more than what is prescribed.”
Soldiers also asked him,
“And what is it that we should do?”
He told them,
“Do not practice extortion,
do not falsely accuse anyone,
and be satisfied with your wages.”




These simple admonitions were so revolutionary for the times the people thought that John might be God. 

Cab Thoughts 12/12/15

"But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought."- George Orwell, 1984




The Island of Funen, which has fewer than 500,000 inhabitants, is dense with Renaissance castles and pastel-washed villages, briny little fishing ports and ripe meadows that roll out in long, green flanks to meet the northern sky. But a big part of Funen’s fairy-tale cred is the fact that the island was the boyhood home of Hans Christian Andersen, his first muse and enduring inspiration. Andersen’s mother was an alcoholic washerwoman; his father was a poor cobbler who died when Andersen was 11; his aunt ran a brothel in Copenhagen. Andersen himself, despite his fame, was isolated by his early traumas. The loneliness is captured in his fairy tales, which are considered adult fiction in Denmark. All of Andersen’s lost boys and girls—the abandoned Little Match girl; the Little Mermaid who sacrifices her tongue in the original version—stay fixed in the memory because they are the emblems of our own early sorrows. (This is from a travel article on Funen)

The Church of England began in schism when Henry VIII broke with Rome after Pope Clement VII refused to approve his divorce from Catherine of Aragon and his marriage to Anne Boleyn. This new pope is discussing serious changes in Catholic thought. So, if the Church decides to accept divorce now, was the Church wrong then?

Just because many successful people failed in early efforts, that does not necessarily mean that failure leads to success. And it certainly doesn't mean it is a prerequisite.

Cruelty grows anywhere and is open-minded about its targets. Bloemfontein is popularly and poetically known as "the city of roses", owing to the abundance of these flowers and the annual rose festival held there. (The city's Sesotho name is Mangaung, meaning "place of cheetahs," perhaps a better name.) During the Boer War, British forces captured the city and built a concentration camp nearby to house Boer women and children. The National Women's Monument, on the outskirts of the city, pays homage to the 26,370 women and children as well as 1,421 old men^. (Also 14,154 black people, though some sources feel that the records are unsatisfactory, and that this number could be as high as 20,000) who died in these camps in various parts of the country.

I have been reading Furst's WWII spy stories. They are wonderful in their atmosphere, their reflection of that time of fear and hope before the war. And one strange element: There is little depth. It is unapologetic, too. This was a time--and a people--of circumstance. That terrible vulnerability gives each story its power.

"None" is a pronoun most of the time. It means nothing, zero, no one, or not any part. Some believe it can only be singular in construction, but that is not true. Most seem to think that because none can mean ‘not one’ that it is always singular, but none can also mean ‘not any’. See the examples for uses in plural or singular. E.G.:

"Perhaps none is more vulnerable than James, a soft-spoken 19-year-old who is quick to flash a smile that would melt ice."

"Based on the forecasts that we have gotten so far this year, none of them were very close to what the game conditions were."

Howard Hughes was a successful Hollywood movie producer when he founded the Hughes Aircraft Company in 1932. He personally tested cutting-edge aircraft of his own design and in 1937 broke the transcontinental flight-time record. In 1938, he flew around the world in a record three days, 19 hours, and 14 minutes.

Recapitulation, also known as the biogenetic law, states that the stages in an organism's embryonic development and differentiation (ontogeny) correspond to the stages of evolutionary development characteristic to its species (phylogeny). Ernst Haeckel, who proposed the theory in 1866, produced a number of controversial embryo drawings to support this premise. So the embryo stages are a reflection of the species historic phases. No one believes this anymore but it was very popular for a while.

China's "population policy" was not the first effort by a state to manipulate population numbers. In the late 19th century the French saw a shift in the balance of power in Europe away from them and toward Germany. German population was growing with its industry. The French government wanted to do something to encourage more French babies so it came up with a series of modest financial bonuses for families who had children, along with a public relations campaign "talking up" the importance of the French family. As a policy it wasn't terribly effective but the broader ramifications were considerable as it marked the introduction of modern population policy.
After WWII the emphasis shifted the other way--not to imply a faddish or superficial element in government thinking. In 1968, Stanford University professor Paul R. Ehrlich published the best-selling book The Population Bomb in which he warned that overpopulation would soon lead to mass starvation. Birth control became a cornerstone of U.S. foreign aid policy.
In the late 1970s, Indira Gandhi, then prime minister of India, introduced a program that involved the involuntary sterilization of many men and women.

Terrorism is an old game.

'My object was to terrorize so as to force society to look attentively at those who suffer.' Thus spake  Ravachol, a Frenchman born François Koeningstein (he took his mother's name, Ravachol, although it sounds like a corrosive) who so typified the crazed bomb-throwing anarchist that his name became a verb.

In the late 1800s, the harsh oppression of factory workers and the new specter of unemployment and homelessness spawned in backlash, "anarchism." The Anarchists believed that with Property, the monarch of all evil, eliminated, no man could again live off the labour of another, and human nature would be released to seek its natural level of justice among men. The vision was of a stateless society, without government, without law, without ownership of property, in which, corrupt institutions having been swept away, man would be free to be good as God intended him. Six heads of state were assassinated for its sake in the twenty years before 1914. They were President Carnot of France in 1894, Premier Canovas of Spain in 1897, Empress Elizabeth of Austria in 1898, King Humbert of Italy in 1900, President McKinley of the United States in 1901, and another Premier of Spain, Canalejas, in 1912. Not one could qualify as a tyrant.

But random destruction is meaningful if one assumes an underlying nascent order of things.

Attorney General Loretta Lynch will release the first wave of 46,000-plus federal inmates, whose sentences were slashed, in the largest mass prison release ever. The mass release, which represents half the federal prison population of drug offenders, is part of President Obama's "criminal justice reform." Under new administration guidelines, criminal sentences were retroactively cut by an average 25 months as a way to make punishment for drug crimes "fair" to minorities, whom Obama says are disproportionately affected by mandatory-minimum sentences. Three-fourths of the parolees are minorities. So the judicial system is trumped by the executive?

Who is....Henry the Navigator?

Photography was a 'wet' art when George Eastman carried the large, heavy equipment necessary for photography on his vacation to Santo Domingo in1878. But Eastman  read about gelatin emulsions capable of remaining light-sensitive after drying. Working at night, in his mother's kitchen, he began to experiment with his own varieties. A natural-born tinkerer, Eastman took less than two years to invent both a dry plate formula and a machine that fabricated dry plates. The Eastman Dry Plate Company was born.  In 1884, Eastman invented roll film; four years later he came up with a camera capable of taking advantage of that roll. In 1888, that camera became commercially available.

Golden oldie:

http://steeleydock.blogspot.com/2013/04/in-academic-political-dmz.html

Tribes in the central Sahara, lacking in gold, salt and other precious commodities, made the slave trade their principle source of wealth, trading over four million slaves from the seventh to the fifteenth centuries AD, sometimes in caravans of over 10,000 camels. In 1444, Europeans entered the business, beginning a lucrative practice that eventually sent millions of slaves to Europe and the Americas. Under Prince Henry the Navigator, Portugal pioneered major advances in shipbuilding and navigation. The Portuguese fleet was equipped with newly designed caravels, which were highly maneuverable and ideally suited for reconnaissance along unknown coasts. In 1434, a Portuguese crew sailed around Cape Bojador and returned safely against the wind. By 1445, Portuguese mariners reached the mouth of the Senegal River which traditionally marked the boundary between the Berber and Arab tribes of the Sahara and 'the Land of the Blacks'. In 1444, a Portuguese official, Lancarote de Freitas, backed by a consortium of merchant-adventurers from the Algarve port of Lagos, mounted an expedition of six caravels to islands on the Arguin Bank with the express purpose of capturing slaves. Their arrival onshore on 8 August 1444 became a public spectacle, watched by crowds of Lagos residents. Prince Henry himself was on hand to supervise the proceedings, mounted on a horse. The captives were marched to an open space outside one of the town gates and divided into five groups. One group of forty-six of the best slaves was set aside for Henry for his share of the booty. The remainder were either retained by their new owners or put up for auction.

Root beer is a dark brown sweet beverage traditionally made using the root or bark of the tree Sassafras albidum (sassafras) or the vine Smilax ornata (sarsaparilla) as the primary flavor. Root beer may be alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and may be carbonated or non-carbonated. Most root beer has a thick foamy head when poured. Modern, commercially produced *root beer* is generally sweet, foamy, carbonated, and non-alcoholic, and is flavored using artificial sassafras.

In the newer culture of America few such signs [...of monopoly...] had been erected; from the sheer lack of organized monopolists, old monopolies could not be perpetuated. America broke down distinctions: where life was full of surprises, of unexplored wilderness, and of unpredictable problems, its tasks could not be neatly divided for legal distribution.  Any man who preferred the even tenor of his way, who wished to pursue his licensed without the competition of amateurs, intruders, or vagrants, or who was unwilling to do jobs for which he had not been legally certified was better off in England.--Daniel Boorstin

By 1971, more than six hundred death courses were being offered across the United States, and five years later that number had nearly doubled. Now thousands of such classes can be found across disciplines from psychology to philosophy to medical science to sociology. Some colleges offer degree and certificate programs with death, dying, and bereavement concentrations, and increasingly, as at Kean University, undergraduates can take such classes as general electives. In 1985, two researchers from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette embarked on what would become a twenty-year study to solve this question: what kind of students take death education courses in college, and why? Sarah Brabant and Deann Kalich surveyed more than nine hundred students enrolled in Brabant's Sociology of Death and Dying course and found that nearly 24 percent wanted to deal with their own grief issues; but, most startlingly, close to half of the students surveyed had 'seriously contemplated committing suicide at some time in their lives.' Even more distressing, 10 percent of the students said they had actually tried to kill themselves at one point.

The first country to grant women the right to vote in the modern era was New Zealand in 1893.

According to the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "social expenditures" are expenditures that occur with the purpose of redistributing resources from one group to another, in order to benefit a lower-income or presumably disadvantaged population. These can be direct transfers or indirect. The U.S. has lower than most direct transfers but the indirect, through incentives, credits and private structures are high. Redistributive social spending in the US is indeed different from many other countries. But the overall magnitude is actually greater (both proportionally and in absolute terms) in the US than in almost all other countries measured. One can argue that the way that the wealth is redistributed through public policy in the US is "wrong" or "suboptimal." But, to argue that there is less redistribution as a result of public policy in the US than elsewhere is simply wrong.

In Washington, D.C., there has been an increase in homicides of more than 20% in neighborhoods across the city. Baltimore, a city of 600,000, is averaging more than one homicide a day—a rate higher than that of New York City, which has 13 times the people. Milwaukee’s murder rate has nearly doubled over the past year.

AAAAAnnnnnddddddd.....a portion of a report by a court Portuguese chronicler, Gomes Eanes de Zurara, in the Chronicle if Guinea on the arrival at the dock of Lagos of Lancarote de Freitas' first slaving voyage and the subsequent division of the slaves:  

These people, assembled together on that open place, were an astonishing sight to behold ... Some held their heads low, their faces bathed in tears as they looked at each other; some groaned very piteously, looking towards the heavens fixedly and crying out aloud, as if they were calling on the father of the universe to help them; others struck their faces with their hands and threw themselves full length on the ground; yet others lamented in the form of a chant, according to the custom of their native land, and though the words of the language in which they sang could not be understood by our people, the chant revealed clearly enough the degree of their grief. To increase their anguish still more, those who had charge of the division then arrived and began to separate them one from another so that they formed five equal lots. This made it necessary to separate sons from their fathers and wives from their husbands and brother from brother. No account was taken of friendship or relationship, but each one ending up where chance placed him ... 

"Dividing them up proved difficult:

For as soon as the children who had been assigned to one group saw the parents in another they jumped up and ran towards them; mothers clasped their other children in their arms and lay face down on the ground, accepting wounds with contempt for the suffering of their flesh rather than let their children be torn from them ...