Violence against women

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The following are some facts about violence against women in the UK:

– A woman dies at the hands of a man every three days.
– 1,425 women were killed in the UK between 2009 and 2018.
– Almost all young women have experienced sexual harassment in public places.
– Almost one in three women will experience domestic abuse.
– Two women a week are killed by a current or former partner.
– Half a million women are raped or sexually assaulted every year, and 90% of the women know the man who raped them.

My comment: Epicureanism is a belief system that stresses kindness, thoughtfulness and consideration to everyone. It rejects chauvinism, sexism and racism and treats everyone as having equal rights. Thus, a man should be a gentleman and treat ladies accordingly. Unfortunately, men feel they are falling behind women, who are just as smart but who feel increasingly empowered. Good on them! Grow up, lads!

Bullying vs. transphobia: the Sussex culture war

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The University of Sussex, UK, has said it will not tolerate threats to “academic freedoms” amid calls for a professor to be sacked over her views on transgender issues.

Defenders of Professor Kathleen Stock, an expert in analytic philosophy, have claimed transgender activists have launched a campaign to “bully” her out of her role, The Telegraph said, distributing posters “which call on the university to fire” her over her views.

A group calling itself “Anti Terf Sussex” (Terf stands for trans exclusionary radical feminist) has described Stock as “one of this wretched island’s most prominent transphobes, espousing a bastardised variation of radical feminism in online posts.

In January, “hundreds of academics” criticised the decision to give her an OBE for services to higher education in the New Year honours list, The Guardian reported. In an open letter, they condemned Stock for using her status to “further gender oppression” and said they denounced “transphobia in all its forms”. (News carried by TheWeek)

My comment: Has anyone any idea what they are arguing about? It reminds me of a quote (which I cannot remember accurately) about academic quarrels mounting in virulence and loathing in inverse proportion to the importance of the issues.

216,000 children abused by French Catholic clergy

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I case you haven’t read the news, some 216,000 children – mostly boys – have been sexually abused by clergy in the French Catholic Church since 1950, a damning new inquiry has found. The head of the inquiry said there were at least 2,900-3,200 abusers, and accused the Church of showing a “cruel indifference towards the victims”. Pope Francis “felt pain” on hearing about the inquiry’s finding, a Vatican statement said.

One of those abused said it was time the Church reassessed its actions.
François Devaux, who is also the founder of the victims’ association La Parole Libérée (Freed speech), said there had been a “betrayal of trust, betrayal of morale, betrayal of children”.

The inquiry found the number of children abused in France could rise to 330,000, when taking into account abuses committed by lay members of the Church, such as teachers at Catholic schools.

For Mr Devaux it marked a turning point in France’s history: “You have finally given institutional recognition to victims of all the Church’s responsibility – something that bishops and the Pope have not yet been prepared to do.”

According to the Vatican statement, the Pope learnt about the report after he met visiting French bishops in the last few days.
“His first thoughts are for the victims, with a deep sadness for their wounds and gratitude for their courage in coming forward,” it read.
“His thoughts also turn to the Church in France, and that, in recognising these terrible events and united by the suffering of the Lord for his most vulnerable children, it can take the path of redemption.”

Pope Francis said he felt “deep sadness” for the victims after hearing about the inquiry, a statement said
The report’s release follows a number of abuse claims and prosecutions against Catholic Church officials worldwide.
The independent inquiry was commissioned by the French Catholic Church in 2018. It spent more than two-and-a-half years combing through court, police and Church records and speaking to victims and witnesses. Most cases assessed by the inquiry are thought to be too old to prosecute under French law.

The report, which is nearly 2,500 pages long, said the “vast majority” of victims were boys, many of them aged between 10 and 13.
It said the Church had not only failed to prevent abuse but had also failed to report it, at times knowingly putting children in contact with predators.
“There was a whole bunch of negligence, of deficiency, of silence, an institutional cover-up,” the head of the inquiry, Jean-Marc Sauvé, told reporters on Tuesday. Until the early 2000s, the Church had shown “deep, total and even cruel indifference” towards victims. “The victims are not believed, are not listened to. When they are listened to, they are considered to have perhaps contributed to what they had happen to them,” he explained. He added that sexual abuse within the Catholic Church continued to be a problem.

While the commission found evidence of as many as 3,200 abusers – out of a total of 115,000 priests and other clerics – it said this was probably an underestimation. “The Catholic Church is, after the circle of family and friends, the environment that has the highest prevalence of sexual violence,” the report said.

Olivier Savignac, head of victims association Parler et Revivre (Speak out and Live again), was abused at the age of 13 by the director of a Catholic holiday camp in the south of France. He told the Associated Press news agency that before the abuse, he had thought of the priest as “someone who was good, a caring person who would not harm me”. We keep this, it’s like a growing cyst, it’s like gangrene inside the victim’s body and the victim’s psyche,” he said.

The inquiry found that about 60% of the men and women who were abused had gone on to “encounter major problems in their emotional or sexual lives”.

This was over 70 years ago and more than half the cases were before 1970. But still – for many French this will be the moment they wake up to the sheer scale of the phenomenon of Church sexual abuse. What was once anecdotal and prurient is suddenly a defining feature of society.

The burden of the report is that ad-hoc expressions of repentance and a bit of tinkering with ecclesiastical structures are no longer good enough.

There has to be recognition that sexual abuse of youngsters by priests was systematic. It was the Church – not rogue individuals – that was responsible.
Many in the Church will be horrified by what they discover. Many will welcome the moment as a catharsis. As Sister Veronique Margron, president of the Conference of Religious Orders, put it: “If the Church must tremble, well let it tremble.” (An edited version of an article by Hugh Schofield, Paris correspondent, The Guardian).

My reaction: The United States, now France! Going back centuries the toll could be in millions. One could be excused by assuming that all majority Roman Catholic countries have had similar problems. Words probably fail us all! How can priests hold forth from the pulpit and remain respected?

Help!

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I recently asked a British publisher if they could send a publication to an address in Washington DC. The publication never, apparently, arrived, so I contacted said publisher again. This time they said they had sent it to

“Washington DC, United States Minor Outlying Islands”

I had to point out to them that Washington DC is the capital city of the United States, not an outlying island (although maybe it would be better off if it were!), and suggested that their version of the address might be enough to explain why copies have gone astray, such is the disfunctionality of US Mail.

Why am I telling you this pathetic story? Well, the lack of any general knowledge is not confined to the boondocks of the United States, but is well and blooming in the “United” Kingdom.

Depressing, isn’t it?

Duck recorded speaking to human

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Scientists have recorded the first known instance of a duck that has learned to mimic human speech. The duck, called Ripper, lives in Australia. It is quoted as saying: “You bloody fool.”

Parrots, songbirds and hummingbirds were thought to be the only birds thought to be able to mimic human speech, though several mammals such as whales, dolphins, seals, bats and elephants can also imitate sounds. (Washington Post 22 September 2021)

My comment: This explains a lot. Turns out that much of the speechifying in Congress and Parliament isn’t human at all. Seats have been vacated by super-rich politicians in favor of palatial seaside mansions. What you hear reported is the recorded voice of a duck.

The Pandora Papers

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The Washington Post reported Sunday that millions of private financial records shared with the newspaper showed that members of the global elite, including King Abdullah II of Jordan and other country leaders, used a secretive offshore system to hide billions of dollars from tax authorities, creditors, criminal investigators, and others. The documents detailed the Jordanian king spent more than $100 million on luxury homes in Malibu, California, and other places. Leaders of the Czech Republic, Kenya, Ecuador, and other nations hid millions of dollars’ worth of property and cash. The trove of documents, called the Pandora Papers, was far larger than the Panama Papers disclosed in an investigation five years ago (Washington Post 10/3/2021).

My comment: Has it always been this way since time began? Have we always been governed by people with only a passing interest in the ruled. What is it that sparks the lust for millions of dollars, pounds etc? There are only so many cars you can drive at the same time; only so many palaces you can enjoy and fancy holidays you can take simultaneously. The same can be said of companions of the opposite gender, if you get what I mean.

Epicurus would probably laugh at this modern grabbitariat and point out that fear of discovery, of thievery and assassination, makes these anxious, bigwig bullies in reality insecure. He would likely advise you to pity them as they await their comeuppencies.

You call this an “airport”?

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We arrived in New York last Tuesday and had to change airlines to reach our final destination. I thought for a moment that we had landed in an undeveloped country. The chaos, lack of help or helpful signs, the rather surly staff, the quixotic building layouts and what seemed like a route march to the next flight – all had me wondering if, once we had clearly missed our onward flight, whether we would have to navigate our way to a local hotel for the night – yet another stressful endeavor!

As it happens the secondary flight was delayed because of a fault in the windshield apparatus in the pilot’s cabin! Saved by a window wiper! We got home that evening. But I had had a vision of Hell – it isn’t far away.

Pay for the poor

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The single-most significant problem millions of American workers face on a daily basis is the simple fact that they’re not paid enough. The federal minimum wage is only $7.25 an hour, which leaves millions of full-time workers in poverty while dragging down the wages of the rest of the workforce in turn.

$7.25/hour, or just $15,000 a year for 40 hours of work a week, 52 weeks a year, leaves the overwhelming majority of these workers living below the poverty line, unable to adequately provide for themselves or their families. The average rent for a one-bedroom apartment, for instance, is almost twice what a person working minimum wage could afford. Even with several roommates, affording a place to live is a serious struggle for low-wage Americans.

On the tax front, income earned from labor is taxed at a significantly higher rate than income derived by wealth (called “capital gains”). This puts working people at a perpetual disadvantage against the already-wealthy.

The tax most people pay on their earnings – ordinary income tax – is taken from money earned through labor. Americans go to work, receive a paycheck, and pay income tax. Capital gains taxes, on the other hand, are the taxes paid on profits that come from the sale of assets – wealth someone already owns. Investors buy a stock or a piece of real estate and then sell it for a profit. The profit is considered a capital gain, and as long as the investor holds on to that asset for at least a year, they pay much less in taxes than they would on ordinary income of the same amount.

Make no mistake, this is a massive tax break. A billionaire earning $800 million a year in capital gains pays a lower top tax rate than someone earning $90,000 a year in ordinary income. (Patriotic Millionaires, 8 Sep 2021)

My comment: I think this should be filed under the heading of “obscene”. What has it to do with Epicurus? The very rich contribute to election expenses and in return get gentle tax treatment. Some would call this massive corruption of the system. Epicurus was not an admirer of massive corruptions of the system, and nor should we be.

Religion

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Back in 2018, in reply to John Falconer, Michael Martin commented as follows on this blog:

“You should live your life and try to make the world a better place for you being in it, whether or not you believe in god.

If there is no god, you have lost nothing and will be remembered fondly by those you left behind.

If there is a benevolent god, he will judge you on your merits and not just on whether or not you believed in him.
(Michael Martin)

The health effects of music

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Owing to the release of dopamine listening to music makes you feel good. This much is known. Studies by Levitin and others suggest the brain’s natural opioids also play a part. Their findings might help explain why music can act as an analgesic, and support its use by some hospitals to help relieve pain after surgery.

Some types of music may have greater healing potential than others. A key factor appears to be rhythm. One reason is that neurons in the brainstem seem to fire synchronously with the tempo of sounds we hear. In a review of research on the neurochemistry of music, Levitin and his colleague Mona Lisa Chanda cited research showing that slow-tempo music can reduce heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature and other responses controlled by the brainstem. Such rhythm effects might help music combat stress and anxiety.

Research by Peter Sleight at Oxford indicates that slow music with a 10-second repetitive cycle calms listeners. He believes this is because it matches the length of a cycle of signals sent from the brain to the heart to regulate blood pressure. Music by Verdi, as well as the slow movements of Beethoven’s ninth symphony and the arias in Puccini’s opera Turandot are rich in such 10-second cycles. (based on an article in New Scientist, Sept 2015).

My comment: So why is it that orchestras and pianists in particular, now play pieces far to loudly and very much faster than a generation ago? I personally get exasperated with this, but it does one surefire thing- it gets the audience on its feet in frenzied enthusiasm.

Yes, the standing ovation! Some music is intended to stimulate and excite, but it is usually accompanied by other, slower, quieter passages, so that the audience is treated to a wide range of moods. The current trend is away from the gentle, musical treatment of music towards crude sensational “sturm und drang”- to its great loss.

Lying

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Little white lies have a tendency to snowball. The more we lie, the more our brains seem to become desensitised to deception.

Tali Sharot at University College London and her team ran an experiment that encouraged volunteers to lie. They were shown jars of pennies, full to varying degrees, and asked to send estimates of how many there were to partners in another room. The partners were shown blurrier images of the jars, so relied on the volunteers’ estimates to guess the number of pennies, in order to win a reward for each of them.

When the volunteers were told they would get a higher personal reward if their partner’s answer were wrong – and that the more inaccurate the answer, the greater the reward would be – they started telling small lies, which escalated. A person who might have started with a lie that earned them £1 may have ended up telling fibs worth £8, for example.

Brain scans showed that the first lie was associated with a burst of activity in the amygdalae, areas involved in emotional responses. But this activity lessened as the lies progressed (Nature Neuroscience, DOI: 10.1038/nn.4426). “This highlights the danger of engaging in small acts of dishonesty,” says Sharot.

My comment: Seems to me to be obvious. However, a small white lie to flatter, for instance, might be excused.
In general, however, lying is corrosive to the soul. Most people realise that as they grow up.

Funding the IRS

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It was only a matter of time before the more extreme elements of the GOP tried to undermine the bipartisan infrastructure.  And right on cue as the bipartisan working group is attempting to finalize the bill’s details, some conservative groups are now demanding that the deal not include increased funding for IRS enforcement. This demand is absolutely ridiculous – here’s why………..

Taken at face value, their claims that spending more money on IRS funding is not fiscally responsible are plainly absurd. Spending money on IRS enforcement brings in significantly more money – it’s a net positive investment. That’s why it’s being used as a pay-for, not as something that has to be paid for.

On a deeper level, being opposed to giving the IRS more money for enforcement is essentially an open endorsement of allowing millionaires and billionaires to commit tax fraud without any consequences. As a recent report from the Treasury Department revealed, wealthy Americans currently get away with an incredible amount of tax evasion every single year in the United States. In 2019 alone, $580 billion that was owed to the IRS was not paid. Over the next ten years, experts predict that this “tax gap,” or the gap between what taxes are owed and what taxes are paid, will reach over $7 trillion, or 15% of all taxes owed. That is a lot of money. And most of it is being kept by rich people.

Just the top 10% of earners account for over 61% of the total tax gap. This shouldn’t come as a surprise, because the richer you are, the more complicated your finances become, and the more difficult it is for the IRS to tell if you’re skipping out on paying your fair share. While average people are required to have money withheld from every paycheck, rich investors are supposed to decide for themselves how much to send in and send a check to the IRS every year. Not surprisingly, this leads to a huge amount of abuse.

And because the IRS doesn’t have enough investigators with the necessary expertise to go after rich people with complicated finances, they audit poor people at a higher rate – not because it’s more important to go after them, but because it’s easier.

So how did this happen? We got to this point because conservatives in Congress have systemically and deliberately underfunded the IRS to the point where between 2010 and 2017, it lost 43% of its tax technicians and 44% of its revenue officers. This notion left the IRS with the same amount of enforcement officers as it had in the 1950s when our economy was one-seventh the size it is now. That is unacceptable.

The increased IRS funding is really the only piece of the bipartisan infrastructure bill’s funding package that is worthwhile, so it’s no wonder conservative groups are attacking it. But in the face of their attacks, Congress needs to stand strong on this issue. The U.S. government’s inability to stop tax evasion has been a growing problem for decades, but in its current state, the IRS is almost fully incapable of properly identifying and punishing criminal tax evaders. The system we have very clearly isn’t working – it’s beyond time to fix this problem and put a stop to criminal tax evasion by properly funding the IRS.  (The Patriotic Millionaires)

My comment:  Amen to that!

Joke

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“We’re looking for a Treasurer for the Christmas fund”, said Paddy
“Didn’t you take on a new one last month ?” said Murphy.

“That’s the one we’re looking for”, Paddy replied.

(Relevance to Epicureanism? A sole diet of actual news is so depressing that ataraxia seems a thing of the distant past. We need a smile, at least)

Epicurean belief simply put

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Epicureanism was never meant to be a dry academic philosophy. In fact, it is best kept away from academia, where, as usual with philosophy, long words render it dull, if not incomprehensible. Rather, it is a vital way of living which seeks to free men and women from a life of unhappiness, fear and anxiety. It is a missionary philosophy for the practical-minded with common sense. Let others complicate it if they wish, but I prefer it simple.

The following eight counsels are a basic guide to Epicurean living.
1) Don’t fear God.
2) Don’t worry about death.
3) Don’t fear pain.
4) Live simply.
5) Pursue pleasure wisely.
6) Make friends and be a good friend.
7) Be honest in your business and private life.
8) Avoid fame and political ambition.

I would add:

– Think of others;
– Be polite and considerate to everyone, regardless of race, age, class or gender;
– Try to see the other point of view;
– Meet others half way, if possible.
– Take the smooth and pleasant road, as free from stress and conflict as possible.
– Aim to be moderate in all things.
– Try to laugh and make others laugh. We don’t do it enough
– But don’t be put upon!

Housing in Britain

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To The Times
The Chancellor of the Exchequer’s modest housing measures deserve modest support, but most of this discussion misses the point. Of course supply must be increased, not least to deal with the backlog. The underlying problem, though, is uncontrolled demand. Most household growth comes from immigration, not from the domestic population: in recent years, more than four-fifths of additional households in the UK have been headed by a person born overseas.

Forget the absurdly defective household projections by the Department for Communities and Local Government. For as long as net migration continues at about a quarter of a million per year, Britain will be trapped in a treadmill of housebuilding without limit. (David Coleman, emeritus professor of demography, University of Oxford)

My comment: Britain is a small island and it has beautiful countryside that we all want preserved. At the same time the native population is barely increasing. As it heads off over the 60 million figure the extra people are mostly immigrants. We need them (provided we can integrate them) because they work hard and offer skills we are no longer prepared for now that technical education is so poor and apprenticeships few in number.

But the housing issue is a big problem, and it is right to bring it up. It seems unfair to ask the taxpayer to pay for more expensive housing, but where else will the money come from? I think Epicurus, given similar circumstances, would have advocating cutting military expenditure and putting resources into housing, rather than increase taxes. But then, like now, nobody ever asked him.