Is the EU on a path to self-destruction?

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The following extract was written for the Daily Telegraph, a right-wing publication, with associated agenda.  Nonetheless, Mr. Warner has a point.

“There are  some Europeans who believe that the UK’s disruptive influence was at the root of all the EU’s problems, and that they can now revert to business as usual. This is a huge mistake, for the same factors that spurred Brexit – concern over immigration, precarious jobs, “increasingly alien law-making” – are just as evident over the Channel. Theresa May has managed to co-opt the groundswell of public alienation and reinterpret it as a vote for a “global Britain”. Yet Europe’s centrist parties are incapable of this sort of “bend-with-the wind leadership”. They resist any concessions to nationalist sentiments, because that runs counter to their precious European project, yet at the same time, they dare not introduce full EU political integration. So they’re just ploughing on. Punishing the UK for leaving is seen as more important than addressing underlying concerns. “It’s an almost willfully self-destructive approach.” (Jeremy Warner, The Daily Telegraph)

I must say, it does appear as if the EU thinks it can just carry on as usual, this in the face of nasty, hate-filled nationalist parties who will quite possibly win upcoming elections.  Then there is the issue of the euro, a currency that some people think should never have been introduced, owing to the very disparate types of economy within the European Union.  Currently  the value of the euro in Germany is (artificially?) kept low, allowing the country to continue to export at low prices, while countries like Greece are struggling to pay with an (artificially?) highly valued euro.  The German banks pile loan upon loan onto local banks in Greece, Spain, Italy and others, and that will probably never be paid off.  We have had one currency crisis recently, and can expect another.  Meanwhile, the EU went mad trying to build an empire that encroached upon an area deemed to be an old Russian sphere of influence, and took NATO along with it, seriously annoying the Russians.  Really stupid, actually.

Some British people think that the EU is doomed and that it is better to get out now, rather than later, when the political and financial mess could Be huge. They may be right.   The runes are against the EU, with a resurgent Russia, an unpredictable America, and a growing continental anti-EU sentiment.

I happen to think that the principle of the EU is one of the finest collective pieces of statesmanship ever devised by Europeans, but the dreamworld that the EU establishment now lives in is rapidly undoing the enterprise.

Music reflecting the times we live in

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We went to a concert the other night.  Tchaikovsky and Beethoven were featured.

Nowadays, if you have them in the program you also need a modern composer as well. In this case the piece was a Trombone Concerto (I won’t mention the name of the very experienced composer for reasons of tact.  I’m sure the composer is a great chap).  It must have been programmed ages ago, but uncannily turned out to precisely reflect the mood of the immediate times.  It was 27 minutes (or in my case 27 hours) of the most dissonant, gloomy, ear-piercing and dystopian music imaginable.  It included some delightful passages of harp playing, but I put in my musician’s earplugs just too late to protect my ears from sound of the most enormous wooden mallet thundering down repeatedly upon something or other, painfully affecting the eardrums. Curiously, the music was composed as a bow to Leonard Bernstein in 1991, when Americans were still confident, positive and could still be heard to exclaim, “Isn’t this just the greatest country?”

What the program didn’t point out was that there was an historical parallel between the Beethoven Symphony No. 8 and the Trombone Concerto.  Beethoven’s Symphony was composed in 1812, in the middle of an era of chaos and disruption caused by Napoleon (who that year reached Moscow with his army).  Yet, Beethoven managed to produce a symphony full of catchy, uplifting  melodies;  no gloom and misery for him – he instinctively knew what audiences needed at that terrible moment. On the other hand the Trombone Concerto, in this current period of foreboding, instead of lifting us up, left this listener more depressed than ever.  And for what?  Why? What is the point?  We actually we needed to evade reality and have a moment of cheer.  There is nothing wrong with escapism; on the contrary, it is a way of maintaining Epicurean ataraxia, or peace of mind. Long live melody and fantasy!

 

Why Epicurean Frenchmen should vote for Macron.

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In my humble opinion, France is one of the world’s greatest countries. It is a beautiful country with elegant cities, magnificent countries, lofty mountains and (albeit decreasingly), unspoilt beaches. It has punched well above its weight in its contributions to philosophy, economics, art, music, science and literature. Having been devastated by World War 2, it successfully rebuilt, surpassing rival powers such as Britain and Russia until the late 1970s, in large part because its leaders decided it would be at the heart of Europe.

Since the late 1970s, France has been in relative decline. Britain’s entry into the Single Market and the ‘Big Bang’ in financial deregulation meant it caught up and has since overtook its fiercest rival. Now unbridled by Communism, Russia has experienced very high levels of economic growth until very recently. Russia has also regained some of its influence it lost on world affairs since the collapse of the Soviet Union. In addition to this, France’s industries are notably less competitive than Germany’s, despite the two countries being in the Euro and adopting very similar fiscal policies.

The feeling of relative decline from what had been an economic, military and culture superpower, has induced a new nationalism into the French policy. Marine Le Pen, the woman almost certain to finish first in the first round of this year’s presidential election, talks of restoring national greatness. Unbridled by the excessively cosmopolitan and liberal EU, Le Pen promises a new era of French supremacy. Much like Donald Trump or the UK’s Leave campaign, Le Pen’s employment of nostalgia for a bygone era is crucial to her success.

However, French voters should not be fooled. France didn’t get rich by cutting herself off from the international markets, but by being at the heart of them. The country benefits enormously from trade, and would suffer immeasurably from reducing it. Its also worth pointing out that reducing immigration would not restore the country to its former glory. The average Frenchmen is very highly skilled and well educated, which is something to be proud of. But low-skilled work still has to be done, and very often, it is immigrants and their descendants that do work seen by most as undesirable.

Le Pen’s nationalism may have a great deal of emotional appeal, and there is certainly something to be said of it. Too often, the liberal centre has relied on dry statistics and the views of various think tanks, instead of making a compelling argument with an emotional resonance as well as an intellectual one. Having said that, a resurgence of French nationalism would be to the detriment of all of Europe. The continent faces an American administration that is at best, ambivalent about the EU collapsing (http://www.vox.com/world/2017/1/16/14285232/trump-eu-nato-interview). Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin violates European territorial integrity in Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, and props up Assad, the Syrian dictator that brutally suppressed his political opposition, resulting in a civil war and the worst refugee crisis since the 1940s. Since Europe has no great allies beyond its borders, it can only faces the challenges of today if European nations are willing to work together. Supranational issues- climate change, the refugee crisis and terrorism notwithstanding- demand a coherent supranational response.

Since Le Pen would not work with the EU so much as ally herself with Trump and Putin to undermine it, what of the alternatives? When Francois Fillion won the Republican primary, many French conservatives rejoiced.  Here was a man who would finally reform France’s bloated public sector, and cut it down to size. They also saw his Christian conservatism as a bulwark against the country’s increasingly liberal attitudes, as evident in the introduction of gay marriage under Hollande. For some, Fillion was the respectable face of nationalism- sufficiently anti-immigration and anti-Islam, without the overt jingoism and xenophobia that still plagues the Le Pen dynasty. But regardless of what is to be made of Fillion’s policies, he has come under allegations of severe corruption, having allegedly paid his wife public money to work as a parliamentary assistant. (http://q13fox.com/2017/02/02/evidence-mounts-against-french-presidential-frontrunner-in-penelopegate-scandal-tmswp/) As Clinton’s failed presidential run showed, it is important not to be tainted by allegations of scandal, even if you believe the allegations to be untrue.

The Left’s candidates are equally unsuitable for office. Benoit Hamon may be to the left of Hollande. But he is still a member of the governing Socialist Party, which has presided over continued economic stagnation and has refused to reform the public sector for fear of its union allies. Despite his populist rhetoric, a Hamon presidency would not be very different from Hollande’s. Comparisons between Hamon and Jeremy Corbyn are overblown, with the former being far more friendly to the establishment than the latter. France’s nearest equivalent to Corbyn is Jean-Luc Melenchon, who is running as an alternative left wing candidate. Melenchon’s frustration at France’s poverty and inequality is understandable, and despite spending large sums of money, the French state often provides poor public services to its citizens; education in the working class and ethnic minority banlieues is the obvious example. But Melenchon is too radical to be considered a serious candidate. While France ought to improve public services and reduce inequality, the country can’t afford to spend more money. The over-centralised and inefficient state must be modernised and the budget deficit reduced before additional funding be considered feasible. Melenchon’s Euroscepticism and opposition to NATO, while perhaps having a different ideological grounding than Le Pen’s, would still leave Europe less secure and more divided.

Which leaves Emanuel Macron, who must be considered the man for the job. Macron believes in public sector reform, but unlike Fillion, does not set unrealistic targets for doing so. Macron may be an economic liberal, but he has sufficiently distanced himself from Thatcherism so as not to be considered a threat to the country’s working poor. More importantly, Macron is a friend of the EU. Unlike Le Pen, he does not consider Trump and Putin to be allies, nor Brexit a positive phenomenon. He would strengthen ties with France’s neighbours. He would repudiate the far-right’s xenophobia, by accepting the EU’s quota for refugees. He supports free trade, while expressing a healthy scepticism of some of the details in TTIP. He would work with other European countries to improve the quality and coherence of governance, while empowering local communities through a long-overdue program of decentralisation. Finally, he is the most socially liberal of the presidential candidates, and would seek to create a tolerant and pluralistic society, in France’s fine secular tradition.

 

 

Has anyone noticed? This is ridiculous.

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Trump’s first employment report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows that the economy has added 227,000 jobs.  The unemployment rate is currently  4.8 percent.  This is close to full employment.  (Yes, thank you, Obama.  Think of the mess he inherited).

So when the new Administration “supercharges” the economy with big handouts to the already super-rich, where will companies get the extra workers they are going to need?  Of the American citizens  out of work at present some have given up, some are physically unable to work, some have become druggies, but the greatest number are probably people in their late forties,  fifties or early sixties who used to work in manufacturing.  That old style of manufacturing has moved on to become much more automated and based on electronics.

Sitting at home the the older people have become effectively de-skilled and need to be trained for jobs that are needed now, not for jobs that have long gone.  How will this be done?  In other countries the government spends tons of money re-training workers, with mixed success (but at least they try).  Not in the US.  The idea is that when you are young you go to college, get a marketable skill and that will see you through life.  This is now nonsense, and needs a fast re-think.  But Republicans don’t want to raise taxes to pay for things re-training in middle age .  They don’t like paying taxes for other people’s kids to be educated, let alone older people. Betsy deVoss, the pick for Secretary of Education wants everyone in private, fee-paying, schools, so how will the financially struggling, out-of-work guys get re-trained?  Looks like stalemate.

Of course, we know the answer – immigration!  Bingo.

 

 

 

 

Who do you know who might suffer from the Dunning–Kruger effect?

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The  Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which low-ability individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability as much higher than it really is. The phenomenon was first observed in a series of experiments by David Dunning and Justin Kruger of the department of psychology at Cornell University in 1999.  They attributed this cognitive bias to a metacognitive incapacity on the part of those with low ability to recognize their ineptitude and evaluate their competence accurately. Their research also suggests corollaries: high-ability individuals may underestimate their relative competence and may erroneously assume that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
Dunning and Kruger, in 1999, postulated that the effect is the result of internal illusion in those of low ability, and external misperception in those of high ability: “The miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others.”  The study was inspired by the case of McArthur Wheeler, a man who robbed two banks after covering his face with lemon juice in the mistaken belief that, because lemon juice is usable as invisible ink, it would prevent his face from being recorded on surveillance cameras. The authors noted that earlier studies suggested that ignorance of standards of performance lies behind a great deal of incorrect self-assessment of competence.
This pattern of over-estimating competence was seen in studies of skills as diverse as reading comprehension, practicing medicine, operating a motor vehicle, and playing games such as chess and tennis. Dunning and Kruger proposed that, for a given skill, incompetent people will fail to recognise
  • their own lack of skill
  •  the extent of their inadequacy
  • fail to accurately gauge skill in others
  • acknowledge their own lack of skill only after they are exposed to training for that skill.
Philosophers and scientists have spotted the same thing, including Confucius (“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”),  Bertrand Russell  (“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision”), Charles Darwin  whom they quoted in their original paper (“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”) and Shakespeare in As You Like It (“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool” .

“Managerialism” in health: the second of two posts on healthcare

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On this blog we have discussed the power of the college and university administrators and the corresponding loss of power of the academics and university workers. In healthcare there has been a similar revolution, introduced under the guise of unquestioned ‘best practice’.  It is  seldom discussed or debated.

The advent of neoliberalism (or Thatcherism) in the 1980s,  a reaction against Keynesian economic policy and the welfare state, led to the importation of management practices  – managerialism – from the private to the public sectors, together with radical neo-liberal cost cutting and privatisation of social services.

Managerialism  is defined by two basic tenets: (i) that all social organisations must conform to a single structure; and (ii) that the sole regulatory principle is the market, the dominant criterion for decision making.  Other humane criteria, such as loyalty, trust and care have been  devalued and viewed as anachronisms. Instead there are formal procedures or standards, performance indicators, budget end points, efficiency markers and externally imposed targets.

With these managerialist principles and practices have come standardisation,  market-style incentives, devolved budgets and outsourcing, replacement of centralised budgeting with departmentalised “user-pays” systems, casualisation of labour, and an increasingly hierarchical approach to every aspect of institutional and social organisation.  Professional managers can be overtly hostile to the values of health care professionals and the missions of health care organizations.  Bullying has become more widespread, and individuals are given no discretion or autonomy.  Loyal long-term staff are dismissed and often humiliated, and rigorous monitoring of the performance of the remaining employees focuses on narrowly defined criteria relating to attainment of financial targets, efficiency and effectiveness.

The result of all this is that humanity has been excised from a humane profession.The result has been a shift in power from clinicians to managers and a change in emphasis from a commitment to patient care to a concern with budgetary efficiency. Increasingly, the priority is the reduction in bed stays and other formal criteria, and everything is about time and money. Older and chronically ill people become seen not as subjects of compassion, care and respect but as potential financial burdens. The system is still staffed by skilled clinicians committed to caring for the sick and needy, but it has become increasingly hard for these professionals to do their jobs as they would like.

Meanwhile, health care managers have become increasingly richly rewarded,  apparently despite,            or perhaps because of the degradation of the health care mission over which they have presided. The system threatens primary care, where doctors are allowed a small, fixed time in which to deal with the human beings in front of them.  This  interferes with doctor-patient relationships, reduces the training and education of (mostly foreign immigrant) nurses and seriously affects morale. Vulnerable patients become more vulnerable, staff turnover mounts, whistle-blowers are penalised and capital equipment, such as MRIs are overused unnecessarily to enhance income.

In short American healthcare governance lacks accountability, transparency, honesty, and ethics.   In some cases  the leadership is ill-informed, ignorant or even hostile to the health care mission and professional values.  It is incompetent, self-interested, conflicted, sometimes even corrupt.  If you change the nationality from American to Brotish, much the same observations can be made.  We are being dehumanised, desensitized and treated like numbers.   (adapted from a longer article by Roy Poses, MD, Clinical Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University).

We are being dehumanised, desensitized and treated like machines or objects.  People worry about the mechanization of the world and the growing use of artificial intelligence and robots, but, properly programmed, these “creatures” might well prove better, more thoughtful, kinder and more thorough caregivers and administrators than the present lot of bloodless number- crunchers.

Is all this exaggerated? Do you recognise it?

Just basic good manners: No. 1 of 2 posts on healthcare

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A letter arrived from a doctor telling me it was time to make an appointment for a check-up.  The problem was that the last time I saw the doctor he told me “come back in five years time” . That was exactly a year before.
But when I called I was told to hang on….and told to hang on…and told to hang on.  I tried another line – same thing.  Eventually, having wasted 20 minutes on this matter already, I spoke to a woman who told me the letter was a mistake, and that this often occurred. I wondered what would have happened had I made an appointment in good faith and spent a morning there, only to find they didn’t need me to come.  Were I a wage- earner I could have lost a morning’s wages.  I told the woman that, aside from anything else, being kept for ages on the line and being asked to stay there when no one was on duty was a waste of the customer’s precious time and shouldn’t happen.  She couldn’t have cared less.
My point is not just a rant about the American medical system, it is the lack of good manners and training.  It happens a lot in the American healthcare system.  Doctors, especially surgeons, skin doctors and those with anything to do with the digestive system, make huge sums of money, and while their technical skills are usually fine, the management-of- people bit is a bore for which they themselves are not trained, and it shows.  “The level of care for  the customer is inversely proportional to the money being made”.  (Roberts Law)
 I was brought up to empathize with others and to apologise if a mistake was made.  “I’m so sorry you have been inconvenienced.  I will draw it to the attention of my boss and we will make sure this sort of thing doesn’t happen again” – a comment like this costs nothing.  Most people understand mistakes, and make them themselves.  But to so obviously not care – and in a caring profession – is a shock for those of us who believe consideration, empathy and good manners are part and parcel of an Epicurean – or civilised – life,  and should be offerred in healthcare.

The scandal of arbitration

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Over the last several years, thousands of businesses across the country — from big corporations to storefront shops— have used arbitration to create an alternative system of justice. In arbitration rules tend to favor businesses, and judges and juries have been replaced by arbitrators who commonly consider the companies their clients. The change has been swift and virtually unnoticed, even though it has meant that tens of millions of Americans have lost a fundamental right: their day in court. “This amounts to the whole-scale privatization of the justice system,” said Myriam Gilles, a law professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law. “Americans are actively being deprived of their rights.”

In this scenario is there anything to protect the customer or the worker as well as the corporation? Of course not.  For companies, the allure of arbitration grew after a 2011 Supreme Court   ruling cleared the way for them to use the clauses to quash class-action lawsuits. Prevented from joining together as a group in arbitration, most plaintiffs gave up entirely, records show. Still, there are thousands of Americans who — either out of necessity or on principle — want their grievances heard and have taken their chances in arbitration. Little is known about arbitration because the proceedings are confidential and the federal government does not require cases to be reported. The secretive nature of the process makes it difficult to ascertain how fairly the proceedings  are conducted.  This, of course, works out splendidly for the companies involved. For the truly injured parties, not so well.

All it took was to add an arbitration clause, something that most employees and consumers do not even read. . Yet at stake are claims of medical malpractice, sexual harassment, hate crimes, discrimination, theft, fraud, elder abuse and wrongful death, records and interviews show. The family of a 94-year-old woman at a nursing home in Murrysville, Pa., who died from a head wound that had been left to fester, was ordered to go to arbitration. So was a woman in Jefferson, Ala., who sued Honda over injuries she said she sustained when the brakes on her car failed.  Just two of scores of such cases.  Some state judges have called the class-action bans a “get out of jail free” card, because it is nearly impossible for one individual to take on a corporation with vast resources.

The redoubtable Senator Warren talks about tricks and traps in the financial system –  this is what she’s talking about?

How did financial products get so dangerous? Part of the problem is that disclosure has become a way to obfuscate rather than to inform. According to the Wall Street Journal, in the early 1980s, the typical credit card contract was a page long; by the early 2000s, that contract had grown to more than 30 pages of incomprehensible text. The additional terms were not designed to make life easier for the customer. Rather, they were designed in large part to add unexpected–and unreadable–terms that favor the card companies. Mortgage-loan documents, payday-loan papers, car-loan terms, and other lending products are often equally incomprehensible. (have a look at your cellphone terms of business, printed in type size too tiny to read).  And this is not the subjective claim of the consumer advocacy movement. In a recent memo aimed at bank executives, the vice president of the business consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton observed that most bank products are “too complex for the average consumer to understand. And this is all because, according the the daft Supreme Court (about to get very much worse) the media is owned by corporations and corporations are “people”. Do the justices have any idea what they have done?

Thought for the day

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“Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest- tossed to me, I will lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

And compare the above fine words with the un-poetic sentiments and actions of the new US Administration and its followers.

Casual encounters both in the United States and the United Kingdom, maybe not scientifically verifiable, suggest that, once established in their new country, the former “huddled masses”, now prosperous, are in no hurry to welcome immigrants and refugees who might compete with them.

Paying tax

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The wealthiest households are paying tax at the lowest rate in 50 years, some paying just half of the Federal income tax that top earners paid in 1960. They are, of course, still complaining.  Trump is very concerned for them.  On the other end of the scale we were approached for help and advice some years ago by a poor immigrant lady whose income was $18,000 p.a and who had had a tax demand of $6000. Ouch! I am not suggesting that this is typical – I don’t know. But it helps to show how chaotic and unfair the US tax system is.

Only yesterday my wife was talking to a Latino lady who cleans houses for a living.  She told us that Trump was great.  He was going to reduce taxes for people like her. Halleluyah!  “No”, my wife replied, “that isn’t correct.  He has promised to reduce taxes for the very rich, in the expectation that they invest, create jobs and that the wealth trickles down to people like yourself.”

Of course, we have heard this canard many times before and people still fall for it.  Actually, most of the tax breaks enjoyed by the super-rich go towards yachts and luxury items, or buying villas in exotic countries. There are some super-rich with hearts who do good things with their money, create foundations and fund good things in healthcare etc.  But they are a minority.  Most of them are represented by the sort of people in the Trump cabinet.

Why should the huge disparity in wealth between the rich and poor concern Epicureans? Because if you care about your fellow human beings, situations like this are bad for everyone’s peace of mind (except the greediest), and  bad both for national morale and long-term political stability. Lobbyists have secured exceptions for the wealthy in national budgets, allowing them to use offshore tax havens and other scams dreamed up by the big accountancy firms. In return they fund the election expenses of politicians, who are effectively owned by them.  This they call, tongue in cheek, “democracy”.

Sensible people believe in paying tax. Minimize it legally by all means, but if there is no tax system we have no roads , no schools, no police, no law courts, no food and drugs testing, no defense….I won’t go on. The anti-tax people are short-sighted, selfish freeloaders and their self-centered beliefs have nothing in common with Epicureanism, or Christianity if it comes to that.

Breitbart gaining power day by day in the White House

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President Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, is recruiting from Breitbart News to staff the White House,  raising Breitbart’s profile and power. One of Breitbart’s biggest stars, Julia Hahn, is expected to join the White House as an aide to Bannon. Breitbart’s national security editor, Sebastian Gorka, will also relocate to the White House, likely with a spot on the president’s National Security Council.

Hahn worked for Laura Ingraham at a time when the radio host led the charge to oust former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (admittedly no loss. Ed).  Hahn has had Speaker Paul Ryan in her cross-hairs, writing mocking stories about him being a closet supporter of  Hillary Clinton and helping his primary challenger.  Her focus has been on immigration, trade and economic populism, three issues at the center of Trump’s agenda.   Gorka’s primary focus at Breitbart has been the threat of radical Islam. He has been a fierce critic of what he describes as the Obama administration’s weak response to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria and other international terror groups. Hahn and Gorka would give Bannon two allies who buy into the issues that were central to Trump’s.

This sets up two rival centres of influence – Bannon on the one hand and White House chief of staff Reince Priebus on the other.  Priebus recruited  key allies Sean Spicer and Katie Walsh, the former finance director and chief of staff at the RNC, who will act as deputy chief of staff at the White House. Breitbart are opening bureaus in France, Italy and Germany, where they believe Brexit-style insurgencies could be on the cusp of developing.  Some say that Breitbart is  nothing more than a propaganda arm of Trump’s White House, “a state-sponsored/controlled platform designed to advance the administration’s propaganda.”  But Breitbart denies this, pointing to their complaints to Trump about  not announcing the hiring a special prosecutor to investigate Clinton and for continuing former President Obama’s policy of issuing work permits to young people who are in the country illegally.  (extracted from a news item from The Hill.  1/25/2016).

If all this seems petty and parochial, it is not.  It potentially has repercussions for the whole world.  Never previously has a super- power gone rogue like this.  These Breitbart people are very dangerous, extreme and racist.  They are the ugly face of Republican America, without soul, empathy or care for their fellow man.

Oh ocean tide, retire! It is your King’s command!

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Yesterday’s edition of the Washington Post carried an article by George Will.  He pointed out that loss of manufacturing jobs was the tip of an iceberg – it is the continued loss of retailing jobs that is an even greater worry.  There isn’t a lot you can do about manufacturing, if only because what is left of it in the West, that hasn’t been moved overseas, is rapidly being automated.  Employment in that sector will continue to decline. The loss of conventional shops is also occurring.  Macy’s and Sears, once major retailers are in real trouble, and where I live the shops are constantly changing hands as new companies come, find their efforts are uneconomic, and leave.  I remember traveling through Florida, north to south, observing among other detritus of junky building the number of derelict shopping centers, boarded up and weed-infested, and wondering why.  No need to wonder now -Amazon and other online shopping companies are decimating bricks-and-mortar retailing at a huge rate.  Amazon only the other day announced the recruitment of a large number of staff in the expectation of further growth, although it is a drop in the ocean compared with the overall decline in retailing jobs, and the wages are dreadful, apparently. Now they are in food delivery as well as everything else. But at least they do sell items made in America.  Walmart grew huge by sourcing most of it products from China, Vietnam and other countries, accounting for a massive movement of shipping to and fro.

I admit to being one of the many culprits.  I ordered some cartridges for the printer from Amazon.com yesterday afternoon;  by this evening they had arrived.  No need to get in the car and spend time visiting the nearest appropriate shop (15 minutes there and 15 minutes back).  All too convenient.  Soon drones will deliver almost before you click “confirm order”.

What can Trump do about jobs in this sector, the number of which is/was huge?  Not a lot.  I am reminded of King  Canute (1015 to 1035) who commanded the tide to stop coming in in order to demonstrate to his courtiers that he was not omnipotent.  Regrettably, Trump is not that modest;  the tide will come in regardless.

Abortion and birth control

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Women’s reproductive rights and control over their own bodies and their own lives are about to be brutally assaulted in the United States.  I therefore, on this blog, wish to make the following statement, which is based upon the humanist message of care, compassion, support, love, consideration for others, and wish for all human beings to have full and happy lives,  a message that resonates down the ages from the days of Epicurus, who espoused these simple, decent, civilised principles:

“It is a grievous  and shameful sin to bring into the world a child that is not wanted by its mother, and cannot be loved, cared for and brought up like other well-loved children.

Making a mother carry a child to term by law or by societal or religious custom is cruel and intolerable, more cruel than terminating a foetus that might be technically alive but cannot yet comprehend or cope with a probable life of no love, poverty, inadequate diet, little schooling and no prospects –  and to live that life until what age?  80 years old? More likely, 35 in many countries of the world.  That is the way of adding more messed-up, angry, unloved, unhappy people to an already unhappy world.

The exponents of banning abortion, very often the same people who inflict homelessness and sudden death on the innocent in foreign wars in the name of liberty, ignore the misery they cause others.  A woman, brutally raped, is expected to love and cherish the unwanted offspring of some man she barely knows?  In a failing marriage and amid much unhappiness the announcement of  a birth is unlikely to mend the marriage;  rather, it breaks it up, leaving a single, resentful  mother to cope singlehandedly, often projecting her resentment for lost opportunity onto her child. A 14 or 15 year old teenager, not yet a woman, has to suddenly undertake to rear a human child in the face of a blighted future?

But whether it is rape, teenage unpreparedness for motherhood, marital misharmony, lack of education and earning prospects, threat of illness or incapacity, the body of a woman and the brain encompassed within it are the sole property of that woman.  No busibody has to right to tell her what to do with it.  It is for her, not some preacher or politician to decree how she should live her life; or if they do do insist on bully tactics, they should themselves be prepared to support that woman and her unwanted child emotionally and financially, or keep their views to themselves. Of course they have no intention of doing anything to help the agonised and wretched women who, for their own personal reasons find themselves in the position of unwanted motherhood.   These advocates of making abortion, even family planning, illegal, are from an Epicurean perspective immoral”.

This is a matter of principle, Epicurean principle.

 

Google has been hijacked by racists

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Type the question “Did the Holocaust really happen?” into Google and the first answer you get (the one you take to be the most authoritative) is headlined: “Top ten reasons why the Holocaust didn’t happen.” The origin is so-called Stormfront Radio, featuring Don Black, Paul Fromm and David Duke.

The second entry refers to “the Holocaust hoax”. In fact, seven of the top ten all insist the murder of six million Jews is a made-up story. Yet such malign outcomes are by no means a one-off. So proficient have far-right groups become at colonising the internet, they’ve been able to game the Google algorithm and hijack its search results. Google, however, is so wedded to the image of itself as a neutral platform, it will “hand-tweak” the worst cases, but refuses to take a moral stand and eliminate hate speech in all contexts, together with deliberately bogus news.  (this post originated with an article by Carole Cadwalladr of The Observer)

My father was the front line liaison officer between the RAF and the Polish Air Force in Northern Germany in 1945, and was the first to enter one of the Nazi death camps. I have a leather whip he took from an SS officer and gave to me in memory of the piles of bodies marked with the Star of David. “Never forget,” he said to me. I haven’t.  The thongs of the whip are disintegrating, but not the meaning of what is left.

To allow these racists free rein on the internet under the bogus rubric of “free speech” is utterly immoral. Google should be held to account. They invented this system and should be answerable for its mis- use.  Too much is justified in the name of ” free speech”.  Free speech isn’t free ; it has consequencies.

Meanwhile Trump right-hand man, Steve Bannon, at the very least a sympathizer with people like Fromm, Black and Duke, is esconced in the White House, working alongside Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, an champion of Israel and all that it does.   Intriguing.  How long will it last?

For those who know no history

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His education was sketchy, his knowledge of the world even more so.

He was a bully from his earliest years, vain and consumed with the urge to win.

He started life as a socialist but later became an ardent nationalist, founding the fascist movement.

On becoming ruler he removed political opposition, establishing an elaborate and powerful secret service that did his bidding.

After the  world slump his aim was to create jobs. This he partially did, but strikes were declared illegal.

His aim was a totalitarian state. He ruled constitutionally until 1925, when he dropped all pretense of democracy.

So self-confident was he that at one point he held seven ministerial posts simultaneously.

He sought to restore the greatness of of his country in the time of the Emperor Augustus.

There was no self-doubt. He posed as a new ubermensch, and promoted the idea that he had quasi-divine attributes.

His support came chiefly from the countryside and the small towns, not the cities.

He gave rousing speeches in which facts were what he said they were.

To maintain power he created “Blackshirt” armed militias, who terrorized opponents.

He had to have a Great Enemy to attack and berate in order to give a focus for his supporters:  in this case it was communism.

Who was he?