Montaigne

“All passions that suffer themselves to be relished and digested are but moderate”. (Michel de Montaigne)

(with apologies for the length; it isn’t possible to summarise this in a paragraph)

The U.N. Economic and Social Council presented its first report on the 17 Sustainable Development Goals towards ending extreme poverty, fighting inequality and tackling climate change by 2030. These are some of the main findings:

The good news:
– The proportion of the world’s population living below the extreme poverty line dropped by more than half between 2002 and 2012. Some 800 million people still live under $1.90 a day.
Fewer children are going hungry. The proportion of children under age 5 who are small for their age owing to malnutrition fell from 33 percent in 2000 to 24 percent in 2014. Still, an estimated 158 million children under age 5 were affected by stunting in 2014.

– Between 1990 and 2015, the global maternal mortality ratio declined by 44 percent to an estimated 216 deaths per 100,000 live births — and the mortality rate of children under age 5 fell by more than half. An estimated 5.9 million children under 5 died in 2015, mostly from preventable diseases.

The not-so-good news
– The share of overweight children under age 5 increased by nearly 20 percent between 2000 and 2014. Approximately 41 million children in this age group worldwide were overweight in 2014; almost half of them lived in Asia.

– Women and girls work longer hours than men and boys and have less time for rest, learning and other activities because they still overwhelmingly do the household chores.

– In 2014, about half the urban population globally was exposed to air pollution levels at least 2.5 times above the standard of safety set by the World Health Organization. Outdoor air pollution in both cities and rural areas is estimated to have caused 3.7 million premature deaths in 2012.

– The incidence of HIV, malaria and tuberculosis declined between 2000 and 2015, although in 2015 2.1 million people were newly infected with HIV, and an estimated 214 million people contracted malaria.

–  In 2013, 59 million children of primary school age and 65 million adolescents of lower secondary age were getting no schooling, most of them girls.

– The births of about 220 million children a year go unrecorded. In the least developed countries, one in two children have not been registered by age 5. This means that everything from getting into school to getting a job becomes a struggle.

I personally think the burgeoning population in less developed countries is a huge problem, given climate change, the threat to harvests, the availability of water, increasing pollution, lack of jobs and shrinking resources. What do you think?

Trump (tweets):”This very expensive global warming bullshit has got to stop. Our planet is freezing, record low temperatures, and our GW scientists are stuck in ice”.”Snowing in Texas and Louisiana, record-setting freezing temperatures throughout the country and beyond. Global warming is an expensive hoax!” (Quoted by Elior Weinberger in the London Review of Books)

Instead of locking up troubled youths American Courts are increasingly ordering them directly into probation. As a result juvenile incarceration has dropped by half in the past 16 years. Typical demands by Courts are “Attend classes on time and regularly, be of good behavior and perform well … be of good citizenship and good conduct.” If the youths don’t comply they are locked up.

Often it is the order, “obey parents and guardians,” that trips up rebellious teens. As soon as they walk out of the door, monitored electronically, many get into trouble, presumably because they are daily associating with their old friends and acquaintances. The majority, mostly colored boys, drop out of school and their likelihood of later being involved in the adult criminal justice system skyrockets. In other words, putting kids in the probation system can lead to further involvement in the justice system, rather than providing an alternative to it. Electronic monitoring, an alternative to detention, is often what leads kids to be detained. (adapted from an article by NPR).

This, like it or not, is where fathers come in. An involved and caring father reads the riot act and gets the son to do something useful, even if it is only a mowing the lawn for neighbors. This way he can earn a bit of pocket money and start to be proud of an achievment, not simply follow the herd (his “friends”). So many teens don’t have fathers around, and I don’t care what the politically correct say, a double-parent act is the best way of getting kids to adulthood; single parenthood is at best a gamble. A mother-father family was designed that way a million years ago for a good reason (and I have no doubt father-father and mother-mother can work as well, although the jury is still out on that one). Success depends on love, involvement, mutual respect and discipline. These are Epicurean attributes, but they are also simply human, caring ones.

The planet’s wildernesses are shrinking so fast that they could vanish within a century, a report has warned. According to the study, 1.3 million square miles of once pristine landscape have been tarnished by large-scale human activity in the last 25 years – about a tenth of the total worldwide. Almost a third of that was in the Amazon, despite deforestation in Brazil having slowed in recent years. Central Africa, home to thousands of endangered species including forest elephants and chimpanzees, accounted for a further 14%. Although around 20% of the world’s land – equivalent to around 11.5 million square miles – is still classed as wilderness, the report warns that any further reductions could be catastrophic. As well as losing many animal and plant species, the consequences for climate change would be devastating, since so much carbon is stored in forests. “Without any policies to protect these areas, they are falling victim to widespread development,” said Dr James Watson of the University of Queensland. “We probably have one or two decades to turn this around.”

In this context the pros and cons of tourism are a conundrum. One can argue that tourism helps pay to keep the wild places of the world wild. It helps pay for the soldiers who now have to guard the rhinos and elephants in Botswana and Namibia, for instance. Indeed, the tourist income is so important that protection of wildlife is a national priority. On the other hand, if my sister and her husband had not been to Namibia years ago, I would have known nothing about it. In general, I am in good company. So when my wife and I had a (spectacular) visit to Namibia this summer I was surprised to see so many people. The number of visitors climbs every year, as do the number of game lodges. I took a photos of what looked like an army climbing single file up one of the famous giant sand dunes. My point? How long can Namibia, for instance, maintain its wonderful deserts and its wild life? I am part of the problem; maybe you are too?

A while ago I bought fresh roses from Colombia from a firm called Global Rose. Two days after they arrived ads for Global Rose started to appear on the screen whenever I used Google. Targeted advertising, care of Google. It was harmless, but it was the speed with which it happened that startled me.

The power of Google and Facebook lies in user-generated data that lets them make huge amounts of money from companies wanting to target their advertising. They sell to a host of entities – public and private – hungry for the knowledge that can be harvested from massive data sets. Probably neither Google nor Facebook fully understand the value of the information they sell, amd most users have no idea how their searches and comments are used. This has led some to worry that there is very little holding these companies to account.

Facebook is thought to have increased voter turnout in the 2010 US congressional elections by at least 340,000 by providing an “I Voted” button to 61 million users, essentially peer-pressuring their friends to do the same. In 2013 44 per cent of US adults accessed news on Facebook, rather than newspapers or TV, up from 31 per cent. Since its news feed algorithms control which stories people see, there are concerns that the company has the potential to shape public opinion by curating the news.

Google slso causes concern. It could, for instance, start charging insurance firms to access group insights from its massive user base, which could mean individual customers’ premiums go up. Or it could close down services that millions of people find useful because they don’t bring in the right kind of saleable data or adverts.

The UK’s National Health Service recently handed over to Google’s artificial intelligence arm, DeepMind, millions of retinal scans, on the assumption that DeepMind will reduce the burden of eye disease. And they did it for free. There was no discussion about the deal beforehand, and no privacy safeguards put in place as far as we know.

“My prediction is that we’ll look back in 10, 15 years on this period as a remarkably naive and irresponsible time,” says Julia Powles, a researcher in law and computer science at the University of Cambridge.

This sounds as if we are all collectively being very naive and very unwise. I don’t like monopolies at the best of times. Let’s assume that the current owners and managers of Facebook and Gogle are well-meaning and honest. What happens if more greedy people take over their management in the future?

Conventional wisdom in the West has it that national leaders should step down after one or two terms. But the African democracies that are currently thriving – such as Zambia, Malawi, Tanzania, Ghana, Kenya and Senegal – all started out with presidents who ruled for at least 18 years. These long-serving leaders bequeathed “peaceful transitions” leading to stable democracies. But those African countries with leaders who did “the right thing” and transferred power within a few years to a democratically elected government, often met with disaster. Former Ugandan president Yusuf Lule, for example, was voted out in 1979, and the result was a series of military coups and civil war. Sierra Leone, Somalia and Liberia had similar experiences. Traumatised by colonialism, African nations seem to need the stability of a single ruler before multi-party democracy can take root. Long-serving leaders and democracy “are not mutually contradictory – one seems to lay a foundation for the other”. (Andrew M. Mwenda, The Independent, Kampala)

The reason the post-independence rulers ruled for so long was that they were regarded as “fathers of their countries”, and this gave them the status to overide powerful tribal interests. African commentators still go on about the trauma of colonialism, but “winner take all” tribalism is much worse, and chronically corrupt as well. Despite the colonial trick of favouring small tribes in government, colonial power did offer a peaceful interlude, with some economic development, before the country resumed its tribal bickering with the colonialists gone. The effectiveness of the “fathers of the country” was a blip in the history of the continent. Corruption and coups are its natural state.

“They who are of the opinion that money will do everything may very well be suspected to do everything for money”. (English statesman George Savile, quoted in The Boston Globe)

Barbara Maher of Lancaster University (UK) and her team looked at the brains of 37 people who had lived in Manchester in the UK or Mexico City. All contained millions of iron oxide nanoparticles per gram of brain tissue, suggesting that tiny specks of metal in car exhaust gases seem to fly up our noses and travel into our brains, where they may contribute to Alzheimer’s disease.

A closer look at six brains found that round particles outnumbered angular crystals 100 to one. Crystal forms of iron oxide are more likely to have a natural source, whereas round particles normally come from melting iron at high temperatures. Maher says the particles’ round shape is compelling evidence that they come from pollution. These nanoparticles are less than 200 nanometres in diameter, so may be moving from the air into the nerve endings in our noses, and from there to the brain, says Maher’s team.

Previous work on cells grown in the lab has suggested that iron oxide is present in the protein plaques thought to have a role in Alzheimer’s disease, and that it generates reactive compounds called free radicals, which can kill nerve cells. Population studies have found that people who live nearer busy roads have a higher risk of mental impairment in old age.(Clare Wilson, New Scientist)

The good news is that studies have also found that our risk of getting Alzheimer’s by a particular age is falling, so if pollution is contributing to the disease, it doesn’t seem to be making it more common. Even so, reducing air pollution might cut our risk of Alzheimer’s. There is a serious possibility now that electric cars are really going to catch on, that their cost will come down, and the re-charging issue will be solved. If this finally materialises then the health of all those living in cities or near busy roads should improve.

You have to hand it to Putin. He and his cronies may be autocratic and corrupt, but he is achieving two things that Russian Tsars sought to achieve, and is doing so simultaneously – in Syria. By supporting Assad, brutally and without concern for the massive destruction and death, Putin has achieved a permanent warm water port in the Mediterranean. Russia sought this for centuries.

Secondly, by encouraging the massive movement of Syrian refugees in the direction of Europe, Putin is upending the decades of EU expansion and looks like contributing to its political instability, and even its possible collapse. Why? Because the EU developed an imperial posture of constant expansion, far too far and far too fast, including countries that arguably had been within the Russian sphere of influence within living memory. When the EU began to include countries like Serbia, Roumania and Bulgaria and the three Baltic countries, when it toyed with Ukrainian membership, and when NATO talked about the ring of rocket installations at the Russian border, this was all too much for the Russians. Their paranoia about their borders cannot be exaggerated, nor their resentment at the collapse of their own empire (make Russia great again). Think Napoleon, Hitler and earlier invaders. Now we have Brexit and a wave of very right wing governments popping up in Eastern Europe, driven by what seems to people as a wave of unwelcome and destabilising moslem immigration. From the Russian point of view the cost of the Syrian bombers must be well worth the price.

What has this to do with Epicureanism? Well, as an Epicurean I would not have provoked the Russian bear, but tried to woo it and be inclusive. I would not have so obviously taken advantage of its weakness since the fall of Communism. Brussels has been really ill-advised.

The Washington, D.C-based Migration Policy Institute released “An Analysis of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States by Country and Region of Birth.” It’s based on U.S. Census Bureau data.

Some of the findings may not surprise you. Mexicans represent 56 percent of the total. 15 percent come from Central America and 14% from Asia. The report finds that while the illegal population doubled in the 1990s from 3.5 million to 7 million, peaking at about 12.2 million people in 2007, it has since fallen by about one million (mostly Mexicans). Of the illegal immigrants the greatest number are Central Americans, Africans and Indians.

Meanwhile, Southwestern border apprehensions have fallen 80 percent since 2000 as fewer crossings are attempted. In the view of the Migration Policy Institute “the U.S.-Mexico border is more secure than it’s been in 40 years.” As for potential terrorists, there’s now a high probability of being apprehended at the border, and entering the US there is very risky. Better to enter through, say Dulles airport in the normal way; just don’t crack jokes or draw attention to yourself.
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So much for Trump’s stupid wall!