An email to my son, USA to U.K.:
On 31/03/2020 Robert Hanrott wrote:
Will, I am going to phone you tomorrow, Tuesday. I am concerned about you all.
Dead
………………………………………………………………..
And a reply……..
Hi, Dad,
We are all fine. Please do call. It’ll be nice to speak to you.
One thing though. When you sign off — particularly at this time — please don’t do it with the soubriquet ‘Dead’.
Will.
Across America, people have been told to take refuge at home and to venture out only to get things they really need, like groceries, prescription drugs and petrol. But should weapons also be on that list? Gun rights advocates think they should. They’ve now achieved a federal shutdown-order exemption for gun shops( guns and ammo) and firing ranges, arguing that these establishments provide an essential service during a pandemic.
Unless anyone is planning on “shooting those little coronaviruses one by one”, this is a recipe for disaster. In states that are still allowing gun shops to stay open, such as California, there has been a boom in sales, with people queuing round the block outside the most popular shops. Some Asian Americans have reportedly been arming themselves in case they suffer racist attacks linked to the virus. Other people have bought weapons in case there’s a breakdown of social order.
Fear is natural at times like this, but there’s no reason to let gun shops profit from it. Loading up with rifles isn’t a rational response to a medical emergency. “It is caving in to dark thoughts and expectations, and it moves the needle on our collective safety a little further down the ‘dangerous’ part of the scale.” (Scott Martelle, Los Angeles)
My father had a hunting shotgun, which was kept under lock and key. Every three months a policeman arrived at the house to ensure that the gun was safely locked up and hadn’t fallen into the hands of some nutter. Result of this nationwide policy? A handful only of innocent people gunned down for being in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is the task of government to protect the people, not to encourage tens of thousands to lose their lives. Epicureanism at work, or common sense – take your pick.
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. While Epicureans have written scholarly works, they have always been most interested in explaining Epicureanism in a manner simple enough for anyone to understand and remember.
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, 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. But don’t be put upon!
( From time to time I re- post the above – it gives the reader the basic idea without being too long. There is too much to read during this crisis!)
Continued from yesterday:
The core promise of the American dream has always been that you can do better than your parents. But we have to deal with the fact that our values have been hi-jacked.
We decided that we needed more democracy in our politics. What better way to do that than to allow people to go to the polls and vote in primary elections, to choose their nominees? That has not worked out. What the founding fathers wanted was a representative democracy, not a pure democracy. When you combine the notion of pure democracy with the total monetization of that democracy by having no limits on what people can spend and no limits on what rich people or rich corporations can contribute during elections , you have a democracy that just doesn’t work. The smartest, most driven, most talented people have been able to use the. we paradigms to their own advantage at the expense of the common good.
For a country to work, you have to have balance between personal ambition and personal achievements and the common good. The way you do that is to have guardrails on the system. In finance, you have regulatory guardrails. You have labor laws that produce a level playing field between employer and employee. You have consumer protection laws. You have to ensure that the winners can’t win in a way that hurts everybody else. We need to restore the old values and long-term thinking, such as investment both in infrastructure and in companies, asopposed to stock buy- backs.
We need to redirect the old values that were hijacked — the First Amendment, due process, meritocracy, the financial and legal engineering — they need to be reanimated to undo some of the damage that’s been done.
On the other hand there are people out there doing really important work, really good work.The patient isn’t quite dead yet — there are some cures that are still possible.
(A condensed and edited, for length, version of a conversation between Sean Illing and “Tailspin” author Steven Brillon Today, Explained, a daily podcast, 28 June 2018)
Over the past 50 years, lots of things have changed in the United States. Here are a few examples.
1) A child’s chance of earning more than his or her parents has plummeted from 90 to 50 percent.
2) Earnings by the top 1 percent of Americans nearly tripled, while middle-class wages have been basically frozen for four decades, adjusting for inflation.
3.) Self-inflicted deaths — from opioid use and other drug addictions — are at record highs.
4) Nearly one in five children in the US are now at risk of going hungry.
5) Among the 35 richest countries in the world, the US now has the highest infant mortality rate and the lowest life expectancy.
The American Dream has vanished, What happened? Who or what broke the country?
The key distinction you make in the book is between the protected and the unprotected classes. Why is this so important in American society?
Steven Brill, the author of this autopsy says”
“I think talking about protected and unprotected people is more relevant distinction than saying people are Democrats or Republicans, or that they’re conservatives or liberals.
“The unprotected are all the people in this country who rely on the government in some way to provide for the common good. They actually need public education to be good because that provides opportunity to their children. They need mass transit. They need a fair tax code. They need someone to answer the phone at the Social Security Administration when they get their Social Security check.
“And what’s happened over the last three or four years is that big swaths of the unprotected people in this country have gotten very frustrated and angry that basically nothing is working for them — whether it’s the economy, or the highways, or the power grid, or the tax code, or job training programs, or public education, or health care. They basically have the sense that the government’s responsibility to provide for the common good is gone. It’s evaporated.
“This is why they reacted, or at least 46 percent of them reacted, the way they did in the 2016 election, which was really an effect of severe frustration — “Let’s just elect this guy who’s promising all this stuff. He seems really unconventional, but at least he says exactly what’s on his mind. Let’s try this.”
“And the protected class? They are the “winners”. They don’t need a good system of public education because their kids go to private school, or care about mass transit because they can afford to drive anywhere. And they don’t need public health care because they can pay for private coverage. In short, they’re not invested in the common good because they’re protected, and the system is rigged to keep them that way.
“The story of decline really begins about 50 years ago, so is this basically a story of how a subset of the baby boomer generation drove the country off a cliff, the high achievers in the knowledge economy — the corporate lawyers who helped take companies over, the bankers who created derivatives and stock buybacks, and so forth. We became an economy that basically moved assets around instead of creating new assets.
(An edited version of a conversation between Sean Illing and “Tailspin” author Steven Brillon Today, Explained, a daily podcast, 28 June 2018) Part 2 tomorrow.
