Talking past one another

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Prime Minister Teresa May has called the visit  of President Trump to London “a significant week for the special relationship and an opportunity to further strengthen our already close partnership”. She stressed the need to build closer trading ties (she is a out to depart, unmourned).

Trump’s US ambassador in the UK, Woody Johnson, has meanwhile suggested that the National Health Service  should be ”on the table” in future trade negotiations with the US. Trump’s man in London also indicated the UK would need to allow US agricultural products, including chlorinated chicken, onto the UK market as part of any post-Brexit trade deal.

Firstly, there is no “special relationship” between the US and the USA.  This is a fantasy on the extreme Right. The special relationship (very special) is with Israel.  Secondly, if there is any move to allow American companies to take over the NHS there will be riots on the street.  American health corporations, ( by the way, in the midst of consolidation, with a huge number of takeovers  and mergers), already have a presence in the UK market, pushing up costs, and their undermining of the NHS is unpopular.  Lastly, chlorinated chicken is shorthand for what is perceived abroad as mass produced, chemically treated, tasteless and unhealthy food.  Further riots would ensue.

How can one achieve ataraxia with such idiots talking past one another?

 

The olive oil bird “massacre”

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My wife and I have been in Sicily.  During our visit we stayed at an olive farm, set in beautiful countryside.  The farm produces five varieties of olive oil, plus a blend, all of which we tried while enjoying the wonderful food for which Sicily is famous.  What we didn’t know while we stayed there was the following bit of information, which I have just found in the magazine “Nature”:

“The global demand for olive oil is having a catastrophic effect on wildlife. On some farms, olives are still harvested by hand, but in these days of mass production, machines are taking over. Between October and March, many farmers use powerful tractors to strip the trees of their fruit and, in the process, vacuum up hundreds of thousands of birds that have migrated south for the winter. The tractors operate after sundown (to take advantage of the cooler temperatures that help preserve the olives’ flavour), starting just as the birds have roosted in the trees. Dazzled and disorientated by the machine’s lights, the birds are sucked up on a “catastrophic scale”. Researchers found as many as 100 dead birds in each trailer, including large numbers of British species such as robins, greenfinches, warblers and wagtails. It is estimated that 96,000 birds die this way each winter in Portugal alone.” “Nature” calls on governments, in its article, to ban night-time harvesting.

The olive oil makers have kept that quiet.  Wish we had known and could have quizzed the obviously very energetic and successful owner, who has a thriving business.  No mention was made by her of mechanical picking at night, as opposed to mechanical processing, and I still don’t know how her picking is done.  But had a great time testing the different offerings.    Maybe Epicurus, faced with this bit of news about olive picking might say, “One doesn’t know what one doesn’t know.  You can’t put everything right in this world”.

 

What a mess we are making of our planet!

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Microplastics have been found dropping from the sky in a remote stretch of the high Pyrenees – a stark illustration of the way that the pollutants, carried on the winds, have the potential to accumulate “anywhere and everywhere”.  Humans and other animals are consuming microplastics via food and water (including tap water), and there is evidence that we may also be breathing them in from the air.

The long-term effect of ingesting this material is not yet clear, but its sheer ubiquity means that the issue must be taken seriously, said Steve Allen, of the EcoLab institute near Toulouse, France. “If it is going to be a problem, it is going to be a very big problem,” he warned. “I don’t think there is an organism on Earth that is immune to this.” The researchers calculate that microplastics can travel 60 miles in the air. But as Saharan winds can carry particles of sand for hundreds of miles, this is likely to be a low estimate. The plastic was found in a part of the Pyrenees that is four miles from the nearest village and 15 miles from the nearest town.  (The Guardian and The Week, 27 April 2019)

What can we do about those who despise science and scientists, shrug their shoulders and call the growing threat to the planet fake news?  We can try to vote them out, but they have the support of rich corporations and individuals who are corrupt and who will protect their fortunes at any cost – to others, of course.  Money is more important than other people and the planet itself.  When the crunch comes they will blame someone else – they always do.  We are slipping into deep crisis, and it may need another wrenching and violent world upheaval to eventually help the human race to survive.  What we want is ataraxia and happy lives.  Collectively we cannot see beyond our noses.

 

138 surgeries close their doors

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GPs have blamed under-resourcing and recruitment difficulties as surgery closures across the UK reach an all- time high, affecting an estimated half a million patients last year. According to research by the medical website Pulse, 138 surgeries shut their doors in 2018, compared with just 18 in 2013.

Data released under freedom of information by 186 out of 217 clinical commissioning groups and health boards revealed that smaller surgeries – those serving 5,000 or fewer patients – were the worst affected in 2018, accounting for 86% of closures.

One doctor told how after 26 years he gave up his GP surgery in Brighton, where he and his partner were run off their feet looking after 6,500 patients. “The money was just falling away,” he said. “We gave the staff six months’ notice and we walked away.” NHS England said its figures showed fewer practice closures and patient dispersals in 2017/18 compared with 2016/17. But those figures are only for England, and cover the financial year, whereas Pulse’s figures cover the whole UK and calendar years.  ( The Guardian, 31 May 2018)

What the British government is doing is accepted conservative practice – starve the beast and replace it  with contracts offered to private companies.  Much of the current health privatisation benefits large American corporations, who may reward politicians financially at an appropriate  moment (no, I am not inferring corruption.  Corruption is in the eye of the beholder.  Use your own judgment).  Whatever health experts in the US claim, the British NHS has done a fantastic job on ( in comparison with the US, with limited resources.  As service declines so the public is expected to support private intervention.  It’s  a form of malicious robbery, if that isn’r a tautology.

The Pentagon could learn from Agincourt

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During the Battle of Agincourt,  the “humble and effective English longbow made short work of the expensive and vulnerable French cavalry”. Is America at risk of suffering the same sort of military humiliation?

Christian Brose, the former staff director of the Senate armed services committee, believes so. The traditional model of US power – based on large, expensive and heavily manned systems – has, he says, become a dangerous anachronism. It no longer makes military or economic sense to invest in $13bn aircraft carriers and $89m fighter jets when the US is fighting technologically primitive enemies in the Middle East, and when its “relatively small number of ultra-sophisticated platforms are increasingly vulnerable to detection and destruction” by rivals such as China and Russia. The US should instead create many more, cheaper military platforms, “and – within ethical limits – enhance their autonomy”. That would put fewer soldiers in harm’s way and reduce the risk from swarm attacks. But alas, this change is unlikely to happen any time soon: the “military-industrial-congressional complex” will resist any disruption to its business model. “In the meantime, the risk of being on the losing side of our own Agincourt” grows greater by the day.   (Bret Stephens, New York Times, The Week 4 May 2019).

There is nothing moderate (or Epicurean) about the money and resources thrown at the American military.  They get everything they want, crowding out the needs of all sorts of other aspects of American life.  Under Trump the money devoted to military effort rises by the day.  And yet we cannot win a war, Afghanistan being the prime, and most scandalous example.  Meanwhile the deficit careers upwards as if there could be no possible economic consequences.  All hail Mr. Christian Brose for pointing out what should be obvious, but which , I am sure, is an unwelcome point of view to the score of special interests wanting an ever more bloated and clumsy military.