A nice, harmless report that isn’t about wrecking civilisation!

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The use of birdfeeders in gardens has dramatically increased the diversity of the birds living in Britain’s urban areas, a new study has found. The British Trust for Ornithology said that at least half of home-owners feed garden birds – a trend that started to take off in the 1970s – and this now supports an estimated 196 million birds a year, and more than half of the country’s species. While many common birds such as blackbirds and robins have maintained a steady presence at feeders, sightings of others, including great spotted woodpeckers, sparrowhawks and wood pigeons, have dramatically increased. Goldfinches were spotted at just 8% of feeders in 1972, but at 87% of them by 2012.

Relevance?  Well, it is a little thing, but caring for other living creatures is surely Epicurean, rewarding for the giver , who has the joy of seeing a greater variety of visitors visiting his or her garden, and good for the planet , which is losing its natural diversity.  I wish we did a better job at feeding and protecting the elephant and the pangolin, to name but two species at risk from humans.

Don’t do it! (anyway, not yet)

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Epicurus counseled us to avoid politics and politicians, and watching the antics of politicians in the US, the UK (and, come to think of it the majority of other nations ) he was right. But we are experiencing another attack of world-wide irrational rage and lust for careless and cruel destruction last seen in the age of Hitler.  We have to be wise and strategic to avoid a burst of violence.  It has happened before.  Epicurus wanted us to seek and find ataraxia, and would have advised us to restore an atmosphere of moderation at all costs.

 Mueller clearly thinks he cannot, under the rules he operated under, indict the President , but hints that he would done so had the rules allowed.  Notwithstanding this,  I think we should support  US Senate Democrats who want the House to cool it on impeachment.  They see an impeachment drive as hurting more than helping their efforts to win back the Senate majority and generally back Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s efforts to keep a lid on the issue.

Even Senate Democrats running for president who back impeachment aren’t pressing Senate Democratic Leader Charles Schumer to take a more aggressive approach to the issue. Democratic senators say the subject of impeachment rarely even comes up in caucus-wide meetings and that it distracts from issues like health care they see as more important to voters.   

Impeachment is just what President (poor me, look at the wonders I am single-handedly achieving for the nation) Trump would like.  It would redouble the efforts of Republicans  to re- elect him and sharpen the already dire divisions, created, yes, single-handedly by him.

There is a moral issue here.  If a crime or crimes were committed (and Trump behaves as if he is guilty of something),  then he should be out of office.  But, pragmatically. it  is better to elect  a new President in 2020 who is honest, has some integrity and believes in the. Constitution (someone who has read it would be reassuring).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Brexiteer living in a bogus, imaginary past

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Jacob Rees-Mogg is a very rich Conservative Brexiteer politician (who has parked his fortune in an offshore tax haven to demonstrate his patriotism.  (Irony intended).  He has quaint ideas about “making Britain great again”.  The following is a review of his book on British 19th Century history.  The views of the reviewer seem to be shared by everyone who knows any history:

“The accolades distributed to Rees-Mogg’s subjects are framed in clichés that no half-way intelligent or discerning writer would dream of handing out. Prime ministers are “great statesmen” and therefore to be treated with due deference. Albert and Victoria and their children, including the repulsive Bertie (later Edward VII), were a “happy family”. General Gordon (a mercenary soldier) was “a paragon of Victorian manhood”. General Napier was “heroic” and “daring” and won a “famous victory” at the Battle of Miani. Pugin is “remembered today with respect and admiration” because “he emphasised the notion of truthful and honest living, with buildings to match”.

Patriotic, enthusiastic and celebratory, it recalls nothing so much as Henrietta Marshall’s 1905 children’s history of Britain, Our Island Story (though Marshall was a much better writer than Rees-Mogg). This is the kind of history that Michael Gove, as education secretary, wanted to be promoted in the national history curriculum for schools, until he was forced to withdraw his proposals after a deluge of criticism and ridicule from the Press and those who know any facts.  Rees- Mogg’s celebration of the Victorian age is plodding, laborious, humourless and barely readable. (adapted from an article by Richard J. Evans,  New Statesman, 22 May 2019) 

I have mentioned this man Mogg before. The book is unimportant, very unimportant, but I do so because you can’t devise a successful future for a country if you know nothing about its history.  It’s like trying to work out on a map where you are going when you don’t know where you’ve come from or where you are.  Whatever happened to knowledgeable, canny politicians?

Painkillers and corruption

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The billionaire founder of a leading US drug manufacturer has been found guilty of bribing doctors to prescribe a highly addictive painkiller to patients, many of whom did not need it.

John Kapoor, of Insys Therapeutics, was convicted of fraud and racketeering, charges stemming from the tactics his firm used to sell Subsys, a spray manufactured from fentanyl, a synthetic opioid far stronger than heroin. Insys’s marketing strategy revolved around inducing doctors to prescribe the drug in ever higher doses by offering them lucrative fees for giving speeches about Subsys at phoney events.

Although Subsys was designed for cancer patients suffering unbearable pain, many of the people to whom it was prescribed were not cancer sufferers. The firm’s staff also posed as healthcare providers to mislead patients’ insurers about their need for the drug. Four other executives were convicted alongside Kapoor.  (The Week 11 May 2019)

As a former worker for a pharmaceutical company I am somewhat cynical to start with about the ethics of some of the drug marketing and the huge profits made by manufacturers.  They tell us that the cost of research and development are huge, and failures are frequent.  They fail to mention that very often at least part of the research is done by governments and universities, and it is they who profit.  But the above behaviour is simply disgusting and immoral..  It seems the big profits earned have attracted straightforward crooks.  At least I never had to work for crooks.

The NRA is now an extreme political party

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Earlier this year, the National Rifle Association opposed a bill that would prevent convicted stalkers and abusive boyfriends from possessing guns. “Why? Because any gun purchase increases profits for gun manufacturers, and any regulation – even common-sense measures – is to be opposed.”

Having brought the group to this indecent and immoral policy the NRA leadership deserves everything it gets, and it is starting to get it.  It is losing money to the tune of $40m a year, and at its recent annual meeting an ugly power struggle broke out among its leadership. Long-time CEO Wayne LaPierre accused the NRA’s now-ousted president, Oliver North, of trying to blackmail him into resigning, with a dossier of alleged financial improprieties. This followed a devastating New Yorker exposé revealing a culture of “secrecy, self-dealing and greed” in the organisation, with NRA executives awarding themselves high six-figure salaries and lavish benefits. To add to the NRA’s woes, it’s also facing an investigation into whether Russian agents used it to funnel money from a Kremlin-linked banker to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign.

It gets worse.  The attorney general for New York state (where the NRA is chartered), has announced an investigation of the NRA’s tax-exempt status, stating that the group, which holds itself up as a charitable body, is more akin to a “terrorist organisation”. It was originally designed to help marksmen with firearms training and safety. Lobbying for gun rights only became central to its mission in the 1970s: even then the group pursued that end in a “notably bipartisan” way. Today though, it cleaves to the Republicans and goes “all in for the culture war”. Where once NRA leaders concerned themselves with safe, responsible gun ownership, they now inveigh against “socialists” and hold forth about issues such as immigration, race and healthcare, a virtual surrogate for the current White House. It has no hint of empathy for the the scores of people killed by gunfire, or their families – the guns count more than the people.  (Adapted from a variety of articles in the press, including The Week, 11 May 2019)

To the best of my knowledge the NRA has never expressed concern or sympathy with the thousands of people, especially children, who have been murdered with guns, designed for foreign wars, and acquired by madmen without due care as to their record or mental condition.   That lack of care and empathy renders them beyond contempt.