Men and friendship

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Many men rely on their womenfolk to make and retain friends for them.  How many women do you know who complain that they have to make all the social arrangements?  In the event that they are divorced or separated for whatever reason, men can be lonely indeed.   

When I was young I yearned to have a girlfriend. Almost anyone who was lively and fun would have been a thrill. Instead I struggled, and watched the cool guys who didn’t appear to care less, the men with the straggly beards and the unkempt hair, the guys who never turned up on time, getting all the girls.

And then one day someone said to me, You try too hard. And maybe you’re trying with the wrong people, too. I thought about this, and adopted a more casual, take-it-or-leave it attitude. I abandoned the obvious targets (blondes, mostly) and concentrated getting to know fun people who had similar interests to mine, who had a sense of humor and occasionally even laughed at my stories. Suddenly, I had more people complaining about my jokes, but willing to date me (as long as I shut up occasionally).

My advice: Relax. Step back. At least pretend not to care. Give people space; if you don’t, they will retreat as you advance. And what can be most difficult for many people – lighten up and don’t be intense (I have no reason to think you are, but just in case the cap fits).

Freedom of the Press?

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78 journalists were killed in 2017 while doing their jobs. Data from the Committee to Protect Journalists shows that 2018 is likely to be no better – the number of journalists murdered as opposed to killed in war, on dangerous assignments or other incidents is on the rise.

Jamal Khashoggi, killed by Saudi security forces in Istanbul in October, has been one of 31 journalists murdered in 2018. In the previous year 326 journalists were imprisoned for their work by increasingly authoritarian regimes. More than half of those behind bars were held in Turkey, China, and Egypt, often on charges of opposing the state.

Countries like Russia and China have never had democracy or a free Press, and will probably. never have it. There is irony in the fact that, if you spend any time in, say, Egypt you will find plenty of people who are vocal about the “horrors” of British rule (its long gone – and maybe they are right), and yet they seem to put up with a vicious military dictatorship that suppresses free speech. Maybe they would argue that it’s “their” own vicious military dictatorship and they are entitled to it. Turkey was only a democracy for a handful of years. Even Sultans, who brooked no opposition, were better than the power-crazy Erdogan.

We are going through a period that parallels the history of the 1920s and 1930s. Life in both the US and the UK is going to get worse before it gets better. But sometime we will emerge from it. Let us hope that out of it comes a vibrant and free Press – we need it – but one would be stupid to accept bets. People seem to like “strong” men, even if they are uncontrollable, cruel, self-involved, paranoid, and adore the selfish rich. We should be publicising lists of the lazy people who can’t bother to vote when they have the opportunity, and then spend their lives complaining. Voting guarantees nothing, I suppose, but at least it is a declaration of individual liberty, even if it is ignored. Meanwhile, those who do vote need reliable information from a dedicated Press.

If you don‘t like it don’t buy it

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A woman struggles to park a car. A man seems unable to change a nappy. Adverts portraying the sexes in a stereotyped way can be very irritating, says Tom Welsh. But it’s one thing to think they’re crass and outdated, quite another to prohibit them. Yet that’s what the UK’s advertising watchdog plans to do. Last week, it declared a ban on any ads containing “gender stereotypes that are likely to cause harm, or serious or widespread offence”.

Come again? The watchdog’s role is to stop advertisers wilfully misleading the public or broadcasting inappropriate content to children, not to “act like philosopher-kings, determining what is good or bad for adults”. Yet that’s what the regulators are increasingly doing. They recently banned a Costa Coffee ad for urging people to eat its bacon rolls for breakfast in place of avocados, and thus encouraged “poor nutritional habits”. Spare us this assault on free speech. Consumers already have perfectly good recourse for sanctioning advertisers who cause “widespread offence”: they can shun their products. (Tom Welsh, The Daily Telegraph 21/12/18).

I rather agree with the writer. Let the consumer decide. The way to deal with gender steriotyping is to laugh at it and refuse to buy the product. Banning it plays into the hands of the right-wing libertarians and big government haters. One of my objections to so many TV ads is that they totally lack creativity. British ads on TV used to be the best in the world, funny and memorable. Now they have become just like American TV ads, crass, simplistic and preachy, oh, and politically correct – there is no harm in depicting a white, elderly couple, or a black elderly couple. But nearly always mixed race? Treat us like grown-ups!

Homelessness in Britain

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At least 320,000 people are homeless in Britain, according to research by the housing charity “Shelter”. This amounts to a year-on-year increase of 13,000, a 4% rise, despite government pledges to tackle the crisis. The estimate suggests that nationally one in 200 people are homeless. Shelter says its figures, which include rough sleepers and people in temporary accommodation, are likely to be an underestimate of the problem because they do not capture people who experience “hidden” homelessness, such as the sofa-surfers, and others living insecurely in sheds or cars, for example.

In London, 170,000 people – equivalent to one in 52 – have no home. Westminster had the most rough sleepers, 217, followed by Camden, with 127. In Kensington and Chelsea, the UK’s richest borough, there were over 5,000 homeless people – equivalent to one in every 29 residents. The figures indicate how homelessness and housing insecurity is spreading beyond its traditional heartland of London into the wider south-east and Midlands, and the impact of high rents and welfare cuts ripples outwards.

Polly Neate, Shelter’s chief executive, said: “Due to the perfect storm of spiralling rents, welfare cuts and a total lack of social housing, record numbers of people are sleeping out on the streets or stuck in the cramped confines of a hostel room. We desperately need action now to change tomorrow for the hundreds of thousands whose lives will be blighted by homelessness this winter.”

Melanie Onn, the shadow housing minister, said: “It is appalling that enough people to fill a city the size of Newcastle (should be) without a home. This is the outcome of eight years of austerity that even the United Nations say was designed to hurt the poor. ().

My comment: Walk down a Central London street and you hear fewer and fewer English voices. Many are welcome visitors, but there is a huge number of rich foreigners laundering money and immigrants seeking work. They occupy property and have inflated buying and rental prices beyond the reach of British citizens, forcing Londoners to move away from the capital. This has caused more house price inflation all over the country. It reminds me of the period after the Second World War with mass homelessness caused by bombing, but at least that did not just discriminate against the poor. Brexit, however, could cause a major exit of hot money, dubious property owners and East European migrants, and bring the house price rise to a grinding halt. Current prices are quite ridiculous. (Of course a mass exit would be damaging for quite other reasons).

Federal Drug Administration

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The other evening at a dinner party I sat next to a charming and enthusiastic employee of the FDA. She waxed lyrical about its dedication, expertise and good management.

A few days later, on January 6th there appeared a scathing article about the FDA. It did not criticize the drug authorization program, but it did point out the apparent carelessness with which the FDA treats medical devices – implants, artificial hips, surgical mesh etc. Some 32 million Americans walk around with medical devices in their bodies, some of them very hard to get out if they go wrong. Just one device, a neck implant, is associated with 1.7 million injuries and more than 80,000 deaths – and the public know nothing about it. The FDA insist that high risk devices undergo “stringent“ testing. In fact, only 5% of implantable cardiac devices, for instance, are thoroughly tested and subjected to clinical trials.

The reason given for the laisser faire attitude is that when the FDA was given the job of overseeing medical devices in 1976 they accepted the existing products on the market as being established and safe. In other words they grandfathered them. So now the makers tell the FDA that some new product is old, really, but improved with minor tweaks. In the jargon of the trade it has “substantial equivalence”. This is enough to get it waved through the system, o.k for some products, but not so much for high risk items. The second loophole is called the “supplement pathway”, and applies to new models of high risk devices, such as artificial hips. Either way, potentially lethal devices are in daily use, and the FDA blithely continues its existing policies.

One of the problems is that, like the Agriculture and Aviation departments, the FDA regards the device manufacturers (corporations) as “customers”, not the users (patients). 35% of its regulation cost is paid for by the very companies who make the devices. Since the companies are customers the FDA acts accordingly, hurrying approvals and behaving like any commercial supplier. Moreover, for years the people running the FDA have been recruited from the device manufacturers, or lobbyists for device manufactures.

It is clear that the FDA should be fully publicly funded (only) and be made to rigorously check every medical device, making its findings public. Secondly, the head of the FDA should be a career civil servant, and should not be recruited from the trade. The same thing should be done with the FAA, whose preoccupation is with the success and welfare of the airlines – (and to hell with the passengers), and the Department of Agriculture, whose concern is with the food producers, not the consumers. How all this went wrong in the first place I don’t know, but the politicised situation lends itself to charges of corruption. Faith in transparent institutions, government or otherwise, is an Epicurean principle and is the bedrock of democracy (if we had it!).