Wars we barely know about, funded lavishly

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America’s wars spread continually — there are now seven of them, and they never end; and yet, if you happen to live in the United States, most of the time it would be easy enough to believe that, except for the struggle against ISIS in Iraq and Syria, there were no conflicts underway. The Afghan War is now 15 years old and heating up again as the Taliban takes more territory and U.S. operations there grow, but it was missing in action in the 2016 election campaign. Neither presidential candidate debated or discussed it. And yet, there are 10,000 U.S. troopsand numerous private contractors) still based there, along with the U.S. air force power. The Pentagon refers to it as a conflict that will continue well into the 2020s. It is simply a war that time forgot. Similar things might be said about American operations in Somalia and in Libya. Nor is the intensity of the air war in Syria or Iraq much emphasized or grasped by the American public.

Then there’s the grim, devastating and gruesome war that couldn’t be forgotten because, in essence, just about no one here noticed it in the first place. I’m speaking of the U.S-backed Saudi war aimed at impoverished Yemen. It’s a conflict in which the actual American stake couldn’t be foggier and yet the Obama administration supported it every way imaginable, and it has been inherited by Trump. Most of the time, from an American point of view, it might as well not be happening. There is evidently no good moment to bring up the subject of where American bombs are falling on our planet, so why not now? (Tom Despatch).

And now the Trump Administration has pushed through another huge hike in the money spent on the military in his new budget. It has just passed because it is now regarded as unpatriotic to query whether the money is being spent well. Epicurus abhorred wars, which were unusually unpleasant during his lifetime. I wonder what he would think of all the un-won wars being conducted by the United States, paid for on borrowed money in aid of – what exactly? To keep those employed by the military-industrial complex profitable? When the history of the former American empire is written, it will be the useless drain on money and resources devoted to military adventures that will be the focus of historians.

Wine glasses get ever bigger

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We’re not just drinking more wine than our forebears: we’re drinking it from ever-bigger glasses. A team from the University of Cambridge analysed 411 wine glasses and found that the ones we use today are, on average, almost seven times larger than those used in the Georgian era, having grown from 66ml in the early 1700s to 449ml today. Various factors explain the increase, including the end of a tax on glassware in 1845; the rise of automated glass production in the late Victorian era; and a growing fashion in the late 20th century for very large glasses that would allow the wine to “breathe”.

If you go out to dinner and your place setting has a huge wine glass, a “normal” serving of wine looks pathetic in it. If I am serving wine I want to look hospitable and reasonably generous and fill the glasses at least a third, if not half, full. You can thereby demolish a bottle before guests even start to eat.

Yes, you have guessed it! The current fashion for huge glasses has been engineered to sell more wine. Surprise! Surprise! Actually, it is neither potentially good for the guest nor good for the pocket to serve so much alcohol. Unlike most things in life, however, one can do something about it. I have made an executive decision: when we are in the market for new wine glasses they are going to be of modest size.

Exam cheating in the UK

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Mobile phones have been blamed for a sharp rise in exam cheating. Almost 2,600 pupils were penalised for cheating in their GCSE or A-level exams last summer, up 25% on the previous year. Half of those students had been found with “unauthorised materials” in exam halls; in most cases, this was a phone.

What on Earth is the point of cheating? It is in the personal interest of all children to learn, to learn to learn and to go on doing so throughout life. Do the cheaters take any pleasure in the fact that they “passed” an exam by cheating? Are they proud of it or secretly ashamed, and will it turn out to be a lifetime pattern? In my school two boys were caught with crib sheets on their laps during a public exam. They were immediately expelled from the school. One was in later life jailed for some crime whose details I don’t know, so maybe he was simply a born crook, if there is such a thing. I personally think that it gives one a feeling of self-confidence to actually know the material and be able to put it down on paper lucidly and correctly. It does, however, presume a certain amount of work and concentration in class.

What I would like to know is the meaning of “penalised” in the first sentence above. Your knuckles rapped? A dressing down? Or does it also mean being ignominiously booted out of school? And are teachers constrained when they discipline a child who is an immigrant or a member of a minority or someone with particularly vocal and difficult parents? Because all children should be treated equally. It is during childhood that you learn discipline, self-discipline and how to live in this world with others with self-respect and dignity.

Does having children make you happy?

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Parenthood and happiness are hard to study. One researcher commented, “If you want to understand the causal effect of sleeping pills on somebody’s sleep, you can run placebo trials, but kids can’t be handed out at random to see what effect they have on people”.

What is certain is that across the developed world people are choosing not to have children, thus rejecting what was once considered an inevitable and essential part of the human experience – procreation. Perhaps that’s not so surprising. Having children can have a significant impact on finances, careers and the planet.

Children in the wealthy West are a huge financial commitment. The average middle-class US family has spent more than $245,340 on each child by the time they’re 18. In the UK, the cost of raising a child has swelled 63 per cent since 2003, with childcare alone eating up 27 per cent of the average salary (Centre for Economics and Business Research in London).

Finances aside, there’s an environmental issue. Children can come with a large environmental footprint. In the US you can recycle and bike to work all you want to reduce your carbon emissions, but those gains will be 20 times less than the CO2 impact of having a child, according to a 2009 study from Oregon State University.

Then there is the planet’s “carrying capacity”. United Nations projects that “if current population and consumption trends continue, humanity will need the equivalent of two Earths to support itself. Some have taken this message to heart.

There is now almost half a century of evidence on the relationship between having children and personal happiness. On the negative side, having children makes couples less happy with their sex lives, is associated with depression, sleep-deprivation, and, as one study puts it, “hastens marital decline”. One oft-cited 2006 study co-authored by Princeton psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that a group of working US mothers ranked childcare 16th out of 19 everyday tasks in terms of positive feeling, just ahead of commuting to and from work, and work itself.

A study of more than 14,000 Australian and German couples, found that mothers reported a sharp rise in stress after the birth of a child – three times that of the father – and that it increased year-on-year until four years after the birth, when the study stopped. Further research that followed more than 2000 first-time German parents, found that the average hit to happiness exacted by the arrival of an infant is greater than a divorce, unemployment or the death of a spouse.

Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, published a paper in the journal Psychological Science, showing that having children made men (but not women) happier. Others have pointed out it is marriage itself that makes people, especially men, happier. Child rearing is another matter.

The situation seems to be that people who have kids have all sorts of differences from the people who don’t have kids. There are so many variables: income, the helpfulness of relatives, the way the parents have been brought up (happy or unhappy homes), the age of the parents, (for people younger than 30, children are associated, on average, with a decrease in happiness. From 30 to 39, the average effect on happiness is neutral, and at age 40 and above, it’s positive). Studies show that parents’ happiness increases a year or so before the birth of the first child, and then returns to pre-birth levels by the time the baby is about one.

So the true picture is clearly nuanced. Parenthood can boost people’s satisfaction with their lives, apart from their financial circumstances – but for many the money woes associated with children are so great that any additional happiness they felt was swallowed up. (Adapted from an article in the New Scientist).

I think the truth is incredibly complex, as complex as the character and feelings that we all have as humsn beings – up, down, content, confused, frustrated, elated.