Bring back the Bobby

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In the “good old days” the British neighborhood policeman was not just a law enforcer; he was also a social worker and man-of- all-work, known to all locally, even by name.   If your grannie with alzheimer’s disappeared and couldn’t find her way home, it was the local Bobby who would find her and escort her back. If some young yob threw a stone and broke your front window it was the local Bobby who routed him out and gave him a good talking to (or had him before a magistrate).  If your house alarm unexpectedly went off while you were out it would be the ubiquitous  Bobby who found his way into the house and turned it off.

And then came the squad car, and suddenly all the police were riding around in vehicles, dependent on radio calls from base and shut off from the people they knew and had been serving.  Quite quickly they lost that personal contact with the customers of the law, and those customers seldom saw the same policeman twice in a month, always through a car window, names unknown.  Putting police in squad cars was the stupidest thing done to law enforcement (although fewer policemen were needed, which. was the financial point, everything being about money).

Now take a look at American policing, and you see a parallel problem, except that the police are militarised and  are armed with guns, tasers and cameras. 

We are debating the de-funding of the police.  No.  Don’t do that.  Take away their squad cars, make them patrol on foot (or on a mobile segue (? ) and get to know the neighborhood and the residents.  O.K, this is America, so I suppose I have to compromise and let them keep their wretched guns.

Light relief: “Maturity”

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Maturity

Now I’m mature I can sense in my heart

That it happened too late and I’m falling apart.

Its not just attention  I’m tending to lack

But my abs are less tight and my biceps are slack.

My hair, once a forest, now looks like a moor,

I was once eagle- eyed, but my eyesight’s now poor.

My hearing’s all right on the second repeat,

And I’d rather not mention the state of my feet,

I was only just telling a friend, by the way……

Damn!  I’ve totally lost what I wanted to say.

 

Giving up US citizenship

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A record number of people are giving up their US citizenship, according to analysis by a New York accountancy firm.  More than 5,800 Americans renounced their citizenship in the first six months of 2020, Bambridge Accountants reports, a 1,210% increase on the six months to December 2019.

 The US’s global tax reporting requirements are a major reason why many people decide to cough up the $2,350 (£1,775) fee required to officially cut ties with the US. Boris Johnson, for example, renounced his US citizenship in 2016 after complaining about the “absolutely outrageous” US tax demands. Nevertheless, it seems that Trump is sending an increasing number of expats over the edge.

“What we’ve seen is that people are exasperated with President Donald Trump, how the coronavirus pandemic is being handled and the political policies in the US at the moment,” a partner at the firm commented to CNN. “If President Trump is re-elected, we believe there will be another wave of people who will decide to renounce their citizenship.”

My comment:  Epicureans do not normally get involved in party politics, but peace of mind is of great concern, and what is happening on a daily basis is making ordinary law-abiding people extremely nervous.  Nowhere is perfect, but a small village in France or Italy seems increasingly attractive, even given the fact that the bureaucracy there is notorious.  I personally would like to live somewhere where people are taught science, and respect it (personally, I am an historian – all the more reason to listen to scientists).  Why do far too many Americans despise science?  Baffles me!   Please explain!

Harassment

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A Belgian man has been the victim of a bizarre nine-year-long harassment campaign: for nearly a decade, he has been sent pizzas that he never ordered.

“I cannot sleep any more,” said Jean Van Landeghem, who lives in Turnhout. “I start shaking every time I hear a scooter on the street.” One day in 2019, ten delivery drivers turned up on a single day, one of them trying to deliver 14 pizzas. The 65-year-old has reported the campaign to police, but still doesn’t know who’s behind it. “I cannot take it any more,” he said.

My comment:  this is my 2020 choice of weirdest  piece of news I have spotted.   At least it is not about dire and distressing party politics.  I could handle any number of pizzas in preference to being bombarded by those.

Artificial intelligence: not so intelligent after all?

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To The Economist

Artificial intelligence is an oxymoron. Intelligence is an attribute of living things, and can best be defined as the use of information to further survival and reproduction. When a computer resists being switched off, or a robot worries about the future for its children, then, and only then, may intelligence flow.

I acknowledge Richard Sutton’s “bitter lesson”, that attempts to build human understanding into computers rarely work, although there is nothing new here. I was aware of the folly of anthropomorphism as an AI researcher in the mid-1980s. We learned to fly when we stopped emulating birds and studied lift. Meaning and knowledge don’t result from symbolic representation; they relate directly to the visceral motives of survival and reproduction. Great strides have been made in widening the applicability of algorithms, but as Mr Sutton says, this progress has been fuelled by Moore’s law. What we call AI is simply pattern discovery. Brilliant, transformative and powerful, but just pattern discovery.

Further progress is dependent on recognising this simple fact, and abandoning the fancy that intelligence can be disembodied from a living host.  (Rob MacDonald, Richmond, North Yorkshire. (letter to The Week 11 July 2020)

My thought: As I thought, not so intelligent after all.

Hope for prostate cancer patients

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Prostate cancer breakthrough

A total of 57,192 new prostate cancer cases were diagnosed in the UK in 2018, making it the most commonly diagnosed form of the disease.

A simple blood test could be used to identify prostate cancer patients who are less likely to respond to certain drugs, or at risk of relapse, paving the way for more tailored treatments.

A team at two hospitals in London tested 1,000 blood samples drawn from 216 men who were taking part in a clinical trial into drugs for advanced prostate cancer. They found that those with high levels of tumour DNA in their blood at the start of treatment had worse health outcomes; and that the men who responded to treatment had the most significant drop in tumour DNA over its course. Their levels typically reduced 23%, whereas the patients who partially responded to treatment had a 16% drop. As liquid biopsies are cheaper, quicker and less invasive than surgical ones, doctors can carry them out more often – making it easier for them to track the effectiveness of treatments.  ( The Week, 13 June 2020)

My comment: I have a personal reason for including this piece of information –  I had prostate cancer and also had the operation, not a pleasant experience.  If you are male and over , say 40, you should get yourself tested, every year as directed.  Not to do so could kill you.  Message received?

Population : the global crash

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The world is ill-prepared for the coming global crash in children being born.  Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century.   23 nations – including Spain and Japan – are expected to see their populations halve by 2100. and there will be as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

What is going on?

The fertility rate – the average number of children a woman gives birth to – is falling.   If it falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall.

In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime.  By 2017 the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4.  A Lancet  study projects that it will fall below 1.7 by 2100.

_113374327_global_fertility_rates_july2020_640-nc.png

As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling to 8.8 billion by the end of the century.  “That’s a pretty big thing; most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline,” researcher Prof Christopher Murray told the BBC.  “We will have to reorganise societies to address it”.

The falling fertility rate is being driven, not by falling sperm counts, but by more women in education and work, and greater access to contraception.  Key population forecasts for the end of the century are as follows:

Japan’s : fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million.  

Italy: from 61 million to 28 million over the same timeframe.

23 countries – including Spain, Portugal, Thailand and South Korea – populations will  more than halve.

China, peak population 1.4 billion in 2024, then droppingto 732 million by 2100. India will take its place as largest country. 

The UK:  75 million in 2063, and falling to 71 million by 2100.

 183 out of 195 countries will end the century with a fertility rate below the replacement level.

This is good for carbon emissions and for deforestation of farmland, but it also means more old people than young people on the planet.  The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100. (James Gallagher,  Health and science correspondent, BBC  15 July 2020)

My big question: Who will pay tax in a massively aged world? Who will pay for healthcare for the elderly? Who will look after the elderly?  And will anyone ever again be able to retire? 

The Narrowing of the American mind

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It is of course appalling that a columnist for The New York Times should feel obliged to resign on account of the in-house bullying she’s had to endure. Bari Weiss was hired by the paper three years ago, as it sought to recruit voices that could challenge its dominant liberal ethos. And though no hard-line conservative – she’d left The Wall Street Journal in protest at its gradual surrender to Donald Trump – Weiss was happy to take on left shibboleths, questioning the excesses of #MeToo, debunking the notion of cultural appropriation, and so on.

But for many of her fellow journalists this sin against left orthodoxy was unacceptable. “They’ve called me a Nazi and a racist,” she wrote in her resignation letter. “My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels.”

Yet before the Right gets on its high horse over “the dangerous cancel culture that Democrats want to impose” on the nation, it should examine its own role in all this. For “if the Left is woke, the Right is bespoke: it has become tailored around one person”. And that person is Trump. The right-wing press gives little house room to any journalist who is critical of him. What we are seeing on both sides “is the narrowing of the American mind”.   It’s making everyone nastier.  (Mona Charen,  Chicago Sun-Times and The Week25 July 2020)

Do a Roosevelt on the US economy?

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Jim Tankersley wrote an article for Patriotic Millionaires which encourages us to rethink the traditional narrative of the post World War II economic boom in the US – the idea that innovation and American exceptionalism drove our expansion – is incorrect. 

Instead, he argues that massive investments into our own citizens was the biggest factor behind the boom. Now that we’re in a similar wartime-level economic depression, Tankersley argues that we should replicate those massive investments into the most vulnerable economic groups right now to pioneer a new era of growth out of one of our darkest moments.   ( Patriotic Millionaires, 8/6/2020)

My comment: the New Deal was a measure of daring and brilliance.  It took millions out of unemployment and poverty, gave them skills and education and laid the groundwork for the amazing successes of the post-war period.  In fact, in a more enlightened moment in history, it had widespread support, despite the effects on the national debt.  This is a moment similar to the great depression.  But who, if anyone, has the vision?

“Blasphemy, a way to control the people, and their thought

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Late last week Tahir Naseem, an American citizen, was murdered while standing trial for blasphemy in a Pakistani court. Naseem was a former member of the persecuted Ahmadi minority, and was lured to Pakistan in 2018 to be detained on charges of blasphemy. Coupled with the continued detention of Nigerian humanist Mubarak Bala since April of this year, it’s become clear that Congress cannot wait any longer to demand an end to blasphemy laws around the world. The silence is unacceptable.

83 countries around the world still have blasphemy laws that endanger the lives of those who do not conform to the state’s official religion or worldview. People of many faiths are all at risk. These laws have dire consequences; conviction can mean life in prison or a death sentence. And as Tahir’s death demonstrates, you don’t even need to be found guilty for your life to be in danger.

Recently, countries such as Greece, Ireland, and Canada have repealed their blasphemy laws and more are considering bringing these draconian laws to an end. However, the situation in many countries is increasingly dire, as evidenced by the the above gruesome news.  (American Humanist Society. 6 Aug 2020

My comment:  There is a bill before the US Senate, S. res. 458, which calls for an end to all blasphemy, apostasy, and heresy laws around the world.  We really should pass this bill and act against the medieval intolerance that persists in various parts of the world.  Regrettably, we have our own religious extremists to contend with.  Epicureanism stands for tolerance and give and take, regardless of local culture and beliefs.

Getting out of the UK. Phew!

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The number of British nationals emigrating  to other EU countries has risen by 30% since the Brexit referendum, with half making their decision to leave in the first three months after the vote, research has found.  (Bravo. Ed.)

Analysis of data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and Eurostat shows that migration from Britain to EU states averaged 56,832 people a year in 2008-15, growing to 73,642 a year in 2016-18.

The study also shows a 500% increase in those who made the move and then took up citizenship in an EU state. Germany saw a 2,000% rise, with 31,600 Britons naturalising there since the referendum.  Cited as reasons for moving are reduced levels of consideration and level-headedness in decision-making in the UK. and more impulsiveness, spontaneity and risk-taking”.  

While the EU withdrawal agreement enshrines the residency, work and social rights of EU citizens in the UK and Britons in the rest of the bloc, it failed to guarantee the free movement rights of British migrants, restricting future employment and residency prospects in other member states.

Co-author Daniel Tetlow said that “Brexit was by far the most dominant driver of migration decisions since 2016”. The jump in citizenship was “further evidence that an increasing number are making migration decisions to protect themselves from some of the most negative effects of Brexit on their lives”, the report said.

The key loss for British nationals is the freedom to move countries within the EU or to work across borders. This does not apply to EU nationals in the UK who retain free movement rights beyond Brexit courtesy of their EU member state citizenship.It means that unless British nationals take out citizenship in their host country, they can no longer work in or offer a service to another EU member state, impacting professions including accounting, law, architecture, translation and health.

More than 21,000 British nationals emigrated to Spain between 2016 and 2018.  11,00 went to Germany, 10,000 to France, 6000 to Ireland and 5000 to the Netherlands. ( Source: Guardian graphic. Source: Berlin Social Science Center.)

The second most popular country for British nationals was France, which does not require registration of EU migrants. Between 2008 and 2015 the number of registrations was just over 500 a year. After the referendum this rose tenfold with 5,000 registrations over the following two years.

In Germany, 14,600 Britons had dual nationality in 2019 compared to 622 in 2015. A total of 31,600 applied and received German citizenship in the three years after the referendum (2016 to 2019) with another 15,000 German passports expected for 2020. Overall half the estimated 120,000 Britons in Germany are expected to have dual citizenship by the end of this year.

In 2019, more Brits took German citizenship  than Poles, Romanians, Iraqis or Syrians.  Interviews with migrants in Germany for the study found those who migrated considered it a “big risk” but were prepared to make the trade-off to secure future residency and access across 27 countries.  (Lisa O’Carroll, 4 Aug 2020. Guardian).

My comment: Were I younger I think (my wife willing) that I would move to France.  Britain and the US (especially the US) seem to be blundering into a re- run of German, Italian and Spanish politics of the 1930s.  No one knows any history, and thus they blunder into a modern fascism without a clue what they are doing.

 

 

Monopolizing drugs

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So much for hopes of international cooperation in the fight against Covid-19. The US has just bought up “virtually all stocks” of the drug Remdesivir – leaving the rest of the world with none “for the next three months”. The drug, made under patent by the US pharma giant Gilead, is one of just two treatments proven to help people recover faster from the virus. The Trump administration has repeatedly shown it is “prepared to outbid and outmanoeuvre all other countries” to secure vital medical supplies. Still, the announcement this week was certainly timely: it coincides with evidence that the pandemic in the US is “spiralling out of control”. Other Western countries could secure supplies of the drug were they to tear up the patents’ rule book and buy from “generic companies in Bangladesh or India, where Gilead’s patent is not recognised”. So far, it hasn’t come to that. But America’s “unilateral action” raises fears of what will happen when the holy grail of a vaccine becomes available. Cornering the market on Remdesivir is perhaps a “taste of things to come”. (Sarah Boseley, The Guardian 4 July 2020)

My comment:   Of course what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander …….. were the Oxford University covid 19 drug to be proved effective and safe, what is the prevent the British from declaring their own monopoly and refusing access to Americans and everyone else?  Hard to keep up with the short-sighted stupidities.

I remember with affection the era in which the priority was to get nations working together for the common good.  There are still people, all too many, who do not subscribe to civilized mutual cooperation.  “Beggar you’re neighbour” seems to be quite acceptable as a policy for everything.  Anti-Epicurean to be sure; short- sighted as well.

Warming of the Globe

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To The Economist

Limiting temperature rises to 2°C above pre-industrial norms would still leave atmospheric carbon dioxide at well over 450 parts per million (ppm). We evolved – and until less than a century ago, lived – on a 300ppm planet. We need to return the Earth’s climate to its pre-industrial state, without doing the same to the economy.

The UN recently hosted the first Global Forum on Climate Restoration. Entrepreneurs and climate scientists discussed the undoubtedly gargantuan challenge of removing and permanently storing around a trillion tonnes of carbon from the atmosphere by 2050, and presented technically viable ways to do this. Even if market-based approaches to remove carbon dioxide fail entirely, and they won’t, a reasonable estimate is that it would cost 3-5% of global GDP for 20-30 years to return the atmosphere to 300ppm. As a comparison, ten years ago America diverted 3.5% of its annual GDP to prevent the financial system from collapsing. That felt like a good investment. So does this.  (Jon Shepard, Global Development Incubator, under the title “A cooling investment“)

My comment: A minority of people throughout the world are trying hard to concentrate the attention of politicians to the scary warming of the planet, so far with small effect. The best news today is that BP has announced that it will stop oil exploration and development and concentrate only on renewable energy.  But this is just one company.  A large number of Americans seem to think that warming is a hoax.  Their names and activities will go down in history as betrayers  of the human race.  But in a culture where money is god, and you have no right to stop them making money, however recklessly and selfishly, this is how it is and will quite possibly destroy civilized life. But who cares?

 

American storm troops.

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“He sent what House Speaker Nancy Pelosi called his “unidentified storm troopers” togged out like soldiers in a war zone onto streets filled with protesters in Portland, Oregon. Those camouflage-clad federal law enforcement agents were evidently from the Department of Homeland Security’s Federal Protective Service and the Customs and Border Protection agency.

Soon, hundreds of them are evidently going  to “surge”– a term that should sound eerily familiar — into Chicago and other cities run by Democratic mayors. In such a fashion, the Administration is quite literally bringing this country’s wars home. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump recently described everyday violence in Chicago as “worse than Afghanistan, by far.” He was talking about the country the U.S. invaded in 2001 and in which it hasn’t stopped fighting ever since, a land where more the 1000,000 civilians reportedly died violently between 2010 and 2019. By now, violence in Chicago (which is indeed grim) in the mind of the Great Confabulator, become “worse than anything anyone has ever seen”, and so worthy of yet more militarized chaos”. (William Astor, Tomgram july 26, 2020).

My comment:  I happen to have a history degree, one of my tutors having been a senior translator at the Nuremberg trials.  He was an expert on Europe in the period leading up to the Second World War.   All the time I am reminded of his horrific stories and regret that Americans have such superficial knowledge of the history of fascism, enabled as it was by the aftermath of the 1929 financial disaster.  The modern parallels are truly scary, the personalities involved weirdly parallel, the activities of Q-Anon little different from German, Italian and Spanish fascism of the 20s and 30s.  Epicureanism  is partly about peace of mind.   Hard to maintain!

Meanwhile, the world temperatures are rising…….

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Verkhoyansk, Russia

The highest temperature ever seen in the Arctic circle – 38°C – has been recorded in a town in Siberia. Scientists had previously predicted that the Arctic circle would not experience temperatures like that until 2100. A small town with a population of 1,000, some 3,000 miles east of Moscow, Verkhoyansk is known for its exceptionally cold winters. Its record low of -67.8°C is one of the coldest temperatures recorded on Earth. In summer, it typically reaches highs of 20°C.

However, Siberia has been in the grip of an exceptional heatwave for more than a month, causing wildfires that have sent smoke stretching over thousands of miles. On 23 May, the mercury in Khatanga, more than 100 miles north of Verkhoyansk, hit 25°C, an astonishing 13°C higher than its previous record.  (The Week 27 June 2020).

My comment:  There are governments that are actually trying to devise responsible policies to fight global climate change.  But for some, the United States in particular, the whole thing is being treated as a hoax devised to damage the economy and to make life harder for the pampered super-rich, who effectively control the current government and dictate policy.  For them the clear and obvious effects of warming are to be treated as party political. Global warming is deeply inconvenient for these selfish people and is best ignored or treated as party politics.

I won’t live to see the worst effects of the calamity facing the planet, but i feel for and fear for those who come after me and I doing my pathetic best not to make matters worse.