Woman in England sold by her husband

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“On Saturday the 7th instant, the inhabitants of this city (Carlisle, Cumberland, England, United Kingdom) witnessed the sale of a wife by her husband, Joseph Thompson, a local farmer who was married in the year 1829, to his present wife.

“She is a spruce, lively, buxom damsel, apparently not exceeding 22 years of age, and appeared to feel a pleasure at the exchange she was about to make. They had no children, and that, together with some family disputes, caused them by mutual agreement, to come to the resolution of finally parting.

“Accordingly, the bellman was sent round to give public notice of the sale, which was to take place at 12 o’clock. This announcement attracted the notice of thousands. She appeared above the crowd, standing on a large oak chair, with a rope or halter made of straw round her neck. She was dressed in rather a fashionable country style, and appeared to some advantage. The husband proceeded to put her up for sale, and spoke as follows:–

“Gentlemen, – I have to offer you notice my wife, Mary Ann Thompson, whom I mean to sell to the highest and fairest bidder. Gentlemen, it is her wish as well as mine to part for ever.

“She has been to me only a bosom serpent. I took her for my comfort, and the good of my house, but she has become my tormentor, a domestic curse, a night invasion, and a daily devil. (Great laughter.)

“Gentlemen, I speak truth from my heart, when I say, may God deliver us from troublesome wives and frolicsome widows. (Laughter.) Avoid them the same as you would a mad dog, a roaring lion, a loaded pistol, cholera morbus, Mount Etna, or any other pestilential phenomena in nature.

“Now I have shown you the dark side of my wife, and told you her faults and her failings, I will now introduce the bright and sunny side of her, and explain her qualifications and goodness.

“She can read novels and milk cows; she can laugh and weep with the same ease that you could take a glass of ale when thirsty: indeed, gentlemen, she reminds me of what the Poet says of women in general –

‘Heaven gave to women the peculiar grace,

To laugh, to weep, and cheat the human race.’

“She can make butter and scold the maid, she can sing Moore’s melodies, and plait her frills and caps: she cannot make rum, gin, or whisky, but she is a good judge of the quality from long experience in tasting them. I therefore offer her, with all her perfections and imperfection, for the sum of 50 shillings.”

“After an hour or two, she was purchased by Henry Mears, a pensioner, for the sum of 20 shillings and his Newfoundland dog. The happy couple immediately left town together, amidst the shouts and huzzas of the multitude, in which they were joined by Thompson, who, with the greatest good humour imaginable, proceeded to put the halter, which his wife had taken off, round the neck of his newly acquired Newfoundland dog, and then proceeded to the first public-house, where he spent the remainder of the day”. (From the Lancaster Herald, Date: April 7th, 1832)

Comment:   Sounds as if she was lucky to get away from him.  Mind you, to be cynical, it could be a quick and easy way of sorting the spike of divorces expected as a result of Covid19, as long as the women are allowed to seek their grumpy husbands.

Salt weakens the immune system

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A high-salt diet doesn’t just raise blood pressure: new research suggests that it also weakens the body’s ability to fight bacterial infections. For a German study, ten healthy volunteers aged between 20 and 50 were given an extra six grams of salt a day, on top of their normal diet. After a week, their immune cells were found to be less effective at engulfing and killing bacteria than they had been.

Co-author Prof Christian Kurts, from the University of Bonn, said the results were concerning because it’s not that difficult to consume an extra 6g of salt a day. “This is roughly the amount contained in two fast food meals, i.e. two burgers and two portions of French fries,” he said.   (The Week, 4 April 2020)

My reaction: only an extra six grams?  And it does that to you?   New resolution: henceforward:  no salt callar on the dining room table!  Especially at the present moment when immune systems need to be in A1 shape.  It’s all part of the achievement of ataraxia.  

Big tech, big tax dodger

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Google made £1.6 billion in revenue in the UK during the past year, but paid only £44 million in corporation tax, while the average Google employee earned £234,000 last year as the company’s share price climbed.  

Google’s tax fell from the £66 million paid in 2018, after Google UK reported a fall in profits due to the hiring of 800 extra workers. The company still made £1.6 billion in revenue last year, up from £1.2 billion in 2018, leading to the generous payouts for its 4,439 employees.  

Google’s European operation has its headquarters in Dublin, where taxes are lower. About 137 governments are trying to come up with an agreement on how to get tech  giants to pay more tax on the products and services they sell, rather than on their profits, which companies can register in low-tax jurisdictions.

Britain is planning a digital services tax, introducing a 2 per cent sales duty that may raise £1.5 billion over four years. But Google’s advertising revenue is thought to be four times the £5.5 billion that has been booked. The 2 per cent Digital Services Tax will barely scratch the surface.

A Google spokeswoman said: “We pay more than 80 per cent of our corporate income tax in the US, which is our home country. We also pay all of the tax that is due in the UK. We strongly support the OECD’s work to develop a new international framework for how multinational companies are taxed.”  ( Duh! Ed.) 

Dame Margaret Hodge, a former chairwoman of the public accounts committee, described the situation as a joke told Mail.   Paul Monaghan, chief executive of Fair Tax Mark, said: “Once again, it seems like Google are writing their own rules in the UK. Income is up but corporation tax charges are down. That’s before we get to the puzzle of how they continue to get away with booking so little of their UK advertising revenue through their UK subsidiary.” (Tom Knowles and AlexRalph, April 08 2020,  The Times).

What has this to do with Epicureanism?  Equity and fairness. Period!

Bolsonaro and the Brazilian evangelicals

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Brazil’s far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, called for a national day of fasting and prayer last Sunday, to “free Brazil from this evil” of coronavirus.

Bolsonaro’s popularity has plunged recently, owing to his refusal to take seriously the threat of Covid-19. However, he retains strong support among Brazil’s large community of evangelical Christians, and he has exempted religious services from coronavirus lockdowns.

Although brought up as a Catholic, Bolsonaro was re-baptised as an evangelical Christian in the Jordan River in 2016. “Brazil is in a serious crisis. The forces of evil are rising against a God-fearing Christian president,” tweeted Congressman Marco Feliciano, who is also an evangelical pastor.

Yes, Brazil is in thrall to the same sort of religious extremists we are familiar with in the US.   Fortunately, not all evangelicals are macho science deniers.

Nonetheless, makes you despair.

Anti- aging strategy:  The immune diet

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One of the most successful anti-ageing strategies ever discovered is caloric restriction. It requires a permanent cut in energy intake of up to 60 per cent. In every experimental animal that has been put through this, from fruit flies to primates, it extends lifespan and healthspan (the number of disease-free years at the end of life).

The strategy works because it switches on an evolutionary adaptation to starvation, which prioritises repair and survival pathways over growth and reproduction. Calorie-restricted animals tend to be leaner, fitter, metabolically healthier and mentally sharper than those that eat at will. They also have a stronger immune response.

Unfortunately, caloric restriction is extremely hard to maintain voluntarily. But there are ways to mimic it without going on a permanent starvation diet. The key is to deactivate a nutrient-sensing pathway inside cells called mTOR. When calories are scarce, it switches off, initiating the metabolic cascade that transitions your system into famine mode. The pathway can also be toggled off with drugs called mTOR inhibitors, the best-known being rapamycin.

Some people self-medicate with rapamycin even though it isn’t officially recognised as an anti-ageing or immune-boosting drug. There are other ways to achieve mTOR inhibition though. One is intermittent fasting, a temporary state of caloric restriction that is enough to switch off mTOR for a short while and still obtain its benefits. There are various regimes including the 16:8 diet, which involves completely eschewing calories for 16 hours and only eating in an 8-hour window. Even done once a week, this is an effective way of slowing aging, strengthening the immune system.

Exercise and keeping your weight down are also a proven mTOR inhibitors.  Aging is associated with a decline in the function of the immune system’s B-cells and low production of antibodies in response to vaccines.  So is being obese, which is associated with poor vaccine response, even in people who are young.( New Scientist, March 29, 2020)

The two Popes

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Earlier this year, In a rare public intervention, the Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI  issued a stout defence of priestly celibacy – just as Pope Francis was considering lifting the restriction on married priests in some circumstances, in particular, the ordination of married men in the Amazon region, where there is a severe shortage.

Francis, who has previously suggested he is open to such exceptions, is due to announce a decision in the coming months. But a new book has a chapter by Benedict defending priestly celibacy, which warns Catholics not to listen to the “special pleading, the theatrics, the diabolical lies, the fashionable errors that would devalue it”. Later, Benedict’s co-authorship credit was removed from the cover of the book, amid a furious row over whether or not the 92-year-old was manipulated into taking a public stance.  (Vatican City, January 2029, a carried in The Week, 18 January 2020)

My take:  Friendly message to the ex- Pope:

You’ve had your day, your opportunity.  You resigned voluntarily, leaving a celibate clergy mired in sexual scandal.

For what it’s worth (from a supporter of Epicurus, whose take on life and death is so very different to yours, and, I think more humane):  Benedict, go home and stop interfering.  You are doing the Catholic Church more harm than good.  

P.S: message from an historian:  the policy of celibacy had nothing to do with Jesus, or the Bible.  The church was concerned about having to look after numerous widows and their offspring in an age of short male lifespans.  Moreover, Italian law said that the property of married priests was heritable by wives and offspring, depriving the church of land, and therefore power.  No wives or kids was the answer to an institution coining it nicely, in the Middle Ages, anyway.

Higher number of steps, lower risk of death

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The higher your daily step count, the lower your risk of death per year, according to a new analysis by the US National Cancer Institute – but the link only goes so far.

Public health officials have long encouraged walking as a way of improving general health, but many studies have focused on people in their early 60s and have sometimes ignored minority groups, such as people who aren’t white.

Between 2003 and 2006 the study looked at 4840 people who were representative of the US population over the age of 40.  Pedro Saint-Maurice at the National Cancer Institute and his colleagues asked the participants to wear an accelerometer for a week, which  is a fairly good gauge of usual activity.

The team found that the average daily step count of this group was 9124 steps. This figure is higher than many previous studies have found, probably because the study included younger people, those working in less sedentary jobs, and more men (who tend to be more physically active).

The researchers used the US National Death Index to determine which participants had died by the end of 2015. 4000 steps a day was used as the baseline (easily achieved by someone who drives to work and sits at their desk for the whole day.)

By comparison, the team found that taking 8000 steps was associated with a 51 per cent lower risk of dying per year, and taking 12,000 daily steps was associated with a 65 per cent lower risk of dying per year.

But there is a plateau: taking more than 12,000 steps a day didn’t seem to be associated with a further reduction of risk of yearly mortality. Up to 12,000 steps, a higher number of steps was associated with a lower risk of dying per year regardless of sex, race, level of education, health condition and whether a person smoked or drank alcohol.

The researchers also found that the intensity of the steps taken had little to no effect on the risk of yearly mortality (that is, speed doesn’t seem to matter).

“Many individuals wear wearables and monitor their step count,  but there is a critical gap in knowledge between the relation of steps and health outcomes,” says I-Min Lee of Harvard University. This study corroborates and expands on previous research, she says. “It provides empirical data extending these findings to other groups of people.”  (A lightly edited version of an article in New Scientist by Jason Arunn Murugesu.   Journal reference: JAMA, DOI: 10.1001/jama.2020.1382)

Relevance to Epicureanism?  Fitness and good health promote a happy life and peace of mind.

BabyBoomers then and now

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To The Guardian. March 2018, from a baby boomer: 

“As a 70-year-old baby boomer I read and learnt from Phillip Inman’s article. As usual, though, there is no comparison made between the life circumstances experienced during the youthful years of baby boomers and those of today’s young people.

“Most of us grew up without central heating; icy bathrooms, phoning from the only phone in a freezing hall, doing homework next to a single-bar electric fire. Holiday accommodation – rarely, if ever, abroad – consisted of youth hostels or tents. Car ownership tended to be limited to enthusiasts with car maintenance skills. The purchase of clothing was a treat and TV was a four-channel affair without remote control. Sex was difficult to come by as getting together under parents’ roofs was out of the question. The age of majority was 21, so even the lucky 2-3% who went to university were in gender-separated halls or digs where landladies were in loco parentis. Late buses took us home from evening social events. Birthday celebrations would be held at home to the record player. I was lucky to own a bicycle, but no helmet. Deaths on the roads were horrifyingly high as seatbelts were unknown. Cancer meant automatic death.

“Do our relatively deprived youths give us any rights to a moderately comfortable old age?”. (name and address not given)

My take:  I was  born before the war, so don’t identify with boomers.  Nor do enjoy some of the behavior of the of the young (but won’t dwell on it).  But I deeply sympathize with the incredible difficulty the young people have in affording housing, the lack of security in their jobs, the emasculation of the pension system I have so happily benefitted from,  the appalling  so- called gig economy, not to mention the outrageous cost of further education (the taxpayer paid for mine! Yes, truly!.  I am so grateful for it and hope I have given back some at least of what I received).

The young have a point; the boomers are an insensitive lot, and the picture of life as described by the writer somewhat exaggerated.

Living in ancient Rome: give thanks for modern life

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Juvenal described life in an ancient Roman tenement, and in the winding, crowded, brawling, filthy streets below:

“Think now about all those other perils

Of the night; how high is it to the roof up there

From which a tile falls and smashes your brains.

How many times broken, leaky jars

Fall from windows; how hard they strike and break

The pavement.  You could be thought lazy and careless

If you go to dinner without writing a will.

There are as many deaths waiting for you

As there are open windows above your head.

Therefore you should hope and fervently pray

That they only dump their sewage on you.

Someone below is already shouting for water

And shifting his stuff;  smoke is pouring out

Of the third floor attic, but you know

Nothing of it, for if the alarm begins on the ground floor,

The last to burn will be the man who has nothing

To shelter him from the rain but the tiles,

Where the gentle doves lay their eggs”.

For all our problems and fears we should be thankful for the good things about our current world: better health and sanitation, better housing, better diet, more mobility, more life options…. one could go on.  Epicurus, were he still alive, might exclaim, “ So it is possible to improve the lives of the human race!”. and he might also add, “ By and large.”

Meditation

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There seems to be good evidence that regular sessions of mindful attention have a calming effect on the amygdala, the brain’s emotion processor, and reduce impulsive reactions to stressful or negative thoughts and experiences. Mindfulness, they say, can help mute our emotional response to physical pain, and lessen anxiety and mind-wandering (not the kind that feeds creativity but its unfocused opposite). The benefits are apparent, even for beginners, and they increase with practice.

Compassion meditation, which aims to boost empathy, has an even more immediate effect: just 7 hours over the course of two weeks has been shown to boost altruistic behaviour. It is probably no coincidence that this makes us happier, too.

Science writer Daniel Goleman and neuroscientist Richard Davidson Coleman  are most interested in capacity of meditation to cultivate enduring selflessness, equanimity, compassion and the ability to free the mind of negative emotions.

Much of the evidence for these traits comes from Davidson’s lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he has scanned the brains of dozens of highly experienced Tibetan monks. These yogis, who have meditated for thousands – in some cases, tens of thousands – of hours, describe themselves as living in a heightened state of present-moment awareness, “as if their senses were wide open to the full rich panorama of experience”.

Davidson claims he has found a neural correlate to this mind-warp: a massive increase in the intensity of gamma waves in the brain, a signal associated with conscious perception. Are these monks living on a different plane of consciousness from the rest of us?

One of their most interesting passages in a recent book describes what this self-lightening looks like on a neural level, how meditation practice quietens the brain’s default mode network, the constant background chatter that accompanies mind-wandering and self-absorption.

If a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, as various psychological surveys argue, then a focused mind must be worth struggling for. For Goleman and Davidson, the struggle is not so much about individual relief but about reducing “greed, selfishness, us/them thinking and impending eco-calamities, and promoting more kindness, clarity, and calm”. (An edited account by Michael Bond in NewScientist, September 16, 2017)

My take:  The objective is very Epicurean.  I personally call meditation”My Peace”, and only wish I had the leisure and the time – and the peace – to do more of it.  My wife  asks this of me and she is absolutely right.

P.S Jane asked about this subject and whether the mind is blank; if not , what do you think about when meditating.  Personally I have a virtual garden, actually it is a beautiful garden in Ravello, Italy. It has a stupendous view from high cliffs over the sea.  It has statuary among the trees and flowering shrubs and is totally peaceful.  I go for virtual strolls , enjoying the sun, the light and the tasteful beauty.

Going to your British GP: another perspective

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“Does your GP let you talk about more than one ailment when you see them? Count yourself lucky if they do.  

“Surgeries across the country increasingly enforce a strict “one appointment, one problem” policy. I raised the issue on Twitter the other day and was inundated with responses. Among them was one from a mother whose daughter ended up in A&E with pneumonia after her doctor refused to examine her cough during a visit about depression. All agreed it was a crazy policy, given that conditions often involve a number of different symptoms, and that people can be shy about admitting upfront what’s bothering them.

“The problem goes back to the overly generous deal Tony Blair’s government cut with GPs in 2006. Very high salaries (“roughly twice what a French GP earns”) enable our doctors to live comfortably while working just a few days a week. Result? It can take weeks to see a GP and, even then, you’re rushed through. No wonder our survival rates for cancer, so reliant on prompt diagnosis, lag far behind many of our peers.”  (Allison Pearson, The Week, 21 Feb 2020)

My take: Perhaps I am lucky, but when I am in London and have to visit the GP I get wonderful treatment, and, since I am not exactly young, often for several things bothering me.  But then my National Health doctor clearly isn’t in it for the money.  Hordes of patients line up outside the surgery before opening time, and the waiting room is always packed.  So I need a lot more evidence before I forego my love of the National Health Service  (yes, the consultations are free) . The fact is that the disgraceful attitude reported by Allison Pearson (above) is probably not general and depends on why doctors go into medicine in the first place.  Most are altruistic.  Thanks, Doc!

Fish and parasites

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Fish are infected with 283 times more parasitic worms than they were 40 years ago. Anisakis worms can infect a variety of marine fish and squid, as well as whales and dolphins, and can be present in fish used raw for sushi.

Scientists analysed the abundance of Anisakis, or herring worm, between 1978 and 2015, gathering  data on the average number of parasites per fish from 123 studies – which included 56,778 fish across 215 species. They found a 283-fold increase over nearly 40 years.

Anasakis starts its life cycle in the intestines of marine mammals, is excreted into their faeces and then infects fish, small crustaceans or krill in the larval stage.If eaten by fish they go on to form a cyst in the muscle tissue of that fish. When the fish gets eaten by the marine mammal, the life cycle recommences.

Humans can also contract these parasitic worms by consuming smoked or improperly frozen fish The worm can’t survive inside us, and are unable to complete their life cycle there. But the presence of this parasite can still initiate an immune response in people that can cause nausea, vomiting and diarrhoea.  The good news is that the seafood processing industry and sushi chefs are skilled at spotting and removing these worms.

The reason for the increased abundance of the parasites may be linked to the rise in marine mammal numbers from the 1970s onwards after the introduction of protections against hunting. Warming seas could also increase the rate of Anasakis reproduction.  Minimizing the number of worms that people are encountering in their sushi dinner is going to become more challenging into the future as we get these increasing abundances. (New Scientist.  Donna Lu, Global Change Biology, DOI: 10.1111/gcb.15048).

My take: depressing  isn’t it?  Challenges everywhere you look, and still no toilet paper!  (I don’t mean to be flippant, but it seems that there is no end to the ways we are messing up our planet.  And we vote in people who don’t care).

 

Liberty and its mis-uses

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“America is the only country ever founded on an idea. The only country that is not founded on race or even common history. It’s founded on an idea and the idea is liberty. That is probably the rarest phenomena in the political history of the world; this has never happened before. And not only has it happened, but it’s worked. We are the most flourishing, the most powerful, most influential country on Earth with this system, invented by the greatest political geniuses probably in human history.” — Charles Krauthammer

Krauthammer may be right about the US, even twenty five years ago. But the US has now gone further than any other Western country in encouraging free-riders.  It has allowed the very wealthy to opt out of the obligations of citizenship altogether.  Income from capital is now taxed more lightly than income from labour, the rich now pay a lower rate of tax than school teachers.  Massive multinational operate from small islands with low tax rates, rather than in the western countries in which they operate.  Moreover, the rich effectively dictate to their own political party with massive funding (involving inevitable quid pro quo’s) and are deaf to the dangers facing the country: global climate change, a chronically expensive healthcare system with the worst health outcomes in the world, the rise of China, and a failure to balance the budget when the economy was operating at capacity before the corona virus appeared.

This is glaringly obvious to anyone who keeps up with the news.  Yet huge swathes of the voting population seem unaware that they are being ripped off – politically, financially and morally, and seem content with it, still living in the past.

 Were Epicurus among us now, I suspect he would consider moving to a country with a less toxic political system.  Peace of mind was, after all, his principal objective.

The wild animal trade in China

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Teams in China are racing to discover which wild animal at a Wuhan food market was the source of the corona virus:  snakes, pangolins or bats? We don’t know yet.

What is clear is how seriously China is now clamping down on the trade in wildlife. Recently, the country’s highest authorities enacted a permanent ban. “It is forbidden to hunt, trade and transport terrestrial wild animals that grow and reproduce naturally in the wild for the purpose of food,” says the new law.

 For decades, campaigners have been calling for an end to wildlife markets in China, where animals, including those that are sick or disease-laden, are kept caged, often in poor conditions and near to people. Animal welfare is reason enough to ban them. The markets were also home to the huge under-the-counter trade in illegal fare, such as shark fins.

However, there are risks that prohibiting the markets could drive the trade underground, making the situation worse.  After the outbreak of the SARS coronavirus, which, in 2002, also came from animals, legal markets were suspended, but people still bought wildlife on the black market and the virus still spread.  Research has found that bans by Chinese authorities on live bird markets amid the 2013 bird flu outbreak led to the spread of that virus to uninfected areas.The problem was that different provinces implemented bans at different times, meaning poultry prices would be dented in one area, motivating traders to move infected animals elsewhere. 

Fortunately, the new ban is on wildlife traded for food is different. It could encourage criminal activity, but if done well, it could limit the economic incentives that have seen some partial bans fail.  It may also kick-start a generational change, as children won’t grow up with the wild animal trade, the legal markets for which were never well-regulated.  Banning wildlife markets in China permanently won’t end the illegal trade but it will reduce it: a faint silver lining amid the crisis.   (an edited    version of an article by Adam Vaughan, New Scientist)

Rule by religious extremists? Bad for peace of mind!

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The weekly Bible study arranged by Capitol Ministries for members of Congress and President Trump’s cabinet, illustrates how entwined Christianity is with our government.  Attendees include the vice president, secretaries of state for education, housing and urban development, agriculture, and health; the head of NASA; Trump’s chief of staff; former labor and energy secretaries; and over fifty senators and members of the House (all Republicans).  If you want a taste of power and get ahead you just have to attend.

The organizer of the weekly study is Ralph Drollinger, who, up until a decade or so ago, was called a fringe zealot, avoided by the powerful in Washington. He is now a key figure, not just in attempting to push a conservative theology but in using religion for political purposes.

We think we have a secular democracy that would be approved of by Epicurus.  No!  What it is becoming, (or largely become) is an evangelical-dominated movement that denies science, bashes government and prioritized loyalty over professional expertise, and denies climate change.  

This is not just politics; it is about the basics of living in America. In the past the country stood for fairness, reasonable equality of opportunity, and giving a leg- up to the poor and dispossessed, or, at least not making their lives and their jobs more miserable.

In the current crisis, we are all reaping what these evangelical power-zealots have sown. Epicurus did not believe in the gods (or, at least, he thought they were uninterested in mankind and spent their time chasing goddesses).  He was a believer in Greek democracy, equity, fairness and expertise.  If you are reading this you probably are, too.