The US is not the only Western democracy to have disfunctional democracy

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In the last British general election 1.1 million people voted for the Green Party, which produced for them one seat; 3.8 million people voted for UKIP, which produced one seat as well; 2.4 million people voted for the Liberal Democrats: 8 seats; 1.4 million people voted for the Scottish National Party: result 56 seats. Meanwhile, the Tories got 52% of the parliamentary seats from 37% of the popular votes cast.

This is crazy and totally, well, undemocratic. A total of 7.3 million (25% of voters) are effectively disenfranchised, their votes worthless. No wonder there is disengagement from politics. The culprit is the British first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system and of a failure to embrace proportional representation.

In America the local politicians gerrymander the constituency boundaries and pick their constituents. In the UK an independent commission alters boundaries according to population densities, without political input (we are assured). Despite the commission, the results are unfair the UK and are unrepresentative in both countries. Epicurus didn’t like politics and politicians, but he did like a level playing field; and he was right.

Financial advisors

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Choosing a financial advisor is one of the most difficult things one can undertake.  A study called,”The Market for Financial Adviser misconduct” (curious title) says that out of a database of 1.2 million individuals and 650,000 registered financial advisors, 7% were disciplined for misconduct and that median payment to customers in compensation was $40,000, One third of these people are repeat offenders, over half of whom nevertheless keep their jobs.  Of the half fired, 44% are hired by someone else within a year, although they take a 10% pay cut.  They tend to congregate in firms with other people guilty of misconduct.  The reason these firms don’t go out of business is that they prey on elderly or unsophisticated customers in relatively wealthy, elderly and less educated counties. Florida and California have the most dubious companies with the most people with records of misconduct.

My own experience, which is not good, has made me very risk-averse. In general it is true to say that unless you study the financial market every day and that is your main interest in life, the only way of surviving and keeping your money is to buy what Americans call Certificates of Deposit, which offer minimal interest but which are insured if the market goes belly up. In England a similar instrument is called a Fixed Interest Deposit Bond, also insured.  For Epicurean ataraxia leave the gambling to gamblers.

Is it time to ground the drones?

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President Obama once specified that the drone programme mustn’t create more enemies than it would on the (old-fashioned) battlefield. Is it meeting that test? Since the “drone wars” began in 2008, al-Qa’eda’s central command has been devastated, but the group’s offshoots have boomed. Yemen’s government was toppled by Houthi tribesmen angry that the US had turned their country into a “target range”. It’s time for a “top-to-bottom review” of the drone programme – one “focused not only on targeting rules, but also on costs and benefits”. ( part of an article by Doyle McManus, Los Angeles Times)

It seems to me that hardly a week goes by when there hasn’t been a drone mistake. Schools, hospitals, our own men, weddings, funerals all at one point or another have been mistakenly hit. Apologies are forthcoming, but probably never listened to. According to some accounts we have managed to turn the Pakistanis from being, more or less, sympathetic with American efforts to crush the Taliban and Al Qaida into sympathisers with the latter.

The point is that the CIA lost too many of their human “assets” long ago and concentrated on electronic surveillance. Now we are struggling to verify targets. It was inevitable. I remember meeting a senior member of the British secret services, who, in a moment of candour, said it was really stupid to rely on electronics instead of dedicated, trained spies and observers on the ground. Syrians and Afghans, for instance, may well want to help destroy ISIS, but they aren’t stupid; they see Afghans who helped the Americans denied help or visas to get out of the country to safety. Why should anyone spy for American troops? Eyeless in Gaza isn’t in it.

Montaigne on death

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“Go out of the world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from womb to life, without feeling or fright, make again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe, the life of the world”. (Montaigne)

Epicurus teaches us that death is nothing to fear. Life is feeling or sensation; when life ends, there is no feeling. Death does not hurt. He believed that man is a bundle of atoms. You have eternal life only in so far as your atoms are recycled forever in a myriad of forms.

Hounding donors

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Olive Cooke was a 92 year old worker for charity, who some while ago took her own life, apparently overwhelmed with phone calls and dunning letters from charities asking her for more and more money. She had signed up to give money to 27 charities, but that done she was besieged with 267 letters a month alone, marked out as “easy prey” by an “unfeeling”, mechanised industry. She threw herself into the Avon Gorge.

These days, if you forget to tick the “no contact” box you get on its “pitiless radar”. Then the leaflets, replete with pictures of sad-eyed children and tormented animals, start flooding in, along with calendars, pens and even coins to ramp up the “moral blackmail”. Busy midlifers usually find a “proportionate response” to all this. But older people – members of a kinder, more polite generation – are “sitting ducks”. Charities need steady income streams to operate, and they’ve found that hounding people to sign up to give via direct debit is the most effective way of guaranteeing them. Eventually, their hard-sell tactics may come back to bite them; if we want them to mend their ways before then, it may be that only new regulation will work.

I have personally solved the problem by having a standard list of charities agreed between my wife and I. If a fundraiser phones I can then tell him or her that I have this list and I have agreed with my wife that we won’t add to it unless there is a very good reason. This simplifies the task and lets me make polite excuses where necessary.