No doubt the mafia corrupts Italian society, but how do they differ from the huge American corporations who spend fortunes on lobbying, wining and dining politicians, distorting elections with money, offering inducements for favorable contracts, cosy regulations and tax concessions? Why is there no talk of breaking up distorting monopolies? Epicurus might have had a Greek word for all this – he would have called It a ?????? *
* If you don’t speak Greek – a racket.
British animal rights activists from Peta (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals) have argued that the term “pet” is derogatory to animals, and should not be used. Instead, they suggest words like “companion”, which is less patronising. Referring to oneself as an owner of a pet “implies that the animals are a possession, like a car, for example”, rather than “their own individual beings”, the charity’s spokesperson said.
My comment: Last time I looked I couldn’t find a dog, cat or any other companion- type animal who spoke English or who comprehended anything more than maybe the soppy word “Walkies?” to denote impending exercise. My point is that animals are not about to demonstrate in the street because they are called “pets”. Don’t be daft!
A large proportion of global population of 7.7 billion people is aged 24 or under. In Africa 41% are 15 or under, The Asian and Latin American figures it is 25%. Most of these young people will reach adulthood scarred by recession, civil war, falling living standards and austerity programs. Many current protests center around shared grievances about inequality and jobs. In India each month 1 million people turn 18 and can register to vote. In the Middle East and North Africa an estimated 27 million youngsters will enter the workforce in the next five years. Any government that fails to provide jobs and housing is in for a rough ride. The young people referred to above are different from previous generations in that they are nearly all have access to the internet. They are healthier, on balance better educated than previous generations, and are aware of the concepts of free speech and living wages, and less prepared to see them denied.
Protests are everywhere and expectations are higher. The young, faced with a fearsome climatic future, are protesting injustice, inequality, environmental degradation and the oppressive powers that be. Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes backed by financial elites and wealthy oligarchies are prepared to crush threats to their power, while hypocritically deploring protester violence. (Simon Tisdall Guardian Weekly, 1 Nov 2020).
My comment: We can thus expect a growing incidence of violence and migration caused by climate change, lack of jobs and opportunity, not to mention affordable food. Some of this is being driven by the attitudes of elderly populations who have done nicely, thank you, but seem to care little collectively for the struggling younger generation. (Exhibit 1 is Brexit, driven by the votes of the elderly, I regret to say). Epicureanism and peace of mind should be attractive under these conditions, a set of beliefs that apply everywhere and are not age-dependent. We should continue to advocate for Epicurus, his peaceful beliefs and way of life.
Finland is to guarantee new fathers at least 95 working days of paternity leave (equivalent to more than four months off work), a reform aimed at giving all parents the same rights, regardless of gender. Each parent will be given 164 working days of paid parental leave, and can transfer up to 69 of them to their partner. Besides promoting equality, the reform is designed to lower the divorce rate and halt the decline in Finland’s fertility rate (at 1.35 births per woman, it’s one of the lowest in the world). Effectively, it trebles the father’s allowance, giving Finland one of the most generous parental leave systems in Europe (see below).
Using OECD figures here is a snapshot of paid leave for mothers in other countries around the world:
Female workers on an average salary in Estonia can take job-protected leave when they give birth and continue taking home full wages for the first 18 months of their child’s life, in the form of 20 weeks fully paid maternity leave followed by the first 62 weeks of maximum paid parental leave. After that, monthly payments drop considerably until the child turns three.
Maternity leave is available at two-thirds of a woman’s average earnings for 14 weeks – six of which are compulsory. Parental leave can then be taken by mothers and fathers at a percentage of earnings until the baby’s first birthday, but it is usually taken by women. It can be extended up to 14 months if both parents take it.
Sweden is ranked by Unicef as the world’s most family-friendly country and 17th for maternity leave. Women are entitled to 10 weeks full rate equivalent maternity leave followed by 480 days parental leave, 90 days of which is ringfenced for each parent.
Billionaire Lloyd Blankfein joked as he announced his 2018 retirement as Goldman Sachs CEO that he looked forward to “unrestrained tweeting” in the years ahead. But the Twitter life apparently bored the billionaire, and his twitter account went silent for three months — until last week when Senator Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary. Sanders, a Blankfein tweet ranted will “ruin our economy.” As a nominee, Blankfein says, he’d be the Russian pick “to best screw up the US.”
Blankfein seems to be engaging in some Trumpian projection here. Few Americans, a just-released Better Markets report details, have done more to “ruin the economy” in real time than Blankfein in his 12 years as Goldman’s top exec. The bank reached ”new heights of lawlessness” in the run-up to the 2008 financial crash, Better Markets notes, and then “continued to violate the law in the post-crash era.” The new report may be the best evidence yet that Wall Street, as a certain senator from Vermont charges, has only one essential business model: “fraud.” Chuck Collins, Inequality.org 2/17/20)
My take: I won’t edge into party politics and comment on Bernie – it is inappropriate. However, Blankfein is an example of a small number of people who have successfully manipulated both the economy and society to engineer a situation where capitalism, as it has developed, is working for them but not for ordinary people, either in the US or anywhere else. Billionaires like Blankfein can buy anything they want and have special privileges when they want the ear of a politician. Meanwhile they pay little or no tax, and in some cases give little to charity. If I were Blankfein I would keep rather quiet.
In the words of Lucretius:
“..we are all born from the same celestial seed; all of us have the same father,
from which the earth, the mother who feeds us, receives clear drops of rain,
producing from them bright wheat and lush trees, and the human race, and the species of beasts,
offering up the foods with which all bodies are nourished, to lead a sweet life
and generate offspring…”. (de rerum natura, bk.II, lines 991- 97)
and he might have added (less poetically):
There is only one Earth that nurtures us and is bountiful.
To foul the seas, pollute the air, then to deny all responsibility;
To spread soullessness about, and concrete the land for short-term gain,
To tolerate starvation amid plenty; to allow the purchase of the political process;
To import the desperate only for cheap labour; to disrupt public lives for private gain;
To allow the cost of a roof over the head to grow too high to be affordable for the working man; and to lumber the young with massive college debt ………
All this is foolishness ………….Or maybe mass suicide. Epicurus told us to live a life of pleasure, to care for our children, for our neighbors and for the planet, and (by inference) to keep life on Earth sustainable and liveable.
Rich, care-less sirs, you climate change deniers – we have your names; they will be carved in halls of infamy.
Over the summer the U.S government announced a new plan to end the food stamp program for thousands of low-income people, mostly immigrants.The new rule will tighten work requirements for able-bodied adults with no dependents, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said in a call with reporters.
Under current law, able-bodied adults without dependents can receive SNAP benefits for a maximum of three months during a three-year period, unless they’re working or enrolled in an education or training program for 80 hours a month. But states have been able to waive this time limit to ensure access to food stamps during the ups and downs of reentering the workforce. Before this rule, counties with an unemployment rate as low as 2.5% were included in waived areas. The new rule, which is set to take effect in April will tighten the criteria for states applying for such waivers, making 6% the minimum unemployment rate for a county to receive a waiver…. It arrives as part of a broader effort to limit access to the federal food safety net, the first of three such measures in the works. The USDA initially estimated that up to 750,000 individuals would be dropped from SNAP if the proposal took effect. The USDA now says the figure is 688,000. (Washington Post).
My comment: Epicurus famously welcomed slaves, women, the rich and the poor in his garden. He offered (rather unattractive) meals consisting of nothing more than bread and water, but at least he and his friends could discuss philosophy over something to eat.
Fast forward, in what some call the richest country on the planet, and at a time of full employment when we need more workers, immigrants, in desperation, are being denied sustenance and are effectively being forced to leave the country and return to their crime-ridden and job-scarce countries. This is nonsense, and a disgrace, but it seems that the religiously-inclined are content with it. Christianity only applies to the deserving, apparently. So that’s o.k.
If you subscribe to the teachings of Epicurus it is not o.k.
A Catholic priest in Rhode Island has defended his decision to ban all lawmakers who voted in favor enshrining abortion protections under state law from receiving communion at his parish.
Recently, Reverend Richard Bucci, a Catholic priest in Rhode Island, declared that every legislator who voted last year to pass the bill codifying the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe v. Wade decision will also not be allowed to act as witnesses to marriage, godparents, or lectors at weddings, funerals or any other church function.
The announcement was listed in the Sacred Heart Church in West Warwick’s weekly bulletin and included dozens of names in the House and Senate. The decision was made a few days after the 47th anniversary of the Roe vs. Wade ruling.
Bucci claimed that the legislators had sneaked the legislation through without telling the public, a claim vehemently denied by State Representatives who passed the measure, who campaigned on the issue and whose votes are on the record.
One Representative said of the Church : “They have a problem with the lack of respect for the separation of church and state, and for our votes on behalf of our constituents being punished by a church who protected child abusers.”
Bucci has now doubled down his defense on the ban, while hitting out at those who raised issues of child abuse within the Catholic church.
“We’re not talking about any other moral issue where somebody’s making a comparison between pedophilia and abortion,” Bucci is reported to have said: “Well, pedophilia doesn’t kill anyone, and this does.”
”Pedophilia doesn’t kill anyone, and this does”.
No wonder church donations and attendance are down. It virtually endorses pedophilia. I would argue , with equal conviction, that bringing a child into this roiling world, unwanted and unloved, is a sin, potentially condemning another human being to a life of misery. This is what their god wants?
More than half of us breathe the wrong way , missing out on better health and altered consciousness. Here are some tips on how to breathe properly:
It may be the most natural thing in the world, but breathing is surprisingly easy to get wrong – and that matters more than you might think.
Most of the time, the right way to breathe is through your nose. The nose is exquisitely designed to trap dust and other foreign bodies. Beyond your visible nose lies the nasal cavity, a cavernous space the size of a gaping mouth. This is lined with folded membranes designed to warm or cool the air to body temperature, add moisture and trap pathogens in yet more mucus. Your sinuses – air-filled spaces that connect to the nasal cavity – swirl the air around more and add nitric oxide, which kills bacteria and viruses and relaxes the blood vessels in the respiratory tract, allowing more oxygen to pass into the blood.
The upshot of all this is that nose breathing adds 50 per cent more air resistance than breathing through the mouth. That gives your heart and lungs a workout and increases the vacuum in your lungs, which allows you to draw in up to 20 per cent more oxygen than breathing by mouth.
As if that wasn’t enough, nasal breathing boosts brain function and is important for learning and memory. The explanation is that the nasal cavity has a direct line to the emotional and memory processing centres of the brain, via sensory neurons that connect to the brain’s olfactory bulb. These neurons sense air moving in and out of the nasal cavity and lock brainwaves to the same rhythm. Synchronised brainwaves then spread beyond the scent-processing brain areas into regions responsible for memory, emotion and cognition.
Nil by mouth
According to some estimates, more than 50% of children and 61% of adults breathe through their mouths too often. As a result, we also risk bad breath, poor sleep, learning difficulties, tooth decay and even malformation of the jaw.
As for how fast to breathe, if it is calm you seek, slow it down to about six breaths per minute. This triggers a reflex that widens blood vessels and reduces heart rate. Concentrating on a long, slow exhalation also stimulates the vagus nerve, which is in charge of the rest-and-digest response, the opposite of fight or flight. Breathing more slowly still might even lull you into an altered state of consciousness lAt three breaths per minute, theta brainwaves increase together with a zoned-out state that looks like slow-wave sleep, a deep state of slumber.
There is also humming. Humming sets up swirls of air in the sinuses, which boost production of nitric oxide 15-fold, with all its immune and cardiovascular benefits. The only time that nose breathing falls short is when you need to fill your lungs quickly. In an emergency, a gasp of air through the mouth works wonders. Just try not to make a habit of it. (Lightly edited version of a recent article by Caroline Williams, in the New Scientist, 8 Jan 2020, On health)
“Having new sorts of transport devices on our roads would also help push cities into thinking beyond the simple “car/pedestrian” binary – essential in the long run if we’re to tackle the climate crisis. This is not a plea for the Silicon Valley model of picking up and dropping rented scooters wherever you want: discarded scooters littering the pavements are a pain and an eyesore. But allowing these things on the road? It’s a no-brainer. (Alex Hern, The Guardian)
My take: Tell this to the elderly people in my neighborhood! Our city government are proposing to allow 10,000 more scooters onto our already crowded streets. The sidewalks are not exactly littered with scooters, (just left any-old-how on the sidewalks). That would be an exaggeration. But only an exaggeration because the proposed additional 10,000 haven’t yet appeared.
Scooters are used by young people who think they are immortal, it seems. They wear no helmets or reflective devices on their clothes at night. They travel everywhere at maximum speed in car lanes if they can get away with it, and park, yes, any-old-how, not thinking of pedestrians and the ubiquitous little ole ladies. It is only a matter of time before the serious accidents start to happen. I love The Guardian, but sometimes it lets theory trump common sense. At least impose some enforceable rules!
The educational under-performance of Britain’s white working-class males is “desperate”. Less then 10% of white boys from deprived backgrounds go to university, the lowest share of any demographic group. Boys lag behind girls at all stages of schooling – in few other areas, says the Higher Education Policy Institute, is there “such a big gender gap but so few proposals to remedy it”. Where white working-class boys are concerned, one thing is paramount: to bring degree courses closer to their social context and aspirations. Investing more money in the further education colleges and technical courses that have been allowed to wither should be the Government’s urgent priority. (Miranda Green, Financial Times and The Week 11 January 2020)
My take: Years ago the British government made a really stupid decision (so what’s new?) They allowed technical colleges and polytechnics to call themselves “universities”. At one point, Oxford Polytechnic was arguable harder to get into than the big university down the road. So, instead of only offering practical and training, these new universities became more and more academic, leaving the young lads with fewer training-for-life opportunities.
Secondly, in the old days the way to get on in life was to join a big company as apprentices and be trained on the job over a period of years. The pay was not great, but there was a reliable future ahead for young lads. This is what the Germans did and still do, amazingly effectively. This more or less disappeared in England. I strongly believe in education – the broadening and training of the mind – and in the arts as a means. But this is not necessarily appropriate for everyone and especially for non-academic lads good with their hands. The latter are now floundering, and it is the fault of governments.
Bring back apprenticeships!
The relevance to Epicureanism?: We should be offering opportunities to everyone whether from poor of well-off backgrounds. How can you achieve ataraxia when you feel you have no future?
Newsletter note from a neighbor who moved to the US from China:
“Hi neighbors, I know lots of you have heard of the recycling crisis in the US since China’s ban on importing foreign garbage in 2017. There are many articles about this issue, such as this one from the guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/jun/21/us-plastic-recycling-landfills. It says: “As municipalities are forced to deal with their own trash instead of exporting it, they are discovering a dismaying fact: much of this plastic is completely unrecyclable.
“The issue is with a popular class of plastics that people have traditionally been told to put into their recycling bins – a hodgepodge of items such as clamshell-style food packaging, black plastic trays, take-out containers and cold drink cups, which the industry dubs “mixed plastic”. It has become clear that there are virtually no domestic manufacturers that want to buy this waste in order to turn it into something else.
“Take Los Angeles county. The Guardian reports that recycling facilities are separating “mixed plastics” from those plastics which still retain value – such as water bottles, laundry detergent bottles and milk jugs – and, contrary to what customers expect, sending them directly to a landfill or incinerator.
”I also want to add that the process of recycling is super-polluting. My hometown in China is not far from a processing center that used to accept plastic recycling from the US. The cancer rate there skyrocketed and the groundwater is now no longer drinkable.” (Name withheld)
I once went round a recycling plant with my wife. Most plastics, we were told, were being recycled. At that time we had to separate out different types of plastic, ready for collection. What I didn’t take on board is that the (mostly Asian) countries that took the recycling were stopping doing so. It now seems that most of it now goes into landfills – not a happy situation, to say the least.
What is nor explained is why the plastics have to be used in the first place (cost, presumably). Salad, for instance, comes in large, clumsy clear plastic boxes. Why is it impossible to produce mass recyclable plastics, or similar materials that are transportable, light and hygienic? This would be welcomed by everyone, or at least all those who would welcome reducing the role of oil-producing companies.
The year 2019 saw the continuation of “the world’s most bizarre financial experiment ever”, said Merryn Somerset Webb on MoneyWeek.com – “negative interest rates”. The European Central Bank and the Swiss National Bank were among those charging investors for the privilege of holding their bonds. There are now $16trn-worth of negative-yielding government bonds in the global economy – an unprecedented development.
No one knows what this means, or how much we should fear it. Perhaps, as former US Fed chair Alan Greenspan observes, “zero has no meaning”. Or perhaps it is a sign of something “more terrifying” to come. (The Week, 28 December 2019).
Negative interest rates are a tool of monetary policy used by the European Central bank to help stabilise the economy, but their effects long term are not certain. As I understand it, if there were a recession the central banks have already used all the tools available to effect a maximum stimulus, and this is the urgent and macro problem that we face in the future. Are there enough resources in reserve to withstand yet another new crisis that effects the world economy? The coronavirus comes to mind.
The US is not the only country where widening inequality is a disturbing trend. In the UK a recent Office for National Statistics report estimates that the top 10% of earners now own 45% of Britain’s £14trn total pot, while the bottom 30% own less than 2%. (The Week, 28 December 2019).
If I regularly return to this problem it is because historically inequality nearly always eventually leads to decline, social discontent, loss of ataraxia, even revolution (as in Tsarist Russia, 18th Century France, and various other countries in our very lifetimes).
This is not something sought after by Epicureans, to put it mildly. It destroys trust, social cohesion and fairness, and puts too much power into the hands of far too few. It is not surprising that it suits politicians, who can fund their elections with sordid deals in back rooms with a small number of very rich donors (who are doing very well at present, thank you), but it makes “one person, one vote” a charade.
Why can’t all our fellow citizens see this? Why do they tolerate it, along with gerrymandering? I can’t believe that they are less intelligent than the people who lived at the time the American Constitution was devised or that social media sucks up all their thinking time. Maybe they are just disengaged?
(A few statistics, I’m afraid…..)
The prime minister of Croatia, Andrej Plenkovic – whose government has just assumed the rotating presidency of the EU – has warned that his country is suffering a “population loss equivalent to losing a small city every year”, and called for EU-wide strategies to tackle the “existential” threat in southern and eastern Europe posed by falling birth rates and mass emigration.
Last year, 230,000 Croatians left their country (mostly for Germany, Austria and Ireland) between 2013 and 2016; the country’s population is just 4.2 million. The populations of ten of the EU’s 28 member states fell in 2018, with the biggest relative drops recorded in Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Croatia and Romania.
But….the Financial Times reports a quite different situation in Spain:
“A decade after Spain faced economic crisis, prompting hundreds of thousands of people to flee the country, its population has reached its highest ever level as immigrants and returning locals flood into the eurozone’s fastest growing major economy. Spain’s population grew by 276,000 people in 2018 to nearly 47 million, the fastest annual increase since 2009. The rise came largely from immigration, both from traditional sources in Latin America, especially Venezuela and Morocco as well as other European countries such as Italy and Portugal.
“In the four years to 2016, Spain’s population declined by nearly 400,000 people. The fall reflected the severity of the crisis that hit the country: between 2008 and 2013 the Spanish economy shrank by nearly 10 per cent. At the end of 2013, more than one in four persons of working age was unemployed; nearly 60 per cent of those under 25 seeking a job could not find one. Now Spain is more than four years into a strong economic recovery. The improving picture in the labour market helps explain the migration inflow and the fall in emigration by Spaniards. More Spaniards returned home than left the country last year, for the first time in at least seven years. Spain’s economy has been expanding at twice the eurozone average since 2015 and it is expected to continue to do so this year.
My comment:
Of course, what isn’t discussed is why the population declining in countries like Croatia and Italy but growing in Spain? The improving picture in the labour market helps explain the Spanish migration inflow and the fall in emigration by Spaniards. But the labour market usually responds to government policy. So what is wrong with Croatia and Italy? is it government incompetence or could it be a culture of corruption, or both? Corruption in Eastern Europe is a well- known problem.
