Inequality in the UK

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The five richest families in the United Kingdom own more wealth than the bottom 13 million people.  The extreme inequality these numbers illustrate will likely be a motivating factor for UK voters in the imminent general election. These voters have a clear choice: accept the years of austerity that have deepened UK inequality or set a course for a more equitable future. (Inequality.org).

We are accustomed to talking about inequality in the US, but the UK is just as bad, and getting worse.  The possibilities for the man in the street to have a calm, rewarding and happy life are reduced when corporations and the ultra-rich are able to skew government policy to their own advantage.  Britain has had a long and severe bout of deliberate cutbacks to most social programmes.  The people who live far from London have felt ignored and poorer every year. But it looks as if this  will be getting even worse shortly, as the UK leaves the EU.

The welfare of the greatest number is the legitimate concern of Epicureans.  It is quite clear that massive, yawning gaps in wealth are bad for the man in the street, bad for the people with the money, and a threat to what little democracy we have left.  This is not party political comment, just a statement of fact.

Optimism boosts longevity

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People with optimistic outlooks tend to live longer than their more negative peers, researchers at Boston University School of Medicine have found. The study drew on data from two long-running studies of Americans aged over 60: one of 1,500 male war veterans, and one of 70,000 female nurses. At the start of both, the participants had completed questionnaires to gauge how optimistic they were, and had also been asked about other factors likely to influence their longevity, including diet, health and exercise.

Analysis of the data, adjusted to take account of these “confounders”, revealed that most optimistic participants lived 10% to 15% longer on average than the least optimistic ones, and that they were significantly more likely to live to the age of 85. “Healthier behaviours and lower levels of depression only partially explained our findings,” said lead researcher Dr Lewina Lee. “Initial evidence from other studies suggests that more optimistic people tend to have goals and the confidence to reach them, are more effective in problem-solving, and they may be better at regulating their emotions during stressful situations.” The exciting possibility raised by the findings, she added, is that we may be able to “promote healthy and resilient ageing by cultivating psycho-social assets such as optimism” in people.   (The Week, 7 September 2019)

It is hard to remain an optimist given the climate crisis and the emergence all over the world of corrupt so-called “strong men”, whose motivation is primarily to stay where they are (on top) indefinitely, and enrich themselves and their cronies.

Peace of mind and happiness comes most consistently when education is good and accessible , everyone has access to decent healthcare, when the gap between rich and poor is minimized, and there are opportunities for advancement and self- improvement for everyone regardless of race or birth.

This seems as if it should be glaringly obvious, but clearly, as far as huge swathes of humanity are concerned, it is anything but.  We are miles askew from mass ataraxia.

 

More on secret government databases

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Rights campaigners in Britain have described as “utterly chilling” a secret database compiled by counter-terrorism police containing personal information about thousands of people referred to the government’s controversial anti-radicalisation Prevent programme.

The Prevent Case Management (PCM) database is accessible to all police forces in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland, and the Home Office is also able to request data from it, according to documents sent to the human rights group Liberty, and seen by The Guardian.  Prevent is a voluntary programme which aims to divert people from terrorism before they offend. Up until now it was not known that police could enter details from each Prevent referral into the PCM database, including personal details and reasons for the referral. Gracie Bradley, of Liberty, said it was “utterly chilling that potentially thousands of people, including children, are on a secret government database because of what they’re perceived to think or believe”. (The Guardian 7 Oct 2019)

The movement, all over the world towards misuse of available technology is growing apace.  China, Russia, Saudi Arabia – the list is getting longer.   We imagine we are living in a democracy, but the shades of totalitarianism are getting more ominous.  People, often jobless and desperate, are installing governments that will, if allowed to, remove all accepted human rights. We should be allowed to believe what we believe.   I do agree that we should fight terrorism, but openly and democratically.

 

Gene profiling by US police

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People add their genetic data to genealogy DNA databanks in the hope of tracing long-lost relatives, biological parents and so on. They don’t expect their genomes to be accessed by the police. Yet officials in the US have used “investigative genetic genealogy” in more than 100 cases. One genetic testing company, Family Tree DNA, has had to apologize to users for sharing data with the FBI.

The attraction of such databases to law enforcement is clear. Just 3 million profiles from a particular population will generate a match with a third cousin or closer for 90 per cent of DNA samples. With a match, police can use public records to build  family trees and home in on people who fit the suspect’s age, location and even physical appearance.  They can even collect biological material from non-suspects without alerting them, the material to be retained in police databases as so-called “abandoned” DNA.

These DNA searches jeopardise privacy in several ways. It takes only a relatively small number of profiles to effectively waive the genomic privacy of hundreds of millions of people. An investigator who looks at the records of dozens of people linked by biology – even if they aren’t linked to each other in the real world in any way – will learn a lot of private information, with the obvious potential for abuse. 

In a new twist, police in Florida recently obtained a warrant to search all GED match’s opted-out profiles, causing disquiet among direct-to-consumer genomic testing firms. Such services hold the data of millions of people who have had their genomes screened, whether for genealogical or health reasons.  Since US privacy laws are anaemic, the least well-resourced DNA companies may prove attractive targets to the FBI and police.

More controls are urgently needed. The 21st Century Cures Act, enacted by the US Congress in 2016, created a legal protection known as a “certificate of confidentiality” to prevent law enforcement from accessing sensitive information collected to advance medical knowledge. Similar protection could be extended to recreational genetics 

12055345767968669487.jpgThe Department of Justice is currently working on a set of regulatory restrictions in order to beef up “anaemic” privacy laws, but the distaste for regulation may mean nothing much happens.  (Based on an edited article by Erin Murphy, New Scientist,  Nov 16 2019).

All who support or subscribe to Epicurean thought should be alarmed by the fact that modern technology is being used to track us and build secret databases on our lives.  It took massive effort and manpower on the part of tyrants like Hitler and Stalin to create “ Big Brother” systems of suppressing free comment and thought.  The new technology is quite easily and cheaply used.  It’s relatively easy to misuse it.  For every advance there is always a group eagerly casting aside ethical behavior.

Which foods are good for you?

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For most medical issues random control trials, involving sometimes thousands of people, are usual.  But  most research on food is only observational, using unreliable food diaries and then tracking the health of participants.  About a million nutrition research papers have been published, but a fraction of these are good quality, randomized studies.  Most are very short in timespan.  The fact is that the effects of diet change take years to become obvious.

It turns out that you can take vitamin supplements and eat whole grains, fruit, vegetables and fish, and there is no reliable proof that they have any affect on mortality rates, heart attacks. cancer or anything else.

The problem is partly explained by the fact that people with low incomes tend to have unhealthy lives generally.  On the other hand those who are prosperous and who eat, say, blueberries, have fewer heart attacks because they have more effective healthcare and other privileges of money. How do you judge whether health outcomes are due to the poverty or the prosperity? Do  the blueberries matter?

What has happened over the years is that researchers have been able, without huge projects or even a lot of work, to find “evidence” that their favorite health food is the answer to long healthy life.  Moreover the media boosts interesting findings that make headlines, without looking at the scientific evidence.

The answer lies in Epicurean moderation:  eat a wide variety of foods but moderately.  Then  you will be reasonably (moderately?) fit.

(Written after reading an article on food by by Clare Wilson,  New Scientist, July 13, 2019)

 

Mass displacement by climate.

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3.5 m people forced to flee cyclone Fani in India and Bangladesh

1000 killed and 617,000 uprooted from their homes by cyclone Idai in Mozambique and Zimbabwe

Bahamas were recently devastated by Hurricane Dorian

The Amazon forest fires are mostly caused naturally (although no one knows how many were man-made).

Fast ice melt in Greenland  and Antarctica.

The Great Barrier Reef blanching and dying.

13 Pacific islands have disappeared in recent years.

Glaciers melting in Andes, Iceland  and Asia.

Brush fires across Russian tundra igniting ground peat, which could burn for years, displacing people).

Rust in coffee crops of Central America, leading to collapse of coffee farming in Guatemala and  El Salvador major driver of migration save to US).

Libya in huge water crisis (90% of its water now undrinkable)

Sana’a,  capital of Yemen has lost all its natural water supply

Lack of water fueling tribal conflicts in Fergana Valley, Afghanistan

Gaza strip ( pop. 2.1 million) will run out of water from its already polluted acquifers in about 12 months time

Present population of Africa 1.35 billion, expected to reach 4.95 billion by 2,100.  How will this huge population survive?  Good question.

And global climate change is a hoax?

The threat of debt, Part 2

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The Washington Post of November 30 reported that a decade of low interest rates has allowed companies to sell record amounts of bonds to investors, sending total U.S corporate debt to nearly $10 trillion, or a record 47% of the overall economy.  The Federal Reserve, the IMF and major institutional Investors are concerned that the financial markets will plunge when the next recession hits, making that recession dire.

You guessed it – it has been the financially weakest companies that are the worst culprits, using debt for “financial risk taking”, upping investor payouts and Wall Street deal making rather than productive plant and equipment.  In September alone US corporations issued $220 billion in new bonds, the biggest figure in two years. Over the last five years corporations have spent $3 trillion in buying back their own shares.  Interest rates have never been this low for so long. An artificial environment of near- free money has kept alive some debt ridden “zombie” companies that really would have failed under normal circumstances.

The Washington Post article gave other examples of the craziness. The fact is that the situation is like sitting on a bomb and not knowing what will trigger the explosion.

So here we have the golden boys of the Harvard Business School and the like playing roulette with the US ( and World!) economy – and they are supposed to be smart?  Have you read the last post  ( this one was delayed by a local internet access failure) about individual debt?  Two perfect storms!  Had all these jokers, corporate and private, heartened to the words of Epicurus – be moderate – we wouldn’t be trying to guess when the next financial collapse is going to happen.

Oh, and this has everything to do with mass common sense ( or lack of it) and nothing really to do with party politics.

The threat of debt, part 1

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According to Equifax the value of unsecured personal loans in the US is up 10% in the last year alone and is similar in size to credit card debt, averaging $16,259.  In view of the currently healthy economy  and increasing wages for some, this is a bit counter-intuitive.  But, whatever the reason, in banking , if it is growing like a weed  it is probably a weed.

US consumer debt in general has reached the record level of $115 billion, helped along by a plethora of new online lenders, who apparently don’t ask too many questions of the 20 million people who use their services.  The payments, and repayment dates,  are fixed and it appears that many borrowers use this personal borrowing in order to consolidate debt, often debt on multiple credit cards. But if anything goes wrong (a serious illness, for instance) then the lenders return to borrowing on their credit cards again, in addition, creating a spiral of debt.

Meanwhile, the national auto loan debt totals $1.3 trillion and credit card debt $880 billion.  Total it all up and you get close to the levels of January 2008.  (By the way the the personal debt lenders cap their interest at 36%, which I would call usury) .

You can guess what word I am going to use:  yes, “moderation”!  When it comes to money – lending it or borrowing it – nothing ever seems to stay moderate for long.

Standing up for history

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To The Sunday Times

In 1960s Oxford I would see Cecil Rhodes’s statue, think how wrong he was and walk on. That is life in an open, tolerant country: bits of our history are sticking up everywhere, and we are free to admire, condemn or laugh at them. I prefer that to a country in which public art has to conform to a prevailing ideology.

Mike Lynch, Cambridge

Quite right!  I don’t much like the deeds of Cecil Rhodes, but to take away his statue is petty and narrow minded.  Yesterday came news that a statue dedicated to the explorers Lewis and Clark is being removed because their Indian guide, Sacagawea, is represented as being in an inferior position.  Quite rightly the story is that Lewis and Clark wouldn’t have found the Mississippi without her. That is true. It is also a disagreeable fact that all women were in inferior positions in those days. Unfortunately that fact is also part of the American story.

If you excise every bit of history you don’t like you will have no history.  If you don’t know where you come from and how you got here,  you will have no hope of knowing where you are going.  Epicurus did not much like the narrow- minded.

What we sorely need is more people with a knowledge of history, a subject that educates you on the behavior and motivation of human beings. It might stop some of the stupid things our leaders  do.

More on self-perception

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9% of British men consider themselves handsome; a further 7% regard themselves as good-looking. By contrast, just 1% of British women describe themselves as beautiful and 2% as good-looking. (YouGov/The Times,  21 September 2019).

Epicurus would no doubt have commented that it is what is in the hearts and minds of men and women that matters, not their outward looks.  This, for both genders, requires them to be polite, kind, attentive, gentle, thoughtful, generous and considerate of others.  Oh, and to have a sense of humor.

As for this writer, he has never thought about it, really.  To him all women are beautiful; some as just more beautiful than others.

 

Artificial intelligence

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The promise of artificial intelligence is that it will make decisions faster.  But what happens if it makes bad decisions faster?  We are trying to replicate human skills that have evolved for millions of years, and yet we cannot predict accurately what decisions AI will come up with.  Just say AI progresses to a point where it is smarter than human beings.  Where will that leave us ?  Answer  – as virtual slaves to machines.

My own reaction to this is to invoke Epicurean moderation.  There are clearly activities for which artificial intelligence can be a benefit to the world – and others where it is yet another challenge to peace of mind.

And yet…..and yet…… I have been sitting here, having invoked moderation, trying to think what applications of AI I could actually support and find useful. But I don’t want an AI-equipped machine to cook for me, drive for me,  buy tickets to a concert for me, or book foreign holidays, either.  As you get older you need use your brain and what memory you have left. Use-it-or-lose-it.  Even at its most benign a fast- thinking machine potentially removes the need to think for yourself. So  I will give AI a pass, (that is if I have an, unlikely, say in the matter).

Oh, just remembered (without AI):  happy Thanksgiving!

A literary judgment

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to The Guardian:

Notice seen recently in the window of the bookshop in Fowey, Cornwall: “The Post-Apocalyptic Fiction section has been moved to Current Affairs.”

Harry Cavill, Camberley, Surrey 

 

And an ancient complaint from an Epicurean:

At the end of the 4th Century A.D Ammianus complained that the Roman Empire had lost its cultural moorings and had descended into a state of triviality, where scholarship was no longer respected and fewer and fewer people read anything at all.  Sound familiar?

What is intelligence?

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Far from being an indefinable concept, a single measure of intelligence underpins our problem-solving, musicality and even creativity and emotional skills

When researchers talk about intelligence, they are referring to a specific set of skills that includes the abilities to reason, learn, plan and solve problems. The interesting thing is that people who are good at one of them tend to be good at all of them. These skills seem to reflect a broad mental capability, which has been dubbed general intelligence or g.

That’s not to say people don’t specialise in different areas. Some will be particularly good at solving mathematical problems, others will have particularly strong verbal or spatial abilities, and so on. When it comes to intelligence tests, although these specific skills account for about half of the variation between people’s performance, the other half is down to g. “If you took a sample of 1000 people and gave them all IQ tests, the people who do better on the vocabulary test will also do better, on average, on the reaction speed test, and so on,” says Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher at the University of Edinburgh, UK.

Our thinking on human intellect is clouded with misinformation. But the latest science of intelligence is surprisingly enlightening.  This seems to fly in the face of old ideas. In the early 1980s, Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner argued for the existence of multiple intelligences, including “bodily-kinaesthetic”, “logical-mathematical” and “musical”. However, most researchers now believe these categories reflect different blends of abilities, skills and personality traits, not all of which are related to cognitive ability. Likewise, recent research indicates that so-called emotional intelligence – the ability to regulate one’s emotions and relate to other people – is simply a mixture of general intelligence and personality.

Even creativity is related to g. There is a linear correlation up to an IQ of about 120 – classified as above average intelligence – although the link breaks down after that. “The idea that you can be creative without being intelligent is a myth: it takes a certain level of intelligence to acquire raw data to be creative with,” says neuropsychologist Rex Jung at the University of New Mexico.

So, what is the biological basis of g? One suggestion is that it reflects “mental energy”: the brains of people with high IQs seem to use less energy when performing mental tasks, and their neurons conduct signals faster. Possibly then, clever brains are more efficient. Another idea is that smart people have greater working memories, so can hold onto and process more information at any given moment. For now, the g-factor has a lot in common with the X factor: we don’t know precisely why it makes someone stand out, just that it does.
(Linda Geddes, New Scientist 22 July 2018)

An Epicurean enjoys the company and friendship of intelligent people, but also respects the conversation and views of those who haven’t been so amply blessed.  Some call it “being a lady or a gentleman”.

The multitasking myth

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Is the idea that women are better multitaskers than men a convenient myth, to help men avoid the domestic burden? That is the implication of a new study by scientists at Aachen University in Germany, which found that the two sexes are equally good – or rather equally bad – at performing different tasks at the same time. For the study, 48 men and 48 women took part in a computer-based challenge that required them to identify letters as either consonants or vowels, and numbers as either odd or even, as they flashed up on a screen. In the first part of the experiment, the participants were presented with the letters and numbers separately. In the second, they were asked to categorise them at the same time, or to switch rapidly between the two – mimicking the kind of mental shifts involved in multitasking in other settings. While both sexes were equally adept at the first part, they found the second stage equally challenging – suggesting, says the team in PLOS One, that “there are no substantial gender differences in multitasking performance”.  (The Week, 31 Aug 2019)

What  I deduce from this is that it reinforces the whole idea of gender equality, and that individually people might prove better or worse than others, but overall there is little or no overall difference between women and men when it comes to the day-to- day tasks of life.  Hooray!

But now comes the rub.  Men and women have to behave as equals.  There seems to be among  a (hopefully small) number of women that the “tables have turned”, and that they can with impunity express their ideas and opinions at length without given a male companion an opportunity for discussion, only because of their gender, a form of bullying. Yes, for centuries men have also held forth, treating women as “the other”, not worth attending to. And many still do, regrettably.  That Is bullying, too, and is also bad manners.

Men and women have to respect each other, be kind and considerate, and espouse equality, nothing more or nor less.  We really have to stop all this nonsense.  It is no excuse to say, “this is what I learned while growing up”.  They imbibed the wrong message.

 

Is this Epicurean?

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Heartlessness is now official US policy

The Trump administration is deporting thousands of legal immigrants to countries “they barely know”. The Immigration and Customs Enforcement authority (ICE) can find any refugee “deportable” if they’ve a crime on their record – even selling marijuana – and that covers about 120,000 immigrants who came here as refugees.

So now deportations to places like Somalia, Cambodia and Eritrea are soaring, as people who’ve spent decades in the US are sent to countries blighted by crime and political repression. In March, a deportee died in a restaurant bombing in Mogadishu. An Eritrean deportee was so distraught he killed himself en route to his native country.

Then there’s the case of Jimmy Aldaoud, a 41-year-old Michigan man recently deported to Iraq. Born in Greece to Iraqi Christian refugees who brought him to the US as a baby, he was severely mentally ill and often homeless. This led to the multiple arrests used as the justification for deporting him. Yet he’d never been to Iraq, “had no language skills, no place to live and no family connections”. He died, probably from poorly-controlled diabetes, a few months later. Unless ICE changes the rules, there will be many more Jimmy Aldaouds.  (Chris Gelardi, Slate (New York), and The Week 31 August 2019).

It is hard to believe that the “base” really supports this cruel treatment towards people who never lived before in the country they are deported to.  This is not a political issue; it is an issue of human kindness and respect for others.

I am an immigrant myself, albeit I did it correctly, to my utter frustration and disbelief (I will not bore you with the bureaucratic hassles).  Thus, although I consider myself a humanitarian, I think the laws should be obeyed and no one should sneak into any country without permission, otherwise I might have sneaked in myself.

But the supporters of this policy of expelling people to countries they have never lived in and whose language they barely, if at all, speak,  is quite the opposite of humane and Christian.  How can one characterize opposing  abortion, but supporting expulsion?