Ducks and democracy

Posted by on

To The Daily Telegraph
Here in the US we have a law making it illegal to hunt ducks or geese with more than three shells in one’s shotgun. We want to give them a fighting chance, as it were.

A companion law also makes it illegal to hunt those migratory birds with a machine gun, but that just seems downright sensible, doesn’t it?

Ducks have more protection from guns under US law than schoolchildren, grocery shoppers or concert-goers. I guess we like it that way, since this is a democracy and we only pass the laws we want to live by – at least that’s how I think it works.
Tom Boland, United States

No comment necesary from me!

Don’t blame Russia for our diseased politics: a different perspective

Posted by on

The recent indictment of 13 Russians for meddling in the 2016 US election has prompted a hysterical reaction from some pundits. One commentator called the cyber plot “the second-worst foreign attack on America in the past decade”, after 9/11; another warned that Russia and America were now engaged in a “virtual war”, lamenting that the battle was being fought on the US side “without a commander in chief”; another called for a “Cold War containment” policy to deal with Moscow.

Is this really a proportionate response to what appears to have amounted to little more than a few Russian trolls making mischief on Facebook? “The problem is not that American democracy was hacked”, but that it is in such a fragile state that a “few crude memes” can generate such discord. Similar Russian attempts to meddle in elections in France and Germany were shrugged off. The crisis in the US long predates Russian interference, and “stems from a polarised polity where one party actively encourages its followers to distrust news from non-partisan outlets”. Low voter turnout, voter suppression and rampant jerrymandering have further undermined public confidence in the system. Launching a new Cold War against Russia is not going to solve any of these problems. (Jeet Heer,The New Republic)

Putin wants to “make Russia great again”, which means recovering the Tsarist territories “lost” when communism collapsed. These territories could be interpreted to include Ukraine (of course), the Baltic countries, Poland the Czech Republic, maybe Finland and the countries of the Caucasus. Crimea was a success, so why not press on with the resurrection of the 19th Century empire? In order to realise this (hopefully hopeless) ambition NATO and the EU have to be destabilised and the United States at the very least neutralised. If you buy into this strategy and factor in the deep resentment of US and EU bullying and disrespect (as the Russians see it) over decades, then you have an answer to what latterday Tsar Putin is up to, apparently with huge public support. I don’t like any of it in the least, but understand the resentment. Arguably, Western policies have upset the ataraxia of the Russian people for years.

Are there now too many graduates?

Posted by on

To The Daily Telegraph
How many graduates does our economy really need and how many can it afford? Fifty years ago, only 5% of school-leavers went on to university. Now the figure has soared to almost 50%, the entirely arbitrary target dreamt up by Tony Blair in his early days in office. This target seems to have become an article of political faith, yet I am aware of no economic evidence that the British economy needs such a high proportion.

In Germany, for example, Europe’s most successful economy, it is only 27%. Instead, Germans prioritise better apprenticeships and focused work-training schemes for young people. That’s what British business and industry are calling for, not for yet more graduates – many of whom have surprisingly poor basic numeracy, literacy and critical reasoning skills.

Our obsession with access over quality has led to such a bloated higher education sector that we have the absurd situation of universities competing for students. (Nigel Henson, Farningham, Kent)

I don’t think the large number of graduates is a bad thing in terms of the quality of life over a graduate’s lifetime (assuming they actually learn critical thinking, espouse lifelong learning and discover aptitudes and interests they never knew they had). Jobs are altogether a different matter. It does seem there are too many graduates for the jobs available. So you have the ludicrous situation of spending a small fortune getting a degree only to discover that no one wants you. Meanwhile we are importing skilled workers from Eastern Europe to do jobs the British always used to do perfectly well. Given Brexit and the urge to cut off the spigot of well-trained Poles and others, where do Brexiteers think the country is going to find engineers, architects, plasterers, bricklayers etc. once they have all been sent home?

Duh! Haven’t thought of that!

Is meritocracy really what we want?

Posted by on

Theresa May has said, “ I want Britain to be a place where advantage is based on merit, not privilege, where it’s your talent and hard work that matter, not where you were born, who your parents are or what your accent sounds like “.

Sounds reasonable.

And yet, in the wake of the financial crash of 2008 it became clear that meritocracy wasn’t working. Jobs had dried up, debt had soared and housing had becoming increasingly unafforadable. Both May and Trump acknowledge inequality, but prescribe meritocracy, capitalism and nationalism as the panacea. Both praise economic havens for the super-rich, the group they regard as the meritocrats.

Meritocracy used to be regarded as a term of abuse, describing an unequal state that no one would want to live in. Why offer more prizes to the already prodigiously gifted, who could look after themselves, and do? Instead, we should concentrate on helping people who do important but poorly paid jobs (teachers, for instance), spread wealth more widely and thus have a better quality of life and a happier population. This should be the Epicurean way.

Regrettably, it is the “meritocrats” who control the levers of power. Maybe over half these people have been the happy recipients of sheer luck, being born to the right parents, being in the right place at the right time. No doubt the people who run the huge tech firms are smart people, but they caught the tide, had good technical skills, but were also good “politicians”, a must in big corporations. Look at the people now appointed to run the American government. I know none of them, but in general they come across as a hard ruthless and humourless crowd, good at pushing themselves forward, but with a deficit of human kindness. If they are typical of meritocrats, let’s find a better way of stocking government with top bureaucrats!

Stephen Hawking on God

Posted by on

Stephen Hawking, who has unfortunately just died, famously declared that there was no need for a creator. He was an atheist who stated that science offered a more convincing explanation of life and the universe than god or gods. He believed that the universe is governed by the laws of science. In his 2010 book, “The Grand Design” (written with Leonard Mlodinow) he wrote that the Big Bang was inevitable and spontaneous. “Because there is a law such as gravity the universe can and will create itself from nothing……..Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist. It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going”.

Interviewed on ABC News he said, “One cannot prove that God doesn’t exist. But science makes God unnecessary. The laws of physics can explain the universe without the need for a creator”. On other occasions he expressed the conviction that there is no God. “No one created the universe and no one directs our fate. There is probably no heaven or afterlife either. We have this one life to appreciate the grand design of the universe”.

Epicurus believed that there might be gods on Mount Olympus, but spent their time making merry and chasing goddesses. They took no interest in the doings of mankind. This, I suspect, but I can’t prove, was a “ ppolitically correct” statement that avoided huge blowback from priests and believers at the time. In fact, I think he was, privately, an atheist, who laughed at the stories about the gods and preferred a scientific approach to life and the universe. We can, as Epicureans, support both Hawking and Epicurus, but we must do so respecting the beliefs of others and putting our views forward politely, with a smile, especially for those who are religious but are trying to learn and understand modern physics and make sense of it.

Wildlife crisis again: Arctic ice melt is killing birds and leaving caribou stranded

Posted by on

The ongoing loss of sea-ice cover is wreaking havoc on ecosystems across the Arctic, and may spell the end of more species than previously thought.

Arctic sea-ice cover shrank last year to the second lowest summer level ever recorded, following an unprecedented winter low, threatening species that rely directly on sea ice, like ivory gulls.

But less obvious species may also be in trouble. Most seabirds and large zooplankton species were less abundant – by 90 per cent on average for birds – when sea ice melted early in spring, suggesting that these species will decline in a warmer climate (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0276), and result in a very different Bering Sea ecosystem, a system which currently supports one of the largest remaining palatable fisheries in the world.
.
It’s not just sea life that’s at risk. To Arctic animals, the disappearance of ice could represent a new and serious impediment, particularly to moving among islands. One species, the Peary caribou, a culturally important animal for indigenous people, who use it for food and clothing, travels over the ice between a score of islands to find food and shelter, to mate and to raise their young. Sea ice allows the caribou to interact and allows for genetic exchange, which influences their productivity and diversity. The connectivity among islands has declined, since the the loss of ice means the animals can’t get from island to island, disrupting caribou movement and gene flow. Over time, numerous animals may go extinct. (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0235).

A lack of ice may also hamper the dispersal of plants, dooming them to extinction. “With the current rapid warming, plants need to move to colder places to thrive and colonise new areas when sea ice is prevalent (Biology Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2016.0264).

The New Scientist reports that the anticipated negative changes are off the charts, although the complexity of the ecosystem and lack of historical precedent means it is difficult to make accurate predictions about future changes. (based on an article by Julianna Photopoulos, New Scientist).

When the flora and fauna are gone, they are gone, and the planet will be the worse off for it. Meanwhile, the Neros of the world fiddle while the proverbial Rome burns, relying on the dubious data of only 5% of the Earths climatologists. As the nations of the world increasingly espouse right-wing, nationalist, illiberal and money-grubbing regimes the situation is going to get worse, not better. Nothing must stand in the way of money-making, it appears! The least we can do, as supporters of Epicurean thought, is to support those trying to avoid climate catastrophe, helpless though we seem.

Decline in wildlife numbers

Posted by on

Global wildlife populations are set to fall by more than two-thirds since 1970 by the end of the decade, warns the Living Planet report by WWF and the Zoological Society of London (ZSL).
The assessment of more than 14,000 populations of 3706 species of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians and reptiles from around the world reveals a 58 per cent fall between 1970 and 2012 – with no sign that the average yearly 2 per cent drop in numbers will slow.
The figures have prompted experts to warn that nature is facing a global “mass extinction” for the first time since the demise of the dinosaurs.

Species are being affected by unsustainable agriculture, fishing, mining and other human activities that threaten habitats, as well as climate change and pollution. “Human behaviour continues to drive the decline of wildlife populations globally, with particular impact on freshwater habitats,” said Ken Norris, director of science at ZSL. But he stressed that, so far, these are declines rather than extinctions. “This should be a wake-up call to marshal efforts to promote the recovery of these populations,” he said.

We share the planet with a host of other creatures. That host is being reduced by human activity. We should be conserving them. To suggest that the cause is not global climate change simply illustrates the ignorance of part of the public and their determination to ignore and denigrate scientists at every opportunity. Talk about cutting off one’s nose to spite ones face!

Where have all the American boom towns gone?

Posted by on

“America’s boom towns have disappeared. Throughout its history, the country’s cities have transformed themselves into hotbeds of growth and prosperity. San Francisco became a boom town due to the 1850s gold rush; Detroit tripled in size between 1910 and 1930 thanks to the rise of the car industry; Los Angeles exploded in the 1920s as film sets, oil wells and aircraft plants drew in migrants seeking their fortunes. As for Chicago, in 1850 it was a muddy frontier town of 30,000 souls; by 1910 it was “hog butcher for the world” and the nerve centre of the US rail network, with more than two million residents.

“But America no longer creates boom towns. The areas experiencing high growth today, such as the Sun Belt, are attracting people with cheap housing, not high wages, while the places that should be drawing in ambitious migrants – Brooklyn, the San Francisco Bay Area, Boston’s suburbs, Washington – are barely growing. Tight restrictions on development and the resulting sky-high property prices have seen to that. When migration stalls in the very places with the most opportunities, it can only worsen income inequality and stifle a nation’s productivity”. (Emily Badger, New York Times)

My personal take on this is that in former times big industry relied more on brawn than on brain. Now so much depends on education snd technical expertise. The tech industry thrives on savvy immigrants, specially from India, where some of the smartest engineers and well-educated computer experts now come from. As a foreigner (but a US citizen) I feel I can look at the American scene as, partially, an outsider. What I see is a disappointing educational situation (I am being polite!). The level of education in general is poor, which is why the country desperately needs immigration. O.K, the right kind of immigration. One reads comments on the web and in newspapers and it is clear that too many people cannot even speak or write their own language. If you can’t do that, you resort to a limited vocabulary of crudeness and vulgarity. If Americans just want to get a job and don’t value “education” then scrap many of the universities, create technical training institutions where you learn something that is useful to companies, and admit that the old ideal of education is beyond us.

We are in the midst of a huge social and political crisis that there is no political will to correct (the lock-hold of the NRA on politicians being a prime example). We have given up democracy and are now experiencing an oligarchy. There are enlightened exceptions of course, but in general oligarchs are happy with the status quo, which is one of extremes of wealth and poverty and a reluctance to invest in the health and welfare of the country. How can you possibly feel pleasure or enjoy ataraxia in such a situation? And yet there are apparently millenials who willingly support this!

Seneca on procrastination

Posted by on

But even “more idiotic” (to use Seneca’s unambiguous language) than keeping ourselves busy is indulging the vice of procrastination — not the productivity-related kind, but the existential kind – that limiting longing for certainty and guarantees, which causes us to obsessively plan and chronically put off pursuing our greatest aspirations and living our greatest truths on the pretext that the future will somehow provide a more favorable backdrop.

Putting things off is the biggest waste of life: it snatches away each day as it comes, and denies us the present by promising the future. The greatest obstacle to living is expectancy, which hangs upon tomorrow and loses today. You are arranging what lies in Fortune’s control, and abandoning what lies in yours. What are you looking at? To what goal are you straining? The whole future lies in uncertainty: live immediately.

Seneca on achievment and ambition

Posted by on

Seneca was particularly skeptical of the double-edged sword of achievement and ambition, which cause us to steep in our cesspool of insecurity, dissatisfaction, and clinging.

It is inevitable that life will be not only very short but very miserable for those who acquire by great toil what they must keep by greater toil. They achieve what they want laboriously; they possess what they have achieved anxiously; and meanwhile they take no account of time that will never more return. New preoccupations take the place of the old, hope excites more hope and ambition more ambition. They do not look for an end to their misery, but simply change the reason for it.

This, Seneca cautions, is tenfold more toxic for the soul when one is working for someone else, toiling away toward goals laid out by another.

When you are young it is natural to be ambitious and to try to achieve great things. But if you remain that way at 70 or 80 you have learned little from life and are probably difficult to live with. For most of us this striving seems rather pointless.

Seneca on wasting time

Posted by on

“You are living as if destined to live for ever; your own frailty never occurs to you; you don’t notice how much time has already passed, but squander it as though you had a full and overflowing supply — though all the while the very day which you are devoting to somebody or something may be your last. You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire. How late it is to begin to really live just when life must end! How stupid to forget our mortality, and put off sensible plans to our fiftieth and sixtieth years, aiming to begin life from a point at which few have arrived!”

Seneca, writing in the first century, saw busyness — that dual demon of distraction and preoccupation — as an addiction that stands in the way of mastering the art of living.

Nineteen centuries later, Bertrand Russell, another of humanity’s great minds, lamented rhetorically, “What will be the good of the conquest of leisure and health, if no one remembers how to use them?”

Guns and the Florida school massacre

Posted by on

At least the Florida legislature has bucked the NRA and introduced some safety improvements for guns. But have they banned AR-15 military-style, rapid fire assault guns? No!

According to local police, the perpetrator, Cruz, was armed with such an AR-15 rifle. These weapons fire bullets that can penetrate a steel helmet from a distance of five hundred yards. When fired from close range at civilians who aren’t wearing body armor, the bullets from an AR-15 don’t merely penetrate the human body—they tear it apart. It “looks like a grenade went off in there,” Peter Rhee, a trauma surgeon at the University of Arizona, told Wired. (part of an article by John Cassidy in the NewYorker magazine, February 15).

I was watching CNN immediately after the gun atrocity at the school in Florida. A member of the panel seriously suggested that all schools should have armed guards with loaded guns outside the premises. What have we come to? Shoot-out at O.K Corrall? There are sensible things Congress could do about guns that don’t involve confiscating everyone’s “sacred” firearms. Not selling automatic weapons designed for soldiers in wartime to disturbed 19 year olds is a start. But the panel member didn’t even begin to address what the majority of the US population want. The NRA and its shills simply don’t care, nor, apparently, do the Federal congressmen who take its sordid campaign money.

From my personal (and terrifying) experience, when a shooter starts shooting, the average trained armed guard, shocked and nervous, is unlikely to hit anything, except by accident. The people who seriously expect fire to be returned and the instigator instantly shot dead have been watching too many Wild West movies (which, by the way, have had a dire effect on generations of, mainly, men – the Sherriff unerringly gets the bad man, immediately and calmly. Real life is seldom like that!).

Is there any point in old men? (Don’t all shout at once!)

Posted by on

“In “How Men Age” biological anthropologist Richard Bribiescas covers some interesting uncharted territory. This is not a mere description of getting older. Instead, by considering male ageing in the light of natural selection, it aims to answer why men’s lifespans are shorter than women’s, why baldness, prostate disease and erectile dysfunction are so prevalent, and how humans as a species have benefited from men’s tendency to get fat.

“From an evolutionary perspective, nothing matters more than sex. And as far as men are concerned, nothing influences sexual power more than testosterone. It increases libido, promotes muscle growth and encourages risk-taking behaviour – all of which help attract a mate. But testosterone peaks in early adulthood, so that men are past their physical prime by the age of 30. It’s tempting to see it as all downhill from there. But Bribiescas shows convincingly that’s not the case. He points out that testosterone has a dark side – it can increase a man’s metabolic rate and suppress the immune system. In other words, there’s a trade-off. High levels of the hormone early in life help explain why men don’t live as long as women and why they are prone to prostate cancer later on. So waning testosterone can be seen as a positive development. It may make older men less physically competitive against younger ones, but men can produce offspring throughout their lives and, argues Bribiescas, as they age they develop new reproductive strategies to achieve this.

For a start, although they may lack raw strength, their experience often makes them better providers than their younger counterparts. Bribiescas has done fieldwork with the Ache people of Paraguay, and points to research showing that men’s hunting success peaks in their 40s, long after their testosterone levels peak. What’s more, older men tend to become more nurturing. As testosterone decreases, a man’s girth increases, and the metabolic changes associated with growing adiposity* promote care of offspring. Bribiescas calls this the “pudgy dad hypothesis”, and argues that it has implications for the evolution of our species as a whole.

Humans live far longer than other primates. For longevity to evolve, natural selection must favour long-lived individuals. Older women cannot reproduce, so they are out of the running. But if, throughout human history, older men have been fathering children, then they will have passed on genes associated with longevity to both daughters and sons. Old men, therefore, could be the reason we all live so long. It would appear there is some point to them after all. (review by Kate Douglas, New Scientist, of “How Men Age: What evolution reveals about male health and mortality”, by Richard Bribiescas, Princeton University Press.
(* denoting body tissue used for the storage of fat)

I have also been wondering what the point of old men is. I concluded that the only reason for them is to bring the credit card with them to the restaurant to pay for the meal, and then to leave the tip. However, after serious thought I think they have other functions: to tell stories, make people laugh and to tell the truth about life. And, Oh, the freedom you feel when you can’t be fired and you no longer care so much about what people think of you! Epicurus clearly had old men in mind when he developed his philosophy, there in his garden.

A different perspective

Posted by on

The following letter was written in October 2016, but, aware that the opposition to Brexit on this blog can be passionate, to say the least, I think that Epicurean moderation and respect for the opinions of others require me to publicise an interesting pro-Brexit point of view from Angus Dalgleish, a professor of oncology research at St George’s, University of London, an expert in his field:

“Brexit will be a boon for scientists?
“There has been a “chorus of doom” about the negative impact Brexit will have on scientific research. Well, I’ve no concerns about leaving the EU – in fact, it will be a blessed relief for people in my field. Britain used to be one of the best places in the world to do clinical trials. But the EU Clinical Trials Directive of 2004 more or less killed off the trials industry, with onerous, overcautious new regulations which have stifled innovation.

“Thus researchers are now barred from looking for exciting new uses for old drugs – I, for example, conducted trials with a TB vaccine in cancer patients – practices that used to yield breakthroughs. As for the allocation of grant money, this – as my experience on an EU cancer commission taught me – is mainly “determined by lobbying, not by peer-reviewed decisions”. Leaving the EU will allow us to escape this “constipated culture” and return to “a freer, researcher-led and much more creative approach to regulating medical studies and saving lives”. (The Daily Telegraph and The Week).

Good news? However, I must say I am surprised to learn that the UK is free of the problem found everywhere else, namely that grant money is not “determined by lobbying, not by peer-reviewed decisions”. Amazing!