It was very sad to see Americans on TV barking at each other over health care reform. They really seem to hate each other. One young man yelled at a 50-something stranger that she was too old to survive under Obama's system. There are lunatic claims that public provision is nazism or communism - or both!
The town-hall meeting looks like anything but democracy, more like a lynch-mob. There seems to be no procedure, no formal proposing and opposing of a motion, just a roomful of people shouting at the tops of their voices. How can you have democracy when people won't even let each other speak, let alone listen to what they say.
I begin to despair of America. Perhaps the only way to save the world from its excessive weight is for the US economy to collapse. It used to seem that sooner or later there must be a run on the dollar, but no country dares to sell some of its dollars for fear of seeing the rest lose their value. And one of Saddam Hussein's 'crimes' was wanting to be paid for oil in euros.
Saturday, 22 August 2009
Friday, 21 August 2009
Equality
I've just read The spirit level: why more equal societies almost always do better by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett. It is a brilliant book, though I'd like to have had more information on some of their graphs. The conclusion is that great inequality such as exists in America and Britain makes most aspects of life worse for everyone and not just for the poorest.
I conclude that Obama's effort to reform health-care in America is misplaced; the prime objective should be to reduce the levels of inequality, after which the cost of health care would be much reduced. He is risking defeat on a reform that will make only a marginal difference. The same applies to the British NHS, which has become a National Sickness Service, struggling to pay for a lot of treatments that ought never to have become necessary.
Looking back I wonder where Britain took a wrong turning. Back in the 1950s and 60s we seemed to be becoming a less unequal society; many people from poor backgrounds were rising in society and there was a lot more trust. Perhaps the greatest mistake of the Attlee government in the 1940s was to leave ownership of the newspapers in the hands of millionaires; they should have facilitated trustee ownership. Also, that was the moment to take away the charitable status of public schools, which have never been for the public in general.
Mrs Thatcher knew who she owed her success to, and one of her main projects was to make newspaper ownership more profitable and to allow combined ownership of different media. The result has been a general dumbing down of the sources of information and the victory of the hollow celebrity culture. Can the internet help to find solutions? Take a look at the website of the book: www.equalitytrust.org.uk
I conclude that Obama's effort to reform health-care in America is misplaced; the prime objective should be to reduce the levels of inequality, after which the cost of health care would be much reduced. He is risking defeat on a reform that will make only a marginal difference. The same applies to the British NHS, which has become a National Sickness Service, struggling to pay for a lot of treatments that ought never to have become necessary.
Looking back I wonder where Britain took a wrong turning. Back in the 1950s and 60s we seemed to be becoming a less unequal society; many people from poor backgrounds were rising in society and there was a lot more trust. Perhaps the greatest mistake of the Attlee government in the 1940s was to leave ownership of the newspapers in the hands of millionaires; they should have facilitated trustee ownership. Also, that was the moment to take away the charitable status of public schools, which have never been for the public in general.
Mrs Thatcher knew who she owed her success to, and one of her main projects was to make newspaper ownership more profitable and to allow combined ownership of different media. The result has been a general dumbing down of the sources of information and the victory of the hollow celebrity culture. Can the internet help to find solutions? Take a look at the website of the book: www.equalitytrust.org.uk
Tuesday, 18 August 2009
Back!
Sorry (if there's anyone to apologize to!) - I'd almost forgotten I had a blog. Partly because it doesn't seem to get any comments, which makes it a lonely business. I've been very busy writing the ecology book that I've promised myself to do. I've drafted 14 chapters out of 18, but some of the early ones will have to be substantially rewritten because the project evolves as it goes along.
Having stopped reading newspapers and listening to the Today programme (because we have a washing-up machine, so I don't spend time at the sink in the morning), I have had to fall back on Channel 4 for the best of a bad bunch of TV news programmes. At the moment we have 20 minutes a day on Afghanistan, where our troops were supposed to go "without a shot fired". Now they talk about us having to stay for 40 years.
When are these idiot politicians going to understand that occupation is the problem? Ever since Lloyd-George decided to take over the Ottoman lands we've had nothing but trouble. Now, instead of seeing that invasion was a mistake, they are talking about how to dig in further. And with the recession, army recruitment is booming. I am staggered by the remilitarization of British culture. Back in the 1960s we thought we were going to turn into a peaceful country like Switzerland or Norway.
Part of the trouble is that it seems to pay off. Having left Parliament to a standing ovation, Prof Blair is now combines five jobs - Peace Envoy to the Middle East(!!!), Advocate for Africa, Adviser on Climate Change, Iraq Consultant to J P Morgan (he knows such a lot about oil!) and Professor of Religious (sic) Studies at Yale. And he hopes to become President of Europe!!!! It makes you dizzy!
Having stopped reading newspapers and listening to the Today programme (because we have a washing-up machine, so I don't spend time at the sink in the morning), I have had to fall back on Channel 4 for the best of a bad bunch of TV news programmes. At the moment we have 20 minutes a day on Afghanistan, where our troops were supposed to go "without a shot fired". Now they talk about us having to stay for 40 years.
When are these idiot politicians going to understand that occupation is the problem? Ever since Lloyd-George decided to take over the Ottoman lands we've had nothing but trouble. Now, instead of seeing that invasion was a mistake, they are talking about how to dig in further. And with the recession, army recruitment is booming. I am staggered by the remilitarization of British culture. Back in the 1960s we thought we were going to turn into a peaceful country like Switzerland or Norway.
Part of the trouble is that it seems to pay off. Having left Parliament to a standing ovation, Prof Blair is now combines five jobs - Peace Envoy to the Middle East(!!!), Advocate for Africa, Adviser on Climate Change, Iraq Consultant to J P Morgan (he knows such a lot about oil!) and Professor of Religious (sic) Studies at Yale. And he hopes to become President of Europe!!!! It makes you dizzy!
Saturday, 4 July 2009
Smiles
People tell me I look rather fierce. I think that is because, being smaller than me, they look up at my face from below. Take a mirror and check for yourself. Place the mirror below face level, keeping your mouth as straight as you can, and the image seems to curve down. Put it higher and your lips seem to curl into a smile, although you haven't moved them. This is because the mouth is never straight; it curves back at the sides - 'up' seen from above and 'down' from below.
Evolution has made men on average taller than women. So does this mean that men are more likely to look stern to women than to each other, and women more friendly? Certainly children usually look up at adults and are more likely to see the corners of their mouths as turning down. Perhaps the curled-lip smile, as opposed to the toothy smile, evolved partly to counteract this signal. Perhaps the respect shown to tall people results partly from their apparently stern lips. There's an experiment for someone to do.
Evolution has made men on average taller than women. So does this mean that men are more likely to look stern to women than to each other, and women more friendly? Certainly children usually look up at adults and are more likely to see the corners of their mouths as turning down. Perhaps the curled-lip smile, as opposed to the toothy smile, evolved partly to counteract this signal. Perhaps the respect shown to tall people results partly from their apparently stern lips. There's an experiment for someone to do.
Monday, 29 June 2009
The most important invention
I was reading The Skeptical Adaptationist (Randy Nesse's blog) and came across the discussion about the most important invention of the past 2000 years. He suggested printing. I would say the contraceptive pill, because of its effect on human behaviour.
Feminism has been around at least since the French Revolution, but it only began to take off when the pill gave women control over their own fertility. I remember a discussion at breakfast in my Oxford college in 1961. The other students, all male, were excited at the thought that women would no longer have an excuse not to yield to them. I argued that this would mean the end of marriage as we knew it and perhaps the collapse of parenthood. At the time all my women friends were scrambling to get engaged before their last undergraduate year ended. Every week someone else started showing off her ring.
And what has happened? Where the pill is freely available hardly any students think of marriage. People live together for years without marrying. The age of first pregnancy has moved from the mid twenties into the early thirties. A large proportion of young women say they never want babies, and some are freezing their eggs in anticipation of perhaps choosing motherhood when they are past menopause. The birth rate in most of Europe has fallen below replacement rate. In fact this one factor alone has slowed down the world's population growth and may reverse it just in time to prevent calamity.
Feminism has been around at least since the French Revolution, but it only began to take off when the pill gave women control over their own fertility. I remember a discussion at breakfast in my Oxford college in 1961. The other students, all male, were excited at the thought that women would no longer have an excuse not to yield to them. I argued that this would mean the end of marriage as we knew it and perhaps the collapse of parenthood. At the time all my women friends were scrambling to get engaged before their last undergraduate year ended. Every week someone else started showing off her ring.
And what has happened? Where the pill is freely available hardly any students think of marriage. People live together for years without marrying. The age of first pregnancy has moved from the mid twenties into the early thirties. A large proportion of young women say they never want babies, and some are freezing their eggs in anticipation of perhaps choosing motherhood when they are past menopause. The birth rate in most of Europe has fallen below replacement rate. In fact this one factor alone has slowed down the world's population growth and may reverse it just in time to prevent calamity.
Saturday, 6 June 2009
The audacity of boats
Welcome back to the A of B blog! And thank you for reminding us of the self immolation of Jan Palach. I don't remember his suicide as having had much effect. It was one thing to be burnt by the Inquisition - witness the Martyr's Memorial in Oxford, which still sends a chill after nearly five centuries. It is another thing to burn yourself. It seems a sort of self-indulgence to try to make yourself a martyr if no one else will do it for you.
I got a shock today when I googled a church for a bit of research and found that it advertises itself as "a traditional catholic orthodox anglican parish, faithful to the apostolic church and 3-fold (male) priestly ministry". It is as if the Oxford martyrs had died for nothing. The differences with catholicism that cost them their lives have been sponged away, together with the differences between catholic and orthodox that split the churches a thousand years ago. You don't get rid of conflicts by pretending that they never existed.
Obama's speech in Cairo was a brave attempt to mend fences between America and the world's Muslims, but he is still carrying some very heavy baggage. He called the Iraq invasion a "war of choice" as opposed to the one in Afghanistan which is a "necessary war", but he did not apologize for the former, nor did he see the colonial flavour of big, rich, mainly Christian or post-Christian countries trying to impose their solution on a small poor Muslim-majority country. No foreign power has ever managed to control Afghanistan, and eventually NATO is going to have to negotiate with its opponents, so the sooner the better.
I don't deny that the Taliban ideologues are oppressive bigots, but peoples have to conduct their own revolutions, and the presence of foreign armies makes that very difficult, perhaps impossible; can anyone give me an example of a country that transformed itself under occupation? Post-war Germany and Japan are not examples, because they resumed change in a direction they had been moving in before they were taken over by warmongers.
I got a shock today when I googled a church for a bit of research and found that it advertises itself as "a traditional catholic orthodox anglican parish, faithful to the apostolic church and 3-fold (male) priestly ministry". It is as if the Oxford martyrs had died for nothing. The differences with catholicism that cost them their lives have been sponged away, together with the differences between catholic and orthodox that split the churches a thousand years ago. You don't get rid of conflicts by pretending that they never existed.
Obama's speech in Cairo was a brave attempt to mend fences between America and the world's Muslims, but he is still carrying some very heavy baggage. He called the Iraq invasion a "war of choice" as opposed to the one in Afghanistan which is a "necessary war", but he did not apologize for the former, nor did he see the colonial flavour of big, rich, mainly Christian or post-Christian countries trying to impose their solution on a small poor Muslim-majority country. No foreign power has ever managed to control Afghanistan, and eventually NATO is going to have to negotiate with its opponents, so the sooner the better.
I don't deny that the Taliban ideologues are oppressive bigots, but peoples have to conduct their own revolutions, and the presence of foreign armies makes that very difficult, perhaps impossible; can anyone give me an example of a country that transformed itself under occupation? Post-war Germany and Japan are not examples, because they resumed change in a direction they had been moving in before they were taken over by warmongers.
Monday, 25 May 2009
Korea
All the big boys have lined up to condemn North Korea for its nuclear test, but when will the world ever learn that the worst way to deal with a rogue state is to isolate it and threaten it? That just enables the delinquent rulers to tell the people what danger they are in and to strengthen their grip. The way to encourage "regime change" is to remove the threats and lower the tension.
I am not sure that Iran should really be called a rogue state. It's electoral system is not much less democratic than that of Great Britain, and if it has a nuclear weapons programme it is surely defensive and not offensive. Iran has not invaded a neighbour for centuries, and the ancient Persian empires were more devolved and multi-cultural than most European ones.
Israel, which has invaded its neighbours at least six times in 61 years, has never been put under pressure for its nuclear weaponry. Indeed it has never admitted to possessing it. Mordechai Vanunu, who alerted the world to the scale of the problem in 1986, was kidnapped, spent 18 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, and is now not allowed to emigrate from Israel. If the world can't condemn Israel it should not condemn anyone.
I am not sure that Iran should really be called a rogue state. It's electoral system is not much less democratic than that of Great Britain, and if it has a nuclear weapons programme it is surely defensive and not offensive. Iran has not invaded a neighbour for centuries, and the ancient Persian empires were more devolved and multi-cultural than most European ones.
Israel, which has invaded its neighbours at least six times in 61 years, has never been put under pressure for its nuclear weaponry. Indeed it has never admitted to possessing it. Mordechai Vanunu, who alerted the world to the scale of the problem in 1986, was kidnapped, spent 18 years in prison, mostly in solitary confinement, and is now not allowed to emigrate from Israel. If the world can't condemn Israel it should not condemn anyone.
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