Can you have ethics without some form of religion?

I think not. 

Ethics have to have a basis. You can't derive an "ought" from an "is" - unless you have a philosophy that combines both - e.g. God the Creator who is also the Lawgiver. 

Without that, ethics is merely a study of moral attitudes without any hortative or normative force. Or a matter of logical consequences - "if you believe x and wish to be consistent, then you should do y". For example I asked a class whether eating animals was cruel and they all said yes, but balked at the idea of not eating meat at lunch. 

One answer would be simply to change one's principles to make them consistent with one's desires. Although possibly, being consistent could also be seen as an optional principle.

A moral code may be desirable, but that is not enough for it to be independent of human wishes or inclinations. Codes may differ sharply, with no way to determine which is correct or superior: for example, how does one adjudicate between cannibals and vegans?

The Beast From The East, by Wiggia

I had to take the wife shopping yesterday, I have to take the wife shopping anyway as she no longer can drive, and we went to the local Sainsbury's.

All went well until I was requested to fetch a loaf: what I saw as I turned into the bread sales area was a scene from East Germany, when all the shelves were permanently empty in the food stores. Amazingly with only a couple of days left of the effects of the “beast from the east”, shoppers were still plundering the bread and milk sections.

I had taken No1 shopping on Monday morning as usual and it was fairly quiet but by the time we left the car park was full as the public piled in to purchase anything that would stave off death by starvation. The till operator said the weekend had been unbelievable with the public buying multiples of everything from bottled water to fruit and veg and they had run out of most staples.

I have no idea how the public react to a weather warning on the rest of the continent but we have made an art form of the whole thing, from the weather reports in the MSM threatening Armageddon with threats of ten foot snow drifts, ice flooding and gales everywhere, trains stopped running before any snow had fallen in the south, schools shut everywhere on the principal that NO one would be able to get in and health and safety prevailed - prevailed to such an extent that the same schoolkids told to stay at home for safety reasons were then seen on national news jumping off steep hills on unlikely homemade sledges.

The road outside my house had the good fortune to have a snow clearer come through in the night, but I discovered in the morning that the snow clearer in ridding the road of snow had thrown it all on the pavement, meaning pedestrians had to walk in the road !

I can remember a similar cold spell - it was worse - back in the early eighties, when a local firm in Essex cornered the market in moon boots, bringing in on a barge up the river Blackwater in Essex thousands of these boots from Holland; I thought afterwards there must be cupboards everywhere stuffed with these boots that will never see the light of day again. There is no doubt that an impending weather “event” can be a great sales promotion.

A similar thing happened in the Great Storm when trees were down all over the place: my supplier told me he had been inundated with people wanting to buy chainsaws as tree surgeons could not cope with the work offered, and he had sold out twice and Stihl were trying to get extra supplies in from Germany.

Again I thought that there would be thousands of redundant chainsaws on eBay soon after, as those that had purchased them would have no further use, but no it never happened and again there must be thousands of hardly used chainsaws rusting in sheds all over the country. So no doubt now moldy bread and rancid milk is already being dumped along with limp lettuce and off veg, all will be forgotten until the next beast from the east or wherever it may come from.

Is Our Political Class Incompetent?

I watched the first half of BBC's Question Time on catch-up, and there was the old, dangerously avuncular Ken Clarke explaining how those who voted Leave hadn't considered all the - oh, so complicated - implications.

Sadly, no-one there thought to take him up on the question of contractual due diligence. For after Parliament voted to end the UK as a free country - as Tony Benn pointed out - in 1993, Ken Clarke, then Chancellor of the Exchequer, boasted that he hadn't read the Maastricht Treaty.

He was not alone: Douglas Hurd, then Foreign Secretary, said (Maastricht signing, 7 February 1992) "'Now we've signed it – we had better read it!'"

What would any commercial business do with a contracts manager who waved through agreements without even looking at them?

So I'm not inclined to take seriously any waffle from the old Bilderbergian about knowing exactly how everything will pan out before making a decision.

And no - not incompetent, or at least. not merely incompetent: arrogant, antidemocratic and treacherous.

FRIDAY MUSIC: Arvo Pärt, by JD

This evening (Friday) on BBC4 is a programme called "The Magic of Minimalism" about the American composers Steve Reich, Terry Riley, Philip Glass and La Monte Young.
https://digiguide.tv/programme/Documentary/Tones-Drones-and-Arpeggios-The-Magic-of-Minimalism/1237248/

I shall probably watch it, of course, but Charles Hazlewood's description of them as 'great composers' is stretching it a bit. Their music is interesting but eventually becomes monotonous.

It would be a more interesting programme if he were to include the genuinely great 'minimalist' composers of the 20th century, the late Sir John Tavener and especially the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt

“I have discovered that it is enough when a single note is beautifully played. This one note, or a silent beat, or a moment of silence, comforts me. I work with very few elements – with one voice, two voices. I build with primitive materials – with the triad, with one specific tonality. The three notes of a triad are like bells and that is why I call it tintinnabulation”- Arvo Pärt
http://www.good-music-guide.com/reviews/071_arvo_part.htm

Herewith a selection of Tintinnabulation plus a rather quirky interview of Arvo Pärt by Björk.

The US gun debate - some additional facts

The recent mass shooting in a Florida school has seized the imagination, since it combines elements of fear, unpredictability and helplessness.  But emotional reactions have a way of skewing perceptions of overall reality. For example, the thought of an airplane crash has a similar terrifying effect, even though commercial passenger flight is, statistically, the safest mode of travel.

Without at all wishing to discount the horror of those killings at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, I offer a few facts that might make us consider related issues more deeply:

In most countries, suicide is a bigger threat than homicide

"In 2013, 33,636 persons died from firearm injuries in the United States [...] The two major component causes of firearm injury deaths in 2013 were suicide (63.0%) and homicide (33.3%)." (1)

In most large and advanced countries, suicide is significantly more likely than murder or manslaughter - 2 1/2 times more in the US, 12 times more in Germany. (2)

Some other advanced and developing countries have a worse intentional death rate than the USA

Taking the overall rate of intentional death (i.e. homicides and suicides together), the US is less plagued than Finland, Japan and China, to name but a few. (2)

In the USA, black people are, proportionately to their numbers, far more likely than whites to be victims of homicide

Despite representing only 12.6% of the US population (3) ... "Of the 13,455 cases from last year [i.e. 2015] in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims – or 52.3 percent – were black." (4)

A number of other large countries have a worse murder rate than the US

The intentional homicide rate is some 5 times higher in the USA than in the UK (5), but the rate in the US [4.88 per 100,000 inhabitants] - terrible though it is - puts it 94th in the list by country. Large countries [see (6) for population figures] that have a higher homicide rate include (e.g.) Brazil (pop: 209m), Mexico (129m), Russia (144m) and the Philippines (105m).

Mass gun slayings in the US are a small percentage of overall firearm homicides

In 2015, mass shootings accounted for less than 4% of total US homicides by firearm. (7)

Things used to be far worse, in the Middle Ages

The murder rate in the university town of Oxford, England, in the 1340s is estimated to have been 110 per 100,000 inhabitants (8) - slightly worse than the most violent country today (said to be El Salvador - see (5), again)
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(1) https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/nvsr/nvsr64/nvsr64_02.pdf
(2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_death_rate
(3) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_ethnicity_in_the_United_States
(4) https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-09-29/race-and-homicide-in-america-by-the-numbers
(5) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentional_homicide_rate
(6) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_(United_Nations)
(7) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-34996604
(8) http://www.nytimes.com/1994/10/23/us/historical-study-of-homicide-and-cities-surprises-the-experts.html

FRIDAY MUSIC: Breton Lays, by JD

Staying with the French theme of recent weeks, here is some very different and distinctive music and dance this week from the region of Bretagne, Brittany. This is the Celtic fringe of France and the final video here is Himne de la Bretagne "Bro gozh ma zadoù " which you will recognise as exactly the same as the Welsh equivalent, Land of my Fathers.

http://visite.bretagne.free.fr/index.php/en/culture.html

Africa: Still A Basket Case, by Wiggia

Wiggia is pessimistic about the outlook for South Africa:
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This is a short summary of my feelings after seeing the "address the nation" speech and the other speeches in the South African Parliament; absolutely nothing ever changes there in Africa.

Anyone who has been to Africa will have seen those countries that have “shrugged of the yoke of colonialism” as they like to call it, fail miserably to take advantage of the legacies left by the European settlers.

The scramble for Africa had many faults, the carving up of territories with disregard for tribes was probably the worst mistake, but with exceptions a land sparsely populated then was given a blueprint for a way forward that would enhance their future in a way they could never have dreamed of.

The cry we hear for reparations from African states is nothing more than a hand being held out for endless funds to bolster their total failure to take advantage of that legacy. Certainly Europeans took or made available valuable resources in these countries, resources the inhabitants had no knowledge of or any means to extract or use those resources; it was Europeans that made that possible.

So what happened? For many reasons - greed, personal ambition, the quest for power is all pervading in those countries - graft is on a scale outside the imagination of European politicians. Even relatively minor government officials find ways to squirrel away millions in Swiss bank accounts; and even those who (rarely) are brought to account and jailed or dismissed are immediately replaced by more of the same.

We see Prime Ministers and Presidents from these countries feted on official visits here, politicians who could never legally gain the wealth that they flaunt to the public; yet still they reign, using the power of their parties and corrupt legal processes to build impregnable walls round themselves and their cohorts.

Coincidentally I met one one of these officials when I was working for a client in Bayswater, London. One morning I was outside and the door of the house next door opened and several people came out; all, I discovered, were Nigerian. A smiling man called out good morning and we had a quick chat about the work I was doing next door.

It was only later when talking to my client who owned several properties in the area that he told me who he was and that the Nigerian also owned the property the other side of his: this one always had the curtains closed day and night and is where his “other” wives lived. This was all after this episode that you may remember:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-20211380

This of course is just another story in a long list of corruption scandals out of Africa. But it is not just corruption that holds the continent back: power is the real driving force to the universal malaise there. Power and the acquisition of it is the bedrock of all political parties everywhere and here as there how that is gained becomes more questionable and democratic with time.

Yet Africa somehow manages to do all this with acquiescence of its people who blindly believe that any change will deliver them from poverty and that whatever happens whitey is to blame. One can’t blame them, for that it is what their leaders have been telling them for years, because they have no other excuse.

Nothing could be a better example of the above than the maiden speech of Cyril Ramaphosa the new president of SA, finally having ousted the corrupt Jacob ‘I showered so I can’t get AIDS’ Zuma. He starts off his tenure with the popular commitment "land will be appropriated from white farmers without compensation"* giving all the murdering thugs who support the EFF and its leader Julius Malema in the belief he will be the nation's saviour the right to kill and injure white farmers even more than is happening at this time; their choice, of course.

But that route will lead South Africa to the condition of Zimbabwe, and international investment withers on the vine. It does not seem credible that a nation with the resources of SA can disappear down the plughole of incompetence, but sadly once again we are talking about Africa, a continent about to suffer the biggest demographic explosion the world has seen - and they make getting rid of white farmers who feed and export for the nation a priority!

Africa will not change in any meaningful way. It has proved time and again since they got their independence from the European colonialists that the only thing they are good at is wrecking the legacy left and opening Swiss bank accounts on the money the West still gives them, and that includes the charities. It is a basket case.
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*"We will accelerate our land redistribution programme not only to redress a grave historical injustice, but also to bring more producers into the agricultural sector and to make more land available for cultivation... this approach will include the expropriation of land without compensation.

"We are determined that expropriation without compensation should be implemented in a way that increases agricultural production, improves food security and ensure that the land is returned to those from whom it was taken under colonialism and apartheid."

https://www.biznews.com/sa-investing/2018/02/16/cyril-ramaphosa-debut-state-nation/