The poisoned environment, the EU and the need for a more radical revision of democracy

"Endocrine disruptors can accentuate or inhibit the response to hormonal signals. They have been
implicated as one of the potential causes of the significant drop in male fertility observed in Europe over the last 50 years and as having negative impacts on the environment."


I'm not fond of being bossed-about, but clearly there are some matters that have to be addressed at a collective level and it seems that the EU has added this to the 2012 agenda (htp: Ian Parker-Joseph). If the science is right, then yes, I support action.

And while I also support those (especially UKIP) who resist our regional tryout of the New World Order, has anyone considered that if we did successfully disconnect from the EU political machine, we'd be left with the domestic dictators of Westminster and Whitehall, freshly energized and unshackled?

The democracy project has a lot more to do than tweak Rompuy's nose.

UPDATE: Coincidentally, Alastair Smith has just published an article in The Economist, explaining why those in power are never acting in our best interest. After an amusingly cynical analysis, he concludes:

It’s not possible to reform a system by imploring people to do the right thing. You have to know how it works. Dictators already know how to be dictators—they are very good at it. We want to point out how they do it so that it’s possible to think about reforms that can actually have meaningful consequences.

A mild defense of Dawkins

This is in response to Sackerson’s piece on Richard Dawkins. It is probably not my best work, given my lack of sleep.

I have read ‘The God Delusion’, and Anthony Flew’s review of it. Most of the former is concerned with the science of why religion appears to exist, based on the scientific evidence available. In his first major point, Flew chooses to focus on Dawkins’ discussion of Einstein, in which he says:

“But (I find it hard to write with restraint about this obscurantist refusal on the part of Dawkins) he makes no mention of Einstein’s most relevant report: namely, that the integrated complexity of the world of physics has led him to believe that there must be a Divine Intelligence behind it.”

The problem for Flew is that I have read Einstein’s writings and comments on the subject. The latter explicitly said that he did not believe in a deity, and that the most that could be said is to deify the structure of the Universe itself. This is not quite what Flew implies. The rest of his review does not address the science presented.

That being dealt with, I have far more interest in the reasons for the outspoken anti-religious tactics of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, P.Z. Myers and Christopher Hitchens.

It is my claim that they are a product of the current social forces.
Since I moved to the US in 1978, I have seen a rise in the loudness and power of the Religious Right, who have supplanted the fiscal conservatives as the core of the Republican Party. These people are not the pleasant vicars and church-goers of my youth. For my UK readers, I note that Ian Paisley was educated at Bob Jones University, a font of wisdom for the fundamentalist community. His style is representative of many in the movement.

This rise in power can be explained in part by the political and economic uncertainty from the gradual decline in the power of the US, and from the many scientific discoveries which show that emotionally-charged deeply-held beliefs (especially ‘no evolution’) are simply not supported by reality. As any psychologist will tell you, this conflict between the frontal lobe and amygdala results in anger, directed firmly at anyone who rejects their ‘correct’ beliefs. Some have coined this the Ameritaliban.

A few people, such as Pope John Paul II and Stephen Jay Gould, tried to make peace, by showing that religion and science could live in harmony. This has also been tried by the Templeton Foundation. These efforts were roundly rejected by the anti-science crowd, who continue to vilify the former two after death, and use every tactic possible to neuter science education and research.

Faced with a call of ‘no quarter’, is it any wonder that voices like these arose on the pro-science side?

Foreign demand to support the price of gold?

I start with an entertaining and informative investor newsletter: David Collum's annual personal investment report, which is worth reading in full. The prose is very sparky and the scorn and indignation laid on good and thick.

For the impatient, I can report that he begins by describing his own asset allocation:

With rebalancing achieved only by directing my savings, I changed nothing in my portfolio year over year. The total portfolio as of 12/31/11 is as follows:

Precious Metals et al.: 53%
Energy: 14%
Cash Equiv (short duration): 30%
Other: 3%

... which tells you where he stands in the bull/bear debate.

Now, here's a sweet little piece of possible future villainy:

[The Chinese] are rumored to have 1,000 tons of gold with a target of 8,000 tons. How do they buy 7,000 tons? They bid for it like everybody else. Chinese citizens have been encouraged to save using gold (a defacto gold standard and covert accumulation). Although the gold bugs in the US occasionally discuss confiscation, I think the Chinese proletariat are the ones being set up. 

That is so nasty and cynical that it seems almost inevitable.

And easy:

7,000 metric tonnes of gold at current prices ($50,290.84 per kilo at time of writing) is worth a shade over $352 billion.

This IMF report from 2010 (fig. 3, p. 27) estimates Chinese household net savings at some 15% of GDP, and  World Bank data estimates GDP in 2010 to be the equivalent of US $5.88 trillion. So the dollar equivalent of Chinese net household savings is around $882 billion.

So if Chinese convert merely 40% of their personal cash to gold (which David Collum seems to have done already), the target will be met. Theoretically, it's doable today. Meanwhile I still see not just one, but a number of shops offering to buy gold in my neighbourhood. Perhaps the gold is heading East, like the copper wiring from our railway signals and the wrought iron manhole covers from our streets.

It's not just China that's importing gold, of course; Indians (for example) save a third of their income in gold.

So it seems to me that the gold price won't crash back to the levels of some years ago.

INVESTMENT DISCLOSURE: None. Still in cash (and index-linked National Savings Certificates), and missing all those day-trading opportunities.

DISCLAIMER: Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content.

Professor Richard Dawkins and questionable standards of scholarship

It has long been my impression that Professor Dawkins' emotions override his commitment to the highest standards of scholarly argument and research, and this is stated as a clear accusation by a victim of one of his attacks, the distinguished academic philosopher and former atheist Anthony Flew:

Dawkins is not interested in the truth as such but is primarily concerned to discredit an ideological opponent by any available means. That would itself constitute sufficient reason for suspecting that the whole enterprise of The God Delusion was not, as it at least pretended to be, an attempt to discover and spread knowledge of the existence or non-existence of God but rather an attempt – an extremely successful one – to spread the author’s own convictions in this area.

For the rest of Professor Flew's article, please see here.

I am not concerned to argue the case either for or against atheism here. There are honourable people on both sides of the argument.

But I am concerned that an eminent scientist long associated with my university should lose his professional compass so grossly on a matter that deeply interests and affects millions of people.

It is also worth noting, as perhaps many do not realise, that Professor Dawkins was, in effect, sponsored by an American billionaire to ride his hobby horse. The University's website openly admits:

Simonyi Professorship was set up with the express intention that its first holder should be Richard Dawkins.

I should like to know who is (and was then) on the appointments board for the Simonyi Professorship, and the interconnexions among them and others including the successful candidate and Mr Simonyi himself. I fear that the more I come to know about this, the more I may possibly feel that the Chair and its surrounding issues might serve to lessen respect for the University and its work.

If there is any reader of this post who teaches or is attending, or has taught or attended at Oxford University and would care to join me in a letter to the University inquiring into the Simonyi Professorship, I should be obliged if he/she would get in touch with me.

How Western civilisation will fall

Special Educational Needs and Inequality

One might (perhaps) expect that less wealthy areas of England would have a higher proportion of children identified as having Special Educational Needs (SEN). Not so, according to this graph on page 103 of the NHS Atlas of Variation in Healthcare (November 2011 edition):

Using a measure called Indices of Multiple Deprivation and correlating it with the proportion of primary age children with a SEN Statement, it seems that children from poorer areas are less likely to be so diagnosed.

I don't think that's a true reflection of underlying need. There's loads of children with EBD (emotional and behavioural difficulties) and pace Mr Clegg the  modern pattern of disrupted family structure really doesn't tend to help them. Perhaps schools that have more such children accept the situation as "normal"; or maybe their SENCOs (Special Educational Needs Coordinators) are simply overwhelmed. It's notable that primary age children are more likely to get excluded in Year 6, as the dreaded teacher-damning SATS exams draw near and the school finally decides that it can't afford to have a severely disruptive child in the group - was there really no such difficulty in the years before that?

But there are other kinds of need. Autism is an interesting case, and incidence of diagnosis is seemingly influenced by the social class of the family - an ASD (autistic spectrum diagnosis) expert in Birmingham LEA told us a year or two ago that the better-off quarters of Birmingham were yielding an ASD diagnosis rate some five times higher than in poorer areas. Perhaps it's because ASD doesn't carry the same potential stigma for the parent - it's genetic rather than a consequence of poor parenting skills - and perhaps also it's because it's a good way to attract extra attention and resources for your child (autism is a lifelong condition, unlike, er, "naughtiness").

Not that autism isn't real - I have taught autistic children all the way from mild cases down to the ones that can't or don't speak at all. But middle-class parents are (naturally) better at fighting their child's corner to get the diagnosis. And it strengthens their arm that the techniques and resources specifications in SEN statements are legally enforceable - such fun, as Miranda Hart's on-screen mum likes to say.

So in some ways the graph above is inadequate - it needs to be broken down into types of disability, and further into economic sub-divisions of the LEA (there is a world of difference between, say, Nechells and Hall Green). But even with the data aggregated in the way it is, there seem to be more questions to ask about inequalities in diagnosis and provision.

How to become incredibly rich in the coming total economic collapse

You can't. And I don't want to read any more articles promising something like this.