A reading from the Book of Santa, Ch. III, vv. 15 - 18

¹⁵When the king thus showed favour to their brother, the reindeer spake privily one to another, saying, surely we shall suffer wrath if we do as we have done heretofore.

¹⁶Let us honour Rudolph in the sight of our master, that his countenance shall smile upon us also.

¹⁷Then came they to Rudolph and praised him with loud voices, crying, thy name shall be remembered among us, yea, even to the seventh generation.

¹⁸Yet in their hearts was much bitterness, seeing that he had been set up over them.

Progress

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Badgers, Israel and Scientology

Richard Ingrams, in The Oldie (January 2014 issue): "Any commentator hoping for a quiet life should avoid writing about Israel, Scientologists and badgers."

I had originally planned to write a spoof combining all three, but in fact there is a connection to be made between the first and last: according to a recent report, bovine tuberculosis has begun to spread into the West Bank.

Until recently, Israel has been clear of the disease. But it's certainly not clear of badgers. According to the IUCN, the Eurasian badger, meles meles, our beloved British Brock, is found in northern Israel down to Haifa, and the honey badger, mellivora capensis, is all over the State, so their geographical distributions overlap to a degree. It's not inconceivable that if the brocks of the eastern Med have TB, they may indirectly have transmitted it to honey badgers, and so on to cattle.

 

We can just about drag the Scientologists into this if we agree with them that "all illness in greater or lesser degree and all foul-ups stem directly and only from a PTS condition", i.e. mixing with "Suppressive Persons" who try to oppose the Scientologist's quest for self-betterment. This psychological/spiritual explanation of disease is shared by Christian Scientists, among others, and I'm pretty sure a positive frame of mind and supportive social relations do help the immune system. In that case, a fig for disease.

But why does bovine TB matter? It can spread to humans, but aside from breathing in the exhalations of infected animals, or negligent hygiene when handling them or processing their meat, or drinking their untreated milk, the risks are low. If present in meat, the bacterium is killed by cooking.

The Rural Economy and Land Use Programme (RELU) cites none of these in its explanation of why bTB is a concern, saying instead:

Why does bovine tuberculosis matter?
The increase in the number of herds affected and the spread of infection across the UK has impacts upon:

— Farm productivity.
— Mental health and wellbeing of farmers, frustrated by control programme culling of apparently healthy cattle.
— Health and welfare of animals, because effort is focused on the control programme, rather than on the development of good herd health strategies.
— International trade agreements, if herds testing positive reach a critical level.
— Public expenditure, at a time when budgets are under extreme pressure.

Seems like all except the first are to do with drawbacks of the control programme, rather than the disease. Not enough to justify the mass slaughter of meles meles, perhaps.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Mass death at Station M

(Picture source)

Is Fukushima killing the Pacific Ocean all the way to America's West Coast?

Michael Snyder's latest post joins the dots to create a sketch of rolling mass extinctions related to nuclear seawater contamination off eastern Japan. He leads with news of a fresh carpet of dead organisms beneath Station M in Monterey Bay, as reported by National Geographic magazine.

In turn, NG's article bases itself on a press release from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI), which shows that algal blooms in 2011 and 2012 created a temporary superabundance of food for other creatures, who multiplied and then died off as the supply ran out.

MBARI says this happens periodically, and the "pulses" explain why there are more ocean floor scavengers than could be sustained by the normal amount of  nutrient "snow" drifting down from above. When explosions of "sea snot" occur, material not consumed immediately mixes into the mud and creates a reserve that is mined over succeeding years.

So, not caused by TEPCO, then.

In a way, that's a shame. For as with global warming, overenthusastic nuke-scare-mongering like Snyder's could backfire and cause the public to ignore issues that may indeed be worth worrying about.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

Snow in Cairo

A few days ago, we had quite a few reports of snow in Cairo, an event apparently rare enough to make the news. The above headline from the Mirror is fairly typical. Other examples are :-

Playing in Cairo snow a first in 112 years
Snow Falls In Cairo For The First Time In More Than 100 Years

Egypt Sees First Snow Storm In Years

As I'm mildly interested in snowfall I decided to check it out. I soon came across the more nuanced view below, although you wouldn't guess from the headline. 

From all accounts, snow in Cairo is exceptionally rare – although historical records are difficult to attain. Some reports suggest it’s the first snow in Cairo in over 100 years – although they are not substantiated.

New York Magazine offers this intelligence:

Claims that this is Cairo’s first snowfall in exactly 112 years seem to be sourced from a tweet by one local man who later admitted he was just guesstimating. Whatever the exact number is, though, the point is that it basically never snows in Cairo.

Yet this weather site has snowfall records from Cairo airport going back to 1943. It shows snowfall on at least one day in 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1994, 1995, 2002, 2003 and 2004. 

Maybe the recent Cairo snowfall was uncommonly heavy or widespread, but if those figures are correct it was a long way from being the first in 112 years. Unless in the past it only ever snowed at the airport. Somehow I doubt that.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

US education: another turn of the wheel

To get the full feel of US culture, it helps to know a few things. One is Churchill’s correct observation that, “Americans do the right thing, once they have tried everything else.” Another is the cultural preference to make everything a matter of black and white, “If you’re not a winner, you’re a loser.”

This refusal to acknowledge shades of grey means an awful lot of cognitive dissonance, and bending of the rules. It also means massive and regular policy shifts. Progress is more a matter of stumbling onto new ideas in a Drunkard’s Walk than a gradual set of small improvements.

Nowhere are these false dichotomies more obvious than in Education. For example, when studies indicated that there might be too much rote learning in the standard curriculum, it was replaced by “discovery” or “inquiry-based learning”, with absolutely no memorization at all. For another, the famous No Child Left Behind initiative of President G.W.Bush requires by law that every single student in the country perform above benchmarks by 2014. Not surprisingly, this has led to massive cheating, and very low benchmarks.

On the surface, the US education system looks free and democratically-driven. Each state has its own Board of Education, which sets the statewide standards and basic curriculum, from which each school district generates its own requirements. That is, unless you live in Ohio, Louisiana, Kentucky, Kansas, or several other states, where the process has been hijacked by a vocal religious minority, who wish to ignore centuries of scientific advancement.

When new studies showed that not enough students were “ready for higher education”, a group of states signed on to the Common Core, an agreed-upon set of material that every high school graduate should know. With Teutonic efficiency, school administrators have leapt upon the idea that this minimum should be the maximum. Not only that, but the results of the students’ tests will be used to measure teachers, and “eliminate the failing ones.” This appeals to US conservatives, who rail against public education, and to corporations such as Pearson publishing, now poised to make billions. One of their income streams is to provide scripts to teachers, from which they are not permitted to deviate. Another is to generate the aforementioned assessments.

 As I get ready for retirement. I can’t wait to see what happens next.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.

No satnav for Lalaland

But there is really no scientific or other method by which men can steer safely between the opposite dangers of believing too little or of believing too much. To face such dangers is apparently our duty, and to hit the right channel between them is the measure of our wisdom as men.

William James - The Will to Believe

One of my ideals is believe nothing. I could have called it a belief rather than an ideal, but even I can see the pitfall in that. 

Yet as James implies in the above quote, it isn’t actually possible to believe nothing. We need beliefs as conceptual frameworks to communicate socially – to live even. It is possible try putting the brain into neutral and merely observe, but we observe via language and that's something we have to borrow.

So what’s the point of trying to believe nothing? I think it reminds us to be wary of generalisations, sentiment, cultural norms and especially language. Yet as Wittgenstein showed, we can’t become intellectual hermits and invent a  private language to solve the problem.

One difficulty with a cautious attitude to belief is how we delve into matters too complex for data or logic to flash up convenient answers. Political discourse for example is easy enough to engage in but not so easy to analyse in a neutral way. Political arguments veer off so quickly into Lalaland.

This presents few problems for anyone who enjoys the fun of debate, because Lalaland is easily navigated via a host of special aids – political ideas framed by an allegiance to one’s favoured Lalaland region and written in the regional dialect.

However these regional allegiances are only clearly visible to those who don’t share them. Those with no wish to settle in Lalaland – those who are not prepared to adopt one of its seductive cultures or learn one of its many languages. Therein lies the real difficulty doesn’t it?

To see any political allegiance for what it is, we cannot share it.

We can’t easily engage in political debates as a neutral critic either, because almost any criticism is seen as an enemy allegiance. Debate grinds to a halt or becomes lost again in the endless highways and byways of Lalaland.

Of course, politically ambitious cynics often profess undying allegiance to a Lalaland region without ever going there in person. Their sights are set far beyond its borders even though they find the inhabitants useful. 

Nick Clegg is an example.

All original material is copyright of its author. Fair use permitted. Contact via comment. Unless indicated otherwise, all internet links accessed at time of writing. Nothing here should be taken as personal advice, financial or otherwise. No liability is accepted for third-party content, whether incorporated in or linked to this blog; or for unintentional error and inaccuracy. The blog author may have, or intend to change, a personal position in any stock or other kind of investment mentioned.