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There never was a more noble cause than the Emancipation of Women. Never was an untruth so blatant that women were morally and intellectually inferior to men. Never was there a better case for Reason to oppose itself to ignorance and hate, which appeared in their usual guises of “common sense” and “the way we’ve always done it”.

The trouble with humanity is that good causes can be hijacked by others, very often to make money. Such was the case with Torches of Freedom*. It was the way that the tobacco industry and early geniuses of marketing like Edward Bernays jumped on the bandwagon of feminism in order to sell cigarettes. And how they succeeded! There had been quite strong social pressure against women smoking for decades. But by pushing their Torches of Freedom campaign, and many other marketing ploys linking smoking to freedom for the gals, they soon had the entire second half of the population hooked, and well on the way to the cancer ward.

The success of advertising, marketing and PR has educated vast groups of people to believe that they can choose their facts in the same way they choose their brand of toothpaste or car. In place of critical thinking, the ideals are unquestioning brand loyalty, personal identity and unconscious choice. These are not the skills that created the Enlightenment or underwrote the Industrial Revolution. Some people call for teaching critical thinking in schools. There will be others who will fight that tooth and nail, as their jobs and power depend on it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torches_of_Freedom

#edwardbernays #smoking #criticalthinking #smoking #pr #marketing #emancipationofwomen #feminism

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Waiting for us after Covid 19 has blown out is a series of far more terrible pandemics. More terrible because there will be several of them. Because their symptoms will be more unpleasant. And because transmission will be harder to stop. Welcome to the war against antibiotic resistant bacteria. Update: we are losing. Regular readers will recall our several posts on rays of light in the gloom (LSS passim). But so far, it ain’t enough.

We need something extra, a game changer, that will give us a completely new way of tackling resistant bacteria, to eke out the precious supply of antibiotics. Writing in the Guardian,* Clement Giradot seems to have it. They are called Bacteriophages-little viruses that eat bacteria. They can be targeted, lab-grown and produced to high standards. Of course they are not the total answer, we will still need antibiotic drugs. But the link gives a real example of clearly-written popular science, and if you have any interest in the world outside your self, then read it for its own sake

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/sep/21/phages-the-tiny-viruses-that-could-help-beat-superbugs

if you want to help the world’s first charity designed to tackle the antibiotics crisis, click on this link

Homepage with ASK

#bacteriophages #antibioticresistance #antibioticresearchuk #billandmelindagatesfoundation

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The most important thing to know when you have a problem is to know that someone can do something about it. It’s called hope. As the Coalition of the Greedy and the Ignorant smash up the planet, it’s not just a question of stopping them. it’s also a question of offering practical, targeted solutions.

Once such is the Foundation for Climate Restoration*, whose admirable initiatives are well covered by Santi Carneri in El Pais today.* Their essential aim is to restore the atmosphere to preindustrial levels of CO2 by 2050. That’s about 300 ppm, give or take the odd ppm. Nice aim, guys-but how are you going to make that one stick? Well, their aim is to bring in all stakeholders-business, governments, ONGs, religious groups and ordinary citizens, to make the elimination of CO2 commercially viable. That’s the key bit for us: give enough people a selfish motive and the common good will result. The ghost Adam Smith will be cheering from the sidelines. The organisation’s website and Santi’s piece will give you some good reading; once again, we want to get out of the way. What impresses us is the array of stakeholders that they are bringing in. We particularly like the Canadian firm Carbon Engineering, whose link is posted below.

here’s two for the foundation

Resources

Home Page

This one is El Pais; translators at the ready! https://elpais.com/elpais/2020/09/17/planeta_futuro/1600328554_467174.html

And this SHOULD get you to carbon engineering

Home

#globalwarming #climatechange #extremeweather #carbonengineering #carboncapture

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Children of the nineteen-sixties will recall the famous Waddington’s board Game Risk. It was simple enough. The world was divided into 42 territories via five continents. There were six players. The aim of each player was to launch aggressive warfare and acquire sufficient armies to crush all other players and achieve world domination. (On the up side, we learned the names of faraway places like Irkutsk and Kamchatka).

Well our world of the twenties is not so different, except that now the weapons can be financial as well as military. The two principal players are the USA and China. The question that worries US policymakers is: what sort of financial cards is China holding?

As every schoolchild knows, China has been buying up US debt big time. There current holdings are estimated at $1trillion-about 5% of US debt. What would happen if they suddenly liquidated.if things got nasty over Taiwan, for example? In a fascinating article for The National Interest, Scott B MacDonald discusses the effects on markets, countries and economies. That means every person reading this.

https://nationalinterest.org/blog/politics/china-holds-lot-americas-debt%E2%80%94could-beijing-weaponize-it-169222

#USChina #debtweapon #reservecurrency

we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for this piece

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Ask anyone about the Australian Dream, and most people will come up with the same sort of picture: a world of modern suburbs with huge gardens and herds of SUVs. Where everyone is hardworking and prosperous, enjoying endless summers of barbecues and sport. Where the beer and chardonnay are ever-flowing and the only problem is the odd huntsman on the wall.

There’s a lot to like about it: democratic, unpretentious -with ordinary people at last coming into their own. But, unless Australians are very careful, it may be impossible to sustain. Emily Cadman in Bloomberg Green* describes how uncontrolled development in the age of global warming, may be making the great city of Sydney uninhabitable. Already temperatures in the west of the city are reaching 50 degrees, and you can find yourself hit with eighty on the tarmac in a car park. Roads melt, violence soars-and some people die from the heat. That’s before the bush fires.

We at LSS have always admired a lot about Australia. The essential egalitarianism, the blokeish no nonsense spirit, toughness of their sports teams. It is a dream worth preserving- but sometimes even dreams must be adapted.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-09-15/sydney-s-new-suburbs-get-so-hot-that-people-could-die-there

#climatechange #globalwarming #sydney

we thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for the lead to this story

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“Is there Life on Mars?” sang David Bowie in the nineteen seventies. Try fitting the word “Venus” into that song at all necessary points. Because astronomers have now announced that the discovery of the gas phosphine in the atmosphere of Venus may be evidence of life on that planet. We include two articles from El Pais for your links. You may want to use a translator. But for once we can translate the entire content of both articles for you in a single word. CAUTION.

We have seen so many false dawns in the search for extra-terrestrial life. In the late nineteenth century Percival Lowell, then using the best telescope in the world, thought he had discovered a whole civilisation on Mars. There were the Viking results of 1976, which after initial excitement faded into “not proven”. Remember the Martian fossils twenty years later?

We at LSS once had the privilege of working alongside some of the best forensic scientists of their day. (we emphasise alongside, not as!) And the problem they faced was the same as these space scientists. You get a data point. It is real. Obviously it has implications; and once you think about these you are speculating by definition; you have moved out ahead of the data. How far can you go safely? The answer that the forensic scientists gave was very simple; don’t go very far; always apply the rules of logic; if possible, do more tests.

We at LSS have a sneaking hope that the results do prove the existence of life on Venus. But until more is understood about the chemistry of phosphine, particularly on hot, high pressure worlds like Venus, we think it is best to reserve judgement.

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-09-14/hallados-posibles-indicios-de-vida-en-venus.html

https://elpais.com/ciencia/2020-09-15/mas-dudas-que-microbios-flotando-en-las-nubes-de-venus.html

#phosphine #venus #astrobiology #life

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It isn’t often wen get a ray of sunshine in times as gloomy as these, but we couldn’t stop ourselves from congratulating Google on reducing their corporate emissions to zero. (tell them to look at the link below-Ed.) Funny how that company has so crept up in our lives and language! “What was the total exports of industrial resin molds from New Brunswick 1997-2011? Oh, I’ll Google it!” “How many times did Royal Engineers defeat Woolwich Arsenal in the Cup Final? Google it!” It’s a verb now meaning to search on the internet, and deservedly so. Even its competitors are just pale imitations, like Prosecco compared to Moet et Chandon. And if you remember Ask Jeeves, then you must be an Oasis fan.

According to the article from the BBC*, Apple and Microsoft are now hurrying to following suit. Haters of capitalism might not like it, but really big companies can show the way. Unlike certain governments, they are not in hock to various special interests. How long now before other organisations and corporations of high ethical standards follow suit? How about Saudi Aramco? The Southern Baptist Convention? News Corp? We await with pleasure. Meantime, we are off to google some tea bags and milk, as we fancy a cup of tea.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-54141899

#carbonneutral #globalwarming #google #bbcnews #microsoft #apple

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Europe in 1945 was devastated. A cataclysmic economic crash was followed ten years later by a destructive war. Millions had had been killed in action or in ethnic cleansings. Cities were ruined. Pattern of trade and credit were shattered. The Soviet Union, led by sociopathic dictator Josef Stalin, was gobbling up the countries of Eastern Europe. There seemed little to stop them spreading the rule of totalitarian communism to the west.

Into the chaos stepped US Secretary of State George C Marshall. Ably assisted by British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin (you won’t have heard of him: being Labour and a Trades Unionist, he has been written out of history) a Plan of colossal size, imagination and, let’s say it, generosity was instituted in 1948. It cost $15 billion; that’s an eye watering $3 249 billion in todays money. But it saved Europe, and as Keynes might have said, it saved the world. Cities were rebuilt, trade restarted and prosperity began to rise. The ambitions of Russian Dictators were thwarted-well, for a couple of generations anyway.

There are strong parallels between 1945 and now. Following the crash 0f 2007-08 the economies of the world are in a febrile state. Poverty and inequality are rising. Healthy international trade is failing. Economies are only kept alive by ad hoc, panicky government interventions. Yet the tasks we could achieve are both immense and possible. If accomplished they could lead to a world as broad and sunny as the postwar decades, when everyone (at least in western countries) was enjoying some of the fruits of prosperity and freedom.

It is in this light that we take very seriously the call for a new Green Marshall Plan. We quote from Larry Elliott of the Guardian. But you should find this covered in most world media today Here are the key extracts:

The …. Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development will next week publish a report….. on behalf of an advisory panel including the chief economist of the Bank of England, Andy Haldane; Robert Skidelsky, the biographer of Keynes; and Mariana Mazzucato, a professor at University College London…….

The report will call for policymaking to be based around four objectives: environmental sustainability; rising wellbeing (rather than simply higher incomes); lower levels of inequality; and more resilient economies.

The [aim} is to harness the best of the market – its ability to adapt and innovate – with the power of the state in order to bring about economic transformation 

Some of our more elderly, nervous readers are becoming anxious about the activities of the more, ah, how to put this?-enthusiastic– members of the green movement. All we can say is that the adoption of the OECD plan would cut the ground from under any number of muddy, well-intentioned feet.

read://https_www.history.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.history.com%2Ftopics%2Fworld-war-ii%2Fmarshall-plan-1

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/sep/13/covid-19-drives-leaders-to-make-unprecedented-interventions-but-what-next

https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/jul/02/uk-should-prioritise-green-projects-to-kickstart-economy-says-imf

#greennewdeal #greenmarshallplan #oecd #larryelliott #covid19 #economics

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The collapse of reason and the trend to people just shouting at each other, either in the street or on the internet, is a trend we have returned to several times at LSS. (Apocalypse-now And Discommunication LSS 13 9 2020). Why do rational arguments not prevail? Why do facts bounce off people like shells off a well- armoured tank?

Now Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire may have stumbled on an important piece of the jigsaw. Reading though a journal called The Hill, via the excellent Apple News, he came across an article by one Neil Baron. Ostensibly about Mr Trump, as you would expect from a journal whose remit is to cover the comings and goings in the Congress of the United States. Riffing yet again on the deep entrenched positions of Mr Trump’s supporters and opponents, the authors suddenly strikes gold. Psychological gold. Read this:

Other Americans and people throughout the world ask, why do these people stick with Trump? Behavioral science suggests some answers. Social psychologists note that the longer and more fiercely we need to defend our decisions, the more difficult it is to admit we’re wrong. 

and:

According to the cognitive dissonance theory, a conflict between what we do and what we believe creates anxiety we need to alleviate. The conflict between the rampant criticism of Trump and his supporters’ tenacious defense of him has created that anxiety. So they alleviate it by shunning information inconsistent with their support and embracing consistent but false rhetoric such as the “deep state,” “fake news,” the pandemic “hoax” and the QAnon conspiracy.

Neuroscientists using brain imaging found that the reasoning areas of the brain shut down when confronted with information inconsistent with one’s beliefs and that the brain’s emotion circuits light up when supporting information is introduced.

Here at last may be the deep explanation of discommunication, where both reason and facts fail. It’s wired inside us, like the hardware in a badly designed computer. And sinister people know how to trade on it. The task before the intelligent, rational, above all empirical readers of LSS is to find ways to fix the problem. We welcome suggestions.

https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/516140-why-trumps-approval-numbers-may-be-soft

#discommunication #thehill #neilbaron #cognitivedissonance #reason #emotion

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For anyone who still tries to deny the reality of man-made climate change, and its devastating consequences, the terrible fires sweeping the West Coast of the United States should be the final proof they need to abandon their beliefs.

Today El Pais (Signs of Apocalypse)* lists half a million people evacuated, 15 dead and dozens of missing. The temperature in Death Valley last year reached an all time world record high of 54.4 degrees C. Meanwhile previously stable climate cycles have started to fluctuate wildly and dangerously.

It’s not as if El Pais is a woolly green polenta-and sandals journal of way-out environmental activists. It’s a sober reflective essentially centrist outfit whose overwhelming mission is to lower the temperature, at least in politics. Shame they can’t do it in Oregon. Tonight Sir David Attenborough considers the wider aspects of the problem on BBC*

Which is another case in point. That most anodyne of institutions is now the subject of vituperative outpourings of hate and bile, with its defenders beginning to occupy equally entrenched positions. Same for Black Lives Matter. Extinction Rebellion. Brexit. Why the collapse of reasoned discourse, and the advance of discommunication, where people just yell at each other, learning nothing, teaching nothing? We believe that our most empirical communicant, Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire and a magazine called The Hill may have stumbled on the beginnings of an answer.

https://elpais.com/opinion/2020-09-12/senales-apocalipticas.html (some will need a translator app)

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-54118769

#climatechange #globalwarming #sirdavidattenborough #californiafires #oregon #discommunication