We at LSS have always been strong admirers of the popular musical singing group The Eagles. It has hard for non-musicians to write of music without sounding cliched and puerile. Yet for us songs like Doolin Dalton and Take it Easy, and Desperado capture something of the life lived in the vast plains and mountains of the western states. The Last Resort and Hotel California sing of the opulent , and sometimes corrupt atmosphere of the long coastal belt running from San Diego up to San Francisco. Nowhere was this more true than in the golden sixties and seventies, when California was the technological and cultural hope of the world. That was the world Frey and Henley knew.
The lush relaxed sounds of Tequila Sunrise at first suggest nothing more than a pleasant sundowner, looking out between the palm trees as the sun sinks into the Pacific. Perhaps you have a nice job in banking, financing the burgeoning new tech and entertainment industries. Maybe you build swimming pools, and now you’re sitting by your own one. Or perhaps you are connected with the arts, and your world is more like that described in the paintings of David Hockney, or the film Boogie Nights, with its intriguing insights into the film industry. Life’s pretty good, huh?
Well, maybe. We can’t reproduce the lyrics here for copyright reasons. But listen carefully and you suddenly find a couple whose relationship is breaking down in a tangle of incomprehension, adultery, and booze. Why do things go wrong, in the middle of all this plenty? It’s a good question. Frey and Henley asked many more. They proved that to be a poet you don’t need battlefields and mouldy old abbeys. The stuff to write about is right there in the malls, freeways and condos of what still in our opinion, is one of the most interesting places to visit in the world. So, my fine readers, let’s mix this one to the memory of Glen Frey (1948-2016). Thanks.
What you will need: Cocktail shaker. 6 medium ice cubes. 1.5 measures tequila. 3 measures fresh orange juice-and we don’t mean out of a container, we mean real oranges. Half measure grenadine.
How to do it: Add the ice to your cocktail shaker, then pour the juice, grenadine and tequila. Shake vigorously for 20 seconds. Pour into a cocktail glass and decorate with a slice from one of the oranges.
Decline and Fall of the fossil fuel industry-really? That’s what Jillian Ambrose of The Guardian* reports today. The dual effects of Coronavirus and the new efficiency of alternative energy sources may have produced a tipping point in which this once mighty industry enters into its sunset years. Revenues are expected to fall from $39 trillion to $14 trillion, with a 2% decline in use of fossil fuels every year. Read the link below. To which we might add two things. Firstly, remember how the denialists used to tell us how green energy would never work? Secondly -investors beware-as Jillian says, “fossils” are an enormous component of market valuations, and portfolios. Clearly, a transition is needed. And there are indeed alternative energy markets which shrewd managers would do well to scrutinise. Let’s look at two possible examples below.
If we could make profits from cleaning up pollution, then everyone would be doing it. One hopeful company is Climeworks of Switzerland, which has set up a plant to capture CO2 from the air, and sell it on to people like growers of cucumbers and tomatoes. Definitely two of our favourite vegetables at LSS. We post links below,** and also a summary article by Ali Morris of Dezeen
As for solar power the Mail has a great story by Jonathan Chadwick*. Professor Tan Swee Ching of the National University of Singapore is working on a highly promising new solar panel which can work at low light intensities, maybe even in the shadows. It may even be possible to make a flexible one to wear as a bracelet, so you can charge your phone as you go along. Again, take a look at the link. We thank Mrs Christine Hartley for this last source
We at LSS love it when someone discovers something big, something exciting, that seems to be real illumination of the darkness we’re in. Over the years, we have seen it in physics, paleontology, history, theology, and even sports. Now we think that Skylar Baker-Jordan of the Independent*, may be on to something. We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire for drawing our attention to this piece.
Let’s start with a little warning: it’s written from a point of view which could be described as “leftish”, “Liberal” or “Progressive” There’s nothing wrong with that; all articles will have their biases, which is why intelligent people always read from journals on both sides. So it takes the expected view of Mr Trump’s supporters which can be summarised in this quote about the regions in which he grew up.
Beneath the stereotype of “Midwest nice” and “southern hospitality,” a bloviating jingoism, a blustery bullying, a latent authoritarianism has always lurked.
Strong stuff indeed, and doubtless the other side could trade some equally wounding insults via Fox News or The Sun. Such name calling has slowly escalated into the terrible partisan divisions which have so wounded the United States and the current disturbances which may yet bring it to its knees.
Progressives like to say “the Right has guns-we have reason. We have facts.” So why do all these so-called reasons and facts keep seem to bounce off the intellectual carapaces of their opponents? Right- wing people are no more stupid than Left-wing ones. Look at a group of Trump supporters or Brexiteers and you will find successful engineers, businessmen or craftsmen. (they do tend to be male). It is here that Baker-Jordan hits the intellectual paydirt.
In 2016, the political scientist Matthew MacWilliams found that high levels of authoritarianism frequently correlate with support for Donald Trump. This does not mean these folks consciously crave dictatorship, but rather that they express classic authoritarian traits — a desire for “law and order” and social hierarchies, for example — triggered by their anxiety over social change. This is what makes engaging with my Trump-voting family so tricky. Most of them are incredibly defensive and utterly convinced of the righteousness of their cause because anything that challenges the status quo is seen as an innately bad thing.
Here lies the hostility to media, denial and aggression, the support for leaders like Trump and Bolsonaro. The real deep inescapable fact is this anxiety, and the cause is the massive bewildering social changes brought about by globalisation.
It is no good at all sneering at these people, or demonising them. Because they are a psychological type that constitutes a large slice of the population. A slice that often works hard, pays its taxes (except for the rich ones) and is often a vital part of the little networks that keep societies alive. By which we mean things like sports clubs, churches, masons, charities and all the other groups that constitute a healthy social ecology. If the progressives are the side of reason and fact, they need to face the fact that these people exist, and accommodate their needs. Otherwise they will be in the unfortunate position of those sailors who deny the existence of waves in the sea. And all the gains in areas like race, ecology, inequality and even freedom itself will surely be lost.
Today, Gentle readers, the stories are coming in so thick and fast that we are struggling to get them all in. But we think that they are so important that you should know. So we’re going to give you a quick summary, credit the source, and give you the references to read for yourself.
The first is a major breakthrough in the science of new antibiotics. As we all know antibiotic resistance is now a major killer, and it’ll get bigger. Now a team at Princeton led by Professor Zemer Gitai has discovered a compound called SCM 79797. It seems to be showing real effect against even resistant gram negatives like E coli and MRSA. There is a superb article in Phys.org below* and if you like your news more mainstream, here’s Rhys Blakely in The Times* (spoiler alert-it’s paywalled)
We than Mr John Read of Buckinghamshire for this story.
It will be a long time for any new antibiotic to make it through trials, into production, and then prescription. We need to keep up the pressure to develop new ones all the time. If you want to help, please visit the website of the Charity antibiotics research uk * which we link below. They do sterling work on this and were one of the early groups to warn of this terrible danger. We post a link below.
About forty five years ago, a new fashion swept through the think tanks, newspapers and political parties of the west, particularly in the UK and US. The State, they said was out of date and oppressive. It was full of fuddy- duddy old civil servants, with rules and restrictions. It was slow and sclerotic, and the taxes which paid for it could be better spent on things like imported cars and mistresses. Wealth and progress would come from the dynamic private sector, where strong buccaneering entrepreneurs (they were always men) would tear up the Red Tape and Get Things Done.
Around this time some Forensic Scientists in a Police Laboratory had a problem. Was there a way of visualising the invisible impressions of writing caused by a pen in the sheets of paper which are underneath the one that the pen is leaving its ink upon? That could provide them with very important evidence indeed. The only way to do that back in 1978 was to shine a light on the pages and hope for the best.
So they approached a couple of college lecturers called Doug Foster and Bob Freeman, who were experimenting with electrostatics. They created a device called the Electrostatic Detection Apparatus (ESDA) It was a box which sucked the document you wanted to examine flat. The operator covered it with a simple clear film, then applied and electrostatic charge. The next stage was to apply a simple black powder, which visualised the invisible writings, which could then be photographed or preserved. The technique had no effect on the document. Note- “interference free evidence” is the Forensic Scientist’s dream. It could be repeated again and again. It fitted well with other departments like drugs or biology, provided you arranged that the documents people got the thing first. It led to thousands of successful convictions, and excellent intelligence operations.
The demand for the ESDA from science labs, police forces and government agencies became immense. On the back of that Foster and Freeman set up a small factory to commence the commercial manufacture of their ESDA. Their links with Forensic Scientists led them to realise that there was a need for other devices, for example that could analyse the pigments in inks, in fingerprint technologies, and many other crime-related fields. Soon they were growing and taking on employees, and moving to bigger premises. Now they have a major business exporting around the world.
So where did the State end and the private sector begin? Whisper this as a heresy, but we think that they both played a role. The intellectual excellence and detached curiosity of the state scientists provided a seed bed of ideas and a place to test and perfect without the grinding macho pressures of the market. There is no doubt that the entrepreneurial spirit of Messrs Foster and Freeman researched developed and grew things in a way no civil service could ever achieve. Above all a well financed state sector provides a stable predictable market into which budding new enterprises can sell with a certain degree of confidence. The reason that the pharmaceutical industry is strong in the UK is because of the NHS. The reason the Americans had such a strong aerospace sector was the enormous budgets of the Department of Defense. When you can rely on a stable market, you can predict your sales, borrowings and production runs. From there, you move out into the marginal markets. The history of pulling back the State and letting the Private Sector rip has had some deadly failures; witness the failure to develop new antibiotics.
This is not to say that the state should be underpinning every private sector company. We doubt that hybrid public private partnership enterprises will be particularly successful . And there are many factors which influence industrial success- banking structures, education, labour laws for example. But one of them is a thriving public sector, particularly in areas like Law Enforcement, Heath and Defence, as a guaranteed market of resort. The old mantra of “Public Sector Bad- Private Sector Good” is as out of date now as its Communist antithesis was in 1989.
Attentive readers of this blog will recall us searching for the sources of the following quote on the purpose of education , which we here reproduce in full:
[to turn out young men] who would be acceptable at a dance and invaluable in a shipwreck
The originator was the first Headmaster of Stowe School, JF Roxburgh
We thank Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire, who sourced it for us in Prospect magazine
At this point, we feel that our overseas readers may require a little explanation as to what Stowe School is. The Educational system in England is divided into two. There are State Schools, which attended by 93.5% of the population. Then there are Public Schools, which are attended by 6.5% of the population. Confusingly, they are also known as Private Schools and the Independent Sector. Stowe is very much in this second category.
There is a myth current among some that these Public Schools foment the development of a tiny and exclusive elite which selects itself again and again across the generations. 65% of Judges, 52% of Ministers, 44% of News columnists and 43% of cricketers come from this 6.5 per cent they say- and they go on to give many other examples. These critics go on to allege that this is somehow unfair, unusual and economically inefficient.
To which we at LSS repost: nonsense! Absolutely anyone can become a pupil at a public school and join the elite. They are open to everyone who can pay the fees.. The following figures demonstrate how easy this is.
At Stowe for example, the fees are a mere £12,697 per term. There are things like registration fees and acceptance deposits, but these are a one- off . And so a year’s education at Stowe will only set you back a mere £39 491. Of course most people have two children, so a fairer average might be £78, 982.Naturally, you will have to find things like uniforms, sports equipment and pencils on top of that, but you may well get change from £100 000 per year.
And Stowe is cheap compared to some! Take Eton, where the fees are £14,167 per term, plus estimated extras of £500-£1000 per term. David Cameron and Boris Johnson went there, so you can see it must be value for money. Or Dulwich (Nigel Farage) which will set you back £14 782 per term.
The great advantage of these schools is that they are run as private sector businesses, subject to the same market disciplines as for example Richard Branson’s Virgin Group, Ryanair or Tesco. Why they are given the same tax status as charities such as Cancer Research or the RSPCA is however a mystery which we at LSS cannot fathom.
In 2019 the UK average salary was £36 983 per annum for someone in their thirties. The median was £29 400.
There’s an old Spanish poem by Jose Asuncion Silva, which in our translation goes :
Old things, sad and faded, without voice or colour// know secrets of long dead epochs// of lives which no one conserves in memory…. and which when touched and looked at by unquiet men// tell in passing anguished voices//stories unusual of past times.
Well, that’s the gist of it. It tells of someone going through an old attic and finding things which had been put down centuries before. Have you ever looked at an old coin in a museum and wondered what the Roman soldier was thinking when he dropped it-the last thought to catch on the coin before today? Even finding an old video cassette or calculator in a garage can bring back the you of another time, before you had imagined anything that is happening now.
If that’s true for us, and things lost only a few decades or centuries ago, how much harder it is to imagine the life of something that died 425 million years ago. We read in Nature Briefings of the discovery of the very first animal which walked on land in what is now Scotland. (see link) It was a bit like a millipede, although apparently it wasn’t a millipede. But read it for yourself, there are some excellent photos as well with this one.
But what happened on the day it died? Was the weather warm and sunny, or overcast with showers?What day of the week was it-a Thursday? Were this creature’s plans for the weekend permanently ruined by The Grim Reaper? If it were brought back to life today, would it resent the fact that we vertebrates have claimed all the credit for conquering the land, even though that only happened fifty million years later?
Magazines like Nature and Science and their many competitors are filled with learned accounts of fossils and finds, bits of pterosaur and bits of pottery. We must respect their tireless examinations, exhaustive detaillizations, and voluminous expositions. But sometimes take time to step back and try to imagine the lives of forgotten soldiers or things that swam in warm vanished seas.
nature summary:
An inch-long critter similar to a millipede looks to be the oldest animal known to have lived on land. Fossil imprints of Kampecaris obanensis from the island of Kerrera in Scotland have been radiometrically dated to around 425 million years ago, in the Silurian period. The arthropod probably fed on decomposing plants on a lakeside. Even earlier land animals, from the Cambrian era, are known to have existed, but only indirectly, from their tracks. CBC | 3 min read Source: Historical Biology paper
It is the end of one month, and the start of a new one. We could not resist a line to say thank you to all who have read, contributed or “followed” our little blog. The following list is not inclusive, and if you are not there, then we beg you to forgive our sad oversights and poor IT skills. Also we cannot begin to include twitter and facebook lines-there are too many. So to all mentioned below, and anyone else. Thanks again.
Peter Seymour chittasakrewadi cooking without limits Gary Herbert soundeagle Lindsay Charlton ambitiousblonde Mike Mooney politics with Cw Hannesvon Eeden HLInglese alexmarkovich Steve Day calatorcuintrebarea lluisbusse shevra dest kaye ray dr bogden Jill Lee lovethe001 Martin Ottewill America on coffee wandering ambivert alanrubens and Vivek, whose idea this all was
The list is starting to grow quite large . We do not wish to sound conceited, or, as our Spanish chums might say engreido, but this will be the last time we do nominated thanks. But we will continue to push out something like this every few weeks, because we appreciate your time.
There’s a lively debate on both sides of the Atlantic about the decline of western nations from their former dominance, and the rise of other powers as serious rivals for the first time in centuries. This declinist anxiety is said to be behind the victories of Trump and Brexit, and many other things. Certainly, declinists have a point; western nations such as the USA and Britain are no longer the automatic role models they once were. But they were so big once- why the big decline, like old boxers going to seed?
Historians usually point that the key advantage to the western nations came with the Enlightenment in the early eighteenth century, when the culture of reason and evidence began to be exalted above all else. Science is simply the practical application of reason and evidence, and it led to crucial advances in industrial production, navigation and education that left other cultures far behind. Well, they’re not behind anymore, as fumbled responses to Covid-19 demonstrate. It feels like Marlon Brando in On the Waterfront, continually asking himself: when did it all go wrong?
One strong contender has to be December 1953 at the Plaza Hotel in New York, where a meeting of the top CEOs of the tobacco industry was convened to decide their response to the terrible mess that they were in. Because it was in these years that the first scientifically researched, peer reviewed studies were appearing that showed the link between their products and lung cancer. It looked as if the game was up. Did they apologise and close down their companies? No. Decide to pay compensation? No. Go into educational publishing? No. They hired a PR firm instead. And what a PR firm all that tobacco money could buy-Hill and Knowlton, the best of the best. These are the basic steps they took, and they have formed the basis of many a commercial response to science ever since.
What follows is a summary of an academic paper so well written that it can be taken with your evening cocoa, like a thriller: Inventing Conflicts of Interest: A history of Tobacco Industry Tactics by Allan M Brandt. So please, please read it for your self on the link below.
1 Decide your overarching strategy, which was- If the culture doesn’t like your product, change the culture. So that any attempts of practical litigation or legislation to mitigate the activities of your industry are so hampered that they become negligible.
2 Appear objective and compliant; the best PR leaves no fingerprints
3 Manufacture sufficient doubt, or impression of doubt, that your enemies’ aims become mired in confusion in the minds of the public.. Thus natural differences of opinion can be manipulated to produce “skeptics”, whose noble appearance of “dissent” may mask the motives of other interests
4 Use the skeptics to control the media agenda; one skeptic can represent balance and controversy to lazy journalists, however many reasoned exponents are lined up on the other side
5 Using all your money create an industry research body, to move the focus of research safely away from your product. Feed the public lines like: “we will get more facts as soon as possible.” “There are many possible causes of cancer”. “There is no conclusive proof of the link between smoking and cancer.” (personal note: we remember a relative of ours replaying that line in 1971. He died many years ago of cancer)
6 Continue to use your financial muscle to associate your product with such perceived virtues as being grown up, manliness, sex, wealth and the Great Outdoors. (this is our own, not Brandt’s, but we liked it so much it had to go in)
Surely all this didn’t work? Surely human beings are rational, independent creatures who can look at the evidence and decide for themselves? In 1954 the industry sold 369 billion cigarettes and had a per capita consumption of 3344 cigarettes annually. By 1961 these figures were 488 billion and 4025 cigarettes respectively. And some people say there is no such thing as progress.
Outside the industry, things were less rosy. Aside from all those pesky deaths from cancer. emphysema and the like, all that money up in smoke, and sad lives cut horribly short, there was a long term cultural damage which we at LSS believes explains much of our present plight.
For the first time, the normative processes of science had been significantly disrupted for commercial gain. The honest concepts of scepticism and doubt had been manipulated into weapons to confuse and deny. The emotional genius of PR now trumped the rational spirit of science. And people in industry, business and politics had learned that it could be done again. And again.
The rise and fall of nations is as much about technologies as demographics. Brains can often prevail over numbers. If a society becomes blind to its real sources of strength, its fall cannot be long delayed.
Our weekly look at stories we didn’t have time to fit in-with a great deal of help from our readers. Thanks.
Is Herd Immunity the answer to Covid-19? Was it ever? According to Nature Briefing, commenting on a New York Times article, no, we’re not anywhere near it anyway:
Even in the hardest-hit parts of the world, many fewer people have been infected than would be needed to achieve the herd immunity that might slow — but not stop — the outbreak. Serology surveys in places including Wuhan, Madrid and London have tested a cross-section of the population for antibodies against the disease. So far, the highest rate of infections found is around 20%, in New York City. That is well below the required level — something more like 60% (maybe) — to achieve herd immunity. There are many caveats around how the surveys are done and the accuracy of the antibody tests. And we don’t know for sure whether a past infection will give a person immunity, or to what extent.
Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire thinks that the Swedish experience is directly pertinent to this. Here he gives us Wired‘s take on it. The clue is in the headline: “Sweden’s Coronavirus Experiment has well and truly failed”. Read it. It’s hard-hitting stuff
And the same Mr Seymour has not been idle elsewhere. Here CNN report on how Vietnam has joined other successful Asian countries, only more so, with a death toll of zero.
Learning, Science and Society 