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.
We at LSS are an international blog, and we can’t afford to take sides. But anyone with eyes to watch a TV cannot have missed the growing tension between China and Western countries over the status of Hong Kong. Britain is at the heart of this, partly as the legacy of its history, and partly because of its close relationship to the USA. Everyone agrees that this will bring problems; but can they be resolved?
The heart of the matter is Britain’s diplomatic gambit: the potential offer of “a path to citizenship” for up to 2.9 million Hong Kong Chinese residents*, if China continues with its present policies (our guess is that they will). Whatever your views on immigration, that is a lot of people, equivalent to the populations of the current cities of Birmingham, Glasgow, Liverpool and Bristol.
Now, we at LSS are proud to call ourselves realists. Whatever one’s personal views, only fools would deny that immigration is a number one issue in the UK. All agreed that it was the decisive issue in the 2016 Referendum campaign on EU membership. Whatever the roots of peoples’ concerns, ignoring them is just not viable. Above all, a sudden influx seems to be a psychological tipping point for many people. And if the new UK government policy is activated, the 2.9 million may have to be admitted very quickly. as were the 60 000 Ugandan Asians in 1972. If the policy is to work, the Government will need the consent of its people. And so we call for a UK wide referendum on this issue, as the only means to look for that consent. In General Elections, there are always many issues: if ever there was a one-off, done-and-dusted, this is it. There are precedents; not just the EU referenda, but also the devolution and independence ones in the various countries of the UK. And above all, the whole thing could be done quickly as the arguments are well rehearsed on both sides. For the sake of balance, we offer both sides here, plus links which you can follow up on.
Anti- immigration campaigners will point to the enormous difficulties of trying to suddenly integrate so many newcomers. Net immigration is now at its highest ever, and rising (270 000 in 2019, as opposed to a decade average of 256 000 per year) The population has already risen by six million since 2001. There will need to be an enormous increase in the provision of housing, welfare and health services to say the least. These arguments are summarised by migrationwatch*
A representative view of the other side can be found at the free market Adam Smith Institute. As might be expected, their arguments are always of the classic economic efficiency mode. Abolishing migration caps to allow the best qualified workers leading to faster economic growth. But read it for yourself -they certainly go into detail. In a way the culture of Hong Kong- hard work, high levels of education, and a strong entrepreneurial spirit at all levels is a tribute to the free market ethos which the Adam Smith Institute expounds.
No one can deny that immigration can bring benefits: Rishi Sunak, Sajid Javeed, Sadiq Khan and Priti Patel all hold, or have held important jobs in national life. It would be hard to imagine a premiership team without its complement of foreign players, or universities without the best scientists. However, the issue for most people is the speed of immigration, and how it is controlled.
Since the late nineteenth century, global temperatures have risen by 0.8 degrees centigrade. Two- thirds of that rise has been since 1980. This year, southern England has experienced its warmest Spring ever. So we thought that our readers ought to get used to some real tropical-style cocktails, and enjoy them before we all sink beneath the waves. So this week-the Mojito.
Oh, sorry, did someone at the back just say 0.8 degrees isn’t much? Well, briefly, it’s a truly immense amount of heat in a very short time-and it’s getting worse. It only took a rise of a few degrees in a few short centuries to produce the Permian Mass Extinction, the most cataclysmic loss of life on the planet, that made the little affair of the dinosaurs look like a dust-up in a supermarket queue.
Right let’s get on with the cocktail. This week we are indebted to that excellent source of Civilisation BBC Good Food. We’ll try to keep ’em sourcing from as many different sites as possible. in the weeks to come.
You will need: juice of one fresh lime. 1 teaspoon of granulated sugar. A handful of mint leaves +one sprig of the same. Do make sure they are washed if taken from the garden, especially if you have cats or foxes in the neighbourhood. 60ml of white rum, such as Bacardi.
How to do it: Mix up the mint leaves, sugar and lime juice in a jug. Make the mint small, but don’t macerate the leaves. They are there to add flavour, not control it.
Now put them in a tall glass over lots of ice cubes. Add your white rum. You can top up with icy cold soda water to your taste. Stir, and garnish with the mint sprig.
We have found this to be a most refreshing addition to a late afternoon in many a hot climate, and wish all of you the same. While you do it, here is a quote we saw on the interweb, which we quite fancy. We wish to hell we could source it.
“the purpose of a good education is to produce people who will be acceptable at a dance, and utterly dependable in a shipwreck”
So far we have thought of Covid-19 as a respiratory disease. The symptoms*are pretty well-known to most people by now, as we also know that they vary a lot between different patients. But what if we are missing a trick? What if the thing is zeroing in on our nervous systems? And what havoc could that wreak?
According to a very well-researched article in New Scientist, Jessica Hamzelou* is finding more and more evidence that it could. We all know that many Covid-19 patients are presenting with some neurological symptoms, mainly loss of smell and taste. But Jessica reports that some neurologists are becoming worried by Covid-19 patients who are presenting with more acute brain symptoms such as encephalitis.
Good thinker that she is, Jessica presents a null hypothesis. We at LSS love a good null hypothesis. The damage to the brain is caused not by the virus, but by loss of oxygen due to acute respiratory failure, cytokine storms-all the usual suspects in fact.
Yet the evidence points to a different, and more sinister, explanation. Firstly, we know well that other coronaviruses such as HCoV-OC43 can indeed enter the nervous system and brain. And so can the SARS virus, which we all know is like SARS-CoV-2 ‘s mortiferous elder brother. Once in, what harm can it do? Well, we saw loss of taste and encephalitis above. There is also the risk of post viral fatigue syndrome, and a rather unpleasant disease called Guillain-Barre syndrome, which presents as a creeping paralysis. And never forget that some viruses, such as Herpes simplex virus can lie low in the nervous system for years, only emerging long after the initial infection has passed.
So what can be done? The first thing is to read Jennifer’s article. It is a least a month later than most of the other literature, so it’s bang up to date. Secondly-we are not medically trained. But it’s common sense to think that, if you are going back to work or socialising again, to still be very cautious. Our last thoughts- that this is the tip of an iceberg. If the virus has a neurological action, its effect on the growing brains of young people could be very dangerous. So, perhaps a little more spending on this, and a little less on road by-passes might be a very good investment indeed.
New movements in history start as attempts to address the dreadful wrongs of their times. Christianity began as a movement protesting against the cruelties and callousness of the Roman social system. Socialism was an understandable response to the inequalities and squalor of the Industrial Revolution. At first their adherents were clear; their cause was just, and together they would change things for the better. Which, on the whole, they did. But the unity of such movements never lasts for long. Students of the early Church will recall the Ebionites and Gnostics. Later there were much larger schisms as Athanasians battled it out with Arians, or Monophysites with their Orthodox co-believers. The divisions in the socialist movement were soon chronic: there were Social Democrats, Socialists, Anarchists, Communists, Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, Trotskyists, Maoists, and many others, as each little group realised that their vision of the future was not to be quite the same as that of their Comrades.
What may be very loosely termed the Green or Environmentalist movement will soon face the same iron laws of History. The movement began as a very understandable response to the destruction of the planet in a reckless and utterly unsustainable manner, which will undoubtedly destroy us all. At first a whole plethora of groups like Greens, Friends of the Earth and Green Peace could rub along with the same goals, the same general actions Their efforts have been beyond praise. If anyone has given this narcissistic species one last chance, it was them. Yet success brings the need for hard choices and the following article by Harry Cockburn in the Independent shows how this will play out again and again in the years to come. We are grateful to Mr Peter Seymour of Hertfordshire who has drawn our attention to this dilemma.
The UK Government is expected to give the go ahead to a remarkable new solar park project at Cleve Hill in the Thames Estuary. It will generate 350 MW of clean energy from 880 000 panels, no less. It will kick £1000 000 a year into local authority revenues. Patriots should rejoice, as it will be the world’s largest energy farm, leading the way to a zero carbon future. The company building it claim there will be a 65% increase in biodiversity. Understandably, Friends of the Earth support it.
Equally understandably, Greenpeace, The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and the Kent Branch of the Campaign to Protect Rural England do not. All have done incredible work to protect what little is left of nature from barbarism and who have also earned the right to be taken seriously. They point to the danger of the storage system, which will cover 25 acres, and the general visual impact of a huge new industrial installation in the melancholic beauty of the marshes.
Whatever the rights and wrongs of the dispute it points to the increasing dilemmas which will be faced by the Green or Environmentalist movement. Dilemmas which its enemies will rush to exploit. Out there are some very rich unpleasant men, hooked on addiction to money, who will stop at nothing to wreck the growing movement for environmental responsibility. They are the common enemies of the groups named above. They fund denialist groups and fake science. They hire journalists and trolls to spread disinformation. They will use every trick to spread distrust and discord among environmentalists and progressives. They trade in paranoia, greed and despair.
Dilemmas and difficult decisions cannot be ducked or evaded. There will be defeats, splits and bitter personal animosities. But if everyone who cares about the environment always remembers why they are right, and that their cause is essential, they will still find the resources to win.
We at Learning, Science and Society must now offer our first correction to a mistake, and offer our first apology. In a previous Blog (Professor Brian Cox…LSS 27 May 2020) we described our correspondent Mr Gary Herbert as being Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire.
In the course of our many conversations listening to Mr Herbert, we came under the impression that he and his family held lands on both sides of the Buckinghamshire-Bedfordshire border. A bit like one of those old Anglo-Norman lords, who had holdings in many counties in England, Normandy and Anjou. Big on wine, cheese and killing the lower orders. You know the ones.
Mr Herbert and his Legal People have advised us that in fact the vital Bedfordshire-Buckinghamshire border abuts, adjoins and therefore borders his lands. He should therefore be known as Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire, not Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire, as he has been hithertofore described in these annals. We apologise to Mr Herbert for any hurt, distress and inconvenience to him, his family and friends which we have inadvertently caused. In future he will be referred to at all times by his correct title, which is, as attentive readers will recall, Mr Gary Herbert of Buckinghamshire.
We know that many people have referred to him by other terms in the past, but we will not use them here as this is a family blog.
How big is everything? For a long time, the earth itself must have seemed vast enough. Imagine a Phoenician in about the year 1000 BCE standing on the shores of Spain and staring out across the void of the Atlantic. It must have seemed immeasurably vast and mysterious.
Ancient Greek astronomers such as Aristarchus and Hipparchus were the first to make scientific estimates of important distances, around the third century BCE. They were pretty good at it, considering that there were no telescopes. The Earth was about 39000 km in circumference (pretty accurate); the Moon about 383000 km(again pretty good); the Sun 16,210 000 km (out by a factor of ten). These distances were immense, inconceivable, by the standards of the time. The fastest ships would take weeks to make the passage from Alexandria to Rome. Trading expeditions to the East would need a year. To people of the time, reaching the moon was technologically impossible, it would be like us imagining a jaunt to the Andromeda Galaxy.
There matters remained for over a thousand years. But with the advent of modern science, things only got vaster. It was found that the earth rotated, and worse still, went round the Sun. Which discovery, as every schoolchild knows, was profoundly disturbing to most people. Cassini made the first accurate planetary measurements of Mars in 1672. With the use of telescopes and parallax, he was not far out. Once again the Universe had jumped in size. Once upon a time things had seemed very cosy, the world all on its own with God and the stars just above. Now what lay beyond Saturn, then the last known planet-and how far?
It was Bessel who in 1838 finally managed to squeeze enough out of parallax to finally give him a good distance for 61Cygni. For the record , it’s 11.398 light years. With the discovery of cepheid variables, astronomers such as Leavitt and Hubble were able to map out our local Milky Way Galaxy, then prove the existence of fractal numbers of other galaxies dotted around a universe which is currently estimated to be 46.5 billion light years across. Our current fastest spaceships, like the Voyagers and Pioneers have taken nearly fifty years to even get into interstellar space; they will take several tens of thousands to come near other stellar systems.
Is the Universe actually infinite? One problem is that people who know talk about these things in complicated mathematics. The use of words simplifies, but it also profoundly distorts. One man who tries to bridge the gap is the very intelligent Professor Brian Cox, In a you- tube video recommended to us by Mr Gary Herbert of Bedfordshire, Professor Cox gives his thoughts on the many exciting discoveries of modern astronomy-and their unsettling implications.
As the world entered the Covid-19 crisis, we all knew the massive economic damage that would follow. Many no doubt well-meaning people predicted a rapid bounce back in the autumn of 2020. They even talked of a V-shaped model of economic activity. We at LSS are never certain; but over the next few weeks we shall try to find evidence to support that-and evidence against.
Larry Elliott of the Guardian has always been a reliable guru on the doings and don’tings of the UK Economy. His sharp analysis of the UK property market (real estate to US Readers) is a good jumping off place to give us some pointers to how things might turn out in general.
People in England are now talking about a bounce back in the UK housing market as demand, pent up by the lockdown, is released. There is even talk of a mini boom. Elliott is rather more circumspect. He points out that rising unemployment (currently 2.1 million) is often a harbinger of falling house sales to come. There’s more. A lot of UK employment is backed up by the Chancellor’s furlough scheme. This starts to tail off in August, and formally ends in September, at which point quite a large number of decisions will have to be made about which jobs are economically viable. And, to quote Shakespeare, here’s the rub: the government’s mortgage support scheme ends in October. People worried about their jobs will have to start thinking again about where their next mortgage payment is coming.
Elliott’s discussion is restricted to the UK property market alone. What follows next is our own take. Property-the decision to buy a house- is a classic “big ticket” item in a household budget. But there are others, in roughly this order-home improvements, cars, holidays, and eating out. All of them supporting thousands of jobs, and all intensely vulnerable to decisions on discretionary spending that all households make. As these jobs are lost, indicators of things like unemployment, consumer spending and purchasing fall faster, further depressing confidence. Demand and supply uncouple like the two sides of a DNA molecule, and the economy starts to die. Some foreign readers may smile at this point, because Britain is a service based, highly financialised economy, particularly vulnerable to shocks of this kind. That may be; but the same laws of economics apply in all economies to a greater or lesser extent. In a capitalist economy, confidence is the key, and we think it has taken a very hard knock everywhere.
Elliott notes that the last nail in the UK property market is usually rising interest rates-and at the moment all policy is geared in the opposite direction. But he closes with a sombre warning from Professor Tim Congdon, no less: all this printed money will one day generate inflation. And the way you deal with that is interest rates. That’s where Friedman displaces Keynes. Those of us who remember the boom and crash of the nineteen seventies remember Friedman well indeed.
