A big thank you, an apology and a nod to a few old blogs

We’ve been having some technical problems particularly with e mails this week. These are now largely resolved, but the amount of time and energy involved meant that normal productive service has been largely impaired. To sort of make it up. We thought we’d do two things: repeat our normal thanks and apologies, and then take a quick look back at some of the blogs which we think you might like. Note: we didn’t claim the blogs were “good” “better” “our best” or anything like that. We just think they were different and we put together unrelated things in a new way: or we showcased some original work by somebody somewhere.

So thanks to all readers, followers subscribers and everyone else who makes this humble little blog possible.

Now forward to the past.

On medical research we have been stalwart champions of the cause of discovering new types of antibiotics : we’ve averaged at least one every couple of weeks on this, so back references are superfluous. But we’re also proud to have picked up on exciting new developments such as CRISPR Cas-9 and Base Pair editing (LSS 9 9 23 et seq) and our blogs provide a nice series of snapshots on whats been unfolding over recent years.

Conservation and sustainability has been a constant theme. We managed to combine it with antibiotics on a blog called No plants No antibiotics (16 6 26) But you’ll find climate change all over the place here: and rightly so in a site devoted to reason and evidence

World Government has been a more recent theme: not because we are necessarily in favour of it, but we do think someone needs to make its case. Which we did starting with our series of 8 1 25.

Contradictions have always fascinated us. Such as: what does it mean to be Right Wing in the modern world? You can be for Free Markets, or you can be for the traditional nations. But you can’t be both for long, as our two blogs The Kronenbourg Question (7 6 22) and Is Donald Trump a Socialist? (7 4 25) pointed out

And finally: our Roman obsessions: we seem to use that Empire to explain everything from modern geopolitics to cultural decay to climate change. Key to our modern understanding of this ancient Empire is the work of Professor Harper whom we first showcased in our blog 17 12 22

Please keep all your ideas and suggestions coming. Wew are deeply honoured to be noticed by so many people in so many different parts of the world. Above all: keep reading. That’s what makes our day

#climate change #politics# economics #medicine #health #history #dna

Alternatives to a World Government: Part #1 of a new series

All the thinkers we admire say the same thing really: what is your alternative explanation? Bayes insists on always balancing two probabilities. Russell on always looking at the opposite point of view, Keynes on first establishing if your pet idea is general or just a special case. And Daniel Kahneman on checking which bit of your brain you’re thinking with anyway. Which brings us round to our universal panacea, a World Government. We’ve made the case for it a number of times here(LSS passim) so veteran readers will know our diagnosis: most of the problems of the world appear intractable because nation states can never work together with sufficient speed and co-operation to resolve them. Hence economic stagnation, growing xenophobia and a rapid breakdown of the ecological systems upon which we all depend for Life.

Hang on: because aren’t we muddling diagnosis with solution? In which case abolishing the nation state becomes a futile quest, and our World Government a mare’s nest. Are there other diagnoses of our ills which, if correc.t could address all these ills while safely retaining our systems of Governance.? We ought look at them : we owe our readers that much. And so we drew up a list of other possible root causes, which we cheerfully present below. We shall examine them in the coming weeks. Our candidates include Economic inequality. Institutional decay, Technological acceleration, and its concomitant, cognitive overload., Economic model exhaustion, Tribalism and Media systems and collapse of a common narrative

None of them are mutually exclusive and we will find overlapping themes, read similar authorities and consider facts more than once as we move through the series. So bear with us. But one thing we do know: one of you out there, maybe more than one, will have an idea we haven’t thought of. So if you want to put a candidate on the list let us know. In any case we look forward to all of you accompanying us on this next journey.

# bayes #jm keynes # bertrand russell #daniel kahneman #history #economics #politics #governance #technology

Friday: Greek rosé wines corner

When we asked our team of researchers what Greece, and Greek culture, have given to the world, they came up with this:

Homer epic poetry Hesiod didactic poetry Sappho lyric poetry Pindar odes Aeschylus tragedy Sophocles tragedy Euripides tragedy Aristophanes comedy Herodotus history Thucydides history Xenophon history Plato philosophy Aristotle philosophy Socrates ethics Diogenes Cynicism Zeno Stoicism Epicurus Epicureanism Pythagoras mathematics Euclid geometry Archimedes physics engineering Eratosthenes geography Hipparchus astronomy Aristarchus heliocentrism Anaximander cosmology Democritus atomism Hippocrates medicine Galen medicine Herophilus anatomy Ptolemy astronomy geography Phidias sculpture Praxiteles sculpture Polykleitos sculpture Ictinus architecture Callicrates architecture Mnesicles architecture Parthenon architecture Athenian democracy political theory Solon lawgiver Cleisthenes reforms Pericles statesmanship Alexander the Great empire‑building Hellenistic science Alexandria library Septuagint translation Byzantine theology Cappadocian Fathers Orthodox liturgy Hagia Sophia architecture Procopius history Anna Komnene history Photios scholarship Cyril and Methodius Slavic literacy Byzantine diplomacy Greek fire military technology Cretan Renaissance literature El Greco painting Rigas Feraios nationalism Adamantios Korais Enlightenment Greek War of Independence Philhellenism modern Greek state Venizelos diplomacy Cavafy poetry Seferis poetry Elytis poetry Kazantzakis literature Theodorakis music Hadjidakis music Papandreou political thought Onassis shipping Greek diaspora scholarship modern Greek cinema modern Greek science modern Greek shipping global Greek cuisine Mediterranean diet.

“Ah,” we countered, but they never invented cocktails!” But they did have-no, do have- some fine rosé wines. So to counter this obvious aching gap in Greek culture we sent those same researchers off to create a short but very handy guide to three Greek Rosés, priced to all pockets, which could make for some delicious refreshments if it gets as hot as we think it might get hot in this El Niño summer. (See LSS 5 6 26)

£8–£10 — Kourtaki Retsina Rosé (Attica)

Often found in larger Tesco or Sainsbury’s stores, depending on region. Dry, light, herbal, very Greek, very summery. (If your local doesn’t stock it, M&S sometimes carries a Greek rosé under its “Found” range.)

£12–£14 — Mylonas Rosé (Mandilaria/Agiorgitiko, Attica)

Available from The Wine Society, Waitrose Cellar, and several independents. A proper step up: strawberry, pomegranate, a little herb; beautifully balanced.

£18–£22 — Gaia 14–18h Rosé (Agiorgitiko, Nemea)

A cult bottle. Stocked by Berry Bros. & Rudd, The Wine Society, and good Greek specialists. Serious rosé: pale Provençal style but with Greek backbone and minerality.

Sorry if they forgot Demis Roussos

With thanks to Mrs MF of Bridport, Dorset

#wine #greece #hellenic #rosé #holiday #demis roussos

Roman Coin hoard has lessons for our times

Southern Britain 297 AD. A frightened Roman official, alone in the woods, is frantically digging a hole. It is unaccustomed work for a man of his rank, and he sweats, while nervously looking over his shoulder for soldiers, secret policemen, or even hungry peasants. Why is he here? Any number of reasons could have caused his fall: civil war, a coup, a sudden change of Emperor. Hole completed, he quickly throws in his entire wealth-a bag of gold coins, jewels and silver cups, and takes one last look at them before filling the earth on top. Carefully,he notes the position of larger trees and certain other markers. For one day he hopes to return, when Fortune has turned again. But he never will. He is the last person to see these things before they are unearthed, over seventeen hundred years later into a world of AI, Space technology and jet airliners. The darkness closes-and opens.

Such are always our thoughts when ever we stand in front of a hoard of Roman treasure in a museum. Who left these things there? Why? What was in their mind when they left them? And-why did they never return? When we read this story of the latest hoard to be unearthed [1] near Ilminster in Somerset , covered in this excellent Guardian piece by Steven Morris, these thoughts and many others came back. Hoards are invaluable to historians and archaeologists, because the coins allow solid dating estimates, which are worth far more than gold to serious scholars. Their occurrence rises in direct proportion to the frequency of political and economic troubles in the Empire. And nowhere was more troubled than the provinces of the Britannias in the period 286-296AD [2] when rebel rulers tried to set up a separatist regime against the central Empire. The likely date of the finds (297) offers haunting possibilities for speculation about their likely loser, and the subsequent events of his life.

But what fascinates most are the hoards themselves. Unlike amphitheatres, churches and other remains, which decay and otherwise change in tune with the society around them, hoards are frozen in time. The last time they were seen was in a declining empire, wracked by pandemics and climate change. A melancholy time of failing trade, broken roads-and an overwhelming mood of doubt and uncertainty. Where increasingly authoritarian governments tried to hold together the remains of a failing world with ever more repression and ever more dubious promises of a return to the long remembered Golden Age. Yet the Empire had endured for so long and was still so big that people who buried the coins could imaging no other possible form of political and social organisation. And were not able to break out of the cycle of decline until they could. Perhaps there is a lesson for our times in there too.

_{note – we worked really hard to get our Roman uniforms right. We hate those films and programmes where they dress fifth century Romans in the clothes and uniforms of about AD 14}

[1]Somerset detectorist strikes gold with ‘spectacular’ Roman ring find | Roman Britain | The Guardian

[2]Carausian revolt – Wikipedia

#archaeology #roman empire #coin hoards #history

Another big thank you-and we apologise to a leading national newspaper and one of its most eminent journalists

Recently we have had so many likes, new readers and suggestions that we can’t keep up. As some of you know, we have other writing commitments beyond this blog, plus a busy programme of reading and learning; and many of you, erudite readers, will know the effort which that entails. We try to visit the sites of all who like or comment: many are far superior to our own in terms of design and layout. Have you all been to the Slade School of Fine Arts or something? Keep ’em going, and don’t worry about us nicking your ideas. Our IT and design skills are below those of a two-year-old Sasquatch, and that’s on a good day. But we will say to all and every one of you :THANK YOU. It is a pleasure to be in your intellectual company.

Now for an apology. To you our readers, to Larry Elliott, to the Guardian, to whomsoever really. For in our blog of 11 November 2024 From American Decline to World Government; fasten your seatbelts for a bumpy ride, we categorically stated

Let’s just jump across the Atlantic for a moment to say goodbye to Larry Elliott who quits his post at the Guardian after 36 years {2]

Well we’re happy to state Larry Elliott is still very much to be found among the pages of the Guardian. Whereby he still features as one of our regular showcased writers in turn, Perhaps the nature of his contractual relationship with the Guardian has changed. That is a matter between him and them. But there he is still, plugging away, filing copy, all of it worth a read, which is why he will continue to pop up here, gentle readers, Sorry for that misunderstanding. But there was one thing we did get right in that blog, gentle readers. Remember something about American Decline and bumpy rides? How’s your seatbelt today?

_{Editorial note: the picture of ourselves posted above is more of an idealised statement than a precise and literal likeness of its subject and anyway was made up a number of years ago, But you probably guessed that anyway}

#USA #geopolitics #Iran #middle east #inequlity #economics #war

Our thoughts for the New Year: a little works better than a lot

The first few days of the year are always filled with a media barrage of advice. You can’t go on the interweb, open a magazine or turn on the telly, without some omniscient panjandrum telling you to do a dozen worthy things. Eat less, until you look like a prisoner in the Soviet Gulag. Run like a marathon athlete. Fill your mind with worthy moral projects and take on so many new tasks that you become a Different Person. All by January 10th. We know none of this ever works, because if it did the experts would not have to repeat themselves every year. And the reason it doesn’t work is because it’s asking too much of people.

It was the late great Dr Michael Mosley who realised this. In his eminently readable work Just One Thing: How simple changes can transform your Life [1] He sets out a whole slew of small ideas which people can achieve rather than big things which they can’t. If you want to discover what they are read the book. But it inspired us to go around the mighty offices of the Learning Science and Society Headquarters here in beautiful Croydon and ask people about their ideas for New Years resolutions which will stick. Here are our findings:

Commuting get off one stop earlier than normal, and walk. OK if your stops are only a quarter of a mile apart But what if you live in Haywards Heath and work in Croydon? You’d have to walk from Gatwick. Our verdict: good if sensibly applied

Dry January which most people interpret as no booze from New Years day until Valentines Day. Feasible and- we have actually done it. But what if your local Toby Carvery is offering a crazy special at £6 a head? Are you really going to sit there and drink water?

Declutter a cupboard Makes space and is exercise of a sort provided you don’t gash your head on an exposed door and have to have the splinters removed in Croydon General Hospital. Plus the local charity shops will just love all those old mini discs, pencils, tatty files , keyboards, adding machines, unused 1997 diaries, abacuses and stone tools which you find. But what if you don’t have a cupboard?

Learn the name of a colleague whose monniker you have forgotten/never knew anyway Ok as far as it goes but could be creepy. Being on the Board, we are used to this all the time and with practice it’s not as tricky as it looks.

Read one page from a book each day Ok slows you down and broadens the mind But what if the book is Mein Kampf or the Croydon Trades Directory for 1989 ? Verdict: choose carefully

Give someone your full intention for 60 seconds Oh come on, these are meant to be achievable!

So here are our conclusions, to sit alongside those of the great Dr Mosley. Da quod jubes et jubes quod da, we say (give what you command and command what you give) A favourite catchphrase which we share with St Augustine of Hippo. On which note we will simply wish you all a successful 2026.

Our thanks to the staff of Croydon General Hospital and apologies for the extra work we caused them

[1]Mosley, Michael. Just One Thing: How Simple Changes Can Transform Your Life. Short Books / Hachette UK, 2022.

#health #diet #New Year

The Fisher King: an ancient legend for our sad modern times

I sat upon the shore/Fishing, with the arid plain behind me/Shall I at least set my lands in order?

Thus TS Eliot sets out his stall: The Waste Land (1922)is all about the legend of the Fisher King. His take on a world trying to recover from the traumatic wounds of World War. The what King? What’s a modern shiny AI powered science-and-business blog like LSS doing with some crusty old Medieval legend, reworked not only by the saintly Eliot but by such questionable characters as Richard Wagner? The answer is very much indeed. For if we do not confront the message which the King encodes, all our technology will bring us to less than nothing indeed.

For all its tellings, the central myth of the Fisher King hasn’t changed much The King is a wounded guardian of the Holy Grail whose injury renders his kingdom a barren wasteland. He cannot heal himself, and his land suffers with him—infertile, desolate, and spiritually dry. He spends his days fishing, a symbol of passive hope and suspended vitality. According to Grail legend, only a pure-hearted seeker(Parsifal) who asks the right question can heal the king and restore the land. The myth embodies themes of spiritual paralysis, inherited trauma, and the redemptive power of inquiry and compassion.

Festering trauma, unhealed wound. There must have been lots of those around after the First World War, as Freud knew well. And we have plenty today. As money moves at light speed across the world, dragging goods and people after it, familiar landscapes are shattered. Shops close; factories are shuttered and streets fill with strangers. All too many suffer a psychic wound like the Fisher King’s. Trauma that renders the landscape barren. The soul, unable to heal itself, turns to ancient identities, mythic lineages, and cultural relics as if they were sacred springs. Or Fentanyl. And the name of that wound is Loss. Of empire, of power, of innocence, identity: of the essence that they were. But nostalgia kills the future, and with it all hope. The healer must come, and find the right words, soon. For the next war is very close. Perhaps it will feel, briefly, like these other words from The Wasteland

What is that sound high in the air/Murmur of maternal lamentation

Who are those hooded hordes swarming/Over endless plains, stumbling in cracked earth?

Ringed by the flat horizon only/What is the city over the mountains?

Cracks and reforms and bursts in the violet air?/Falling towers

Jerusalem Athens Alexandria Vienna London

Unreal

All quotes from The Poetry Foundation a marvellous source of learning and wisdom if ever there was one

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fisher_King#:~:text=The%20Fisher%20King%20%28French%3A%20Roi%20P%C3%AAcheur%3B%

[2] The Waste Land | The Poetry Foundation

##economics #politics #poetry #parsifal #TS Eliot #Wagner #The Fisher king #legend

Heroes of Learning: Alexandra David-Neel

Today we celebrate the life, travels and accomplishments of Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) who died tragically young, one month short of her 101st birthday. Yet in that time managed to pack in as varied a CV as anyone ever has. Explorer, feminist, writer, mystic, opera singer, anarchist and first westerner to enter the forbidden city of Lhasa. [1]

Her exposure to the world started early when her father took her to visit the memorial to the recently executed Communards in1871. Whether this troubled her we cannot say. But her teenage years were certainly feisty. By the age of 18 she had clocked up travels to England Switzerland and Spain, on the way encountering controversial characters like Madame Blavatsky and getting herself enrolled in the 30th degree of Scottish Freemasonry.By 1899 she had written her first books and converted to Buddhism. But it was only as the curtains lifted on the twentieth century that she really got going. The next 46 years read like a whirlwind of adventure which would leave Indiana Jones green with envy. She got out East by becoming a successful opera singer in what was then called Indo China. After that her perambulations included vast stretches of India, Sikkim(where she lived as an anchorite in a cave) China, Mongolia, Tibet (hence the Lhasa episode), interspersed with marriage and a peaceful interludes in Digne-les-Bains in Provence.

It was here she finally retired for last decades of her life, . as the burden of her exertions caught up with her. It is interesting to recall that this quintessential nineteenth century explorer actually died after Neil Armstrong had placed his famous first step on the Moon. But we guess that she must have approved. We hope our links will tell you more about this energetic, learned and above all courageous woman. A beacon of learning indeed in dark times.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_David-N%C3%A9el

[2]https://avauntmagazine.com/alexandra-david-neel

#tibet #buddhism #lhasa #dalai lama #provence #china #sikkim #neil armstrong

Heroes of Antibiotics: Liam Shaw and his Dangerous Miracle

Today, gentle readers, we combine two of the favourites topos of this blog: Heroes of Learning and Antibiotics research latest. For Liam Shaw is a mighty contributor in both fields. Who is he? Well here is a brief summary of his life ant times from Penguin Books, the publishers of his book Dangerous Miracle: (which of course we urge you to rush out and buy) [1]

Liam Shaw is a biologist researching the evolution and spread of antibiotic resistance. For the past four years he has been a Wellcome funded research fellow at the University of Oxford, and he is also currently an honorary research fellow at the University of Bristol.
His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, Morning Star, and Private Eye. Dangerous Miracle is his first book.

That’s quite a CV for a very learned man, and we take all he says most seriously indeed. So seriously in fact that we direct your earnest attention to his further thoughts laid out in this admirable article which he has just penned for the Guardian[2] For Liam has a key insight: antibiotics are like fossil fuels. They are OK in themselves: they may even bring great benefits to the comfort and quality of our lives. But both have fallen into the hands of a group of reckless, short term, pleasure seeking, greedy, violent hominins that call themselves Homo sapiens ( a laughable act of vanity) with all the disastrous consequences we face today. Rather wickedly, he points out the hypocrisy of rich nations, who have benefitted so abundantly from a surplus of both fossil fuels and antibiotics now earnestly entreating the poorer nations of the world to be good chaps and cut down on their use. Nice one!

We at LSS still think there is room for hope on the antibiotics question, as out recent blogs have hinted. If the situation has indeed improved since we started, much is due to the work of Liam, Professor Sally Davies and others whose tireless research and campaigning has done so much to slow the decline and possibly turn us around. But we can see no reason to slack up yet, gentle readers. Neither should you.

[1]https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/455232/dangerous-miracle-by-shaw-liam/9781847927545

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/aug/17/why-antibiotics-are-like-fossil-fuels

#microbial antibiotic resistance #medicine #health #microbiology #fossil fuels #global warming #pandemic

Simon Kuper on how to Make the Transition to Intelligence and Wisdom

One of Saturday morning’s great pleasures, an hour or so before Spanish class, is to settle down in Costa with a coffee and a hard copy of the Financial Times. And one of the best writers in that journal is Simon Kuper. He’s clear, he’s brief, he deals in the currency of short sentences and defined concepts. He’s also a polymath, covering subjects as diverse as politics, urban planning and football(he’s even done a very workmanlike guide to the affairs of Barcelona FC . [1] In fact, he’s exactly the sort of writer we ought to showcase here, because he believes in our core LSS values of evidence, reason, and reserved judgement.

How appropriate therefore that his last column was called Seven Intellectual Habits of the best thinkers., for there can be no better short guide. [2] The problem is that access is behind a paywall. As LSS is such an important institution, and our readers so avid for wisdom, we rang the Editor of the Financial Times a to demand that this be lifted as a Special Case., and that he/she/ they might like to buy us lunch to discuss the matter further. The young person on the switchboard thanked us very much and promised they would call us back. So far they have not done so(that was three days ago) but doubtless there were other callers. So, while we are waiting, we thought that we could offer you a distilled reproduction of Simon’s thoughts:

1 Read Books ” Their complexity is a check on pure ideology” People who simplify the world are the ones who fall for conspiracy theories or the offers of charlatans.

2 Don’t use screens much Apparently, biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who invented CRISPR technology gets her best insights when she’s out weeding her tomato plants. Obviously you have to use screens a bit, or you couldn’t read this! But we get Simon’s drift: a little screen time is a lot.

3 Do your own work, not the world’s The same Doudna got a gig at Genentech, leading their research. She lasted two months before hightailing it back to Berkeley where the true intellectual freedom led her to the Nobel Prize. We agree: people who spend all their time on office politics actually accomplish very little that is either interesting or of value.

4 Be multidisciplinary Kuper cites the examples of Hayek, Godel, Van Neumann and others who all studied one thing, trained in another and did their best work in a third. Daniel Kahneman is cited as another multi-disciplinarian polymath of formidable intellectual power. Rather worryingly, our AI system has set his book as homework for us. Where’ are John and Sarah Connor when you really need them?

5 Be an empiricist who values ideas Kuper cites the case of Isaiah Berlin and his marvellous work the Hedgehog and the Fox , a masterpiece of political philosophy. Incidentally Winston Churchill got him mixed up with Irving Berlin and invited the wrong one to dinner.”My British Buddy” as Berlin himself would later remark in song.

6 Always assume you might be wrong Yep: in this country we are still trying to repair the effects of the blissful certainties of Brexit. You will doubtless have examples from your own lands

7 Keep learning from everyone “Only mediocrities boast as adults about where they went to University at 18.They imagine that intelligence is innate and static. In fact people become more or less intelligent through life depending on how hard they think. The best thinkers are always learning from others, no matter how young or low status” We quote Kuper rather fully here as the first part seems one of the most admirable and accurate summaries of the sorts of people one met on a daily basis during long decades in the Scientific Civil Service. Now there’s intelligence indeed.

[1]https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/barca-book-simon-kuper-9781780725543?sku=NGR9781780725543&msclkid=6c7699156a7f1cc4c9f2f1238

[2]https://www.ft.com/content/c42cb640-a03c-441b-868f-d1a92d78bcb7

#wisdom #intelligence #FC Barcelona #isaiah berlin #daniel kahneman #thinking #financial times #simon kuper