You learn something new every day

If I've given you a quotation then you don't need to click on the link. But if you want to know more then the links are potentially interesting.

1. ... about how awful things are in Venezuela - "over the past year around three-quarters of Venezuelans have lost weight, averaging 8.7kg per person, because of a scarcity of food. No war, foreign or civil, is to blame for this catastrophe. Venezuela did this to itself."

2. ... about that time when Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld ran a universal basic income experiment for Nixon.

3. ... about Norwegian female special forces.

4. ... about panic attacks - "Panic attacks decrease markedly during pregnancy, and disappear entirely during childbirth. This last is really remarkable. People get panic attacks at any conceivable time. When they’re driving, when they’re walking, when they’re tired, when they’re asleep. Just not, apparently, when they’re giving birth. Childbirth is one of the scariest things you can imagine, your body’s getting all sorts of painful sensations it’s never felt before, and it’s a very dangerous period in terms of increased mortality risk. But in terms of panic attack, it’s one of the rare times when you are truly and completely protected." On the other hand, "you’re about a hundred times more likely to develop a new case of panic disorder during the postpartum period than usual."

5. ... about US healthcare - "simply normalising for violent and accidental death puts the USA right to the top of the life expectancy rankings". (So this maybe there is a Peltzman effect - introducing seatbelts allows people to drive in more dangerous ways - at work here: Americans have great healthcare so they take more chances with their diet and guns? Lots of guns in Switzerland too, the second most expensive country for healthcare. The best form of gun control might be making healthcare worse?)

6. ... about why the American alt-right loves the NHS.

7. ... about the historical depth of Polish-British relations - "suffice to say that Canute the Great’s mother Świętosława was Mieszko I’s daughter". Suffice it indeed.

8. ... about Argentine missiles - "Argentina was almost the first country to develop a small, supersonic cruise missile. Way back in 1960." One thing that struck me was that the the plan - from a German with, shall we say, a war history - would have involved using a lot of British hardware.

9. ... about trying to get oneself declared alive in Uttar Pradesh - "As he walked out that day three decades ago, Lal Bihari was already thinking about how to become alive again. But it would take him 17 years, during which time he would kidnap his cousin; add the title of mritak (dead man) to his name; get thrown out of the UP legislative Assembly; contest elections against two prime ministers; demand widow’s pension for his wife; and start an association of dead people. After he finally came ‘alive’ again, he continued exposing this land-grab practice. Says Panchu, a 75-year-old in Adampur village, Azamgarh, “My own son had killed me off. If it had not been for Lal Bihari, I would still be dead.”"

10. ... and about Warren Hastings. This link is really quite something. It is an informative piece telling you what the trial of Warren Hastings was all about. And it is written by an Indian. "The Hastings impeachment was an act of imperial soul- searching unparalleled in history; and no one who wades through its voluminous archives can fail to be impressed. For seven years, British MPs and lords examined and debated in the most minute detail almost every document that had crossed the desk of their Indian Governor- General. Many were inspired by hostility to the East India Company, but there was also genuine concern for the human rights of Indians." Beat that for fair-mindedness! Hastings seems to have been not all bad by modern standards, and he was wrongly accused of things that are bad by modern standards because those things were also bad by the standards of the day. It's a great reminder of that wonderfully exciting period in British political history at the end of the 18th century that gave us, among other exciting intellectual experiments, Edmund Burke, Adam Smith and America. 

A good news story

Here is the story of Mel Nebhrajani. She has an Asian immigrant background. She started out as a Chancery barrister and is now in the Government Legal Service. The link is to an interview about BAME lawyers, diversity, under-represented groups etc etc. "Heard it all before", you might think, "minority woman starts out in the unwelcoming private sector and is only welcomed in the public sector". But no - this is a very different story. Read more below.

Questions to which you will want to know the answer

1. Can we blame Ed Miliband for everything? I mean, Trump, Brexit, all that stuff? (Clue: yes.)

2. Why did mediaeval knights spend so much time fighting snails? 

3. What do people who own slaves think about slavery? ("I came across a slaveholder who was surviving with help from a bonded labourer and loans from the Grameen Bank, a Nobel Peace Prize-winning microfinance organisation dedicated to extending loans to the world’s poor.")

4. How does Utah achieve the social mobility of Denmark? (More interesting than it sounds.)

5. Has food taken the place of music?

6. How cool is the great new game, Strange Beasts? 

7. How is the EU like a boyband?

Answers at the links.

Some things to look at and think about

1. More people live in the small red area than in the all blue areas on this map put together (from here):



2. British comedy needs to escape the shackles of Ricky Gervais. This article is well worth a couple of minutes of your time, not least for seeing Nigel Farage turn up in a Harry Enfield sketch.

3. Real life, shot to look like a beautiful 'how to' Youtube video.

Things to read and think about

1. Let's start with politics. David Runciman: "It is often said of democratic politics that the question voters ask of any leader is: ‘Do I like this person?’ But it seems more likely that the question at the back of their minds is: ‘Would this person like me?’"  Runciman also tells us this: "All the women in May’s current cabinet, barring the leader of the Lords, Baroness Evans, were helped to enter Parliament by May’s organisation, [Women2Win]." (Runciman's article is a review of a book about Theresa May. Runciman knows David Cameron from school, and makes it somewhat about Cameron too. The contrast is interesting and he writes it very fairly. But I would love to see a similar article written by someone who was at school with May.)

2. For those of you who care about such things, reasons not to worry about all that Brexit stuff that people still keep going on about:

(A) There was no wave of hate accompanying Brexit. You didn't spot it in real life. That's because it didn't happen. In fact "the UK public actually became more positive towards EU immigration between November 2015 and November 2016, the period covering the campaign, vote and supposedly hate-filled aftermath". Note also that "the UK’s positivity towards non-EU immigration is significantly higher than the EU average." People just don't like the EU. If you think that normal British people are unable to distinguish EU citizens from the EU, consider whether you are able to distinguish between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

(B) And there's not going to be a problem with a Brexit deal either. Deals will get done. Maybe this will be one of them.

3. Now let's slow down and chillax more generally.

(A) There are good reasons to slow down. Drugs can make you better at chess and it seem that they do so not (as you would have thought) by speeding you up, but by slowing you down.

(B) Resist the Internet!, says Ross Douthat calmly and sensibly. But he's not alone. You may recall David Gelernter saying it in one of my links not long ago, and here is Scott Adams too: "My observation is that smartphones have made half of all adults mentally ill. I mean that literally, not figuratively. The business model of phones is addiction, not value. And they addict you at the expense of the things humans need in their lives to be happy and healthy."

(C) Are you reading stuff? Stop! "Let’s say you pick up a copy of Jude the Obscure, become obsessed with Victorian fiction and somehow manage to make your way through all 200-odd books generally considered part of that canon. Moretti would say: So what? As many as 60,000 other novels were published in 19th-century England—to mention nothing of other times and places. You might know your George Eliot from your George Meredith, but you won’t have learned anything meaningful about literature, because your sample size is absurdly small. Since no feasible amount of reading can fix that, what’s called for is a change not in scale but in strategy. To understand literature, Moretti argues, we must stop reading books." But you should read that link and perhaps worry a little.

(D) You're not surfing the web or reading, so what should you do? Voltaire had it right: we must cultivate our garden. Perhaps because everything is going to be fine, or perhaps because the (or at least a) world is going to end.

Ten links for you

1. The Vatican's Latinist: "I saw him for an hour in Rome in 1985 and that one hour completely changed my life." And many other people's lives too, it seems.

2. The Fox's Prophecy. And pretty prophetic it is too. "Taught wisdom by disaster, // England shall learn to know // That trade is not the only gain // Heaven gives to man below": there's Brexit and Indyref2 in one stanza from 1871.

3. Computer games vs the Game of Life. "In May 2016 he finished his graduate-school training in business law. A few months later, he decided he didn’t want to work in law after all; he wanted to play video games. ... During his studies, he could only spare a couple of hours each day for his habit. Now he can slip into his video-game worlds for five or six hours at a time. A law career would have meant more money. Yet it would also have meant much more time spent at law." Trade-offs, you see.

4. Semper sic tyrannis? "If, however, it turns out that the intelligence agencies have indeed been actively collaborating with the White House in working against opposition politicians, the whole tale assumes a particularly dangerous aspect as there is no real mechanism in place to prevent that from occurring again. The tool that Obama has placed in Trump’s hands might just as easily be used against the Democrats in 2020."

5. "One precious thing about ordinary readers is that sometimes they develop feelings for the characters. This is something critics never discuss. Which is a shame. The Anglo-Saxon critics do good plot summaries but they don’t talk about the characters either. Readers, however, do it uninhibitedly." Houellebecq. In my view, it is nearly always worth reading interviews with boxers or Michel Houellebecq.

6. "I don’t understand why we look down on people who vote against their own interests. ... putting the good of the country ahead of your own pocketbook? I salute you, my noble friend, and wish you had a less idiotic idea of what’s good for the country." That's from this chap, here.

7. A couple of links about the capitalist world we live in: why are the French so miserable? and how to save capitalism,

8. Malcolm Gladwell on leaks. There's quite a few things going on in this piece to do with the changing of the generations, game theory, technology and the law and more besides.

9. What Robert Kelly himself has to say about that BBC interview.

10. Last but not least, a funny and new (well, newly-published) story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Trump and Clinton gender reversal

This is the story. Not quite as medically invasive as it sounds: re-enacting the debates with a male actor playing Clinton and a female actor playing Trump. Everyone expected a female Trump to be unbearable - but it turns out s/he's a really appealing character, whereas a male Clinton is even more unlikeable.

It's an interesting example of upending one's expectations. I would also say it's a pretty good rebuke to the idea that people don't take to strong women in politics. A certain confident, forthright style seems to go down well, as least in debates. As if Margaret Thatcher's performances at the dispatch box did not already prove that.