Word of the day: Anthropocene
April 15th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The ‘Anthropocene’ is a term increasingly used to define a new planetary era: one in which humans have become the dominant force shaping Earth’s bio-geophysical composition and processes.
Initially emerging in the earth sciences as the name for a proposed new geological epoch, the Anthropocene has been widely adopted across academia as a catch-all description of the overwhelming impact of human activity on the planet.
Key markers of human effects on the global planet eco-system are:
- Increasing average temperature
- Rise in the sea level
- Unprecedented rates of biodiversity loss and extinction
- Changing chemical composition of soils, oceans and atmosphere
- Effects of plastic pollution on marine and terrestrial processes
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
A review of the new biography “Walter Citrine” by Dr Jim Moher
April 14th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The subtitle of this book is “Forgotten Statesman of the Trades Union Congress”. Now most books and programmes that use the words ‘forgotten’ or ‘unknown’ in their title are usually something of an exaggeration, but not this one. In spite of over 50 years of Labour movement activism (including half of that time as a national trade union official), I confess that I knew little about Citrine other than his authorship of an “ABC Of Chairmanship” (1939). Moher is, therefore to be congratulated on producing a fascinating and highly-readable account of a remarkable life.
Walter Citrine (1887-1983) was born in Liverpool, a working class man who left school at 12 and became a local and then national official with the Electrical Trades Union (ETU), before spending two decades (1926-1946) as the General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress (TUC). What might have been retirement years for many men were, in Citrine’s case, occupied as Director of Welfare & Training at the National Coal Board, Chair of the British Electricity Authority, and member of the House of Lords. He died aged 95.
The heart of this narrative is his time at the TUC which encompassed the first Labour Government of 1924, the General Strike of 1926, the second Labour Government of 1929-31, and his role at home and abroad in support of the wartime Coalition Government of 1940-45. We learn a lot about his professionalisation of the TUC and his role in making the trade union movement a genuine partner in the war effort. He never wanted to be wartime minister but, in 1940, Churchill made him a Privy Councillor so that he could easily approach Ministers including the PM himself. I would have liked rather more on the General Strike and a bit less on international trade union affairs, but balancing a biography of such a rich life has ultimately to be a personal choice.
In the 1930s and 1940s, there was only one other trade union figure who rivalled Citrine in stature and influence and that is Ernest Bevin who was General Secretary of the Transport & General Workers’ Union and then wartime Minister of Labour & National Service. A major theme of this biography is the relationship between Citrine and Bevin which was initially close and increasingly became strained.
Moher writes of “the extraordinary emerging ‘involuntary partnership’ between two remarkable union leaders”. He explains that “Inevitably, they were rivals as well as partners and never close but … they complemented each other’s strengths”. As far as the crucial wartime years are concerned, he writes: “”While it is the case that Bevin had the more public role in raising the labour supply, it was Citrine’s work behind the scenes which was pivotal in the complex and delicate task of persuading unions to suspend hard-won rights”.
It is clear that Moher believes that Citrine has been underrated by historians and that in contrast Bevin’s role has been somewhat overstated. Moher even suggests that, in part at least, Citrine’s record was deliberately undermined by Bevin. He writes of Bevin’s “cumulative list of moves to undermine Citrine” and suggests that this “shows a ruthless, devious character, which in others would be condemned, not praised”.
While there have been several biographies of Bevin, this is the first of Citrine, although Citrine did produce two volumes of biography (1964 & 1967). Most biographers – including me – are very fond of their subjects and Moher does not disguise his great admiration for Citrine. He highlights “his brilliant intellect, imaginative administrative flair and highly effective forensic skills” and concludes that “Walter Citrine was probably the most powerful figure to have graced the Labour movement in the twentieth century”.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
Word of the day: fungibility
April 12th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of its parts is indistinguishable from another part.
For example, gold is fungible since a specified amount of pure gold is equivalent to that same amount of pure gold, whether in the form of coins, ingots, or in other states. Other fungible commodities include sweet crude oil, company shares, bonds, other precious metals, and currencies.
Fungibility refers only to the equivalence and indistinguishability of each unit of a commodity with other units of the same commodity, and not to the exchange of one commodity for another.
OK, now that you understand fungibility, how about the current excitement over non-fungible tokens? Know all about those?
A non-fungible token (NFT) is a unit of data stored on a digital ledger, called a blockchain, that certifies a digital asset to be unique and therefore not interchangeable. NFTs can be used to represent items such as photographs, videos, audio and other types of digital files.
Access to any copy of the original file, however, is not restricted to the buyer of the NFT. While copies of these digital items are available for anyone to obtain, NFTs are tracked on blockchains to provide the owner with a proof of ownership that is separate from copyright.
So, now you know …
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
The Duke of Edinburgh and I
April 9th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
I understand that the Duke of Edinburgh Award Scheme has invited particants to share their stories on social media. I achieved the Bronze Award in the early 1960s but never took it further.
As a bright lad, I found most of the stages of the award something of a doddle. The problem was the requirement to spend a night camping.
As a Manchester lad, I’d never spent a night under canvas (and, since then, I’ve never spent another night in the open). I went on the trip with a school friend from Derbyshire in the hills around his town of Glossop and we were massively underprepared.
We had no tent poles but used a snooker cue instead. While trying to plant the cue in the hard ground, it snapped, so we stood the end on a rock.
I spent all of that bitterly cold night wrapped around that cue trying to keep it upright as the wind had other ideas. I still remember seeing the moon rise, move slowly across the sky, and finally fall – as I pledged “Never again”.
Posted in My life & thoughts | Comments (1)
Has physics found a fifth force?
April 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In physics today, there is something called “the core theory” which asserts that everything consists of particles (such as electrons, protons and neutrons) and forces (namely, the strong and weak nuclear forces, electromagnetism and gravity) that arise out of fields (such as the Higgs field).
Now, for decades, scientists have sought to reconcile the general theory of relativity (which explains the cosmos) and quantum mechanics (which explains the sub-atomic world), that are known to be inconsistent with one another, into a grand unified theory (GUT) or theory of everything (ToE).
Different ideas have been proposed. Loop quantum gravity – a theory of which Carlo Rovelli is both a leading advocate and developer – has now replaced string theory – which Stephen Hawking used to propose – as the best contender for a Theory of Everything (a term used by Hawking and others but not Rovelli).
Now there is an experiment, based at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) in Batavia, Illinois, USA, which searches for signs of new phenomena in physics by studying the behaviour of sub-atomic particles called muons. The latest stage of this experiment has come up with the proposition – yet to be conclusively confirmed – that there is a fifth force in physics which could radically transform how we understand, well, everything.
More information here.
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
A review of the 2018 film “BacKkKlansman”
April 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Nobody makes movies like African-American director Spike Lee who has chronicled much of the black experience in the USA. This film was actually nominated for Academy Awards for Best Director and Best Picture although the one of the six nominations that the work received went to Best Adapted Screenplay.
The adaptation is from the memoir by Ron Stallworth, so – incredibly – this is a true story, although some major plot features are dramatic inventions. In the early 1970s, Stallworth – convincingly played by John David Washington – was the first black officer on the Colorado Springs Police Department and, while working in the intelligence division, manages to make telephone contact with the local division of the ultra-racist Klu Klux Klan (hence the clever title of the film) because he is fluent in both the King’s English and jive.
When Stallworth is invited to meet KKK members, he has to enlist a white colleague to impersonate him. In the book, the identity of his partner remains secret but, in the film, he is ‘Flip’ Zimmerman and ably portrayed by Adam Driver. Zimmerman is Jewish which was not the case with Stallworth’s actual colleague but adds to the dramatic tension.
Real life characters with important roles are Stokely Carmichael aka Kwame Ture (Corey Hawkins) and KKK Grand Wizard David Duke (Topher Grace).
In this powerful work, Spike Lee connects the dots of historical racism in America with clips of films “The Birth Of A Nation” (1915) and “Gone With The Wind” (1939) and newsreel from the Charlotteville rallies (2017).
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Word of the day: irenic
April 2nd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
It means “tending to create peace”.
The word comes from Eirene, the Greek goddess of peace, who also gives us the name Irene.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the film “The Hitman’s Bodyguard”
April 1st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This intriguing title put me in mind of the 1967 action comedy “The President’s Analyst” – what happens when the counsellor to POTUS has his own mental issues? In this 2017 movie, what happens when one of the world’s most accomplished hitmen (Samuel L Jackson) needs to be protected by one of the world’s top bodyguards (Ryan Reynolds)? There’s a good deal of profanity, an enormous amount of shooting, driving, and exploding, and some humour.
The hitman’s wife (Salma Hayek) and the bodyguard’s ex-girlfriend (Élodie Yung) are both very capable of looking after themselves as well (in real life Yung is a black belt in karate), but this is a buddy movie so we see too little of them and Gary Oldman too is underused as the baddie with an endless of supply of heavies lining up to be disposed of by the hitman and the bodyguard. But I was pleased to see location shooting in Amsterdam which I’ve visited several times.
This is what i would call a popcorn movie and did well enough at the box office to spawn a sequel.
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A review of the classic novel “All The King’s Men” by Robert Penn Warren
March 31st, 2021 by Roger Darlington
This 660-page work, published in 1946, is a classic example of the great American novel. Indeed it won the Pulitzer Prize and is often rated as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It has twice been made into a film: first in 1949 (winning the Academy Award for Best Picture) and much more recently in 2006. In fact, it was only after seeing both movies that I used the third lockdown of the global pandemic to tackle the novel, but I’m pleased that it did because it is a finely-written and cleverly constructed work – although of its time (so one has to overlook a few uses of the N-word).
It is set in the !920s and 1930s and written from the point of view of Jack Burden, a political reporter who covers the ascent to power of charismatic populist Willie Stark and then becomes the right-man man of the dynamic but corrupt governor of the unnamed southern state. It is widely believed that the story was inspired by the record of Huey Pierce Long (1893-1935) who was the radical populist governor of Louisiana (whom Warren was able to observe closely while teaching at Louisiana State University), a controversial character who was eventually assassinated.
Although the focus of the novel is initially Stark (usually called “the Boss”), it increasingly becomes about Burden who states: the story of Willie Stark and the story of Jack Burden are, in one sense, one story”.
“All The King’s Men” presents a deeply cynical view of “poly-ticks”. Willie Stark insists several times: “Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption and he passeth from the stink of the didie to the stench of the shroud. There is always something.” The ‘something’ is the part of a man’s record that permits him to be bullied into submission or bribed into compliance.
The novel reads like a Shakespearean tragedy with the unexpected consequences of various characters’ actions leading to a succession of deaths. Indeed a major theme of the work is that life is all about consequences. As Stark puts it: “politics is always a matter of choices and a man doesn’t set up the choices himself. And there is always a price to make a choice.” As the final words of the book put it, we all have to accept “the awful responsibility of Time”.
These days it is impossible to read the novel or view either of the film adaptations without thinking of Donald Trump.
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How does the current global pandemic compare with the influenza pandemic of 1918?
March 30th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
The influenza pandemic is usually called the Spanish flu. However, it was only called that because it came to the attention of the media more in Spain since this country was neutral and had a freer media than the Great War combatant nations of Britain, France and Germany where the flu was initially prevalent.
We don’t know for sure the origin of that pandemic but recent research suggests that it might have been a military establishment in the USA. It is highly likely that Covid-19 originated in Wuhan in China, but we can’t yet be totally certain of that. The virus might have been present in other countries before being detected in China.
The technical term for so-called Spanish flu was the H1N1 influenza virus. The technical term for the coronavirus currently rampaging through the world is SARS-CoV-2.
The Spanish flu lasted from February 1918 to April 1920, so approximately two years. The current pandemic started in December 2019 and therefore, so far, it has been running for almost a year and a half.
The Spanish flu infected around 500 million people which was about a third of the world’s population at the time. So far, Covid-19 is believed to have infected 127 million out of a current world population of 7.9 billion .
We don’t know the death toll from the Spanish flu. It is usually estimated as between 20 – 50 million, but the lowest estimate is 17 million and the highest is 100 million. The current pandemic is far from over but currently the death toll stands at 2.78 million.
The flu of 1918-1920 was experienced in four successive waves. The present pandemic is not over, but the UK and USA have had two waves and much of Europe is currently experiencing a third wave.
Most flu epidemics disproportionately kill the very young and the very old, but the Spanish flu caused a higher than expected mortality rate for young adults aged 20-40. So far, Covid-19 has disproportionately killed the over 70s.
In 1918-1920, there were no antiviral drugs and no vaccines. Already a range of treatments exist for Covid-19 and a number of different vaccines have already been developed and approved.
A final thought: the Spanish flu may have killed as many as the Great War, almost every town and village in Britain and France has a memorial to the war dead, but when was the last time you saw a memorial anywhere to the flu victims of 1918-1920? Indeed the event hardly seems to figure in history books or people’s consciousness. Which begs the question: how will the pandemic of 2019-2021(?) be remembered and memorialised?
Posted in History, Science & technology | Comments (0)