Today in the United States it’s Super Tuesday as Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden square up to one another big time
March 3rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I’m fascinated by American politics, so I’ve been following the contest to select a Democratic Party candidate to run against the Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential election in November. A massive field of candidates has been running but the number has recently fallen very quickly and very substantially with Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar pulling out in the last couple of days.
So far we’ve only had four states voting to determine how they will allocate their delegates at the Democratic National Convention. So, up to now, only 155 delegates have been awarded. Today – known as Super Tuesday – no less than 14 states are voting and a massive 1,357 delegates (a third of the total) will be distributed. The two most populous, California and Texas, will take part – the former for the first time on Super Tuesday.
Essentially it is now a contest between Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, the self-proclaimed democratic socialist, and former Vice-President Joe Biden, the moderate and establishment choice, although mega-spending billionaire Mike Bloomberg will have his name on the ballot papers for the first time and Elizabeth Warren is still running.
I expect Bernie Sanders to confirm his standing as the front runner, but it will be interesting to see if he can secure a commanding lead or if this is going to be as brutal a battle as Sanders versus Hillary Clinton four years ago.
You can find out what’s at stake in each state that will be voting – the smallest to the largest – with some bonus nuggets of trivia thrown in here.
Posted in American current affairs | Comments (4)
What do you know about Paraguay and why is today a special one for that country?
March 1st, 2020 by Roger Darlington
One of the many reasons that I love foreign travel is that, having visited a country, I am more likely to pay attention to any news coming out of that nation. I only spent a short time in Paraguay but it was sufficient for me to pick up that today is a special one for its citizens.
The six-year War of the Triple Alliance (1864-1870), in which Paraguay confronted the combined forces of Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay, had a huge impact on this landlocked nation. As many as two-thirds of the entire population of Paraguay are reckoned to have perished during the conflict, including around 90% of its men. Brazil and Argentina would go on to annex enormous swaths of Paraguayan territory.
Paraguay is now marking the 150th anniversary of the end of the conflict with book launches, conferences and concerts and official commemoration ceremonies today in Asunción, Paraguay’s capital.
You can read more about the war here and more about the anniversary commemorations here.
Posted in History | Comments (0)
50 simple ways to make your life greener
February 29th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
We all need to our bit to respond to the climate emergency facing our planet. We can’t all do the same things, but this article provides expert tips on how to be kinder to the planet – from cooking and cleaning to fashion and finance. Please choose at least one.
Posted in Environment | Comments (0)
Would you like to live to be 100 (or more)?
February 27th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
“Living to 100 will soon become a routine fact of (long) life. Life expectancies have been rising by up to three months a year since 1840 and although gains in the UK began to slow in 2011, it is still estimated that more than half the babies born in wealthier countries since 2000 may reach their 100th birthdays.
It is an impressive increase: in the early 1900s, the probability of a baby reaching 100 was 1%. A newborn in the UK today has a 50% chance of living to 105. There were 3,600 centenarians in 1986. Today there are some 15,000.
You do not have to be a newborn to benefit from this trend of increased longevity, though. A 60-year-old in the west today has an even chance of living to 90 and a 40-year-old can expect to live to 95.
But the longevity boost is not done yet: it is generally agreed that the natural ceiling to human life is somewhere around 115. Others say that even without cutting-edge AI or other technological wizardry, we could live far longer.”
These are the opening paragraphs in a recent article in the “Guardian” newspaper which provides some advice on how to live to old age.
I am currently 71; my oldest friend is 90; the oldest person I’ve met is 103; and the oldest man in the world – who will be 112 next month – is now a man here in the UK.
My 90 year old friend reacted to the “Guardian” article by telling me: “I don’t think it’s a good idea to support and even extend longevity. Judging by myself, good health physical and mental is really not enough to keep one happy and what is life without happiness?”
Posted in Science & technology, Social policy | Comments (1)
Word of the day: occultation
February 24th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I’m reading a new book on the recent history of the Middle East with particular reference to the rivalry between Sunni Islam Saudi Arabia and Shia Islam Iran. The work is called “Black Wave” and it is written by the Lebanese Emmy award-winning journalist Kim Ghattas
In one of the early chapters, there is an account of the 1979 occupation of the Holy Mosque in Mecca by Saudi zealots who included a man whom they declared to be the Madhi, a messianic figure who will emerge from occultation to signal the arrival of the end of times and the age of righteousness. Inconveniently, this so-called Madhi – who was supposed to be immortal – was killed on the third day of the siege.
Occultation in Shia Islam refers to a belief that the messianic figure, or the Mahdi, an infallible male descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, was born and went into occultation and will one day return and fill the world with justice and peace. Some Shia, such as the Nizari Ismailis, do not believe in the idea of the occultation.
The groups that do believe in it differ on the succession of the Imamah, and therefore which individual is in occultation, with the largest Shia branch – the one dominant in Iran – holding it is Hujjat-Allah al-Mahdi, the twelfth Imam who has been in hiding for the past eleven centuries.
It’s been a long wait and I suspect that it’s going to be a whole lot longer ..
Posted in World current affairs | Comments (1)
A review of the utterly over-the-top movie “Birds Of Prey”
February 23rd, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Thought that films about comic book characters were all man-made? Well, here in the DC comic universe, we have a movie with women as producer (Margot Robbie), writer (Christina Hodson) and director (Cathy Yan) in which the girls also fill the main role of Harley Quinn (Robbie again) and the three eponymous birds (Mary Elizabeth Winstead as The Huntress, Jurnee Smollet-Bell as Black Canary, and Rosie Perez as a tough cop).
Indeed the one leading role for a man (Ewan McGregor as the villain Roman Sionis) does not really work and essentially all the men in the movie are there to be smashed up by the women. It’s an absolute riot, utterly over the top, with minimal plot, maximum (comic book style) violence, and an extensive and thunderous soundtrack.
Effectively this film is a spin-off from “Suicide Squad”. The best thing about that earlier movie was Margot Robbie who played Harley Quinn, formerly prison psychiatrist Dr Harleen Quinzel who fell in love with a patient the Joker, and the full title of this work is “Birds Of Prey (And The Fantabulous Emancipation Of One Harley Quinn)” so now Quinn is front and centre and Robbie is such a delight in this much-expanded performance.
But it would have been a better film if she could have been teamed with the birds earlier in the fractured narrative and if the plot made any kind of sense. This polar opposite to an art house film will not be for everyone but it is entertainingly escapist in the silliest of ways.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
How much of our brain do we really need?
February 20th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Some time ago, I read a fascinating book called “The Brain” by David Eagleman. If there is one clear message from the book, it is that the brain exhibits remarkable plasticity. People talk of the brain as hard-wired, but it is the opposite of that. Eagleman describes some remarkable cases of people recovering from injury or operation and concludes: “The brain is fundamentally unlike the hardware in our digital computers. Instead, it’s ‘liveware’.”
He tells the remarkable story of a young girl called Cameron Mott who suffered so seriously from violent seizures, as a result of a rare form of epilepsy that would eventually lead to her death, that a team of neurosurgeons removed an entire half of her brain and, except for some weakness on one side of her body, she encountered no problems because the remaining half of her brain dynamically rewired to take over the missing functions.
In this week’s “New Scientist” magazine, there is a piece about a teenager – known simply as C1 – who was born without the entire left hemisphere of her brain. The woman has been diagnosed with semi-hydranencephaly, an extreme;y rare condition in which a large part of the brain’s cortex is missing. C1 is now 18 years old and the right side of her brain has taken on some of the functions of the missing left side. Today she has average-to-high IQ and above-average readings skills. Indeed she plans to go university.
So, what exactly is the brain? Eagleman explains that an adult brain weighs three pounds (1.4 kilograms) and has the same number of cells as a child’s brain (in fact, a child of two has double the number of synapses of an adult prior to a process of neural “pruning”). We know that the typical brain has about 86 billion neurons and each neuron makes about 10,000 connections sending tens or hundreds of electrical pulses to thousands of other neurons every second.
But we are only just beginning to understand how the brain works and why sometimes it does not (such as the growing problem of dementia).
Posted in Science & technology | Comments (0)
Thank you and farewell “Madam Secretary”
February 15th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
I suppose all good things have to come to an end and I’ve just watched the last episode of the American television series “Madam Secretary”. The series began in 2014 and seasons 1-5 each had between 20-23 episodes. The sixth and last season has concluded with just 10 episodes, making 120 episodes in all. I’ve seen them all.
OK, this political drama was not as good as “The West Wing”, but nothing has been as good as “The West Wing” – the best television ever in my view. However, “Madam Secretary” did a good job in – as did “The West Wing” – showing politics as a power for good and representing lots of stories taken from real life.
Tea Leoni was the Secretary of State for 110 episodes and President for 10, As President, she survived impeachment and her final act in the series was to revive the Equal Rights Amendment. I enjoyed the series and will miss it. Now my need for a regular fix of American politics will rest solely on “The Daily Show” with Trevor Noah.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
A review of the important new movie “Queen & Slim”
February 14th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
How many American films have a black woman as both writer and director and black actors in both the lead roles and in most of the support roles? But this is how it should be for a work that reflects the Black Lives Matter agenda and it is a genre-blending triumph, part thriller-cum-social commentary, part road movie-cum-romance. One of the characters refers to the two principals as a black “Bonnie and Clyde” (and certainly the ending has echoes of that film), but they were hardline criminals and a better comparison would be with the movie “Thelma And Louise”, a tale of accidental criminals on the run with character-changing consequences.
The viewer is plunged straight into the narrative – a young black couple on a first date in an Ohio diner: the Queen character, an uptight attorney who has had a bad day and is soon to have a much worse night, about whom we will learn a lot more, and the Slim personage, a more relaxed kind of everyman – well, every young, black American – about whom we learn very little. On the ride from the diner, they are stopped by a white traffic cop. What could possibly go wrong? Only when things have gone spectactularly awry do we have the film’s title and opening credits, but we are now hooked and will stay so for as long as this couple is on the run, meeting a whole range of colourful characters and driving through an impoverished land.
The writer is Lena Waite and the debut feature director is Melina Matsoukas. They are brilliantly served in the eponymous roles by Daniel Kaluuya (“Get Out”) and Jodie Turner-Smith, both in fact British actors. Not all the black characters that they meet are honourable and not all the white policemen that they encounter are prejudiced, but anyone in the film who has seen the viral video of the opening incident mythologises it as avenging angels on the run from injustice or callous cop-killers evading what they deserve.
This is the best movie about the black condition that I’ve seen since “Detroit” but, whereas that film was about one true-life historic incident, this one is a fictional representation of the true and very contemporary American debate about white policemen routinely killing innocent, unarmed, and often young black men.
Posted in Cultural issues | Comments (0)
Sajid Javid has resigned as Chancellor rather than sack his Special Advisers, but who are Special Advisers?
February 13th, 2020 by Roger Darlington
Special Advisers – or SpAds as they known in political circles – are a small number of political advisers appointed by each Secretary of State to serve that Cabinet Minister only for the duration of that minister being in the office.
Some have specialist knowledge of the subject matter of the Government Department headed by their boss, while others have more general acumen in politics and communications. They are supporters of the political party in government and are loyal to the Secretary of State who appointed them – which is why Javid rightly refused to dismiss his own advisers and work with advisers appointed by No. 10.
Special Advisers are usually most effective when they are low profile and do not cause problems in public for their Secretary of State. Dominc Cummings is clearly out of the mould and is behind the current shock resignation of Javid.
I was a Special Adviser in two Departments in the Wilson/Callaghan Governments, while both my son and my daughter-in-law each served in two Departments in the Blair/Brown Governments – all these Departments being different.
The definitive history of Special Advisers was written by Andrew Blick and published as “People Who Live In The Dark”. You can read my review of this work here.
Posted in British current affairs | Comments (0)