Word of the day: meliorism
February 8th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Meliorism is the doctrine that the world tends to become better or may be made better by human effort. It comes from the Latin word melior which means better.
I first came across the term meliorism today when reading a new book: a biography of the new US president Joe Biden by Evan Osnos.
Osnos uses the word in the sentence: “The tensions afflicting the Democratic Party reflected a clash between liberal meliorism – the ‘long view’ politics of [Barack] Obama and [Joe] Biden – and the urgent movement that [Bernie] Sanders called a ‘revolution’ .”
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“A Promised Land” by Barack Obama (6)
February 6th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Large sections of the last 250 pages of the book are devoted to different areas and aspects of foreign policy. In so far as it is fair to summarise Obama’s approach in a single sentence, that would be his assertion that: “I was determined to shift a certain mindset that had gripped not just the Bush administration but much of Washington – one that saw threats around every corner, took a perverse pride in acting unilaterally, and considered military action as an almost routine means of addressing foreign policy challenges”.
As well the issue of climate change, he takes the reader through relations with Iran, Russia and China followed by discussion of the Middle East and the Arab Spring. As his Secretary of State Hillary Clinton does in her memoirs “Hard Choices”, he explains some of the many conflicting considerations in any decision. “The world was messy”, he writes, and “in the conduct of foreign policy, I had to constantly balance competing interests, interests shaped by the choices of previous administrations and the contingencies of the moment”.
After the soaring expectations of Obama’s election, he concedes that “For most of my second year in office, we were in the barrel”. The reason was clear: “The economy still stank“. He refers to “the cumulative effects of exhaustion” and acknowledges that “Everybody was sleep deprived”. The mid-term elections are usually bad news for the party holding the presidency, but this time it was a disaster: “The Democrats had been routed, tracking towards a loss of 63 House seats, the worst beating the party had taken since sacrificing 72 seats at the mid-point of FDR’s second term”.
However, this volume of memoirs concludes with a chapter on the killing of Osama bin Laden, an action which was very popular with the US electorate. It is a dramatic conclusion to the book, but it is only two and a half year’s into the first term of the Obama presidency. So the second volume of these fascinating and eloquent memoirs will have to cover the next five and a half years.
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Ever heard of the Schumann resonances?
February 5th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
No, neither had I – until today. A friend of mine, who is very spiritual, explained that her troubled week might be related to a high value of the Schumann resonances. As a sceptic, I am profoundly doubtful about all spiritual phenomena or explanations, but I was assured that Schumann resonances are a real thing.
Having checked, I find that my friend is right. The Schumann resonances (SR) are a set of spectrum peaks in the extremely low frequency (ELF) portion of the Earth‘s electromagnetic field spectrum. Schumann resonances are global electromagnetic resonances, generated and excited by lightning discharges in the cavity formed by the Earth’s surface and the ionosphere.
You can learn more here.
If, unlike me, you see this scientific phenomenon in terms of the Earth’s aura in resonance with the human aura, you might be interested in this posting.
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A review of the new film “The White Tiger”
February 3rd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Inevitably, this film will be compared with “Slumdog Millionaire”. Both tell the story of a young man’s rise in urban India; both are based on novels by Indian writers: both have Western directors.
But “Slumdog” – while including some tough elements – was ultimately a feel-good rom-com with a message of redemption, while “Tiger” is a darker film with more violence and a lack of morality in its narrative. Both unashamedly show the poverty in India, but “Tiger” underlines the caste basis of much of this poverty and the systematic corruption of the political and business worlds of this flawed democracy.
In an impressive performance, Adarsh Gourav plays the lowest-caste villager Balram Halwai who manages a spectacular rise to successful entrepreneur, initially using obsequiousness and cunning, but later deploying much more hard-hitting methods. In being the very rare creature who escapers from destitution, he is the white tiger – or, if you like, the black swan – of the title.
American-born director and writer Ramin Bahrani has done an excellent job in making a commercial film about what is essentially a political critique of modern India which manages to combine humour and excitement with darkness and even death. The colours and sounds of vibrant India are very much on display and there is some clever camerawork in a tale which is always enthralling.
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A review of the new film “The Dig”
February 2nd, 2021 by Roger Darlington
It’s 1939 and war clouds are gathering over Europe and fighter aircraft – from RAF Martlesham (incidentally now the site of BT’s research centre) – are in the skies over Suffolk. Wealthy landowner and widower Lady Edith Pretty (Carey Mulligan) engages local excavator Basil Brown (Ralph Fiennes) to investigate the mounds on her land, leading to a wonderful discovery of Anglo-Saxon remains.
This might seem an unlikely narrative for a film but it works very well – in effect telling three inter-linked stories: the revelation that the Dark Ages were not so dark, the classic prejudices of pre-war Britain, and a subplot involving a romance between two young characters (played by Lily James and Johnny Flynn).
Fiennes is brilliant as the wise local and demonstrates a fine Suffolk accent. Mulligan is an odd choice for the role of Pretty since she is a full two decades younger than the character she is portraying, but she is a marvellous actor and I guess that the early declaration that this is “based on a true story” allows for interpretation rather than strict representation.
Having watched this quiet and charming film, one wants to run round immediately to the British Museum to which Pretty donated the Sutton Hoo find but, since Netflix released the movie in the middle of a third coronavirus lockdown, sadly this is not possible.
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The BIGGEST mistake of President Barack Obama
January 30th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Regular readers of this blog with know both that I’m a huge admirer of Barack Obama and that I’m currently reading the first volume of his political memoirs “A Promised Land”.
I’m enjoying the 700-page book enormously – I have read his two previous works – not least because he is a fine writer. BUT there is one grammatical mistake which he makes regularly: he uses a capital letter immediately after a colon.
The first of many examples of this is in the Preface when he talks of the contest between two opposing visions of America: “At the heart of this long-running battle is a simple question: Do we care to match the reality of America to its ideals?”
I don’t know whether this mistake (as I see it) is an American thing or an Obama affectation. But it is so wrong.
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In the United States, voter suppression is even higher on the Republican agenda
January 29th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
What most non-Americans do not appreciate is that, in the United States, entitlement to vote and the mechanisms for voting are matters for each of the 50 individual states with therefore substantial variation across the country and a constant tussle to change the rules to favour the political party in state control.
After an election filled with misinformation and lies about fraud, Republicans have doubled down with a surge of bills to further restrict voting access in recent months, according to a new analysis by the Brennan Center for Justice.
The 2021 legislative sessions have begun in all but six states, and state lawmakers have already introduced hundreds of bills aimed at election procedures and voter access – vastly exceeding the number of voting bills introduced by this time last year.
In a backlash to historic voter turnout in the 2020 general election, and grounded in a rash of baseless and racist allegations of voter fraud and election irregularities, legislators have introduced three times the number of bills to restrict voting access as compared to this time last year. Twenty-eight states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 106 restrictive bills this year (as compared to 35 such bills in fifteen states in February 2020).
Of course, other state lawmakers are seizing on an energised electorate and persistent interest in democracy reform. To date, thirty-five states have introduced, prefiled, or carried over 406 bills to expand voting access (dwarfing the 188 expansive bills that were filed in twenty-nine states as of February 2020). Notably 93 such bills were introduced in New York and New Jersey.
With unprecedented numbers of voters casting their ballots by mail in 2020, legislators across the country have shown particular interest in absentee voting reform, with more than a quarter of voting and election bills addressing absentee voting procedures. Only seven of the forty-one states that have introduced election bills have not proposed policies to alter absentee voting procedures in some way.
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A review of the new action movie “Ava”
January 28th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
Jessica Chastain is a fine actor, but she clearly wanted an action hero outing because she takes both the eponymous role as a super assassin and a producer credit in this action-filled drama. If male actors have such tough-guy roles as James Bond, Jason Bourne and John Wick, I for one like to see woman actors in strong female roles such as “The Assassin” and “Atomic Blonde”.
Chastain is not the only talent on show here. John Malkovich and Colin Farrell play members of the same organisation of assassins, while Geena Davis and rapper Common are members of her Boston family. So there are some accomplished actors here and there is plenty of brutal action. The problem is the script with a poor storyline and weak dialogue.
But, heh, there are so few new movies around just now and, at the end of another cold and dark day in yet another coronavirus lockdown, for me “Ava” hit the spot for a compact hour and a half.
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Mega-rich recoup COVID-losses in record-time yet billions will live in poverty for at least a decade
January 27th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
In this week of each year, politicians, business leaders and policy wonks gather in the Swiss resort of Davos in Switzerland. This year, the event is happened virtually because of the global pandemic. But, as usual, Oxfam has published its annual review of inequality in the world and the main theme of the 2021 report entitled “The Inequality Virus” is the dramatic increase in inequality caused by the virus.
The report shows that COVID-19 has the potential to increase economic inequality in almost every country at once, the first time this has happened since records began over a century ago. Rising inequality means it could take at least 14 times longer for the number of people living in poverty to return to pre-pandemic levels than it took for the fortunes of the top 1,000, mostly white male, billionaires to bounce back.
Oxfam’s report shows how the rigged economic system is enabling a super-rich elite to amass wealth in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression while billions of people are struggling to make ends meet. It reveals how the pandemic is deepening long-standing economic, racial and gender divides.
- The recession is over for the richest. The world’s ten richest men have seen their combined wealth increase by half a trillion dollars since the pandemic began – more than enough to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine for everyone and to ensure no one is pushed into poverty by the pandemic. At the same time, the pandemic has ushered in the worst job crisis in over 90 years with hundreds of millions of people now underemployed or out of work.
- Women are hardest hit, yet again. Globally, women are overrepresented in the low-paid precarious professions that have been hardest hit by the pandemic. If women were represented at the same rate as men in these sectors, 112 million women would no longer be at high risk of losing their incomes or jobs. Women also make up roughly 70 percent of the global health and social care workforce − essential but often poorly paid jobs that put them at greater risk from COVID-19.
- Inequality is costing lives. Afro-descendants in Brazil are 40 percent more likely to die of COVID-19 than White people, while nearly 22,000 Black and Hispanic people in the United States would still be alive if they experienced the same COVID-19 mortality rates as their white counterparts. Infection and mortality rates are higher in poorer areas of countries such as France, India, and Spain while England’s poorest regions experience mortality rates double that of the richest areas.
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Covid: UK virus deaths exceed 100,000 since pandemic began
January 26th, 2021 by Roger Darlington
There are three main ways of calculating the death toll from coronavirus: those who died within 28 days of being tested positive for covid (the official government measure announced on the media each day); those who had the virus mentioned on their death certificate (a wider measure from the Office of National Statistics); and excess deaths (a calculation comparing the level of all deaths in a given period to an average of the same period over the previous five years).
Some time ago, deaths from covid in the UK passed the 100,000 mark on the measure of excess deaths. Now the 100,000 figure has been exceeded on the ONS measure. In the next few days, even the Government’s measure will go over 100,000.
Any figure would represent an absolute tragedy for the people who have died and the families and friends whom they have left behind. But, when you remember that – at the beginning of the first lockdown – we were told that we would do well as a nation to keep deaths to 20,000, the current figure is heartbreaking. It is one of the highest death rates in the world.
The UK death toll should start to level off as the vaccines have their beneficial effect, but this nightmare is still far from over. And, if anyone tells you that lots of people die from seasonal flu each winter, remind them that a typical death toll from winter flu is 8,000.
Footnote: Later in the day, the government announced that, by its measure, the death toll had now reached 100,162.
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