Thought for the Day

With almost everyone, everywhere, now confined to home, consumer demand is collapsing and central banks are throwing money desperately into the system. Noone knows how long this will last – but some, like Adam Tooze in yesterday’s post, are beginning to explore what lasting impact this is likely to have. 

William Davies – who wrote Nervous States – how feelings took over the world (2018) - has offered this fascinating article -

Rather than view this as a crisis of capitalism, it might better be understood as the sort of world-making event that allows for new economic and intellectual beginnings.

In 1755, most of Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami, killing as many as 75,000 people. Its economy was devastated, but it was rebuilt along different lines that nurtured its own producers. Thanks to reduced reliance on British exports, Lisbon’s economy was ultimately revitalised.

But the earthquake also exerted a profound philosophical influence, especially on Voltaire and Immanuel Kant. The latter devoured information on the topic that was circulating around the nascent international news media, producing early seismological theories about what had occurred. Foreshadowing the French revolution, this was an event that was perceived to have implications for all humanity; destruction on such a scale shook theological assumptions, heightening the authority of scientific thinking. If God had any plan for the human species, Kant concluded in his later work, it was for us to acquire individual and collective autonomy, via a “universal civic society” based around the exercise of secular reason.

It will take years or decades for the significance of 2020 to be fully understood. But we can be sure that, as an authentically global crisis, it is also a global turning point. There is a great deal of emotional, physical and financial pain in the immediate future. But a crisis of this scale will never be truly resolved until many of the fundamentals of our social and economic life have been remade.

The calm tones of Dr John Campbell can be heard on his daily video briefings which reinforce the essential messages with a wonderful mixture of visual and verbal points – an object lesson in how to convey clear and effective messages in 20 minutes.

This is Monday 23^rd’s briefing – and this is today’s (Tuesday 24 March)

But he slipped in, almost casually, a horrifying possibility – that a vaccine might not be available until March 2021 with wide availability only later in the summer…. 

Links which appealed in Ploiesti

Another Monday! Doesn’t time go fast when you are enjoying yourself! 
I start not so much with a link as a complaint….

1. I was appalled last night to discover that one of the most popular Romanian television stations – ProTV – had chosen to show us at 10pm last night a gruesome film about a virus wiping out America (the rest of the world isn’t mentioned). The film stars Will Smith as a lone virologist still working in his home lab to find an antidote for testing on the zombies into which humans have (d)evolved. 
Totally inappropriate film at this moment - with the only uplifting element being the final scene's arrival at a barricaded  (Vermont) border of the vital antidote phial.
Needless to say, I watched it to the bitter end!!

The Politico website tells me that Holywood has in fact been churning out such films for quite some time – eg Outbreak (1995); and Contagion (2011). I’ve only seen one such film – Perfect Sense (2011) - which had an added poignancy for me, being filmed in Glasgow and starring my compatriot Ewan McGregor…..

2. It isn’t often we get freebies but, for the next month, the kind people at the UK Prospect magazine will let us have free access to the entire 25-year archives of the journal and have selected a few highlights to whet our appetite. 
I have occasionally bought “Prospect” and did include it in the list of journals I devised some three years ago – “rather too smooth” was my terse comment, by which I meant that it was a bit glossy and mainstream for my tastes…

But the taste I’ve had so far may change that view. It’s certainly very fine writing, starting with a brilliant Ivan Krastev essay from 2009 which looks back with Krastev’s usual insights at 20 years’ experience of countries like Bulgaria and Czechia; and continues with an essay from Fukuyama on Identity

3. A few weeks back, the Guardian started a very worthwhile initiative on strengthening its European coverage "This is Europe" which, so far, has given rich pickings

4. I’m always captivated by intellectual history – a curious topic I grant you but its attempt to explore how linguistic barriers allow distinctive ways of thinking and dialogue to develop seems to get to the heart of understanding a country. I’ve made the point here several times that Perry Anderson is one of the few people with the linguistic skills to be able to offer comparative thoughts on the matter in the English language.

An article in the New York Review of Books alerted me to the Reading the China Dream website which has been publishing English translations of key articles in a lively dialogue which the Chinese intelligentsia has been carrying out in recent times eg this one. For more on this see this post last year about the geography of thinking       

5. I listened this morning to the reassuring tones of Dr John Campbell in his most recent report - although this article indicated the scale of the opportunities which the British government has missed by its dithering. The economic historian Adam Tooze has an explanation for this odd policy -

Faced with all of this, the stupidity lies in not recognising promptly that we must act, that we must shut down, that even the most essential individual activity of the market age, public shopping, has mutated into a crime against society.

Economics is shaping the crisis. It is the relentless expansion of the Chinese economy and the resulting mix of modern urban life with traditional food customs that creates the viral incubators. It is globalised transportation systems that speed up transmission. It is calculations of cost that define the number of intensive-care beds and the stockpiles of ventilators. It is the commercial logic of drug development that defines the range of vaccines we have ready and waiting; obscure coronaviruses don’t get the same attention as erectile dysfunction.

And once the virus began to spread, it was the UK’s attachment to business as usual that induced fatal delay. Shutting down comes at a price. No one wants to do it. But then it turns out, in the face of the terrifying predictions of sickness and death, there really is no alternative.

Romania has this week technically been under emergency powers…...with the authorities particularly sensitive to the return of hundreds of thousands of Romanians from work in Italy (officially 1.2 million Romanians were working there – mainly casual and manual work). Only some 60,000 are officially quarantined since many chose to come via the Ukraine to conceal their status

On Friday I had a dawdle around the centre of Ploiesti – a city 60 km north of Bucharest which used to be Romania’s centre of oil production and which has been my home for the past 5 weeks. This a very short drone video of the city centre

The pedestrian and car flow were then not significantly reduced. All shops seemed open - the markets certainly. The only differences in the last few days are that the supermarket cashiers and shelf-packers are all wearing masks and gloves and that we wait at the cashdesk a metre and a half apart.

I might say that the supermarkets remain well-stocked - with no sign of the panic bulk-buying which has disfigured the UK. I visited Lidl late Saturday afternoon and it was quiet and well-stocked

My chemist does, however. have a limit of 3 customers only within the shop - with credit card only transactions. For the past few years Romania has had washable banknotes and I had that morning actually washed all the cash I had (a lot since for the past month I’ve been in for the long haul).

I'm one of these bolshie types who object strongly to the way we're being forced into a cashless system......In Romania such a policy, of course, would require the older generation to die off - which, of course, may happen faster than we all thought.

6. And I thought this was an important article to pinpoint the blame we must take for letting human civilisation encroach on the animal and natural world

Other eye-witness reports from those in lockdown

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/03/23/the-existential-inconvenience-of-coronavirus

https://www.thenation.com/article/society/coronavirus-spain-us/

https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/milan-coronavirus-italy-tim-parks-essay/

https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2020/03/19/pandemic-journal/

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/22/london-life-lockdown-coronavirus-social-distancing

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/23/europe-views-uk-coronavirus-plan-disbelief

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/20/were-clearing-the-decks-a-gp-on-watching-the-coronavirus-pandemic-unfold

Music from my travels

Romania has a superb classical radio station – Radio Muzical – with a hall for live performances which are/were broadcast simultaneously. The station has been keeping my spirits up these past 5 weeks - but yesterday I felt it was time to take a trip along memory lane by dipping into the hundreds of CDs I have amassed during my travels around central Europe and Central Asia over the past 30 years. 

I have vivid memories of the variety of musical bazaars I would come across and of exciting new finds – particularly of the more popular sort which (apart from Queen) had never appealed.

Bonnie Tyler made a lot of guest appearances in central Europe in those days and Willie Nelson, Rod Stewart and Michael Bolton’s voices would accompany me on the car radio as I drove to and from the 2 bases I had in the early 90s for a couple of years in Eastern Hungary and indeed into Satu Mare, Romania.   

Later, in Uzbekistan, Santana and Russian pop (such as Alla Pukacheva – and a Yulia with a guitar) became favourites

So my faithful Philips CD radio which I had in Sofia for a decade has been pressed back into service for this purpose. There it was classical music I bought - at amazing prices, a fifth of what I would pay in the UK, allowing me the luxury of buying simply to taste...... 

And thus I came across the amazing voice of Lisa Gerrard on a CD called Immortal Memory with Pat Cassidy. Her full repertoire can be sensed here

It turns out that she was part of the Dead can Dance group which I remember coming across in the late 90s on my travels….probably in Central Asia. What I hadn’t appreciated was her link to the famous Bulgarian voices – which you can see and hear also here

If that arouses your interest then watch this recent performance from Lisbon and this youtube version of the CD I first heard in the early 2000s - The Serpent’s Egg

Jan Garbarek, Pat Metheny and Ben Webster were other discoveries from those days – until then I knew only Dave Brubeck and Paul Desmond.  

But it was the ouds which fascinated me – Anouar Brahem is a great favourite, particularly Le Pas du Chat Noir. But all his CDs are in the mountain house – here is a longer presentation and an excerpt from a performance he did in Bucharest in 2012

In Azerbaijan I picked up some Rabih Abou-Khalil - here he is doing a fado in Lisbon

A voice in the wilderness

Earlier in the week I praised an English doctor for the calm, graphical way he explained the current pandemic.

Today I want to draw your attention to a German doctor who has been calmly suggesting that governments have been panicked into extreme measures by their failure to understand the specifics of statistical measurement and reporting.

My first reaction was that the guy was a right-wing denialist – like Brazil’s right-wing President Bolsonaro - but his style seems a bit too professional for that – and indeed, when I checked on Wikipedia, it was to discover that he is not only mainstream SDP but is currently the Deputy-Head of the German Delegation to the Council of Europe

Dr Wolfgang Wodarg is a lung specialist (pulmonologist) and starts his presentation (subtitled in English) by explaining there are 100 types of virus - which are constantly changing. He quotes research from Glasgow which looked at some ten viruses in which Coronavirus was always present – although only some 7-15% of viruses he says are of the Coronavirus strain.

Wutan, he points out, is China’s largest laboratory for the testing for viruses and has, therefore, a large number of medical researchers who found this strain on about 50 people they were testing. This was duly put into the global data base and picked up in Berlin who did a test and passed the results to WHO for some sort of certification…..

At this point the explanation got a bit cryptic and seemed to suggest a contrast between how the WHO handles validation requests from pharmaceutical companies, on the one hand, and research institutes on the other. Basically Wodarg seems to argue that WHO registered the new strain very easily….without actually knowing how dangerous the new strain was….That requires epidemiological data going back some years – whether for the general population, for those presenting with symptoms let alone for those in hospitals or in critical care. The percentage of those with the virus will start at about 8% but move up to almost 100% for those critically ill…   

I think he says Germany would normally expect 2-3,000 deaths a year from flu and this should be borne in mind in all the current focus on the death rate  

He faults the virologists for creating something sensational – which first impressed the Chinese authorities…...and then got picked up by the global media

Wodarg’s arguments – available on his blog - have caused quite a storm in Germany apparently – although I have not been able to check that discussion out so far. I am a sceptic by nature and very much enjoy books such as those of Ben Goldacre

If he is correct, of course this would massively boost the cause of the “Denialists” – which must be a thought worrying some experts….

One thing does, however, puzzle me – why Wodarg does not simply argue that we should be keeping the number of deaths in perspective. In other words be deducting from the gross number presented in the news reports the 0.1% of deaths expected from flu… 

Instead he seems to be denying there is an issue

The doctor does, however, seem one of these “outsiders” I have discussed quite recently in these posts with one foot in the medical camp and another in the political. 

People who straddle different worlds are able to resist groupthink – and it is significant that, at the end of the youtube presentation, he quotes from my favourite fairy story – “The Emperor who had no clothes”.

Update; Germany is apparently experiencing a low and flattening death rate at 0.3% (compared to both Italy's 9% and UK's 4.6%) according to this article - although Monday we were being told that some regional authorities were being slow in returning their statistics! 
But the UK seems still to be farting about as two blogs from opposite ends of the political spectrum indicate first from Boffy and today on Richard North’s site  
And this article shows how much of an outlier the UK has become

The pic is the last painting done by Egon Schiele a few days before he and his wife succumbed to the Spanish Flu in 1918. He was 28

Links I Liked

Pandemic literature is surprisingly large – we all know of Camus’ The Plague but this very comprehensive article gives us scores more

I know some of my readers think I’m a bit bonkers when I go on about what you can tell about a book’s author by the sort of bibliography the book offers in its endnotes. But the first part of this extended book review demonstrates precisely my point– identifying curiously missing titles in a bibliography which takes up 80 of almost 700 pages and whose  absence demonstrate conclusively the author’s ideological drift.

The book in question is Eurotragedy – a drama in Nine Acts by Ashoka Mody (2018) which I had been tempted to flick. But the review – by one Otero-Iglesias - has told me enough to know that this is yet one more book I can do without. I was so delighted to find such detective work that I actually wrote to the guy to congratulate him……

It’s some years since I first encountered Adam Curtis - who inspired a post In Praise of the Documentary. I’ve just come across a 3 part series he did on the amazing influence the Rand Corporation had on the world in the 1950s and 60s. They were the number-crunchers “avant la lettre” – with such names as Robert McNamara, Thomas Schelling and MAD (“mutually-assured destruction”) Hermann Kahn    

The series is called Pandora’s Box and can be viewed here; here and here.

One of the ideas they propagated was something we knew as PPBS (“planning, programming, budgetary systems”) which says it all – the belief that everything could be rationally planned…….even the course of the Vietnam War….

McNamara, of course, went from that abject failure to head up The World Bank and inflict huge environmental damage on the world……

The recent Facing Extinction post mentioned in passing one of the key names of the “survivalist” school John Michael Greer who used to have a great blog, some of whose writings can still be found in the Counter Currents website

eg

-        https://www.countercurrents.org/greer290511A.htm;

-        https://www.countercurrents.org/greer241111.htm

Just type J Michael Greer in the search engine

Finally, some Seinfeld outtakes

Coronavirus - who to Believe?

We’re all flooded with information about Coronavirus – most of it partial, speculative or imaginative, serving to feed our fantasies. We should try to shut out everything and focus instead on what reasonably authoritative sources are telling us about the spread and treatment of the virus – at both the collective and individual levels…

I grant you that, in these times of fake news, it is not easy to identify “reasonably authoritative sources”!  

But we can surely rely on the World Health Organisation - which I found to be a highly cost-effective organisation when I helped the Head of its European Public Health division for six or so months in 1991. Certainly I find its 5 page Guidance Note a model of clear advice for governments.

But of course that’s not where we immediately head when we want advice – we go to our favourite newspaper and to people we trust – and we will generally take the advice we want to hear….That’s certainly what I did – going to “The Guardian” which, of course, would and does take anything British or US governments say with a huge pinch of salt….

One of the Guardian articles dealt with the question of handwashing – but not as well as a blogger who happens to have been an environmental health inspector and gave more detailed advice from his experience of a variety of outbreaks including swine-fever and foot-and-mouth.

It was the same blog which alerted me earlier this week to just how much of an outlier the British Government continues to be not just on Brexit but also on Coronavirus – with it choosing to delay the introduction of the drastic steps which Italy and Spain (and other governments) have already introduced. 

But public pressure has forced the British government to place restrictions on sporting events – although schools remain open. Even Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have closed their schools and universities…       

The method in the madness are some theories called “herd immunity” and “Nudge theory” which argue that it is not realistic to expect people to change their behaviour dramatically and that, if the virus is let rip in the population, immunity will be acquired.....(!!!)
A variety of people have challenged this, with a former Director of Child Health at WHO emphasising that -

“The key principle from WHO is intensive surveillance,” he told the Guardian. “You test the population like crazy, find out where the cases are, immediately quarantine them and do contact tracing and get them out of the community. This deals with family clusters. That’s the key bedrock of getting this under control.”

The Brits are supposed to be pragmatic – but here is yet another example it appears where theory is driving us, literally, to perdition. As is often the case, my friend Boffy has an important contrary view for which I am deeply grateful....This post of mine was drafted with a strong sense that I was venturing into, for me, uncharted waters....I had tried to get a response from one of my daughters, a Scottish medic, but she is in Norway on a cross-skiing venture!! And the only other medic in my family is currently awaiting a hip operation…….

But I still don't understand the failure to test those who are displaying flu-like symptoms and who could be contaminating others......Nor frontline doctors - no wonder one of them is reported as saying -

  

The point of not testing you is to spread the infection, deliberately. That is the crazy gamble of this “herd immunity” guess. And who better to spread the disease than the people dealing with acute cases. There is no other logic to not testing people. 

An Update I’m incorporating into the post are the daily youtube videos which an English doctor is uploading about the situation. His calm measured tones and the simplicity of the presentational material give an object lesson in how to convey clear and trustworthy messages…. The comparison with the politicised messages from government leaders is striking 

Dr John Campbell has apparently been running this excellent teaching resource for some time. Another example of the difference which one effective individual can make!!

Some Italians managed to gives us musical cheer from their self-isolating balconies – also here and here

And the redoubtable Tobias Jones – who has been entertaining us all from his base of the last few decades in Parma gives us a superb description of what it’s like to be in lockdown in the country

Sources

http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87548

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/uk-covid-19-strategy-questions-unanswered-coronavirus-outbreak
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/why-is-the-government-relying-on-nudge-theory-to-tackle-coronavirus#comment-138916369

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/epidemiologist-britain-herd-immunity-coronavirus-covid-19

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYTFk34nhoI

https://boffyblog.blogspot.com/2020/03/covid19-governments-irrational-response.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/16/great-british-deference-dangerous-boris-johnson-coronavirus#comment-138962254

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/this-coronavirus-crisis-has-forced-the-retirement-of-pantomime-johnson

http://peterjnorth.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-british-government-urgently-needs.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/15/experts-fashion-covid-19-reality-bites-trump-johnson

https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2020/03/15/it-was-the-virus-that-did-it/

http://eureferendum.com/blogview.aspx?blogno=87547

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/mar/13/boris-johnson-coronavirus-hero-mayor-larry-vaughn-jaws

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/13/coronavirus-school-exams-five-day-week-pandemic#comment-138904699

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/mar/13/how-many-will-die-of-coronavirus-in-the-uk-a-closer-look-at-the-numbers

Peripheral - rather than tunnel - Vision….

My faithful readers know that at the end of each year, I make a collection of the year’s posts and make them available - scroll down the right-hand column of the blog until you see the section "new material" which lists the E-books. 
I offer these collections simply because the lack of topicality means that most posts are still worth reading…..even years later. Brexit was, of course, the one big exception to that rule of mine but, even there, a lot of the posts were treating the UK more as a case-study - and trying to understand what made it distinctive.

Blogging is for me both enjoyable and productive – it focuses my mind and disciplines my writing. I totally agree with the 15 benefits enumerated by this blogger. And its search facility allows instant delivery both of what I could only vaguely remember     and relevant material I had completely forgotten about…

Indeed the blog has only one (very small) drawback….The material is back to front…..with the reader presented with my latest musings while even better material is sunk without a trace.

I’ve been particularly active this new year – 30 posts in the 10 weeks.

Some of my readers may be new – I notice, for example, a lot of new readers from Turkmenistan. Welcome!

Others – like the Italians who are now in lockdown – have been with me for some months but may have missed some posts.

So, for all of you, I offer a short book - “Peripheral Vision – the 2020 posts…. so far

Just click the Pcloud file to download

Facing Extinction?

How to Save the World is a gloriously-named blog run by Canadian “survivalist” Dave Pollard. It’s a strand of North American life it’s easy to mock with its connotations of the frontier spirit – let alone of the paranoid streak made famous by historian Richard Hofstader. But survivalism represents an important contrarian element in what otherwise is a rather smug society – boasting such writers as Dmitry Orlov and John Michael Greer.

It was Pollard’s latest post which drew my attention to a powerful extended essay called “Facing Extinction” – and made me realise that 8 months have gone by since I noted the curious absence in my blog of references to global warming. That post had recognized a twofold problem which confronts those who write about climate change –

First, how to overcome readers’ resistance to ever-worsening truths, especially when climate-change denial has turned into a political credo and a highly profitable industry.

Second, in view of the breathless pace of new discoveries, publishing can barely keep up. Refined models continually revise earlier predictions of how quickly ice will melt, how fast and high CO2 levels and seas will rise, how much methane will be belched from thawing permafrost, how fiercely storms will blow and fires will burn, how long imperilled species can hang on, and how soon fresh water will run out (even as they try to forecast flooding from excessive rainfall). There’s a real chance that an environmental book will be obsolete by its publication date.

Naomi Klein, like most of us, had tended to hide her head in the sand on this issue – with justifications that equally explain my own blog silence on the issue - that

- it was too complex; 

- others were dealing with it; 

- technical change would sort things out; or 

- a few personal changes in life-style could at least salve the conscience….

In 2009 a chance encounter changed that for her – and she started to write This Changes Everything which became a bestseller in 2014.  My post of eight months ago on the issue offered an annotated bibliography of no fewer than 17 books. But thereafter silence…….

But, hey, I’m no expert, I say in self-justification.

That is not, however, good enough…..since I have explicitly recognised in these columns that one of the few roles I can play (given the scale of my reading) is to IDENTIFY and then DISSEMINATE relevant and effective writing on the subject.

So, in that spirit, let me share with you some of the great stuff I found recently while I was reading the “Facing Extinction” essay – which I should really start with….
It may be long (almost 30 pages) but I urge readers to flick through it at the very least - since it is a very personal piece in which we actually meet Leonard Cohen, who was a close friend of the author. 
The essay starts with a summary of the signals which warn of our extinction and then moves to explore the possible reasons for our refusal to face reality – praying in aid Becker’s famous The Denial of Death (1973), terror management theory, Carl Sagan and Neil Postman.

That indeed is one of the things which make the essay so readable – that she is constantly introducing you to people…..some of whom were familiar to me such as Naomi Klein or Jerry Mander – although I had never heard of the latter’s book she referenced viz In the absence of the sacred; Jerry Mander (1991). Its first half is an assault on our fixation with technology – not unexpected from the author who wrote the superb book “Four Arguments for the elimination of television”

 Amongst the many new names were Christian Parenti author of Tropic of Chaos - climate change and the new geography of violence (2011); and Jem Bendell, the author of another very personal piece - “Deep Adaptation – a map for navigating climate tragedy” whose significance I recognise by virtue of its rejection by magazine editors

But I’ll let you know more once I’ve actually read the material…..

Suffice it to say that we should not be allowing the Coronavirus to take our eyes off an ecological crisis which threatens the human race.

Other relevant articles/podcasts

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/mar/08/im-profoundly-sad-i-feel-guilty-scientists-reveal-personal-fears-about-the-climate-crisis

https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2019/09/what-is-the-theory-of-change-in-naomi-kleins-on-fire-the-burning-case-for-a-green-new-deal.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/mar/10/deadline-save-world-climate-test-crisis-governments

https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-voyage-to-the-end-of-ice-20200116/

https://soundcloud.com/thisistheclimatecrisis
https://soundcloud.com/thisistheclimatecrisis/the-great-unraveling-of-our-world-with-prof-richard-hil