Updates, Again

Updates, Again

    It's a fast-moving world out there and as printed media is discovering, one which is proving difficult to keep fresh to readers.  From political campaigns to government (and financial market) upheavals, the news hits and is sometimes over before the ink dries.  So take these updates with a grain of salt, current for today or at least for the past month...life moving onward ever faster (I've highlighted the earlier post on which the update is based).

    Brexit: here's what British political scientist, David Runciman (writing to the London Review of Books) had to say, which nicely summed up the decision by Britain to leave the European Union: So who is to blame?  Please don’t say the voters: 17,410,742 is an awful lot of people to be wrong on a question of this magnitude.  They are not simply suckers and/or closet racists – in fact, relatively few of them are – and they are not plain ignorant.  You can’t fool that many people, even for a relatively short period of time.  And yes it was close, but it wasn’t that close.  The margin between the two sides – 3.8 per cent – was roughly the same as the margin by which Obama defeated Romney in the 2012 presidential election (3.9 per cent), and you don’t hear a lot of people complaining about the legitimacy of that, not even Republicans (well, not that many).  Plus, turnout in the referendum, at 72.2 per cent, was nearly 18 per cent higher than in the last presidential election.  The difference, of course, is that a general election is a constitutional necessity whereas the EU referendum was a political choice.  If you don’t like the outcome, don’t say it was the wrong answer to the question.  It was the wrong question, put at the wrong time, in the wrong way.  And that’s the fault of the politicians...Cameron must shoulder the lion’s share of the responsibility.  It was a reckless gamble, given that the stakes were so high.  No one can say how this will play out, but it has already put enormous pressure on the basic functioning of the British state, something that Conservatives are meant to value above all else.  One of the possible repercussions being watched are the subsidies and tariffs received by farmers and how it may affect the food supply for both humans and animals (Britain grows a substantial amount of feed for cattle, much of which is subsidized).

    Mosquitoes: As it turns out, the Zika virus is heading for a showdown at the now-downplayed Olympic games coming up in Rio.  But our efforts to eradicate mosquitoes has quite a history, pretty much beginning with U.S. Army doctor Walter Reed's discovery of their transmission of yellow fever (during the building of the Panama Canal).  But Zika's record of infection pales when compared to the continuing spread of Dengue fever (even running a distant third to the Chikunguya virus, which has nearly 60% more cases of infection).  A nice summation of our ongoing battle with (and the questioning of gene-editing technology --already in use in three U.S. cities-- and its possible future effects on the ecosystem) can be view on the pages of Wired.

    Space: In reading Christophe Galfard's book on our briefly explaining our position in space and how physicists work much of this out (such as our view of the Milky Way, of which we are sitting in a distant corner, is substantially blocked by our viewing position -- leaving the solar system, we would realize that our view of our galaxy and the universe as we know it would be quite different), there was one more interesting note to bring our tiny size into view.  A radio wave transmission moves at the speed of light, thus a message from the moon to earth would take roughly a second out and a second to come back.  Move to the sun and that transmission is over 8 minutes (about 17 minutes out and back); our nearest star once you leave our galaxy (Proxima Centauri which is a bit closer than Alpha Centauri A or B) is quite a bit farther.  How much farther?  Send a message from there and it would take over 90,000 years, one-way...yikes.  And that is just from our nearest solar system.  Space is indeed a bit beyond our imagination...

    Refugees:  When I wrote of my friend volunteering his surgical skills to a refugee camp in Jordan (those escaping the conflict in Syria), he recommended that I watch the film Salam Neighbor, currently being shown on Netflix and other media venues.  In the film, two journalists are allowed inside for the first time (once in the camps, reporters and photos are generally not allowed) to film daytime life for some of the refugees (the camp was deemed unsafe for their staying at night).  You'll watch them go through the process of waiting for a tent, setting it up (the soil in this instance was quite hard and not the sand one imagines), the waiting for food and water, the tales of refugees escaping only in the darkness of night (they said that to escape at any other time would find them shot and killed if spotted).  It's a sobering glimpse at putting up with such a life for a month by these journalists, 30 days of such living -- the average stay for a refugee in a camp such as this?...17 years.  The polarization now occurring in the world might have best been summed up by a local farmer in Britain when asked about immigration there (as told to writer James Meek in the London Review of Books):  I told Agnew (the farmer)  I wondered whether there wasn’t something quite Ukippy about the EU itself.  Couldn’t Europe be seen, like the Ukip vision of Britain, as a them and us proposition, an exclusive club that wanted to limit access, to keep out undesirables and prevent its unique character being spoiled?  On a world scale, couldn’t he consider Europe as an entity cohesive enough, homogenous enough, to be local?  ‘I would have been happy with that if it were the Netherlands, Denmark, Scandinavia, perhaps France,’ he said, with sudden intensity of feeling.  ‘I thought that was what it was all about.  All these Eastern European countries … to try and say “That’s us” is very difficult.’

    Gun violence: Admittedly, I've covered guns and their usage quite a bit; but the recent events in both the U.S. and in France make one wonder when or how such violence can be intercepted before it happens (much is, believe it or not).  And getting into the mind of a person with mental issues (commonly used as an explanation after a shooter or suicide bomber is killed) or one craving the beliefs of terrorist groups is a difficult proposition.  But two pieces came up that were both quite interesting, one from Scientific American Mind on how terrorist groups utilize their marketing power and the other from the New York Review of Books on our craving for gun ownership in the U.S.  Far too long to delve into here, I'll save the ISIS recruiting draw and other such discussions for a later post; but the articles are worth peeking at.  As author David Cole wrote in the latter piece: A few isolated states may strengthen their gun laws, but at least an equal number will do the opposite.  In the year after the Sandy Hook shooting, eleven states made their gun control laws tougher, but at least two dozen states loosened theirs.  And on the national stage, nothing will be done.  As we saw after Sandy Hook, even when the public overwhelmingly supported a modest bill to extend background checks to private gun sales, the bill never made it out of the Senate.

    It is difficult to keep up with today's news and issues, what with books and print (hard and electronic) to read and shows to watch and the Web to view: who can keep the pace?  There is life out there (get one, as some would say to any of us).  And before you throw stones at me, recognize again that this is a blog, a series of opinions and hopefully discussions of topics that will spur you onto your own searches.  What I've tried to do here is but a small attempt to give you a somewhat current picture of just a few subjects...now get back on that trail and enjoy the outdoors.