Space flights, quotations, trans people, death row and car parks

19 April 2025

The really big news this week is that Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin spaceflight programme launched one of their phallic-symbol pods ‘manned’ entirely by ‘chicks’ into space for 11 minutes so they could patronise show the world how enlightened they are.  Blue Origin is, of course, targeted at the tourism industry rather than any serious exploration of spacei.

Wouldn’t it be better if space programmes were crewed by the people who could contribute most to scientific research regardless of what gender was assigned to them at birth (which is known to be an arbitrary judgement in some cases)?  Sadly, as Bob Dylan said “I don’t think it’s liable to happen / Like the sound of one hand clappin’.”

Donald Trump has of course banned diversity, equity and inclusion programs so they can happily exclude females, with or without penises, in future unless the PR justifies it.

Bezos’s Amazon gave $1m to Trump’s 2024 election campaign and Bezos himself stopped the Washington Post publishing an editorial supporting Kamala Harris.  By a complete coincidence, Trump’s gang has just awarded a $2bn contract to Blue Origin. 

(I’ve a friend who, as far as I know, doesn’t have any particular problems with his own penis but gets tremendously agitated about where trans women should be allowed to ‘wash’ if they haven’t undergone a full physical transformation;  I can only think this is because he thinks he’s a traditional man who knows how to protect chicks better than they do themselves.)

The same friend also seems to think that I must support Labour because he’s sussed I’m not a great fan of Trump or Elon Musk – why does my computer keep printing Muck when I’m trying to write Musk? – or any of the 22 Conservative leaders we’ve had in the last few years (fact checkers should note that I have guessed how many leaders the Tories have consumed in the last 35 years and 22 might be wrong).

In fact, I think Labour’s proposal to reduce benefits is stupid and their decision to take the gender assigned at birth as definitive reminded me of the old saw “For every complex problem, there’s a simple solution, and it’s wrong”.

Last week, I also came across a quotation from the 20^th century economist Walter E Williams who said “Most of the great problems we face are caused by politicians creating solutions to problems they created in the first place.”

More interesting reading is likely to be found in Corinna Lain’s book Secrets of the Killing State: The Untold Story of Lethal Injection, which is to be published on 22 April.  She describes her motive in writing this as “I was trying to figure out why states are so breathtakingly bad at a procedure that we use on cats and dogs every day”, something I’ve often wondered.

Her answer is that a significant factor is who performs the executions and she offers Missouri’s chief executioner from 1995-2006, Dr Alan Doerhoff, who was responsible for 54 of the state’s 65 executions, as an example;  he has since boasted that “Nobody will ever do as many [executions] as I have.”  There are a lot of words that describe such people, most of them ending in ‘pathy’.

Prisoners on death row were allowed to employ lawyers to carry out a (limited) inquiry into Doerhoff’s experience and, under oath, the executioner testified that that he had problems mixing the drugs “so right now we’re still improvising”.  He also said that he “sometimes transpose[d] numbers” and that he was dyslexic (he later denied this saying he just sometimes just got numbers muddled).

In Arizona, one of the ‘IV team executioners’ had once been a nurse but their licence was suspended after they’d been arrested multiple times for Driving Under the Influence while impaired by alcohol or other drugs.  In one 10-day period in 2007, they were arrested three times in Arizona.

Another member of the team had no medical licence and also had a record of DUI as well as bouncing a cheque. Their only relevant experience was once serving in a military medical corps (although they hadn’t actually inserted an IV for 15 years).

Aren’t these people on the wrong end of the needle? 

As at 1 January 2024, 2,241 people were on death row in America;  58% of them are not classified as ‘white’. 

Not all states use injections for executions so perhaps frustrated British shooters who are being stopped from killing wildlife on peatlands over here would like to satisfy their urge to kill by applying for these jobs?

For some reason, this brings to mind a recent article in Which? magazine on the different types of parking tickets issued in the UK.  This was all new to me and I can do no better than quote from their article:

“Most parking tickets will be one of these three:

Penalty Charge Notice (PCN) or Excess Charge Notice (ECN) – usually issued by the council on public land, such as a high street or council car park.

Parking Charge Notice – issued by a landowner or parking company on private land, such as a supermarket car park.

Fixed Penalty Notice (FPN) – issued by the police on red routes, white zig zags or where the police manage parking.”

They are enforced in different ways and the private parking companies have the empathetic public-spiritedness of Hitler’s Waffen SS.  Even when they allow people 20 minutes free parking, if you spend 10 minutes there, then spend 9 minutes finding a working payment machine and queuing behind people trying to get it to work, then take 2 minutes getting back to your car and leaving the car park, tough.  Leave it and £1.90 goes up exponentially – the highest I’ve heard of so far is £180. 

Which? also offers advice on dealing with usurious increases, but there are no guarantees of success.

Bob Dylan reimagined, Donald Trump for real, and the climate crisis

25 January 2025

On Sunday, I went to the cinema and saw a film nominated for 8 Oscars, loosely based on Bob Dylan’s early life, ‘A Complete Unknown’ (words taken from Like a Rolling Stone).  It’s not biographical but it’s a representation of his early life as a chancer up to when he appeared at the Newport Folk Festival with an electric band.

All the real-life characters are brilliantly cast although Dylan asked that Suze (pronounced ‘Suzie’) Rotolo’s name didn’t appear.  She was an established artist and a political activist with her own ambitions and ultimately escaped to Italy to make her own life because she didn’t want to be known as Dylan’s muse.  In her memoir ‘The Freewheelin’ Years’ she comes over as a lovely, independent and talented person who deserved, and got, better than Dylan.  In the film, she’s sort of represented by a character called Sylvie Russo but ‘Sylvie’ seems feeble and more compliant than Suze.

Monica Barbaro plays Joan Baez, whom he treated just as badly (listen to Baez’s later song Diamonds and Rust), and Barbaro gives an very good impression of her voice;  Edward Norton is sensitively avuncular as the folk purist Pete Seeger and Boyd Holbrook plays a small role as Johnny Cash, lightly revealing the problems he had with alcohol.  Dylan is rarely seen without a cigarette in his hand but references to his use of other drugs are played down.

Even with such strong support, the film belongs to Timothée Chalamet’s as Dylan, performing all the songs himself.  He gives a subtle but totally believable interpretation of the Dylan who was becoming famous and moving towards the first of many new directions he was to take in later years, not really caring about other people who had helped him on the way, like Seeger and Baez (who says to Dylan “You’re really kind of an asshole”).

Dylan himself approved the script but didn’t influence the final cut, probably because he doesn’t care what people think about him and was happy to see the legend further confused.  There’s a lot of online discussion about whether he suffers from Aspergers and has no way of knowing how other people are feeling, which would be consistent with some of the casual cruelty the Dylan character shows in the film.

Scenes from his life are mixed up and conflated – the cry of “Judas” was actually recorded in Manchester on his British tour but was put into the film’s Newport concert.  Although it now grieves me to admit it, I felt similarly betrayed at his London concert on that tour and by hearing for the first time some of the electric songs in the second half, which seemed particularly shocking after the acoustic first half he had just played. 

But I got used to them and now accept his broken voice doing little more speaking the words, backed by a piano, a cello and some subdued percussion, and I’m happy to accept a recent song whose title he borrowed from Walt Whitman:  “I contain multitudes”.

Other news this week included Donald Trump on Monday, with his left hand on a Bible, saying “I do solemnly swear that I will … preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States”.

Within hours, he had forgotten his oath and pardoned 1,500 violent criminals who had been properly convicted for their parts in the 6 January 2021 insurrection that Trump himself had encouraged by telling them to “fight like hell”.  In doing this, he described attacks on police officers as “very minor incidents”, even though hundreds of police officers were injured in the attack on the Capitol Building and nine people, including police officers, died as a result of the attack.

Pamela Hemphill, 71, refused to accept the pardon, saying it was an insult to the police officers who she credits with saving her life after she’d been knocked over and trampled on.

Trump then signed various racist (second-generation birthrights given by the Constitution), isolationist (Mexico and WHO), transphobic (only two genders), dangerous (climate crisis denial) and other executive orders that descended to the ridiculous (renaming the Gulf of Mexico and an Alaskan mountain).

Shortly before this, JD Vance, a former Marine who had accused Trump of being a white supremacist and compared him to Hitler but changed his tune when he saw his own future at stake, was sworn in as Vice-President.  And Pete Hegseth, who believes government should be subordinate to Old Testament laws, was made Defense Secretary.  (I thought the OT was originally Jewish and adopted by Christianity but Hegseth is obviously closer to God than I am.)

I’m also beginning to wonder if Melania has hidden shallows.  No normal FLOTUS-to-be would have dressed for a funeral and worn a hat that prevented her husband kissing her at his inauguration.

Trump obviously wasn’t affected by a recent study at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, published in Nature Climate Change, which had measured changes in 200 sites between 1990 and 2020. Too many long words perhaps.

The study showed how Arctic forests, wetlands and tundra are being transformed by the planet’s rapid warming.  Since before the last ice-age, these ecosystems have held immeasurable amounts of carbon in the permafrost but, as temperatures rise and ice sheets melt, tundras unfreeze and more CO₂ is released into the atmosphere.

Their analysis shows that 30% of these lands are now releasing the carbon they’ve been storing for tens of thousands of years which is, in an understatement by the lead researcher, “a pretty big deal”.

GBNews has quoted the Telegraph’s report that “an Israeli official close to the negotiations” had said that “if Hamas adhered to all the rules set out in the new deal, Israel would leave the strip”.  I wonder if they should have said “ … what’s left of the strip” because Gazans returning to the devastation will be left to guess where their house was and where some of their missing relatives probably still are.

Cats’ life expectancy, exclusive groups, a backward story and drugs

18 May 2024

Last Sunday, the day after I’d written about Israel realising “their ceaseless rocket attacks have probably killed the Israeli hostages that Gaza was holding”, Hamas announced that one of their Israeli hostages had died from wounds inflicted by an Israeli rocket attack.  I sometimes wonder who reads these mutterings.

Later in the week, we discovered that scientists have discovered an earth-sized planet orbiting a small, ultra-cool red dwarf star some 55 light years away (which, bearing in mind that it takes less than 1½ seconds for light to get from earth to the moon, is a long way away).  It’s about the same size as Earth and orbits its star in 17 days, which means that a year there lasts 17 days and, if I lived there, I’d be well over 1,500 years old.

How do they know there aren’t two planets of the same size relative to their ‘sun’, 180^o apart, on the same plane, that take 34 days to circumnavigate the star?

On earth, a 2019 study of almost 8,000 cats by the Royal Veterinary College has shown that some breeds tend to have shorter lifespans than others and the Sphynx cat, an ugly, hairless little beast bred intentionally (and incestuously) in the 1960s, has an average lifespan of 6.8 years while Burmese and Birman cats live for an average of 14.4 years.  The average lifespan of all breeds was 11.7 years.

There are two obvious conclusions to be drawn if these results are accurate and representative of all cats in a particular breed:

1. if you want a long-lived furry friend, get a Burmese or a Birman cat
2. if you want to get rich, breed Sphynx cats.

Much coverage has been given to the Garrick Club’s decision to allow members to join after almost 200 years and somebody has suggested a list of women who might become members, including people like Mary Beard, Judi Dench, Elizabeth Gloster, Amber Rudd and Juliet Stevenson but it’s not clear whether these people have actually expressed an interest in joining, or even whether they were consulted before their names were mentioned.  It may be entirely misguided on my part but I’d love to have been there when Judi Dench was told she’d been suggested as a potential member.

I’m also puzzled by the people who have been named as members, though I admit some have been embarrassed enough to resign after their membership was made public.  Having turned down invitations to join various clubs over the years, I still can’t imagine wanting to join any club that excluded women but that’s basically because I feel more comfortable in the company of women than I do in the company of men. 

The limited membership problem made me think of Mensa, the organisation whose membership is limited to people who score highly on IQ tests.  I could never see the point of joining a group of people whose only common feature was enjoying doing IQ tests.

But I sometimes wonder if I’m a bit unusual.  I did a bank of tests recently and one question involved listing as many words beginning with P I could think of in a minute.  At the end, I was told I’m the first person they’d ever come across whose first suggestion was ‘pterodactyl’.

I recently read ‘A Spark of Light’ by Jodi Picoult, who presents the story backwards.  It has a thought-provoking plot, is well written and telling the story backwards adds an interesting dimension to it;  the first section is headed ‘Five p.m.’, the second ‘Four p.m.’ and so on (with an unavoidable coda headed ‘Six p.m.’)  An interesting selection for book clubs?

As we age, our senses can weaken, with a need for glasses and hearing difficulties usually the first to be recognised.  Losing our sense of smell can be harder to identify, despite its close links to memory.  Sometimes a particular smell can bring back a vivid flash of memory from decades ago and scientists are wondering if losing our sense of smell might be an early sign of the memory loss associated with dementia.  However, research has been complicated by the loss of a sense of taste, which is closely related to smell, being one of the symptoms of Covid.

Smoking also dulls the sense of smell and I remember when I gave up smoking that I smelt something, possibly cowslips, and realised I hadn’t been able to smell them for years.  This could, of course, be a good reason for smoking like a chimney if one works in a sewage plant or an abattoir.

When I first started work, every office had ashtrays, heaped high with butts and, looking back, it’s shocking to remember that we smoked in department stores, foodshops, aeroplanes, cinemas and trains – even the London underground – had special ‘no smoking’ coaches.  Nowadays, smokers have become social pariahs who huddle together in windy corners and a 2021 survey showed that the number of adult cigarette smokers in America had fallen by almost 50% in the previous 15 years.

This is bad news for tobacco companies but, as good capitalists, they reacted by offering smokeless nicotine pouches and vapes which give the illusion of smoke.  Even more disgustingly, at least to those of us who used to smoke French cigarettes with the distinctive flavour of Algerian black tobacco, vapes now come with fruit flavours, presumably to hook in younger smokers.  The pouches contain anything from 1½mg to 9mg of nicotine, compared with the 8mg to 20mg in cigarettes, of which only 1-2mg is actually absorbed.

To put the dangers of smoking into perspective, according to the Office for National Statistics, about 75,000 deaths in 2021 in England and Wales were smoking-related;  about 21,000 were alcohol-related and about 5,000 were drug-related.  The last figure includes 2,250 from opiates, 850 from cocaine and the other 1,900 from all other class A, B and C drugs, of which about 20 were related to cannabis (though more deaths from other drugs were of people who also had traces of cannabis in their system).

What nobody seems to know is the percentage of people actually using these drugs who died so these totals don’t indicate the relative lethality of the various groups (but don’t we wish we weren’t starting from here when classifying and taxing various drugs).

Refugees, Japanese respect, Boris blows it, Teslas, drugs and reality

25 March 2023

The mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, and the commissioner of the Metropolitan police, Sir Mark Rowley, have been arguing over whether London’s police force is “institutionally” misogynistic, racist and homophobic.  Why don’t they agree to differ about words and just get on with the job of cleaning it up?

Using government data and the Home Office’s estimate of how many people it hopes (“hopes”???) to deport from the UK, the Refugee Council has calculated that almost 200,000 people, including 40,000 children, could be locked up or forced into destitution if the government’s Illegal Migration bill becomes law.  An official at the Home Office said they don’t recognise these numbers.  As Mandy Rice-Davies said 60 years ago in a rather different context, “Well, they would say that, wouldn’t they.”

When Vladimir Putin met Xi Jinping this week we saw some interesting body language which made it clear that both of them accept the Chinese president as the more powerful. 

On the day after this love-in, Japan’s prime minister Fumio Kishida made a surprise trip to the devastated Ukrainian town of Bucha to meet president Volodymyr Zelenskiy.  After laying a wreath for the dead and observing a minute’s silence, Kishida bowed, a Japanese gesture of respect, especially when volunteered by a prime minister.  In his speech he said “Japan will keep aiding Ukraine with the greatest effort to regain peace.”

Despite her having lived in Budleigh Salterton, Dame Hilary Mantel’s memorial service is to be held in Southwark Cathedral because it has links to Thomas Cromwell about whom she wrote some books.  What a feeble excuse to save VIPs all the effort of trekking down to her own county, where she also wrote a lot of other books that didn’t mention Cromwell.

Boris Johnson made a characteristically “flimsy” appearance before the privileges committee that’s trying to decide whether he actively misled parliament over Covid lockdown parties but he blew any credibility he had left by losing his temper.  A senior Conservative MP on the committee, Sir Bernard Jenkin, told him the committee didn’t agree with his interpretation of the guidance.

The following day’s papers were generally critical.  Even the Daily Telegraph headlined “Johnson besieged but defiant” and their associate editor wrote on the front page “The cults of Boris and Brexit are simultaneously imploding”.

Steve Bell’s political cartoon in the Guardian neatly summed it up with a picture headed “The Blair Defence” and showed Tony Blair emerging from Johnson’s head as he says “I lied in good faith”.

Coincidentally, while all this was taking up the front pages, Rishi Sunak published a summary of his tax returns, presumably in the hope that we’d all be distracted from the fact that his income over the last three years was around £5m, mostly gained abroad.

Also on Tuesday, a man was arrested on suspicion of attempted murder in Birmingham after dowsing a man walking home from a mosque with something inflammable and setting him on fire.  What are the odds that his attacker is white and one of Tommy Robinson’s groupies?

And Donald Trump wants to be handcuffed when he appears in court if he’s indicted for paying hush money to the ‘adult’ actor Stormy Daniels.  Why don’t they agree to handcuff him but only if he’ll agree to wear black bondage gear?

Uganda, a former member of the British Empire, has just passed a law that will make a homosexual act a capital offence.  If one can believe the rumours one hears about various institutions, doing the same in Britain would (if there wasn’t an age limit dividing gropers from gropees) rid parliament of a lot of MPs who’d been to private schools;  and, quite a few who had sung in church choirs. 

Sceptics are not rushing to buy electric cars unless they’re either small-car users in large cities or people who want to impress others or save the planet, whatever comes first.  My personal concerns are the price (about half of which is the batteries themselves), the vintage technology of batteries, the problems of disposing of used ones, the scarcity of charging points and the additional time you have to spend watching paint dry on long journeys. 

According to a recent report from Reuters, there now seems to be a new problem which is that entire cars are having to be written off because it’s impossible to repair battery packs after even comparatively minor damage, and the batteries in Tesla Y SUVs are a structural part of the car.  Imagine what this is going to do to electric vehicles’ insurance premiums.

In America, National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is also investigating two complaints that the steering wheel came off the same model while they were being driven. Whooops a daisy! (Tesla’s response was to shut down its media enquiries department.)

Some neurologists and psychologists at the University of California in San Francisco have studied the effects on the brain of dimethyltryptamine (DMT), the psychedelic compound found in the flowering shrub Psychotria viridis and a key component of ayahuasca, a drink that’s been used in Mexico to induce altered states of consciousness in Amazonian peoples for at least a millennium.  Further work has been done by the DMT research group at Imperial College London.

Physiologically, recordings of brain activity showed that DMT breaks down established networks so ‘normal’ electrical impulses take new paths between areas of the brain that don’t normally talk to each other and everything gets mashed up.  The results are that the connections and networks which usually ‘create’ reality for us offer up different versions of reality.

Psychologically, they can include perceptions of contacts with beings from other dimensions and journeys through alternative realities.  People describe leaving this world and entering another that is “incredibly immersive and richly complex, sometimes being populated by other beings that they feel might hold special power over them, like gods.”

Some projects are now in the early stages of testing the combined effects of altered states of consciousness and psychotherapy as a treatment for depression.

Philosophically, the cognitive effects of rewiring the brain so radically, even for such short periods, raise questions about what reality actually looks like …

To add another perspective to this, researchers from Essex University and Berlin’s Humboldt University have recently concluded that drugs do not automatically improve artists’ work, even though John Lennon once described the Beatles’ album ‘Revolver’ as their “pot album”, and it certainly marks a significant change from their earlier work. 

Not everybody agrees and ask how we could know if, say, Modigliani’s work might not have been even better without the absinthe, cocaine and cannabis, and his joint opium sessions with Picasso.

Charlotte Church has recently admitted that the broadcaster Chris Moyles once offered to “take” her virginity when she turned 16, and he later claimed his remark was “actually rather sweet”.  Isn’t that disgusting?

Wealth distribution, the rich and the poor, borrowing, kindness and nominative determinism

23 January 2022

One of America’s more stupid politicians suggested during the Trump shut-down in 2018 that, if people really think they’re suffering from not being paid for a month, they could always put it on a credit card or borrow enough money for food.  What better illustration of the difference between the worlds of the rich who have black AmEx (Centurion) cards and don’t understand how you can max out a credit card, and the poor who already have. 

Payday loans can accrue interest at around 1250%.  This compares with the 0.35% you can get for your savings – though you could get as little as 0.01% or, if you tie your money up for a year or two, as much as 1.5%.

If you could get 1250% on your savings, every £1,000 you save would be worth £2,250 at the end of a year instead of £1,035 you get at the moment.

So who on earth would borrow money at these rates?  Obviously they are people with no other way to get money so they can buy food and keep warm.

Their lack of money can be due to a whole range of causes, from bad luck, inadequate state support or ineligibility (or Home Office delays in deciding if you are eligible) to life events such as bereavement and health problems to expensive addictions, from drugs like tobacco and alcohol to the illegal ones, and gambling. 

Some people seem to believe they’ve chosen to be poor because they haven’t got on their bicycles and found work so it’s their choice whether to buy food or keep warm;  or that they spend what they do have on luxuries like tobacco (and I know from experience that tobacco can give a great deal of pleasure and isn’t always just ‘a luxury’) so it’s a poor sense of priorities rather than actually not having enough money. 

This is both ill-informed and wrong and tends to reveal the speaker’s own financial position, rather like people who think food banks are wonderful things, thereby completely missing the point that, in an ideal society where nobody was poor, you wouldn’t need food banks.

Debt is a deep, dark hole with slippery sides.

I was brought up at a time when the only ‘acceptable’ debt was a mortgage and, if you couldn’t afford something, you saved until you could, or you did without.  My children have huge student loan debts which they seem to accept is fair but I worry that their generation is growing up thinking it’s ‘normal’ to have debts and many young people just can’t afford to go to university at all.

With the conversion of so many colleges to universities in the 1980s, pressure from families, schools and peers to go to university increased, and people who didn’t began to feel like lesser mortals.  I’ve never understood why people with really useful practical skills are considered less ‘intelligent’ than people with a degree in TV box-set studies from the University of Luton.  I know who’d I rather rewired our house.

These social problems were compounded by the schisms that appeared in the 1980s when the gap between rich and poor started to widen and society become more and more fractured as management pay increased to levels that even the greediest of managers in 1980 could never have imagined.

A small and unscientific, but credible research project in America showed that one of the main problems is that rich people are constitutionally unable to grasp how deep is the divide between them and poor people.  An assistant professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania (whose fees are more than $100,000 a year) asked her students how much they thought an average American makes in a year.  A quarter of them thought it was more than $100,000 while one of them suggested $800,000.  According to the Social Security Administration, the actual figure was $53,838 last year.  The family income of an average Penn student is $195,500.

Capitalism would, of course, expect companies to be x times more efficient and profitable if managers are now paid x times more than their predecessors but this clearly isn’t the case in practice.  Also, research into how satisfied people are with their remuneration showed clearly that the amount people got was almost irrelevant because people judged the adequacy of their pay against that of people they perceived as peers;  hence the vicious upwards spiral in pay at the top of companies.

I have a suspicion this is a man thing – bet I can piss higher up the wall than you – but haven’t found any research to support this (the pay spiral, not the pissing).

To an extent, this has always been the case and Dorothy Parker (1893 to 1967) once said “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”

We are now in a position which ensures that poorer people pay a much higher proportion of their income in taxes than do the rich.  VAT is particularly responsible for this imbalance but UK taxpayers getting £200,000 a year pay the same rate of income tax as those getting £10m.

Last week, 102 of the world’s millionaires and billionaires, including Disney heiress Abigail Disney, called for governments round the world to increase the taxes they pay in order to help pay for the pandemic response and tackle between rich and poor.  Calling themselves “patriotic millionaires”, they called for “permanent wealth taxes on the richest to help reduce extreme inequality and raise revenue for sustained, long-term increases in public services like healthcare”.

This sounds like a really sensible proposal and should be accepted with grace because it’s made by those who can think straight.  However, it’s unlikely to be introduced because the people who set tax rates tend to be wealthy themselves.  Our Chancellor of the Exchequer, who is the single greatest influence on how much UK tax the rich and the poor have to pay, used to be a banker and married money (his wife is reportedly richer than the Queen).

It also misses an important point.  Implicitly, these 102 people realise they have more money than they need and many millions of poor people are suffering because they are keeping the money that could change their lives in piggy banks in tax havens that only the rich can afford.  If they’ve got too much, why don’t they just give it away now and just keep enough to live on? 

More giving might just help make the world a kinder place.  It doesn’t have to be money:  saying a kind word (or not saying an unkind word) or helping neighbours with shopping or gardening or lifts to the shops, hospitals or whatever else would make their life a little bit easier is enough.

My own problems are smaller.  Even though it’s two years since we changed to an automatic car, I’m still baffled by the gear lever and a friend confirmed last week it would baffle her too, which made me feel a lot better.  The gear lever has two basic ‘drive’ positions, one for normal driving and one for reversing.  You push forward for one and pull back for the other.  Guess whether you push the lever forward to move forward and back to move back, or vice versa … 

I thought I’d try the new online word-game ‘Wordle’.  It sounds fun if you have a couple of minutes to spare but it wanted me to log in through Facebook or something else so I gave up.  It does however resemble the old Mastermind game which involved finding what order your opponent had put some brightly coloured pegs in at their end of the board.  One Christmas, I played ‘psychic Mastermind’ with my brother and my first line was exactly right several times and very close rather more times.  Yes, of course it could have been coincidence, like when I was showing someone I could throw 1 to 6 on a dice, in order, with no false throws on the way.  I then threw the number they chose until I suddenly felt my link with the dice had disappeared, like a connection being clicked off in my mind, and my throws were random from then on,  Another coincidence of course, but still a bit weird.

More weird stuff last week as Boris Johnson’s reign lurches to an end:  Grant Shapps, one of his ministers, announced that ‘banal’ announcements on trains are to be stopped.  That’s just the sort of incisive decision-making our public transport systems need.  Actually, I used to love the announcements that said, just after the train had pulled out of the station, “The next stop will be …” which meant that, if wanted to get off before then, you were buggered.

Every so often, I come across examples of nominative determinism, my all-time favourites being Dorothy Kitchen who ran a tea room in Hertfordshire and David Bright who ran a cleaning company in London, but this week’s example came close:  the first Brit to catch the new strain of bird flu was Alan Gosling.

Depression and illegal drugs, current research and problems with decriminalisation

28 November 2021

People with “less severe” depression should, according to new NHS guidelines, be offered a “menu of treatment options”, such as cognitive therapy, exercise, mindfulness or meditation, before they’re given high-intensity psychological intervention or stuffing them full of the usual chemicals (though that’s not quite how they put the last bit).  What is noticeably missing is any extra funding to allow this to happen and, with the NHS at breaking point even before the new omicron* mutation of Covid spreads through the UK, this looks like another of those ‘all mouth and no trousers’ claims so beloved of the government.

(One of our former prime ministers, Gordon Brown, has pointed out that this latest mutation is the price for refusing to send vaccines to the developing world.  The UK has some 100 million vaccines that will pass their sell-by date in December while South Africa has only vaccinated 27% of their people overall, with the rate in its rural areas rarely reaching two figures, and neighbouring countries have even lower rates – a classic case of ‘dog in the manger’.)

About 17% (7.3m people) of UK adults were depressed even before the Covid pandemic increased its prevalence and severe depression is, of course, life-threatening because it increases the risk of suicide.

The medications commonly used to ‘treat’ depression have changed radically over the last 60 or so years but they still affect different people in different ways and there’s no guarantee that any particular drug will cure everybody, or even affect them in the same way (talking therapies are no more consistent in their effects).

So the effects of magic mushrooms and other ‘illegal’ substances on depression and other conditions such as PTSD and addiction are now being researched.  A team at Imperial College London has found that two doses of psilocybin mushrooms are effective in treating depression and, in America, the state of Oregon has legalised psilocybin. 

(Indigenous communities around the globe have used psychedelics in spiritual ceremonies and healing for millennia.  It just takes the superstitious west time to catch up.)

There is also some evidence that ketamine, already licensed for use as an anaesthetic, can ease depression that hasn’t responded to other forms of treatment and some scientists are hoping it may offer an alternative to existing treatments for chronic suicidal tendencies.

The medical use of cannabis was legalised in the UK in 2018 after studies showed it can benefit epileptic children and two rare but severe forms of childhood epilepsy.  Multiple Sclerosis sufferers have also claimed cannabis reduces the pain.

MDMA has shown promise if it’s combined with talking therapies when treating post-traumatic stress disorder but, so far, it’s only been used in research and isn’t available more widely. 

Many research projects around the world are also looking into the benefits of other psychedelic drugs and four separate reviews of progress have been published this year reporting dozens of studies offering compelling evidence for more research into psychedelic-assisted therapies.  It appears that psilocybin is a relatively safe drug and has shown very promising results, especially with depression.

In America, Oregon was the first state to decriminalize the possession of most drugs and to create a legal system for supervised psilocybin experiences;  closer to home, Netherlands also allows these.  California, Vermont and Hawaii are actively considering new legal frameworks for psychedelics and even Texas is directing state funding to research.

Over here, Deborah Frances-White, a comedian who was only recently diagnosed with ADHD, was nervous of trying a psychedelic drug because she relies on the speed at which her brain works to provide inspiration onstage.  However, a friend who’d been into the desert and done ayahuasca told her it had healed many of her traumatised wounds without slowing her down.

So Frances-White went to Amsterdam, where supervised hallucinogenic trips are legal, and spent four hours having her mind opened.  Afterwards she said “My brain was as fast as ever, but at some kind of new and unusual peace”.

As readers with good memories will know, I took LSD once when I was in my 30s and now (some years later …) it remains one of the formative experiences of my life, having opened doors to new ways of experiencing things.  A friend who took it at the same time says she feels the same.

Why are so many people prejudiced against illegal drugs but disregard how many people are dependent on two life-threatening and highly addictive legal drugs?  (Think Nigel Farage, cigarette in one hand, beer in the other.) I do find myself wondering if it’s just because they are illegal and not for any more convincing reason.

I’m not alone in believing that all illegal drugs should be decriminalised, quality-controlled and taxed so as to put drug dealers out of business and save public money trying to catch them.

But (there has to be a ‘but’) how this should be done would need a lot of consultation and deliberation, neither of which come naturally to our present government.

In November 2016, California legalised the recreational use of marijuana but (another ’but’) allowed individual cities and counties within the state to make their own local rules and prevent its legal sale.  The inevitable result is that you still can’t buy cannabis in much of the state and experts estimate that 80-90% of the market remains underground because legal outlets pay taxes and regulatory costs so they have to maintain links with the illegal, unlicensed market to make a profit.

This leads to other problems, including black-market dealers having a financial incentive to offer menus that include more profitable hard drugs, and to cut these with other similar-looking substances to make the drug go further.  Cocaine, for example, usually comes as a white crystalline substance but can be diluted with anything from bicarbonate of soda to bleach powder and what you buy in the streets may not be pure and may be poisonous.

(It is of course rather more difficult to ‘dilute’ cannabis buds but hash comes in many different forms, all extracted from the resin of cannabis plants.)

In the meantime, let’s not make judgements about things of which we wot not.  Why don’t we start by giving users and those who treat them a voice alongside pharmaceutical experts, neurologists and other specialists when deciding whether and which particular drugs should be legalised?

Having said that, I do wonder if Boris Johnson might be improved by a dose of something that would space him out a bit, though maybe that was his problem last Monday when he gave a glitteringly asinine speech (which included a 20 second pause – a long time if you’re trying to make an impact) which signally failed to impress the Confederation of British Industry, and they’re supposed to be on his side.

(Who else thinks countries should be run by people who don’t want the job and are keen to sort things out sensibly and as quickly as possible so they can get back to their normal lives?)

*          What happened to epsilon, zeta, eta, theta etc?

Good and hopeful news with lessons for us all, and the value of kindness

15 August 2021

With the big hairy misogynist Taliban men re-taking Afghanistan (I wonder why they’re so frightened of people – such as women – who have different views), I’m looking at the good news this week.

The recent report from on climate change the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change didn’t contain any great surprises about just how close we are to the point of no return.  All the world’s governments have accepted the views of the hundreds of the world’s top scientists who contributed to the report that the climate emergency has unequivocally been caused by human activities and is unequivocally already affecting the planet’s land, sea and air.

But, it says, there is still hope that, if we can get to net zero CO₂ in time, global warming should stop and might even go into reverse.  It’s a big IF, of course, and it’ll need international cooperation to cut emissions to zero before the 1.5^oC increase which will be reached by 2050.  This means halving emissions by 2034, which seems likely to need a complete change in the mindset of politicians and businesses worldwide.

If every one of us does what we can, however small, and if politicians start to look beyond their chances of re-election, and if fossil fuel industries start thinking of their grandchildren rather than spending every evening counting the bawbees in their piggy banks, it can be done.

We can each make small changes at home (such as using green energy tariffs, LED lighting, improving insulation, replacing gas boilers with electric heat pumps and so on) and if the motor industry can improve electricity-powered vehicles, especially HGVs and PSVs – and reduce their cost – we’re making a start. 

I wonder if anybody has done any sums that relate the number of vehicles using UK roads and their annual mileage to the time taken to recharge their batteries so they’ll know how many charging points will be needed and the maximum distance there will need to be between them.  You only need one battery to go flat in a queue for a charging point …

On house prices, there’s good news and bad news.  The good news is that you can buy an average house in Londonderry for 4.7 times the average annual salary there;  the bad news is that an average house in Winchester costs 14 times the average salary there.  (In London, you ‘only’ need 11 years’ salary.)  

The survey was done by Halifax, the UK’s biggest mortgage lender, and shows the north / south divide to be alive and kicking:  of the ten most expensive towns, Cambridge was the furthest north while, of the ten least expensive towns, six were in Scotland, one was in Northern Ireland and the other three were Carlisle, Bradford and Hull.  The lowest average salary was £27,730 (Hull) and the highest was £59,391 (St Albans).  There’s something very wrong somewhere.

How did I get here while doing good news? 

Let’s think about beavers.  Not only do we have two local colonies (in Dartmoor and East Devon) but beavers are becoming increasingly established in Scotland with a survey by NatureScot, the government conservation agency, estimating a wild population of 1,000 beavers in Scotland, and their river management skills have been proved to reduce flooding with minimal loss of farming land.

Advised by the indigenous Klamath Tribes, America’s Nature Conservancy (a not-for-profit body, roughly equivalent to a UK charity or social enterprise) has preserved the Sycan Marsh Preserve, a 30,000 acre wetland thick with ponderosa pines in Oregon.  When the recent Bootleg fire rampaged through the forests, it slowed right down when it reached the Preserve, giving firefighters time to get ahead of it and steer it away from a research station.

The Klamath Tribes have also been working with the US Forest Service to bring back their pre-colonial forest management techniques such as clearing out undergrowth and lighting small, controlled fires that rejuvenate the soil and make firebreaks that limit ‘natural’ fires.

America’s Senate has finally passed Joe Biden’s $1tn infrastructure bill with bi-partisan support which included the infamously inconsistent Mitch McConnell.  Its aim is to update the country’s power grid and to support greener policies such as expanding networks of charging points for electric vehicles.  And a group in the House of Representatives want to allocate even more money for elderly care, childcare and other social welfare policies so there’s hope there too.

Incidentally, did you see that a tobacco company is trying to take over a vaping specialist so it will not only produce highly addictive cigarettes but also the chemical infusions that are supposed to be so good at stopping people smoking.  Why does this make me think of the ouroboros?

A man from Leroy in Canada (wouldn’t it be great if his name was Leroy?) wanted an ice cream cake so – as you do – he hopped into his helicopter and flew to the nearest town to buy one.  He parked in the Dairy Queen’s car park and was apprehended as he proceeded in a southerly direction towards his vehicle in possession of the said comestible.  He appears in court in September charged with dangerous driv operation of an aircraft.

As Cop26 nears, the UK government has discovered that another problem caused by Brexit – the queues of lorries waiting to do the paperwork in Dover – can easily be solved by converting one lane of the main route to Dover into a lorry park, and they have now removed the original time limit on this arrangement so it can become permanent.  This will naturally increase costs for UK and EU transport companies which will make them look at alternative ways of getting goods across the Channel and they will obviously think of using trains which will dramatically reduce the contribution Kent currently makes to global warming.  Brilliant!  And I believe in fairies.

Meanwhile, a right-wing American broadcaster was urging his audience not to get the vaccination right up until June, when he got Covid and changed his mind.  He died on 4 August.

During the Olympics, Hansle Parchment, a Jamaican hurdler, went to the wrong place and a volunteer paid for him to get a taxi to the Olympic Stadium, where he won a gold medal.  Afterwards, he traced the volunteer to thank her and repay the taxi fare.  Jamaica’s minister for tourism, Edmund Bartlett, has offered her a free trip to Jamaica saying “We want to reciprocate the kindness shown to one of our own.” 

That’s what kindness does.  It brings rewards that can be far greater than the original act, not necessarily to the same person but if you get a warm feeling from a kindness that somebody’s done you, you’re more likely to be kind to others and, in time, kindness will spread through society like a pyramid, from a small point at the top right down to the bottom where it covers the entire earth.  That’s my vision anyway.  Will you tell the Taliban or shall I?

Somebody else’s vision was neatly illustrated by a women’s rights demonstration in America which featured a woman holding up a placard saying “Men against abortion?  Have a vasectomy”.  Perhaps those of us who have had one should be given a badge saying “I’ve been done”?

After the horror of the shootings in Plymouth last week, I asked my Conservative-voting friend if he thought that anybody who’d had a gun licence suspended until he’d taken an anger management course should never ever be allowed to own a gun again even after taking the course;  he said he thought only police and the military should be allowed guns.  This would also prevent people who get their kicks from going out with guns to blast the heads off gods’ creatures (which he said was “silly”), a benefit I hadn’t thought of, though I’ve always worried about the mental health of people who actually enjoy killing things.

A couple of weeks ago, I suggested that perhaps all drugs should be legalised, controlled and taxed.  After I’d written this, I realised that big pharma, who would have a vested interest in protecting their profits, would suddenly start using their international power to prevent the production and distribution of drugs that they hadn’t manufactured, thereby putting drug barons out of business overnight.  Go for it people!

Therapeutic uses of hallucinogens

1 August 2021

I told my children that I had nothing against drugs in principle but I’d prefer it if they didn’t take anything requiring a needle because of the risks of infection and because some of the nastier, more contaminated drugs were injected.  I also said that some street drugs are often cut with quite unpleasant substances to make them go further and increase the dealers’ profits.

And yes, I told them that some drugs were illegal but that the two drugs that killed by far the most people*, alcohol and nicotine, were legal, and that some of the drugs classified as class A are prescribed by doctors, so the classification of drugs as A, B or C is influenced more by politics than science.

In recent decades, cannabis was demoted from class B to class C but was later returned to class B and, as drugmeisters stayed ahead of the game, other stuff that had previously been freely available and sold as ‘legal highs’ was classified as illegal.

Cannabis itself had been used for centuries both for pleasure and as an analgesic but I only became aware of it when I discovered the American beat poets of the 1950s.  I also read Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception’ about his experiences of mescaline, a natural hallucinogen derived from various species of cactus which had been used ceremonially in Central and South America for millennia, whose effects are similar to those of LSD and psilocybin (derived from ‘magic mushrooms’).

LSD was first synthesised in 1938 and research into its medical applications took place into the 1960s, the most famous probably being those of the psychologist Dr Timothy Leary, but as life became more tight-arsed in the 1970s, it became more difficult to fund research. 

However, the older generation that disapproved back then has now died and been replaced by people who might even have taken it themselves in the past and many countries are now licensing and funding clinical research into the medicinal value of ‘illegal’ drugs in treating medical conditions, from using cannabis to ease the pain of multiple sclerosis to using LSD to treat mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, addiction and PTSD.

Having written regularly on our relationships with food and farming for the ‘New York Times’, Michael Pollan got interested in psychedelics and, in 2018, published ‘This is Your Mind on Plants’, a personal report on the renewed scientific interest in LSD and Ayahuasca (a psychoactive tea that originates from the Amazon region).

Pollan also reports on our relationships with three other plant-based substances – opium, mescaline and coffee – and, having tried each of them, he considers the way in which each has been adopted by different cultures and why humans need to use these consciousness-changing substances, and why some societies are so paranoid about them.

I suspect part of the answer to the last question is that pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in suppressing private experimentation while they make profits from mass-producing addictive opiate painkillers such as OxyContin and Tramadol which have been involved in many deaths and the creation of millions more addicts (addiction, of course, helps increase pharma’s profits at minimal extra cost).

I find it interesting that he included coffee in his trials.  I have fond memories of breakfasts in roadside cafés in France consisting of large bowls of strong, bitter coffee accompanied by Gauloises or Gitanes cigarettes containing caporal tobacco, a strong black tobacco which, with what would now be called ‘pre-loved’ garlic, helped to give Paris’s Métro stations their own distinctive odour.

Many years later, my secretary kept a percolator on the go and I’d drink about 8 cups during the day as a matter of course.  Then, one day, while I was waiting for another car to come through some roadworks towards me, somebody who’d just come out of the pub up the road drove into the back of my car at about 50.

I didn’t feel very well for several days so I took time off work and didn’t eat or drink anything but, when I returned to work, my first act was naturally to fire up the percolator.  After sinking the first cup, I realised that my hands were shaking and my mind was racing so I started to drink water instead and now only have a couple of coffees a month.

Pollan looks at coffee’s place in history and how the social and business gatherings that took place in coffee houses from the 16^th century onwards helped to create the financial world we now have to suffer (and, arguably, contributed to the creation of the first futures market – for Dutch tulips – and the ensuing crash in 1637).

We now also know that some plants give their pollinators a shot of caffeine to encourage their efforts …

In the late 19^th century, the drugs of choice in the west were opium and its close relation, morphine.  Opium ‘dens’ offered people places where they could smoke and dream and doctors would inject morphine to relieve the pain caused by everything from war wounds to menstrual cramps.  It wasn’t until the start of the 20^th century that people realised how addictive these opiates are and how their effect is rather like several large gin and tonics taken in quick succession:  they don’t actually cure anything but you no longer care.  (Remember how disapproving Dr Watson was of Sherlock Holmes’ habit, and that their creator was a doctor?)

One open-source publisher has collated, sieved and compared the results of various peer-reviewed research into LSD carried out in different countries and found a clear consensus that showed “the therapeutic potential of LSD to reduce psychiatric symptomology, mainly in alcoholism”.  It was also clear that LSD rarely showed any physiological toxicity and no organic or neurological damage was associated with its use, leading to the conclusion that LSD is actually one of the safest recreational drugs.

Some contraindications have been identified, including severe cardio-vascular disease, pregnancy, epilepsy and pre-existing tendencies to paranoia, which can lead to bad trips involving acute anxiety, and confusion that can lead to unpredictable behaviour in the absence of a ‘babysitter’ but, for healthy, not-pregnant people, it just tends to expand their horizons.

The effects of LSD generally include a distortion in our usual understanding of time, a loss of interest in personal identity, enhanced perception of shape, size, sounds and colour, synaesthesia and a general sense of the completeness and inter-relatedness of everything.

(Other studies have shown similar benefits from psilocybin and that brain scans after its use show reduced activity in parts of the brain that are believed to direct one’s attention, which is consistent with users’ subjective reports of a reduced sense of self and feelings of ‘oneness’ with everything.)

My only experience with LSD was one of the formative experiences of my life;  it made everything fascinating and hypnotically beautiful and left me with an abiding sense of peace and comfort, but certainly the passing of time became spasmodic and unpredictable and I remember being able to see time, blowing like smoke across a field.

My unscientific, subjective feeling was that it weakened the barriers between one’s conscious and subconscious memories and my enhanced peacefulness and recognition of beauty were because there’s nothing in my head I don’t know about;  but I could imagine that, if one had buried unpleasant events, they might exhume themselves and freak you out.

Other drugs can have similar effects and, of course, cocaine was in common use until early in the last century (hence the ‘coke’ in Coca Cola, which contained cocaine until as late as 1929).

Queen Victoria would take laudanum, an opiate-derived drug, and I remember my parents treating tummy upsets with a few drops of chlorodyne, a mixture of laudanum, cannabis and cocaine, which was delicious and worked wonders.  It’s inventor’s name, J Collis Browne, is still borne by a medicine that contains a small amount of morphine and still helps tummy upsets.

Because so many mind-altering substances are currently classified as illegal in most countries, multi-million pound growing, processing and distribution criminal industries have filled the gap, leading to efficient smuggling and ‘county lines’ networks that border controls and the police can’t realistically hope to stop, even if they occasionally succeed in closing down individual operations.

Just imagine if, like alcohol and tobacco, all such drugs were legalised, their manufacture and processing were subject to strict quality controls and they were heavily taxed and freely available.  It would free up a lot of police time to follow the government’s latest – and utterly pointless – decision to increase SASs to take a few more knives off the street, the government would gather the taxes and big pharma would have a field day.

*          Figures just released for Scotland show another increase in annual drug-related deaths to more than 1,300, around one in every 50 deaths;  according to the Scottish Public Health Observatory, deaths from alcohol- and tobacco-related conditions exceeded 10,000 in 2019 (pre-Covid) and accounted for more than one in every six deaths (18% of all deaths).