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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I find it deeply therapeutic to begin the day by transferring a Medium story over here (and messing about with it). It sets me up nicely for the hours of real work. The trouble is they are more than likely to be versions of stories here that got transferred there. Also you run out of stories and start hunting round for more and more desperate rationales, of which this is the latest.
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“Another skylark, madam?” December 10, 2023
| Ambelopoulia is a controversial dish of grilled, fried, pickled or boiled songbirds Wikipedia |
Controversial because two million migratory songbirds using Cyprus as a stopover between Europe and Africa get slaughtered every year to satisfy the demand.
This is illegal under EU laws but every country is offered an exemption ‘for folk cruelty’ when they apply for membership (we got one for fox-hunting). Cyprus did not apply for an exemption for song-bird hunting — presumably for PR reasons — but the practice was made illegal under domestic legislation.
This has had only a limited effect because hunting and ambelopoulia are national passions in Cyprus, vide this exchange heard on a BBC Radio 4 environmental programme
BBC environmentalist: Does the Cyprus government have any intention of doing anything about the ambelopoulia trade?
Minister for Wildlife: No.
BBC environmentalist: Would this have anything to do with all those trophies of animal heads I can see on the wall behind you?
Minister for Wildlife: We do try but it’s a question of priorities.
Our BBC reporter informed us mournfully that it wasn’t too bad when the Cypriots used branches with glue to trap the birds but nowadays ‘mist nets’ are employed on a lavish scale and it has become a zillion dollar industry. If you want to have a go yourself
* erect a mist net in a likely spot
* disentangle any songbird caught
* bite it in the neck
* throw it in a bucket
* until you have enough for a nice bowl of ambelopoulia.
We weren’t told precisely what happens to the great many non-migratory, non-songbirds that get caught up in the nets but we were assured that, on Cyprus, the peewits and the cuckoos no longer peewit and cuckoo with their old gay abandon.
| But the BBC wouldn't be there if there wasn't a British angle... |
Many of the largest mist nets, the ones used year after year, are on British sovereign bases’ land because Cypriot environmentalists find it difficult to get access so they can blow the whistle. The British have problems of their own. “Mist nets are the devil of a job to see, even for trained pilots." “Look, wing commander, over there. Those men with buckets.”
Nor can much be done about Turkish Cyprus where they catch songbirds with parallel enthusiasm but only for the export ambelopoulia trade. You try killing a robin using halal methods. It’s not easy.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I always had difficulty working out a persona on Medium but settled eventually on Chief Jeremiah
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Is it to be Hell or the Handbasket? May 10, 2023
Let’s not kid ourselves. We’re not going to make it. Things are getting worse faster than we anticipated, the solutions are being applied slower than we had hoped. Time, maybe, for a change of strategy.
That may not be possible. Proposing such a thing would be swamped by accusations of climate change-denying (or worse) long before the proposals ever got a hearing.
Technically this is called ‘careful ignoral’, a sub-type of cognitive dissonance. Human beings much prefer not solving a problem with a familiar solution than re-ordering their brain circuitry in a search for the correct one. We prefer being burnt at the stake than recanting the beliefs that got us there.
As an applied epistemologist, I don’t have beliefs so I don’t suffer from this particular problem. Though I do suffer from the problem that nobody ever listens to applied epistemologists. That never stops us so here’s your way ahead.
For every solution there has to be a question.
| “Is global warming the problem and is the greenhouse effect causing the global warming?” |
Two questions for the price of one. There is a fair possibility — I cannot say more than that because nobody can — that the answers are (a) no and (b) no.
It is certainly the case that global warming has accompanied all the other weather changes that are happening so fast and so disastrously. There is the obvious — but never examined — possibility that global warming is one of the weather changes rather than the cause of the others.
| If so, we must look for the underlying reason for all of them. |
Otherwise we may end up solving the global warming problem — increasingly likely now that green energy is comparable in price to fossil fuel energy — but still in the mess. And another couple of decades will have ticked by.
That underlying reason is sort of known, sort of not known. A classic symptom of ‘careful ignoral’. In a nutshell, it’s the disappearing rain forests. In a wider carapace, it’s the disappearing everything. But the reason for the careful ignoral is that it is seldom a case of
| ‘Oh, we’ve done x, it’s caused y, we’d better stop doing x.’ |
That wouldn’t be ignored and would be fixed in a day. What happens in practice is one bunch of people do x but it is a different bunch of people that get y. To give a small example:
(a) the communists are ousted from power in Mongolia
(b) the browsing animals of the Mongolian steppe get out of control
(c) the Mongolian steppe turns into a near-Mongolian desert
(d) it is no longer sending water vapour into the west-bound jet stream
(e) it stops raining in California.
Californians don’t accept this because
(a) they believe they get their rain from the Pacific Ocean
(b) they therefore prefer to blame El Niño for their constant droughts
(c) they ignore the fact that El Niño has always been there
(d) so it cannot be the cause of a new phenomenon
(e) Californians won’t blame Mongolian herdsmen, not in a million years.
Unless they spend an hour watching the Applied Epistemology Library’s YouTube The Distribution of Deserts https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5uNQIMcKNTM
(f) But they won’t do that in a million years.
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Ishmael
In: Toronto
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Have you seen my latest posts on Hyperborea?
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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I am girding my loins to dive in.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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This earned me a certain amount of notoriety and remained a steady seller throughout my Medium career
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My To-Do List for Saving the World May 15, 2023
(in no particular order)
1. Outlaw recycling
2. Put all waste in landfill
3. Ban civil jet aircraft
4. Re-open, re-build, repair all existing nuclear power plants
5. Create a World Maritime Agency with a vast fleet of warships
6. End all sanctions
7. Watch my YouTube on Desertification and the Hydrological Cycle
Notes
1. Recycling has achieved a roughly 12% success rate, much the same as when it started several decades ago. It is perfectly clear that no matter what we do with the detritus of civilised living, recycling is not it. But why abolish this modest contribution? Because (a) it has meant in practice offloading the worst of it onto poor countries who in turn offload it into the environment (b) it has provided an alibi for everyone who wants ‘to make a contribution’ that they are doing so. Just stop recycling and force us all to confront the problem effectively. The small amount of useful recycling, i.e. not just producing rubber and plastic crumbs, can be left to commercial scrap metal merchants as has been done ever since the birth of civilised living.
2. Every time we come up with some solution or other to the waste problem — e.g. incineration, plastics that break down rapidly — we subsequently discover we have produced an even bigger problem — e.g. nasty particles in the atmosphere, nasty sherds in the ocean. Do what we do with radioactive waste, bury it with great care until we actually know what we’re doing.
3. We don’t exactly know what we’re doing to the upper atmosphere, nor what a changing upper atmosphere is doing to us, but until we do know a good start would be to stop injecting vast quantities of burnt aviation kerosene directly into it. A return to propeller-driven aircraft would part-solve this and part-solve a good many other problems connected to airmiles.
4. Nuclear power is presently the best method of generating base-load electricity. We may (or may not) decide that building new nuclear power stations is the way ahead, but using existing ones to their uttermost is not just sensible it is de rigueur.
5. It is obvious that the oceans are in trouble. It is also obvious that we don’t have the political tools to do anything about it since, while everyone has an interest in saving the ocean, everyone has an interest in exploiting their own bit of ocean or exploiting the common ocean. We pretty much know what needs doing, but only the supra-authority of a World Navy will force us to do it.
6. Humankind is addicted to conflict and there’s nothing to be done about that short of abolishing humankind. However, there are ways and means to ensure conflict is limited to A bashes B until B does what A wants it to, without upsetting wider applecarts. And right now we need all the applecarts to be going in roughly the same direction, even the ones you happen to believe are being driven by particularly evil applecart drivers. Sanctions have proved to be ineffective but pernicious, destabilising for the sanctioners but dangerously isolating for the sanctioned. Yet everyone loves them because they are cheap and give the illusion that ‘something is being done’. Sanctions should be treated like chemical, biological and nuclear weapons.
7. The Distribution of Deserts https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=5uNQIMcKNTM. You should ignore the limited production values — applied epistemologists don’t get paid for their work. You should, however, pay special attention to the bits that prompt the thought, “That can’t be true, I learned all about it in school.” That’s the kind of thing applied epistemologists are not paid to tell you about.
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Mick Harper
Site Admin
In: London
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One of the more difficult problems to solve is that people confuse amenity with saving the planet. This was me trying to draw this to people's attention. Rather confusedly, reading it now, but this was early days.
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Britain’s answer to the sewage problem. The rivers. May 22, 2023
The big political issue in Britain at the moment is our dirty rivers. I don’t mean there’s a Clean Rivers party and a Dirty Rivers party, I mean there’s a ‘You Clean ’em Up’ party and a ‘No, You Clean ’em Up’ party.
This is odd because one thing all rivers in Britain have in common is that they are common. They don’t belong to anyone, they belong to everyone. It is the birthright of every free-born Briton to make them dirty, it is the job of every tax-borne Briton to clean them up. So what are our would-be governors saying? Let’s listen in:
“Nationalise the water companies,” say the left.
“That will cost an arm and a leg. We won’t have anything left in the kitty to clean up the rivers,” say the right.
“We could raise taxes,” says left and right.
“Raising taxes is no way to win an election,” agrees left and right.
“We’ll get the fat cat water companies to pay,” resumes the left. “They’ve been making billions in profits and it all goes abroad, they’re owned by sovereign wealth funds and whatnot.”
“You just added up all the water companies’ profits made over the last twenty years selling water to, and taking sewage from, sixty million customers,” rejoins the right. “It works out less than one per cent on turnover. Take away that profit and the water companies will go bust.”
“And we can nationalise them for a song,” says the left.
And so on and so forth. Back and forth. In politics everyone’s got a solution that requires someone else picking up the tab. What will happen, eventually, is they will attach a precept on every water bill and nobody will notice they’ve picked up the tab.
| And not a single tax was raised! |
They did it with electricity bills to get the power companies to go green. But there is a difference. Green energy is to do with saving the planet and we are happy(ish) to pay the difference. We’re all in it together. Cleaning up the rivers will do nothing for saving the planet so we might be unhappy(ish) paying the difference because we’re not necessarily all in it together. Let’s listen instead to what that watery master, M J Harper, has to say on the subject.
| There’s no such thing as a clean river. |
In any land occupied by tax-paying human beings you can have any sort of river you want — from limpid trout stream to fire hazard — but you can’t have clean rivers. Only cleaner rivers. What everyone is ignoring is one simple fact
| We don’t need rivers at all. |
The water we use doesn’t come from rivers, it comes from rainfall either direct or recycled and stored in reservoirs. True, the reservoirs are topped up from rivers but only way upstream where the water is so clean we can practically drink the stuff. This needs no direct intervention from the likes of us, it is clean by nature and available in God-given abundance, especially here in God’s own country. Other than that
| Rivers are just glorified sewers. |
They take all the rainfall that hasn’t been intercepted by plants or us and they dump it into the sea. That’s what sewers do as well, so what’s the difference, rivers vis à vis sewers?
| We don’t demand clean sewers, we do demand clean rivers. |
Sometimes. Some of us. In some places. For instance, here in London, we didn’t want the Thames stinking up the place, so we built the world’s first modern sewer system and got rid of the smell. That sufficed for a hundred years, then somebody wanted fish or cormorants or some damn thing so we cleaned up the Thames a bit more and got the country to pay for it. “Look, Madge, over there, it’s a cormorant.”
The word was out. Pandora’s box was open for business. Anyone can have the river of their dreams and they won’t have to pay for it
As long as they have the political muscle of course. Who has and who hasn’t is played out on our telly screens all the time:
* Large people in comfortable swimwear living in Godawful-on-Trent demanding they be able to ‘wild swim’ any time they feel the urge. (What’s wrong with the local swimming baths, mine’s pretty wild?)
* Medium-sized people in body-hugging swimwear demanding clean beaches. (What’s wrong with abroad?)
* Anglers complaining about the lack of fish. (What’s wrong with you, sticking hooks into the mouths of sentient creatures?)
* Birdwatchers complaining about the lack of nymphs. (You’ll have to ask them what that’s all about.)
* Vaguely familiar people in waders holding up phials of greyish water saying, “The pH is off the scale.” (You’ll have ask their agent.)
Because that’s what it’s really all about. Rivers are naturally clean unless water companies discharge raw sewage into them and they are allowed to do this by ‘special licence in an emergency’. In other word whenever it is raining so hard the sewage treatment works would overflow if they didn’t. Nobody wants an overflow at the other end, in the en suite. “Look, Madge, shit.”
In Britain, water companies are capitalist enterprises, black in tooth and claw, so of course they use this emergency power to skimp on treatment works and discharge raw sewage into our rivers every chance they get. These emergencies happen tens of thousands of times a year and it’s pointed out tens of thousand of times a year that they shouldn’t:
“It ought not to be allowed.”
“Set up a standing committee.”
“Heads will roll.”
“They’ll get taken into public ownership if they don’t look out.”
“I’m voting Lib Dem next time, you see if I don’t.”
“I’m voting Green, that’ll show ‘em.”
“It’s a scandal any way you look at it.”
No, it isn’t. If it is happening tens of thousands of times a year, it is not a scandal, it is what philosophers call the 'state of nature'. The default position. All that talk of ‘licencing’ and ‘emergencies’ is sheer persiflage.
* The companies don’t bother applying for them any more
* The government doesn’t prosecute them for not applying
* The Regulator, Ofwat (and you may well ask), will make regulation noises.
* Somebody will pay a fine — the water companies take it in turns
* Everyone will go back to being supplied with cheap water, having their sewage removed without any fuss, not having their taxes raised and bellyaching about dirty rivers.
So let’s have a new political party that says in its manifesto: We are going to send a questionnaire to every taxpayer:
1. In the box provided, write the number of pounds you are prepared to pay per annum for a clean up the rivers blitz.
2. In the box provided, indicate whether you want the British government or a consortium of foreign governments in charge of the clean-up blitz.
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