George Orwell on freedom of the press

Apparently it was the proposed prefaceto ‘Animal Fam’ The freedom of the press

How big is the middle class?

“The world is on the brink of a historic milestone: By 2020, more than half of the world’s population will be “middle class,” according to Brookings Institution scholar Homi Kharas.

Kharas defines the middle class as people who have enough money to cover basics needs, such as food, clothing and shelter, and still have enough left over for a few luxuries, such as fancy food, a television, a motorbike, home improvements or higher education.”

according to a new report.

 This may explain why activists like Rahul Banerjee feel frustrated.

Rahul Banerjee gets some rare seeds

Pearl Diving in Bharia Land  “Subhadra remembered that many years ago when our friend Jacob Nellithanam had been running a campaign to preserve indigenous seeds, he had brought a variety of Bajra that had long whiskers on its seeds when on the plant that prevented the birds from eating it. She said that we should get that variety as only then would we be able to revive Bajra cultivation in Pandutalav. So began our search for the whiskered pearl!”

Carl Zimmer on the latest hybrid find

 A Blended Family: Her Mother Was Neanderthal, Her Father Something Else Entirely 

Longest train ride through India

From Dibrugarh in Assam to Kanniakumari Early this year, I took this train from Visakhapatnam to Ongole. It came seven and half hours late. But the waiting room was clean and nice, the ladies were constantly cleaning it and making decorations with ‘muggulu’ in front. There were a constant stream of transit passengers. I did not mind.

Have bees solved the travelling salesman problem?

Not really. Apiological: mathematical speculations about bees (Part 3: Travelling Salesman) 

Kohli’s new trick

Kohli’s magic trick is his suppression of ego says Mark Nicholas 

Pratap Bhanu Mehta is not amused

 The age of cretinism self recommending. It is subtitled ‘India’s reactionary modernism’.
‘.

Excerpt from new book on the tangled genetic tree

By David Quammen seems better than the review in NYTimes.

A religion for our times?

Spaghetti injunction: Pastafarianism is not a religion, Dutch court rules 

Review of a recent book by Noah Harari

21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Noah Harari review – a guru for our times? “The best reason not to throw this book out of the window is that, occasionally, Harari writes a paragraph that is genuinely mind-expanding.”

Women in Neuroendocrinology

How women came to dominate in Neuroendocrinology by Nicole Baran. Some chapters from this book seem available online. 

Death of a Marxist

on the Egyptian Marxist Samir Aminby Vijay Prashad

David Brin on the Neolithic bottleneck

In Bio-Scientific problems and quandaries David Brin writes among other things:
“But are we still evolving? Between 9000 and 7000 years ago, there appears to have been a plummet in genetic diversity among human males, in what’s called the ‘Neolithic bottleneck.’ An undergrad is now credited with coming up with an explanation. Heck the surficial hypothesis is obvious – that across that time, combative males prevented other males from breeding. But apparently this study's methodology for using available data to exclude other hypotheses was very clever.  “Zeng surmised that intense warfare between patrilineal clans killed off so many men, only one was left for every 17 women.”

This should come as no surprise. Historical accounts show numerous societies doing this, even in historical times. Polynesia, for example, and the Mayan states. All of the adult males in a valley or on an island might be wiped out and replaced by the invaders who were likely related. (Indeed, I wonder that the authors of this study haven't zeroed in on those more recent episodes.) Nearly all of us are descended from the harems of the fierce men who won these struggles... helping to explain the "quirks" or unpleasant proclivities we see in many modern males, traits that are unsuitable for civilized living. Indeed, if this cycle were allowed to continue, it might help to explain the “Fermi Paradox” of why we don’t see high, alien civilizations.”

From Vinod Mehra’s memoirs

Atal Bihari Vajpayee and his Achilles heel: Excerpts from Vinod Mehta’s memoirs 

Interview with Jean Dreze

‘Hindutva Is Better Described as a Movement of the Oppressive Minority’: Jean Dreze 

Review of THE TANGLED TREE A Radical New History of Life By David Quammen In NYTimes. And an excerptfrom the book. Despite what the review says, two women scientists are mentioned in the book “Meanwhile, the corn geneticist Barbara McClintock, discovering genes that bounce from one point to another on the chromosomes of her favorite plant, worked with very little support or recognition through the prime years of her career—and then accepted a Nobel Prize at age eighty-one.

Lynn Margul is, a Chicago-educated microbiologist unique in almost every way, shared at least one thing with McClintock: the frustrations BLUES1P_Quammen_TangledTree_KB.indd 13 6/21/18 4:06 PM xiv Three Surprises: An Introduction of being dismissed by some colleagues as an eccentric and obdurate woman. In Margulis’s case, it was for reviving an old idea that had long been considered wacky: endosymbiosis. What she meant by the term was, roughly, the cooperative integration of living creatures within living creatures. That is, not just tiny creatures within the bellies or noses of big creatures, but cells within cells. More specifically, Margulis argued that the cells constituting every creature in the more complex divisions of life—every human, every animal, every plant, every fungus—are chimerical things, assembled with captured bacteria inside nonbacterial receptacles. Those particular bacteria, over vast stretches of time, have become transmogrified into cellular organs. Imagine an oyster, transplanted into a cow, that becomes a functional bovine kidney. This seemed crazy when Margulis proposed it in 1967. But she was right about the matter, mostly.”

Links, 12, August 2018

  Why do many friendships dissolve as we age?
Laziness helped to lead extinction of Homo erectus
A British photographer captures the Indian phenomenon of men non-romantically holding hands
On belief superiority “Finally and more promisingly, the researchers found some evidence that belief superiority can be dented by feedback. If participants were told that people with beliefs like theirs tended to score poorly on topic knowledge, or if they were directly told that their score on the topic knowledge quiz was low, this not only reduced their belief superiority, it also caused them to seek out the kind of challenging information they had previously neglected in the headlines task (though the evidence for this behavioural effect was mixed).”
Spatial navigation countrywise  “While age most strongly correlated with navigational performance, researchers also found that country wealth, as measured by GDP (gross domestic product), correlated with performance. The researchers say this relationship may be due to associations with education standards, health and ability to travel. They focused on GDP for this analysis as it was a standard metric available for every country, but as part of the ongoing research project they will follow up with further comparisons of other factors.....Comparing the country-level results to the World Economic Forum's Gender Gap Index, the researchers found a correlation between country-wide gender inequality and a larger male advantage in spatial navigation ability. The gender gap in game performance was also smaller in countries with greater economic wealth.”

Michael Hudson on whether Marx was right or wrong

Fromthree years ago The Paradox of Financialized Industrialization
“All three kinds of crisis that Marx described are occurring. But the West is now in a chronic depression – what has been called Debt Deflation. Instead of banking being industrialized as Marx expected, industry is being financialized. Instead of democracy freeing economies from land rent, natural resource rent and monopoly rent, the rentiers have fought back and taken control of Western governments, legal systems and tax policy. The result is that we are seeing a lapse back to the pre-capitalist problems that Marx described in Volumes II and III of Capital and Theories of Surplus Value.
....

Bertell follows Marx in focusing on the production sector: hiring labor to produce products, but trying to get as much markup as possible – while underselling rivals. This is Marx’s great contribution to the analysis of capitalism and its mode of production – employing wage labor at a profit. I agree with this analysis.

However, my focus is on the causes of today’s crisis that are independent and autonomous from production: rentier claims for economic rent, for income without work – “empty” pricing without value. This focus on rent and interest is where I differ from that of Ollman, and also of course from that of Roemer. Any model of the crisis must tie together finance, real estate (and other rent-seeking) as well as industry and employment.

.....

In retrospect, Marx was too optimistic about the future of industrial capitalism. As noted above, he viewed its historical mission as being to free society from rent and usurious interest. Today’s financial system has generated an overgrowth of credit, while high rents are pricing American labor out of world markets. Wages are stagnating, while the One Percent have monopolized the growth in wealth and income since 1980 – and are not investing in new means of production. So we still have the Volume II and III problems, not just a Volume I problem.“

I wonder whether Michael Hudson is ignoring the reach of technology and our capacity for overproduction which made this inevitable.

An easy method for changing habits?

A Stanford University psychologist’s elegant three-step method for creating new habits via Lambert Strether at Naked Capitalism. I think that I already stumbled upon this in a small way and have been using Fitbit to manage my walks. More at the following which I have not read. https://www.tinyhabits.com