A Week In Washington

In the US, Government keeps its hands off businesses for the most part and lets them get on with it. It is a big part of what makes the USA successful.

And it is businesses that erected social media, and businesses and not the Government that have banned Trump et al.

I guess Twitter, Google, and Facebook were in part outraged. And I am sure that in part they thought it was a wise move to ban Trump in order to avoid risking politicians questioning their claim that they are platforms and not publishers of content.

The story has not played out yet, and white supremacy may be on its last legs, or not. The day of the inauguration will go some way to answering that. So with the knowledge that things could still change dramatically, I think what happened in Washington shows the resilience of American democracy. In some countries the news blackout would have been total and people would have been picked off the street and ‘disappeared’. So all in all, a good week for the decent majority.

Iran And Afghanistan In The Last Days Of The Trump Administration

Reported in The Week in its issue of 28 November 2020 is this

President Trump’s foreign policy doctrine — a mixture of isolationism and occasional violent interventions — has never made much sense, said Max Boot in The Washington Post. And it’s becoming no more coherent in the dying days of his administration. Last week, Trump reportedly asked senior advisers about options for attacking Iran’s main nuclear site at Natanz. Yet at the same time, he also ordered the return of more than half the US troops in Afghanistan, reducing their number from 4,500 to 2,500. The order left analysts “mystified”, said Frog Kaplan on Slate.

President Trump’s behaviour is not ‘mystifying’ if you link Iran and Afghanistan by their geography. If the US were to hit Iran’s nuclear facilities, then what about the thousands of US troops in Afghanistan, a country that is right next door on the eastern border of Iran? So which way does the wind blow?

It would make a lot of sense to get those troops out of Afghanistan before attacking Iran. Of course, if there was a cloud of radioactivity that spread, he would have to put up with international complaints about injuries to the innocent civilian population in Iran and Afghanistan. With troops safe, he could argue that he saved the world from a greater threat of a nuclear Iran. But to add injury to American troops to that mix would seal his fate.

Birds and Lead Shot

How many pheasants and partridges do you think are shot in the UK every year? The number might surprise you.

Animal Aid says that every year, around sixty million pheasants and partridges are bred to be shot.

WildJustice says that 43 million pheasants and 9 million Red-legged partridges are raised and released to be shot.

The pheasant shooting season in Great Britain runs from the 1st October – 1st February, and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 1st February.

The pheasant shooting season in Northern Ireland runs from the 1st October – 31st January and the partridge shooting season runs from the 1st September – 31st January.

Let’s approximate and say there are equal numbers shot in Britain and Ireland. The numbers are probably not the same, but let’s split the difference and say the season overall runs from 15 September to 31 January – that’s 138 days.

Let’s say that all the birds raised are shot and that an equal number are shot each day during the season – so that’s 430,000 birds shot per day.

Is that number accurate? Let’s see approach it from another direction, starting with how many people shoot pheasants.

The Game Shooting Census and Shoot Owner Census is run by GunsOnPegs and Strutt & Parker. For their report in 2018 they surveyed 652 shoot across the UK. From that they extrapolated to the total number of shoots and arrived at 9,000 shoots and 1,724 birds shot per shoot. So they did it for us and it’s an easy calculation:

Fifteen-and-a-half million birds shot each year during the 138 days of the shooting season.

Isn’t that incredible? People paying to line up and have pheasants and partridges herded towards them, and then shooting them when the birds take the air. I mean, if you could hear all the shoots over the UK, the sound of guns must be almost continuous for 138 days.

Lead Shot

Moving on from the shooting, let’s look at the amount of lead shot that is used.

Let’s suppose that every shot bags a bird. It’s unlikely, but let’s go with that.

GunsOnPegs quotes the recommendations from ElyHawk cartridge maker. For a 12 bore shotgun they recommend the 30g No.6 and the 32g No.5.

A pellet of No.6 weighs 1.6 g. So in 30g there are 18 or 19 pellets. Let’s say 18. A pellet of No.7 weighs 1.28g. So in 32g there are 25 pellets.

Let’s assume that the shooters use 30g No. 6 and 32g No. 7 equally, and split the difference between 18.5 and 25, and say 22.

So with 15,500,000 birds, that’s 341 million pellets of lead, some of which land up in the pheasants and partridges and a lot of it that ends up on the ground.

When lead comes in contact with moist air it becomes reactive. And especially so when the soil is acidic, as most farmland soil is. And even a moment’s thought will show the danger, because lead is forbidden to be used in water pipes.

Each year, more lead lies on the ground to be absorbed into the ground and the ground water, to be absorbed by birds, animals, and humans.

Lead is a cumulative poison that affects the neurological system. Children absorb a larger amount of lead per unit body weight and are more susceptible to lead poisoning than adults. Lead causes a lower IQ, behavioural changes and concentration disorders

Under A Spreading Chestnut Tree

Ah, under a spreading chestnut-tree. The line comes from asong that goes back centuries and was popular in England in the days of music hall. If I recall correctly from old clips, there was a saucy innuendo in the way the words were delivered.

And ‘under a spreading chestnut-tree’ is also the opening line of a poem, The Village Blacksmith by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Under a spreading chestnut-tree
⁠ The village smithy stands;
The smith, a mighty man is he,
With large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms
Are strong as iron bands

It’s not the most etherial of openings. The words and the rhyming are pretty obvious and, to my mind, clunky. But then later in the poem there is this, the penultimate verse.

Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing,
Onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin,
     Each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done,
     Has earned a night’s repose.

Of course, I don’t know how much the average village blacksmith valued or respected his work. What was life like for a person like that in the 1800s in Longfellow’s day? Perhaps the blacksmith went home each day and collapsed exhausted and hated everything about his life.

Or perhaps he learned a lot about the materials he worked with, and grew to love the things he discovered in the materials and the challenge of working with them.

Perhaps when he was young he contemplated his future and tried to imagine how he was going to become successful. Perhaps he chose a profession where he had the best chance of acquiring the success he wanted. 

One could see how he would attach himself to anything that furthered that goal. He would turn like a weathervane, attracted to the next chance to advance.

If, on the other hand, he thought of what inspired him and of the work he wanted to accomplish, then the focus would be on the work. That is something honest and worthwhile that he could feel good about. He would not be divorced from the world. Rather he would be attached to it and feel good as a servant of it.

[Note: For he and him read also she and her.]