A young man has stabbed his grandmother to death in England and now faces trial. The trial is to decide whether he committed murder or manslaughter. That he killed her is not in doubt.
According to the Daily Mail, the man’s ‘addiction’ to cannabis – a usage quoted at a mere two joints daily – may be to blame. This is the grounds of his defence case, incidentally.
Buried in the article are further details that the man was also taking prescription medications – specifically Elvanse for Attention Deficit Disorder and Xanax for depression. It is reported that his mood had changed significantly in the months prior to the killing, and that his family had grown concerned about his taking both cannabis and these prescribed medicines.
I don’t wish to prejudice this particular case so instead I will speak generically. Elvanse is an amphetamine stimulant. Xanax is a Benzodiazepine sedative. Anyone taking both is having their moods artificially heightened and lowered simultaneously.
Yes, you read that correctly. One of the side effects of a medication commonly prescribed for depression actually causes further depression. Furthermore, both drugs can cause dependence. That is, it is possible to become addicted to them. By contrast, there is no evidence that it is possible to become physiologically addicted to cannabis, though psychological dependence is widely reported.
In the 1970s, heavy sedatives like Mogadon were commonly prescribed to housewives who experienced depression or anxiety. For many of these women, this was a sentence to decades of zombification, their moods and personalities entirely suppressed under a cosh of sedation.
We now recognise that in many instances, what they were actually suffering from was social isolation, attempting to raise small children alone in dormitory suburbs without sufficient social connections and supports.
I wonder whether there might be similar societally caused reasons underpinning the vast upswing in depression, anxiety disorders and issues like ADHD among the younger generations today?
It may well be that such medications are helpful in some instances. But in many cases, people are prescribed via a ‘throwing darts at the wall’ method, where they are placed on one regimen for six months, and then if it doesn’t work, the dosage is varied or a slightly different medication offered in replacement.
As a result, they can go years without seeing their symptoms alleviate, especially as the periods of tailoring up and down on these drugs can be especially disconcerting and debilitating. Furthermore, as in the instance of the two medications mentioned, dependency issues can develop.
In such circumstances, it is hardly surprising that some young people attempt to self-medicate, especially with widely available recreational substances like cannabis. And obviously cannabis is not a good idea for a still-developing young mind, especially since it appears to catalyse the likelihood of schizophrenia and like conditions among those with genetic predispositions.
Furthermore, the THC content of cannabis has been rising for decades. The ditchweed smoked at Woodstock bears almost no resemblance to the high-octane skunk now sold in California, Amsterdam and elsewhere. When the UK newspaper the Independent reported on the dangers of skunk in 2008, reported THC content was up to 14% Nowadays, it can be as high as 25%
I have no easy answers here, but I am beginning to wonder whether future decades will look back on this era and the widespread prescription of amphetamines and barbiturates to young people, including children, with similar horror as we now look back on the decades of mothers lost in a haze of ‘mommy’s little helpers’.
The last two thousand years or so (CE) make up only c. 1% of human history, but around half of all people ever have lived during that period, and one in 12 or 13 of all people ever are currently alive today.
For the record, just before humans began to farm and settle in urban environments, around 9,000 years ago, there were only around 20 million people on the entire planet. That’s the population of Cairo today.
At the time of Christ, 2,000 years ago, there was between 90 and 200 million humans on Earth. In other words, between the population of today’s Congo and today’s Nigeria.
China’s population today is around 1.48 billion. That was the population of the entire planet around 1875 CE.
When I was born, there were fewer than half the number of people alive today. Welcome to infinite growth on a finite planet. We’re getting to the point where the consequences are becoming inescapable.
Elon Musk, who I must remind you is the richest man on the planet, could afford to buy a top-notch £300k family home every day for the next two millennia.
However, he chooses not to do so. Which in one sense is wise. Who needs so many houses anyway? Other than maybe Elton John? But Elon doesn’t even have ONE house, which you have to admit is somewhat unusual for the billionaire class.
Can I crash on your couch tonight, man?
Apparently he couch surfs rather than purchase a home in the Bay area, where Tesla is based. He claims to rent a prefab from his own SpaceX firm in Texas, which I am entirely prepared to believe, because he’s definitely eccentric.
Since earning $58,000 currently would put you in the top one per cent of incomes on Earth, and since financial advisors recommend spending no more than 10% on discretionary expenditure, I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Elon is talking a billionaire-sized amount of bollocks.
Even for the top 1% of earners, who should not be spending more than $5,800 annually on discretionary purchases like trips to space, that’s nearly TWO DECADES of saving.
It’s also worth adding that, if you DO happen to be fortunate enough to earn $58k, or the UK equivalent which is £44,400 at today’s exchange rate, you’d only be able to borrow about £144,300, so you’d need one helluva deposit to afford even the average UK house, which was priced at £274,000 in January 2022.
In other words, like I’ve been saying since the days of Occupy, it’s not actually the 1% who are the problem. Believe it or not, the 1% are actually now middle class too. It’s the 0.1% who are the problem. In fact, we could probably go further again.
I’d be quite gratified if Mr “I don’t own a home!” quietened down a tad about how allegedly cheap his space tours are and instead started buying some other people some houses, even if he doesn’t fancy one for himself.
We don’t all have billionaire pals who let us crash on their couches, after all.
From time to time, I (mis)translate poems from languages which I don’t speak, or at least, which I don’t speak well. I don’t claim that there’s any great artistic merit in this, but I enjoy doing it and there is some degree of effort, I promise. Anyhow, here’s the latest one.
Patrizia Cavalli is an Italian poet whose selected poems translates approximately as My Poems Won’t Change the World. I suspect neither will this (mis)translation. Nevertheless, her modesty is less appropriate than mine. Her poems are excellent and should be read by everyone.
So, what did they find? A whole bunch of stuff. They tested for 870 human traits in total, categorised in terms of the physical, the medical, the neurological, the behavioural and so on.
They cross-referenced their findings from contemporary European genomes against historical genomes of homo sapiens, including those from pre-neolithic hunter gatherers, early neolithic hunter gatherers, and near eastern farmers from the dawn of civilisation.
The study is dense, and it certainly helps if you are a trained geneticist, or at the very least a medical student, to read it. I am neither, but I was formerly a health correspondent, so I was able to pick out a few interesting discoveries.
Firstly, as might have been expected from the varieties of human skin tone among Europeans, this was one of the factors most prone to genetic selection over recent human history. Effectively, those in the south of Europe selected for ability to tan, while those at northerly climes selected for fairer skin. This was largely already understood to have happened.
Similarly, there is a positive selection for height. Gals have liked a tall guy throughout history, apparently. And there is also positive selection for blond and lighter hair colours, which again we could have deduced from the fact that these hair colours primarily exist among European populations.
Likewise already suspected, but perhaps less widely known, is the fact that Europeans positively selected for a predisposition to schizophrenia. It’s not clear why this is, given that schizophrenia is a debilitating mental illness. Nevertheless, the research indicates some positive selection for it, as well as, oddly enough, a predisposition towards anorexia.
Perhaps not so suspected are minor but yet statistically significant positive selections for a range of things, including raw vegetable intake and heavy alcohol drinking. Then again, Europe has a growing vegetarian and vegan population, and also tends to top the charts for excessive alcohol consumption worldwide.
The most significant evolved traits in recent history relate primarily to facial characteristics – not only hair colour but also things like nose shape and upper lip size. If this makes our ancestors seem somewhat superficial, more concerned with physical appearance than other traits, that may simply be because they are easier to immediately identify.
But much less easy to identify traits also show significant positive selection in recent times. Intelligence and insomnia have both been positively selected for in Europe in recent human history (by which I mean the past few thousand years). This makes sense of course, since it helps to be smart, and someone who stays awake at night is the first to notice nighttime dangers, but more generally this actually indicates that evolved traits go much deeper than the skin.
There’s a lot more in this study, and no doubt it will prove extremely interesting to other researchers. It certainly raises some questions, not only about the traits we have inherited from the neolithic period or our early farming history, but about the traits which seem to be subject to positive selection up to the present day.
One suspects these results can likely be extrapolated to other global populations by replicating the extensive work that went into this study. Or rather, perhaps not these exact results, but rather similar sets of results, indicating similar ongoing evolution in slightly different ways among different global populations.
It would be nice therefore to see similar studies for other global populations, in order to understand the extent to which, for example, the positive selections for schizophrenia and anorexia predisposition are universal or to what extent they’re merely European.
But the bottom line is this: we sometimes assume that recent history is not enough time for humans to have evolved much more than some few superficial variations, like skin tone. However, as this study shows, such evolved variegation is much more than skin deep, and reaches into our very behaviour and psyches.
I attended the Bodleian Library’s fascinating webinar on unconventional maps of Oxford on Tuesday evening, where the star turns were easily the secret Soviet maps of the city from the 1970s.
It’s a fascinating, and not fully understood story. The Soviets produced top class maps of pretty much the entire planet between the 1950s and 1980s, which remained entirely secretly and unknown to the world until the early 1990s. So good are they, that the Bodleian itself still uses some of them for reference, particularly for Turkey and Greece, apparently.
Depicted, a detail from the Red Atlas featuring Dublin city centre, from c. 1980.
No one knows entirely why the Soviets did this, especially when you couldn’t even get a map of Moscow in Moscow until the very late 1980s. I can testify that when I lived in Minsk, there were no maps available. I ended up drawing my own in a notebook just to be able to get around.
The Red Atlas probably weren’t invasion maps, but they definitely were for restricted access. All sorts of fascinating locations are carefully marked up in purple, including the usual suspects like police stations, prisons and military bases, but also places of more curious interest, such as universities.
Chicago published a selection of them a few years ago, primarily of British and American locations, and called ‘The Red Atlas’. As for the Bodleian map librarians, ownership of this is probably useful if you can read a little Russian and don’t mind your maps being about five decades out of date.
It was a little disappointing though to discover that the Bodleian’s map librarians had never heard of the map of Lyra’s Oxford, from the fiction of Philip Pullman. Clearly they aren’t familiar with his work, despite it being probably the most famous and popular of speculative geographies of the city of dreaming spires.
Their other choices of alternative Oxfords included legendary town planner Thomas Sharp‘s vision of an automobile-enabled Oxford of the post-war period, and a civil war era map which may have been deliberately inaccurate in order to throw off enemy parliamentarian forces.
But the best of the rest, secret Soviet maps apart, was the 1883 ‘Drink Map’ of Oxford, produced in a spectacular example of an own goal, by the Temperance Movement. Its reverse featured a lengthy lecture on the dangers of alcohol and the evil magistrates allegedly facilitating excessive drinking in the city, but one gets the strong feeling that, as with other such drink maps of Britain at that time, they were more likely used by thirsty people seeking a nearby locale for some fortifying adult beverages.
Nowadays, such drink maps are basically pub crawls in cartographic form. They even come in formats where one may colour in images of pubs, like a drunken infant, thereby ticking off hostelries which you have deigned to feature with your sozzled presence.
Nickel is a metal used in electric cars and stainless steel. Russia produces 20% of the world’s supply. So when Russia invaded Ukraine, obviously people were concerned about that supply and the price rocketed, from around $29,000 a ton to over $100,000.
Ordinarily, nickel doesn’t move much and floats between $10,000 and $20,000. So this was a serious and unprecedented move in price. However, one Chinese company, owned by a guy known as ‘Big Shot’ (seriously) had attempted to short the market. His firm Tsingshan was apparently on the hook for tens of billions.
But the London Metal Exchange, which for some historical reason is allowed to set the global market price for most base metals, decided to undo the trading. Not suspend it (they tried that too) but actively cancel all the trades.
Bug, Pee-Wee and Shrek deciding the price of base metals on their nice red sofa.
This has made some people who thought they’d made lots of money very unhappy. It may be mere coincidence that the LME was bought out by the Hong Kong Stock Exchange a number of years ago, of course.
Lawsuits are now flying, and the price of nickel is back to around $30,000 a ton at the time of writing, only a little above where it was before the invasion.
The fundamental problem is inherent to the five century old stock exchange system itself, and a small market like nickel with a singular point of price discovery like the LME simply exposes the flaws of this antiquated method for setting prices.
It shouldn’t be possible for a commodities market in an industrial metal like nickel to literally treble in a matter of a day, no matter how supply might be threatened. Nor should it be possible for a single man to short an entire commodity market to the extent that he did. Nor should it be possible for agreed deals to be undone.
Here we have an example of traditional rules-bound capitalism – a largely closed shop with its weird in-group habits – but as soon as the market became systemically challenged by its own methodologies, all those rules and traditions were jettisoned with shocking disregard.
I don’t think you get to come back from that. I think the day of the red sofa is likely over.
The world seems rife with conspiracy. Never before have we had a population so well educated, yet apparently so vulnerable to believing in vast conspiracy narratives. It seems like a contradiction. Researchers at UCLA have been using AI to work out how such conspiracy theories seem to emerge and subsequently collapse with ever greater velocity. But they struggle to explain why these ideas emerge at all.
The attraction of conspiracy theories is the promise that beneath the apparent chaos of the world is some underlying order and meaning, even if that meaning is negative and the order is destructive. It’s a desire to feel control, to possess agency over one’s own life.
In an ever more individuated and atomised world, the natural human desire for bonding en masse, for submerging into a gestalt and having a sense of belonging, therefore becomes subverted by such theories. Conspiracy theories are less ideas than they are communities.
The question is not why do conspiracy theories occur. They occur because of the human need for meaning and desire for order. Nor is the question how they may be combated or defeated. They can only be challenged and overcome by implementing transparent order in society. Transparent in this sense includes the underlying principles of fairness and dignity, because people will also strive for alternate explanations when they are treated unfairly or suspect they are being stripped of their human dignity.
The question that remains about conspiracy theories is why certain narratives prosper and others do not. To an extent this is a cui bono question – who benefits? Who makes money from proliferating certain conspiracies? And certainly, there are many who make a healthy living propagating nonsense and half-baked ideas to the masses. They may even be acting in good faith, believing in the attenuated and baroque web of connections they themselves are weaving. But more significantly, it’s an issue of what cultural anxieties are exposed by conspiracy theories.
The current most prolific conspiracy theory – that shadowy cabals of elites operating both in and out of the public eye are attempting to implement population reduction and totalitarian rule – is in this sense a throwback to the unequal and undignified social structures of the laissez-faire 19th century or even earlier, to feudalism. But it also expresses very contemporary anxieties about the Covid pandemic, and deeply held suspicions about the democratic unaccountability of transnational bodies in particular, be they the EU, the IMF, the World Economic Forum or the UN.
There are, in short, no easy answers to conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories ARE the easy answers. They satisfy the atomised citizen’s need to bond in dignity with fellow citizens and they provide a simple and moralistic order against which to resist, thereby providing meaning.
History suggests that people, no matter how well educated, will be inclined to prefer such easy moralistic explanations of the world in which they live. The attraction of such explanations is as hardwired as the desire for sugar or animal fats, and as difficult to break as a habit.
Only a world which offers its citizenry ever greater fairness and dignity, which entrusts them with agency over their own lives, has any hope of competing with the memetic addiction to conspiracy. Until such a world is in place, people will continue to believe that shadowy forces secretly rule the world and wish them harm, be they demons, or Illuminati, Elders of Zion, or psychotic men in the boardrooms of Brussels and Washington.
I caught a head cold on a recent trip, and after a day immersed in reading about ancient Mesopotamia, I decided to take a restorative nap.
The ancients of course attributed all sorts of meaning to dreams. They considered many oneiric communications to be messages from the gods, or prophecies of future events, communications in short which appeared to hack time lines and causality.
One wonders whether the still obscure processes and purposes of dreaming might not have in fact inspired the religious impetus among humanity.
Anyhow, in my feverish dreamstate, I was having dinner with a friend, who in reality possesses an indomitable intellect, and who in this scenario was a world-renowned expert in the discipline of Invernetics.
A google search upon waking produced only a handful of results for the word, mostly typos of Internetics. My basic Latin education parses the term as the technology of winter, or the technology of inducing winter (perhaps a good technology to develop in an age of global warming?)
If the ancients considered such dreams as ontological intrusions into our reality, might we not do likewise, especially given the dearth of solid research into why we dream of what we do? Given the current popularity of multiverse theories, I am inclined to consider my fever dream as an intrusion from another timeline, wherein the science of Invernetics is a well-developed academic discipline.
Perhaps in that timeline, they likewise dream of us, and chuckle to themselves at the preposterousness of a Donald Trump presidency, Leicester City winning the EPL, or the strange prominence of pronouns?
Dreams may be brain froth, as most neuroscientists insist. But perhaps, like pronouns, they might carry more semantic weight than we acknowledge.
One looks forward to the day when the role of dreaming may be more accurately understood and developed. And one also now looks forward to the day when we develop Invernetic technologies to address the gradual heating of our planet.
Last week I was fortunate enough to revisit Jerusalem. It was nearly two decades since my last visit and much has changed in the interim, though equally much has not.
Previously, security was tense in the holy city. It was not possible for me to visit the Temple Mount at that time. I’m not entirely sure if it was even possible for devout Muslims to do so. This time, during one of the designated hours for non-Muslims, and via the sole route permitted to non-Muslims, I was fortunate enough to visit what is probably the most sensitive and contested site on Earth.
Temple Mount
The site itself is a plaza constructed on the top of the ancient mount Moriah. It features the Al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the third most sacred site in Islam. It is equally the most sacred site in Judaism, having been the location of both King Solomon’s temple and the Second Temple, built by Herod and destroyed by the Romans in the first century CE.
Not to be left out, there is a Christian claim here too, somewhat less significant than those of their fellow monotheists, but real nonetheless. The Crusaders left their mark here, and while Christianity reveres the Church of the Holy Sepuchre nearby rather than Temple Mount itself, nevertheless the site retains importance for Christianity, in particular the Well of Souls, a cave located beneath the Rock, as well as the Muslim Al-Aqsa mosque, which was previously the site of a Templar church.
This one small location, approximately the size of 20 soccer pitches, is therefore highly significant to the more than half of the world’s population who adhere to one of the Abrahamic monotheisms.
One might ask, especially if one is not an adherent, why this is so? Taken in chronological order, the Jewish claim is the earliest. For Jews, it is the site where King Solomon built a temple for the Jews where they could gather regularly to be in the presence of God. For those of the Jewish faith, this site, and the subsequent second temple, was the sole location on Earth where God would descend to be present among his chosen people.
The exact site, or temenos, was known as the holy of holies, קֹדֶשׁ הַקֳּדָשִׁים in Hebrew, and access was limited to the high priest alone, on very limited occasions. This model was replicated in the second Herodian temple, which was built following the return of the Israelites to Jerusalem after their Babylonian exile. Notably, almost none of either temple remains today, and hence it is impossible to know the exact site of the holy of holies. For this reason, devout Jews refrain from setting foot on the mount, for fear of stepping inside God’s sacred space.
As if this were insufficient, the site is also traditionally believed to be the location of the binding of Isaac. Additionally, modern historians suspect that the site was chosen in part because it was likely already a sacred location for the Jebusites, whom King David displaced from Jerusalem.
Of course, the choice of location is a blend of both Bronze Age beliefs and canny realpolitik. King David’s unification of the twelve tribes of Judaism required a capital which would be acceptable to all the tribes, and not solely his own. Hence the choice of Jerusalem, an otherwise poor choice for a capital city, given its limited fresh water supply and low terrain which was difficult to defend.
We might say likewise about the Islamic claim to Temple Mount, which emerged early in the Islamic era and helped to inspire the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem. According to Islamic belief, Temple Mount designates the location from which the prophet Muhammed ascended into heaven to consult the prophets, having flown there from Arabia on a flying horse as part of his night journey.
Of course, by the time of the Islamic conquest, Mount Moriah had already served as a sacred location intermittently for over a millennium. Given Islam’s descendancy from Judaic faith as an Abrahamic monotheism, it was perhaps inevitable that a claim over Jerusalem and Temple Mount in particular would emerge. Notably, it is never stated in the al-Isra sura of the Quran that this was indeed the site of Muhammed’s ascendance into heaven. This is a result of interpretation and tradition, primarily in the Hadiths, and perhaps also some realpolitik.
The Crusaders came later, and built a Templar Church on the Mount, which after the retaking of Jerusalem by Muslim forces was transformed into the Al-Aqsa mosque. The Christian claim to Temple Mount is thus much less acute than those of Islam or Judaism, but the site’s proximity to the more revered Church of the Holy Sepulchre, as well as its domination of the Old Jerusalem skyline, no doubt made it a critical location for the Crusaders.
The current political situation on Temple Mount is therefore hugely complex and sensitive, as one might expect. Following the Israeli capture of Jerusalem during the 1967 war, the site is now administered by a Muslim religious council, but secular power rests with the Israeli defence forces. Though this is itself a somewhat tense arrangement, it seems to work adequately on the ground, as it were. Muslim religious police will confront visitors to insure they dress and act appropriately, and will request the intervention of the Israeli soldiers if they are not obeyed.
While I was there, pondering these centuries of worship, contestation and sensitivity, I began thinking about the future of the site, and the future of sacred spaces in general. Temple Mount has passed through the hands of many polities during its existence, and perhaps the sole continuity, as buildings rose, fell or were repurposed, has been its primary role as a sacred location, perhaps the most sacred location on the planet.
In short, what is the future of the Holy of Holies, the sanctum sanctorum, the al-Ḥaram al-Šarīf?
One could speculate about any number of potential futures, from the contentious building of a third Jewish Temple, to a restoration of Islamic rule over the territory. But primarily I’m wondering about issues which are more likely to develop, and indeed are already emerging.
Some five decades into the space age, technological development continues to issue complex challenges to Bronze Age beliefs. Careful consideration had to be made, for example, to define how devout Muslims in space might pray in the direction of Mecca. The further we progress from the period of religious emergence, the more difficult it becomes to translate their behavioural proscriptions or miracle-based narratives into contemporary human experience.
Closer to home than near Earth orbit, we have the rapid emergence of the internet’s evolution into a virtual reality environment, the metaverse. How will sacred spaces emerge in such a virtual state? In what manner will they be sanctified, and how will religious devotees prevent them from being hacked or erased? How will their emergence affect existing religious practices? Already it is possible for people to attend religious services online. Is it possible to envisage a digital hajj or other pilgrimages too?
And what of the metaphysical ramifications of the metaverse? Which pixels or bytes will be sanctified by God’s presence? Could a third Temple of the Jews be constructed in cyberspace? Would a digital Mecca offer password-protected access only to the world’s growing population of Muslims?
It’s not far-fetched to consider such possibilities, as we migrate further and further into an existence bifurcated into physical and online activities. And, in an optimistic vision of mankind colonising the solar system, such as we see in The Expanseand other SF depictions of the future, where would that leave physical temenoi such as Temple Mount?
For around three millennia, the site on top of Mount Moriah has served as a physical location of worship for the ancient Jebusites, for the Jews, and for Christians and Muslims alike. Perhaps technological development might finally sever the connection between place and belief, or perhaps it might merely serve to provide additional modes of religious contestation.
