A spade, a spade. Am in Italy. It matters.

Unbridled capitalism is the ‘dung of the devil’, says Pope Francis

“The new colonialism takes on different faces. At times it appears as the anonymous influence of mammon: corporations, loan agencies, certain ‘free trade’ treaties, and the imposition of measures of ‘austerity’ which always tighten the belt of workers and the poor,” he said.

The Guardian

In the last months of his reign, Francis lashed out at the Trump administration’s plans for “mass deportations” of migrants. In a letter to American bishops that some commentators saw as containing implicit criticisms of JD Vance, Trump’s Catholic vice-president, the pope denounced measures that link “the illegal status of some migrants with criminality”. The pope received Vance for a brief personal audience on the eve of his death on Easter Monday. The US vice-president also met senior Church officials who conveyed the Vatican’s dismay about Washington’s immigration policies.

FT

Ed Kiely · Unfair Judgments: Lethal Cuts at the DWP

Pring’s account reveals something of the character of austerity: it isn’t so much that the state withdraws from an involvement in people’s lives, but that its contact with them is degraded. Many of the people Pring writes about were in touch with an array of government agencies until they died. But these encounters were characterised by indifference, hostility and suspicion. [emphasis added]

The quote comes from a review of a book by John Pring on the crimes perpetrated against the sick by the UK government in the name of hunting out those malingerers who sponge off the state. But the language and sentiment seems apposite to describe much of the NHS.

MD, one of medicine’s sharpest observers writing in Private Eye 1646 (April 4-17th).

Today’s NHS is full of angry consultants whose extra shifts attract punitive pension contributions, and even angrier resident medics who are already exhausted and can’t get onto training schemes. The chances of hitting the 2029 target [getting the waiting lists down to <18 weeks!] looks slim. Perhaps physician associates have been fast tracked to get waiting times down?

Of course, physician associates do not have a qualification that is recognised outwith the UK: they can’t leave for sunnier climes, hence the government’s infatuation. Some of us think they do not have a meaningful clinical qualification at all.

With regards to waiting times, they are now the worst I have ever seen. Choose your specialty here and see what medial care looks like in Edinburgh Scotland’s capital city. (The link was forwarded to patients by my GP’s practice.) And to think this was once a genuinely famous centre of medical excellence.

For an urgent skin cancer referral the wait is close to 20 weeks. My second publication, a single author paper in the BMJ published over 40 years ago, documented how misleading NHS statistics were. Then, it was incompetence, now it is— pardon the metaphor — malignant intent. Going forward, I expect the skin figures to be gross underestimates.

Betty Webb never spoke about her work, until she had to.

Another wonderful obituary from The Economist

She herself had no idea what her work added up to. When she had dropped out of her very ladylike domestic-science course, where she was learning how to run a house and bake sausage rolls, she had not envisaged this. She wanted to help win the war, looking glamorous in uniform and perhaps driving a truck. Instead she was sent to the Auxiliary Territorial Service (ATS), where the uniform featured khaki knickers so vast that they either showed below her skirt or had to be yanked up to her armpits. Meanwhile, her job at Bletchley was to index, by date and call sign, intercepted messages from the German police, and to file them in shoeboxes on her desk…

As a very old woman, watching birds through her cottage window in the quiet West Midlands countryside, she roundly objected to the fascist salutes given by some of Donald Trump’s supporters. How dare they? This was not just dangerous. It was an insult to everything she and her colleagues at Bletchley Park had achieved. For she knew, now, just how much they had done. The secret was indeed out.

Didn’t drive a Tesla either, I suspect.

Is there anything left to learn about The Beatles?

From a review of John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie in The Economist

In 1967 Bryan Magee, a British philosopher and author, noted that 40-year-old songs by the likes of George Gershwin, Cole Porter and Jerome Kern still had wide currency. Given an “indifference to melody in favour of rhythm and intriguing new sound mixtures”, he doubted that the songs of the 1960s would fare so well. “Does anyone seriously believe that Beatles music will be an unthinkingly accepted part of daily life all over the world in the 2000s?” he dared to ask…The question now seems daft.

BTW: Magee was a wonderful and generous student of philosophy and wrote well on Popper

Agent Running in the Field review – Brexit fuels John le Carré’s fury | John le Carré | The Guardian

I have been rereading le Carré’s last book published whilst he was alive. Probably written soon after he became an Irish citizen. I thought we were over some of the shit. Not so.

Robert McCrum wrote back then in 2019.

Angrier still, one of le Carré’s puppets describes the foreign secretary as a “fucking Etonian narcissistic elitist without a decent conviction in his body bar his own advancement”. Not our author’s words, of course, but certainly fuelled by his indignation, as is a memorable anti-Trump diatribe (“Putin’s shithouse cleaner”) on page 141. This novel, however, is neither a hissy fit nor a high-noon shootout, but an autumnal threnody that reconciles rage to storytelling.

How to restore trust in doctors in an age of misinformation

A comment from Swiss Miss in the FT comments section of the above article.

In the US, medicine has declined from a knowledge-based specialty to a commercial product. Drug advertising kicked this off and ought to be disallowed. It increases absurd self-prescribing and wastes the time of professionals.

AFAIK direct to consumer advertising for drugs Is only allowed in the USA and New Zealand. My standard line about drug advertising to doctors (rather than patients): if you think it performs a useful function and you need it, you should not hold a license to practice.

Alan Rusbridger writing in Prospect

Do you remember Julian Assange’s catchphrase, “Courage is contagious?” I think he may have borrowed it from the old Bible basher Rev Billy Graham, but no matter: it had a catchy ring about it. …

Sadly, there is something even more contagious: cowardice. There is a lot of it. In the US today, it is spreading very rapidly, and there seems to be no known cure… 

Back to universities: You’ll be amazed to hear that, following Columbia’s surrender, the Trump administration has decided to “review” roughly $9bn in grants and contracts awarded to Harvard…

A former president of Harvard, Larry Summers, called out what was happening in a punchy piece in the NYT this week. He accused Trump of trying to “bludgeon America’s elite universities into submission… Each act of capitulation makes the next one more likely. Each act of rectitude reverberates.” …

As Summers argued: “Institutions such as Harvard, the administration’s most recent target, have vast financial resources, great prestige and broad networks of influential alumni. If they do not or cannot resist the arbitrary application of government power, who else can? Without acts of resistance, what protects the rule of law?”

The Scotsman leads today with the ongoing financial crisis at Dundee university: “Job loss tally at Dundee University rises to 700 staff in “devastating” update.”

The crisis in UK higher education (there is, a la Trump, a different one in the USA) is, and was always predictable. I remember a faculty meeting here in Edinburgh, close to a quarter of a century ago, when the Head of College was promising good times ahead after a short period of ‘lean times’. This was always a mis-reading about what was going on: New Labour and fees was always a vehicle for financialiasation of higher education. Market discipline and all that.

What was happened is not what was promised: a catastrophic drop in standards; a system that fails to deliver for many, if not most, students; obscene student debt; irreversible damage to the status of UK higher education, and the dismantling of meaningful vocational training and alternative pathways to higher education via the Open University. Higher education is not a panacea for social engineering nor a ‘just add water and mix’ solution for the longstanding failure of UK industry and industrial management policies in the UK.

Note: Dundee is “Scottish University of the Year 2025.” Says it all.

From the Economist obituary of the palaeontologist Richard Fortey.

Trilobites were not only poetry to him. They were also useful. Because he could detect where different species lived, in the open sea or at the shoreline, he could map the ancient edges of continents. It was known that modern continents had split off from a single land-mass; but not that separate continents had existed before that land-mass formed. Through trilobites, like postage stamps, he fixed their positions and remade the prehistoric globe. Proudly, when a fellow-commuter on the 6.21 to Henley asked what he had done that day, he replied that he had moved north Africa 200km to the east. [emphasis added]