Guns and Murders

Tom Kando

My previous post's title was: It's the Guns, Stupid. 

I subsequently thought: There is a simple way to prove this: Just draw up a list of places, list two variables for each place, namely (1) per capita gun ownership and (2) per capita murders, and see if there is a correlation between the two. For example, one could use a list of our 50 states for this or a list of the world's roughly 200 countries.

There is anecdotal and journalistic  evidence that states and countries with high rates of gun ownership also have high murder rates (e.g. Texas vs. Massachusetts, or the US vs, Holland). But I can't think of any  systematic attempt to correlate the two variables, using a list of states or countries. So I did it myself. It was quite simple. I chose to list countries rather than US states. To make it easier on myself I reduced the population to 45 Aimportant@ countries. I then listed each country's  rate of gun ownership and its murder rate.  This produced a bi-variate 2x2 table, on which I did a Chi Square significance test. My data are from  countries ranked by gun ownership rates  and countries ranked by murder rates

Of the 45 countries in my sample, 25 were Ahigh gun ownership@ and 20 were Alow gun ownership@ Of the same 45 countries, 17 were Ahigh murder rate@ and 28 were Alow murder rate. The table below gives the distribution of the 45 countries into 4 cells, as indicated:

                                                               Table I: The relationship between guns and murders

		MURDERS
		MANY	FEW	TOTAL
GUNS	MANY	#1) 12	#2) 13	25
	FEW	#3) 5	#4) 15	20
	TOTAL	17	28	45

 

Cell 1: High rates of gun ownership and therefore high murder rates: US, Pakistan, Venezuela, Honduras, Mexico, Russia, El Salvador, Puerto Rico, Columbia, South Africa, Jamaica, Brazil.

Cell 2: High rates of gun ownership and yet low murder rates: Canada, Finland, Austria, Norway, Switzerland, Sweden, France, Germany, Thailand, Australia, Italy, Belgium, Hungary. Read more...

A Twin’s Perspective on Friendship

By Madeleine Kando

It is difficult to define friendship, but like many other indefinable things in life, ‘you know it when it’s there’. It is more like beauty or art, something that you value for its own sake. As soon as you try to exploit it for personal gain, it vanishes. It’s like trying to catch your own shadow.

I am not talking about the Facebook kind of ‘friend’. I am talking about the bond that is created between two people who decide to devote their time and energy to a mutually agreed upon relationship that is completely voluntary. Unlike other types of relationships like family ties, romantic ties or business ties, where you have some kind of ‘obligation’ to each other, friendship survives on the complete absence of rules. It is literally the stuff of dreams. A friendship is like a dream that you have with another person. And just like a dream, friendship is fragile.

The root word for friend is fréon (to love), which is connected to freo (not in bondage, acting of one's own will). It describes friendship to a T. It is one of the most democratic arrangements in social interactions. And just like a Democratic arrangement, if you don’t work at maintaining a friendship, it just disappears, without complaining or throwing a tantrum.

One factor that has influenced my view of friendship, is the fact that I am a twin. My sister is actually not at all like me. She is uninhibited and blunt and she acts out her frustrations by lashing out. I am self-conscious, reserved and eat up all my anger. But we were never really ‘alone’. There was always this other you that wasn’t you.

We were close growing up, since people couldn’t tell us apart, but for years, we were compelled to create conflict to prove that we were really two people. Especially after my father left and we had to vie for our only parent’s attention.

We have come full circle, however. With the help of distance and time (my twin in Spain, me in the States), we are finally able to meet each other as equals, like two branches on an old tree with a common base. We can talk to each other, accept each other and let bygones be bygones.

I had several friends, on my way to old age, most of them women. There was Marijke in high school, back in Holland. She lived in a beautiful, old style Dutch house with a thatched roof and a large garden with cherry trees. Why we were friends, I don’t remember. She actually decided that we should be, not me. Then, there was Barbara. Beautiful, tall, intoxicating Barbara. We were friends too, to the point of embarking on a secret correspondence based on a semi-pornographic series of teenage books called ‘the thousand and one nights’. Barbara sometimes gave me a ride home on her bike. I sat on the rack behind her, holding her narrow waist, her long skirts brushing against my legs. Her long pony tail reminded me of a beautiful, shiny race horse.

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POWER!

by Madeleine Kando

The information in this essay is based on Bertrand Russell’s: Power, A New Social Analysis, published in 1938. The book is very much a product of its time; a time when war with Germany was about to begin. The Western world was divided between democracies and countries led by successful revolutionary dictators. Similar to what is happening now.

What is power? Is it good or bad? Or is it neutral, like a hammer when you need to put a nail in a wall? The origin of the word ‘power’ comes from the Latin word ‘potere’, which means ‘to be able’. In French the word ‘pouvoir’, both means ‘power’ and ‘to be able to’.

Let’s face it, without power, nothing would get done. My husband needs muscle power to mow the lawn. I need fine-motor power to move my fingers on the keyboard.

But that kind of power is self-contained, it’s neutral. The problem starts when someone wants to have power over other things or beings. Power over humans, non-humans, land etc. There is a difference between the amount of power you need to have enough to eat and pay for a roof over your head, and the kind of power that has caused problems for our species ever since we grew frontal lobes.

There are people who crave power more than others. I myself want power over my cat. I won’t let her pee wherever she likes and when I was a young mother, I had power over my children. I told them when to go to bed, what time to get up, etc. My husband was a CFO and had decision making power over a small staff. We all have some degree of power, if only to control our own thoughts.

But that kind of power is barely worth the name. It is the power of men that lead nations that we should be talking about. Good and bad leaders alike: Mahatma Gandhi, Hitler, Putin and George Washington, to name a few.

Marx had an economic explanation for what drives human behavior, and Freud said it was all about sex. But according to famous philosopher Bertrand Russell, the pursuit of power is fundamental to understanding human nature. ‘Power is a fundamental concept in Social Science, in the same sense in which Energy is the fundamental concept in physics’. (From: Power, A New Social Analysis, by Bertrand Russell)

In other words, power stems from an infinite desire for something that will never be satisfied. ‘The Boa constrictor, when he has had his meal, sleeps until appetite revives’. He is content until he is hungry again. But with Man it is different. ‘Imagination is the goad that forces human beings into restless exertion after their primary needs have been satisfied.’

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The War in Ukraine Could Affect the Whole World

Tom Kando 

I just listened to a fascinating interview of  Yuval Noah Harari. He is the Israeli historian who wrote the brilliant Sapiens: a Brief History of Humankind, among others.

The professor’s first and obvious point is that this war should stop ASAP. The longer it goes on, the more EVERYONE will suffer, not just the Ukrainians, even if there is no global conflagration. The longer the war lasts, the worse the situation becomes. The more hatred is created among the Ukrainians. And no one wants this war, not the Russian people, not the Russian oligarchs. 

Unfortunately, it’s been over a month since this interview took place, and things are going in the wrong direction. I see no imminent peace on the horizon. 

The interview occurred when the Russian peaceniks were still marching in Moscow and Saint Petersburg. By now, Putin’s brainwashing machine has done a superb job in rallying a majority of Russians to supporting the war enthusiastically. Dictatorships are often very efficient at creating Orwellian group think within their borders. In Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan and elsewhere, large majorities continued to happily kill and die for their governments to the bitter end. 

Harari explains that Putin’s attack on Ukraine is not based on a coherent ideology, as for example the Soviet Union was. Instead, it is based on Putin’s own fantasy, not on facts. It is based on Putin’s single-minded desire to re-establish the Russian empire. It is based on the erroneous belief that the Ukrainians are Russians, that they want to be part of Russia. They do not. Ukraine has a thousand-year old history of national identity. Kyiv was a major cultural metropolis long before Moscow. President Zelensky’s and the Ukrainian people’s heroic resistance can be an inspiration to the world.

No war since 1945 has been as much of a threat to the entire world as the current conflict in Ukraine. For the past seventy-seven years, the world has been largely at peace. Authors such as Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature) (https://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature) have documented the decline of war. Since 1945, there have been no wars aimed at obliterating entire countries from the map. By and large, borders have been sacred (or at least the product of negotiations). Countries have ceased ANNEXING each other. No superpower has gone to war in order to aggrandize its empire.  Read more...

The Unraveling of the World

Tom Kando 

The Russian attack on Ukraine is presenting us with a terrible dilemma. We are subject to two impulses that are difficult to reconcile: 

1. We feel deep outrage over Russia’s savage and unjustified attack on its innocent and peaceful neighbor. The barbaric, indiscriminate bombing of civilians, children, pregnant women, schools and hospitals. There are no words to describe Putin’s cruelty. 

2. We fear that this conflict could escalate into global nuclear Armageddon. 

In other words, there is widespread moral agreement, but disagreement about how to respond. 

What Can the Civilized World Do? 

Generally agreed upon are: Strong expressions of moral outrage, solidarity with the Ukrainian people, the provision of humanitarian assistance, exposure of Russian lies, hospitality and assistance to the millions of victims and refugees, economic and military aid to Ukraine short of direct NATO-Russia confrontation. 

The next step is where divergence arises: 

The two key elements of risk assessment are (1) the probability of a risk occurring, and (2) the magnitude of the risk. The greater the magnitude, the lower the probability should be. The probability of humanity committing nuclear suicide is such a risk. This is not a gamble we want to take, no matter how low its probability is. 

Beating back the Russian war machine would require more than speaking out and providing hospitality to refugees. It would require waging war against Russia, with possible escalation to nuclear World War Three. 
There are hawks and doves. Neo-liberals tend to be more hawkish: They are willing to take more risks than the doves. A dovish example is the FiveThirtyEight podcast of an interview of James M. Acton by Galen Duke. Acton is the co-director of the Nuclear Policy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: “Russia, Ukraine and the Risk of Nuclear War.”https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/russia-ukraine-and-the-risk-of-nuclear-war/ 

Acton presents a game-theoretical metaphor: Think of a chess game, where both sides have a button underneath the chess board, which, if pressed, blows up everything including both contestants. The most desirable outcome of a chess game is one where the winner’s victory is not so overwhelming as to lead either side to press the blow-up button. 

Few wars end with one side’s complete annihilation (the US Civil War and the Punic Wars were exceptions). Most wars are won by one side in such a way as to allow the losing side to survive and to recover. And a key to this outcome is that it is based on negotiations.  Read more...

To the Leaders of the Free World

by Madeleine Kando

I am old, 6 years past the average life expectancy of most countries in the World. My life spans from the end of World War 2 to the present year of 2022. Like most old people, I am not aware of how old I am. Until now, that is.

The War in Ukraine that started in February 2022, made me realize that my life was spent during a time when the Western world, my world, was protected from the worst that can happen to human society. It was a time of relative peace and stability. Yes, during that time (which now spans almost a century), there were wars, conflicts, terrorist attacks and injustices done in many parts of the world.

But the rule of law and other basic principles on which the world order was built, protected us from what we now realize has metastasized into the most dangerous and lethal attacks on a way of life that I took for granted. All of that might soon be a thing of the past.

There is a concerted attempt to destroy that which made my life worth living. It was not without personal and social conflict. I am one of those ‘liberal intellectuals’ that many of you out there have a problem with. I am sorry for that. I am not a politician. Just an ordinary wife, mother and grandmother who now weeps when she watches the atrocities taking place in Ukraine. I am sorry that I have been hiding under a rock, suffering from the general delusion that what matters in life is happiness and peace.

The truth is that complacency and a sense of entitlement has brought Armageddon to the doorsteps of the Western World. We just didn’t pay ATTENTION! Is it too late? Do we have to keep whining about higher gas prices? Do we not understand that what is coming down the road is a tornado, gas prices be damned?

If memory serves, it happened before. The Roman Empire destroyed itself as much as it was destroyed by the invading Huns, Goths and Visigoths. It was weak, corrupt, unstable. It had lost its edge, so to speak. Did it deserve its own fate?

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From My Diary of the War in Ukraine

by Madeleine Kando

It is a cold and grey day in late February 2022. We are visiting our friends in Northern New Hampshire. They live on a 300 acre piece of land, their house at the end of a mile long drive way, invisible to the world. There is a lot of snow up here. Snow, pine trees and rolling hills. It’s beautiful.

We have known the Kaufmans for half a century, which tells you how old we all are. But that is what reinforces friendship – we stuck it out this long and will remain friends until all of us turn to dust.

It is a peaceful place, not a single human sound is heard, just the occasional howling of a passing band of coyotes, the long distance shriek of a lone hawk and the loud chatter of the countless blue jays invading the porch, which Janice covers with black sunflower seeds to attract these noisy but beautiful birds. We toast, eat and watch a movie, then go to bed early.

February 24th, 2022

It is a sunny morning. Marty makes his famous breakfast omelet. He looks pale and gaunt. He tells us that Russia has invaded Ukraine and that a war has started in Europe. It seems unreal, impossible to comprehend in this pristine environment. Why? How? The day is spent following the hourly news as the snow begins to accumulate outside.

Marty is a third generation Jewish immigrant. He has deep emotional ties to that part of the world, since his family had to flee Ukraine at a time when Jews were mercilessly persecuted.

We watch the news on CNN. A mother with two small children is interviewed. She is huddled together with hundreds of Ukrainians in a subway station turned into a bomb shelter. She is crying, asking questions: ‘why? Why is this happening?’ She doesn’t understand. Nor do we, up here in the snowy, peaceful Great North Woods of New Hampshire.

February 25, 2022

The snow is accumulating fast. It gets harder to walk down from the pool house, where we are staying. There are snow shoes next to the door, which we tie on to our snow boots. Walking in snow shoes is not easy for novices like us, but we eventually survive the 100 yard distance to the main house, where a warm cup of coffee awaits us.

The conversation revolves around what should be done, could be done, is not done and what will come next. What else is Putin going to invade? There is talk of excluding Russia from the Swift international payments system, instating a no-fly zone, sending more military aid to Ukraine..

I realize how little I know about Ukraine. I learn that Ukraine is the second largest country in Europe after Russia. Marty has a large globe gathering dust in his living room. We lug it onto the dining room table and squint our eyes as we try to decipher the tiny letters. Which countries that are now independent were part of the USSR? There are 15 of them. That, together with the satellite countries that are now part of the EU, Russia lost a third of its landmass in one swell swoop, when the USSR collapsed. No wonder Putin called it “The greatest geopolitical tragedy of the 20th century.”

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My Bedtime Betty Adventure

by Madeleine Kando

My lifelong search for a good night’s sleep led me to a dispensary in the town next to mine. Cannabis products are legal in my state and the industry is booming. This particular store was BIG. It sold many types of weed, there was a section just for paraphernalia and it even had a fireplace with a cozy seating arrangement.

The young salesman gave me a bag full of candies called ‘Bedtime Bettys’ and I took one before going to bed. It’s a cannabis sleepaid, carefully composed of several ingredients that are supposed to make you fall into a blissful sleep. It has the active ingredient called THC, the one that gets you high.

I was lying in bed, rigid as a board, waiting for the magic bullet to hit me. Nothing happened. I mentally cursed Bedtime Betty, telling her that she shouldn’t impersonate the sleep fairy, since she didn’t deliver on her promise. I was lying there, teeth clenched, eyelids squeezed shut, neck muscles spasming, blaming my own naivete and the young salesman who had convinced me of the power of Betty over insomnia.

I tried to get back to my ordinary, outdated and inefficient technique of knitting a sweater in my head. That’s what I do to try to fall asleep. A kind of knitting meditation. It didn’t work, of course. I was a frustrated knitter, a frustrated Bedtime Betty consumer and a very frustrated insomniac.

Suddenly, without any warning, my head started to fill with all sorts of strange and wonderful images. I was floating in a sky filled with foam, like the blanket of clouds that an airplane dives into when approaching an overcast city.

Whenever I focused on one cloud, another one was begging for my attention. I was a butterfly, fluttering from one wonderful thought cloud to another. This was a strange experience. I am usually more like a moth with OCD. I circle a thought, like a moth circles a light bulb, around and around, until they burn themselves to death.

It felt wonderful to be a butterfly for a change. Some were good clouds, others were not. There were clouds that contained toxic material about dying, others that contained instructions on how to knit better mental sweaters, others yet that revealed the ‘multiverse’ theory to me on a quantum level. In plain English: I was STONED! Read more...

Pragmatic Idealism

by Madeleine Kando

If I had to choose one word in the English language to describe my oldest daughter’s personality, I would describe her as ‘pragmatic’. My husband likes to describe her as ‘Dutch’, as if she was a piece of cheese. She is after all, half Dutch, half Hungarian. Dutch on her father’s side, Hungarian on her mother’s side. 

But calling her ‘Dutch’ does not do justice to her OR Dutch cheese. There are hundreds of types of Dutch cheeses and many flavors of pragmatism. Calling someone ‘pragmatic’ is just as vague as describing someone’s personality as 'Dutch', but for lack of a better word I will stick to that description.



The word pragmatic comes from the Latin word ‘pragmaticus’ (being skilled in law or business) and the Greek root ‘pragma’, which means a thing done, a fact. I personally like the following definition of a pragmatist: ‘One who acts in response to particular situations rather than upon abstract ideals; one who is willing to ignore their ideals to accomplish goals.’


Well, in that sense, we are all pragmatists by default? The question is not whether you are willing to ignore your ideals in the face of reality, but how far you are willing to go.



It is often said that the American character is quintessentially pragmatic. American inventors like Thomas Edison, and Alexander Graham Bell epitomize Pragmatism and the Yankee spirit of tinkering. Pragmatism says: ‘Try something and see if it works’. America itself was an experiment. Pragmatism judges whether something is good by its consequences. Pragmatism says that there are no absolute truths. Nothing is sacred. Ideas are basically there to give actions their purpose. Not the other way around.



For example, is it pragmatic to steal a car so you won’t have to walk to work? Well, according to one of the founders of pragmatism, William James, pragmatism is what works for the majority of people. If everyone started to steal cars, it wouldn't be good for the people whose cars got stolen (or for the car thieves who go to jail), so in the long run, stealing a car to go to work is not pragmatic.



If pragmatism is so American, it is in danger of suffering a slow death. How come we have so many 'principled' politicians in government? The current grid-lock is a direct result of falsely-interpreted idealism on both sides of the isle. From the Republicans' obsession with anti-abortion to the unwillingness to compromise on the Democratic side. It's all very non-American, if you ask me.



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Accent Discrimination

By Madeleine Kando

I speak English as if it were my native language. My native language is Hungarian, but I was too young when I left, so I no longer speak it. It is buried beneath other languages that I had to learn on the way to adulthood. I am a language mutt, you might say. Were it not for my accent, which I am told is French, I could impersonate the most diehard native English speaker. 

The only language that I speak without an accent is French, because I learnt it before my speech apparatus settled itself in the comfortable language groove that native speakers always dig for themselves. But before I could learn my multiplication tables, my French had to be tucked away in the bottom of my backpack, when we moved from Paris to Amsterdam. I learnt Dutch quickly and perfectly, without anyone noticing that I was an imposter. Or so I thought.

The problem is, that you cannot hear your own voice the way other people hear it, unless you use a recording device. The fact that I couldn’t hear my own accent protected me from the harsh reality that when people heard me speak, they saw a French duck, but I thought of myself as a Dutch swan.

Kachru's Three Circles of English

English is the Lingua Franca of the world. Non-native speakers use English to communicate with each other, which allows an Eskimo to speak to a Pigmy, to a Dutchman or a Russian without having to learn all these languages. He only has to learn English and presto, he is able to attend a Pigmy conference on how to grow taller, a Dutch workshop on how to build dykes, or read a manual on how to install a samovar in his igloo.

Of the one and a half billion people in the world who speak English, only 380 million are native speakers. Not only are they in the minority, but most of them are ‘mono-lingual’. They only speak one language. Who can blame them? Why bother learn another language if everybody else speaks your language?

Accent Discrimination

English is the undisputed global ruler, but there is English and then there is English. Speaking English without an accent (called neutral English), immediately puts you in a privileged position on the chessboard of life. You could have five post-graduate degrees and an IQ of 180, but none of that matters when you are a person in the possession of an accent. There are jobs and even entire careers that I would not waste my time applying for, knowing that I have a foreign accent. Can you imagine the President of the United States delivering the State of the Union with a French accent? People would roll on the floor laughing.

Accent racism is a result of our basic desire to classify others, to group them in a certain hierarchy and to differentiate friend from foe.* It is a global phenomenon, but it is ironic that ‘neutral English’ should be the norm when two third of English speakers have an accent. It’s like asking the entire male population to wear a crew-cut because a minority of American men are subjected to this atrociously disfiguring custom when they enlist in the army.

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