On elves, gnomes, dragons and fairies

Paracelsus was one of the pioneers of the scientific method in medicine and one of the promoters to abandon the Hippocratic and scholastic theory of the four humours to introduce chemical remedies and surgery as the base of modern medicine. But not all his ideas were so “scientific”. Paracelsus authored many books about magic and alchemy, in a time when these disciplines went hand in hand with chemistry and other natural sciences. One of his most curios books published in 1566 (25 years after his death) is A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies and Salamanders and on Other Spirits, describing all kinds of magic and hidden creatures which are supposed to live in our planet. “Nobody should wonder that there are such creatures. For God is miraculous in his works which he often lets appear miraculously." These are his words in the first chapter of this book.
Therefore, believing in impossible creatures is not exclusive to pre-scientific or anti-logic thought, as some of the most significant scientists believed in such creatures to a major or lesser extend. Just to give an example, Isaac Newton, one of the undoubtedly greatest scientists of all times, urged the Royal Society to sponsor an expedition to the Swiss Alps to study dragons, which were supposed to inhabit those mountains by that time. It was not an eccentricity: since Johann Jakob Scheuchzer published his study about his expeditions in the Alps, many scientists around Europe did believe that dragons and other prehistoric creatures existed.
We all seem to know pretty well where to set the limits between reality and superstition. Believing in creatures is all in the past, when these ideas were so widespread that even wise men believed. Today, we may think that there are just some gullible or uncultured people who believe in those things, especially in far-away cultures. But this is not true: today there are many people defending the existence of magic beings. For instance, a 1995 survey in Iceland revealed that 70% of Icelanders believed in the existence of “hidden people”, that is elves, gnomes and other mythological creatures of Iceland. The other 30% stood for 23% who was not sure, 1% who would not answer and only 6% who denied the existence of hidden elves in Iceland. There are many other similar surveys with similar results in this country because elves are a significant element of Icelandic folklore. To the point that the Ministry of Transports in Iceland appointed a person in charge to check that the layout of new roads would not disturb elves, avoiding their traditional inhabiting spots… as if the US government had a department on Bigfoot.
Therefore, it is not easy to see the limits between real and superstition, especially if you do believe in unreal things. But how can you realise that you believe in unreal things? The Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal, when talking about dragons in the Alps, exposed this dilemma: "If Newton, the most privileged brain of all human beings, believed in dragons, I may well believe in other kinds of dragons unconsciously".

Sources:

1. Paracelsus: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paracelsus
2. The Four Temperaments theory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_Temperaments
3. Paracelsus’ Four Treaties, including A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits: http://books.google.fr/books?id=YIKLKqwsEc0C&printsec=frontcover&hl=ca&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
4. Scheuchzer’s trips in the Alps searching for dragons: http://bedejournal.blogspot.com/2009/08/dragons-of-swiss-alps.html
5. Surveys about elves in Iceland: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hulduf%C3%B3lk#Surveys
6. A research documentary film about the invisible world of Jean Michel Roux, who spent some years studying Icelanders’ believe in elves and other supernatural creatures: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRjatXe5bis
7. About the Spanish writer Fernando Arrabal: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fernando_Arrabal

   
   
   
   

Voting against your own interests

In times of elections, many people wonder why parties traditionally advocating for the rights of a minority get so many votes. It is a recurrent topic of conversation among analysts and even in bars and cafés. Just google "why people vote X", making X the political party which, for you, favours the interests of the affluent minority, and you will realise that many other people have asked the same question. And the answers are also miscellaneous, but they can be divided into two groups basically.
On the one hand, some appeal to the voters’ ignorance of political issues, including soft answers (such as “you need to be really cultured to have a clear picture of politics, history and economy, and this is not easy for everybody”) and not so polite answers (to put it bluntly, “people are stupid”). But more or less, all these answers get to the same point: those who vote a party defending different interests means that they are unaware of the political agenda of this party or the most favourable policies for their own interests.
On the other hand, there are some answers saying that voters, especially in those democracies in which a two-party system seems to rule, react according to the pendulum principle --that is, punishing those who have long been ruling the country because they are to be blamed for all the problems, and the other party is the only available alternative. Some times the pendulum swings towards the party favouring the interests of a majority, whereas some other times it swings towards the party favouring the interests of just a few.
So, which answer is correct? Both types of answers may be right (and they are: just check on the news to identify different cases in which either one of them can be applied). But even if these answers are based on our reality, this is not all. Maybe those who vote against their interests are not ignorant fools or misinformed or cast a punishing vote. Or at least not all of them. Maybe it is just that they wish to vote that party. And this is the argument of John Kenneth Galbraith, one of the greatest economists of the 20th century, in his book The Culture of Contentment. We will try to provide you with a short explanation.
For centuries, the ruling minority passed the rules. The rest of the population, despite being a majority, had no saying in the political and economical matters. With the conquest of the parliamentary democracy, things are different in many countries and most people can take part in decision-making. But do not be misled: even if a majority can influence the public life, it does not include everybody. This is what Galbraith calls the contended voting majority --that is, the socially and financially lucky ones.  Anyway, this majority does not include all citizens but just those who really vote --it does not include those citizens who decide not to vote and those who do not have a right to vote (like immigrants). This contended majority votes for favourable parties, those who give priority to their interests above other people’s interests. When these people talk about cutting the Government’s expenditure, they talk about cutting social assistance, cheap housing, public health services, public education or the needs of immigrants, but   never about cutting other provisions like the financial support to ensure bank deposits in case of bankruptcy (which is an astronomical expenditure) or the subventions to large agrarian corporations exporting to Third World countries. According to this contended majority, such expenditure is not a burden for governments (but poor people’s health expenses and unemployment benefits are). On the contrary, this expenditure is the pillar of citizens’ welfare and safety. In other words, it is like in the ancient regime, when nobles justified their privileges as necessary for the good performance of economy and the country’s stability. Currently, the contended majority justify their privileges with the same arguments. Needless to say, there are always economists and political scientists ready to give a more intellectual nuance to this justification.
Defending your own privileges is not always monolithic. There are more and more privileged people who are also concerned for the rights of those who do not enjoy general welfare, going beyond their own personal contentment, and this is one of the best-known forms of social discourse. But in practice, when the contended majority goes to the polls, they give priority to their own welfare rather than to social justice.
When we say “privileged people”, nobody feels included. But privileged does not only include those who live in luxury, have yachts and celebrate parties on a tropical island. Privileged also includes those who have a job, a house and no major problems to make ends meet. These are privileged too, if compared to those who are not financially sound enough. And not wanting to help the underclass seems to be working: just keep what you have and do not lose privileges. The voters of parties who defend these privileges are in fact supporting the end of the welfare state because they ultimately consider that paying less taxes (hence, ending up with the welfare state) benefits them. And they even justify the excess of the affluent society: if the contended majority attacks the excesses of the supercontended minority, their own excesses would be too obvious in the eyes of deprived people. Paraphrasing Galbraith’s words, the grand opulence of the affluent people is the price to pay by the contended majority to keep what they have, which is not so much but it is good enough nonetheless.
To sum it up, our (well-grounded) criticism on the unfair privileges of the affluent citizens should also include some self-criticism towards our advocacy of our own privileges, which in the case of excessive consumption or the claims to pay less taxes just condemn millions of people to utter poverty.
Maybe those who vote the parties defending the privileges of the contended majority know what they are doing. But maybe they should start thinking if it is fair to defend your own interests to the detriment of the undefended minority.

Sources:

1. John Kenneth Galbraith: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Kenneth_Galbraith
2. The Culture of Contentment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Culture_of_Contentment

   
   
   
   

Following a cluster bomb

Arms trade is one of the big businesses today. The figures speak for themselves: in 2010 arms sales amounted to 150,000 million dollars. It is such a big business, with so many different actors (manufacturers, buyers, intermediary parties, regular armies, paramilitaries, guerrillas, dealers, etc.) that it is difficult to understand how it works.
To make it easier and better understand how the arms trade works, take an average company (not one of the largest, impersonal corporations) and follow its products, but do not beat about the bush by taking some far-away examples of companies located in a Caribbean Island. We have chosen a Spanish firm because it is close to us and because Spain is the ninth largest arms exporter in the world, which makes this country one of the main actors in arms trade. The chosen company is called Instalaza, with headquarters in Madrid and factory in Saragossa, and it supplies many armies in different countries. Let’s make it clear: we have chosen this company at random and it is not better or worse than many more other weaponry companies. We just wish to check how any random company works in this hideous business.
We have chosen a particular product traded by this company: MAT-120 bombs, better known as cluster bombs. Instalaza manufactured and sold cluster munitions until 2008. A cluster bomb is a form of air-dropped or ground-launched explosive weapon that, at a given distance from the surface, releases or ejects dozens of bomblets that are designed to spread over a wide area to cause top destruction and damage. It is very effective to lay waste to an area, so it poses a particular threat to civilians. Such out-of-control devastation capacity urged an international treaty, signed in 2008, by which the 65 signatory countries are banned to use, manufacture, sell, manipulate or store cluster munitions. Spain was the fifth country to ratify this treaty and the first country to dismantle its arsenal consisting of about 6,000 cluster bombs.
Instalaza, which still exhibits MAT-120 bombs in its catalogue (although when it was reported to the press in January 2009, the company decided to clearly specify that cluster bombs were no longer manufactured or sold), complaint to the Spanish government because such treaty would drive the business to the wall and had the gall to ask for 40 million euros as business interruption compensation. Needless to say, the Spanish government did not pay such compensation but, curiously enough, some months ago the factory lands were reclassified in a very profitable way for Instalaza. It may be just a coincidence.
So far so good, but what happened to the cluster munitions manufactured by Instalaza until 2008, which were not dismantled because they were already sold to foreign countries? Only one of the seven countries to which Instalaza allegedly sold these bombs is known: Finland (Instalaza was the winning tender to supply the Finnish army with cluster bombs). No clues about the other six countries… until April 2011, when the NGO Humans Rights Watch discovered some cluster bombs manufactured by Instalaza in Misrata (Libya), used by Gaddafi forces against civilians during the revolution that ended up with Gaddafi’s regime. They are date-stamped 2007. What about the rest of cluster bombs? Should we wait until they are used against civilians to know which countries bought them?
It is not easy to fight against arms trade. For each banned bomb, arms catalogues are filled with many other “legal” weapons. International treaties are slow and limited and we cannot boycott arms trade companies because we are not their target customers. But we can do something about it: put pressure on those who finance these companies. In the 2007 report by Setem, we can check that the bombs sold to Gaddafi in 2007 were manufactured thanks to the financing credits by the following banks: Deutsche Bank, Cajalón, Caja Rural, Caja España, Caja del Mediterráneo, Bankinter, Barclays Bank, Ibercaja, Banco Popular, Banc de Sabadell and La Caixa. 
Is your money banked there? Or in any other Spanish bank financing arms trade? Maybe it’s high time to think about ethical banking, isn’t it?

Sources:

1. World Arms Trade: http://www.globalissues.org/article/75/world-military-spending
2. Post at Delivering Data about arms trade: http://www.deliveringdata.com/2011/05/civil-society-claims-control-over-arms.html
3. World’s largest arm exporters: http://www.sipri.org/databases
4. Article about Instalaza at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instalaza
5. About cluster bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cluster_bomb
6. Treaty limiting the use of cluster bombs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convention_on_Cluster_Munitions
7. Instalaza’s online catalogue (there is an English version): http://www.instalaza.es/
8. Instalaza claims 40 million euros to the Spanish government:  http://www.cincodias.com/articulo/empresas/instalaza-pide-millones-prohibicion-bombas-racimo/20110509cdscdiemp_1/
9. Instalaza land reclassification: http://www.heraldo.es/noticias/zaragoza/urbanismo_recalifica_los_suelos_fabrica_armas_instalaza_para_sacarla_del_casco.html
10. Humans Rights Watch discovers Instalaza cluster bombs in Libya: http://www.hrw.org/news/2011/04/15/libya-cluster-munitions-strike-misrata
11. Instalaza Accounts: http://www.setem.org/setem_ftp/madrid/descargasweb/ANEXO-BANCALIMPIA-SETEM-bombasInstalaza.pdf
12. Setem report about banks financing arms trade: http://finanzaseticas.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/Dirty-Business-SETEM1.pdf

  
  
  
   

The recycling game

How about playing a little game this week? We all supposedly know which recycling bank is the most suitable for our rubbish, do we? It seems easy: old newspapers go to the paper recycling container, withered lettuce leaves go to the food recycling container… but what about corks, champagne bottles, tinfoil, thermometers or incandescent light bulbs? Try to finish our game without making any mistakes. It is not so easy, the results may come as something of a surprise!

Sources: 

There are many websites devoted to residue disposal and refuse collection. If you are really interested in this issue or you have some doubts about it, you’d better check it out with the local refuse collection services of your town. This way you can make sure that you are following the correct disposal criteria of your local public services so you make recycling as efficient as possible.

Just as a reference example, here you can check the criteria and recommendations for refuse collection of the Town Council of Barcelona:

http://www.amb.cat/web/emma/residus/recollida_municipal

You can use the following code to embed this game into your website:

<iframe width="400" height="600" src="http://www.alexcanosa.com/Dd/J001ang.swf" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe>