Challenging Opinions >>

Roy Speckhardt is the executive director of the American Humanist Association, and the author of Creating Change Through Humanism published by Humanist Press .

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As of this podcast, something over 2,000

people have died from Corona virus infections, all but six of them in China.

About 75 thousand people have been confirmed as infected, again, all but a

handful in China. Of the 29 countries that have reported at least one

infection, the majority have reported less than 10 infections, and as I say,

the 28 countries other than China with reported cases have reported a combined

total of six fatalities.

This is clearly serious. 2,000 people dead

is serious by any measure. We have the whole airline industry in chaos about an

apparently faulty aircraft that led to the deaths of a fraction of that number.

And the number of infections, along with the much smaller number of people dead

– the death rate would seem to be something around two or three per cent –

those numbers aren’t the whole story. Throughout what we know of human history,

there have been pandemics with terrible consequences.

The Spanish flu of 1918 killed

at least 40 million people, it could have been 100 million, we don’t really

know. To put that in context, World War 1, which had

just ended, which resonates through our culture, which is still taught in

detail in history classes, memorialized in thousands of locations across Europe

and beyond, World War 1 has inspired hundreds of novels, poems, TV shows, and

films not least the recent Oscar-winner 1917; World War 1 killed less than 20 million people over four

years. The Spanish flu, in just one year killed an absolute minimum of double

that.

So it’s worth paying attention to the

Corona virus not just because of the people already dead or infected, but

Rosanna Weaver is programme manager for executive compensation As You Sow.

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Her face looks at the camera in a way that

is totally different to how teenagers take selfies now. There’s no elaborate

expression, but there is, for some reason, a hint of a smile. Maybe the

instinct to smile when a camera is pointed overcomes her in the moment.

But this is not a sharable moment. Her name

is Czesława Kwoka, and her photograph has been colorized, but even in the black

and white original the uniform of Auschwitz-Birkenau is unmistakable.

The colorization is by Brazilian artist Marina Amaral, and it brings to

life a young person who died many years ago. Her face stares out at us across

the decades. In one photograph, she wears her camp-issued headscarf and looks

up and to the side. She is pretty, but she is thin. Her hair is roughly cut

short. Her lip is cut. The photographer who takes her pictures later testifies

that she has just been beaten by a guard. Later, when he is ordered to destroy

them, The photographer risks his life to save some of the pictures, including

those of Czesława.

She is deported to Auschwitz, along with

her mother in 1942. It’s not clear why, her family is Catholic, not Jewish, but

her uniform has a red triangle alongside her prisoner number, that means

political enemy, so it’s possible that someone in her family is in some

organization that the Nazis dislike.

She’d be 92 now if she had survived. She might still be alive, lots of people live to be 92 or older.

But she does not survive. All that remain

of her are those three photographs, now colorized, staring out from our new

technology, and our wondering of what she might make of this new world.

She arrives in Auschwitz in December 1942.

Some weeks later, in February 1943, someone decides that her life isn’t worth

her reaching 92, or reaching one more day. They inject phenol, a poisonous

acid, into her heart.

Chris Bostic is Deputy Director for Policy of ASH, Action on Smoking and Health. Which, since 1967 has been campaigning against Big Tobacco to reduce the death toll from smoking.

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So this is a famous clip of Ellen Degeneres

on her TV show talking about some ridiculous products aimed at women.

Ellen is a pretty funny character, but she

really doesn’t need to do much work to get a laugh at the idea of pens

specially for women.

But this clip refers to one trope that was

going around a while back, called the Pink Tax.

The idea was that products aimed at women

were having their prices jacked up by the evil patriarchy so that women had to

pay more for the same things than men. The whole idea was really just a

clickbait thing, and it was confused as to whether it referred to products that

were marketed at women’s preferences, or products that women needed to be different

to men’s products because of their physiology.

Ellen’s example is a pretty clear case of a

product that you can literally pay any price you like for. You can go to a

discount store and buy packs of dozens of pens for a dollar or so, or you can

spend hundreds of dollars for a single premium pen. I found one

pen for sale online that costs more than $5,000 – but hey, it’s got free

shipping. And all those pens do pretty much the same job; what you write won’t

be any better because you wrote it with a pen that costs thousands of times

more than the cheapest pen out there.

But why does this extreme price difference

exist? Surely the laws of the market should flatten out the prices. Well,

clearly they don’t. Because here’s a secret of capitalism. If you’re selling

pork bellies or  currency futures, supply

and demand set the prices, it’s a true marketplace. But if you’re buying a pen

because you want to sign a card that you’re sending to someone – do you really

shop around? Of course not.

What sets the price is what the market will

bear.

Steve Garner is a researcher at the department of Social Science at Cardiff University. The BBC Analysis programme that he appeared in is available here.

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Back in August I talked here about the

pro-democracy protests, anti-Putin protests in Moscow, and I noted that,

compared to the similarly-motivated protests in Hong Kong, there were small.

People might grumble, but there is no arguing that Putin has very widespread

support in Russia, and the protesting was done by a particular well-educated

cohort.

But it’s important to remember that as well as being small, these protests in Moscow are supported by a particular slice of society. There is a group of well-educated Russians, mostly in Moscow and other large cities who yearn for democracy and western-style freedoms. You could call them a young middle class. They travel abroad on holidays, they speak English and other foreign languages, they get their news online from largely independent sources…

That last point is important; television,

regular broadcast television, is hugely popular in Russia; it is hugely

influential, and it is totally under the thumb of the Kremlin. Just last week, Alisa

Yarovskaya, a prominent journalist on a Russian regional TV station in north

west Siberia asked Putin at a press conference why Moscow wasn’t supporting a

project to build a bridge to link two local towns, a project that the regional

governor had proposed.

Pretty innocuous you might think. Not in Russia. By the

next day, she was unemployed, saying that she had quit rather than be fired.

That gives you an idea of the level of dissent tolerated, or rather not

tolerated, in Russian TV news.

But as I said in August, the young, urban,

often well-educated people who are most likely to support democracy often just

bypass Kremlin propaganda and get their news online; often they speak English

Ivan Eland is a senior fellow at the Independent Institute. He has a PhD in Public Policy from George Washington University and has been director of Defense Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, and he spent 15 years working for Congress on national security issues.

Earlier this year he published War and the Rogue Presidency Restoring the Republic after Congressional Failure.

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So here’s a thing.

A common talking point on gun control, for

people discussing banning assault rifles, military-grade weapons, or any

particularly category of guns, or all guns for that matter, is the difficulty

of actually removing any guns that were banned from the people who currently

own them.

The people who have guns are probably the

sort of people who aren’t all that minded to give them up, and on top of that,

they are the sort of people who, you know, have guns, so that’s an issue. My

cold dead hands and all that.

Gun control advocates say that wouldn’t be

such a problem as it’s made out to be, and their opponents say that it’s not

really on because it’s the sort of problem where you don’t know how big the

problem is until you have that problem, and that’s not a good position to be

in.

But now we have a test case.

On the March 15 an Australian immigrant murdered 51

people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, apparently

motivated by alt-right white nationalist ideology. He was arrested and will be

tried next year, but in the immediate aftermath the prime minister announced

that there would major new restrictions to firearm ownership.

Before the attack, there was relatively

little control on the ownership of guns in New Zealand, it was probably the

only developed country other than the United States not to require the registration

of firearms, although they did require the registration of the type of

automatic rifles that were to be banned.

Joan Esposito is the afternoon host for WCPT AM 820, Chicago’s progressive talk radio. We talked about, among other things, Barack Obama’s call for progressive unity and condemnation of excessive expectations of purity.

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You’re used to me spouting on here based on

not much more than my own prejudice, but here’s a topic that I am actually

qualified to talk about. I studied linguistics, and I have quite a bit of

experience in language learning.

And anyone who has learnt a second language

will know that the words and phrases in one language often don’t map exactly to

the ones in another. A language is a complete speech convention, it’s not like

Morse code where you transfer words directly. Things work differently from one

language to another. Some languages have several non-interchangeable words

where another language has just one or maybe none, and this can make problems

for a language learner who hasn’t grown up with the experience of knowing when

to use which word.

And this means that people familiar with

language learners will quickly learn to spot what is the native language of the

learner by the mistakes that they make in their target language, the language

they’re learning. There’s even a name for it, it’s called native language interference. Believe it or not, this is useful

when it comes to understanding the comments in the hugely popular online

version of the British newspaper, the Daily

Mail.

The comment was from someone with the

username DMreader and gave their location as Lovely England, it was on an

article about a request from a Russian-backed separatist in Ukraine to Nigel

Farage to support his cause.

Articles, in case you’re not a linguist,

are words like a and the. So, if you want to say ‘I ate the apple’ you’re talking about a

specific apple known to the listener; but if you say ‘I ate an apple’ then you’re not specifying to the listener which

apple, because it’s not important.

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Now, here’s the thing about Russian. The

Ira Mehlman is the media director of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). In our discussion we talked about the prominent stories on FAIR’s home page which suggest that undocumented immigrants in the US are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, or are a disproportionate burden on the economy.

In fact, the weight of evidence indicates that undocumented immigrants commit proportionally fewer crimes than the rest of the population. There are a range of studies on the net cost/benefit of undocumented immigrants to the economy. Some studies indicate that the immigrants make a net contribution right across society, while others indicate that, while most US-born citizens benefit, very low skilled workers (highschool dropouts) suffer a wage drop, although this is offset by access to lower prices, and the effect diminishes with career progression.

FAIR’s contention that all levels of society suffer a significant net financial disadvantage caused by undocumented immigration is an outlier that is not replicated in other studies.

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About 40 men were taken to a barn and shot.

Following that, at least 300 men, women, and children, including infants were

rounded up and locked in the barn, which was doused with gasoline and set on

fire. Anyone who tried to escape was shot. All of them died.

This is what happened in a small village

called Jedwabne on July

Thom Hartmann is one of America’s most prominent progressive talk show hosts. His latest book, The Hidden History of the Supreme Court and the Betrayal of America was publisher by Berrett-Koehler recently.

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I know that some listeners are in the UK,

but most aren’t, and for you in the majority, although you’ve probably heard of

Brexit, you mightn’t really be sure why it is such a big and difficult issue.

It is a big and difficult issue, but the fact that it is a big and difficult

issue makes it difficult to explain.

I’m not going to bore you to death here

with all the details, but I have come across one fairly simple example of why

it is so difficult. Cows. The reason – or one of the reasons anyway – is cows.

I’ll explain why in a minute, but first

some basics. The EU is a huge trading bloc, currently 28 nations, with several

more trying to get in, and one trying to get out – the UK. They are separate

countries, but for trading purposes they work as one. If your business in one country

wants to sell something to a customer in another country, you just put it on

the back of a truck and send it to them. No extra paperwork, no taxes.

Tariffs with other countries are the same

for all 28. They have to be. It wouldn’t be possible to have one tariff for

Chinese goods going to France and another for Chinese goods going to Germany,

because then you could just bring it into the one with the lower tariff and

send it to the other.

Product standards are the same as well, so

that you can make a product or component in one country and put it on the back

of a truck and send it to any of the others. It’s been like that for more than

25 years.

Many people in Britain want to leave the EU

so that they can set their own tariffs and product standards independently.

That would mean that the UK and the EU would have to put up tariff barriers and

product standards checks between each other, but that’s what the UK wanted and

Randall Holcombe is a Research Fellow at the Independent Institute, and DeVoe Moore Professor of Economics at Florida State University. In the past He has also served as President of the Public Choice Society, President of the Society for the Development of Austrian Economics and as a member of the Florida Governor’s Council of Economic Advisors as well as a number of academic roles.

He’s written many books, the most recent of which is Liberty in Peril: Democracy and Power in American History, which was published last September.

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I saw a little

story from Chicago during the week. Not something that’s going to make

headline news, but it’s interesting. It comes from a City Council budget

hearing submission by Library Commissioner Andrea Telli. I told you, this isn’t

headline news.

But it is interesting. What the Chicago

public libraries did was abolish fines for the late return of books. You know the

sort of thing, you get two weeks to read the book, but if you don’t bring it

back in time, you have to pay a dime or whatever for every extra day. The theory

is that people will be more likely to bring back their books on time if they

have to pay a fine for them being late.

 Well,

Chicago said, forget it, bring us back the books when you can, no worries.

What happened? The return rate soared by

240 per cent. That goes against what you might expect, why would so many more people

bring back their books when the penalty is removed? There’s a couple of

reasons.

First, these fines are comparatively tiny,

and they were only ever likely to be enforced when someone came into the

library, probably to return the books, so to a degree they were more of a

deterrent than an encouragement to bring the books back.

But secondly, human motivations aren’t as

simple as that. People often do things for people, not because they have a

financial motivation,

Michael Tauberg is a senior Columnist with ProgressiveBrief.com. We discussed his article Trump Administration Corruption Doesn’t Excuse the Bidens.

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Air pollution in India is off the scale.

That sounds like a rhetorical flourish, but

it isn’t. It’s literally the truth.

Most cities around the world, including in

India, have sensors which monitor the levels of various pollutants, but one of

the most important to monitor is called PM10s and PM2.5s. I won’t get into the

technicalities but that’s basically a particle so small that our nasal hairs,

the mucus on our airways and the other ways that our bodies have evolved to

deal with impurities in the air, are unable to stop. We have no natural defenses

against them.

And they’re bad.

Breathing elevated levels of these

particles is associated with a whole range health problems including bronchial asthma,

chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, interstitial pneumonia and birth

defects, and they are listed as a grade 1 carcinogen, the worst type.

They can come from a variety of sources

including diesel engines, power plants, agricultural burning and domestic fires

for heating and cooking. They are estimated to cause up to 50,000 deaths

per year in the United States, and more

than a third of a million deaths per year in Europe, which is more densely

populated.

There is a scale that

basically measures how polluted the air is, it counts how many particles

are in each cubic meter of air, anything under 50 is good, under 100 is

satisfactory, between 200 and 300 is poor and there’s a warning with that it “may cause breathing discomfort to people on

prolonged exposure, and discomfort to people with heart disease”.

Not nice, but it’s not the worst. Between 300

and 400, very poor air quality “may cause