As NASA puts it…

Also causing temporary radio blackouts, AR1748 is likely not finished. Still forecast to have a significant chance of producing strong flares, the active region is rotating into more direct view across the Sun’s nearside.

Good to know.

and a drive down Mespil road and along by the canal one fine day in September 1957

…more than 10,000 additional suicides and up to a million extra cases of depression have been recorded across the two continents since governments started introducing austerity programmes in the aftermath of the crisis.

Those are the tragic (and avoidable) first order effects, in a sense, but there’s more:

In the United States, more than five million Americans have lost access to healthcare since the recession began, essentially because when they lost their jobs, they also lost their health insurance. And in the UK, the authors say, 10,000 families have been pushed into homelessness following housing benefit cuts.

And the…

…most extreme case, says Stuckler, reeling off numbers he knows now by heart, is Greece. “There, austerity to meet targets set by the troika is leading to a public-health disaster,” he says. “Greece has cut its health system by more than 40%. As the health minister said: ‘These aren’t cuts with a scalpel, they’re cuts with a butcher’s knife.’”
Worse, those cuts have been decided “not by doctors and healthcare professionals, but by economists and financial managers. The plan was simply to get health spending down to 6% of GDP. Where did that number come from? It’s less than the UK, less than Germany, way less than the US.”

That is a crucial point. The decisions taken have not been based on concepts of the public or societal good, but according to very narrow – and given the push back against the conceptual foundations of austerity – and deeply flawed political/economic policies. And how could it be otherwise in societies where the economic is now reified to a point where it appears to sit above democratic accountability.

Consider our own experience where political party after political party sought legitimation from the public vote merely to (and cheerled by a media infatuated with orthodox socio-economic approaches). The Green Party and the Labour Party are merely the most egregious examples of same. But all in government across the past five years share that feature.

Stuckler and Basu make a distinction between recession and austerity:

Such phenomena, he says, “are just a few of many effects we’re seeing. And with all this accumulation of across-the-board, eye-watering statistics, there’s a cause-and-effect relationship with austerity measures. These issues became apparent not when the recession hit Greece, but with austerity.”

Because in recessions efforts were made to mitigate the worst of the situation whereas in austerity the situation is considered to be virtuous in and of itself (whether the line is that it is a ‘necessary’ evil or not).

And they note that:

Investment in intensive programmes to help people return to work – so-called Active Labour Market Programmes, well developed in Sweden (where suicides actually fell during the banking crisis) but also effective in Germany – were a factor that seemed to make a big difference.
Maintaining spending on broader social protection and welfare programmes helped, too: analysis of data from the 1930s Great Depression in the US showed that every extra $100 of relief in states that adopted the American New Deal led to about 20 fewer deaths per 1,000 births, four fewer suicides per 100,000 people and 18 fewer pneumonia deaths per 100,000 people.

There’s more and it’s essential reading. Not least the way in which the data from the UK where the ‘austerity’ approach was adopted in perhaps the most politically opportunist way possible, suggests increasing numbers of suicides driven by economic context, and the dangers to the very fabric of the NHS.

And as Stuckler notes:

[He] finds this all in stark and depressing contrast to the post-second world war period, when Britain’s debt was more than 200% of GDP (far higher than any European country’s today, bar Iceland) and the country’s leaders responded not by cutting spending but by founding the welfare state – “paving the way, incidentally, for decades of prosperity. And within 10 years, debt had halved.”

By the way, worth noting that Stuckler is an economist as well as a public-health researcher.

Earlier this week… a businessman from Clonard, Co Wexford, who was adjudicated a bankrupt in July 2011, was returned to Mountjoy Prison after telling High Court judge Ms Justice Elizabeth Dunne he didn’t recognise her authority. He referred to himself as Francis of the Clan Cullen and, according to the court’s official who deals with bankruptcy cases, Chris Lehane, every time he corresponded with Mr Cullen he received a bill “to be paid in gold” for “using his name”. He had been in prison for contempt of court since February.

For an example of how some of the ‘Freeman’ “thinking” [was] spread check this out from 2009.

Last weeks answers next week (as I’ve them written down somewhere I cant access at the minute )

On then to 1932 and an attack on Fianna Fail from Cumann na nGaedheal ‘Farmers! Keep a Firm Grip of Your Homesteads’

Then a letter from Nessa Childers to Labour Party Members about her resignation from the Parliamentary Party

From the 1994 European Elections a leaflet from Irishwoman Anne Murphy who was running for the Communist Party of Great Britain in London North West.

From the 1973 General Election an ad for Independent ‘Unity’ candidate Patrick Turley who was running in Monaghan

“There can be no more delays, expert groups or excuses” a legislate for X leaflet distributed by The Socialist Workers Party

Economic growth is likely to reach 1.8 per cent this year, a forecast which is more optimistic than EU and Government predictions, but the expansion is unlikely to tempt consumers to begin spending again and will have little initial impact on unemployment.

Ah…

they will only perform research that has “social or economic gain”.

And:

John MacDougal, President of the NRC, literally said, “Scientific discovery is not valuable unless it has commercial value”. Gary Goodyear, the Canadian Minister of State for Science and Technology, also stated “There is [sic] only two reasons why we do science and technology. First is to create knowledge … second is to use that knowledge for social and economic benefit. Unfortunately, all too often the knowledge gained is opportunity lost.”

As Plait notes, this is entirely wrong. As he puts it:

This is monumentally backwards thinking. That is not the reason we do science. Economic benefits are results of doing research, but should not be the reason we do it. Basic scientific research is a vast endeavor, and some of it will pay off economically, and some won’t. In almost every case, you cannot know in advance which will do which.

But as noted in comments under the article this is a line of thinking that can be found much closer to home… George Monbiot noted on his blog, again coincidentally the day before yesterday, that:

Two weeks ago I castigated the new [United Kingdom] chief scientist, Sir Mark Walport, for misinforming the public about risk, making unscientific and emotionally manipulative claims and indulging in scaremongering and wild exaggeration in defence of the government’s position(3). Since then I have seen his first speech in his new role, and realised that the problem runs deeper than I thought.

How much deeper?

Speaking at the Centre for Science and Policy at Cambridge University, Walport maintained that scientific advisors had five main functions, and the first of these was “ensuring that scientific knowledge translates to economic growth”. No statement could more clearly reveal what Benda called the “assimilation” of the intellectual. As if to drive the point home, the press release summarising his speech revealed that the centre is sponsored, among others, by BAE Systems, BP and Lloyd’s.