Half-time review

This is a photo from outside of the Modern Art Gallery in Glasgow - the statue with the cone on its head is a classic piece of Glasweigan iconography and I was pleased to see that, while many of the pubs I used to frequent have changed hands or disappeared, the traffic cone on Wellington's head remains constant.

As I'm sitting in London, basking in the warmth of pies that actually have meat in them, shit weather, catching up with old friends and watching the BBC news, this seems like a good time to reflect on what we've learned so far about the US. If I were to score the country like a high school student, the report card would be somewhat mixed: while the US scores well on some things, it continues to linger at the bottom of the class in many subjects.

My first impression of the beer in the US has very much been confirmed - the craft beers found in the US are truly delicious and I've made a far more comprehensive study of these now. It is not unusual to find a bar that has at least 15 excellent beers on tap, with many more available in bottle. Coming back to the UK has been a bit of a shock, with many bars not going beyond offering a few dodgy European imports and (if you're lucky) Guinness and a couple of cask ales.

However, there are definitely some green shoots visible - Scottish supermarkets are starting to offer some craft beers (in the name of science, I sampled widely) and we found one bar in Edinburgh, The Hanging bat, which offered a selection of 16 craft beers in keg, and another half dozen or so from the cask. Most of the beers were sourced from within the UK and were just as good as anything I've found in the US; there must be other similar bars around the UK. So, while craft beer explosion that happened in the US has yet to come here, I don't think it's far away...

Another first impression that I've confirmed is that the baseline quality of food in the US is higher - pub grub almost always comes with some nice side salads or steamed veg, while the definition of a salad back home ("la salade anglaise", as I like to call it) still consists of a sad, naked mix of lettuce, cucumber and tomato. Excellent food does exist here at home, but in general you have to pay more for the equivalent quality. The one exception to this is ethnic food - Indian and Chinese food in the US is simply bland and terrible. I'm not sure if this is because the food is adjusted to the American palate or because they've just not had the same level of immigration? If I had a restaurant like Kismot in Edinburgh (amazing Indian / Bangledeshi deliciousness) or Banana Leaf in Glasgow (tiny little hole-in-the-wall doing the best South Indian food I've come across), then living in the US would be much more tolerable. We've only really sampled DC so perhaps other parts of the US does better, and Ethiopian and Latin-American food can be very good in DC.

While the superficial things like food and drink make living in the US good fun, when you consider: quality of life in terms of holiday / parental leave, primitive provision of socialised medicine and the American dream, which states you can have anything you want if you work hard enough but if you're poor it's your own fault for not trying hard enough; these things show that the US still has a lot of growing-up to do before it can really be considered a proper country. A fact I would like to repeat here is that only four countries in the world have no statutory paid maternal leave: Papua New Guinea, Liberia, Swaziland and the USA. When the "land of the free" is lagging behind Syria, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, North Korea, Cuba and the rest of the world, you know something has to be fixed.

More poignantly, the recent US government shutdown demonstrates that the political system has basically ground to a halt and is making the country ungovernable. However, the prolonged madness of the shutdown has at least highlighted how bat-shit crazy the Tea Party wing of the Republican party actually is. Hopefully there is enough anger in the country to force some sort of political change although I can't imagine what shape this change would take.

The thing that is most confusing about the US is that I meet huge numbers of people who would agree with most of the last two paragraphs - many Americans are actually very reasonable, intelligent people who believe that the government should do more to help the poor and sick, and that the US should engage positively with the rest of the world. But the design of the US political system is such that a small minority of nutters can bring the whole thing tumbling down. If everyone plays by the rules, the US system should force compromise and produce better legislation. This fails when someone throws their toys out of the pram.

It is fascinating, if nothing else. We're just over halfway through our American adventure now: we initially planned to come for two years, but science is going surprisingly well so we'll stick around a bit longer. My complaints may make the US seem like a terrible place at times, but it is very easy to live there, even without a car or a decent credit rating. One thing that the US does do much better than the UK and parts of Europe (and, sadly, also Canada now, but that is another story) is that it still invests heavily in its science and even though grant approval rates are at an all-time low, the system it at least relatively transparent and the playing field is fairly level.

Whilst the US is a very good place to do science, is that enough to make us consider staying there long term? In a word: no. Although we're enjoying our time there and are grateful for the opportunity to do our science there, the US is just not home. As individuals, it's easy to live there but as left-wing, environmentally-aware, socialist hippies, we don't really belong in the US. It would also be nice to live in a country where at least one of us does not need a visa..! It's looking increasingly like we belong in Europe, especially now that Stephen Harper (evil conservative Prime Minister) is working his hardest to undo everything that makes Canada good. But that will need a long rant into itself, so will have to wait for another day.

Still Ploughing the Furlough

I guess I should point out here that everything in the following post is my own opinion and is in no way representative of that of the government agency where I work. I don't think that I need to worry about this as I'm not actually considered a government employee due to being a lowly postdoctoral fellow, but better safe than sorry.


Unbelievably, the US government is still shut down, almost two weeks after I wrote my last blog post. This is the self-described "greatest representative democracy in the world". Sorry, that was a cheap shot. Although, even now, House representatives have described US democracy as "the envy of the world" during debates, as recently as last week. One could wonder how the US media would be describing this farcical, manufactured political crisis if it happened in a different country, but one doesn't have to, as the Slate already made an attempt here. My favourite line is:

"The current rebellion has been led by Sen. Ted Cruz, a young fundamentalist lawmaker from the restive Texas region, known in the past as a hotbed of separatist activity."

Okay, enough petty bitching. As I said before, being furloughed isn't the end of the world as my work doesn't directly save lives in the immediate-term. However, the government shutdown is affecting the greater science community. During the shut-down, it's illegal to present any data gathered at US government facilities, which makes it impossible for us to attend conferences and share our research with other scientists, even if these conferences were planned months in advance and already paid for by the government. I heard of one researcher who landed in Australia on Tuesday 1st of October to present at a conference, only to be told that she couldn't give her talk and had to grab the first flight back to the US. I can't think of a bigger waste of time, not to mention government resources. Well, maybe the UK trident programme where the UK buys weapons of mass destruction and pretends that it's still a superpower, but that's not relevant here.

I was due to give a talk in Glasgow next week as I'll be home anyway, but some of the data I need are on a hard drive in the lab and I can't access the facility during a shut-down to pick it up. Not to mention that actually preparing the talk at home during the shutdown is technically illegal as well. As is checking government email...

The shutdown has delayed my own work by at least a month or two: all of my experiments require transgenic mice to be a certain age and once the mice are older than this, they become useless so have to be euthanised. This will be the same for many researchers at government facilities so if you scale this up, I'd hate to think how many thousands of animals will be completely wasted due to a political mess. And this is just basic research - shutting down the government has much more tragic, human consequences, such as denying sick children access to clinical trials.

Beyond government facilities, the shutdown is starting to affect scientific research on a much larger scale. Any research grant due to be reviewed or paid out this month will be delayed, causing breaks in research or even leaving labs unable to pay research. A radio telescope in Virginia was closed on 4th October due to lack of funds, and the NSF is having to evacuate researchers from the Antarctic research station.  An editorial in Nature describes this aspect of the shutdown better than I can.

Many aspects of biology rely on huge databases to act as repositories for genome sequences, protein structures or searchable databases of scientific literature. These databases are truly fantastic resources that are used globally, but they are funded and operated by the NIH. "Essential' workers are in place, but there is only enough staff to keep the servers running but not updated. My wife is an environmental microbiologist, and an important task in this field is uploading the genetic sequences of organisms found in your samples to NCBI, which is important for both data-sharing and a prerequisite for publication. These databases are curated by humans to make sure that data is uploaded in a reasonably standardised format, so not only is the shutdown slowing down the reporting and publication of data, but it will be creating an epic backlog for when the government does finally re-open.

So, when will the government re-open? According to the Washington Post, a deal may well emerge in the Senate today. Given that the debt-ceiling is due to be reached in 2 days, it's about bloody time. Even if a deal does emerge in time, if any senators dislike it (Ted Cruz, we're looking at you here), they could still delay it by several days. And then it could get a rough ride from the House of Representatives, who started all this mess in the first place. I guess all we can do is buy some popcorn and sit back and watch the show.

Just as a quick footnote: I've been reading the US constitution recently. Mostly because I don't have many friends and am not allowed to work during the furlough. ANYWAY, the 14th Amendment to the US constitution (section 4) states that:

"The validity of the public debt of the United States, authorized by law, including debts incurred for payment of pensions and bounties for services in suppressing insurrection or rebellion, shall not be questioned."

I would interpret this to mean that the debt ceiling in itself is unconstitutional so, in times of crisis like this, Obama could unilaterally decide to raise it and pay, at the least, interest to US treasury bond holders and prevent the economy from going down the pants. He could invoke the 14th Amendment and claim to be defending the constitution. Which is basically his job.

This isn't a new idea. During the last shutdown threat, in 2011, Garret Epps, a constitutional lawyer, wrote this piece in the Atlantic. Some other articles were written (here and here), which support that position, although someone else argued that only congress has the authority to borrow money on behalf of the US government so the 14th doesn't apply. I'm not convinced - it seems like a simple, legal solution to the madness in the House. But what do I know? I'm neither USian nor a lawyer, I'm just a lowly foreign scientist who would like to get back to work.

Ploughing the Furlough

The US government is currently shut for business, as you've no doubt gathered by now. From my foreign perspective, the government appears to have been forced into a shutdown by a bunch of extremists on the right, who are trying to undo a law that has been on the statute books since 2010, survived more than 40 attempts to repeal it, been declared constitutional by the Supreme Court and was effectively re-mandated by last year's presidential election (* see below).

Instead of spending a bit of time ranting about how bat-shit crazy this is, I'll let John Stewart from the Daily Show do it for me:



Since last weekend, I've started taking more of an interest in US politics and been watching debates in both houses on C-Span. Given the insane rhetoric coming from the Tea Partyists, the first thing that struck me was how orderly and calm the debate from the floor of the House of Representatives seemed to be, on a superficial level, as I'm used to watching the unruly rabble that is the House of Commons in Westminster. Politeness aside, the way bills pass through the House is pretty insane. Unlike the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Speaker of the House of Representatives is very much a partisan position and he/she gets to choose which bills are debated on the floor. The current situation means that, even though many Republicans are actually reasonable people, the Speaker John Boehner (pronounced Baner, apparently) has to pander to the extremists in his party and can't table a budget bill that doesn't have partisan demands (such as defunding Obamacare) without risking his own job, even though there are enough reasonable people in the House to pass such a bill. The net result is that the government has to stay closed until both houses and the president agree on some bill that provides money for the government.

So, I'm writing this blog post from my kitchen table, because the institute I work at is part of the federal government and has now been furloughed. We had to turn up for work yesterday so that we could "phase down" our work in an orderly way and had to be off campus by 12pm. Many businesses in DC have offered bar and food deals to furloughed federal employees (all of us non-essential types), so yesterday was quite good fun. I do appreciate that, as a lowly postdoc working in a science lab, I'm one of the lucky ones as my funding is allocated on an annual basis and I'm not technically a government employee (I work AT the government, but not FOR the government) so I'll still be paid during the shutdown. But this news is not so good for most of the government workers - many of the low-paid workers who actually keep my building running will be sent home until further notice with no guarantee of being paid for the time spent on furlough when the government eventually re-opens. If the shutdown goes on for an extended period of time, federal food programmes for poorer people will start to run out of money, spreading the pain even further. Of course, members of Congress continue to be paid during a furlough.

While the work I do is important, it's not essential - my research means everything to me but no-one will die if I can't do experiments this week. However, being shut out of our labs is still a ridiculous waste of money - a lot of my experiments depend on having mice at the correct age so a huge number of animal lives will be wasted because they can't be used at the appropriate time, which is ethically unacceptable. As I'm not a federal employee, I'm in a bit of a grey area where the furlough might not actually apply to me, but I'm on a temporary visa and the maximum penalty for working during a furlough is a $10,000 fine and up to a year in prison, so I'm going to err on the side of caution here. Technically, we're not even allowed to check work email during a furlough as this counts as working from home. Up until now, I thought the only sure way to make a scientist stop working was to threaten their coffee supply, but even a small risk of arrest and deportation is an amazing disincentive. Not to mention that my route to work involves cycling through a national park, which has also been shut down.

One interesting thing that I've learned about during this is that, because Washington DC is not a proper state, it is only subject to federal laws and, even though the district funded through taxation of those of us who live here, it's not allowed to spend its own money during a government shutdown. Services are still running at the moment because they have some emergency funds, but soon services like rubbish collection could grind to a halt, even though DC has plenty of money in the bank. Thankfully, the DC mayor says that he will keeping things running in spite of congress.

So, what happens next? Well, I'd quite like congress to sort their shit out so that I can get back to work. This could drag on for weeks, though. There's a second crisis just around the corner, when the federal reserve will run out of money in mid-October unless a law is passed that allows it to borrow more money to fund government services. While a shutdown is annoying, I don't even want to imagine what will happen if the US government was forced to default on its debt. Even the extreme right are not that crazy, are they!? I think Churchill got it spot-on when he said "you can always count on Americans to do the right thing—after they’ve tried everything else."

** Update: two bits of essential reading for understanding the furlough: a brutally honest piece from Al Jazeera and an insightful piece from the Atlantic **


(*A bit of background to the US government structure for folks back home: the US government is split into three legislative branches: the Presidency, the Judiciary and Congress, which are all supposed to balance each other. The role of the President is fairly obvious, the Supreme court is used to determine whether laws are constitutional and Congress, split into the Senate and House of Representatives, is the main law-making body. The Senate gives each state equal representation of two senators per state, whilst the number of representatives in the house is allocated to states on a population basis. Wikipedia explains it all rather well. In order for a bill to be signed into law, it has to be approved by both houses and then signed off by the president, who can also choose to veto a law. In principle, this structure should force a situation where no one body can wield undue power and drive through unpopular laws. However, if part of the legislature goes insane, it appears that it can block any bill from passing and bring a government to its knees, as is currently happening.)

Worried? Well? Is your coffee bulletproof?

Many people here in the US are very concerned about health. Given the insansity of the US healthcare system and the extreme poverty that can result from illness if you don't have decent health insurance, I guess this is sort of understandable. But I get the feeling that there are a lot of "worried well" - those who obsess about having the right health supplements, eating the right food out of a poor understand of evolution / biology, spending some time detoxing (as Ben Goldacre says, no-one ever says what these "toxins" actually are), not getting their baby vaccinated, only drinking bottled water filtered thorough the kidneys of virgin yaks or buying expensive versions of everyday products because of some purported health benefit.

As a scientist, I get very pissed off when people use a corruption of science to try and lull people into believing something daft (hence my hatred of the paleo diet), or to fraudulently sell some useless product. Ben Goldacre's Bad Science should be required reading for everyone. Things to watch out for are overly jargonistic, sciencey-sounding words. If you read the word "quantum" in an advert trying to sell you something, chances are they're talking shite. Unless, of course, you're buying a Quantum Computer from D-Wave, but I doubt many of us have several million bucks to buy one of them. New Scientist has a good column that points out some of the more ridiculous quackeries.

I do CrossFit to keep fit and one thing that many CrossFitters rave about is butter coffee (blending butter into your coffee in the morning). It seems kind of deviant and weird to me, but this blog post isn't about that. It's about the website of the guy who made this whole butter coffee thing popular in the first place: yes, I'm talking about BulletProof Coffee. Before I go any further into this website of quackery, I'm going to have a read of the rules governing libel in a blog. Because the US is a very litigious place.

Okay, I think as long as I stick to quoting claims from the company's website and explaining why they're bollocks, I should be okay.

One of the big claims of this Bulletproof fella is that normal coffee is loaded with mycotoxins, toxins from fungal spores that grow if the beans are not dried properly. I'm trying to find the original page I read months ago that had links to lots of academic studies (many of the links were broken, misintepreted or linked to studies on completely unrelated things) but it seems to have been updated. Oh wait, I found it. Before going through some of this guy's claims, it's worth pointing out that he sells VERY expensive coffee, allegedly free of these toxins.

His very first claim about the evils of mycotoxins is that they cause cardiomyopathy, and he links to this article. The article explains why adriamycin does indeed cause cardiomyopathy. What is this adriamycin? An evil mycotoxin? No, it's an anticancer drug. Feel your charlatanometer starting to ring yet? It gets better. He next says that mycotoxins can cause hypertension and kidney disease, citing this evidence. And if one actually checks out the paper? It's describing potential side effects of using cyclosporine, an immuosuppressant, during heart transplant surgery. Do you see a trend here? Using sciencey-sounding words and citing scientific papers, whilst aesthetically pleasing, is only helpful if they are related to your argument.

In the interests of fairness, it should be pointed out that there is a wealth of academic literature demonstrating that various mycotoxins can do bad things to you. They are generally created when fungi colonise improperly stored food, and they do bioaccumulate so that trace amounts can be found in blood samples from most healthy people (data in the same article). A good place to learn about mycotoxins is this website from the UK food standards agency.

Are mycotoxins from coffee a risk? One study carried out in 1980 found that the levels detected were too low to warrant further study, and that even when they added the toxins to green coffee beans, most of it (70 - 80%) was destroyed by roasting. Mr Bulletproof coffee snake-oil merchant cites this study as evidence of mycotoxin presence in coffee. The study looks at 60 samples taken from green (unroasted) beans all taken from Brazil. One third of these samples did indeed have OTA (one of the toxins) present at an average of 2.38 µg per kilogram (that's 2.38 millionths of a gram per kilogram of green coffee bean). The most heavily contaminated sample was 7.3µg / kg, which is still below the European Union safety limit. The toxin is there, so that's bad, right?

Let's think about it. I'll be kind (for the sake of argument) and ignore the fact that these samples were all taken from one country, and that the majority of them had no toxin at all. Let's take the highest level of toxin, 7.3µg/kg. As we discussed, roasting the bean will destroy al least 70% of the mycotoxin, taking us to 2.2µg/kg. But coffee beans lose on average 16% of their mass during roasting, so our hypothetical STRONGLY contaminated coffee contains 1.85µg of mycotoxin per kg of coffee. Brewing one cup of espresso uses 7 to 9g of coffee beans so, assuming every last molecule of mycotoxin from our hypothetical contaminated beans gets into your cup, there will be 16.6ng (nanograms, or billionths of a gram) of toxin in your coffee.

The average minimum dose of OTA that I saw causing any biological effects in the literature was around 1 mg (1 thousandth of a gram) per kilogram of body weight (trust me here, I can't be bothered searching the literature again). Taking the (scrawny) textbook man weighing 70kg, he would need to drink 4,216,867 cups of espresso (at one sitting) made from the beans where I've greatly exaggerated the risk, to see significant biological effects from the mycotoxin. Given that the lethal dose of caffeine needed to kill 50% of rats is 192mg/kg body weight, our textbook man would only be able to drink maybe 100 cups of espresso before he died. Let's be kind and say 200 because he has a caffeine addiction. I'm hoping that it's blindly obvious that you are at way more risk from the caffeine in your coffee than from potential mycotoxin contamination. Mycotoxins are a risk to health, but you're not going to get them from your coffee.

So, Bulletproof coffee man is selling snake oil. Literally. For just under $30 a pop, you can buy his special oil to add to your coffee. Its benefits include "Healthy Cell Walls" which sounds awesome. Except that you don't actually have cell walls. Unless you're a plant.

Although I've focused on someone selling coffee (he seems to make a lot of money from it), the general take-home message is the same for many things supposedly "bad for you". Yes, in sufficient doses, many things can be bad: pesticides, flame retardant chemicals, fungal toxins, vitamins, caffeine, fatty acids. Hell, any food rich in potassium gives you a measurable dose of radioactivity (measured using the banana equivalent dose). The point is that it's the level of exposure to these things that dictates the risk, not the presence. For example, check out one of the many websites that keeps track of things that the Daily Mail says can cause or prevent cancer (some things are on both lists!) I find it ironic that the people I meet who are most worried about ill effects from bad diets, coffee toxins, etc, are those who lead healthy, active lives so are least at risk from these supposed evils.

I have two take-home messages from my rant. One: beware people using sciencey-sounding things to push their bollocks onto you. Two: assuming you don't live in an arsenic mine or on the site of Chernobyl reactor 4, if you exercise and eat real food (made from vegetables and stuff), you'll probably be fine. There are better things to worry about.

The Great American Dream: Part Two

The American Dream can succinctly be stated that "You can get or be anything you want if you work hard enough for it". That doesn't sound too bad, does it? However, if you think a little bit deeper about it, you realise that the corollary of the American dream is "If you're poor, it's your own fault because you haven't worked hard enough".

Taking this philosophy to its logical conclusion allows you to understand the attitude of many USians (at least on the Republican side) towards socialised medicine, welfare, etc: "Why should I give the money that I worked hard for to the government so they can then spend it on poor people who are only poor because they haven't worked hard enough to help themselves?" It is important here to make the distinction between what the US chooses to do as a society (i.e. government spending) and what individuals choose to do in charitable giving, which is generally a lot more generous. I'll come back to this point later.

What has spurred the drift from my usual inane shit about why I can't find the right type of chocolate biscuits here in the US and move onto social justice issues? Well. This Monday, 1st April, the UK chancellor is cutting the top rate of income tax from 50% to 45%. The top income tax bracket is any money earned over £150,000. At the same time, to reduce the budget deficit and try to save the economy that the Tories have been running into the ground, they are squeezing the poor in several different ways.

First, the "bedroom tax" will cut 14% to 25% of the housing benefit for people who have one or more unoccupied bedrooms in their house. There will be cuts and restrictions applied to disabled benefits such as Disability Living Allowance, along with cuts to council tax rebates for disabled people; this comes at the same time that local councils will start introducing or increasing co-payments of various care services. Let's not forget that VAT (a UK sales tax) was increased to 20% a couple of years ago, all in the name of cutting the budget deficit. This is on a backdrop of massive inflation on food and energy prices, with a 0.5% Bank of England interest rate, causing most people to become relatively poorer even as minimal wage increases take effect. Oh, and the Tories have introduced an overall benefit cap, which applies to:

• Bereavement Allowance 
• Carer's Allowance
• Child Benefit
• Child Tax Credit
• Employment and Support Allowance (except when in the support group)
• Guardian's Allowance
• Housing Benefit (HB) (HB, England, Scotland, Wales) (HB Northern Ireland)
• Income Support
• Jobseeker's Allowance
• Maternity Allowance
• Reduced Earnings Allowance
• Severe Disablement Allowance
• Widowed Parent's Allowance

The reason that all these cuts are being applied? Because the UK banking system took ridiculous risks and had to be bailed out by the taxpayer. The same bankers who are still getting millions of pounds a year in bonuses. The same bankers who will benefit from the reduced top rate of income tax which comes into effect on Monday.

The Tory / Lib Dem government (yes, Liberal Democrats, I've not forgotten about you and your treachery; neither will the voters) have done quite a clever job of painting the social security cuts as helping the "strivers" whilst penalising the "skivers", ignoring the fact that many people who receive benefits actually work but do not earn a living wage so are reliant on government help to cover the costs of housing. Why is housing so expensive? Because the UK economy got derailed partly due to overinflated house prices which have not been allowed to crash (helped by 0.5% interest rates), meaning that only the rich can buy houses in places like London and the South East, where they then rent them out at exorbitant rates (and, in many cases, have this inflated rent supplemented by housing benefit paid by the government on behalf of their tenants).

The UK government, in adopting language like "welfare" instead of "social security" and painting a picture of hard workers supporting the lazy poor, seems to be recapitulating the more insidious aspects of the US Republican party. Is that where we want to go as a society? Do we want unemployment benefits to be paid for only two years after which, if someone hasn't found a job, they're left to starve to death because they obviously haven't tried hard enough?

I live in Montgomery County, one of the richest counties in the US and even here, 12% of households are food insecure, meaning they do not have enough money to feed themselves or their children, in spite of many of them actually having jobs. Since the government doesn't pick up the tab to help people, it is the kindness of individuals donating to charities such as Manna Food which stops more people starving to death in their homes. Considering that the US is the richest (and, they keep telling me, the best) country in the world, would you really expect that 16 million children (almost 1 in 5) are at risk of hunger?  I've already touched on health care here, so I won't again mention that the US government pays 25% more per capita on health care than the UK except have no socialised medicine.

So, as a society, is this where the UK wants to go? Do we accept the Tory rhetoric and use the recession as an excuse to shift to the right, lower the top rate of income tax for rich folk (I've not heard anyone say "wealth creators" yet, but it's only a matter of time), and continue squeezing the poor? Alas, the rise of right-wing, xenophobic little Englander parties such as UKIP doesn't bode well for the future. Labour, once the party of the working majority, have been outflanked by the Tories as they shift public opinion to the right. Living in the US, I've seen what happens if you take this philosophy to its logical conclusion and it's not somewhere I imagine most Brits want to end up.

In Scotland, we do things a little bit differently. Our politics are generally to the left of those in the UK as a whole, so we have things like universal personal care for our old folks, an NHS that isn't being slowly sold off to private investors and free university education. On September 18th, 2014, we have a once-in-300-year opportunity to say that we like to do things differently. I think that voting 'Yes' in the independence referendum is the best way for Scotland to decide that it wants to build a different society, one where we look after those who are less fortunate than ourselves, one where we choose to build hospitals instead of spending £100 billion on weapons of mass destruction. One where we actually have a written constitution. I don't look upon it as leaving England to their Tory-led shift to the right, but more as having a chance to show the rest of the UK that there is a better way.

Right, this is unusually long and serious. Next time I'll go back to inane bollocks about my middle-class angst at not being able to source the right type of grass-fed lamb while my neighbours starve to death in poverty.

Wee, sleekit, cow'rin tim'rous beastie!

This isnae a blog post aboot a moose, but it wis inspired by Burns Nicht. Actually, I wonder if there's a Scots word for "blog"? Not according to Wikipedia, but the article on Scots, written in Scots does make me smile. Anyway, I'm haverin' so I'll quit ma bletherin' and get back tae it.

Back in the day when I still lived in Scotland, I used to (perhaps unkindly) take great amusement from Americans who would visit Scotland to connect with their roots. You know the type, "My great-great-great grandfather was born in a tiny mud-hut north of Arbroath and then moved to Boston, so I've come back to find my roots, family and declare myself Chieftain of the clan". And then they'd ask for a Scotch on the rocks, and I'd smile my smug smile, thinking "aye, right".

So, has spending a year or so in the US softened my attitude? Sort of. It was Burns Nicht on Friday so we went to our local Scottish themed pub, the Royal Mile, to take part in their celebration. I'd received   a better haggis offer, but that was in up-state NY, so not so easy to get to. Anyway, the Royal Mile is a wee pub in the bustling metropolis of Wheaton, which is where we live. The bar has a certain dinginess to it that wouldn't be out of place in Scotland, but they ruin the experience by being too clean, having table service and friendly, cheery staff.

I'd never actually been to an organised Burns night event before, as I've never needed an excuse to chug whisky and munch haggis, but we thought it would be an interesting experience. It was actually pretty good fun, with pipes and the address to the haggis, and random punters coming up to recite a poem, sing a song, etc. I may even have got caught up in the spirit(s) (Laphroaig & Caol Ila, to be precise) and done a couple of songs myself. Much tartan was on display and there was a surprising range of ages present (I expected it to be an older crowd, hanging on to memories of the motherland), although I was the only Scot in the village, as it were.

So it got me thinking about why USians (North Americans in general, I suppose) like to cling on to heritage of their colonising ancestors. One often meets Canadians / Americans who identify themselves as Irish, Scottish, Italian, Dutch, German or even French. Although, oddly enough, I've yet to meet an American who claims English ancestry, although statistically, there should be more of them! I ask myself why people need to claim some heritage other than "American". I suppose the first reason is that immigration wasn't a single event but happens continuously, and I've met more than a couple of Scots who have taken citizenship and popped their sprogs in this land. A lot of the people who sound USian may only have been here for a couple of generations.

I guess another reason why many Americans cling to an older heritage is because their country isn't actually that old: I've drank in pubs back home which have been around longer than the US. As a European, I have a sort of vague, lazy sense of cultural identity. I know my country has been around for quite a while and that I'm unambiguously Scottish, so I don't need to spend much time wondering about my family tree or identifying with my people. Given that the US hasn't had enough time to generate much history, there's not a single national identity that USians have - if anything, it seems more regional. Folks in the deep south are pretty different from those here on the east coast, and I've been assured that people out west are more likely to be laid-back, pot-smoking hippies.

Of course, I'm generalising - I do meet many people who are settled enough just to be American or Canadian, but a significant number still look to the past to identify who they are. Interestingly enough, I've met more Canadians who speak Gaelic than I've met Scots with the same skill; Nova Scotian single malts do, however, still need some work.

To those north Americans claiming to be Scottish - do I still silently mock them? Not so much: everyone has to come from somewhere and, while they have funny ideas about how one should drink whisky, I've no qualms with folks identifying with my country. Especially if they want to visit and give our tourism a boost. Or even just furnish me with an excuse to wear my kilt. My main complaint is that the attempts at haggis in this country are woefully inadequate, but I'll save that rant for next time.

Going over the cliff...

Merry non-denominational celebration of the winter solstice! Have a picture of congress, where a third of the US government lives, namely the House of Representatives and the Senate. I took this a couple of days ago, but alas I missed the small window where we actually had some snow. Oh well. Today I want to moan a little bit about how the US government manages to not function.

Time for a quick compare and contrast: in the UK, there are two houses of parliament, the Lords and the Commons and, while the Queen is technically head of state, all decisions are taken in the commons, with the Lords serving purely as a revision chamber. The Lords can slow down, but not block, legislation coming from the commons.

By contrast, the US government has three branches: the Presidency, Congress and the Judiciary, with each supposedly having equal power. Congress is split into two: the House of Representatives and the Senate. While the senate is more prestigious, having fewer members (two per state, with none for DC) who serve six-year terms, the House has equal legislative powers, with the number of members per state being proportional to that state's population and each Representative serving two-year terms. I think the House has 435 members, but I'm not sure and it's not important for this moan.

The constitution of the US means that Congress and the President both have powers that can be blocked by the other, so passing something like a budget requires unanimous agreement between the President, the House and the Senate. This is supposed to prevent any branch of government from getting above itself but, as can clearly be seen by the current "crisis", it can also cause government to grind to a complete halt when you have different parties controlling different branches of government.

I'm sure you're all aware of the fiscal cliff? Basically, the two parties, Democrats and Republicans, couldn't agree on a budget just over a year ago when they had to agree to raise the the debt ceiling (a legal limit on government borrowing). After much haggling and silliness, and after causing the US government's credit rating to be downgraded, both sides agreed a temporary budget settlement by writing in automatic spending cuts and tax rises (that no one wanted), which would apply if the parties couldn't reach an agreement by the end of 2012. This agreement was supposed to buy time to sort out negotiations, because it includes blanket cuts to all federal agencies as well as cuts to welfare spending (to upset Democrats) and to defence spending (to upset Republicans), providing a mutually-assured-destruction form of motivation to sort things out.

So, as we approach the end of 2012, it's safe to assume that both parties put aside their idealistic differences in support of the greater good of the country? Aye, right.

We did a tour of Congress yesterday as we had a couple of friends visiting from back home (woot!) and, 48 hours before everything supposedly goes to shit, there was a surprising lack of politicians around the Capitol, with neither house sitting. So what will happen immediately if no agreement is reached? Lots of things, perhaps the most striking being the immediate cessation of unemployment benefits (around $290 a week) for about 2 million USians. Not a nice way for the very poorest in this country to start the New Year, especially given the current lack of jobs. I guess certain USians believe that the poor are only poor because they haven't worked hard enough, so it's their own fault, so don't see this as a bad thing. Just ask Mitt Romney.

Another Bad Thing will be increases in the Alternative Minimum Tax (AMT), which I only learned about today when I was working out my tax return (even more fun than it sounds). Basically, in the late 1960s, Congress noticed that 155 very wealthy households in the US were not paying a single penny in income tax due to various loopholes and exemptions, so they created the AMT to ensure that they at least pay something. It's effectively another tax form where you do your taxes again, but it has less exemptions for things like business expenses. This seems like an unusually socialist policy for the US (i.e., a good idea).

The problem with this tax is that they didn't index-link the threshold income for paying AMT, so the number of people paying the tax would increase every year. What normally happens is that congress "patches" the threshold for the AMT every year and a patch hasn't been applied for 2012. As far as I understand it, if an agreement isn't reached soon, folks will be liable to pay 26% of anything they earn over $22,500 (in addition to other federal taxes). Given that the median household income in the US is about $48,000, you can imagine how that will hit quite a few people.

(As an aside, I noticed that, even with 2011 levels, the AMT seems to punish those who are married as a married person has an exemption threshold of $10,000 less than for a single person. As I have no child care or mortgage payments to deduct against the AMT, I would have to pay an extra $800 in tax this year just for being married to Dom, if I wasn't a dirty foreigner who has slightly different tax rules. However, we'd better pop a sprog before next year's tax return is due, or skip the country...)

I have read some interesting view points suggesting that the US should accept the same austerity as Europeans and actually deal with their deficit. Others suggest that going "over the cliff" may not be a bad thing at all. Most commentators, however, seem to agree that the sky will fall, rivers will run red and the global economy will crumble massively. Who knows? What seems obvious is that, whatever happens, it'll be poorest in society who pay the biggest price for political and financial uncertainty. In that respect, our cousins in the US are no different from us Europeans.