Simon T. Kaye

…or, why Bono shouldn’t pay up.

This week, U2 will be headlining at the Glastonbury festival. As expected, rock music purists are debating whether U2 is just too pop; whether this might be another symptom in the festival’s dumbing-down (Snoop Dogg, Beyonce and Jay-Z being among recent headlining artists).

But the musical discussion has been overshadowed by a political one. Art Uncut, a spin-off from the  UK Uncut protest movement which we heard so much about during the tuition fees arguments of late last year, is staging a demonstration against U2. Not because Bono isn’t rock’n'roll enough, but because he – in their view – is dodging his taxes.

I encourage you to read the 3rd June piece about this on the Art Uncut website. Titled “It’s crucial we send a message to Bono that what he is doing is wrong”,  the piece forwards what is now becoming a very familiar argument: that there is a moral obligation to maximise individual tax contributions.

The ‘Bono Pay Up’ Facebook event page now has around 200 registered participants, all of them (presumably) ticket-holders for the expensive Glastonbury event. Perhaps this seems a little meagre, given that around 177,000 people are set to attend the festival. But the overall power of a moral argument against tax-avoidance has gathered massive support elsewhere, mixed well into a generally politics-flavoured cocktail of state spending cuts opposition and distaste for specific coalition reforms. Protests and sit-ins at Fortnum & Mason, Topshop and the like have attracted news headlines and big-name support from the likes of the Guardian‘s Polly Toynbee.

Let’s run through the ‘uncut’ argument.

1. State spending cuts are bad, and will undermine valued services which are best provided by the state.
2. Budget deficits, like the UK’s annual £170 billion debt rate, are also bad. It is right to try and reduce national debt and the spending deficit.
3. Raising taxes is not always good, though preferable to reductions in public spending.
4. How then do we plug the deficit, without reducing spending or raising taxes too much? Simple: we force rich companies and individuals to stop avoiding their taxes.

On the face of it, this is a powerful, practical ‘everyone wins’ argument. Congratulations should be offered to UK Uncut and its spin-off campaigns for bringing their agenda into the public eye through the targeting of a few case-studies. Bono and U2 are just the latest example of this.

So what’s the problem? Let’s dig down into the case against Bono and U2.

1. We are not morally or legally obliged to maximise our tax contributions.

I would even view this as a human right. We have the human right to act rationally wherever such action is legal. Minimising our tax contribution is always rational – particularly, in fact, for the very rich, as they are far less likely to need state support at some later point.

Being a multinational company or rich individual and earning a lot of money shouldn’t change this. Human rights aren’t human rights if they stop applying to you over a certain income threshold. Put it another way: at what point does a state gain the remit to delimit human rationality?

This is not to say that civil society shouldn’t be concerned with encouraging selfless, generous, charitable and social behaviours. But Bono surely ticks a lot of these boxes independently, as we shall see below.

2. Ireland is not a ‘developing country’…

…not in the sense that this term is usually understood, anyway. Art Uncut argues:

… [T]ax issues are crucial to development. Christian Aid estimates that developing countries lose $160bn annually, more than the global aid budget, thanks to unscrupulous multinational companies dodging tax. If we want poor countries to become richer, we need to adopt an ethical approach to taxation. It’s clear that U2 take anything but an ethical approach to taxation.

Even allowing this assertion – that developing countries are often screwed by tax-dodging multinationals – cannot help in the case of U2 and Ireland. Ireland is a highly developed and economically modern country.

3. Why should Bono trust Ireland with his money?

There is a reason, after all, why Ireland is now having to embark on a significant austerity programme. As a state, Ireland has hardly demonstrated fiscal prudence.

Irish spending policies contributed to a landmark unemployment rate and the country’s first recession since the 1980s. When the financial crisis occurred, the cost of bank-bailouts contributed to an already-vast deficit. Eventually, the EU and IMF stepped in, and other countries lent fiscal support to Ireland.

Perhaps Bono wouldn’t agree with the spending priorities of the Irish state. Perhaps he didn’t agree with the largely ineffective 40 billion Euro stimulus package, or the policy of buying out failing banks with their toxic credit. By the time of the 2008 crisis, U2 was already tax-resident in a different country; this was both legal and rational and, as an internationally successful band, not particularly strange either.

4. What if Bono spends his money more wisely and charitably anyway?

As the Art Uncut article states,

Bono presents himself as someone who cares deeply about development.

This is putting it mildly. U2′s philanthropy is near-legendary. The band has spent more than a decade (perhaps ironically) campaigning on third-world debt. Bono co-organised the Live 8 charity concert project. He is a founder of the Product Red charity brand campaign. He has his own charity – the One Foundation. This and other work represents millions of pounds of charitable contributions, on top of robust political activism.

I’m not a particular U2 fan, and there may be many good reasons to arch an eyebrow at some of Bono’s posturing, or question the effectiveness or sensibility of his approach. But to suggest that Bono is money-grubbing seems decidedly churlish.

Indeed, if Bono is choosing to reduce his contribution to one or another state infrastructure, and then pumps what surely amounts to more than the difference into charitable projects, and he chooses to do so legally, who has a moral basis for questioning his actions or attacking his civic sensibilities?

To conclude…

I suppose the broader point is that it would seem peculiarly trusting, even naive, if people imagined that in all cases the state they happen to live in is better placed to dispose of their money with wisdom. Yet to volunteer taxes – to offer, as it were, additional taxes, above those that are legally required – would be exactly the same as minimising personal disposable wealth. It would be an admission of incompetence, perhaps, or a wholesale acceptance of the idea that the state knows best.

Surely, and especially in the aftermath of the last few years, nobody actually still thinks this way?

I’ve had some interesting replies to my last post on this, so I thought I’d put down a bit more here. Just from the outset, though: I wrote the original piece out of bemusement that everyone had given up whinging about the NHS for a day. I was hoping to strike my usual balance of being critical of something while still supporting it overall.

The estimable Shiro Ota wrote this:

Perhaps the NHS does constitute some semi lack of freedom (to be as detrimental to your own health as you like, although most people who live in such a way don’t seem to worry too much about their moral responsibility not to strain the system); but surely that’s more than offset (by a long way) by the benefits of aiding those who are genuinely, unavoidably, unhealthy; and those who are upstanding; hard-working citizens who could, nevertheless, not afford equivalent private care.

Randian objectivism is an understandable system that would oppose an NHS. But without subscribing to that (which I don’t), I can’t see a case for opposing its institution. In post-war Britain; or at present.

The question of the balancing act returns, of course - do we derive a greater value (of freedom or whatever else is at stake here) from the existence of the NHS as we do from the potential state of its non-existence?

It’s hard to prove anything from a counterfactual (and I should know). I suppose that all I can say in reply to this is that I don’t feel the only alternative to socialised health-care is its polar opposite. This is reflected in the fact that a Labour government has been spending the last decade and more tying the NHS to private interests, partnerships, and investment. I don’t think it’s working – actually I think it’s disastrously half-arsed.

Coming from another world, though, where we never had an NHS, I think that state intervention would be perfectly acceptable in a system that is, for the most part, operated in terms of a free market of health-care. So I don’t think that Randian Objectivism is the only recourse, or that, indeed, it could be any sort of improvement.

Obamacare may be basically the right synthesis, in the end – I’m sure we’ll find out.

My sainted mother, Dani Kaye, wrote this:

And why don’t you mention what you would put in its place, given the relative poverty of such a massive proportion of the British population compared to, say, Switzerland, where we have mandatory health insurance?

Well I think I made clear that I wouldn’t do anything like remove the nhs… it’s too well-established. But if I was starting from scratch?

Subsidies delivered to essential, first-level health services and medicines, mandatory insurance with certain benchmarks of assistance based on personal income, anti-monopoly laws for hospital ownership and licensing permissions so there wouldn’t be too much geographical overlap… basically a really, really well-regulated market scenario. Rather than the current approach, which is to try to de-regulate, localise and set up PFIs etc. over the top of a state monopoly. No NICE, either: individual health establishments make their own decisions about their services, above a certain level. They compete, improved services are incentivised, and thus we’re hardly dealing with some anarchistic nightmare realm.

Another particular friend asks:

Is it just me or are the Daniel Hannan NHS comments pretty reasonable?

Well, Hannan clearly thinks the whole project was misguided, though he seems to agree that people have always meant well in instituting the NHS. I don’t actually have a problem with this guy. He’s mainly saying things that most people say every day: we spend too much money on it, it’s over-regulated, and it has crazy little breakdowns in its own special ways. It’s a perfectly reasonable point of view.

A few points about the general Fox coverage, though: Doctors over here are paid PLENTY. There’s no argument to be found on that. I truly believe that. Could they be paid more? Sure! But I don’t think their pay levels are in any way part of any of the problems that our system has.

I’ve been enjoying the big online argument over Britain’s NHS. Fox News have thrown around the idea that it lets terrorists into the country. CNN has a pretty good overview of how everyone’s been responding to the US Republicans’ claim that the system is “Orwellian”. And the #welovethenhs tag trundles away on Twitter.

Complaining about the NHS is pretty habitual in practically every British person that I know. “I can’t believe I had to wait thirteen weeks to have my _ looked at!”, “You won’t believe how long I was waiting in Accident and Emergency and then they didn’t even do anything!”, “It’s ridiculous how our hospitals have become home to ‘superbugs’ – why can’t they just keep the places clean?”, and so on.

What most people don’t do is make the outright principled stand – they don’t object philosophically or ideologically to the cost of the NHS, the idea of living in each other’s pockets, or the loss of personal responsibility for health.

(Erm, we also don’t think the NHS lets terrorists in.)

So I’ve always concluded that most Brits want socialised health care, but they want it to be better than it is right now. What’s fascinating about the ongoing debate is that so many people seem to be leaping to the NHS’s defence completely unequivocally.

Well, let’s be measured about all of this. As a Brit by birth, I’ve used the NHS many times. So here is a FAQ:

Does the NHS provide an overall good standard of medical care? Absolutely. It works. People get treated, and it’s absolutely free at the point of use. I usually come away satisfied. Just not always.

Is that standard as high as in a privatised health system? Not at the top, but it’s far better for folks at the bottom of the chain. By the way, in the UK, people who want to can take out private health insurance and seek private aid, so there isn’t a total monopoly.

Is the NHS a massive, creaking bureaucratic behemoth? Oh lord, yes. The NHS is plagued by wastefulness, red tape and is swarming with money- and time-wasting bureaucracy. Hopefully this can be reformed.

Do most people put more money into the system through tax than they’re ever likely to get back through treatment? Of course. If you don’t like that, you don’t want socialised…. well, anything. Apart from maybe education.

Is it OK to be philosophically opposed to nationalised health care? Yes. It does work, it’s about a million miles from being perfect, but if you’re fundamentally opposed to the idea of distributing the personal responsibility for one’s own wellbeing, then you should feel free to hate the NHS.

As the chief legacy of Clement Attlee’s post-war reforming government, the NHS was originally intended to form the cornerstone of a projected ‘Socialist Republic of Great Britain’. Clearly, this never happened. But the idea was so popular and so effective that the NHS is absolutely at the heart of the UK’s version of the ‘post-war settlement.’

It’s an assumed fact of life here: people don’t think to oppose the NHS on any fundamental level any more. The single biggest compromise to universally socialised medicine in the NHS took place months after the service was inaugurated, with the introduction of prescription charges. Since then, not even Maggie Thatcher has found the time to repeal the key parts of our health care system.

Speaking for myself, I find it hard to escape the usefulness and ‘fairness’ of this system (especially when it has treated me well, as it has for the last little while).

But would I institute such an establishment again, today, if I had the choice? Probably not.

The fact of socialised health care legitimises the worst instances of government nannying. We are now nagged and scolded on a daily basis over the latest health fads, based on one or two studies somewhere in some department of medicine, and often quickly withdrawn when competing evidence is produced. We eat too much salt, we don’t eat enough vitamin C, we need certain foods, a certain lifestyle. I don’t think government should get involved with the way people live their lives. But when everyone else pays for your own health problems the responsibility for them becomes impersonal. Your weight, your habits and your choices become everybody’s business.

The NHS is unweildy, but willing; it works in earnest, but doesn’t always deliver perfect healthcare. No system can. So if you’re going to oppose the NHS, do it properly, from the ground up: do it because you think it’s a signpost on the road to decreased freedom. Everything else is just noise.

“The next ten or fifteen years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician.” 

These words were uttered at a hearing in the heart of Political America recently. You can see it, and an interview with Ariana Huffington of the Huffington Post, over on this webcast of a segment from MSNBC’s ‘Morning Joe’.

Oh yes; journalism (its nature, its state) isn’t just making news at the moment; it’s in the news. The rise of the ‘blogosphere’ has been a perennial issue for some time; as a journalism student I saw many well-known journalists speak and the one topic that they all always came back to was the changing face of their trade in the age of new media.

Alan Rusbridger failed to convince with an almost-powerpoint about how the Guardian’s transition to the ‘Berliner’ format was an attempt to shore up sales while papers do the job of convincing people that their coverage is worth actually paying for (I think I’ve complained about his talk before…). Of the writers, ‘columnist’ Polly Toynbee was particularly derisive of this challenge to her status as arch-opinion-former.

It’s at the movies, too. State of Play (which is excellent) feeds off the in-house tension between a veteran political reporter who types onto a dark screen with two fingers at a time and the young thing behind his paper’s attempt to survive online. When Crowe’s character says “You think I’m over-fed, too expensive and take way too long”, he isn’t simply referring to himself. Newspapers now cost around £1 a day in this country (which almost legitimises my ever-more-frequent splashing out for the International Herald Tribune, at closer to a quid-fifty). Why pay that to read news that was only fresh ten hours ago?

The Independent, under Simon Kelner, tried something new. Objectivity? Who needs it! News is subjective. Importance is relative. Everyone writing this paper is human; let’s not pretend we don’t have opinions. The result was the ‘viewspaper’, a concept which has slipped away somewhat since the start of Roger Alton’s reign (he prefers the more old-fashioned approach of decorating the pages with beautiful women. They “basically make the world a better place”, after all). Today I’m not quite clear whether the ‘viewspaper’ ever made the Indie into anything more than the Express of the left.

The recent outcry over Swine Flu panics on the Internet allowed every traditional-media commentator to point out what they perceive to be the inferiority of blogs, and twitter, and social networking sites. If it’s not edited, it’s not safe. No-one making this claim can have seen some of the front-page headlines I saw a week ago. “Swine Flu to kill 91,000 Londoners” is a personal favourite.

Newspapers are not immune to misjudgments, errors, factual inconsistencies and unqualified opinions. It’s pretty ironic to see the stalwarts of the printed-press attacking new information-distribution systems for inflating problems or being hysterical when the very slump in sales caused by new media is the driving force behind the popularisation, dumbing-down and spectacle-seeking that practically every newspaper I can think of has been moving towards (though I do feel inclined to point out my belief that the USA’s daily printed media are of a sustained quality compared to the papers here in the UK).

The current, excellent issue of Prospect magazine (I know, I keep linking to them) mounts a debate around and defence of ‘serious journalism’. More here.

This seems particularly timely as the Telegraph, mocked and criticised (Private Eye calls it the ‘Maily Telegraph’) for its massive staff cuts and new-found interest in celebrity nonsense, dominates everyone’s news-schedules for the second day running. Its comprehensive investigation into and explanation of Parliament’s flawed expenses system is an absolute must-read, clearly the product of prolonged research, and a genuine scoop. Are there mistakes? Of course. Dozens, I’m sure (it’s still worthwhile).

But, crucially, The Huffington Post probably couldn’t get away with this many factual issues or slightly-libellous claims without compromising its standards. I’m simply not convinced that we hold our more established online news-sources to a lower standard than we do our printed media. I’d personally trust a twitter feed more readily than an editorial in the Express.

Warren Ellis advised us in last month’s Wired (another great magazine) not to trust the new media as a source of news. Why? Because online news providers “have no interest in their minimum-wage blogmonkeys thinking about anything bigger than their hitcount”. But how, precisely, does this differ from the editors and writers of the modern-day newspaper, faced with shrinking sales and deflating advertising revenues?

Things move quickly in this new world. Amazon’s Kindle, the most successful of the e-ink reader systems, is moving toward a larger format that can more effectively accommodate the big pages of newspapers and journals. The days of getting ink on our fingers may well be numbered, and this would be no bad thing for an environment that needs its trees.

Are newspapers going to disappear? No. They’ll change, they’ll be forced to adapt. I personally think they’ll become more like magazines. I’m reading more magazines now than I have at any other time in my life; I’ve referred to at least three different magazines right here in this article.

To return to the quote at the top of this blog – is the decline of the traditional media really going to undermine the accountability of the political world? People thought this way when radio hit newspapers, and again when television hit newspapers. The truth is that it has become harder to do wrong, and to get away with it, than ever before. This fact raises ethical issues of its own.

But let us not delude ourselves that ‘serious journalism’ plays some quasi-constitutional role that more democratic systems of reportage cannot match.

Another marvelous image from XKCD

Evgeny Morozov, who writes an unmissable blog for Foreign Policy, makes a more important criticism of twitter’s current role, suggesting that it’s providing more disinformation than anything else – but also mentions the possibility that the internet could work as a fantastic finder and predictor of emerging biological threats. With the increasing integration of mobile phones and other devices, the internet ceases to be merely our nervous system, and emerges as a component of a global immune system.

Prospect Magazine (for whom I once worked! woo!) have put online a fascinating article: Mark Honigsbaum writes about the means of catching pandemics early. He points out that Swine Flu may well have been abroad in Mexico for a few weeks before the news broke in any meaningful way online. More importantly, his assertion is that the nature of the internet renders it less useful for disease detection – underinformed or worried searchers on google, for example, would distort the information on a given outbreak. Or, to extrapolate from this: the internet is too open, too democratic to operate as an even quasi-scientific virus catcher.

The logical outcome of this – and explicitly suggested by the above – is that the brains behind Twitter and Google and the rest turn their attention to a reserved system of aggregating relevant information for the purposes of planetary self-defence and early warning.

I’m not entirely sure how I feel about this recommendation. The advantage of the internet as it stands is that it is simply the broadest information-exchange ever constructed. I don’t see how a more limited network could articulate the information more quickly.

Swine Flu is surely the most quickly discovered and shared potential-pandemic that we’ve ever seen. If it had started in a western country, it would have broken out on Twitter within moments (though there is weight to the counter-argument that, hey, these things start in poorer countries were internet access is more rare. But that is changing…)

As for informational quality – well, this is a perrenial problem anyway. I’m not sure how comfortable I am with the blind assumption that vetted, ‘establishment’ data is always preferable.

Systems such as Digg and others have an almost marketised hierarchy built-in. The preferences of many translate into the emergence of decent and flawed information: it’s all available, but it’s clearly sorted. Such a system is clearly the next step for micro-blogging as well.

This is the kind of thinking that reminds me of David Brin’s Earth, which posited an emerging planet-wide sentience. In effect, this is a far simpler idea: our ‘intelligent’ superstructure is conscious only as its individual, reporting components are. It’s the beginnings of a hive-mind.

So – I won’t be so quick to sneer at the torrents of little fears, hopes, jokes, and links that pour through twitter on the theme of Swine Flu. It may be our fastest defence against the next big pandemic - whether that’s tomorrow, or twenty years away.

 The morning of Thursday April 1^st hinted at the unseasonably warm and sunny weather that was to come.

As the throngs of protesters began their marches and vigils in London, they had no way of knowing just how much of that long, hot day they were going to end up spending outdoors, without food, water, or freedom of movement. Neither did the majority of the thousands of people who had come to make themselves heard as the G20 convened in an anonymous-looking convention centre elsewhere in London.

Much has already been said and written about the crowd-control tactic of ‘Kettling’. It caused a flurry of consternation in 2001 when the police deployed a solid line of men around a group of May Day protesters in Oxford Circus and constricted the mass of people within.

The cordon in action

The debate which followed culminated in a legal ruling, just this year – that the use of the kettling tactic had been legitimate. Clearly the London police forces have taken this precedent to heart: if it was fair in one case, then it is fair game in every other.

So perhaps it should have been no surprise when mounted police first charged the ranks of protesters, and then a line of batons and riot shields enveloped the crowd entirely. Until that moment, the police had behaved calmly and professionally.

Some people spend the whole day in the kettle; eight hours and more. An elderly couple, completely unassociated with the protesters, had become trapped with the rest: they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The police did not countenance letting that couple out; neither did they allow a journalist to leave, despite his obviously possessing the relevant credentials. Families, including small children, were treated no differently. No excuse would do: one person urgently needed to meet an ill relative in order to care for her, but the line remained closed. A man with a broken arm was allowed medical attention – but his friend was not allowed to go with him.

Right now we are all appalled by the tragic death of Ian Tomlinson, and at the footage of his being struck by a police officer moments beforehand. The investigation into this matter must proceed. But we must not lose sight of the broader actions that the police undertook the very same day. ‘Kettling’ should come under similar review.

The police seem to believe that a protest has become unlawful, and therefore suppressible, if it starts to block roads and obstruct thoroughfares.

The majority of the actual violence and vandalism that took place can be traced back to the confrontational atmosphere which settled upon the demonstrators as a result of their incarceration. Where before the miscreants and troublemakers had been a tiny minority, the thousands of people alienated by a seemingly uncaring police force were liable to become angry and even aggressive – and that’s exactly what happened.

The police have forgotten that one legal ruling cannot constitute a permanent bending of civil rights law. There are serious implications to what happened that day, from the insensitive group-think of the police to the simple restriction on freedom of movement, which is regarded everywhere as a fundamental human right.

Boris Johnson is wrong. This police tactic was disproportionate and unfair to the vast majority of protesters, who had legitimate concerns and sought only to voice them, quite legally.

Is there anybody left who seriously questions whether ‘kettling’ should be banned from the Police toolkit of crowd control tactics?

(Click headings for links)

The sun is getting colder.

Only a bit colder. This sort of news tends to get the climate-change deniers very excited indeed. This is because they are idiots (a worrying trend, which I want to write about some other time, is how stupid science-denying and edgy-internet-libertarianism seem to go hand-in-hand a lot of the time. Just what kind of a super-culture are we breeding here?).

The sun has cooled from its modern-day heat peak of 1985. UK scientists suggest the sun is on an 11-year cycle; others that the sun follows a centuries-long pattern. Either way it’s unnerving that there is now no sun-spot or flare activity. One is put in mind of the excellent Sunshine. Or of Alastair Reynolds, who points out in his Revelation Space trilogy that messing with a star would be the best way for an advanced intelligence to totally obliterate planet-bound species. The sooner we’re operating in more than one solar system, the better. Also, someone should write about human civilization trying to cling on post-mysterious-sun-extinction.

The sun without its spots.

Alternatively, what if the intelligence is within the sun? Better yet,what if the intelligence is the sun? Watching us roast or throwing us a helping hand?
 

Scientists are reverse-engineering the mammalian brain.

This follows news a while back that half a rat’s brain was successfully reconstructed within a computer model and run for 60 seconds, non-real-time (the rat brain’s subjective time was operating at a fraction of real time for processing reasons). In just those moments of subjective time, the brain generated patterns recognisable from brain-scans of living rats. Now the Blue-Brain people have rebuilt a part of the human brain, with similar results. THE SINGULARITY APPROACHES. 

“It starts to learn things and starts to remember things. We can actually see when it retrieves a memory, and where they retrieved it from because we can trace back every activity of every molecule, every cell, every connection and see how the memory was formed.”  – BBC News reporting on the ‘Science Beyond Fiction’ conference
 

The cow has now joined the ranks of the fully gene-mapped.

A Hereford cow named Dominette is deemed the archetypical bovine for the purposes of mapping their genetic profile. Perhaps we can take away their pain receptors for guilt-free meat-eating. That is all.
 

A vast ‘Lyman-Alpha’ blob – a bundle of gas and energy several times the size of a galaxy – has been spotted by powerful telescopes a long, long time before it should have had time to form in the early universe.

What exactly are we seeing here? Lyman-Alphas (not a term for the CoS of a fictional White House) are essentially structures that give birth to millions of stars. Clouds of interstellar material are ballooned by the energy output of their contents.  We’re starting to look so far back in time that pretty soon we’ll have to see some of the oldest emitted light in the universe. If this thing existed before it was supposed to, then what was it? A remaining cloud from whatever existed before the big bang?
 

Pig flu is more dangerous and more likely to go pandemic than bird flu.

Oh god, the Jews and Muslims were right.

Seriously, though, I’m starting to seriously think that pig-meat should be off-limits. We’re talking about the fourth-smartest animals on the planet here. The fact that their evil diseases could kill us all is just gravy for the potatoes.

And finally, we could send emails through the planet.

I had to include this, as it’s a Queen Mary scientist making noises about it. Perhaps a more intriguing use for this technology would be the ability to transmit signals through other planets – say, to our base on the far side of the moon without an intermediary satellite?