Is food addictive? More so than the internet?
Could food be addictive? It’s a seductive notion. Heavy over-eating, the argument goes, shares many of the psychological characteristics associated with addictive behaviour like drug use, alcoholism and compulsive gambling.
We like the idea of being addicted. Through it science gives us an excuse for bad behaviour. Writers like Zadie Smith, Nick Hornby, Dave Eggers and Naomi Klein are now using software to block their own access to the internet to overcome the addictive distractions of compulsive web-browsing. The internet is changing the way our brains works, says the neuro-pharmacologist Susan Greenfield. It’s all to do with opioid and dopamine. Morbidly obese people, and no doubt compulsive Twitter users, have the same changes in the brain as drug addicts.
Another novelist, Will Self, a former heroin user, is less tolerant of internet self-indulgence and the lure of its alluring cul-de-sacs. There is a path between the snare of determinism and the illusion of free will. Turn off the computer. Eat less. There is merit still in the old virtue of self-control.
FollowIt’s the CIA which is the problem in Pakistan, not Save the Children
The decision by the government of Pakistan to expel six foreign aid workers is, in one sense, understandable. Many in that country feel deeply ambivalent about the “war on terror” which the United States and its allies are waging, with a heavy loss of innocent life, in so-called collateral damage, by US drone attacks on the Taliban in Afghanistan and northern Pakistan. Many still smart at what the breach of Pakistani sovereignty involved in the incursion by US special forces to kill Osama bin Laden in Abbottabad last year.
But the Pakistanis are almost certainly hitting out at the wrong target by linking Save the Children with Dr Shakil Afridi who was sentenced to 33 years in jail in Pakistan for running a bogus vaccination programme which US intelligence service used to track down Bin Laden. It was wrong of the CIA to use a humanitarian programme in this way. The evidence of that is clear from the large numbers of Pakistani parents now refusing to take their children to be inoculated for fear that the health projects are a CIA front.
Save the Children have been tainted in the eyes of some Pakistanis because Dr Afridi attended one of its training seminars shortly before the attack. The charity protests it has no links to Dr Afridi or the CIA. The training session he attended is one it has run for more than 100,000 Pakistani health-workers over the years. He has never been employed by Save the Children, nor paid for any kind of work. The charity has never run a vaccination programme in Abbottabad. Nor is there any evidence of any links between Save the Children and the US intelligence services in Pakistan or elsewhere at any time.
What is clear is that around seven million Pakistani children are in receipt of help from the charity which spends a massive $100m a year in the country and employs 2,000 local aid workers. The Pakistani authorities would do well now to grant visas to six more senior members of Save the Children’s international staff to replace those it has expelled. Not to do so would do a great disservice to millions of its own children. But the CIA should also announce that it will not in future jeopardise important aid assistance by infiltrating agents into humanitarian work.
Riots on the streets of Belfast do not mark a return to the bad old days
Rioting on the streets of Belfast seems a reversion to the bad old days. With the sight of an Orange band marching round in circles, playing a sectarian tune, in front of a Catholic church, many will be tempted to say nothing has changed. But that would be wrong.
Outsiders see a symmetry within the psycho-geography of Northern Ireland between its Protestant and Catholic halves. But that is superficial. The Protestant Loyalist working class community of the past was one where boys left school at 16 and moved straight into well-paid jobs in the shipyards or heavy engineering from which Catholics were excluded. Today those jobs have gone but the culture which placed a low premium on education remains in a community where unemployment has become engrained to the third generation amid areas of sink housing.
By contrast the Catholic working class placed much greater emphasis on education and also participated in political activity where many of their Protestant counterparts restricted themselves to paramilitary groups, Unionist politics being largely a middle-class preserve. With the legislating away of institutional anti-Catholic discrimination over the past decades the Catholic community has a lift beneath its wings which is distinctly absent in working class Loyalist areas whose paramilitaries were behind this week’s riots. Marches and parades – and disputes about them – are the tribal badges which attach to this divide.
Why Michael Gove is not fit for purpose
There is a whiff of panic about in the Tory party at present. It is manifest in Michael Gove’s hokey-cokey over the shift in GCSE pass marks for which he is trying to take credit without accepting blame. It is there in Damian Green’s decision to deport thousands of foreign students on the very day that new immigration statistics show how much David Cameron is failing in his barmy election pledge to slash the number of immigrants to the UK. It is there in the decisions to pull funds from several of the Conservatives’ much-vaunted “free schools” just days before they were due to admit their first students.
Add to that the floundering over Heathrow expansion, the railways, the green belt, Lords reform and electoral boundary changes and it is clear that the “omnishambles” which began with George Osborne’s bungled Budget has some way yet to run.
The ruling by the exam regulator Ofqual – that this summer’s dramatic cut in GSCE pass rates is justified – has done nothing to ameliorate the problems. It is true, it admits, that pupils who received the same marks in the January and June exams were awarded different grades. Yet that wasn’t because marking in June was too strict, but because in January it was too generous.
Even if we believe that – in the teeth of the evidence from schools’ past ability to predict results with a fair degree of accuracy – it still constitutes an admission that the exam regulator got something seriously wrong. The revelation that Ofqual insiders knew three years ago that modular exams promote grade inflation only adds to the air of conspiracy.
What is clear is that, faced with genuine concerns about devaluing grades, Michael Gove reacted in a way which was both educationally ham-fisted and politically cack-handed. The same is true of Damian Green’s handling of failings atLondonMetropolitanUniversitywhere a quarter of foreign students are said to have no valid visa and 40 per cent haven’t been tested on their basic command of English.
“Hello to you out there in normal land. You may not comprehend my tale or understand!”
Two British athletes broke world records on Day One of the Paralympics yesterday heralding the prospect that the Games will match, or even exceed, the triumph of the London Olympics. The opening ceremony offered a good augury of that in its comparable sense of scale, power of imagination and breathtaking can-do technical ability – illustrated by a British Army war veteran, who was a double amputee, zooming down into the stadium from a 350 ft high zip wire.
Some eight million people watched the spectacle on television, far more than tuned in previous Paralympics openings, fully justifying Channel 4’s decision to involve its most-high profile presenter, Jon Snow, in the event. Some grumbled about its advertising breaks but the commercial broadcaster has to live in the real world, particularly after recruiting the authoritative sports specialist Clare Balding from the BBC and spending £500,000 on a talent search to unearth new expert disabled presenters.
There was too an admirable effort not to sentimentalise disability. Activists had warned in advance against describing the athletes as brave or courageous in their struggle against their disability. That is not, of course, to minimise the scale of individual athletes achievements. But the ceremony contextualised them, as with the story of Martine Wright, who was horribly injured in the 7/7 bombings and whose fight back to fitness won her a place in the sitting volleyball team. Such stories inspire and, as the Olympics showed, the public have an appetite for inspiration in these hard times. That is clear from the impressive ticket sales for the 11 days of the games. We want, as Sebastian Coe said at the opening ceremony, to be excited, dazzled and moved.
To say that is not to be blind to the disparity between the provision for Olympic and Paralympic athletes – nor between the disabled athletes of the First and Third Worlds whose wheelchairs, prosthetics and other equipment as they paraded round the stadium were clearly of varying quality – a fact the Games authorities should address. There is a similar gap between the best and the worst provision to ordinary disabled people in this country, depending upon the postcode lottery of which hospital or local authority serves them.
But what the ceremony so spectacularly achieved, from the outset with the uplifting words of the read more…
Why are we heralding the Paralympics – and at the same time making the lives of disabled people more difficult on a daily basis?
The Paralympic Games, which open in London today, could change people’s attitude towards disability for ever, the capital’s Mayor, Boris Johnson, has suggested. It is not hard to see why he says that. More than 4,000 athletes will compete in 11 days of games in which the British team has been given a target of 103 medals – almost one per hour of the competition. The festivities promise to rekindle the euphoria and widespread sense of positivity engendered by the London Olympics – and from which the nation has suffered unwelcome withdrawal symptoms in the fortnight since that great festival ended.
Indeed many have suggested that this second course in a great banquet of athletics, archery, cycling, judo, rowing, sailing, swimming, weightlifting and wheelchair rugby will be all the more inspiring for the fact that the competitors have had to overcome even greater challenges including mobility disabilities, amputations, blindness and cerebral palsy.
Britain’s greatest Paralympian, Lady Tanni Grey-Thompson – who holds 11 gold medals, six London marathon wins and 30 world records – has, however, counselled caution over the suggestion that the event will transform deep-seated discriminatory social attitudes towards disabled people. The large funding gap between Olympic and Paralympic athletes is but one symptom of that. A more disturbing symbol is to be found in the week of protest which disability activists today launch against Atos, the Paralympic sponsor which runs the Government’s new crackdown tests to curb sickness benefits. More than a thousand sickness benefit claimants died last year after being told by Atos to get a job as part of George Osborne’s attempt to slash the nation’s welfare bill.
Baroness Grey-Thompson fears that the development of the next generation of disabled sportsmen and women could be undermined by government plans to restrict the disability living allowance which allowed her to pay for the transport and equipment that opened competitive sport to her. That – and the ending of the Independent Living Fund, local authority spending cuts and a move away from educating disabled children in mainstream schools – could undercut the inspiration the coming days ought to bring to a new generation of Paralympians.
The shame of that is exacerbated by the fact that the Paralympics are today returning to their spiritual home. read more…
There is a corpse-soaked no-man’s land between badness and madness
So he was bad not mad. It took an Oslo court ten weeks to decide that the mass killer Anders Behring Breivik is sane and sentence him to 21 years in jail. In practical terms the outcome did not matter much. Had he been declared insane he would have been committed to a secure mental institution for just as long. But the verdict has immense significance for reasons which are rooted deep in the human psyche.
The killer himself was anxious to be declared of sound mind. Such a judgement, he felt, would validate his own view of himself as a political warrior in some latterday European crusade against Islam. An insanity ruling, he said, would be “worse than death”.
Some might have thought that a good enough reason to return such a verdict. But most Norwegians wanted his sanity declared too, not just because of the lucidity his testimony – and his boast that his well-planned crimes were the most “spectacular” committed by a nationalist militant since World War II – but also because they needed to be able to assign moral culpability for such terrible acts. Someone had to be blamed, and punished.
But there is a corpse-soaked no-man’s land between badness and madness. That was clear from the ambiguity of one of the witnesses produced by the defence as they sought to prove Breivik’s sanity. The sociologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen said that Breivik was a fantasist with a home-made uniform who couldn’t tell the difference between reality and the computer games he played. Yet large parts of his world view are fairly widely shared by individuals “who feel that globalisation is not going their way that their country is being invaded by foreign aliens, that Muslims can never be good democrats, and that we are being ruled by spineless multiculturalists who don’t see the dangers of Islam.” That made him, for all his fastidious narcissism and crazy notions of racial purity, sane.
Evil wears many masks. Our favourite is the one which is cruel, savage, sadistic. It speaks of something supernatural and demonic and has about it a hypnotic fascination which makes movie directors often imply there is something glamorous about evil. Breivik gives the lie to that. So did the terrible incident in 2004 when a group of Chechen terrorists took a Russian school at Beslan hostage. It ended in a shoot-out in which more than 300 people died, 186 of them children. One of the cruellest moments came when a ten-year-old boy was bayoneted to death for asking for a drink of water.
But Beslan illustrated the chaos of the margins between badness and madness when one of the hostage-takers looked into the eyes of another ten-year-old boy and told him: “The Russians killed 20 of my children and now I’m going to kill you.” Only a crazed logic could lead a man into that twisted sense of justice.
How Pussy Riot revealed the deep cynicism of the Russian Orthodox Church
It seemed deeply cynical of the Russian Orthodox Church to wait until after sentence had been passed to ask for clemency for the protestors from Pussy Riot. Earlier Patriarch Kirill had demanded the most severe punishment possible for the women who had performed a parody prayer in Moscow’s main cathedral asking the Virgin Mary to drive Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, from their native land.
Pussy Riot is not an English translation. The band has no Russian name. The fact that the women protestors chose an English name – and one which left most of their fellow Russians utterly bewildered when they first heard it – tells you something about the intent of these artistes provocateurs. Nor was their choice of venue a coincidence. The Cathedral of Cathedral of Christ the Saviour was built to honour those who died defending Russian freedom, against Napoleon in 1812. It is a reconstruction of a cathedral which was destroyed during the Soviet persecutions when churches were routinely desecrated with obscene songs.
Pussy Riot chose the cathedral because the venues for their previous protests – outside a prison and in Red Square– had not created waves. A song near the Kremlin about “Putin who is pissing his pants” brought them only a brief arrest and no worldwide attention. A punk prayer, before the iconostasis, the holiest public place in an orthodox church, with a chorus of “Holy shit, shit, Lord’s shit!”, was calculated to outrage.
But if there is something adolescent about Pussy Riot’s scatological language, their message is more profound, as the women’s closing statements in court reveal.
The corrupt relationship between the Orthodox church and the Putin state is not news. Its head Patriarch Kirill, a former KGB agent, has called Mr Putin a “miracle from God” and backed his re-election. He pronounced that “Orthodox Christians do not attend [protest] rallies”. In return Mr Putin has made decisions on property and religious schools which benefit the church. Last year the Patriarch was granted official residence in the Kremlin, restoring the church-state intimacy of Imperial Russia .
Lament for a dynamic and charismatic leader
The death of Meles Zenawi, the prime minister of Ethiopia, at the relatively young age of 57, is a grave blow not just to the country which he rescued from the brink of recurring famine. It is a blow to the whole African continent and to the wider international community.
Meles was far from a perfect politician. In his later years he became more intolerant of opposition and dissent, presiding over some infringements of human rights. But that must be set against his masterminding of the transformation of what was one of the poorest countries in the world in a way which transfigured the lives of the vast majority of its citizens. A nation routinely teetering on the brink of life and death has become, thanks to him, a place of modest prosperity.
In his youth Ethiopia had been held in static feudalism under the Emperor Haile Selassie. Then came paralysing communism under the bloody terror of the Soviet-backed regime of Colonel Mengistu. Meles emerged as the brightest talent in the group of Tigrayan revolutionaries which overthrew Mengistu in 1991.
Over the next two decades the dynamic and charismatic leader, who began as an Albanian-style Marxist, embraced a pragmatic controlled capitalism which made Ethiopia a model for economic growth and development. He became one of the leading lights in the African Union and was one of the seminal thinkers in Tony Blair’s Commission for Africa which set the blueprint for new kinds of partnership between developed and developing world.
I wrote to a local MP last week, which is not something I do very often. Graham Brady is chairman of the Tory 1922 Committee, as well as the member for Altrincham and Sale, so I thought he might actually be able to do something about what was alarming me. He didn’t reply, perhaps because he knew it was already too late.
The reason for my impulsive engagement with the political process was a rumour that I’d heard circulating in the part of south Manchester where I live. It was that the Government was about to remove the West Coast train line, which joins us to the capital, from Virgin Trains – who run it rather well – and give it to a company with a much worse reputation for service. This mattered for two reasons, only one of which was immediately obvious.
When I left Londonwell over a decade ago and came to live in the North, returning to the metropolis for the occasional daytrip seemed to require the kind of effort associated with launching an expeditionary force. The trains were run-down, infrequent and unpunctual and the staff grumpy and demoralised. By the time you got back home you were exhausted.
But after some initial bumps in the track, Virgin Rail has transformed the railway into a clean, quiet and comfortable service. Trains run to London every 20 minutes, so if you miss one by the time you’ve had a coffee the next has arrived. The fastest do the journey in under two hours. The staff are efficient and friendly. Most important the trains almost always now leave and arrive on time. Small wonder that Virgin has doubled the number of travellers. Their smoked salmon and scrambled egg breakfast is almost worth getting out of bed for – and if you get the early morning red-eye to Euston you can be at a nine o’clock meeting before some of the Londoners arrive.
What makes all this a matter of concern to a wider readership than my fellow Mancunians is what the decision to drop Virgin reveals about the continuing priorities of this Government with its short-termism, its myopic focus on the bottom line and its disregard for those who bear the consequences. In that lies the explanation for a decision which is incomprehensible to those who regularly use the route.
So what, in the end, did the Olympics do for us?
Looking back, what were the Olympics all about? All the pre-Games scepticism about the £9bn cost – or the Faustian pact with big business, or the ineptitude of private sector organisers, or the entrenched privilege of the Olympic oligarchs, or the dubiety of the politicians’ grandiose claims about legacy – all that pretty swiftly evaporated when public enthusiasm for the sporting contests themselves began. Something caught fire in the public imagination and it felt good for us, individually and collectively.
It was not, in the end, about sport. That might seem an odd thing to say. But that great celebration of youthful energy and achievement spoke to something deeper. By that I don’t mean the old Victorian notion, ascribed to the famed headmaster of Rugby public school, Thomas Arnold, that sport is somehow morally improving. There is more to sport than keeping fit, the argument goes, there is a meaning to it which grows from the self-discipline and team work it requires. It teaches self-awareness, the value of both competition and co-operation, the role of the individual and the team. It’s about abiding by rules, but also by a spirit of fairness and respect for other people’s abilities. Morality is thus built into sport.
That notion only goes so far. Interestingly it was not the view of Arnold so much as the fictionalised version of him immortalised in the 1857 children’s novel Tom Brown’s Schooldays which insisted that sport could reach out beyond the playing fields of Rugby (or indeed Eton) to shape society for its greater good. “It merges the individual in the eleven; he doesn’t play that he may win, but that his side may.”
It was as much part of the birthright of British boys, old and young, as were habeas corpus and trial by jury. The gatling’s jammed and the colonel’s dead but we can jolly well bowl Johnny Foreigner a few imperial googlies.
This is a good U-turn on care of the elderly
A month ago it looked as though the Government had had a failure of moral courage over how to deal with one of the biggest long-term problems facing the nation –the rapidly-rising bill for caring for people in their old age. Ministers indicated that there was no room in the current spending round to address the issue. Yesterday David Cameron dramatically changed his mind. Quite right too.
Last year around 40,000 older people were forced to sell their homes to pay their care costs. With a room in a care home now costing an average of £26,000 a year one in four people faced bills of more than £50,000. One in 100 had to find £100,000 or more. The problem is set to grow exponentially. In 20 years the population of over-65s is projected to grow by 50 per cent. The number over the age of 90 is expected to treble. As a country, we will need to be spending a far greater proportion of our national income on care and support.
Politicians have ignored this demographic time-bomb for years. As a result we have developed a muddled system of providing social care only when people have almost completely run out of money. That has generated massive uncertainty among the older generation who get no help with care bills if they own assets of more than £23,250. Selling their homes – before or after their deaths – has been the only option. It has created a system where people are encouraged to cheat and give their assets away to their children so they appear not to have any wealth when they are means-tested. That has not just generated enormous fear in the frail and elderly but also an inability to plan because they have no idea what the worst case scenario might be.
