Manchester prison suicide rate slammed

Wed Feb 22, 2012 7:18PM GMT

Inspectors have condemned the suicide rate among inmates at HMP Manchester prison, formerly Strangeways, as "too high for too long", calling for more care for convicts at risk of self-harm.

A report of the 1,300-capacity jail revealed seven prisoners have taken their lives there in less than two years and two more prisoners have been found hanged in their cells after the inspectors’ visit.

Prisons inspectors also criticized staff at HMP Manchester jail for adopting “a degree of fatalism” towards deaths and accepting them as “the way things were in Manchester ”.

Chief inspector of prisons Nick Hardwick said, "The level of self-inflicted deaths has been too high for too long and should be no more accepted as an inevitable feature of the prison today than any of the other grim aspects of its past.”

Geoff Dobson, deputy director of the Prison Reform Trust campaign group, regarded the number of suicides at the prison since the start of 2009 as “a matter of great concern”, urging the prison staff to “move swiftly to learn the lessons of these tragic incidents”.

Furthermore, the chief executive of the National Offender Management Service, Michael Spurr, described a self-inflicted death as “a tragedy” for families, prisoners and prison staff.

From The Socialist newspaper, 22 February 2012

What's wrong with capitalism?

Here Lynn Walsh, editor of Socialism Today, the Socialist Party's monthly magazine, exposes the myths proposed by Tory prime minister David Cameron as he tries to sell us the idea of 'popular' capitalism. www.socialismtoday.org

David Cameron, like other capitalist leaders, has been deeply shaken by the tumultuous events of the last year.

Revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East, general strikes throughout Europe. Riots in Britain, massive public sector strikes.

The eurozone debt crisis. Stagnation of British capitalism, deepened by the Con-Dems' austerity measures.

Despite their smiling faces, Cameron, Clegg and the others fear social upheaval and revolution.

They also fear an electoral backlash against them from their traditional middle class supporters.

Cameron has to admit that there is a "crisis of capitalism" and that capitalism is "unpopular".

So he is attempting to stitch together some political camouflage under the heading of "popular capitalism".

Ownership society?

In a recent speech (19 January) Cameron promised new legislation, which he claimed would make it easier for people to set up cooperatives and small businesses.

This is part of his scheme to get "more people engaged in a genuinely popular capitalism".

He wants "an ownership society".

He wants a nation of shareholders, savers, and homeowners - as well as new entrepreneurs - who will enjoy the "success of capitalism".

'Fairness' is the slogan of the day.

How credible is this coming from a cabinet of Con-Dem ministers who are together worth £60 million?

Most of them, including Liberal Democrats, come from wealthy, privileged families.

Twenty-three of 29 ministers have assets and investments estimated to be worth more than £1 million.

Cameron, who wants 'fairness', has personal wealth of £4 million.

George Osborne, the austerity chancellor, is worth £4.6 million.

Their personal wealth reflects the huge inequalities of income and wealth in British society.

The share of net (after-tax) income received by the top 1% of taxpayers rose from around 4% in 1978 to 10% by 2000.

 In stark contrast, the share of national income of the bottom three-fifths of the population fell from 40% to 33% between 1977 and 2008. (Stewart Lansley, The Cost of Inequality)

Wealth (in the form of property, financial assets, etc) is even more unequally distributed. In 1988 the top 1% owned 17% of 'marketable wealth'.

By 2002 the top 1% owned 23%.

Meanwhile, the share of the bottom 50% shrank from 10% in the mid-1980s to 6% in 2002.

These changes reflect both the trends in capitalism (de-industrialisation, casualisation of the workforce, etc) and the policies of successive governments (a financial free-for-all through deregulation, huge tax cuts for big business and the wealthy, an assault on trade union rights, etc).

Chanting the 'free-and-fair' mantra will not reverse these deep-rooted trends.

Cameron scores a point when he comments that "the last [New Labour] government made something of a Faustian pact with the City...

 It seemed frightened of challenging vested interests, believing... that the interests of big business were always one and the same as those with the economy as a whole."

But what will the Con-Dem government actually do to change this?

Tighter regulation, promised by Cameron, may impose some temporary restrictions on the banks and finance houses. But, as in the past, they will very quickly find ways round any new legislation.

Cameron attacks the "bonus culture" and the "excesses" of the City.

But what will the Con-Dems do about it?

A number of top bankers and chief executives have, under the pressure of intense public hostility, given up their bonuses for last year.

Yet hundreds of bankers will still be collecting phenomenal bonuses in addition to their inflated salaries.

For instance, 24,000 employees of Barclays investment bank will still be getting bonuses averaging £64,000.

The head of Barclays Capital, Bob Diamond, got a bonus of £6.5 million for 2010 on top of his salary of £1.35 million.

This year, he will be offered a bonus for 2011 of 'only' £2 million.

The excesses of the banks, being bailed out at our expense, will not be curbed by sermons or even legislation.

Capitalism, in reality, has become more and more dominated by parasitic finance capital.

For instance, in the 1880s, total British bank assets were equal to 5% of gross domestic product.

At the peak of the bubble in 2006 they had risen to a staggering 500%.

Their debt was 30 times their assets.

The return on their shares - the profits made by shareholders - reached 30%.

Cameron promises that he will make sure that "the market is fair as well as free".

But this is impossible. Capitalism is based on exploitation.

New wealth (in the form of goods or services which are sold on the market for money) is created by the application of workers' labour power to materials and production equipment (built up through capital investment).

But what the capitalists pay workers in wages is only part of the value of the labour power expended in production.

The rest (the unpaid labour of workers, or surplus value) the capitalists take for themselves in the form of profit.

This is how the capitalists accumulate capital.

At the heart of the market is an unequal exchange between workers and capitalists.

This is why capitalism can never be 'fair'.

The unequal exchange between workers and bosses at the heart of the capitalist production process ultimately underlies the polarisation of income and wealth in society.

---

Spiraling exploitation

One indication of the increased exploitation of workers is the sharp fall in wages as a share of GDP. By 2011 this had dropped to 53.8%.

This meant that workers were taking home £60 billion less in 2011 than they would have if the wage share had remained at 1978 levels.

This amounted to a cumulative loss of approximately £1.3 trillion. (Stewart Lansley, All in This Together? TUC, 27 January 2012).

Will Cameron, in the name of a 'fair market' be attempting to reverse this anti-working class trend?

Will he restore trade union rights, enabling workers to defend their wages and conditions?

Will he raise the minimum wage to a level that guarantees a living wage?

---

'Fair capitalism'- a fairy tale

Cameron proclaims his "ambition of building a nation of shareholders, of savers, of homeowners... Margaret Thatcher did the same with privatisation [of utilities], with share ownership, with the right to buy your council house."

But figures from the Office of National Statistics show that Thatcher's attempt to spread share ownership has been a total failure. In 1963, individuals in Britain owned 54% of UK shares traded on the London Stock Exchange (LSE).

This fell to 13% in 2006 at the peak of the boom. Under the impact of the crisis after 2007, they fell further to only 10%. Overseas investors now own 42% of LSE shares.

Even the pro-Tory Daily Telegraph comments: "The data highlights how the Thatcher revolution in private share ownership failed to create a lasting impression on the stock market..." (27 January 2010) Cameron will be no more successful than Thatcher in promoting so-called popular capitalism.

One of the main aims of Cameron's cooperatives bill is to promote the development of small businesses. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMEs), however, are being ruthlessly squeezed at the present time.

Those that supply goods and services to bigger companies in the manufacturing sector are being hit by the stagnation of manufacturing.

Most small businesses, however, are in the service sector, and are being hammered by the decline in consumer spending, as a result of squeezed incomes and unemployment. SMEs are also being crushed by the credit squeeze imposed by the big banks (despite the ultra-cheap credit provided to them by the Bank of England).

It is absurd to think that small businesses can flourish while the economy is at best stagnating, or on the verge of another serious downturn.

Cameron's 'fair and free' camouflage is a tatty, see-through effort to cover up the pathological symptoms of capitalist crisis. It will prove to be futile.

A cauldron of discontent and anger is boiling up within society.

It will not be cooled by fairy tales of a 'fair', 'responsible' capitalism.

---

'Popular capitalism'

David Cameron wants to "get more people engaged in genuine popular capitalism".

He wants to see "more entrepreneurs": "I admire, more than anything, the bravery of those who turn their back on the security of a regular wage to follow their dreams and start a company."

This (leaving aside the insult to the unemployed) panders to the idea that anyone, if only they are entrepreneurial enough, can become a successful capitalist.

 Maybe a tiny handful, perhaps, on the basis of outstanding technological innovation and with sufficient financial backing from a sponsor, can become successful (often taken over by a big company at a later stage).

The reality of present-day capitalism, however, as Cameron well knows, is that it is dominated by giant companies and big banks.

It is an absurd fantasy to believe that just anyone can start a successful business and grow big.

At the end of the post-war upswing in the 1970s, the top 100 companies controlled around 70% of the assets of all manufacturing and non-financial services.

The concentration is undoubtedly greater now, although up-to-date information is strangely lacking.

However, analysis of companies listed on the UK stock exchange shows the degree of concentration. In 1998 the top 100 companies accounted for 68.4% of the market capitalisation of all companies.

By 2008 the share of the top 100 had risen to 87.77%.

In Britain there is an incredibly high level of monopoly in a whole range of industries.

For instance, in the following sectors, the five biggest firms dominate the market: sugar 99%, tobacco products 99%, gas distribution 82%, oils and fats 88%, confectionary 81%, manmade fibres 79%, coal extraction 79%, soft drinks and mineral water 75%, pesticides 75%.

Detergents are dominated by Unilever and Proctor & Gamble. This is clearly monopolistic capitalism, not popular capitalism.

Five big banks dominate the UK banking sector.

 Four giant companies (Tesco, Sainsbury's, Asda and Morrison's) between them control 74.4% of the grocery market. They have wiped out thousands of small shops.

Despite the claim of the Thatcher government to be opening up the power companies to competition through privatisation, six big companies now control the retail electricity market: EDF Energy, Centrica, RWE npower, E.ON, Scottish Power, and Scottish and Southern Energy.

What these facts show is that capitalism is becoming less and less popular.

Only 10% of company shares traded on the London Stock Exchange are held by individuals (and most of those are held by wealthy people).

Marx was right

These facts confirm the continuation of deep-rooted tendencies within capitalism analysed by Karl Marx 150 years ago.

He showed that competition between capitalists produced two interrelated trends.

One is the increasing centralisation of capital, as the biggest companies strive to take over a bigger share of production and markets in seeking to maximise their profits.

This accounts for the huge waves of 'mergers and acquisitions' - takeovers - during recent financial bubbles.

At the same time, there is a steady concentration of ownership, as control of the big companies is concentrated into fewer and fewer hands (mostly through financial investment vehicles such as hedge funds, mutual funds, and investment companies, which are investment clubs for the super-rich).

These trends, moreover, operate on an international basis, as globalisation and the deregulation of markets (ultra-free market policies) have unleashed global competition between the big corporations and banks.

Concentration

A recent study of 43,000 transnational corporations (TNCs) revealed the tightly knit interconnections between the top global corporations.

(Vitali and others, The Network of Global Corporate Control, www.arXivl.org)

The study shows that "nearly 40% of the control of the economic value of TNCs in the world is held, via a complicated web of ownership relations, by a group of 147 TNCs in the core, which has almost full control over itself".

Many of the companies within the core are interconnected through mutual shareholdings and can be thought of as "an economic 'super-entity' in the global network of corporations".

It hardly comes as a surprise to learn that three-quarters of the core companies are banks or financial institutions!

Within Britain and across the globe these big banks and corporations wield enormous power.

They dictate to governments.

Through financial markets, which deploy the wealth of big business and the super-rich, they determine the anti-working class policies of governments: social spending cuts, mass unemployment, squeezed wages, and the erosion of rights.

There is nothing 'fair' or 'popular' about their activities.

That is why capitalism, as even Cameron is forced to admit, is very "unpopular".

A few speeches about Britain's alleged "insurgent economy" (where?) and a country "fizzing with business potential" (?) will not change the reality.

Cameron claims he is seeking "a new model" of capitalism.

 But what we need is a new model of society, a socialist reorganisation.

 "Improving human wealth and happiness," - Cameron's professed aim - depends on taking over the giant banks and companies that dominate the economy.

They need to be run democratically, on the basis of a plan, to meet the interests of the great majority of society, not the wealthy few who currently control them.

Democratic workers' management and control would ensure that the economy was run efficiently (avoiding the bureaucratic problems that arose under Stalinism in the Soviet Union).

Cameron's promise of a "more socially responsible and genuinely popular capitalism" is a cruel deception. Capitalism offers only a bleak future of economic stagnation and social crisis.

This will be aggravated by the Con-Dem government's anti-working class austerity measures.

Rewriting the rules for setting up small companies will not change anything.

 We need a root and branch reorganisation of society.

Prince Charles's secret veto documents to be released

Information commissioner orders limited release of papers relating to marine and coastal access bill consultation

Robert Booth

Never afraid to stand up

April 16, 2009

Charlie Chaplin was born in London on 16th April, 1889.

Both his parents were music hall entertainers and Charlie started appearing on the stage while still a child.

His father, Charles Chaplin, deserted the family and eventually died of alcoholism.

His mother, Hannah Chaplin, found it increasingly difficult to find work on the stage and in 1895 the family entered the Lambeth Workhouse.

Later, Charlie's mother had a mental breakdown and was sent to the Cane Hill Lunatic Asylum.

When he was sixteen Chaplin won the part of Billy in a West End production of Sherlock Holmes.

He later joined Fred Karno's music hall revue.

 While touring the United States in 1913 Chaplin was discovered by the film producer Mack Sennett.

Over the next couple of years Chaplin made a series of short slapstick films for Sennett's Keystone Company.

 In these films Chaplin developed a character that wore baggy pants, tight frock coat, large shoes on the wrong feet and a black derby hat.

By his thirteenth film, Caught in the Rain (1914), Chaplin began to direct his own films. Chaplin now slowed the pace of his films, reduced the number of visual jokes but increased the time spent on each one.

Chaplin placed the emphasis on the character rather than slapstick events.

The themes of his films became more serious and reflected his childhood experiences of poverty, hunger and loneliness. Chaplin's work revolutionized film comedy and turned it into an art form.

Chaplin's films were highly successful and became a household name throughout the world.

When Chaplin first started with the Keystone Company he was paid $150 a week, by 1915 he was receiving $1,250.

Three years later, when he joined First National, Chaplin signed cinema's first million-dollar contract. During this period Chaplin's films included The Tramp (1915), The Pawnshop (1915), Easy Street (1917), The Immigrant (1917) and A Dog's Life (1918).

In 1919 Chaplin joined with D.W. Griffith, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford to form United Artists, a company that enabled the stars to distribute their films without studio interference.

It is also argued that it was in response to a rumour that the film companies intended to put a ceiling on the star salaries.

Films produced by Chaplin and his company included The Kid (1921), The Gold Rush (1925), The Circus (1928) and City Lights (1931).

Chaplin became increasingly concerned with politics.

A strong supporter of Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, Chaplin's film, Modern Times (1936), was seen by some critics as an attack on capitalism. J. Edgar Hoover, head of the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI), began compiling a file on Chaplin's activities, including his friendship with radicals such as Upton Sinclair, H. G. Wells, Hanns Eisner, Albert Einstein and Harold Laski.

A strong opponent of racism, in 1937 Chaplin decided to make a film on the dangers of fascism.

As Chaplin pointed out in his autobiography, attempts were made to stop the film being made: "Half-way through making The Great Dictator I began receiving alarming messages from United Artists.

They had been advised by the Hays Office that I would run into censorship trouble.

Also the English office was very concerned about an anti-Hitler picture and doubted whether it could be shown in Britain.

 But I was determined to go ahead, for Hitler must be laughed at." However, by the time The Great Dictator was finished, Britain was at war with Germany and it was used as propaganda against Hitler.

During the Second World War Chaplin played an active role in the American Committee for Russian War Relief. Others involved in this organization included Fiorello La Guardia, Vito Marcantonio, Wendell Willkie, Orson Welles, Rockwell Kent and Pearl Buck.

 Chaplin was also one of the major figures in the campaign during the summer of 1942 for the opening of a second-front in Europe.

After the Second World War the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began to investigate people with left-wing views in the entertainment industry.

In September 1947 Chaplin was subpoenaed to appear before the HUAC but three times his meeting was postponed.

Unknown to Chaplin, J. Edgar Hoover, and the FBI, now had a 1,900 page file on his political activities.

Hoover advised the Attorney General that when Chaplin left the country he should be allowed to return.

In 1952 Chaplin visited London for the premiere of Limelight.

When he arrived back he discovered his entry permit revoked and had been denied the right to live in the United States.

As Chaplin pointed out in his autobiography: "My prodigious sin was, and still is, being a non-conformist.

Although I am not a Communist I refused to fall in line by hating them."

Chaplin, blacklisted from making films in Hollywood, responded by making A King in New York (1957).

 The film stars Chaplin as the deposed king of Estrovia who flees to America where he is tormented by McCarthy style investigations.

Chaplin was once again accused of being pro-communist and the film was not released in the United States.

While in exile, Chaplin wrote his memoirs, My Autobiography (1964) and directed the movie, A Countess from Hong Kong (1966).

Despite the objections of J. Edgar Hoover, in 1972 Chaplin was invited back to the United States to receive a special award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

He was also allowed to distribute his satire on McCarthyism, A King in New York.

Charles Chaplin died in Switzerland on 25th December, 1977.

Imagining economic democracy By Peter Tatchell NowhereIsland -  Resident Thinker - 13 February 2012 http://nowhereisland.org/resident-thinkers/23/ Don't accept the world as it is. Dream about what the world could be - then help make it happen. We expect political democracy. Why not economic democracy too? Imagining a society where the economic system was in closer democratic alignment with the political system is not impossible at all. In fact, it's easy - and obvious.   Extending the economic franchise make sense. It is a simple matter of democracy and justice, which would lay the foundations for a more equitable and constructive partnership between everyone who contributes to wealth creation and the provision of public services. Just for a moment, pause. Forget about society the way it is. Imagine a social alternative with economic participation, accountability and decentralisation. Wouldn't that society be less prone to corporate irresponsibility, financial crisis, inequality and alienation? A form of economic democracy is possible. We simply need to imagine it and then work to make it a reality. All it takes is the will and creativity to envisage a new system of economy. Our current economic model is a form of dictatorship, characterised by an absence of democracy, participation, transparency and accountability. Employees and the wider public are frozen out of economic influence and decision-making. In the existing economic system, which too many people take for granted and assume is inevitable, big business rules. The leaders of industry, commerce and finance have almost total power. They run their enterprises on quasi-totalitarian lines. All decision-making is concentrated in the hands of a tiny, privileged elite of major shareholders, directors and managers. In contrast to the 'one person one vote' principle that characterises our political system, in our economic system the corporate top brass have all the votes. They alone determine how companies and public institutions operate. Employees - without whom no wealth would be created and no institution could function - are powerless and disenfranchised. These, then, are the flaws of the existing economic regime. So what would constitute an alternative economy? I don't have all the answers, let alone a blue-print, but I can suggest some fragments of what an alternative might begin to look like. Although not a future economic system per se, these ideas are, perhaps, the embryo of a long gestation from what we have now to what we could have in the future. One important check and balance on the abuse of economic power would be to make corporate negligence and recklessness an explicit criminal offence. This would ensure more responsible economic management and act as a deterrent against those who would gamble with the economy for personal gain. Bankers and company bosses should not be able to wreck whole economies and squander people's jobs, pensions and savings with impunity. They ought to be held personally liable for damaging corporate decisions, in the same way that doctors and other professionals can be held liable for negligence. The threat of legal penalties - including financial pay-back and prison - is likely to result in more prudent corporate governance. Another safeguard against the abuse of economic power would be mechanisms for greater democratic participation and accountability in economic decision-making. This could involve the requirement that all medium and large-sized companies - and public institutions like the NHS - have on their management boards one-third employee-elected directors and independent directors appointed to represent the interests of consumers. Having employee directors, building on the success of the German works council model, would incline an organisation to greater workplace fairness and more harmonious industrial relations; resulting in employees showing improved commitment and productivity, which is good for the economy. Not being driven so strongly by the profit-motive, employee and consumer directors could push for workplace policies that are more socially inclusive and responsible. They could also act as watchdogs and whistleblowers against corporate irresponsibility; thereby helping prevent the implementation of harmful boardroom decisions. To break up the unhealthy concentration and centralisation of economic power, employee mutual societies could be established and given control of their members pension funds. This would decentralise and democratise investment decision-making and give it a stronger social dimension. The £900 billion invested in UK pension funds accounts for a third of the stock market; a potentially massive counter-weight to the economic clout of big business. Employee-controlled pension funds, under expert financial management, could be invested in ways that help make the economy more people-centred and public welfare-oriented. Hopefully less inclined to invest in the arms trade and clothing sweatshops, they'd probably be more open to investment to meet social needs, including renewable energy, new medical technologies, affordable housing and quality public transport.   A further way to devolve and democratise economic power would be to have a mechanism for employee share ownership, collectively held and administered on behalf of all staff by employee mutual societies. Private share capital companies would be obliged to assign to these societies a proportion of their annual profits in the form of a new share issue. The great strength of this scheme is not only its democratic and social justice elements. It also incentivises and rewards employees for economic success. The more productive and profitable a company, the more shares it would be required to issue to the employee mutual societies and the sooner they would gain significant boardroom influence through their share ownership. This mechanism would give employees serious encouragement to increase productivity, which benefits them, their firms and the whole economy. It's a win-win for everyone. As well as redistributing economic power in favour of employees and the wider public, these four elements of a new economic governance would reduce the likelihood a re-run of the current economic crisis by a combination of decentralising economic power, democratising economic decision-making, improving corporate social responsibility and strengthening the accountability of businesses to their employees and consumers.   This transcendence of elitist, concentrated and autocratic economic power would result in a future society with a more democratic, cooperative and accountable economy. Imagine and create. Why not? To find out more about Peter Tatchell's campaigns and support his work visit: http://www.PeterTatchell.net

 

Valentine's Sayings

Love me and the world is mine.
- David Reed

There is no surprise more magical than the surprise of being loved. It is God's finger on man's shoulder.
- Charles Morgan

There is no remedy for love but to love more.
- Thoreau

The only abnormality is the incapacity to love.
- Anais Nin

You don't marry someone you can live with - you marry the person who you cannot live without.

The ultimate test of a relationship is to disagree but to hold hands.
- Quoted by Alexandra Penney in Self

Anyone can be passionate, but it takes real lovers to be silly.
- Rose Franken

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
- Saint-Exupery

A kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.
- Ingrid Bergman

I never knew how to worship until I knew how to love.
- Henry Ward Beecher

Oh, if it be to choose and call thee mine, love, thou art every day my Valentine!
- Thomas Hood

True love is like ghosts, which everybody talks about and few have seen.
- La Rochefoucauld

Better to have loved and lost, than to have never loved at all.
- St. Augustine

To love another person is to see the face of God.
- Les Miserables

Love is but the discovery of ourselves in others, and the delight in the recognition.
- Alexander Smith

Sympathy constitutes friendship; but in love there is a sort of antipathy, or opposing passion. Each strives to be the other, and both together make up one whole.
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge

The richest love is that which submits to the arbitration of time.
- Lawrence Durrell

Very small degree of hope is sufficient to cause the birth of love.
-Stendhal

Love cures people - both the ones who give it and the ones who receive it.
- Dr. Karl Menninger

To love and win is the best thing. To love and lose, the next best.
-William M. Thackeray

If you love someone, let them go. If they return to you, it was meant to be. If they don't, their love was never yours to begin with...

True love never dies for it is lust that fades away. Love bonds for a lifetime but lust just pushes away.
-Alicia Barnhart

Who says love never lives? Maybe we've never lived.

Some love lasts a lifetime. True love lasts forever.

If love is great, and there are no greater things, then what I feel for you must be the greatest.

The Eskimos have 52 words for snow because it is so special to them; there ought to be as many for love!
- Margaret Atwood

Love is like playing the piano. First you must learn to play by the rules, then you must forget the rules and play from your heart.

Within you, I lose myself. Without you, I find myself wanting to be lost again.

Falling in love consists merely in uncorking the imagination and bottling the common sense.
- Helen Rowland

Never close your lips to those whom you have opened your heart.
- Charles Dickens

To get the full value of joy you must have someone to divide it with.
- Mark Twain

There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.
- Friedrich Nietzshe

Life is a flower of which love is the honey.
- Victor Hugo

Love is the master key that opens the gates of happiness.
- Oliver Wendell Holmes

Love is a canvas furnished by Nature and embroidered by imagination.
- Voltaire

True love is like a fine wine, the older the better.
- Fred Jacob

Love is a perfume you cannot pour onto others without getting a few drops on yourself.
- Emerson

True love is like ghosts, which everyone talks about and few have seen.
- Francois de la Rochefoucauld

Love is a driver, bitter and fierce if you fight and resist him,
Easy-going enough once you acknowledge his power.
- Ovid

If you press me to say why I loved him, I can say no more than because he was he, and I was I.
- Michel de Montaigne

Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same.
- Emily Brontë

Love doesn't sit there like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all of the time, made new.
- Ursula K. LeGuin

Love is an exploding cigar we willingly smoke.
- Lynda Barry

Love has no desire but to fulfill itself. To melt and be like a running brook that sings its melody to the night. To wake at dawn with a winged heart and give thanks for another day of loving.
- Kahlil Gibran

Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other but in looking outward together in the same direction.
- Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand and Stars

When love is not madness, it is not love.
- Pedro Calderon de la Barca

For you see, each day I love you more
Today more than yesterday and less than tomorrow.
- Rosemonde Gerard

Love - a wildly misunderstood although highly desirable malfunction of the heart which weakens the brain, causes eyes to sparkle, cheeks to glow, blood pressure to rise and the lips to pucker.

Love one another and you will be happy. It's as simple and as difficult as that.
- Michael Leunig

The hours I spend with you I look upon as sort of a perfumed garden, a dim twilight, and a fountain singing to it. You and you alone make me feel that I am alive. Other men it is said have seen angels, but I have seen thee and thou art enough.
- George Moore

Absence diminishes small loves and increases great ones, as the wind blows out the candle and fans the bonfire. - François Duc de La Rochefoucauld

Love is, above all, the gift of oneself.
- Jean Anouilh

'Tis sweet to know there is an eye will mark our coming, and look brighter when we come.
- Lord Byron

An old man in love is like a flower in winter.
- Portuguese Proverb

Love is like a friendship caught on fire. In the beginning a flame, very pretty, often hot and fierce, but still only light and flickering. As love grows older, our hearts mature and our love becomes as coals, deep-burning and unquenchable.

True love comes quietly, without banners or flashing lights. If you hear bells, get your ears checked.
- Erich Segal

Love is being stupid together.
- Paul Valery

Before I met my husband, I'd never fallen in love. I'd stepped in it a few times.
- Rita Rudner

You really shouldn't say I love you unless you mean it. But if you mean it, you should say it a lot. People forget.

Love is when you can be your true self with someone, and you only want to be your true self because of them.
- Terri Guillemets

I was half in love with her by the time we sat down. That's the thing about girls. Every time they do something pretty, even if they're not much to look at, or even if they're sort of stupid, you fall half in love with them, and then you never know where the hell you are.
- J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye

Trip over love, you can get up. Fall in love and you fall forever.

Like I've always said, love wouldn't be blind if the braille weren't so damned much fun.
- Armistead Maupin, Maybe the Moon

If I had a single flower for every time I think about you, I could walk forever in my garden.
- Claudia Ghandi

The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.
- Edward Thomas

When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with somebody, you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.
- Nora Ephron, When Harry Met Sally

Are we not like two volumes of one book?
- Marceline Desbordes-Valmore

I've fallen in love many times... always with you.

Without love, what are we worth? Eighty-nine cents! Eighty-nine cents worth of chemicals walking around lonely.
- Hawkeye, M*A*S*H

Valentine's Day

Valentine's Day, or as it is more formally known, Saint Valentine's Day, is celebrated on 14th February each year.

The Valentines that are commemorated or two Italian saints, Valentin or Valentnus, who share the saint's day of 14th February.

The date is now when lovers declare their love by sending each other gifts and romantic cards.

There's nothing especially romantic about the lives of the two original Valentines, they were both martyred for their faith, in Ad 197 and AD 269 respectively.

The early tradition of Valentine's Day was that it was the date that birds began to choose their mates, only later did the romance extend to the human population.

The first reference in print to Valentine's Day is found in Geoffrey Chaucer's The parlement of foules [The Parliament of Fowls], circa 1381:

For this was on seynt Volantynys day Whan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

[For this was Saint Valentine's day, when every bird of every kind comes to this place to choose his mate.]

How the date of 14th February was selected isn't known.

It may relate to the approximate date first anniversary of the engagement of King Richard II of England to Anne of Bohemia, which Chaucer's poem was written to honour.

The couple were both 14 at the time of the engagement, which took place on 2nd May 1381, not on 14th February.

The betrothal of young lovers sounds promising as a romantic story bit, in fact it wasn't.

The marriage was purely a political contract between Anne's brother, King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia  and the English government - the partners were unlikely to have met prior to the marriage.

The earliest known romantic valentine verse was written by Charles, Duke of Orleans to his wife in the 15th century:

Je suis desja d'amour tanné
Ma tres doulce Valentinée

[I am already sick of love,
My very gentle Valentine]

Since then, there have been innumeral others.

Here's a select list to the object of your affections - take your pick:

 

Valentine's Poem

 

How Do I Love Thee?

How Do I Love Thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being an ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints,- I love thee with the Breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life!- and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Elizabeth Barret Browning

 

 

Whitney Houston

I am sorry she is dead at 48,

and couldn't help but feel sad when prayers were said for her nearest and dearest,

at the British Academy Film Awards

when they missed out a mention for the drug barons,

who allegedly will be more upset than most by her passing.

An ‘excess of democracy’:

what two generations of radicals can learn from each other

Hilary Wainwright examines the possibility of forging a new kind of political economy

by learning from the best of both today's radical movements

and those of the 60s and 70s 

Red Pepper

The ability of the Occupy movement to create platforms outside our closed political system to force open a debate on inequality, the taboo at the heart of the financial crisis, is impressive.

It is a new source of political creativity from which we all have much to learn.

At the same time, no veteran of the movements of the late 1960s and 1970s can help but be struck by similarities. There’s the same strong sense of power from below that comes from the dependence of the powerful on those they dominate or exploit.

There’s the creative combination of personal and collective change, and the bringing together of resistance with experiments in creating alternatives here and now.

There’s the spurning of hierarchies and the creation of organisations that are today described as ‘horizontal’ or ‘networked’ – and that now with the new techno tools for networking have both more potential and more ambiguity.

And the same hoary problems reappear: informal and unaccountable leaderships, the tensions between inclusion and effectiveness.

The Tyranny of Structurelessness, the 1970s pamphlet that tackled these unanticipated pitfalls from the perspective of the women's liberation movement in particular, may be well read.

But that was 40 years ago – even before the widespread use of faxes, let alone personal computers and mobile phones!

How could reflecting on these marginalised earlier movements possibly take forward the debates opened by Occupy and the Indignados?

From social rebellion to capitalist renewal

The fate of the energies and aspirations of that rebellious decade is a long and complex cluster of stories.

To consider their relevance today, I want only to point to a historical process that was not generally anticipated at the time and still is not fully understood.

This was the capacity of capitalism, as it searched for ways of out of stagnation and crisis, to feed opportunistically on the chaotic creativity and restless experimental culture of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

For example, from the 1980s, at the same time as attacking the trade unions, corporate management was also dismantling the military-style hierarchies characteristic of many leading companies and decentralising the production process.

A new generation of managers, especially in the newer industries, was recognising that workers’ tacit knowledge was a rich source of increased productivity and greater profits – so long as workers had little real power over their distribution.

Another example is how, in the endless search for new markets, culturally-savvy marketing managers were able to identify and exploit the commercial opportunities in the expanded horizons and wants of the increasing mass of women with incomes of their own.

The key underlying feature of these and similar trends is that much of the innovative character of capitalism’s renewal in the 1980s and 1990s – underpinned by the expansion of credit – came from sources external to both the corporation and the state. In fact, frequently its origins lay in resistance and the search for alternatives to both.

In other words, capital proved very much more nimble in responding to – and appropriating – the new energies and aspirations stimulated by the critical movements of the 1960s and 1970s than did the parties of the left – for which these movements could have been a force for democratic renewal.

What kind of a counter-movement?

Now, with the credit that underpinned the apparent ebullience of this particular period of capitalism having become toxic, the search for alternatives is back.

As I write, the Financial Times, much to its own astonishment, is publishing a week of articles on 'The Crisis of Capitalism'. The opening article declares that 'at the heart of the problem is widening inequality'.

Are we seeing in the combination – not necessarily convergence – of unease within at least the cultural elites, the growth of sustained popular resistance and public disgruntlement, the emergence of what Karl Polanyi called a ‘counter-movement’ to the socially destructive consequences of rampant capitalism?

 And to what extent might the ideas of the movements of the 1960s and 1970s influence the character of that counter-movement?

A fundamental break

To answer this we need, briefly, to remind ourselves of the core nature of the original social critique made by the 1960s/70s movements and in particular the nature of its potential break with the institutions of the post-war order: their paternalism, their exclusions, their narrow definition of democracy and their assumption that production and technology were value neutral.

Central to the character of this critique was its aspiration, more in practice than in theory, to overcome the debilitating dichotomies of the cold war: between the individual and the collective/social; freedom and solidarity/equality; ‘free’ market versus ‘command’ state – dichotomies that were refrozen through neoliberalism and the manner of the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The ideas and practices of the women’s movement are particularly illustrative.

 This movement came about partly from the gender-blind inconsistencies and incompletely fulfilled promises of the radical movements of the time. It deepened and extended their innovations, adding insights arising from women’s specific experiences of breaking out of their subordination.

Especially important here was an insistence on the individual as social and the collective as based on relations between individuals: a social individualism and a relational view of society and social change.

After all, the momentum of the women’s liberation movement was animated both by women’s desire to realise themselves as individuals and their determination to end the social relationships that blocked these possibilities.

This required social solidarity: an organised movement.

The nature of its organisation was shaped by a constant attempt to create ways of organising that combined freedom and autonomy – what every woman struggles for in her own life – with solidarity, mutuality and values of equality.

The result – cutting a complex and tense story short – was ways of relating that both allowed for autonomy and also achieved co-ordination and mutual support, without going through a single centre. In other words, here was what could be called an early, pre-ICT, 'networked' form of organisation.

The political economy of networks

This networked form was distinctive because integral to its origin, character and sustainability were values of solidarity and equality and democracy.

Awareness of these origins could help us now, when networked organisations are everywhere, to distinguish between the instrumental use of the concept of network in essentially undemocratic organisations (within states and corporations, for example) and, on the other hand, as a way of connecting distributed activities based on shared values of social justice and democratically agreed norms.

The latter possibility is radically enhanced through the new information and communications technology in its non-proprietorial forms.

The new possibilities of systems co-ordinating a multiplicity of autonomous organisations with shared values, through democratically agreed norms or protocols, can help upscale economic organisations based on non-capitalist – collaborative, P2P (peer to peer) co-operative or other social and democratic – forms of ownership, production, distribution and finance.

What enables us to make this apparently surprising leap from the forms of organisation shaped by the consciousness-raising groups of the women’s movement (or indeed other civil society initiatives of the same period, such as the factory shop stewards’ committees combining against multi-plant, multinational corporations and developing alternative plans for socially useful production) is the importance they give to practical, experiential knowledge and the need to share and socialise it.

The political economy of knowledge

The reason why this is important for the development of a political economy beyond capitalism is that behind the imposed choice between capitalist market and the state is the polarisation between scientific, social and economic knowledge on the one hand and practical knowledge on the other.

While the former was regarded as the basis of economic planning and centralised through the state, defenders of the free market held up the latter as being held individually by the entrepreneur and capable of coordination only through the haphazard workings of the market, based on private ownership.

The relevant breakthrough of the women’s and other movements of the 1960s/70s was to make the sharing and socialising of experiential knowledge – in combination with scientific forms – fundamental to their purposeful, but always experimental, organisations.

And to do so through consciously co-ordinated/networked and self-reflexive relations between autonomous/distributed initiatives.

Translating this into economics in the age of information and communications technology – a project requiring much further work – points to the possibility of forms of co-ordination that can include and help to regulate a non-capitalist market.

A regulated, socialised market, that is, in which the drive to accumulate and make money out of money is effectively suppressed. It also provides a basis for democratising and, where appropriate, decentralising the state, within the framework of democratically agreed social goals (such as concerning equality and ecology).

It is over these issues concerning the sharing of knowledge and information and the implications for the relationship between autonomy and social co-ordination that the ideas coming from the Occupy movement can creatively converge with those of earlier movements.

It is interesting in this context to read the economics working group of Occupy London describing in the Financial Times how Frederick von Hayek, the Austrian economist and theorist of free-market capitalism, with his ideas on the significance of distributed knowledge, is 'the talk of Occupy London'.

No doubt this was partly a rhetorical device for the FT audience.

 But the challenge of answering Hayek and his justification of the free market on the basis of a theory of distributed practical and/or experiential knowledge does provide a useful way of clarifying for ourselves the importance of the networked social justice initiatives of today and the anti-authoritarian social movements of the past for an alternative political economy.

There is a point at which Hayek’s critique of the ‘all knowing state’ at first glance converges with the critique of the social democratic state made by the libertarian/social movement left in the 1960s/70s.

Both challenge the notion of scientific knowledge as the only basis for economic organisation and both emphasise the importance of practical/experiential knowledge and its ‘distributed’ character.

But when it comes to understanding the nature of this practical knowledge and hence its relation to forms of economic organisation, these perspectives diverge radically.

Whereas Hayek theorises this practical knowledge as inherently individual and hence points to the haphazard , unplanned and unplannable workings of the market and the price mechanism, the radicals of the 1960s/70s took, as we have just explained, a very different view.

For them, the sharing of knowledge embedded in experience and collaboration to create a common understanding and self-consciousness of their subordination and of how to resist, was fundamental to the process of becoming a movement.

In contrast to the individualism of Hayek, their ways of organising assumed that practical knowledge could be socialised and shared. This led to ways of organising that emphasised communication and shared values as a basis for co-ordination and a common direction.

 It provided the basis for purposeful and therefore more or less plannable action – action that was always experimental, never all-knowing; the product of distributed intelligence that could be consciously shared.

At the risk of being somewhat schematic, it could be argued that the movements of the 1960s/70s applied these ideas especially to develop an – unfinished – vision of democratising the state.

This took place both through attempts to create democratic, participatory ways of administering public institutions (universities and schools, for example) and through the development of non-state sources of democratic power (women’s centres, police monitoring projects and so on).

It involved working ‘with/in and against’ the state, such as when the Greater London Council was led by Ken Livingstone in the early 1980s.

Today's movements are effectively focusing their energies especially on challenging the oligarchic market, and the injustice of corporate, financial power.

Here the development of networked forms are increasingly linked to distributed economic initiatives – co-ops, credit unions, open software networks, collaborative cultural projects and so on.

In this way, today's movements are beginning to develop in practice a vision of socialising production and finance and creating an alternative kind of market, complementary to the earlier unfinished vision of democratic public power.

What they have in common, more in practice than in theory, is an assertion of organised democratic civil society as an economic actor, both in the provision of public goods and in the sphere of market exchange.

Cultural equality

This emphasis on the development of strategies for political and economic change that empower democratic civil society, rather than an exclusive reliance on the state, marks a distinct development beyond the politics of the social democratic reformers of the past.

The architects of the welfare state and the post-war order, with all its achievements and limits, believed in economic and political reform.

But they did so generally on the basis of assumptions of cultural superiority: they, the professionals, knew what was best for the masses. By contrast, the rebellions of the 1960s/70s were asserting cultural equality.

Their goals concerned economic and social needs but in a context of challenging dominant understandings of knowledge, emphasising the public importance of practical, tacit and experiential knowledge.

This underpinned commitment to developing the organisations in the workplace and wider society that could share this knowledge and turn it into a source of transformative power.

The broadly anti-capitalist movements since the late 1990s are remaking that struggle, in radically changed political and economic circumstances.

The context is framed by a new form of cultural domination. It is in effect the imposition of a financial accounting mentality.

Thus, pensioners are defined as a 'burden'; workers are defined as 'costs'.

Higher education is defined as a personal investment, as if everyone determined their future in terms of a personal rate of return rather than a contribution to society.

The aim is a culture of acquiescence to the cuts and privatisation in the interests of an unproblematised goal of 'growth'.

How can we challenge these new forms of cultural subordination, turning citizens, by the dictat of an imposed accounting system, into mere ‘hands’ or ‘dependants’ in the language of 19th-century capitalism?

Alternative values in material practice

Part of the answer is surely to be found by illustrating in practice the alternative values that could found a political economy based on a framework of equality, mutuality and respect for nature.

Many such illustrations are up and spreading: credit unions that organise finance as a commons; public sector workers countering privatisation with proposals for improving and democratising services for and with fellow citizens; ‘free culture’ networks insisting on the use of ICT as a means of extending and enriching the public sphere rather than a digital oilfield for profit; a revival of co-operatives and collective consumer action around energy, food and other spheres in which the logic of capital is particularly destructive to society and the environment.

The strategic question we have to work on is how to generalise from, interconnect and extend these scattered developments.

In this sense the insistence on ‘being the change we want to see’ and creating alternatives here and now has a macro significance as well as a micro one.

The exhaustion of the existing system is in some ways far deeper than in the 1960s and 1970s but we should never underestimate the ability of capital to adapt and appropriate – which is why we must think ambitiously, though remaining grounded, about our collective organisational innovations.

Finally, what about relations with the state?

One of the distinctive features of the recent movements and the steady development across the world of forms of social or, more radically, solidarity economics is an ambition to be part of a process of systemic change.

This inevitably raises the question of the relation of these usually autonomous initiatives to the state and to electoral politics.

Most activists in these experiments, rightly, have no faith in the ability of the political class to lead ways out of the crisis.

But there has been an overly-generalised theorisation of engagement with political institutions as necessarily counterposed to the building of non-capitalist economic relations in whatever spaces can be struggled for now.

Experience, however, points to the possibility of a pragmatic and cautious engagement with political institutions from a consciously and determinedly autonomous base.

An example of this can be found in Argentina, where networks of workers' co-ops have struggled for legislation favourable to their interests [PDF link].

For example, starting with support at a municipal and provincial level in Buenos Aires, they have won the legal right to maintain ownership and control of occupied factories.

The logic of their approach has been to develop autonomous sources of power rooted in actual alternatives, rather than merely forms of pressure and protest that leave the creative initiative (or rather lack of it) with the political class.

This experience effectively illustrates an alternative, progressive recognition of the creative, productive power of civil society to the one described earlier in capitalism’s ability to absorb and subordinate the creativity of the critical culture of the 1960s and 1970s.

In conclusion

This brings us back to my opening question of what use there might be in revisiting these earlier movements. In sum, my arguments point to the importance of the unfinished foundations in democratic civil society of an alternative political economy – including a different kind of state.

You could say we were rudely interrupted in our work.

But maybe, as we join with new generations with capacities and visions way beyond our own, we will be collectively stronger if we recover what was potentially powerful and what the elites feared and tried to destroy.

It’s not easy to sum up succinctly what the managers of the ruling order felt so threatened by in the 1960s/70s, so let’s use the words they employed themselves.

 It was ‘an excess of democracy’ that lay behind ‘the reduction of authority’, concluded the Trilateral Commission when it investigated the causes of the political and economic crises of the early 1970s on behalf of governments of the dominant western powers.

The elite alarm at that time was thus more than just the regular ruling class fear of the mob.

The notion of ‘an excess of democracy’ implied a fear of intelligent and organised opposition, which was hence less easy to counter.

It was the autonomous and yet purposeful, organised and capable nature of the movements - including, perhaps especially, in the workplace that they feared most.

Here was the emergence of a new generation with allies throughout society that no longer accepted the place allotted to them by the elite democracy handed down to them after the war.

And yet that generation comprised the children of the post-war democratic order, gaining legitimacy through appealing to its claims and its unfulfilled promises.

 At that moment, the elites lost their authority.

Simple repression would no longer work – not that they didn't try it.

Related to this and later on, as the ideas of the radical movements began to shape political debate in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, the threat, at least in the UK, became that a form of socialism (or at least a viable political vision threatening to the elites) might emerge that could no longer be dismissed by reference to the failure of the Soviet model.

Norman Tebbit, Margaret Thatcher's right-hand hatchet man, put it neatly in reference to the radically democratic Greater London Council of the early 1980s: 'This is the modern socialism and we must destroy it.'

The grounds for these fears lay in the distinctive features of those movements and projects described in this article.

 In their ways of organising (combining autonomy and co-operation, creating the participatory conditions for the genuine sharing of knowledge), the alliances they built (across the traditional divides of economics, culture, labour and community) and their vision (beyond state versus market, individual versus social), they held out in practice the possibility of an alternative, participatory and co-operative political economy.

For a time, the new political culture seemed unstoppable.

Now, in the presence of Occupy and the multiplicity of movements that share in new ways the same hopeful characteristics, it feels as if, like a mountain stream that disappeared from sight, the same 'excess of democracy', with its springs in the 1960s and 1970s, is bubbling up again.

Many thanks to Marco Berlinguer, Roy Bhaskar, Robin Murray, Doreen Massey and Jane Shallice

A passage to India

Colin Todhunter

www.deccanherald.com

What is it about India that draws writers, painters, photographers from the West?

Do they come here to find, take, imbibe something or to give away a part of their essential selves to enrich the people and the milieus they encounter here?

Colin Todhunter seeks out a few seekers who have been drawn to India and lets them tell their stories.

 From the 17th century traveller and writer Francois Bernard to William Dalrymple today, India has always inspired creativity and has attracted writers, artists and musicians to its shores.

The country’s diverse landscapes, multifarious cultures and many philosophies continue to entice creative types who have effectively made the country their second home.

What drives them to be here?

Are they inspired, exhausted or fulfilled by the India they inhabit?

What does India mean to them?

I recently contacted various people to shed light on these questions, and, as a foreign writer in India, my own perspective found its way in.

This story is about a diverse group of people, but it is clear that we all have one thing in common.

Each of us has an ongoing love affair with India.

And, as with most affairs of the heart, although it's a rocky road at times, we keep coming back for more.

 

Claude Renault,
photographer, born in France

My first trip to India was in 1984, to the north. In 1999, I returned for three months to South India, which turned out to be quite different from what I had seen on my earlier visit. I fell in love with India during that trip while in Hampi.

Hampi's more traditional way of life was very appealing, and the rural setting reminded me of aspects from my upbringing that I had missed.

I grew up in a village in Brittany and can still remember the intimacy and easy going pace of life there.

 It was very similar in Hampi.

 

Since 1999, I have been back to India every year, sometimes twice a year, and it's becoming very difficult not to come back or go elsewhere.

The country has become a part of me.

Not a day passes without me reading something about it or listening to some Indian music.

It’s almost an obsession, but a gentle one.

Each time I come to India, I experiment with something new. It can be meeting Indians on the ghats in Varanasi, spending time with Sadhus, sharing days with Hijras or attending a colourful festival like the Sonepur Mela in Bihar.

I love shooting daily life but never wanted to indulge in the sordid, which is a trap you can easily fall into in India. I deliberately choose to show the brighter side of the country.

What I want to capture is a moment of intense emotion, the movement and colour, without being abstract.

As I studied painting and sculpture at art school, I drew more inspiration from painters than photographers, and this shows in my photographs, where colour fills the background as much as the foreground.

As a result, you don’t always see the whole of people’s bodies – heads or legs are cropped for the sake of the whole scene that I want to represent. 

It seems like everybody in India has some kind of knowledge on how to mix colors - it can be a hut, a tiny shop or a wall.

I started shooting in black and white, but nowadays I wouldn’t dream about going back to it.

Life is colour, and India is full of it. There is an energy here that you don’t find elsewhere in the world.

India as a country is going through tremendous changes at the moment. I can feel it and see it every time I land in Delhi.

A traditional, rural India faces a modern India.

To understand either is quite a task.

But I'm a bit selfish.

I don’t photograph modern India so much. I shoot my India, the way I see it, and the way I love it.

Travelling and shooting in India each year gives me strength to live in Europe the rest of the time.

I would have real problems if, for one reason or another, I couldn’t go back to India.

I have thought about settling permanently in India a few times. I would love to. A job there would definitely make me take the step. I am waiting for an offer!

Werner Dornik,
photographer/co-founder of Bindu Art School, born in Austria

I first visited India in 1977 via the overland hippie trail.

I was a hippie too! But many hippies ended up on drugs or in ashrams seeking enlightenment, when there were all these poor people suffering from hunger and illness.

In Varanasi, I saw many people affected by leprosy.

Though the cost of treatment was minimal, they could not afford it. 

 I had money for sightseeing in India for six months, but these people just needed eight euros for treatment.
I was on the point of going home because I just couldn't stand the situation.

I promised myself that I would come back to help those people.

The idea was to return to take photographs to sell in exhibitions back home. So that’s what I did. The first show was a great success, and, because of it, my first photo-book was published.

With the profits from my various visual art projects, I sponsored people in two leprosy colonies in Indore and Khandwa, and that's where the idea of establishing an art school originally came from.

I raised 5,000 euros and wanted to use it in the best possible way.

I was really touched by people who had leprosy because the were not only ill, they were outcasts too, discarded by their families and villages.

But they possessed a certain brightness.

This is what coaxed the idea of the art school – for them to express their beauty, not their pain, because there was so much beauty within them.

For me, India is the most diverse place in the world. In many ways, it is the opposite of western culture, and India forced me to question and develop my own view on life.

I was fascinated by Indian philosophy, especially the Bhagavat Gita, which I have read almost daily from 1978.
But I don't really believe in borders or nations.

For me, it's a question of humanity. I don't have a fixed personal goal and don’t follow anyone or anything.

I just let things come to me.

 All I want to do through my visual art projects, and I include Bindu Art School here, is to strip away illusion, eliminate untruth and show how love can change people.

There is no ulterior motive behind what I do.

I can’t forget people's pain and just wouldn’t be happy if I didn't help.

In some respects, life in India is as everywhere else.

There is an increasing concern with income, attachments and so on.

So, I am aware that it is heaven and hell in one.

I could stay in India forever, if I had to, but I am always happy to return to Austria with its fresh air, water and green fields.

East or west, home is best.

Colin Todhunter, writer,
born in the UK

“East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.”

It certainly felt that way when I first set foot in India in 1995.

But after having spent almost seven years here since then, I can’t help but feel that Kipling may have somewhat overstated the case.

My first abiding memory of India was the incredible amount of people and unbelievable traffic. What were these strange things they call idlis and dosas and why was this country drenched with God?

It was part modern and part 18th century, part air conditioned and part impossibly hot, and part lethargy, part frenzy.

In fact, it was part fascinating, part couldn’t wait to get on the plane to leave.

All these years later, however, life in the UK now feels like a prepackaged, processed supermarket meal that has all the nourishment of – well, a prepackaged, processed supermarket meal.

Eating idli and dosa in India has become second nature, and drinking coffee in a branch of the Indian Coffee House is much more satisfying than doing it in a bland corporate chain in the UK.

Before I came to India, I often had writer’s block.

But, in India, my writing just flowed.

 I was continually inspired.

 India was a total culture shock at first, and I began writing about the perceived anomalies of the place and how it overwhelmed me as a foreigner more used to the genteel subtleties of the West.

 It was a personal odyssey, a narrative focussed on my feelings about ‘the exotic’ and the raw extremities of the place. It was a recipe for entertaining travel writing.

Over the years, however, I have gradually embraced what I see and have moved towards a state of mind that is more attuned to India.

I now feel somewhat part of the place and to a certain extent feel less like an outsider looking in documenting the unfamiliar.

I increasingly find myself focussing less on the differences between India and the West and more on common issues that bind us together as people in an increasingly interconnected world.

This concern for commonality reflects in the way my writing has evolved to focus on for instance ‘globalisation’ and its impact on the poor, promoting projects and causes for socially excluded groups, or discussing the headlong surge towards acquisitive materialism and the effects this has on society, all of which affect both East and West alike.

With one foot planted firmly in the UK and the other in India, I am still able to appreciate that home is family, home is where you were brought up.

But India retains a vibrancy that continues to inspire and pull me back time after time.

I truly believe that there is nowhere else quite like India!

 

Isa Esasi, artist,
born in the Netherlands

I am a painter and illustrator of almost anything, including human bodies.

I'm a foreigner in most places, but probably more so in my birth country, Holland.

However, the one place where I really do feel at home is India.

When in India, I don't feel very foreign.
As a child, I spent some years in a Tibetan monastery in France, so some customs from the East come quite naturally to me.

My father also brought various gifts back from a visit to the Sai Baba Ashram at Whitefield, along with stories about a miracle man who made the impossible possible.

That left a deep impact.

Maybe that was my first real India experience.

The emotion and symbols of eastern spirituality were part of my upbringing, as were colourful visuals, handicrafts, embroidery, drawing, painting and butter sculpture.

These early experiences have helped me to feel at home in India and comfortable with the artistic expressions of the East.

And there’s always space for one more person in India – real emotional space, welcoming space, not purchased space.

I first visited India in 1996 and since then have discovered that the country is absolutely packed with colours, smells, sounds, emotions, inspiration, continuous questions, answers, challenges and solutions.

It is a great creative energy force, which makes me feel very much alive, revived, recharged and fearless.

Sometimes I see so much art around me that I can't be bothered to add anything to it.

 I can just relax and watch, for example, an elephant  holding up traffic in front of me, while a grumpy Ferrari revs its engine close by, as we are all stuck in a sea of auto rickshaws, ambassadors, motorbikes and bicycles.

It’s the contrasts. The most modern computer packages and the most primitive magical rituals exist side by side. In all this, I find my equilibrium between Bhagavan and Bollywood.

India not only provides me with a balance between East and West, but when such a large variety of people share a space, everything becomes a dialogue.

There is less privacy, so one feels part of what’s going on and therefore more responsible.

I have been happily surprised at how well my work has been received in India, from illustration work for children books, mural designing as part of a team, art workshops with children and so on.

 I am lucky that my tattoo art is also appreciated and my painting style seems to connect well.

If I had to choose anywhere in the world to stay forever, it would be India.

Everyone needs to have the opportunity to travel and discover the rest of the planet in order to gather knowledge, fuel for inspiration and find inner peace and balance.

I am so lucky to find all of this in in India time and time again.

Ian Watkinson, photographer
and teacher, born in the UK

My first trip to India was overland in the 70s as one of the many young intrepids dissatisfied with western values at the time and lured by the mysteries of the East.

I was 22 years old.

There were no guide books then, and people in rural areas had never seen a wrist watch, television or camera.

This is when India was effectively closed to western imports, so the cultural differences were perhaps much more distinctive than today.

The experience effectively opened my eyes to a greater understanding of music, culture, art, history and society beyond the Eurocentric system I had been used to.

It changed me permanently, and the desire to be in India has never left me.

India is light and colour. India is spontaneous and ‘in the moment’. People’s lives unfold around the dynamism and continuity of moments.

Photography in India is about capturing the uniqueness of those moments of colour and light as they unfold. Step out onto the street and walk in any direction, and the experience changes and unfolds, moment by moment.

Festivals, musicians, hawkers, ceremonies, gatherings of people – the initial moment of stepping out explodes in a riot of opportunities for beautiful images, and sometimes the experience is overwhelming. Having a camera to try and capture those moments is a way of consolidating them into a cohesive form.

When we perceive India as westerners, we try to see continuity, we need to label things, rationalise them, interconnect them.

But, in India, everything is part of a bigger whole.

The trick is to be able to think in that way.

Once we think that way, the eye and mind see India in a very different form.

The ability to see the detail becomes clearer, and the camera's eye is easier to focus and direct.

I always wanted to put something back  and now teach teenagers from poor families  about  photography and how images are a language and also basic computer skills and graphic design.

I stay in Chennai, and am learning Carnatic music (the mridangham) from professional players and teachers and from friends and neighbours too!

Staying in one place provides an opportunity for developing more than just fleeting friendships.

You become a neighbour rather than a visitor or traveller passing through.

But would I like to stay in India forever?

In India, there is really only the moment, and it can last an awfully long time.

 

Middle East
     Feb 11, 2012  
 
 9/11 REVISITED

Was Saudi Arabia involved?

By Paul Church

At 9:37 Eastern Daylight Time on September 11, 2001, American Airlines Flight 77 slammed into the western side of the Pentagon, killing all 59 passengers and 125 others in the building.

News of the crash went global within minutes; yet another symbol of American power was ablaze.

For the few still struggling to believe that the United States was under attack, doubt evaporated like the bodies of the many dead.

Conspiracists have puzzled for a decade over the failure to intercept the aircraft - or indeed, take even the elementary step of phoning the Pentagon to warn them of the approach.

But only recently has wider attention been paid to the failure of the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA's) Bin Laden unit to tell anyone that "muscle" hijackers, Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, were in the country.

The chairman of the 9/11 Commission, Thomas Keane, is now on record [1] as calling this "one of the most troubling aspects of our entire report".

How is it that, despite having known for several months about al-Midhar and al-Hazmi, nobody at Alec Station saw fit to mention them to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the counter-terrorism policy board in Washington, Immigration or the Defense Department?

The Bin Laden Issue Station - codenamed Alec by insiders such as US Army Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Shaffer - was the CIA unit dedicated to reporting on al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and militants in Afghanistan.

It was this unit that had called on authorities in Malaysia to monitor the Kuala Lumpur "terror summit" at which plans for 9/11 were probably finalized. Both al-Midhar and al-Hazmi were at that meeting.

Accounts differ as to exactly when the CIA became aware of the hijackers' presence in America.

But specific orders were issued not to share the information: Doug Miller, an FBI agent loaned to the Bin Laden unit, was among those who received the instructions.

In his book Pretext for War, author James Bamford quotes another FBI agent loaned to Alec: "[T]hey didn't want the bureau meddling in their business - that's why they didn't tell ... that's why September 11 happened."

Author Lawrence Wright has speculated that, so desperate was the CIA to get a source inside al-Qaeda, the agency shielded the aspiring terrorists while it tried to recruit them. In his book The Looming Tower, Wright also suggests a more serious possibility: lacking any domestic jurisdiction, the agency colluded with Saudi Arabian intelligence to keep their own fingerprints off events.

According to Wright, this was the view of a team of FBI investigators known as Squad I-49.

In an interview for the documentary Who Is Richard Blee?, former counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke was another insider to hint at possible Saudi involvement. Sensationally, Clarke also accused Central Intelligence Department head George Tenet of personally withholding evidence from Washington.

Filmmakers John Duffy and Ray Nowosielski managed to identify two key analysts involved in burying the evidence. Despite legal threats from the agency [2], the film is now available as a podcast.

Backtrack to January 2001: Prince Bandar bin Sultan is head of the Saudi Embassy in Washington.

Bandar was the man at the center of the al-Yammah arms deal, a corruption scandal involving the exchange of arms for crude oil with Britain. A White House insider since he arrived in Washington nearly two decades before, Bandar's close ties with the Bush family are common knowledge.

 Less widely known is that in January 2001, the Saudi Prince sat with vice president Dick Cheney, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers discussing US strategy for the invasion of Iraq.

In his book Plan of Attack, investigative journalist Bob Woodward claimed that when Bandar was handed a map labeled "Top Secret Noforn" in the vice president's office, not even the secretary of state had been informed that his country would be at war.

Colin Powell has denied this, but the incident serves to illustrate the prince's extraordinary access to the inner workings of government.

All the more shocking, then, that between 1998 and 2002, up to US$73,000 in cashier cheques was funneled by Bandar, via his wife Haifa - who once described the elder Bushes as like "my mother and father" - to two Californian families known to have bankrolled al-Midhar and al-Hazmi. The very same would-be terrorists protected by the CIA.

Princess Haifa sent regular monthly payments of between $2,000 and $3,500 to Majeda Dweikat, wife of Osama Basnan, believed by various investigators to be a spy for the Saudi government.

 Many of the cheques were signed over to Manal Bajadr, wife of Omar al-Bayoumi, himself suspected of covertly working for the kingdom.

The Basnans, the al-Bayoumis and the two 9/11 hijackers once shared the same apartment block in San Diego.

It was al-Bayoumi who greeted the killers when they first arrived in America, and provided them, among other assistance, with an apartment and social security cards.

He even helped the men enroll at flight schools in Florida.

When al-Bayoumi moved to England just days before the attacks, his apartment was raided by Scotland Yard. Beneath the floorboards were discovered the phone numbers of several officials at the Saudi Embassy.

Bandar and his wife deny any links to terrorism, but both former co-chairs of the US Senate Intelligence Committee, Richard Shelby and Bob Graham, think otherwise.

They claim the FBI refused to allow the committee to interview investigators who had followed the money from the embassy.

Other sources allege that the 9/11 Commission similarly failed to fully investigate leads, partly because commissioner Phillip Zelikow removed or relegated to footnotes any findings which cast doubt on the Saudis.

A 28-page section of the report exploring possible foreign government involvement remains classified.

Then there is the suppressed testimony of Special Agent Steven Butler, described by officials familiar with his account as "explosive". [3] Butler had been monitoring a flow of Saudi money to the would-be hijackers.

After he testified, staff director for the 9/11 Committee Eleanor Hill sent a memo to the Justice Department detailing Butler's allegations. When reporters quizzed the Justice Department about the content of Butler's testimony, they were told it was classified.

If possible Saudi Arabian involvement in 9/11 raised eyebrows at the Justice Department, what would they have made of mysterious but little publicized meetings between the Saudi ambassador and George Tenet?

In his book State of War, author James Risen recounts how Tenet "set the tone for the CIA's Saudi relationship by relying heavily on developing close relationships with top Saudi officials, including Prince Bandar bin Sultan ..."

Around once a month, Tenet would slip away to Bandar's estate in McLean, Virginia, for talks so secretive he refused to tell officers working under him what they were discussing.

Colleagues would complain that it was difficult for them to tell what deals were being made with the Saudis. Were al-Midhar or al-Hazmi ever mentioned?

"Bandar and Tenet had a very close relationship," confirmed one CIA officer.

The frantic rush to get Saudi Arabian nationals - including members of the Bin Laden family - out of America in the days after the 2001 attacks led to public outrage, and was featured in Michael Moore's seminal but flawed documentary, Fahrenheit 911.

Less was made of a return trip by Crown Prince Abdullah, then de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, in 2002.

The Crown Prince, Prince Saud al-Faisal and Prince Bandar bin Sultan were scheduled to meet president George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Colin Powell and national security advisor Condoleezza Rice at the president's ranch in Texas.

No fewer than eight airliners arrived from Saudi Arabia, and as the planes landed, US intelligence learned that two members of the royal entourage were on a terrorist watchlist.

The next day, Osama Basnan reported his passport stolen to Houston police - proving he was in Texas the same day as the crown prince.

 Were the wanted men on the planes Basnan and al-Bayoumi?

According to the Wall Street Journal, the FBI planned to "storm the plane and pull those guys off" until, evidently fearing an international incident, the State Department intervened.

Notes
1. Insiders voice doubts about CIA's 9/11 story Salon, October 14, 2011.
2. See CIA's Maneuver: A Case of Bluffing? Buying Time? Or Something More? September 13, 2011.
3. The road to Riyadh US News, November 29, 2002.

Paul Church is an independent journalist reporting on geopolitics, warfare and counter-terrorism.

 
 
 

 

The best and worst value holiday destinations

By Katy Ward
Posted 1st February 2012

Going on holiday is rarely cheap.

 Find out where your spending money will stretch the furthest.

With families across the UK feeling the pinch, getting value for money on holiday may be a particular priority in 2012.

Each year, the Post Office produces a Holiday Costs Barometer to compare the price of common tourist items in 40 holiday destinations.

These eight items are a cup of coffee, a meal for two adults, a tube of sun cream, a bottle of beer, a soft drink, a bottle of water, insect repellent and a pack of cigarettes.

Remember, however, the survey doesn’t include the costs of flights or accommodation.

It’s good news for the hoards of Brits who enjoy sunning themselves in the Costa del Sol in Spain as this area was the second cheapest of those ranked by the Post Office.

During their holiday, two adults could get a three-course meal including a bottle of wine for £22.73. In fact, tourists could purchase all eight items for just £37.72.

Its prices were beaten only by those in Sri Lanka, where costs tumbled by almost a third compared with last year.

Here are the 10 cheapest destinations according to the price of the eight tourist items:
1. Sri Lanka (£27.95)
2. Spain (£37.72)
3. Czech Republic (£39.57)
4. Bulgaria (£39.65)
5. Mexico (£44.03)
6. Hungary (£45.57)
7. Portugal (£45.58)
8. Thailand (£46.15)
9. South Africa (£47.62)
10. Vietnam (£50.71)
Source: The Post Office Travel Money

More expensive tourist spots

Of all the destinations included in the Post Office’s findings, Australia had the highest costs.

Taking a trip Down Under is especially pricey for smokers who fork out £11.56 for a pack of 20 Marlboro Lights cigarettes.

The 10 most expensive destinations
1. Australia (£115.69)
2. Barbados (£113.18)
3. Singapore (£113.03)
4. New Zealand (£108.29)
5. Costa Rica (£108.07)
6. Canada (£107.02)
7. China (£106.34)
8. Miami in USA (£104.55)
9. Brazil (£92.74)
10. Mauritius (£91.97)
Source: The Post Office Travel Money

What the survey doesn’t tell us

While it’s certainly useful to know the prices of tourist essentials, there are other expenses to bear in mind.

When going on holiday, it’s usually wise to take out travel insurance.

To set the price of premiums, insurers consider your destination as certain parts of the world are inherently riskier than others.

Travellers visiting a region with a high risk of violence or disease may well end up paying more for their insurance.

Furthermore, this survey doesn’t include the cost of travel – flights to some of these destinations are unlikely to be cheap.

Avoid these holiday rip offs

In most cases, credit and debit card companies impose expensive fees to withdraw cash or make purchases abroad.

To avoid this, consider a card that waives overseas fees.

For instance, the Sainsbury’s Gold Credit Card allows interest-free purchases and cash withdrawals outside the UK.
Although there’s a £5 monthly fee, this card also includes insurance for two adults and up to six children.

If you're paying with your card abroad, the retailer may ask if you would prefer to pay in sterling or the local currency.

In this situation, it would be prudent to choose the local  currency.

Otherwise, the retailer may convert the purchase into pounds an unfavourable rate, which would bump up the overall cost.

One-off energy saving tips

 

: British Gas Winter Hub –

 Tue, Feb 7, 2012 17:06 GMT

 

Saving energy needn't be time-consuming or expensive.

There are many actions you can take which are low cost, quick to do and keep paying back long after you've forgotten all about them.

 Stop heat escaping for good

Trying to reduce your energy usage can feel like a never ending job, especially in the winter.

There is always something new you can do, whether it's installing a new energy saving gadget or employing a new technique.

Sometimes it can feel as though the most effective measures are also the most expensive ones, such as installing a more efficient boiler or fitting double glazing.

 

However, not all energy saving measures need cost a lot of money and there are also lots of actions you can take just once which will continue to save you money for years to come.

Here are just a few of the most effective actions you can take at home.

[See also: What different sorts of boilers do and what they cost]

Turn down the thermostat

Many of us have got into the habit of keeping our central heating thermostats up too high.

We all need to keep warm to stay healthy, but if you're sitting about in beachwear in the middle of February then your thermostat is probably set too high.

Set it to between 18 and 21 degrees Celsius and put on warmer clothing first before you are tempted to push the dial higher.

Remember that the hot water cylinder in your airing cupboard may also have a thermostat, so don't forget to turn it down too (if you have a combination boiler then you won't have a cylinder).

If, when you turn on the hot tap, the water scalds your hands, it is set too high — it should be set at 60 degrees Celsius/140 degrees Fahrenheit.

These actions will cost you nothing and turning the thermostat down by just one degree could save you up to £55 a year on your heating bill.

For extra heating control in individual rooms you can install room temperature thermostats too.

These automatically sense the temperature in a room and turn off the heating once the air temperature has reached the level the thermostat is set to.

They need a free flow of air to work effectively, though, so avoid blocking them with furniture.

Typically, installing room thermostats, which cost around £30-£45, could save you up to £70 a year on your bills.
Put your heating on a timer

Most boilers have timer settings to enable you to pre-programme when you want the heating and hot water to go on and off.

Set the heating to go on 20 minutes before you get up and go off 20 minutes before you leave the house to go to work or go to bed in the evening.

This should be more than enough to warm the house and will save you having to remember to turn it off.
Insulate your tank and boiler

Fitting a jacket around the hot water cylinder in your airing cupboard is one of the simplest, low cost energy saving actions you can take.

According to the Energy Saving Trust, it cuts heat loss by up to 75% and can save you up to £40 a year on your bills, yet costs just £15 to fit.

The jacket should be at least 75 mm thick, so if the existing one has worn a bit thin it's probably worth replacing it. Insulating your pipes costs £10 and will also save you around £15 a year.

Exclude draughts

According to the Energy Saving Trust, if everyone in the UK draught-proofed their homes, we would save enough fuel to heat almost 400,000 properties.

It costs around £120 to draught-proof the average home fully and yet it could save you £55 a year.

 

Typically you will find draughts in areas such as around your letterbox, keyholes, windows, under doors, between floorboards and around loft-hatches.  You can buy foam strips or brushes to fit around windows and doors from DIY stores. Keyholes can also be fitted with metal covers.

Make sure you purchase items which show the British Kite Mark as these will be better quality and should last for 20 years or more. Simple fillers can also be used to block cracks in walls or gaps between floorboards.

If you're unsure where there are draughts in your home, one trick is to wander around your home with a lighted candle. If there's a draught, the flame will flicker.

Ventilation is important, though, so make sure you take care in areas where there is a boiler flue, for example, or in the bathroom where poor ventilation could cause mould growth.

Redirect heat

Heat from radiators can be lost if your home has high ceilings.

 One cost effective way to redirect heat is to place a shelf above the radiator (don't use MDF) to deflect it back into the room.

Radiator panels, placed behind the radiator, can also help and cost around £27 for a pack of 10 or you can buy individual radiator panels from £4.49.

Manufacturers claim they could cut your heating bill by 20%.

If you have an open fireplace but don't use it, you can block it up by either putting a cap over the chimney or installing a simple 'chimney balloon' inside the fireplace to prevent heat escaping up it.

They cost around £20 and could save you up to £15 a year.

Just don't forget to take it out if you decide to light a fire!
Insulate your home
If you have the money available, it's well worth insulating your loft and installing cavity wall insulation if your home is suitable.

In an un-insulated home a quarter of heat is lost through the roof and a third through the walls.

Subsidies are available from energy companies and the government for loft and cavity wall insulation, which both cost up to £350 to install.

 Insulating your loft could save you up to £175 a year, while cavity wall could cut your annual heating bills by up to £135.

UK queen’s 60 years of scrounging’

 

 

Definition of life expectancy

Insurance

how long average person lives the number of years that somebody of a given age is expected to live

 

Life expectancy is the expected (in the statistical sense) number of years of life

remaining at a given age.^[1]

 

 

 It is denoted by e_x, which means the average number of subsequent years of life for someone now aged x, according to a particular mortality experience.

(In technical literature, this symbol means the average number of complete years of life remaining, excluding fractions of a year.

The corresponding statistic including fractions of a year, the normal meaning of life expectancy, has a symbol with a small circle over the e.)

 In modern times, life expectancy has substantially changed on a yearly basis and cannot be used accurately for long-term predictions

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Interpretation of life expectancy

General explanation: It is important to note that life expectancy is an average. In many cultures, particularly before modern medicine was widely available, the combination of high infant mortality and deaths in young adulthood from accidents, wars, and childbirth, significantly lowers the overall life expectancy.

But for someone who survived past these early hazards, living into their sixties or seventies would not be uncommon.

For example, a society with a life expectancy of 40 may have very few people dying at age 40, most will die before 30 or after 55.

In countries with high infant mortality rates, the life expectancy at birth is highly sensitive to the rate of death in the first few years of life.

Because of this sensitivity to infant mortality, simple life expectancy at age zero can be subject to gross misinterpretation, leading one to believe that a population with a low overall life expectancy will necessarily have a small proportion of older people.

For example, in a hypothetical stationary population in which half the population dies before the age of five, but everybody else dies exactly at 70 years old, the life expectancy at age zero will be about 37 years, while about 25% of the population will be between the ages of 50 and 70.

Another measure such as life expectancy at age 5 (e₅) can be used to exclude the effect of infant mortality to provide a simple measure of overall mortality rates other than in early childhood—in the hypothetical population above, life expectancy at age 5 would be another 65 years.

Aggregate population measures such as the proportion of the population in various age classes should also be used alongside individual-based measures like formal life expectancy when analyzing population structure and dynamics

How to live off the land

 

Farmers Guardian

 

Could you survive only on local produce?

As the Government urges us to help reduce Britain's spiralling food miles total, Rich Cookson spends two weeks without salt or sugar, tea or coffee, wine, pasta - or chocolate

Still, food doesn't come much more local than this.

My rabbit was shot a few fields away and the vegetables were grown just eight miles down the road.

The delicious, thick, creamy milk that will go into my mashed potato came free from a friendly farmer this morning. In a couple of hours, there'll be a steaming bowl of delicious and wholly local rabbit stew and mash on the table.

The food we eat is travelling further than ever to get to our plates.

A recent government report revealed that the food eaten in Britain travelled a staggering 30 billion kilometres in 2002.

The study, from the Department for Farming and Rural Affairs, also found that the amount of food transported by lorries has doubled since 1974, and now accounts for a quarter of all miles travelled by HGVs in the UK.

The phenomenal grown of supermarkets, with their centralised distribution systems and out-of-town locations, is partly to blame.

 But they rightly say they're only responding to demand: many of us want to eat strawberries and tomatoes all year round, without thinking too much about where they come from.

The report pointed out that each of us now travels an average of 136 miles a year by car to shop for food, and the combined environmental and social costs of all these food miles is about £9bn a year.

Launching the report, the Sustainable Food and Farming Minister, Lord Bach, said that the issue was "complex and that a range of factors have an effect on the overall impacts of food transport, not purely the distance travelled by individual products... [but] buying local products has the potential to greatly reduce the distance food is transported."

So just how local is it possible to go? Styling myself as Somerset's answer to Morgan Spurlock - the US film-maker who ate nothing but McDonald's for a month and made a documentary about the grizzly consequences - I set out to live ultra-locally for two weeks.

The golden rule is simple: I can only eat food grown, reared or hunted within 10 miles of my house.

That means forgoing a daunting list of staples including tea, coffee, sugar, salt and pepper, oranges, bananas, chocolate, pasta, olive oil and breakfast cereals.

Would I be able to find enough bread, milk, meat, fruit and vegetables to live on - or would I be forced to eat parsnips for breakfast and succumb to scurvy?

Thankfully, I live in the Somerset countryside: with cows munching grass at the end of my garden, and winter crops sprouting at the back of my house, it seems like a cinch.

The night before I start, I clear out a kitchen cupboard.

There's Tanzanian tea, Costa Rican coffee, tinned tomatoes (Italy), prunes (not quite sure why I bought those, but they come from France), dried apricots (Turkey), flaked almonds (Spain), nutmeg (Tanzania), pasta (Italy), dried lentils (France), risotto rice (Italy), sunflower seeds and pine nuts (China), basmati rice (India), pudding rice (Italy), couscous (France), soy sauce (which, dubiously, claims to come from the Netherlands), capers (Cyprus), olive oil (Italy) and an old jar of jalapeno peppers from Spain.

At a conservative (though completely unscientific) estimate, all of the food in that one small cupboard has travelled more than 41,000 miles to get here.

That's not far off twice the circumference of the earth.

I'm left with one small jar of local honey and four eggs from a nearby farm but a few minutes on the internet gives me some decent ideas about how to fill up the fridge.

A good starting place is www.bigbarn.co.uk, a fantastic website that tells you what's available in your locality.

The Soil Association's site ( www.soilassociation.org.uk) provides helpful tips, too.

Day One. With only eggs and honey to choose from, breakfast doesn't look too appetising.

I dissolve honey in hot water, which does little to stop me craving the three cups of coffee I drink every morning, but is much tastier than it sounds.

Alongside a plate of scrambled eggs, it makes a surprisingly hearty meal.

Armed with a rucksack and a wad of cash, I set off for the three-mile walk across the fields to my nearest farm shop.

The store is suitably rustic and has a fantastic array of vegetables - delicious-looking kale, vivid-orange carrots, huge sacks of muddy potatoes, knobbly parsnips, eggs, butter, preserves - but most of it comes from Oxfordshire or Kent (apart from the peppers, which have been air-freighted in from Spain).

I opt for three more jars of honey.

And 18 eggs, just in case.

A mile or so up the road, there's a farm that sells decent beef from its Aberdeen angus herd.

The family has farmed here since 1958 and are happy to talk about how they farm and who else might be worth visiting round here.

 I go for a couple of hefty sirloins and some stewing steak.

They also knock some money off the total price - something you don't get in Tesco.

And then I hit the jackpot: a huge farm shop in the wonderfully named village of Farrington Gurney.

The farm shop, called Farrington's, sells fabulous vegetables from its 430-acre farm. Tish and Andy Jeffery have farmed here for 15 years and their philosophy is strikingly simple.

"We want to sell as much local food as possible," says Tish.

 "The further food travels, the more it loses its nutrients - and I don't see the point in buying vegetables from abroad when they are so much tastier if they are grown locally."

While the shop does stock some food from overseas, I can get a good range of vegetables here (all helpfully labelled with food miles).

The shop's butcher, too, points me towards its beef (reared within a few miles, he says) and locally shot game. Unfortunately, there's no milk (it comes from 20 miles away) and the bread, too, is off the list.

The butter is also produced out of my area, but I desperately need something to cook with and as it's only out by a couple of miles I cheat slightly.

 I emerge with four venison steaks, two pheasants, a large bag of potatoes, red cabbage, beetroot, cavalo nero (black kale), swiss chard, leeks, fennel, celeriac and two pats of butter.

And all for £19.73.

For the next few days I eat remarkably well. I pick the last few apples from my garden and stew them with local honey.

Breakfast alternates between this and increasingly bizarre dishes involving eggs and vegetables (cavalo nero omelettes are a particular favourite).

Beef stew without seasoning tastes rather insipid, but improves with age.

The venison is delicious, as is steamed green veg. I eat my body weight in potatoes.

A couple of days later, some friends come round for supper.

We eat roast pheasant, mashed potatoes, honey-roasted beetroot and kale - all of it local.

They drink wine while I stick to honey and hot water.

Towards the end of the week, I find another shop that sells vegetables produced at a local market garden. The owner tells me about a local cheesemaker, less than a mile from my house.

That night's supper is a squash from the former, baked with goat's cheese from the latter, washed down with honey and hot water.

By day eight I'm beginning to notice how much extra work this is.

Most meals are based around meat, vegetables and potatoes, which all take time to cook.

Without pasta and rice, I'm really stuck for quick lunches.

I've also been scrupulous about saving fat from the steaks I fry and making stock from any leftover bones - both go some way to adding extra taste to my cooking, but I'm sorely missing salt, pepper and fresh herbs.

Breakfast is also difficult: eggs and honey are rapidly losing their appeal and I still can't find any milk. Most mornings, I fantasise about toast and strong coffee.

The following day, I'm working in London. I have breakfast at home but can't find anything that I can take with me for lunch and resort to a sandwich at Paddington station.

I work late and eat on the train that evening too.

With only three days to go, things start to slip.

I succumb to an early-morning coffee and start adding salt and pepper to food. From there, it's a short step to using dried herbs and (local-ish) bacon when I cook.

 I may have broken my own golden rule a few times, but most of my ingredients are thoroughly local - and the difference is remarkable: food simply tastes so much better when it is properly seasoned.

But I certainly won't be rushing down to the supermarket next week: there are a couple of partridges and another pheasant in the fridge, and more local vegetables than I know what to do with.

I'm looking forward to the odd banana or two, and some guilt-free coffee, but there's so much good food on my doorstep that it seems insane to buy it from anywhere else.

I might even tackle another rabbit, if someone can show me how to do it.

Miles better?

* Half of all vegetables and 95 per cent of fruit eaten in the UK is from overseas.

* Two out of three apples sold in supermarkets are imported, says Friends of the Earth - with Tesco the worst offender, sourcing 72 per cent of apples overseas.

Some had travelled more than 12,000 miles.

* From 1978 to 1998, the amount of food transported on UK roads increased by 20 per cent, but the average distance travelled went up by 50 per cent.

* Food transport in and to the UK produced 19 million tons of carbon dioxide (CO ₂) in 2002.

* Transport of food by air has the highest CO ₂ emissions per ton, and is the fastest-growing mode.

* Buying locally grown and manufactured produce boosts the rural economy.

For every £10 spent in a local organic box scheme, £25 is generated for the local economy, according to the New Economics Foundation.

This compares with £14 generated for every £10 spent in a supermarket.

* Ingredients for a typical Christmas dinner travel up to 30,000 miles, according to the Green Party.

SOURCES: DEFRA, FOE, GREEN PARTY, NEF

How to Live Off the Land

eHow Sports & Fitness Editor

This article was created by a professional writer and edited by experienced copy editors, both qualified members of the Demand Media Studios community.

All articles go through an editorial process that includes subject matter guidelines, plagiarism review, fact-checking, and other steps in an effort to provide reliable information.

By an eHow Contributor

1.  

o                                1

Clarify your objectives. Is your goal to experience a short-term wilderness retreat, live in harmony with nature for the long haul or just survive a reality-show stint in the South China Sea? What level of technology and tools will you employ: GPS device or compass and sextant? Zippo or flint and steel?

o                                2

Enroll in a wilderness preparedness course, such as those offered by Outward Bound (outwardbound.com) or the National Outdoor Leadership School (www.nols.edu). You will learn vital skills such as navigating with a map and compass, shelter construction and first aid.

o                                3

Choose an environment with significant opportunities for food, water and shelter. Solo adventures are really only feasible in warm or temperate climates. Abundant water is essential to survival. If you don't have a reliable source of clean water, become expert at purifying water in large quantities.

o                                4

Become expert at starting a fire without matches. Your best bet is probably the bow-drill technique. For detailed instructions on this, go to www.wmuma.com/tracker/skills/fire/bowdrill/.

o                                5

Learn how to make a basic shelter. Review 474 Survive Being Lost for instruction. Choose a camping spot with easy and reliable water access. Without a mechanical system of delivery and storage, obtaining water may be your biggest daily task.

o                                6

Know how to use, repair and sharpen basic tools. Living off the land requires that you get very close to that land. Axes, knives, shovels, hoes and fishing gear will be essential to your survival.

o                                7

Study the flora and fauna of your intended destination. Be able to identify edible plants and practice locating, harvesting and preparing them long before you set out.

o                                8

Learn to see and feel changes in the weather and to take appropriate action.

o                                9

Practice whatever hunting method you choose until you are an expert. Hunting is difficult and unpredictable; fishing is more reliable and requires less physical effort.

o                                10

Learn how to process skins in order to make clothing. Practice harvesting reeds and grasses in order to make baskets and rope.

o                                11

Keep an apartment in Manhatten for those times when you need to get away from it all

What is poverty?

 

How poor is too poor?

What does a person need to participate in society in Britain in the 21st century?

What is the minimum standard of living to which everyone should be entitled?

 Who falls below?

These aren't just abstract, academic questions - they are key to people's life chances and opportunities.

They provide a basis for redistributing income and resources through the tax and benefit system.

They are essential for determining questions of fairness.

So how should we measure poverty? Key government measures take 60% of median income as the poverty line.

But while this is easy to measure and does provide useful comparisons over time, it is essentially arbitrary and is currently being questioned (see “ Redefining Poverty”).

The PSE studies, by contrast, look directly at living standards and ask people what they think are necessities for living in the UK to establish a publicly agreed minimum standard.

Those who have no choice but to fall below these minimum standards are defined as being in 'poverty'.

Using this consensual approach to measuring poverty, the results of this research will provide an independent assessment of the impact of government policies.

What is poverty? has more information and discussion on the measurement of poverty and social exclusion.

Monitoring poverty and social exclusion 2011

 

Findings Informing change

 

This study by the New Policy Institute presents the legacy that was left to the Coalition Government

by its predecessor, and examines the current Government’s priorities for action.

Key points

 

• In the year to 2009/10, the child poverty rate fell to 29%, the second fall in two years.

Child poverty fell by around one-seventh under the previous Labour Government.

• The poverty rate for working-age adults without dependent children rose both in 2009/10 and over the last decade. It now stands at 20%.

• The pensioner poverty rate, at 16%, is now around half the rate it was in 1997.

• By mid-2011, six million people were unemployed, lacking but wanting work or working part-time because no full time job was available.

Though no higher than the previous year, this was 2 million higher than in 2004.

• On a range of education indicators at ages 11, 16 and 19, more pupils are reaching expected standards than in previous years, continuing long-term positive trends. Although closing slowly, the gaps between attainment levels of those on free school meals and other children are smaller than in previous years.

• The proportion of households in fuel poverty has risen significantly in the last few years. Almost all households in the bottom tenth by income are in fuel poverty, as are half of households in the second bottom tenth.

• Changes to the tax credit system mean that an additional 1.4m working households on low incomes now face marginal effective tax rates of over 70%.

• The number of households accepted as homeless in England rose in 2010/11 for the first time since 2003/04 and now stands at 65,000.

The number of court orders for mortgage repossessions in England and Wales rose to 21,000 in the first half of 2011, the first significant rise for three years.

The research

 

By Hannah Aldridge, Anushree

Parekh, Tom MacInnes and Peter Kenway

www.jrf.org.uk

December 2011

The Coalition’s inheritance

 

Table 1 summarises the changes over time in the indicators that form the subject of the main report. It looks at

changes over the last five years and the last decade, where sufficient data is available to make a comparison. The

results assess whether the indicators have improved, worsened or stayed the same.

Over the last decade, 26 of the measures in the table have improved and 14 have got worse. Over the last five

years, 13 have improved and 20 have got worse.

So the Coalition’s inheritance was mixed. Many of the improving measures are in education and health and

represent long-term positive trends. Conversely, almost any measure of labour market participation would show a worse picture now than five years ago.

Low income

 

A household is deemed to be in poverty if its income is less than 60% of median (average) household income for

the year in question. The value of this poverty line in terms of pounds per week depends on the number of people in the household, reflecting the fact that larger households need more money (although not proportionately more) than smaller ones in order to achieve the same standard of living.

In the most recent year, 2009/10, 60% of median income, measured after taxes and housing costs have been deducted, was worth:

Table 1: Summary of changes over the last five and ten years

 

Source: Households Below Average Income, via the IFS; the data is for Great Britain to 2001/02 and the UK thereafter

• £124 per week for a single adult;

• £210 per week for a lone parent with two children under 14;

• £214 per week for a couple with no children;

• £300 per week for a couple with two children under 14.

In 2009/10, 29% of children lived in poverty, compared with 25% of working-age adults with dependent children,

20% of working-age adults without dependent children and 16% of pensioners.

The poverty rate for working-age adults without dependent children is now 20%, the highest since 1997, and an

increase of 5% in a decade. Not only is this proportion increasing at a faster rate than for the rest of the population,

but those in poverty tend to be in deeper poverty than other population groups. More than half of working-age

adults without children who are in poverty have incomes below 40% of the median.

The fall in pensioner poverty over the last decade and more has been substantial. The rate is now around half what

it was in the 1990s. Previously more likely than other adults, pensioners are now less likely to be in poverty.

The poverty rate for people aged 55–64 is 20%, little changed from a decade ago. But over that period, the rate

for people aged 65–74 has fallen from 25% to 15%. For some older working-age adults, the best hope of escaping

poverty is to wait for state retirement age, an age which is set to rise steadily.

A significant factor in this continues to be the low level of benefits paid to out-of-work families. The Minimum Income

Standard, calculated by asking members of the public what they think is an essential minimum standard of living,

provides a guide here. Out-of-work benefits cover 60% of the minimum income standard for couples with children

and 40% for single adults.

Unemployment and underemployment

 

In the first half of 2011, some 6 million people in the UK were underemployed.

This had changed little from 2010.

Underemployment had not been this high since 1993.

Of this 6 million, 2.5 million people were unemployed; 2.3 million people, 550,000 of whom were students, were defined as economically inactive but wanting paid work; and 1.2 million were working part-time but wanted full-time jobs.

Compared with the low point in 2004, both unemployment and the number of economically inactive students

wanting work was up by around two-thirds. The number working part-time who wanted full-time work had doubled.

These figures, specifically the huge rise in people working part-time instead of full-time, indicate that the issue is the

lack of jobs, not an unwillingness to look for work. Policies that focus solely on changing incentives to find work via benefit reform cannot solve this problem.

Figure 2: Underemployment

 

The problem of unemployment is most acute among young adults. By the middle of 2011, the unemployment

rate – those unemployed as a proportion of those in work or unemployed – among 16- to 24-year-olds was

20%, around three times that of the rest of the population.

Education

 

In 2010, 19% of 11-year-olds assessed at Key Stage 2 did not reach the expected standard of Level 4 in

English. This is down from 25% in 2000. A similar proportion lacked Level 4 in maths in 2010 as 2009, down

from 28% a decade earlier.

There has been a steady downward trend in the proportion of 11-year-olds failing to reach Level 4 at Key

Stage 2. The fastest progress was made in the mid- to late-1990s. In the five years between 1995 and 2000,

the proportion not getting Level 4 in English and maths each dropped by 23 percentage points. In the ten

years since, the proportion has further declined by ten percentage points.

Substantial inequalities in attainment still persist between poorer children (those receiving free school meals)

and other children. For instance, in 2010, 40% of boys receiving free school meals did not reach Level 4 for

English compared with 20% for other boys. There are some signs that the gaps might be closing slightly – at

the very least, the improvements seen in Figure 3 above have been seen among deprived and non-deprived

students alike.

Figure 3: Educational attainment at age 11

 

Source: Department for Education; the data is for England

To varying extents, these patterns are evident at ages 16 and 19 as well. Certainly, in absolute terms, the

proportion not attaining expected standards has fallen quite steadily over time.

Fuel poverty and housing

 

Recent rises in fuel prices have led to a huge increase in fuel poverty, particularly among those on lower

incomes. In 2009, 85% of households in the lowest tenth of the income distribution were in fuel poverty, as

were 50% of those in the second lowest tenth. In both cases, these rates represent increases of at least 40

percentage points since 2003.

This is not the only instance of rising prices causing increasing hardship for low income families. The

proportion of children living in low income households that were going without ‘essential’ items for reasons of

cost was higher in 2009/10 than in 2005/06 across a range of items.

In addition to fuel poverty, other indicators on housing adequacy also show worrying trends.

The number of households in England accepted as homeless rose in 2010/11 for the first time in eight

years. Some 65,000 households were accepted by local authorities as homeless in 2010/11, compared

with 56,000 the previous year. The coming together of a range of factors, including falling incomes and high

unemployment, may cause homelessness to rise further in the near future.

The number of court orders for mortgage repossessions rose for the first time in three years, though it is still

below its peak in the second half of 2008. The number of actual repossessions also rose slightly, to 18,000 in

the first half of 2011.

The Child Poverty Strategy 2011 and assessment of the Government’s goals

 

The Government’s Child Poverty Strategy, published in 2011, sets out its priorities for tackling child poverty. It

includes a range of indicators against which progress should be measured, shown in Table 2.

All but four of these indicators appear regularly in the Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion series. The list

is headed by the low-income indicators that between them form the basis for the 2020 target in the 2010

Child Poverty Act: poverty as measured by relative low income therefore remains central to the Government’s

conception of what matters. There is an indicator on ‘in-work’ poverty, which is both necessary and welcome.

Besides low income, there is a strong emphasis on education, with the focus on the gap in achievement

between those eligible for free school meals and other pupils. This is another important inclusion, although

gaps alone are not enough – gaps and absolute levels of attainment at the bottom need to be looked at

together.

Strikingly, almost all the measures show improvement compared with ten years earlier. It is not just child

poverty that has fallen. Gaps in educational attainment between students receiving free school meals and

other students have fallen; the rate of teenage pregnancy has fallen; the number of under-17s committing a

criminal offence has fallen. One can argue that any of the numbers are still too high. But most trends have

been positive.

While these are welcome as measures of what the Government wants to achieve, there is no sense of how

they are to be achieved. The concern is that the policies to support these goals, especially those relating

specifically to low income, rely too heavily on the tax and benefit system – in this case the reform that is

Universal Credit – as a panacea. In so doing, this Government repeats the mistakes of the last one, which

came to rely on tax credits to tackle child poverty.

The fact that there is a strategy for child poverty but not one for working-age adults repeats another error.

The rise in working-age poverty, among those in work and not in work, represents one of the previous

Government’s biggest failures. The lack of recognition of this problem is therefore a major gap in the current

Government’s programme.

Table 2: Measures used in the Child Poverty Strategy

Indicator Latest figure Comparison over time

Relative low income (before housing costs, BHC) 20% in 2009/10 26% in 1999/2000

Absolute low income (BHC) 19% in 2009/10 23% in 1999/2000

Low income and material deprivation (BHC) 16% in 2009/10 17% in 2004/05

Persistent poverty (BHC) 12% in 2005 to 2008 17% in 1997 to 2000

Severe child poverty (BHC) 6% in 2009/10 7% in 2004/05

Children in workless households 16% in 2010 16% in 2000

Children in in-work poverty 21% in 2007/08 to 2009/10 20% in 1997/98 to

1999/2000

18- to 24-year-olds participating in part-time or 44% in England 2010 44% in 2006

full-time education or training

18- to 24-year-olds not in full-time education or 18% in England 2010 14% in England in 2000

training who are not in employment

Low birth weight – gap between social classes 7% for social classes 5–8 8% and 6% in 1999

and 6% for 1–4 in 2009

Early years child development N/A N/A

Gap in attainment between free school meals 22% FSM gap in 2009/10 25% gap in 2005/06

(FSM) and non-FSM children at age 11

… At age 16 28% FSM gap 29% gap in 2002/03

… At age 19 24% FSM gap 26% in 2004/05

Progression to higher education aged 19 FSM gap 18% in 2008/09 20% in 2005/06

Teenage pregnancy 38.3 conceptions to women 44.8 in 1999

aged under 18 per 1,000

women aged 15–17 in 2009

Young offending 14,700 first offenders aged 16,900 in 2000

10–17 in 2009

BHC child poverty in:

… couples who are married/in a civil partnership 16% N/A

… cohabiting couples 22% N/A

… lone parents 28% N/A

www.jrf.org.uk

Published by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, The Homestead,

40 Water End, York YO30 6WP. This project is part of the JRF’s research

and development programme. These findings, however, are those of the

authors and not necessarily those of the Foundation. ISSN 0958-3084

Read more Findings at www.jrf.org.uk

Science and History

The two streams of technical and of scientific tradition have, for most of history, run on apart from each other.

The conditions of early civilization led to a division of the classes which put the scientists among the clerks on the side of the rulers, while the manual craftsmen were only a grade above the peasants and were often themselves slaves.

That division has persisted to this day, and its final break-down is only beginning.

Meanwhile, for long periods of time it condemned science to sterility and technique to repetitive stagnation, while radical advances came only rarely……..

The third period of advance, from the point of view of science perhaps the most important of all, was that of the Renaissance, which marked the beginning of the supersession of feudal economy by a new bourgeois economy; while the fourth,the Industrial Revolution, coincided with the definite  establishment of manufacturing capitalism as the dominant world economy.

Capitalism is distinguished from earlier money economics by the use of the profits of enterprises as capital for further investment, leading to a rapidly expanding industrial development involving machinery and the use of power from coal.

This was the first stage of a transformation of importance equivalent to that of agriculture, for it concentrated the economy on or near the coalfields, and drew the sustenance needed for the vast populations there from all over the world.

The last period of technical scientific advance is that which has now been in swing for some fifty years.(1965)

It is marked in the social field by a struggle of unprecedented violence and range between the capitalists and their supporters on one side and the new socialist forces based on the working classes on the other.

Through all this, technical and scientific progress continues ever more rapidly in the service of both war and peace.

It is characterized by the penetration of science into all forms of production, and by an ever-increasing degree of organization and intercommunication.

It is now evident that enough is known, both of natural science and of techniques making use of it, to solve all major problems of world economy.

We should now be able to provide a tolerable standard of life for the peoples of the whole world, and by further research it could be improved indefinitely.

We are certainly not doing so now, and whether we ever do it is dependent on the solution of the social and economic problem, while present inner contradictions and open conflicts waste resources and threaten the extension of war and famine.

J.D. Bernal

Science in History.

The war on democracy

Language of Closet Racism:

An Illustration
by gorski@earthlink.net">Paul Gorski

Any person who has grown up in the American public school system has been educated to hold racial prejudices.

To illustrate this point, ask any child to tell you about the first date in history he or she remembers learning: "In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue."

What happened in 1492? "Christopher Columbus discovered America."Did he?

The history books I prefer to read have informed me that people were actually already here.

Remember, the people who would eventually be driven from their sacred lands, forced to surrender their native tongue and customs, and "American-ize"?

The result of children learning such "facts" is a depreciation of an entire people--in this case, Native Americans.

So the American education system (with strong reinforcement from the media) has bred a nation of what I will call "closet racists."

 Closet racists are unaware of their prejudices.

They have learned from text books presented to them by people who are supposedly knowledgeable enough to choose the best possible materials.

They are trained, or more precisely, coerced into believing in "the system."

If a child were to question a teacher's assertion that "Columbus discovered America," it is more likely that the child would be chastised for showing disrespect than the possibility of the teacher initiating a discussion on the discrepancy.

 A closet racist is defined, then, as simply a person with racial prejudices who is unaware of those prejudices as such, usually because he or she has never been afforded the opportunity to discuss racial prejudices as such.

The question arising from this assertion is clear: Where is the evidence of this nation of so-called "closet racists?"

What links them? What are their characteristics?

The answer, emerging from years of experience facilitating conversations on race issues, interviewing specific cases, and participating in a variety of cultural diversity workshops, is equally clear: language.

Closet racists share a distinct and surprisingly easily detectable language when observed in a discussion about race or racism.

The intention of this paper is to explore this language through the case study of Jen, a third year college student who participated in Multicultural Education, a class designed to help students find, face, and battle their own prejudices.

In order to analyze Jen's closet racist language, interviews were conducted and reaction papers written at the end of each class were collected and analyzed.

Based loosely on research conducted for a Master's Thesis completed four months ago, though more focused, this paper will refer to data, analysis, and conclusions from that thesis.

The lack of citations from other scholarly sources reflects the lack of material available concerning the language of race issues and unaware racists.

Who Are Closet Racists?

Though everyone who has experienced the American education system is in some degree a closet racist, certain people, and indeed, certain groups, tend to portray the characteristics more than others.

At the most basic level, people who have experienced consistent racial discrimination tend to be less assignable the label of closet racist.

Such people have, through their personal experiences with discrimination, been afforded opportunities to discuss race issues. As Kim, an African-American student in a Multicultural Education class during Spring semester, 1995 explained,

I live these issues every day.

I can't escape them anywhere: stores, classes, the gym.

Three, four, five things happen everyday to remind me that, no matter what white people believe, there is still a ton of prejudice out there. It reminds me to think about the things I do and say, and the prejudices I have.

In short, closet racism is a continuum.

Those with the least exposure to racial issues fall toward the high end.

Experience suggests that those falling on this end are usually "white," or "European-Americans," while "African-Americans" fall toward the low end.

So-called "middle-man minorities" tend to be spread between the extremes.

Jen, a white woman, was chosen for the case study because her sheltered home-life and general unaware-ness of race issues have served as catalysts in her formation as a high-end closet racist.

An admittedly extreme case, and for that reason purposively chosen, Jen illustrates clearly the language patterns of a closet racist.

The Three Strands of the Language of Closet Racism

Three language indicators of closet racism are evident across the continuum.

These are what I refer to as "strands" because, when woven together, they form the language web of closet racists.

Again, strength of language and degree of racist attitudes change dramatically across the continuum, and as a result, these strands, or indicators are more readily observable in certain individuals and groups than in others.

They include fear, unaware-ness, and dis-ownership.

Consider the following excerpt taken from Jen's reaction paper from the first class meeting of Multicultural Education:

The idea of political correctness with the black race astounds me. I found it extremely interesting that some blacks in our class prefer to be called African American. In all of my classes...I have felt like I was stepping on egg shells as to not offend the blacks in my class. I am honestly glad it is not that big of an issue to my fellow classmates--it promotes a more comfortable, genuine environment for me to be totally honest and carefree.

Jen reflected each strand of the language of closet racism within this short passage. These strands can be un-woven as follows:

1. fear: "I have felt like I was stepping on egg shells as to not offend blacks in my classes..."
2. unaware-ness: "I found it extremely interesting that some blacks in our class prefer to be called African American."
3. dis-ownership: "I am honestly glad it is not that big of an issue to my fellow classmates."

Some would argue that Jen's statements as pulled apart above are arbitrary, or taken out of context. But as we consider a year's worth of interviews and written reactions, and as we discuss each strand separately, a language pattern--the language of a closet racist--undeniably emerges.

Fear

We consider fear first, because it is, on the surface, the most surprising strand to find in the language. If closet racists do not consider themselves racists, then why would they show fear in discussing race issues?

 In the most simple terms, closet racists do not want other people to consider them racist, either.

This is why white people developed "political correctness." The idea was to develop a system in which everyone knew what to say in order to allow everyone to avoid, as Jen mentioned, "walking on egg shells."

Fear also becomes the catalyst for many closet racists' decisions on what information to offer (and likewise, what not to offer) during a discussion of race issues. As Jen explained in her second reaction paper:

I was apprehensive to tell my group that my prejudice experience was within my family. I thought they would think that because my grandfather and father were racist, that I am as well--I thought they would dislike me.

She tended to elevate this apprehensive-ness during interviews, sometimes to the point of censoring herself. In one particular case, as she discussed the racial make-up of her hometown, her fear emerged quite blatantly:

...and where I'm from there were two different types of black...there were...I don't want to say this. Is it all right if I say this?...

Her fear was clear, especially as she continued, deciding, in fact, to "say this":

Blacks and niggers, that's how it was defined where I'm from. There were no niggers at my school, they were all black, no niggers. The niggers were at [James Monroe], and that's just how it was, and we knew that.

Jen feared being labeled a racist. Again, it is important to note that she did not consider herself a racist, which leads us to the second strand or indicator: unaware-ness.

Unaware-ness

Closet racists are unaware on several levels, illustrations for which can be found in language patterns. On the first level, as emphasized above, they are unaware of racial issues as racial issues.

(How many white people insisted that race was never an "issue" in the O.J. Simpson trial?) Illustrating this point, Jen, in her first interview suggested that at her high school, "there was not any sort of black/white issues or anything like that."

She made this statement minutes before offering her story about the "two different types of black." In between the two statements she related stories of "some Ku Klux Klan there," "crosses burning, and stuff like that."

But nonetheless, just as she did not label herself as a racist, she was unaware that the very issues she discussed were very racial in nature, and as such she did not label those issues in terms of race, either.

On another level, Jen failed to see the racial prejudice as such in the language of others.

For example, she defended her grandmother: "...my grandmother on my Mom's side is not prejudice..." But as she continued, Jen, in her unawareness, all but labeled her grandmother a racist:

...but she refers to black people as 'colored.' Like when we have a Christmas party every year and Mark, a guy who lives around the corner from me, came to the party...and was the only black person there and she was like...'Who was that colored boy there?' She doesn't refer to him as 'Mark,' always 'that colored boy.'

On a third level, while Jen could sometimes point out racial prejudice in other places, she was quick to distance herself from that prejudice, as if she was somehow shielded from its permeation. In this sense, Jen was unaware of racism as it exists at the institutional level.

Like many closet racists, Jen believed that racism could be found "here, there, and there," but that, in the correct circumstances, racism could be completely avoided.

Again, this naivete could be recognized in her language, as in the following passage in which she compared her high school to the "other public high school" in her hometown:

James Monroe was a predominantly black school, and the only white people that did go to school there were wealthy, and so there was like the wealthy and then there was African- Americans. There was a huge line between them, but there wasn't anything like that where I was.

This passage leads directly into the third strand of the language of closet racism.

Dis-ownership

Closet racists tend to avoid owning their views on race.

They often point to other groups, using terms such as "they," or "those people," instead of refering to themselves. In the previous passage, Jen clearly utilized the language of dis-ownership, thus assessing blame to others. "There was a huge line between them.." "I thought they would dislike me."

Closet racists, in avoiding using "I" and "me" statements in discussions of race issues avoid accepting the responsibility for their perspectives, and in many cases, prejudices.

Recent articles in the Cavalier Daily about so-called self-segragation at the University of Virginia have been drowned in this language. White columnists posed questions such as "Why do the African-American students sit together at lunch, congregate at the 'black bus stop,'" etc? "Why do they have organizations like the Black Student Alliance?"

 In shifting the responsibility to "the African-American students," the columnists dodged the intimidating possibility of accepting equal responsibility for the separation.

The Result of Closet Racism

As is most clearly illustrated by the dis-ownership strand of the language of closet racism, closet racists will observe other groups segragating themselves, and suddenly race becomes an issue.

But, for example, white students fail to notice that white students do not approach tables filled with African-American students during lunch. And white students clearly have congregation spots (i.e. Rugby Road).

The attractiveness--even if it exists at a subconscious level--of closet racism to those who retain it is that if one never labels himself or herself a racist, then (s)he is free from the obligation of doing something about it.

For Jen and many others, closet racism becomes routine, easy, and comfortable. With blinders on their eyes, and the shield of manipulated language in their repertoire, closet racists can live a full life never confronting their own prejudices.

In fact, if the assertion holds up that white people tend to be toward the high end of the closet racist continuum, then the result of closet racism is clear.

The phenomenon of closet racism is yet another catalyst in the cycle of discrimination experienced by racial minorities in America since the conception of this nation.

Only individuals have the power to change themselves. In the socio-political structure in this country, it stands to reason that those in power will at all costs attempt to retain that power. In "coming out of the closet," labeling their prejudices as such, owning those prejudices, thus placing on their shoulders the responsibility to address those prejudices, those in power fear the loss of their comfortable seat atop the nations's socio-political hierarchy.

The status quo is maintained.

So how, then, is the study of the language of closet racism useful?

Sometimes people I've labeled as closet racists want to change themselves. Jen was one such person.

The study of the language she used when discussing race (and other multicultural) issues, and how this language changed, helped me understand the stages she experienced on her trek toward race awareness and appreciation.

Valuable further study concerning the language of closet racism would include the metamorphosis of the language as an individual becomes more aware, thus working toward the lower end of the closet racism continuum.

Also, further study is necessary in addressing the meshing of the strands, and the meanings that derive from such meshing.

Stephen Lawrence's mother says No 10 must do more on race

• Cameron 'not doing enough to tackle racial prejudice'
• Murdered boy's brother stopped and searched 20 times
• Trust set up to help deprived youth has money problems

38 Degrees-People Power Change
 
Dear Friend

Have you seen the news today? Stephen Hester, chief of the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), has been awarded a bonus worth £1 million. [1]

We’ve already had to bail RBS out to the tune of billions of pounds.

Since then, it's failed to meet small business lending targets set by the government. [2]

Now, we’re expected to cough up £1 million to reward the chief executive for good work.

Politicians have failed to stop RBS awarding this bonus to Stephen Hester.

Today, lots of them are speaking out, asking him to refuse to accept the money. [3] If we all add our names to a huge petition telling Stephen Hester to refuse his bonus, we can shame him into doing the right thing.

Click here to sign the petition:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/RBS-chief-bonus

The gap between the have and have-nots in our society is getting bigger all the time.

Many wealthy bankers, politicians and businessmen seem to live in a different world from the rest of us. In their world, it's the done thing to make as much money as possible for yourself while watching others struggle to get by.

Government ministers have failed to stop this massive payout - so let’s tell Stephen Hester that tens of thousands of us are disgusted at his bonus and demand that he do the right thing:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/RBS-chief-bonus

Today, politicians from all sides have spoken out against the £1 million bonus paid to the RBS chief.

A Foreign Office minister, Jeremy Browne MP, said that Mr Hestor earned more in three days than a soldier fighting in Afghanistan earns in a year. [4]

When half a million of us spoke out together this time last year, we stopped the sell-off of England’s woodlands. [5] People power worked!

Now, together, we can demand that Stephen Hester does the right thing and refuses his million pound bonus. We’ll deliver all the signatures to him at the RBS offices.

He might decide that the money means more to him than his sense of what’s right and wrong.

Or he might bow to our pressure and refuse to accept the payout.

One way or the other, we can send this bank boss a clear message - tens of thousands of us believe that it is wrong for him to take this money.

Add your voice to the message to RBS boss Stephen Hester:
https://secure.38degrees.org.uk/RBS-chief-bonus

Thanks for being involved,

Marie, Becky, Hannah, David, Johnny, Cian and the 38 Degrees team

Notes:
[1] http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/298320/Bailed-out-bank-chief-Stephen-Hester-receives-1million-bonus/
[2] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/8889611/Project-Merlin-fails-small-business-lending-test.html
[3] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/9043366/Boris-Johnson-brands-RBS-chiefs-bonus-absolutely-bewildering.html
[4] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2092652/RBS-boss-turn-1m-bonus-says-leading-Lib-Dem-outrage-reward-failure-builds.html
[5] http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/we-got-it-wrong-on-forests-says-spelman-2217731.html/

 

REPUBLIC : Campaigning for a democratic alternative to the monarchy

Dear Friend

As part of our continuing jubilee campaign we have issued a warning to teachers that schools that choose to 'celebrate' the jubilee will be in breach of their legal obligations. 

Last year we had numerous parents and pupils getting in touch concerned with how their school was marking the royal wedding. 

This year we want to ensure you are able to insist that your school treats the issue of the monarchy in an intelligent and balanced way.

Are you a parent or pupil with concerns about your school? 

 Would you be happy to talk to the media about this issue?

To raise the profile of this issue, we're looking for anyone who is concerned about their school's jubilee plans who is interested in talking to the media about their concerns. 

If that's you, please send me an email at graham@republic.org.uk

Republic Wales and Republic Scotland meetings

Republic Wales and Republic Scotland are holding meetings over the next ten days. 

Republic Wales has a coordinating committee meeting in Cardiff on February 1.  All members are welcome to attend - full details are on our website at www.republic.org.uk/events.

Republic Scotland has an organising meeting on February 4, where members will be completing the setting up of their coordinating committee and making plans for the jubilee. 

Both devolved groups are planning protests in Edinburgh and Cardiff and are also looking at how they can support the London protests on the weekend of June 3.

Leafleting in Manchester

Supporters in Manchester will be joined by members from around the country on Saturday February 18 when we'll be handing out hundreds of leaflets and collecting petition signatures in the city centre. 

To find out more email Ray at Ray_Republic@smartplans.co.uk

Events, meetings and debates

Our events page has a number of debates, meetings and other events listed, including events being hosted by the Bishopsgate Institute in London. 

You can find out details of all upcoming events at www.republic.org.uk/events.

This is a crucial period for us and now more than ever we rely on your support. 

Please visit www.jubileeprotest.org.uk to see what you can do to support our jubilee campaign.

Thank you for your support.

All the best

Graham Smith
Chief Executive Officer

Have you pledged your support for our Jubilee Protests? 

 Visit www.jubileeprotest.org.uk today.
 

Public meeting
On the first anniversary of the fall of the Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak....

WHERE NOW FOR EGYPT AND THE MIDDLE EAST?

Speakers include:

Dr Kamal El-Helbawy, Chair of the Centre for the Study of Terrorism
George Galloway, Founder of Viva Palestina
Kate Hudson, General Secretary of CND
Andrew Murray, Founder and former Chair of the Stop the War Coalition

The meeting will be chaired by Seumas Milne, Guardian columnist

Sunday 12th February, 3.30pm, Khalili Lecture Theatre
School of Oriental and African Studies, Russell Square, London, WC1

Organised by The Respect Foundation

Big Society!

Offaly Good: A guide to Burns Night

Our quick guide to hosting a traditional Burns Supper

Robert Burns (or Rabbie Burns) is arguably the most famous man in Scottish cultural history.

 He was born in the small village of Alloway near Ayr on the 25th January 1759.

Burns Night has been marked by Scots for 200 years and was begun by friends of the poet as a tribute following his death in 1796.

Burns Suppers can be either grand formal affairs or small gatherings.

 Alex Salmond will today briefly put debates about the Scottish independence vote to one side to celebrate Scotland’s most famous cultural export Robert Burns.

The First Minister will attend a performance of 'Tam O’ Shanter' by schoolchildren at the Scottish Storytelling Centre in Edinburgh.

Events will take place across Scotland, including the unveiling of a new £25,000 statue of Burns in Alloway, Ayrshire, where he was born 253 years ago.

Suppers to mark the birthday of the Scottish Bard will be held in homes across Scotland.

But what is the correct way to host a Burns Night?

see "Cookery"

Any  study of female menopause must involve their partner ?

Could a relationship trigger a change 

A group of women living together syncronise their menstrual cycle

And what of the male menopause ?
 
Is a male menopause between 40-50 affecting their female partner?

Where are the studies of male menopause ?

Look who owns Britain:

 

A third of the country STILL belongs to the aristocracy

By Tamara Cohen
Last updated at 8:58 AM on 10th November 2010

More than a third of Britain’s land is still in the hands of a tiny group of aristocrats, according to the most extensive ownership survey in nearly 140 years.

In a shock to those who believed the landed gentry were a dying breed, blue-blooded owners still control vast swathes of the country within their inherited estates.

A group of 36,000 individuals – only 0.6 per cent of the population – own 50 per cent of rural land.
 

Their assets account for 20million out of Britain’s 60million acres of land, and the researchers estimate that the vast majority is actually owned by a wealthy core of just 1,200 aristocrats and their relatives.
 
Well off: The Duke of Westminster has a property portfolio totalling around £6billion

The top ten individual biggest owners control a staggering total of more than a million acres between them.

These figures have been uncovered by the ‘Who Owns Britain?’ report by Country Life Magazine,

thought to be the most extensive survey of its type undertaken since 1872.

The top private landowner, not just in Britain but Europe, is the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensbury, whose four sumptuous estates cover 240,000 acres in England and Scotland.

But while his land is the most vast, it is not the most valuable, as the net worth depends on how much is farmland, as well as the value of the property and sporting and heritage activities on it.

The most valuable land belongs to Number 4 on the list, the Duke of Westminster, whose Grosvenor Estate, worth a whopping ¬£6billion, takes in the wealthiest areas of London, including ¬Belgravia and Mayfair.

Second on the list of the most land owned is Scottish magnate the Duke of Atholl.

His 145,700 acres have pushed Prince Charles, who as Duke of Cornwall has 133,000 acres, into third place on the list of individual owners.

Yet all are dwarfed by the incredible reach of corporate land-ownership, which barely existed 100 years ago.

As the biggest 19th-century landowners such as the Church have been sidelined by economic and social changes, their land has been snapped up by the state, charities and the private sector.

More than 2.5million acres – 4 per cent of the country – is in the hands of the Government-run Forestry Commission, which the Coalition plans to privatise.

Second on the list is the fast-expanding National Trust, with 630,000 acres.

PS Three other big landowners you might not expect ...

PENSION FUNDS: 550,000 acres
Many of the UK's 2,800-plus funds have invested in land for centuries and snapped up struggling farms in the 1980s

THE RSPB: 321, 237 acres
The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds owns 200 reserves and its landholding has rocketed in the past ten years.

DEFENCE ESTATES: 592,000 acres

Over two-thirds of land owned by the MoD's property arm is used for training.

It also owns 50,000 service personnel homes, and 800 listed buildings

Catching up swiftly are foreign investors and even supermarkets.

Waitrose owns a 4,000-acre estate in Hampshire, which it runs as a farm, while Tesco’s 2,545 stores alone take up 770 acres.

Most of the report’s information has been uncovered only in the past five years after a registration campaign targeting huge landowners who had previously avoided disclosing their assets.

The report’s author, Kevin Cahill, who has been researching land ownership for ten years, told the Daily Mail:

‘A small minority still own a huge amount of Britain’s land and what surprises many people is that over the last 100 years, not a lot has changed.

‘For the rich the pursuit of land is as important as it’s ever been.

They receive subsidies and most of their assets are held in trust, avoiding inheritance tax.

‘The biggest change in land ownership in the past 100 years is that people who live in cities now finance the

countryside whereas it used to be the other way around.’

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1328270/A-Britain-STILL-belongs-aristocracy.html#ixzz1kJnOR8Ka

The Dought and the Case for Conserving Water

 

Open letter to my MP.
 
 I remind you that my Anglian water bill exceeds my Electric bill.
 
No wonder the Chinese want invest in the profit.
 
( I always thought water should be free for good reasons )
 
However I now get a £36 a year rebate for not putting surface water into the main drain
 
This is an insult!
 
Government should be encouraging households,like us, to increase the use of water,collected from roofs, by making it worthwhile paying for systems to collect the water.
 
Of course we use the collected water and reduce the amount we take through the meter.

Ofwat where and when ?

How to watch Press TV in UK

Fri Jan 20, 2012 3:32PM GMT

Press TV viewers in the UK can continue to watch the news channel via the following satellites or by visiting the following websites despite the British Office of Communications (Ofcom) removing the channel from the Sky platform.

 

 

http://www.presstv.ir/detail/222136.html

You can watch Press TV broadcast from anywhere in the world by visiting the following websites:

· Press TV watch live services (Worldwide)

· Zattoo (Internet platform and IPTV. Supports PC, MAC, Linux and all tablet PCs and smartphones) (UK)


· OHTV Box (Internet Set-top box) (Worldwide)


· Roku Box (Internet Set-top box) (Worldwide) (Available in UK from January 2012)

·
Livestation (Internet platform. Supports PC MAC, Linux and all tablet PCs and smartphones)



You could also view our broadcast through the following satellites:
Hot Bird 8 (13E)
12437
27500
3/4
H

Eurobird 1 (28.5E)
11222
27500
2/3
H

SES ASTRA (19/2E)
12460.50
27500
3/4
H


TE/HGH

What 'ordinary' people can do

Doomsday Clock moves a minute closer to midnight

Wednesday, 11 January 2012

Weapons of Mass Destruction

World stockpile of chemical weapons

 By type
Biological, Chemical, Nuclear, Radiological

By country
Albania
Algeria
Argentina
Australia
Brazil
Bulgaria
Burma
Canada
China
France
Germany
India
Iran
Iraq
Israel
Japan Libya
Mexico
Netherlands
North Korea
Pakistan
Poland
Romania
Russia
Saudi Arabia
South Africa
Sweden
Syria
Taiwan (ROC)
Ukraine
United Kingdom
United States
 
Proliferation
Biological, Chemical, Nuclear, Missiles
Treaties
List of treaties 

The total world declared stockpile of chemical weapons was about 30,308 tons in early 2010.

A total of 71,315 tonnes of agents, 8.67 million munitions and containers, and 70 production facilities were declared to OPCW before destruction activities began.

In addition, several countries that are not members are suspected of having chemical weapons, especially Syria and North Korea, while some member states (including Sudan and the People's Republic of China) have been accused by others of failing to disclose their stockpiles.

Progress of destruction

By October 28, 2010, a total of 43,131 tonnes or 60.58% of declared chemical weapons (of Category 1, which is the main category) had been destroyed as well as all Category 3 declared chemicals. More than 45% (3.95 million) chemical munitions and containers have been destroyed.

(Treaty confirmed destruction totals often lag behind state-declared totals.)

Only about 50% of countries had passed the required legislation to outlaw participation in chemical weapons production.

Three state parties, Albania (included 16,678 kilograms of mustard agent, lewisite, adamsite, and chloroacetophenone), an unspecified state party (widely believed to be South Korea) and India already have completed the destruction of their complete stockpiles.

Russia and the United States, which declared the largest amounts of chemical weapons are in the progress of destruction and had processed 49% and 81% of their respective stockpiles.

The deadline set for both countries of April 2012, however, will not be reached.

Libya has started destruction and has destroyed 4% of its stockpile (as well as 39% of its Category 2 chemical weapons).

Iraq has yet to start destruction.

Japan and China have started in October 2010 the destruction of chemical weapons abandoned by Japan in China by means of mobile destruction units

Inspectors uncover Gaddafi's secret stash of chemical weapons

Discovery raises questions over former Libyan leader's 'deal in desert' with Tony Blair

Andy McSmith  Saturday 21 January 2012 
Libya
 
Muammar Al-Gaddafi
 
The former Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi had an undeclared stockpile of chemical weapons, inspectors announced yesterday, calling into question the judgement of Tony Blair, who accepted the former dictator's promise to destroy them.

Inspectors from the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) have been in Libya this week, and discovered that in addition to the tonnes of mustard gas components that Gaddafi's regime admitted to holding, it also had a secret stockpile of chemical shells which should have been declared.

Colonel Gaddafi promised to destroy all such weapons when Mr Blair visited the country in 2004 and they reached the now infamous "deal in the desert".

 In November last year, the former Prime Minister defended his approach to the regime.

"He was developing a nuclear and chemical programme," he said.

"He gave it all up."

Gaddafi's promise to abide by international law on nuclear and chemical weapons ended Libya's status as a pariah nation, and gave Mr Blair a much-needed diplomatic success after months of searching had failed to turn up any such weaponry in Iraq.

Saddam Hussein's failure to comply with a UN resolution ordering him to open his country to weapons inspectors was the official reason for the 2003 invasion.

The Libyan dictator began the process of destroying his arsenal of chemical weapons after 2004, but it was suspended in February last year at the start of the civil war that ended with the overthrow and death of Gaddafi.

During that conflict, rebels feared that Gaddafi's force might attack them with the stockpiled weapons.

At that stage, the regime held more than 11 tonnes of components for mustard gas that it had declared to international inspectors.

After Gaddafi's fall, the new government reported to the OPCW in November that they had found what they believed to be a stockpile of illegal weaponry.

A team of inspectors arrived in Tripoli on Tuesday.

An OPCW spokesman said: "The two-fold purpose of this inspection was to verify the new declaration in terms of types and quantities of chemical weapons, and to assist Libyan authorities in determining whether another set of discovered materials is declarable under the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention.

"The mission was carried out with the logistical support of the Federal Republic of Germany and the UN Department of Safety and Security, and with the full co-operation of Libyan authorities."

Libya was a signatory to an international treaty under which all stockpiles of chemical weapons were to have been destroyed by 29 April 2012.

 According to the OPCW, the Gaddafi regime had only destroyed about 54 per cent of its declared sulphur mustard and about 40 per cent of the precursor chemical components.

All are now stored at a depot in south-east Libya along with other munitions, mainly artillery shells, which were not declared but which proved on inspection to be for use in chemical warfare.

The new government has been given until 29 April to submit a detailed plan for the destruction of the remaining weapons.

Libya is not the only state expected to miss the deadline.

The US has acknowledged that it may take until 2021 to finish destroying the final 10 per cent of its chemical weapons.

 Russia is even further behind in its efforts, having destroyed only about 48 per cent of its cache.

Falkland Islands sovereignty dispute

Wikipedia

Timeline of de facto control February 1764 – April 1767  France
January 1765 – July 1770  Great Britain
April 1767 – February 1811  Spain
September 1771 – May 1776  Great Britain
February 1811 – August 1829 None
August 1829 – December 1831  United Provinces
December 1831 – January 1832  United States
January 1832 – December 1832 None
December 1832 – January 1833  Argentine Confederation
January 1833 – August 1833  United Kingdom
August 1833 – January 1834 None
January 1834 – April 1982  United Kingdom
April 1982 – June 1982  Argentina
June 1982 – present  United Kingdom

Sovereignty over the Falkland Islands (Islas Malvinas in Spanish)[1] is disputed between Argentina and the United Kingdom.

The British claim to de jure sovereignty dates from 1690, and the United Kingdom has exercised de facto sovereignty over the archipelago almost constantly since 1833.

Argentina has long disputed this claim, having been in control of the islands for a brief period prior to 1833.

The dispute escalated in 1982, when Argentina invaded the islands, precipitating the Falklands War.

Contemporary Falkland Islanders consider themselves to be British.

They gained full British citizenship with the British Nationality (Falkland Islands) Act 1983, after the Falklands War.

Argentina argues that the islanders do not have the right to self-determination, arguing that they are not aboriginal and were brought to replace the Argentine population that Argentina claims was expelled after the re-establishment of British rule in 1833.[2]

The United Nations have called on both countries to begin dialogue over the sovereignty claim

 

Street of Shame

Private Eye

SECOND-CLASS MAIL…  
 
SELECTIVE MEMORY: Mail editor Paul Dacre, whose
triumphalism ignored whole chunks of his paper’s
earlier coverage of the death of Stephen
Lawrence and the Macpherson report
 
 
THE Daily Mail triumphantly devoted no fewer than 21 pages to its heroic role in the conviction of David Norris and Gary Dobson for the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence, culminating in a rare bylined op-ed piece by editor Paul Dacre. But did the paper tell the whole story?

“Quite simply, I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that if it hadn’t been for the Mail’s headline in 1997 – ‘Murderers: The Mail accuses these men of killing’ – and our years of campaigning, none of this would have happened,” the editor boasted. Two other pages highlighted the paper’s coverage since 1997.

But the Mail found no room for any of the articles it had printed on the topic between Stephen’s murder in April 1993 and that front page four years later.

This meant that readers were deprived of a reprint of the Mail’s scoop of 10 May 1993, “HOW RACE MILITANTS HIJACKED A TRAGEDY”, which reported on how Stephen’s death had been “swept into a whirlwind of high-profile publicity organised largely by anti-racist groups on the short path towards the making of a cause”.

It also approvingly quoted anonymous sources from the very police investigation that the paper now calls an “utter disgrace” criticising the Lawrences: “ ‘At the beginning we were very close to the family and had a good rapport.

But later we had to go through several representatives before we could speak to them.

We often only knew about the family’s concerns after they appeared on the television.

We believe that the family are being used as pawns in a far wider game’.”

‘Hardline Left-Wingers’

Nor did the paper reprint its accompanying editorial, which mused: “Is there not something contemptible about professional protestors who capitalise on grief to fuel confrontation?

Such street agitators of the right and left need each other.

Most of us in Britain – whatever our colour – need them like the plague.”

Or the further story two days later which boasted that “the Daily Mail revealed how within hours of the teenager’s death – which police believe was racially motivated – hardline left-wingers moved in to create a cause.”

That, of course, is completely different from Paul Dacre moving in to create a cause, having discovered that Neville Lawrence was the nice man who had done some decorating at his London home (see Eye 971, March 1999).

And, as he now boasts, single-handedly inspiring his old pal Jack Straw, as home secretary, to set up the Macpherson inquiry, which “declared that the Lawrence murder probe was hampered by racism across virtually all ranks”.

And how did Dacre’s paper greet that news at the time?

With editorials warning that “if all 70 of [Macpherson’s] far-reaching recommendations were to be implemented in full they would spark a politically correct purge across the country and irrevocably change the British way of life”, that “the era of the thought police is upon us” and that “there is the growing danger that the event will degenerate into an hysterical witch-hunt… a kind of politically correct McCarthyism”. 
 

Last year costliest on record for natural disasters

16 January 2012

New Scientist

Defend your civil liberties

Human rights organisations such as Statewatch and Liberty have consistently warned that the European Union is accumulating a vast range of powers that pose a threat to civil liberties across the continent of Europe.

---

 

The Lisbon Treaty will continue this process by expanding the role of EU police force, Europol, whose agents have been granted immunity from prosecution.

The EU Arrest Warrant also enables the authorities to have individuals extradited from one member state to another with varying judicial standards without the need to provide evidence against the accused.

EU directives give state agencies the right to monitor all electronic traffic including data relating to e-mails and websites we visit, without a court order.

Article 108 of the EU treaty makes it an offence for an elected government, MP or MEP to in any way try to influence the deliberations of the European Central Bank, which manages the euro.

Article 52 of the EU's Charter of Fundamental Rights attached to the Lisbon Treaty gives Brussels the right to suspend any human right if deemed in the 'general interest' of the EU.

These and other measures, taken together with the completely undemocratic structure of the EU, means that a system of Brussels-based government is taking shape which represents a huge threat to the basic freedoms of ordinary Europeans.

"The emerging EU state is indeed different to the national state, not just because it exercises cross-border powers, but rather because even traditional, often ineffective, liberal democratic means of control, scrutiny and accountability of state agencies and practices are not in place, nor is there any political will to introduce them"
Tony Bunyan, director of human rights group Statewatch

Vote NO2EU–Yes to Democracy to oppose the authoritarian system that EU political elites have been quietly working towards.