The Bizarre Tambourine

The Fatal Five

2012-01-03T07:36:00.000-08:00

Smallpox Officially declared eradicated in 1979 after a global vaccination programme led by the World Health Organisation (WHO). The last known natural case was in Somalia in 1977. Since then, the only known cases were caused by a laboratory accident in 1978 in Birmingham, England, which killed one person and caused a limited outbreak.

Polio Cases have fallen by more than 99% since 1988, from an estimated 350,000 to 1,349 in 2010. In 2011, only parts of four countries in the world (Afghanistan, India, Nigeria and Pakistan) remain endemic for the disease – the smallest geographic area in history.

Tuberculosis While mortality rates have fallen by just over a third since 1990, there were 8.8m cases and 1.45 million deaths in 2010. The Stop TB Partnership – a WHO-backed global effort – aims to halve cases and deaths by 2015 and to eliminate the disease by 2050.

Malaria There were 216m cases and an estimated 655,000 deaths in 2010. Mortality rates have fallen by more than 25% globally since 2000. Most deaths occur among children in Africa, where every minute a child dies of malaria, and the disease accounts for approximately 22% of all childhood deaths. The Roll Back Malaria partnership – the global framework coordinating action against the disease – hopes to eradicate it one day, but aims to reduce the incidence of malaria to fewer than 85-125m cases a year by 2015.

HIV/Aids HIV has claimed more than 25 million lives over the past 30 years, but new HIV infections worldwide declined by 17% between 2001 and 2009. There were approximately 34 million people living with HIV in 2010. In November last year, a joint report by the WHO, Unicef and UNAIDS found that increased access to HIV services resulted in a 15% reduction of new infections over the last decade and a 22% drop in Aids-related deaths in the last five years.

Sources: WHO, Stop TB Partnership, Roll Back Malaria Partnership, UNAIDS

North Kurdistan

2011-12-29T08:19:00.000-08:00

Since the beginning of the Arab uprising Turkey has been held up as a blueprint for the emerging Middle Eastern democracies to copy. But many observers question whether its treatment of its Kurdish minority gives it the right to be treated as a role model.

This year more than 4,000 people have been arrested under arbitrary terrorism charges, including dozens of journalists arrested last week, military operations against Kurdish separatists have intensified, with at least 27 killed in December alone, and guerrillas have stepped up violent attacks on security forces and civilians.

Mass trials of Kurds, including local deputies, mayors, academics and human rights activists, have inched forwards. In the biggest case, more than 150 politicians and activists are being tried in a specially built courtroom in Diyarbakir. More than 100 of the defendants have been in pre-trial detention, some of them for many months.

Abdullah Demirbas, the mayor of a district in the mainly Kurdish city of Diyarbakir in eastern Turkey, is among the defendants on trial for "membership in the KCK", an illegal pan-Kurdish umbrella organisation that includes the armed Kurdistan Workers' party (PKK).

If convicted, he faces 35 years in jail on these charges alone.

"They have not even found a pocket knife in my house," Demirbas said. Human rights groups have repeatedly expressed their concern about the arbitrary use of terrorism laws in Turkey.

"The Turkish laws make no distinction between political activity and terrorism. It is never examined in what kind of activities people are actually involved and whether these qualify them for prosecution. Very many of these cases are based on guilt by association," said Emma Sinclair-Webb, the Turkey researcher for Human Rights Watch.

"People have a right to association. You may not like what people are associating with, but it is illegitimate to just jail, suppress and silence critics."

Demirbas fears that the massive repression of politicians and human rights activists will decrease confidence in politics and lead to more violence: "A state that wants to end violence should widen the political sphere as much as possible, so that people who used to feel compelled to use armed force will turn to dialogue instead.

"But [Turkey] does exactly the opposite: they arrest more than 4,000 people that have never held a weapon, so people will think: 'If we enter politics, we will end up like that.'"

Demirbas does not need to look far for examples: he was given a prison sentence of two years and six months after saying, in May 2009, that "a soldier's and a guerrilla's mother's tears are the same colour. This war needs to end".

Three weeks later his then 16-year-old son joined the PKK.

"He told me: 'Dad, see this is what happens when you try to do politics. This state does not understand politics, it only understands weapons.'"

Demirbas said that he tried in vain to persuade his son to stay.

"That is the psychology of thousands of Kurds. I know of at least 2,000 young Kurdish people who have [joined the PKK] since then."

Mehmet Emin Aktar, president of the Diyarbakir Bar Association, said that Turkey had become "a republic of fear".

He says: "A democratic state needs to provide a trustworthy judiciary. People need to know that they can expect justice if they step in front of a judge. But this is no longer the case."

Like many of his colleagues, he is very worried that the situation will reach a breaking point: "If fear and threats continue to be the main method of the government, the younger generation of Kurds will become more radical."

In the cafeteria of the Dicle Firat cultural centre, a group of men were discussing the latest KCK arrests. "We all have our bags packed," Kazim Öz said. "We now live on the assumption that each and every one of us could be arrested at any minute."

Another man nodded. "Where is this supposed to end? They can't arrest all of us! This morning I counted 36 grandchildren. They can't finish us Kurds like this."

With tensions turning violent again, investment and business development in Diyarbakir has stalled, making unemployment and poverty, for decades a major problem in the predominantly Kurdish south-east, ever more acute.

With prejudice fuelled by the Turkish media, discrimination against Kurds continues.

"Those who conduct business outside Diyarbakir province will not register their car here," said one local Turkish Kurdish politician from the ruling AKP party. "The '21' on your licence plate is often enough to get randomly pulled over and fined. It's just not worth the trouble."

Most people agree dialogue must be reopened and that the Democratic Opening, an ill-fated attempt at rapprochement launched at the end of 2008, was on the right lines.

Recent reports have indicated the AKP may be on the verge of a new peace overture.

"The AKP is wrong when they think they can destroy the PKK through military force," said Vahap Coskun, assistant professor at the Diyarbakir Dicle University. "The PKK's strength does not stem from the approximately 5,000 fighters in the mountains, but from its widespread legitimacy among an important part of the population. For every fighter that they kill, another will go to join them."

Coskun said that the PKK, too, was making a mistake in escalating attacks and violence. "People here are tired of fighting. The PKK's attempts to use the momentum of the Arab spring to incite people to revolt have failed."

He believes that the Kurdish-aligned Peace and Democracy BDP party should encourage peaceful civil disobedience campaigns again, and keep young Kurds from taking up arms.

"There is a massive potential: they have a party, civilian organisations, media, and a very young and mobile mass of people," he said. "If they manage to gather 10,000 people in the streets of Diyarbakir, peacefully demanding mother tongue education, the government would have to acknowledge their request."

This would also put in question the AKP government's use of the "terrorist" label. "The unsuccessful civil disobedience campaign [after the 2011 elections] scared the government, because you cannot label civil disobedience as terrorism," says Coskun.

In his butcher shop in the Diyarbakir city centre, Metin Özsanli, who is a member of the peace committee that has been arbitrating blood feuds, says: "My father has ended 250 blood feuds, and I have ended 65. It is incredible to see that capacity for forgiveness in people."

He added: "We have to talk to both families many, many times, visit them both many times – when only one person has been killed. But over 40,000 people have died in this conflict.

"Prime minister [Recep Tayyip] Erdogan should not give up this easily. It will take many more talks with both sides to end this feud, but I am hopeful that it will end one day."

Evolution of Press in UK

2011-12-26T04:36:00.000-08:00

A million iPads and Kindles may have been unwrapped on Sunday – according to tentative analyst estimates – an influx of portable technology that is expected to hasten a decline in the already faltering sales of printed newspapers, adding pressure on traditional business models that have traditionally supported so many titles around the country.

Publishers, preparing for the handheld arrivals, took the chance to break with a tradition that dates back to 1912, when publishers agreed not to produce Christmas Day papers to give paperboys, among others, a day off. For the first time in its 190-year history the Sunday Times published a digital-only edition on 25 December – with the normally paid for product given away in the hope of luring sought after digital subscribers.

Boxing Day publication, for dailies like the Guardian, has also become a necessity – to ensure digital editions for new Kindle and iPad owners to read. The result is that what was a traditionally quiet period for news has become a critical moment to showcase new work, at a time when an industry already riven by the phone-hacking scandal and under judicial examination, is facing what can be described as an existential crisis.

Fifty years ago two national dailies – the Daily Mirror and the Daily Express – sold more than 4m copies each; today the bestselling Sun sells 2.6m. In the last year alone, printed sales declined by 10% for daily broadsheets and by 5% for daily tabloids – and when the News of the World stopped printing last July 600,000 copy sales simply disappeared.

The knock-on impact of the decline has been a push for digital readers that have seen newspapers like the Daily Mail win 5m unique visitors a day – compared with its printed sale of 2m – but struggle to generate revenues to match. The Mail generated £16m from its website last year, out of £608m overall.

Some specialist titles, such as the Financial Times, are managing the transition well – it has 260,000 digital subscribers – up 40% this year – compared with 337,000 buyers of the printed product, where sales are down by 12%. Digital subscribers generate £180 a year and the paper, priced at £2.50 on the newsstand on a weekday, is profitable.

John Ridding, the managing director, says that 30% of the FT's revenues come from digital sales and that "within two or three years" digital readers and revenues will account for more than those from the printed business. During a typical week the number of people signing on digitally is "five to 10 times" what it was a year earlier, as the newspaper looks to a future beyond print.

Others, though, are under pressure. Local newspapers have been hit particularly hard, with 31 titles closing in the last year. Most of those shutting are freesheets – with titles distibuted in Yeovil, Scarborough and Harlow lost. Historic paid for titles have seen their frequency cut: the Liverpool Daily Post is to go weekly in print in the new year, after sales dropped as low as 6,500. Its website, however, will update in real time. Daily titles in Birmingham and Bath have also gone the same way in recent years – while pre-tax profits at Johnston Press, the owner of the Scotsman and the Yorkshire Post, fell from £131.5m five years ago to £16m last year.

Roger Parry, chair of Johnston Press since 2009, believes the party has been over for several years, since Craigslist and Google began to take classified advertising away from local press.

"I think the future is for local multimedia companies which focus on signing up 50% plus of the households in their area on some form of subscription – that's what happens in Scandinavia," he says. For journalists there will have to be a shift from acting as "print writers to multimedia curators. There will be more content created by local people. The National Union of Journalists will hate this but it is fact of life."

With the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, wanting to license local television stations in 20 cities, that gives local media a new way to reach audiences, although some – such as Witney TV in Oxfordshire – have already made a start with a daily offering of local video news. David Cameron, the local MP, regularly appears, but the site is staffed by volunteers, and its content limited – underlining how tough the digital economics are.

There are commercial pressures in national media too. Although the tabloid media have faced criticism at the Leveson inquiry, not least from the likes of Hugh Grant or Steve Coogan, popular titles remain in fair commercial health. Trinity Mirror's stable of nationals – the Daily and Sunday Mirror, the People, and the Record titles in Scotland – will earn about £70m this year, although they made £86m the year before. The profit margin at the Daily Mail hovers at around 10%.

The challenge for the popular press is retaining printed sales – but the financial pressure is acute elsewhere. Three of the traditional broadsheets – the Independent, the Times and the Guardian – all lose money in a market where five titles compete for 1.3 million print buyers. Their readers are more likely to make the digital transition too, leaving newspapers no option but to embrace new forms of reporting – such as the live blog – and seed content at digital hubs, such as Facebook.

The Guardian may generate £40m in digital revenues from its largely free offerings, but some of that comes from its dating sites. The Times titles have gone for a low price subscription model, which has attracted 111,000 takers, but which generates £11m a year against an editorial budget estimated at £100m.

Some, like Paul Zwillenberg, from Boston Consulting Group, says serious newspapers "will have to cut their cloth because there will be a smaller pool of revenue and profit". But he acknowledges that by pursuing different business models, they may increase their chances of success. The result, though, is that was once an industry of one business model: a printed product sold on the newstand is fracturing into very different types of mainly digital content companies.

NYC in B&W

2011-12-10T09:17:00.000-08:00

Film Festival

2011-12-05T10:26:00.000-08:00

Danielle Mitterrand (RIP)

2011-11-22T11:24:00.000-08:00

We Are Beautiful Devices

2011-11-17T11:39:00.000-08:00

The Nobel prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman lives in an airy penthouse on the 14th floor of an apartment block in downtown Manhattan, not far from the Eighth Street subway station. But never mind that for a moment. Instead, without thinking too hard about it, try answering the following question: roughly what percentage of the member states of the United Nations are in Africa? (I'll wait.)

The correct figure isn't what's important here. What matters is that your answer is likely to be lower than if you had first been informed that Kahneman is 77 years old, or if I had claimed his apartment – where he lives with his wife, the British-born psychologist Ann Triesman – was 60 floors up, and near the 86th Street station. This is the phenomenon known as the "anchoring effect", and it is typical of Kahneman's contributions to psychology in that it suggests something rather disturbing about the human mind: not just that we're susceptible to making skewed judgments, but that we're influenced by factors more subtle and preposterous than we could ever imagine.

Kahneman's new book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, is a meaty memoir of his life's work that describes countless such cognitive quirks – but don't imagine that reading it will cure your irrationality. "It's not a case of: 'Read this book and then you'll think differently,'" he says. "I've written this book, and I don't think differently." Kahneman, whom Steven Pinker calls "the most important psychologist alive", is twinkly and energetic. But beneath the surface, he is a pessimist. And he is allergic to the notion that his book might be mistaken for self-help. It's his first work aimed at a mass audience, and he hated writing it: "I really did not want to disgrace myself in front of my colleagues, and I worried the public wouldn't like it if it read like a textbook. Also, I really don't like old men's books, and I felt I was writing an old man's book." Eventually, in despair, he arranged to pay four younger psychologists $2,000 each to review his manuscript anonymously, and to tell him the brutal truth: should he bother finishing?

They liked it. So did I. It's hard not to: Kahneman's approach to psychology spurns heart-sinking tables and formulae in favour of short, intriguing questions that elegantly illustrate the ways our intuitions mislead us.

Take the famous "Linda question": Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that's logically impossible. (It can't be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the "conjunctive fallacy", whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.

If any of this sounds familiar, it's because Kahneman and his collaborator Amos Tversky, who died in 1999, are the primary inspiration for many of the past decade's pop-psychology books – the publishing phenomenon that brought you tipping points and freakonomics, the wisdom of crowds, black swans, and "predictable irrationality". It is a trend that one unimpressed reviewer of Kahneman's book labelled "the effect effect". In the early days, academics took a similarly sniffy view of Kahneman and Tversky's research: Kahneman recalls one well-known American philosopher turning his back on him at a party with the disdainful words: "I am not really interested in the psychology of stupidity." That soon changed, though, as the pair's influence spread rapidly throughout the social sciences, culminating in 2002, when Kahneman became one of a handful of non-economists to win the Nobel prize in economics.

"The psychology of stupidity" is not, in any case, a very apt summary. Kahneman's point isn't that we're all wildly bizarre or idiotic, but that our mental apparatus, which works so well most of the time, sometimes leads us astray in predictable ways. "We're beautiful devices," he says. "The devices work well; we're all experts in what we do. But when the mechanism fails, those failures can tell you a lot about how the mind works."

In Thinking, Fast and Slow, he presents this as a drama with two "characters": System One, which is the domain of intuitive responses, and System Two, the domain of conscious, effortful thought. System One – the kind of mental ability celebrated in Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink – kicks in without our needing to think about it. The problem is that it always tries to help, even when it shouldn't, and that it works with whatever it's got, which isn't always the most sensible information.

The biggest challenge this posed was to economists, most of whom assumed that people were basically rational and selfish and acted in their own best interests. The work that won Kahneman the Nobel showed otherwise. For example, we hate losing things more than we like gaining them, which is why people refuse to sell their home for less than they paid, even if it makes financial sense to do so. Similar biases make us behave strangely where risk is involved, too: if forced to choose between being given £500 for certain, or a 50% chance of winning £1,000, most of us will opt for the sure thing. But if the choice is between losing £500 for sure, or a 50% chance of losing £1,000, most of us will take the gamble.

Then there's the much-cited thought experiment involving tickets to the theatre. Suppose a woman plans to buy a ticket for a play costing £40, but en route to the theatre she realises she has lost two £20 notes in the street: would she still buy the ticket? Most people, when asked this question, assume that she would. But what if she bought the ticket in advance, then arrived at the theatre to find she'd lost it? In that case, people assume she'd go home without buying another ticket – even though the scenarios are financially identical. As Richard Thaler, another leading light in the revolution that became known as behavioural economics, told an interviewer, Kahneman and Tversky's research meant that "rationality was fucked". Kahneman, on the other hand, likes to say that you'd need to study economics for years before you'd find his research surprising: it didn't surprise his mother at all.

Kahneman was born in 1934, the son of Lithuanian Jews, and grew up in France. Life was generally good until 1940, when German forces swept in. He recalls drawing, around that time, "what was probably the first graph I ever drew", showing his family's fortunes over time – "and around 1940 the curve crossed into the negative domain." His father was captured during a large-scale sweep of Jews in France, but somehow escaped being sent to a concentration camp and was let go instead. ("The story of my father's release, which I never fully understood, also involved a beautiful woman and a German general who loved her," he wrote.) The family kept moving across France. "The feeling was of being hunted," Kahneman recalls. At one point their home was a chicken coop at the back of a pub. In 1944 his father died of insufficiently treated diabetes, six weeks short of D-day. As soon as the war ended, his mother took the family to live in Palestine, in what would soon become Israel.

Kahneman was drafted into the Israeli army in 1955, where he served as an infantryman for a year – "it was a very tense time, but I never fired a shot in anger" – then worked as a military psychologist. One of his roles was to evaluate new recruits by watching them perform the "leaderless group challenge", in which teams of eight men had to transfer themselves, and a large log, over a 6ft-high wall, without anybody, or the log, touching the wall. The task was designed to reveal the participants' true character, and thus demonstrate who had the making of a future leader. As a method of psychological evaluation, it wasn't much good: Kahneman made predictions, but follow-up research revealed them to be little better than guesses. What the experience taught him, in the end, wasn't how to spot a future hero, but rather how hard it was to expunge his own confidence in his predictions. "We knew as a general fact that our predictions were little better than random guesses," he writes. "But we continued to feel and act as if each particular prediction was valid." Confidence is a feeling, not a logical conclusion reached after analysing statistics. Kahneman would later encounter the same phenomenon among investment advisers, who clung to their belief in their abilities even after it was demonstrated that their stock-picking skills left their clients no better off than rolling dice.

The intellectual relationship that defined his career began in the late 1960s at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, when he met Tversky, a young colleague. Kahneman describes their bond as "magical", and it sounds much more like a loving friendship than a scholarly collaboration. For several years, the two spent hours every afternoon in freewheeling conversations, examining their own hunches and intuitions, gradually developing the list of biases and fallacies for which they became famous. "He got up late, and I was a morning person, so we started with lunch, and took it from there," Kahneman remembers. "This kind of collaboration is very unusual in science. We were just extraordinarily lucky, and we knew it." The editor of the journal to which they submitted their first major paper rejected it; their work seemed too frivolous for the academic establishment. "Psychologists really aim to be scientists, white-coat stuff, with elaborate statistics, running experiments," Kahneman says. "The idea that you can ask one question and it makes the point ... well, that wasn't how psychology was done at the time."

With hindsight, however, those single questions seem anything but frivolous. The irrational traits they uncovered are, to pick one notable example, hugely important in understanding the causes of the current economic crisis, which has its roots in (among others) the overconfidence bias and the illusion of skill. If we can't hope to correct such biases in any lasting way, we can perhaps seek to cultivate some humility about the limits of our mental powers. Being the puppet of subtle psychological influences we cannot even recognise is annoying. But at least we can try to remember that that's what's likely to be happening. Well, it's a start.

A Great Film

2011-11-16T14:28:00.000-08:00

Tintin

2011-11-16T14:27:00.000-08:00

Gone

2011-11-16T14:22:00.000-08:00

Basque Peace

2011-11-15T12:43:00.000-08:00

A Basque Peace

By TONY BLAIR

The unconditional declaration by the Basque separatist group ETA this week that it is finally ending 50 years of violence, during which it killed hundreds of people and wounded thousands more, should be welcomed by all governments and peoples. It is a victory for democracy, as well as a victory for the people of Spain and the Basque regions of Spain and France.

The Spanish government — in particular Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and his deputy, the long-time interior minister, Alfredo Rubalcaba — has taken courageous risks for peace and paid a heavy political price when ETA responded by blowing up part of Madrid airport and returning to killing in 2006.

Zapatero and his colleagues never stopped fighting ETA, consistently defending Spanish democracy, and, with the support and cooperation of President Nicolas Sarkozy of France, successfully weakened the terrorist movement by arresting its leadership and disrupting their attacks.

But Zapatero also never stopped offering the hand of peace. He made it clear that there would be no secret negotiations, that there would be no political concessions to ETA, and that another cease-fire would not be enough: ETA must unilaterally, publicly and unambiguously declare that it was ending the armed struggle for good if there was to be peace.

The opposition Popular Party, led by Mariano Rajoy, has also always demonstrated its seriousness and responsibility on this issue.

The firmness paid off this week. ETA has now done exactly what was demanded. Its leaders have put violence behind them for good. This really is the end of the last armed confrontation in Europe.

In its declaration ending the armed campaign, ETA asks for talks with the governments of Spain and France to deal with the “consequences” of the conflict. These talks are necessary to assure the dissolution of ETA as a military force.

Just as we did in our talks in Northern Ireland, these talks will deal with the decommissioning of weapons, explosives and military infrastructure, with the issue of prisoners and exiles, with the rehabilitation of those caught up in the violence, with security normalization and with recompense for victims.

As in Northern Ireland, there will be a “peace dividend” for Spain. The billions of euros that have been spent on security can now be redirected to more socially useful ends, a welcome benefit in a time of cutbacks and budget restraint.

As in Northern Ireland we must remember the victims and ensure that the families left behind are properly recognized and supported.

Above all, it will now be possible for all parties in Spain and the Basque region to pursue their aims politically without violence or the threat of violence.

I believe there also are wider lessons from the end of this conflict.

The first is that governments must firmly defend themselves, their principles and their people against terrorists. This requires good police and intelligence work as well as political determination.

But governments must also recognize the need to “talk to their enemies.” Firm security pressure on terrorists must be coupled with offering them a way out when they realize that they cannot win by violence. Terrorist groups are rarely defeated by military means alone. Peace is always made between enemies, not friends. This is as true in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and the Americas as it is in the Basque region.

I learned from our experience in Northern Ireland that ending violence and making peace irreversible requires patience, taking risks, suffering setbacks and a constant commitment. It also requires creativity, generosity and statesmanship. In Spain these qualities have been demonstrated by all and will be needed to secure a lasting peace.

Spain will hold national elections on Nov. 20 and a new government will have to take on the hard work of clearing up the consequences of the conflict. This is the point in peace processes when the participants often collapse in exhaustion — but it is when efforts need to be redoubled. The European Union and the wider international community should strongly support the new Spanish government in this effort.

ETA has made a historic declaration. The opportunity for peace must now be seized. I will work to support Spain, France and the citizens of the Basque region in any way I can in their effort to secure the lasting peace and democracy they have long demanded and fully deserve.

Tony Blair was prime minister of Britain from 1997 to 2007.

Cartoon Of The Day

2011-11-06T08:40:00.000-08:00

Sport & Race

2011-11-05T05:37:00.000-07:00

'It was one of the interesting things people were talking about. So I explored it in the book," says Neil Duncanson. What book? His multi-biographical book about 100m sprinters, The Fastest Men on Earth. Head to the final chapter, and there's this: a question raising all sorts of connotations. "Is it now a cast iron fact, at least at the elite level, that white men can't sprint?

Well is it, I ask Duncanson, a sprint enthusiast by night, by day a television executive? "I am not an anthropologist, and I am not trying to construct any theories of my own," he says. "But there are a lot of theories out there. And the fact is that the last white guy in an Olympic final was Allan Wells in 1980."

What about Christophe Lemaitre, the Frenchman who last year became the first white guy to break the 10 second barrier for the 100m? Doesn't he prove the futility of hard and fast pronouncements. "Well he is just one guy. If there were a few more like him, perhaps we would have to think again." And anyway, he says, there is little or no danger of Lemaitre winning in 2012. He'll do well to make the final. The book is unequivocal about that. "It's hard," it says, "to imagine a white sprinter climbing on top of the 100m Olympic podium again."

It was a thrill ride for the author. He spent time with his track heroes, among them Usain Bolt, a one-off fuelled by freakish brilliance, bonhomie and chicken nuggets.

And what's the thinking on the racial angle? Duncanson says one interesting theory is that reached in 1999 by scholar and journalist Jon Entine. It's not that all black athletes sprint faster, Entine said. It's a subset with origins in west Africa. And a key difference, according to this theory is the muscles. "We are all geared by slow- and fast-twitch muscle fibres," Duncanson explains. "The theory is that these athletes have a preponderance of fast-twitch muscles. I see it as an interesting debate, but not particularly controversial."

But of course, sport aside, it is controversial. If muscles are genetically different, what of other genetic differences? There's a Pandora's box, on and off the track. Thank God for Bolt. At least there, you know it's the chicken nuggets.

Are Consumption Levels Falling?

2011-11-01T08:27:00.000-07:00

The year 2001 was more eventful than most and, a decade on, we're inundated with anniversaries. September was 9/11, this month the invasion of Afghanistan and next month the release of the first iPod. To which we could add the foot-and-mouth crisis, the Gujarat earthquake and the first ever entries on Wikipedia.

With so many significant events to look back on, one thing that few people will remember 2001 for is its entry in the UK's Material Flow Accounts, a set of dry and largely ignored data published annually by the Office for National Statistics.

But, according to environment writer Chris Goodall, those stats tell an important story. "What the figures suggest," Goodall says enthusiastically, "is that 2001 may turn out to be the year that the UK's consumption of 'stuff' – the total weight of everything we use, from food and fuel to flat-pack furniture – reached its peak and began to decline."

Quietly spoken but fiercely intelligent, Goodall is a consultant and author who, over the last decade or so, has established himself as a leading analyst on energy and climate issues. Probably the only Green Party parliamentary candidate who also used to work at McKinsey, his speciality is trawling through environment statistics that would send traditional eco-warriors to sleep.

"One thing that's remarkable is the sheer speed with which our resource use has crashed since the recession," Goodall continues. "In the space of a couple of years, we've dropped back to the second lowest level since we started keeping track in 1970. And although the figures aren't yet available for 2010 and 2011, it seems highly likely that we are now using fewer materials than at any time on record."

Goodall discovered the Material Flow Accounts while writing a research paper examining the UK's consumption of resources. The pattern he stumbled upon caught him by surprise: time and time again, Brits seemed to be consuming fewer resources and producing less waste. What really surprised him was that consumption appears to have started dropping in the first years of the new millennium, when the economy was still rapidly growing.

In 2001, Goodall says, the UK's consumption of paper and cardboard finally started to decline. This was followed, in 2002, by a fall in our use of primary energy: the raw heat and power generated by all fossil fuels and other energy sources. The following year, 2003, saw the start of a decline in the amount of household waste (including recycling) generated by each person in the country – a downward trend that before long could also be observed in the commercial and construction waste sectors.

In 2004, our purchases of new cars started to fall – as did our consumption of water. The next year, 2005, saw our household energy consumption starting to slump (notwithstanding an uptick last year due to the cold winter). And in 2006 we seem to have got bored with roads and railways, with a decline in the average distance travelled on private and public transport. All of this while GDP – and population – went up.

Other consumption categories have been falling for much longer, Goodall points out. Despite concerns about the increasing intensity and industrialisation of our farming, the amount of nitrogen, phosphate and potassium fertilisers being applied to British fields has been falling since the 1980s. Our consumption of cement reached a peak at a similar time.

Even our intake of food is falling. Although obesity is on the rise, the total number of calories consumed by Brits has been on a downward slope for around half a century, driven by the fact that, compared with previous generations, we do less exercise now and live in warmer homes. Perhaps more remarkably, our intake of meat – the food most regularly highlighted as an environmental concern – seems to have been falling since 2003.

Goodall's research sends a counterintuitive message. We might expect to have been getting through less stuff since the financial crash of 2008; but surely throughout the boom years of 1990s and noughties, our rate of material consumption was steadily climbing in step with GDP?

Not according to Goodall. But do his claims stack up? One obvious counter-argument is the fact that we have "outsourced" our resource-hungry industries to China and other developing countries. After all, various reports have already made it clear that while the UK's own use of oil, coal and gas is falling, our total carbon emissions, once you consider all Chinese factories producing our laptops, toys and clothes, continues to rise steadily.

Oddly, though, when it comes to overall resource use – everything from maize to metals – the same doesn't seem to apply. At least, not if we believe the official figures from the Office of National Statistics. Each year, statisticians there estimate the UK's Total Material Requirement, the grand total of all the goods we consume, plus all the materials used in the UK and overseas to produce those goods.

The numbers are head-spinningly huge. Once you add up minerals, fuels, crops, wood and animal products, the UK churns its way through roughly two billion tonnes of stuff each year. That's more than 30 tonnes for each man, woman and child in the country – a giant stack of raw materials as heavy as four double-decker buses. (Or, more specifically, as heavy as four old- fashioned Routemaster buses. In an exception to Goodall's theory, some of the newer, more efficient buses are almost twice as heavy as the old ones.)

Although that's still a massive – and doubtless unsustainable – rate of consumption, Goodall's point is that our appetite for materials may finally be on a downward curve. In particular, he's excited by the fact that over the past couple of decades, we've significantly grown the economy without noticeably increasing our resource use. To use the jargon, Goodall believes that Britain has finally "decoupled" economic growth and material consumption.

If correct, this means we've achieved something that many green commentators believed was impossible. In his influential 2009 book, Prosperity Without Growth, academic Tim Jackson argued that while economies could become more efficient in their use of resources, genuine decoupling – resource use falling while GDP rises – remained a "myth". This view, and the argument that we therefore should aim for zero-growth economics, has become widely accepted in environment circles.

Goodall believes that the data from the Office of National Statistics, combined with his own research, challenges this assumption. "In 2007, just before the crash," Goodall says, "our total use of materials was almost the same as it was in 1989, despite the economy having tripled in size in the intervening years. And the peak in resource use appears to have been in 2001 – many years before the recession halted economic growth."

Jackson welcomed Goodall's research, describing it as "long overdue" and "exactly the kind of analysis that is sadly lacking at policy level and desperately needed as the basis for a green economy". But he also warned against drawing simple conclusions, pointing out that – thanks to Britain's investments in the global commodity markets – our economy was continuing to increase resource use even if we had started consuming fewer of those resources ourselves. "For those hoping desperately for stuff-free growth," Jackson added, "there is only cold comfort in these statistics."

Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation also doubts the significance of the UK reaching peak stuff. "Measures of our environmental impact are only meaningful when they're related to the planet's ability to keep up. For these findings to be significant, we'd need to be able to demonstrate that we're on the way to being able to live within our ecological means. And on that measure we're still a long way off target."

Jackson and Simms are certainly right that – even if the UK has started consuming fewer resources – it's hardly going to save the planet. Globally, resource extraction is rising, carbon emissions are climbing, rainforests are shrinking, oceans are acidifying and species are disappearing. Solving these problems will clearly take far more than stabilising resource use in mature economies like the UK.

Goodall acknowledges this. "I don't want to suggest for a moment that the world doesn't face massive environmental challenges. But the data I found does suggest the possibility – and it is only a possibility – that economic growth is not necessarily incompatible with addressing these challenges. If growth helps us get more efficient in our use of resources, and actually reduces our consumption of material things, then environmentalists may be very wrong to campaign for a zero-growth economy."

Bringing the debate back to earth, he adds: "It is a trivial example but economic growth, and the innovation that comes with it, have given us the Kindle, a way of allowing us to read books without the high-energy consumption required to make paper. Digital goods generally have lower environmental impact than physical equivalents and if growth speeds up the process of 'dematerialisation', it has positive – not negative – environmental effects."

The idea that the best way to get greener may be to get richer isn't a new one. Economist Simon Kuznets argued decades ago that only when countries get to a certain level of wealth do they start to reduce their environmental impact. In green circles, however, such thinking is controversial. While environmentalists accept that poor countries need to grow economically to lift themselves out of poverty, most are thoroughly sceptical that conventional growth-focused economics is compatible with saving the planet from impending disaster.

There is, however, an emerging pro-growth seam of environmental thinking. Earlier this year, writer Mark Lynas caused a stir with his book The God Species, in which he broke a trio of green taboos by calling for environmentalists to embrace GM foods, nuclear power and growth-based capitalism. GM food would allow us to leave more of the world as wilderness, Lynas wrote; nuclear energy would help us wean ourselves off coal; and climbing economic growth would give us the best chance of combatting global poverty and funding the technical revolution required to green our production of energy and goods.

Simms says that to call for economic growth as the solution to the planet's woes is to miss the point. "The important question is this: is your economy doing something useful, and doing it within environmental boundaries? If we want to create a happy, low-carbon world, there are better ways to do that than slavishly trying to enlarge our economies. Bear in mind that 50 years of GDP growth and increasing resource use in the UK has done nothing to increase our life satisfaction."

Ecological and economic arguments aside, Goodall's suggestion that the UK may have reached the point of maximum resource use throws up lots of interesting questions. Most fundamentally: is it definitely true? How can we be sure that consumption won't soar to new, even greater, highs when the global economy eventually picks up? And if we really have reached a peak, how did we get there? Was it just a matter of shifting to a more service-based economy? Can the internet – or even decades of green campaigning – claim the credit? Or could it be that our densely packed little island is running out of space for new buildings, vehicles and bulky goods? Could eBay and Freecycle be a factor, helping to keep more goods in circulation for longer? Or the fact that more of us are living in cities?

If we can understand how we levelled off British resource use, perhaps that information could help other countries do the same. After all, in a world that may soon be home to nine billion people, there can be fewer more important messages than – when it comes to "stuff" – less can be more.

European Crisis, Explained

2011-10-28T06:00:00.001-07:00

Pankhurst to Lenin

2011-10-27T12:20:00.000-07:00

"Dear Comrade, The situation is moving in a revolutionary direction more swiftly, but of course we are far away yet. The prices of necessaries are rising, but the cost of living is not totally supposed to have risen this month. Unemployment is now acute, and the unemployed are restive. One of Lansbury's meetings was broken up by members of my party because he advised peaceful methods, and the crowd supported the young dockers, seamen, and others of my party who opposed him. Unemployed march to factories, enter them, make speeches, and speak of using them. Ex-soldiers arm and drill. Do not exaggerate these things—they are not formidable yet.

"Unemployed smashed windows and stole jewels last Monday, when the London Mayors led them to Westminster. The Communist parties alone are neither big enough nor bold enough to rise to the occasion . . .

"In Coventry a member of our party, Emery, leads a campaign for setting aside a factory to work for Soviet Russia, the factory to be controlled by the workers. In 'The Dreadnought' I tried to set a bolder policy and should be discussing it with my executive this afternoon, but I was arrested last Thursday and am under £2,000 bail not to meet, or communicate with any of our people responsible for publishing the paper till my trial on Thursday, so I can only communicate indirectly.

"I expect six months' imprisonment. I considered a hunger strike, but I am afraid that weapon is destroyed now since the Government is letting the Irish hunger-strikers die.

"I find all the Communist parties, except Gallagher's Scottish Communist Labour party, disinclined for unity. Parliamentarism and the tameness of the B.S.P. crowd are sore points with our party, and I would have had a hard struggle to bring them round. Now I shall not be there, it seems.

"I have done less than I should in seeing people, because I have had a most terrible struggle since I returned home. Our press where our paper is printed was suffering because 'The Dreadnought' owed money. Whilst I was away an account ran too long, and a creditor got a writ of payment against us in the court. Then all the creditors took fright. On my return the brokers were in twice in one week, and I have been fighting the situation ever since.

"The Third International in Moscow heard my plea when I was there, and promised relief. It does not come. This week the South Wales mining comrades sent for 6,000 extra copies of 'The Dreadnought'. I borrowed paper from the 'Herald'. At present I have no paper for next week. It is not pleasant to go to prison so!

"With Communist greetings.

SYLVIA PANKHURST

Happy Birthday, Princess!!

2011-10-22T07:12:00.000-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-10-12T06:01:00.000-07:00

Scotland Today

2011-10-10T06:11:00.000-07:00

Nobel of Literature

2011-10-07T13:04:00.000-07:00

Love?

2011-10-07T08:14:00.001-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-10-07T07:18:00.000-07:00

About Science

2011-10-07T06:28:00.001-07:00

Nobel of Chemestry

2011-10-06T14:59:00.000-07:00

Allright...!!

2011-10-06T06:10:00.000-07:00

Speak Christian!

2011-10-06T06:02:00.000-07:00

Rapayet Pushaina thinks he is about 80 years old; he is pretty sure he was not born on 31 December, and he is absolutely certain his name is not Iron Scraper.

But that is the information that appeared on his Colombian national ID card for more than 50 years.

Pushaina, an elder of his clan of Wayúu Native Americans, who live in the deserts of the north-western Guajira peninsula, chafes at the mockery of a name that was given to him by an official of the national registry office who went to his remote village 50 years ago.

"I don't want to be Raspahierro [Iron Scraper], I am Rapayet," he said through his Spanish-speaking granddaughter.

He is one of thousands of Wayúu Indians who were given derisive names, according to Estercilia Simanca, a Wayúu lawyer.

"In some cases there may have been a misunderstanding but in others it was clearly intentional," she said.

Wayúu ID cards show names such as Arrancamuelas (Tooth Puller), Bolsillo (Pocket), Cabezón (Big Head), Chichí (Piss), Coito (Coitus), Gorila (Gorilla), Monja (Nun), Payaso (Clown) and Teléfono (Telephone).

Others are Alka-Seltzer, Land Rover, Marilyn Monroe and Tarzan.

Most neither speak nor read Spanish so were unaware of the mockery. The Wayúu native tongue is an Arawak language.

They do not use the Gregorian calendar either, but rather mark dates with knots on a yarn. Because of this, registry officials opted to give everyone the same birth date: 31 December.

"Since I was little, I thought it was strange that all my family had the same birthday," Simanca said.

She has conducted an investigation into the apparently widespread practice of making up names and birth dates and estimates about 70% of Pushaina's generation were given humiliating names by visiting registry officials, and nearly all were listed as having been born on 31 December.

Pushaina only became aware of his "official" name when he began to attend meetings with NGO and government officials about 10 years ago as a representative of his community.

"At first I thought they were pronouncing my name wrong," he said. Then he realised that what was on his ID card was a twisted joke.

Film-maker Priscilla Padilla has documented the abuses in a documentary called Born on 31 December, which was screened last month in Bogotá.

The Colombian registry office has said it does not know how or why the changes to names and birth dates – the bulk of which happened in the 1960s and 70s – were made, and has promised an investigation.

The director of the office, Carlos Ariel Sanchez, vowed to "correct the names that make people uncomfortable or that are ridiculous".

Simanca said she was encouraged by the official statement but that name changes were too costly for most Wayúu, who live in remote rural areas and can hardly afford travel and legal costs which can add up to more than 200,000 pesos (£67).

"Just like they have ID card drives where they go from village to village registering people, they should send out officials to rectify the names," she said.

Pushaina is now privileged among his clan. With the help of Simanca and Padilla, he was able to reclaim his true name.

He says he is happy with his new card. "Now no one can make fun of me any more."

Steve Jobs at Stanford Uni

2011-10-06T04:36:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs (RIP)

2011-10-06T00:26:00.000-07:00

Human Rights in Chechnya

2011-10-04T15:04:00.000-07:00

They never go out alone, and when they are in their small apartment here in the capital of Chechnya, a flat screen on the wall displays a continuous feed from security cameras in the hall and stairway outside.

When the three men squeeze into their little car, they can activate a video camera and microphone in case of trouble and push a small red button on their dashboard to transmit sound directly to their main office 900 miles away.

“It’s an internal rule,” said Vladislav Sadykov, 46, a lawyer who leads the group. “We always travel together. If you are alone, it is easier to kidnap and torture you. The pictures are for protection, and also in case they kill us it will be recorded.”

The three men make up the current shift in a rotation of visiting human rights investigators called the Joint Mobile Group, which has taken on kidnapping and torture cases in this Russian republic that it considers too dangerous for resident human rights workers to handle.

“All local human rights people here live in danger,” said Dmitri Laptev, 24, a lawyer who has been in Grozny for 45 days on his third rotation. “Their homes can be burned. Their children can be kidnapped.”

The separatist war is mostly over in Chechnya, but kidnappings and extrajudicial killings continue in a more targeted way against people who support the rebels or speak out against the government of the Chechen leader, Ramzan A. Kadyrov, human rights groups say.

“When you talk to ordinary people, you are shocked to see how afraid they are,” Mr. Laptev said.

The human rights group Memorial said its monitors were finding it more difficult to do their work, partly because victims and their relatives have become more frightened than in the past about reporting abuses.

“The kidnapping goes on without fear,” said Mr. Sadykov, who is here on his fourth tour. “They do it openly. They show that they are with law enforcement, and law enforcement leaves them alone.”

He added: “It’s simple work, no investigation, no documents, no legal steps. Just seize someone and take him away.”

The Joint Mobile Group, with its main office in Nizhny Novgorod, recruits lawyers and investigators from human rights organizations around the country to work in teams of three in Chechnya for a month or more.

In May, the group was recognized with the annual Front Line Award for Human Rights Defenders at Risk, awarded in Dublin by the Mary Robinson Foundation — Climate Justice, for its work in bringing human rights abuses to light.

“We work like investigators, looking at pictures, talking to witnesses,” Mr. Sadykov said. “We do all this the way it should be done, though we have no official standing. We get evidence and then we ask official organs to make their own investigation.”

The team’s work sometimes bears fruit, he said, and charges have been brought against some law enforcement officers.

The Joint Mobile Group was founded in 2009 after the abduction and killing of Natalya Estemirova, a local researcher for Memorial who was one of the most persistent and best-known activists in Chechnya.

Two of Ms. Estemirova’s colleagues at Memorial were evacuated and one who worked closely with her moved to Norway.

Since Ms. Estemirova’s death, human rights advocates here have mostly stepped back from confronting the authorities directly with reports of abuses, Mr. Sadykov said. Memorial has at times withdrawn its monitors from Chechnya for periods of several weeks or several months.

In a way, the Joint Mobile Group is carrying on Ms. Estemirova’s work.

“They had the idea that she was causing problems and without her there would be fewer problems,” Mr. Sadykov said. “But who am I? We rotate. They know there are people behind us and that if they kill me someone else will come.”

Among the half-dozen cases the group is currently pursuing is one of Ms. Estemirova’s final ones, the disappearance of a former rebel named Apti Zainalov, 23 at the time, who had turned himself in and served a year in prison. After his release, he disappeared in 2009, reappeared briefly under armed guard in a hospital and then vanished again.

In the days before she was killed, Ms. Estemirova had been demanding information about him from the hospital and the police, and the Joint Mobile Group has continued the pressure.

But Mr. Zainalov’s mother, Aima Makayeva, said she was weary of the pursuit and was ready to abandon the legal case if the authorities would just hand back her son.

“The only thing left is to go to Kadyrov,” she said. It is a view that is often expressed in Chechnya, where Mr. Kadyrov is in firm control of both the government and the security forces.

The tactic might work, Mr. Sadykov said. It would relieve the authorities of the constant pressure being brought by the investigators, and of the possibility that someone might actually be arrested and charged.

But, Mr. Sadykov said, it would run counter to the aim of the advocates to foster the rule of law and would instead demonstrate that it is still the men with guns who have the power to seize and release.

“The system is like a swamp,” Mr. Laptev said. “You throw in a stone and you make some ripples, and then it quiets down and the stone sinks to the bottom.”

Mr. Sadykov had an inside look at the system last year when he was part of a three-person team held overnight in a police station while investigating a report of a human rights violation. The group was released unharmed and has filed its own case charging illegal detention.

In a late-night discussion, he said, the police defended their methods, saying a harsh environment demands harsh tactics. “You have to torture,” he said one officer told him. “Without torture how can you fight terrorism?”

But Mr. Sadykov also observed that the work of human rights monitors seemed at least to be making an impression. When the three were released, he said, an officer asked him to sign a statement confirming that they had not been mistreated.

“Otherwise,” the officer said, “you will say we tortured you.”

Is Common Sense Back?

2011-10-04T14:55:00.000-07:00

About 400 people are preparing to gather for a conference in Hartford, Connecticut, to promote the end of religion in the US and their vision of a secular future for the country.

Those travelling to the meeting will pass two huge roadside billboards displaying quotes from two of the country's most famous non-believers: Katharine Hepburn and Mark Twain. "Faith is believing what you know ain't so," reads the one featuring Twain. "I'm an atheist and that's it," says the one quoting Hepburn.

At the meeting, members of the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF) will hear speakers celebrate successes they have had in removing religion from US public life and see awards being presented to noted secularist activists.

The US is increasingly portrayed as a hotbed of religious fervour. Yet in the homeland of ostentatiously religious politicians such as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry, agnostics and atheists are actually part of one of the fastest-growing demographics in the US: the godless. Far from being in thrall to its religious leaders, the US is in fact becoming a more secular country, some experts say. "It has never been better to be a free-thinker or an agnostic in America," says Annie Laurie Gaylor, co-president of the FFRF.

The exact number of faithless is unclear. One study by the Pew Research Centre puts them at about 12% of the population, but another by the Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture at Trinity College in Hartford puts that figure at around 20%.

Most experts agree that the number of secular Americans has probably doubled in the past three decades – growing especially fast among the young. It is thought to be the fastest-growing major "religious" demographic in the country.

Professor Barry Kosmin of Trinity College, who conducts the national Religious Identification Survey, believes up to a quarter of young people in the US now have no specific faith, and scoffs at the idea, prevalent in so much US media and culture, that the country is highly religious or becoming more so. "The trending in American history is towards secularisation," Kosmin said.

He cites the example of the changing face of Sunday in the country. It was not too long ago when many sporting events were banned on Sundays and most shops were closed too. Now the opposite is largely true.

As in Britain, Sunday in the US has become a normal shopping day for many, or a day to watch big football or baseball games. "The great secular holiday in America is Super Bowl Sunday. Even in the deep south, the biggest mega-church changes its schedule to suit the Super Bowl," Kosmin said.

He also pointed to social trends – greater divorce rates, gay marriage and much higher percentages of people having children out of wedlock – as other signs that the religious grip on society has loosened.

There are other indications, too. For a long time studies have shown that about 40% of US adults attend a church service weekly. However, other studies that actually counted those at church – rather than just asking people if they went – have shown the true number to be about half to two-thirds of that figure.

More Americans are now choosing to get married or be buried without any form of religious ceremony. At universities, departments devoted to the study of secularism are starting to appear. Books by atheist authors are bestsellers. National groups, such as the Secular Coalition of America (SCA), have opened branches across the country.

Herb Silverman, president of the Washington-based SCA, lives in Charleston, South Carolina. His local secularist group was founded in 1994 with 10 people, but now has 150 members. "I've been living here in the buckle of the Bible belt since 1976 and things are getting a lot better," Silverman said.

Yet there is little doubt that religious groups still wield enormous influence in US politics and public life, especially through the rightwing of the Republican party. Groups such as Focus on the Family are well-funded and skilful lobbyists.

Kosmin said the attention paid by politicians and the media to religious groups was not necessarily a sign of strength. "When religion was doing well, it did not need to go into politics. Secularity of our population and culture is obviously growing and so religion is on the defensive," he said.

However, it is still a brave US politician who openly declares a lack of faith. So far just one member of Congress, Californian Democrat Pete Stark, has admitted that he does not believe in God.

"Privately, we know that there are 27 other members of Congress that have no belief in God. But we don't 'out' people," said Silverman.

Others think that one day it will become politically mainstream to confess to a lack of faith as US political life lags behind the society that it represents. "Politicians have not yet caught up with the changing demographics of our society," said Gaylor.

Hospital(ity)

2011-10-04T14:51:00.000-07:00

What happens when angels of mercy go walkabout, leaving patients bereft? Why, the boss of the Royal College of Nursing weighs straight in. If his angels are too busy, Dr Peter Carter wants patients' families on the ward and on the job as well, looking after lonely grannies in distress. "Somehow we have sleepwalked, in some parts of society, into assuming this is someone else's responsibility." Cue predictable outrage over this NHS betrayal, plus even more predictable warnings about lowered standards. It's a hospital's job to care and tend, we're told. It's what nurses are for. And the last thing we want is upmarket union leaders passing the buck. But pause: let's take a short trip.

Three times in the last 12 years I've seen what happens in Spanish hospitals when my grandchildren are born. What's that at the side near my daughter's bed? It's a bunk. Her husband isn't merely there for the birth; he's on the spot night and day, bringing this, fetching that, always on hand while she recovers. That's normal, totally expected. Active paternity service, not paternity leave. And now my Spanish grandson has broken his arm rather badly in two places. He's in pain. And, in quite another hospital, the bunk is there again. His mother spends two nights with him, comforting, reassuring, nipping out to buy food, a stabilising presence in an unsettling world.

Which means I too remember how, a few years back, I was in trouble myself, bleeding internally and causing manifest alarm. A Spanish ambulance shrieks through the night. Another hospital to the collection. I'm dosed and monitored non-stop behind curtains in A&E. And there's an airline-type seat beside the bed there. My wife can try to sleep close by. The next morning I'm wheeled upstairs to a small ward – and of course there's another recliner seat close by. The guy to my left, just recovering from open heart surgery, has visitors almost 24/7. They're a bit noisy; they come and go constantly – but hey, join the party. What's the point lying around feeling sorry for yourself? The gang's all here.

And the deeper point, revealed time and again, has absolutely nothing to do with cost-saving – or with graduate angels too proud to plump a pillow. The Spanish experience is instinctive and positive. It doesn't make family involvement a passed parcel of sneaky budget savings. It says, simply, that this is what family life is all about. Hospitals aren't carved up between them and us. Hospitals are more joint community centres in a society used to doing the right thing.

Long ago, as a child, I was in a faraway Nottinghamshire hospital for well over a year: visiting hours, on Saturday and Sunday, 2.30pm to 5pm. My mother, a widow without any hope of a car, had to travel 20 miles via three separate bus journeys to see me. Get there for two-thirty. Get out at five. That's your lot. In retrospect it seems cruel and pointless – but still somehow natural. The mystique of medicine says life is a waiting room. Doctor knows best. Nurses have duties: please keep out of their way.

Of course you can produce due justifications as required. But in fact there's a more fundamental chasm opened here. We pay for and bang on about the NHS because it has almost god-like status. Leave your flowers on the altar and go. Family care ends at the hospital door. Busy professionals are taking over now. Thank you, and good night.

That's a generalisation, of course: it can't wrap millions of cases in a single bundle of blame. But how does any society go truly big on compassion or cohesion when families are deemed a nuisance, a fact without a function? And what does it say about families when they not only accept that divide – but bristle at the thought of bridging it?

Wall St protest

2011-10-01T07:27:00.000-07:00

Mourid Barghouti

2011-09-30T14:08:00.000-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-09-30T13:18:00.000-07:00

FirEd?

2011-09-28T09:45:00.000-07:00

Ed Miliband did what the professional speechwriters always say you should do. He presented an argument, rather than a laundry list. He did not dole out random policy nuggets, with a bit on foreign policy thrown in, in order to touch every base. Instead he made a case, arguing that the values cherished by British society are not reflected in the ethics that underpin our economy.

He even framed that idea in a pithy way, pitching "producers" against "predators", insisting that too often we reward the latter over the former. The speech deserved credit, too, for trying to rise to the moment of current crisis, advocating not mere tinkering at the edges but a recasting of our entire economic model. And yet I worry it will do precisely nothing to improve the prospects of either Miliband or Labour.

That's not because I want more detail on how his ideas will translate into action or how, exactly, governments will distinguish predators from producers. Nor is mine the familiar concern that no one listens to conference speeches any more. The anxiety I have is both more superficial and deeper than that – and it is a worry that goes beyond Labour, touching on the state of politics itself.

Put simply, my fear is that you can make all the speeches and policy statements you like – carefully devising a strategy on this and crafting a narrative on that – but what matters more are shallow considerations of looks, demeanour, speech patterns and biography. That, in short, it is personality, not policy, that counts.

How else to explain today's Comres poll, which had the Conservatives one point ahead of Labour. This despite rising unemployment, an enfeebled economy and a series of cock-ups and U-turns that should have the Tories gasping for air. Some of that can be explained by the Conservatives' success in persuading voters that they are stoically engaged in the hard work of clearing up a mess not of their making. But polls show that the Tories' numbers are boosted by the voters' high regard for David Cameron, while Labour's are dragged down by their lukewarm view of Ed Miliband. Comres found just 24% regard Miliband as a credible prime minister-in-waiting – compared to 57% who do not.

There was similarly depressing reading to be found in a voluminous survey commissioned, admittedly, by the former Tory party treasurer Lord Ashcroft, but whose reliability has not been doubted. He found a Cameron premium, with the PM more popular than his party, as well as a Miliband deficit, with more than one in three voters less favourable to Miliband than they are to Labour. The words focus groups used to describe Cameron were "determined", "competent" and "ruthless" – while the one volunteered for Miliband was "weird".

Was he deemed weird because of his stance on the 50p tax rate or on climate change? No. Those surveyed cited his fighting his brother for the leadership (which they called "creepy"), his failure to get married until recently, and his way of speaking ("geeky").

Politicians and those around them – including those of us who spill gallons of ink each week discussing the smallest policy shifts, trying to calculate their impact on the electorate's preferences – recoil from contemplating the implications of all this. It pains them – us – to think elections could be settled by matters so trivial. I remember long conversations with the Gordon Brown camp, in which they would speak of dividing lines and the like, confident that a clever strategic move on, say, the economy could transform his fortunes – when the unpalatable truth was that voters had simply taken a long, hard look at him and decided that they did not want him as their prime minister. The same fate dispatched William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.

Something similar is afoot in London, where Labour is currently 20 points ahead of the Tories – and where, despite that, Ken Livingstone is trailing far behind Boris Johnson. Why? According to YouGov's Peter Kellner: "It's an instinctive judgment, it's about character." Boris has out-Kenned Ken, stealing his predecessor's clothes as the cheeky, rebel politician. "Ken reinvented himself as a personality politician and he's now up against someone who does personality politics better than him," says Kellner.

It's not always been this way. Clement Attlee could be elected without having the obvious leadership look we'd identify today. Nor would Edward Heath, or even Harold Wilson, meet the modern definition of charisma. John Major was famously grey, yet he won in 1992 – but that was partly because he was up against Neil Kinnock, against whom many voters took a strong dislike. Ed Miliband's problem is that he is competing in Cameron against a man who has long looked the part, who even in a 10-second appearance on television has that mysterious, chemical quality that suggests a leader. Whatever that is, Miliband does not have it – yet.

Many will bristle at this kind of talk, insisting that such things should not matter, that, as Tony Benn always used to say, it's the issues that count. But Benn – no slouch as a personality politician himself – was always hopelessly idealistic on that score. Personalities do count. As I've written before, quoting an old teacher of mine: people don't believe in ideas, they believe in people who believe in ideas.

So this is the problem for Ed Miliband. He is a decent, clever man but he does not look the part. He looks too young; he looks more like the speechwriter than the speechgiver, an adviser to the leader rather than the leader. That could change; he might grow into the role over the next three-and-a-half years. One aide suggests that Miliband has challenged every other bit of conventional political wisdom – running against his brother, being unmarried, taking on Rupert Murdoch – and that maybe he will defy this one too.

"He's not an identikit politician," that aide admits, seeing strength in that fact. At this moment when everything is in flux and when the Labour leader is seeking to break a 30-year consensus on the economy, perhaps it is right to think that the old, admittedly shallow rules on what a prime minister must look like are ready to be broken too.

But it has unfortunate echoes of the Brownite refrain circa 2007, that people were ready for a non-celebrity leader for more sober times. It sounds principled, it sounds laudable. But right now the Tories are much safer than they should be, insulated by a leader with charisma and a touch of the X-factor. Labour desperately needs some of that too.

REM (RIP)

2011-09-28T08:45:00.000-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-09-28T05:36:00.000-07:00

Yusuf Islam in 2007

2011-09-26T13:48:00.000-07:00

Cat Stevens in 1971

2011-09-26T13:43:00.000-07:00

Violence in Human History

2011-09-26T10:34:00.000-07:00

When you heard that a gunman had slaughtered scores of Norwegian teenagers on a holiday island earlier this summer, did you think that here was another symptom of our sick and violent world? So did I, until I read Steven Pinker's brilliant, mind-altering book about the decline of violence. Pinker does not deny that individual human beings are capable of the most appalling acts of savagery. But the test of our propensity for violence is how the rest of us respond. Once it would have been basic human instinct to react to violence on this scale with more violence. But where were the reprisals, the mob rampages, the demands for the torture and killing of the perpetrator? Instead, the Norwegian people responded with remarkable compassion and restraint: love-bombing instead of real bombing. What happened in Norway this summer showed just how peace-loving we have become.

Pinker thinks that most of what we believe about violence is wrong. To convince us he sets himself two tasks. First, to demonstrate that the past was a far nastier place than we might have imagined. Second, that the present is far nicer than we might have noticed. So to start with we get a litany of horrors from ancient and not-so-ancient history: a catalogue of the unspeakable things that human beings have traditionally been willing to do to each other. This is slightly overdone, since anyone who thinks that, say, medieval Europe was a friendly, peaceable place can't have thought about it very much. Still, it is hard not to be occasionally struck dumb by just how horrible people used to be. The image I can't get out of my head is of a hollow brass cow used for roasting people alive. Its mouth was left open so that their screams would sound like the cow was mooing, adding to the amusement of onlookers.

The real fascination of this book is how we got from being a species that enjoyed the spectacle of roasting each other alive to one that believes child-killers have the same rights as everyone else. As Pinker shows, it is both a long story and a relatively recent one. The first thing that had to happen was the move from a nomadic, hunter-gatherer existence (where your chances of meeting a violent end could be as high as 50:50) to settled communities. The trouble was that early governments showed themselves at least as capable of cruelty as anyone else: most of the truly horrific instruments of torture Pinker describes were designed and employed by servants of the state. As the 17th-century philosopher John Locke remarked of the escape from the state of nature to so-called civilisation: why run away from polecats only to be devoured by lions?

So the next thing that had to happen was the state had to be properly civilised. This took place over the course of what we have come to call the enlightenment, thanks in part to philosophers such as Locke. In both private and public life – covering everything from table manners to bills of rights – the means were found to restrain our worst instincts. Slowly, painfully, but ultimately successfully torture was outlawed, slavery was abolished, democracy became established and people discovered that they could rely on the state to protect them.

Yet the enlightenment has acquired something of a bad name. Why? The answer is simply put: the 20th century, surely the most appallingly violent of them all, scarred by total war, genocide and other mass killings on an almost unimaginable scale. All those table manners and bills of rights didn't prevent the Holocaust, did they? At the heart of this book is Pinker's careful, compelling account of why the 20th century does not invalidate his thesis that violence is in a long decline. He makes his case in three ways. First, with a multitude of tables and charts he shows that our view of the century is coloured by presentism: we think it's the worst simply because it's the most recent and we know more about it. If we had equivalent coverage of the whole of human history (how many books have been published about the second world war compared to, say, the Mongol conquests of the 13th century?) we would see that all of it has been scarred by mass slaughters, some of them proportionately even worse than the horrors of the past hundred years.

Second, Pinker argues that the violence of the 20th century is best understood as a series of random spasms rather than part of a trend. The two world wars were essentially freak events, driven by contingency and in some cases lunacy: a bit like the killings on Utøya magnified a millionfold. They do not reflect the default condition of mankind. The evidence for this is the third part of Pinker's case: look at what has happened since 1945, as the world has become immeasurably more peaceful on almost every count. Of course, there have been horrors (Mao, Pol Pot) but no one can doubt that the arrow has been pointing away from the violence of the first half of the 20th century, not back towards more of it.

Pinker calls the post-1945 period "the long peace". But the real surprise is what he calls "the short peace", which corresponds to the 20 years since the end of the cold war. I am one of those who like to believe that the idea of 1989 as some fundamental turning point in human history is absurd: the world is just as dangerous as it has always been. But Pinker shows that for most people in most ways it has become much less dangerous. There have not just been fewer wars, but in the wars there have been many fewer people have died. Terrorism is down, not up. All sorts of disadvantaged groups – women, children, ethnic minorities, even animals – are much less likely to be victims of violence across many parts of the world, and the trend is spreading. Part of the reason we fail to notice this picture is that it is so pervasive: we are more aware of violence simply because we have become so unused to it.

At the outset Pinker calls the story he has to tell "maybe the most important thing that has ever happened in human history". That depends. If you told a medieval peasant that all the horsemen of the apocalypse that blighted his (and even more so her) life would be vanquished by the 21st century – famine and disease as well as war and violence – it might be the first two that seemed the real miracles (as well as being responsible for saving many more lives). Some peasants (though here perhaps more the hims than the hers) might also feel a little ambivalent about the decline of violence. Human aggression, unlike famine and disease, is not just some capricious act of God. It is part of who we are. Giving it up might leave even a victimised peasant feeling a little diminished.

Pinker accepts we have not abolished violence in the way that we have abolished smallpox. In the final section of the book he moves from history to evolutionary psychology to show that human beings are always torn between their inner demons and their better angels. What decides us between them is not virtue or vice but strategic calculation. We resort to violence when violence seems the better bet. We resist it when it seems riskier than the alternative. That's why violence can be self-reinforcing – as in the tit-for-tat world of the hunter-gatherers – but it's also why peace can be self-reinforcing – as in the love-bomb world we inhabit now. Pinker is adamant that we should not be complacent about the decline of violence: the inner demons are still there. But neither should we be fatalistic: as things stand, our better angels are a truer reflection of who we are.

What might change that? As I was reading this book I was repeatedly reminded of two novels. One is Lord of the Flies, an earlier generation's definitive allegory of the violence lurking in us all. Pinker's book makes Golding's vision look dated: there is no state of nature bubbling away beneath the surface of civilised man, notwithstanding all the hysterical nonsense that has been uttered about the recent riots (which were, for riots, remarkably unviolent). The other novel is Cormac McCarthy's The Road, this generation's definitive allegory of how it could all go wrong. McCarthy pictures a world in which some random future spasm (perhaps an environmental catastrophe) leaves us all unhinged and lets the inner demons loose. Does our gradual move away from violence towards civility leave us better or worse equipped to deal with the next great calamity when it comes? No one can know, and Pinker does not pretend to provide an answer. But in the meantime, everyone should read this astonishing book.

Newton, Einstein... Ereditato?

2011-09-26T10:28:00.000-07:00

The tales science tells about the universe star one steadfast hero: the velocity of light. With Einstein, the space and time of Newton's day lost their uniformity, even the solid idea of matter melted into air. But the steady speed of electromagnetic radiation (the c in E = mc²) proved a sturdy enough foundation stone for the old genius to be able to reconstruct physics, and thereby rescue basic notions of cause and effect. Now Professor Antonio Ereditato, a man with singularly apt initials, is reporting that the tiny neutrinos that his team have been blasting under the Alps have clocked up a superluminal pace. A mistake? Very likely, which is why Ereditato and co are releasing their data in the expectation that someone out there will find a flaw, and restore the conceptual order. But what if the finding, which is based on 15,000 observations and has passed all the ordinary statistical tests, is instead confirmed? That would be insensible, which is to say profs would be muttering "does not compute"; but the history of science cautions against branding it unthinkable. That was once the verdict passed on heretical talk of the Earth spinning round the sun, as opposed to the other way round. Recall, too, that it was the then inexplicable Michelson-Morley experiment which encouraged the spread of Einstein's early ideas, and the baffling perihelion precession of Mercury which lent support to his general theory. The first thing in science is to face the facts; making sense of them has to come second.

No Words Needed

2011-09-24T05:23:00.000-07:00

How To Lose $2.3bn

2011-09-20T03:16:00.000-07:00

By now, you'll have heard all about Kweku Adoboli, the City trader charged with hiding $2.3bn (£1.46bn) of losses from his bank. You'll have seen the moody black and white photos he posted on Facebook, along with those made-for-tabloid confessional updates such as "Need a miracle". And you'll have read how UBS managers didn't have a clue about the 31-year-old's rogue trading right up until last week.

In the olden, golden days, the most effective way of taking loads of money off a bank was to rob it. Nowadays, if you really want to hit a bank where it hurts, you go and work for it. The Brinks-MAT heist of the early 80s was worth £68m in today's money. The robbery of the Northern Bank headquarters in Belfast in Christmas 2004 netted the equivalent of £31m. Not bad for a day's work, but pocket shrapnel compared with the £4.3bn that Jérôme Kerviel's rogue trading cost Société Générale in 2008, or the £1.2bn of damage (roughly adjusted for inflation) that Nick Leeson did to Barings in the 90s. Besides, rogue trading is a much lower-impact activity than bank robbery, requiring neither balaclavas nor a cosh, but merely some smart slacks and a plausible manner.

The downsides are obvious: get caught and you'll probably get banged up, and never again be allowed within 10 feet of a cash register. On the other hand, your life might become the subject of a film, preferably starring Ewan McGregor trying out his gassy-lager cockney.

Those, briskly rattled off, are the caveats. So, on the strict understanding that you are not actually going to do anything illegal or even vaguely naughty with this information, let me present a five-point guide to rogue trading – or how to lose $2.3bn without your bosses noticing.

First, understand that you don't need to be especially roguish to be a rogue trader. Anyone can do it. Senior bankers don't want to let on, of course, which is why the then-chief executive of France's giant SocGen referred to Kerviel as both an "evil genius" and a "financial terrorist". He was nothing of the sort – just a lowly employee who made a series of big and wrong bets and then covered them up by forging trades, faking emails and making up clients.

Second, come from the wrong background. Stars in a blue-chip finance firm such as SocGen often come with either the right postgraduate degree from the right university – they land in the right departments and stay there, landing the best promotions. They know one patch of one part of their banks – and are blank about the rest, which makes them useless white-collar criminals.

Yet neither Kerviel nor Leeson started out as traders – but in admin positions that taught them how their banks' compliance and other systems worked. It was that knowledge that enabled the two men to go rogue.

Third, read Codes of Finance by Vincent Lepinay. The first in-depth anthropological study of how banks invent new financial products (such as the newfangled derivatives that helped cause the credit crisis), it's really aimed at academics. But would-be rogue traders will find this new book invaluable, as it lays out all the chinks in the modern investment bank. Lepinay spent nearly two years in a huge French bank that he refers to as General Bank, and his study is both highly revealing and slightly farcical.

The press often talks about investment bankers as if they are all one tribe; but as the MIT researcher describes it, there are instead lots of different factions – who have a hard time even understanding each other. The creators of these new derivatives often have top MBAs and look down upon the quant nerds, who deal with prices and have physics degrees. The quants feel superior to the traders, who rely upon them like a tour party relies on its translator. And then there are the salespeople – who just want to flog the things, be they CDOs, CLOs or just plain CRAP. Then there are the risk controllers, who approach the banks' stars with rightful trepidation, and the senior management, who only pop in once a week. What this means for a would-be rogue trader is that there are more gaps in an investment bank's organisation than in the dentistry of the Wife of Bath.

Fourth, work on the most newfangled products, because hardly anyone else will understand what you're up to. Adoboli (who, let me stress, has yet to enter a plea) was in exchange traded funds – which used to look like unit trusts, but have got increasingly complicated. One of the top market regulators, Mario Draghi, recently described ETFs as "reminiscent of what happened in the securitisation market before the crisis". Read that quote again: he's comparing them to sub-prime mortgages. Most of us should get very worried; rogue traders should go steaming in.

Finally, applaud the calls to separate investment wizardy from high-street banking. In finance, the fashionable thing to say is that the UBS scandal proves the Vickers Commission right to call for a ringfence. True, it might protect taxpayers from banking losses, but rogue trading is a product of dysfunctional institutions and the finance sector's love of innovation as a way of skimming off more profits. To have a chance of stopping it, we'll need to make all finance a lot simpler.

Carter, The Pacifist

2011-09-14T01:59:00.000-07:00

Tanzania

2011-09-10T10:49:00.001-07:00

Go(l)d

2011-09-09T23:51:00.000-07:00

Gold - the chemical element Au with atomic number 79 - "has never been worth zero". King Tutankhamen and the Incas understood the value and scarcity of gold and used it as a symbol of wealth and power. Nothing has changed since.

Kia Ora from Aotearoa

2011-09-09T07:47:00.000-07:00

Hallelujah

2011-09-08T13:48:00.000-07:00

I've heard there was a secret chord
That David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do you?
It goes like this
The fourth, the fifth
The minor fall, the major lift
The baffled king composing Hallelujah
Hallelujah…

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair
She broke your throne, and she cut your hair
And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah

Baby I have been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you.
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
Love is not a victory march
It's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah…

There was a time you let me know
What's really going on below
But now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in with you
The holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah…

Maybe there’s a God above
But all I’ve ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It’s not a cry you can hear at night
It’s not somebody who has seen the light
It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah…

You say I took the name in vain
I don't even know the name
But if I did, well really, what's it to you?
There's a blaze of light in every word
It doesn't matter which you heard
The holy or the broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah…

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though it all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Hallelujah, Hallelujah…

by Leonard Cohen

Language Transformed Humanity

2011-09-08T13:31:00.000-07:00

Cartoon Of The Day

2011-09-08T12:30:00.000-07:00

African (des)Union

2011-09-08T04:59:00.000-07:00

THE UN estimates that 12m people across the Horn of Africa may still be at risk of starvation. Over 30,000 old people and children may already have died. The Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya hosts 400,000 Somalis and could receive another 100,000 by the end of the year. In response the continent’s overseeing body, the African Union (AU), recently held a pledging conference.

The idea was for African heads of state to come to the AU headquarters in Ethiopia’s capital, Addis Ababa, and make a bold 21st-century statement of African brotherhood. After several postponements, the conference took place on August 25th—but only 20 representatives of the AU’s 54 countries turned up, plus a handful of heads of state, notably those of Ethiopia, Somalia, Djibouti and Equatorial Guinea, whose president holds the AU’s annual chair.

Together they pledged just $50m; the UN says another $1.1 billion is urgently needed. It is not clear when this offering will be deposited with the AU for distribution to humanitarian agencies. Jean Ping, a Gabonese former foreign minister who runs the AU’s permanent commission, talked up the conference by adding in $300m in funds reshuffled from the African Development Bank. He noted that AU employees had given two days’ salary towards famine relief.

By contrast, the Turkish public alone has raised $200m in the past month. And Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, visited Mogadishu, Somalia’s wrecked and dangerous capital, along with members of his family and cabinet, to show—in his words—“common humanity”. South Africa’s government, by contrast, pledged just $1m.

The AU’s main contribution to Somalia has been a military force, drawn mainly from Uganda and Burundi, which has prevented an extreme Islamist group known as the Shabab from taking over the capital. This force also protected Mr Erdogan during his visit.

Whereas the AU and its richest members showed little interest in tackling the famine, it has been left to ordinary Africans to campaign on social networks and by texting money via mobile phones. An organisation called Africans Act 4 Africa says that Kenyans alone have texted $2m. Some African businesses have been generous too, pledging a lot more than South Africa’s government. And smaller fry have also made their mark. Abdirashid Duale, the owner of Dahabshiil, a money-transfer company based in Somaliland, has given $100,000. “Just the beginning,” he says.

Sugus!

2011-09-07T06:05:00.000-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-09-07T05:56:00.000-07:00

Poem Of The Day

2011-09-07T01:16:00.000-07:00

For what I did

And did not do

And do without

In my old age

Rue, not rage

Against that night

We go into,

Sets me straight

On what to do

Before I die–

Sit in the shade,

Look at the sky.

by Samuel Menashe

9/11 - The Photo

2011-09-05T13:01:00.000-07:00

Optimistic Little Poem

2011-09-04T22:44:00.000-07:00

Now and then it happens
that somebody shouts for help
and somebody else jumps in at once
and absolutely gratis.

Here in the thick of the grossest capitalism
round the corner comes the shining fire brigade
and extinguishes, or suddenly
there's silver in the beggar's hat.

Mornings the streets are full
of people hurrying here and there without
daggers in their hands, quite equably
after milk or radishes.

As though in a time of deepest peace.

A splendid sight.

by Hans Magnus Enzesberger

Race and Riots

2011-09-04T02:54:00.000-07:00

IF THERE was any consolation to be had from the recent English riots, it was that they did not pit one racial community against the police (as in Brixton and elsewhere in the 1980s), or one such community against another (as in Bradford and elsewhere in 2001). Yet the density of black people among the rioters suggests that race played some part, even if few politicians are keen to contemplate it. Just what that role was is a matter of great concern to thoughtful black Britons.

Black people make up slightly less than 3% of the British population. But in the CCTV snaps of rioters that the police in London, Birmingham and Manchester have put on the internet, slightly more than half seem to be black. Many of the areas in which rioting took place, such as Tottenham, Hackney and Brixton, are largely black. In Scotland, Wales and north-east England, which have small black populations, there was no rioting.

Poverty can only be part of the explanation for this pattern. While blacks are, by and large, poorer than whites, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis are poorer still. There was no disorder in areas with large Asian populations, including in London; CCTV pictures suggest there were few Asian looters. (The fact that the trouble coincided with Ramadan might—or might not—be a factor in this quiescence.)

The black community suffers other, older and perhaps related problems, too. Black children are disproportionately likely to be excluded from school, and black adults to go to prison (see chart). African-Caribbean males are a special worry. African-Caribbean boys do much worse in school than African-Caribbean girls or African boys. The most recent available analysis of GCSE results by race and sex, which was done in 2009, shows that 56% of African-Caribbean boys got five A-C grades at GCSE, compared with 65% of African boys and 70% of African-Caribbean girls (for all pupils, the figure was 74%).

This is sensitive stuff. Many of the black leaders who are prepared to talk about it do not want to be quoted. They tend to home in on three issues, two of which affect white people too.

The first is family breakdown. David Lammy, the MP for Tottenham in north London, where the first riots broke out, and whose father left when he was 11, has spoken movingly on the subject. He points out that, while family breakdown is increasingly prevalent in white society, it is far more common among blacks: 65% of black Caribbean children in Britain grow up in a single-parent family; nine out of ten of those households are headed by women. Children brought up in one-parent families are more likely to take drugs, drop out of school and end up in prison.

A second concern is culture. Tony Sewell, whose charity, Generating Genius, promotes maths and science among black boys, fingers the rap and hip-hop music that MTV popularised from the 1980s: “Black popular culture used to be based on spirituality and social justice…Now we have a music that glorifies violence, materialism and sex.” Lindsay Johns, a writer who mentors young black people in Peckham, south London, adds another bugbear: “achingly PC educationalists, who call ghetto-speak ‘culturally rich’ and ‘empowering’. Rubbish. It’s a mashed-up, debased language that spectacularly disables our young people, because nobody will give them a job if they talk like that.”

The shortage of other role models and templates of success in the black community makes its youngsters especially susceptible to these influences. Yet they reach others too. “Black male culture is powerful stuff,” says Mr Sewell. Firms use black street culture to sell fashionable goods such as trainers. As a result, he says, it has far more sway among other ethnic groups than it did 20 years ago. “Youngsters in other communities want to be part of it; so if it is a problem for the black community, it becomes a problem for everybody.”

The third issue, which is particular to ethnic minorities and perhaps black people above all, is racism, or the perception of it. The unrest in Tottenham began at a protest against the killing of an armed black man by police; some blame police racism for the ensuing violence. At the Samuel Lithgow Youth Centre in Camden, north London, Jessica, a black 13-year-old girl, says her brother was searched twice on a recent shopping outing: “It doesn’t look as though they’re going for any other race.” Stephanie, a 17-year-old girl of Bulgarian origin, concurs. When she hung out with a mixed-race bunch, the police used to search the black boys and nobody else, she says. Official figures lend some credence to these anecdotes: in instances unrelated to terrorism, blacks are five times more likely to be stopped and searched than whites by London’s Metropolitan Police.

Even if the police are more likely to pick on black boys, both the police and society as a whole are far less racist than in the past. Yet history lingers. A teacher says, “Everybody in the black community is told constantly that they’re victims. Parents think the police are racist, the teachers are racist and the establishment is racist. And they tell that to their kids.” If people believe the law to be racist, some may not regard breaking it as morally wrong.

These problems may be entrenched, but they are superable. Mr Sewell’s outfit has helped 40 black boys from tough schools to get into top universities. Leaders of Tomorrow, the mentoring scheme with which Mr Johns volunteers, has helped students get scholarships to some of the country’s best independent schools. Katharine Birbalsingh, an outspoken teacher, is trying to start a new “free school” to combat underachievement in Lambeth, one of London’s poorest boroughs. And, as Mr Lammy points out, “Tottenham has just had its best exam results ever. Most kids in Tottenham weren’t rioting. They were getting good GCSEs.”

The Horse & The Dog

2011-09-03T14:40:00.000-07:00

The Time Lord

2011-09-03T11:34:00.000-07:00

REM

2011-09-03T11:14:00.000-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-09-03T10:42:00.000-07:00

Curves Of The Day

2011-09-03T10:28:00.000-07:00

What would Einstein say?

2011-09-03T09:39:00.000-07:00

In a Reflection published on August 25, 2010 under the title of “The Opinion of an Expert”, I mentioned a really unusual activity of the United States and its allies which, in my opinion, underlines the risk of a nuclear conflict with Iran. I was referring to a long article by the well-known journalist Jeffrey Goldberg, published in the US journal The Atlantic in September of that year, entitled “The Point of No Return”.

Goldberg was not anti-Israeli, quite the opposite; he is an admirer of Israel and holds double citizenship with the US and also did his military service in that country.

At the start of his article he wrote: “It is possible, as well, that “foiling operations” conducted by the intelligence agencies of Israel, the United States, Great Britain, and other Western powers—programs designed to subvert the Iranian nuclear effort through sabotage and, on occasion, the carefully engineered disappearances of nuclear scientists—will have hindered Iran’s progress in some significant way”

The parentheses in the paragraph are also his.

After mentioning the enigmatic phrase, I carried on with the analysis of that Gordian knot of international politics that could lead to the war which was so feared by Einstein. What would he say if he had learned about the “frustration operations” destined to make the most capable nuclear scientists disappear?

Maybe because it was so absurd and incredible, I didn’t pay too much attention to it, but months later, upon reading the recent accusations by the Iranian government, as well as news and opinions of well-informed people, the memory of that paragraph returned to my mind with a vengeance.

Four weeks before the end of 2010, an AFP agency dispatch informed:

“An Iranian nuclear scientist has been killed.

“Teheran accuses the United States and Israel of being behind a double assassination.

“AFP. November 30, 2010

“‘The hand of western governments and the Zionist regime is behind the assassination attempts’. Mahmud Ahmadineyad had no doubts when it came to look for the people guilty of the double attack on the nuclear experts that took place early yesterday in Teheran. Majid Shariari, professor at the Shahid Beheshti University of Teheran and member of the Nuclear Society of Iran lost his life and his wife was injured in an explosion reported a few metres from their home. His colleague Fereydoon Abbasi, a laser physicist at the same university and his wife were also injured after a similar attack. Even though some newspapers announced Abbasi’s death, it was finally the Mehr agency that confirmed that he had managed to save his life. According to the Fars agency, ‘unknown terrorists’ on motorcycles drove closet o the vehicles to plant the lapa bombs.”

“Members of the Ahmadineyad Executive and the Minister of the Interior, Mostafa Mohamad Najjar, directly accused the CIA and Mossad – the intelligence services of the US and Israel, respectively – of being behind these actions that presume a new blow for the country’s nuclear race at the doors of a possible new round of talks with the 5+1 members...”

“With yesterday’s attempt there are now three Iranian scientists who have been killed since 2007. Dr. Masoud Alí Mohamadi lost his life in Teheran last January after the explosion of a bomb as he was leaving his home, a death that has not yet been cleared up by the authorities who also accused the western intelligence agencies of trying to abort what they considered to be a right, the nuclear race for civilian purposes. The first victim in the heart of the scientific community was Ardeshir Hosseinpour, killed under strange circumstances in 2007 at the nuclear centre of Isfahan.”

I don’t remember any other moment in history when the assassination of scientists has been transformed into official policy on the part of a group of powers armed with nuclear weapons. The worst is that, in the case of Iran, it is being applied on an Islamic nation, with which, even if they are able to compete and surpass it in technology, they could never do it in a field where, for cultural and religious questions, it could surpass them many times in the willingness of its citizens to die at any moment if Iran should decide to apply the same absurd and criminal formula on the professionals of their adversaries.

There are other serious events related to the carnage of scientists, organized by Israel, the US, Great Britain and other powers against the Iranian scientists, something about which the mass media does not inform world opinion.

An article by Christian Elia published on the Rebelión website on August 25, 2010, reports that:

An explosion has killed the father of the “drones” (unmanned planes) – of Iran – but he is just the last of the scientists who have lost their lives in the country.

“To find a photo of Reza Baruni on the Internet is a mission impossible. However, in the last few days, his name was at the centre of a mystery that has many international aspects...”

The only thing certain is that Reza Baruni, the Iranian aeronautical engineer, is dead. An air of absolute mystery hangs over everything else. All the industry analysts consider Baruni to be the father of the [...] UAVs (unmanned vehicles) of the Islamic Republic [...]. On August 1^st, 2010, his house was blown up.”

“On August 17, 2010, Debka (very close to Israeli intelligence) publishes news of Baruni’s death and reveals its conclusions: the Iranian engineer’s home blew up because of the explosion of three very powerful explosive devices. Baruni was murdered.”

“But the murkiest episode in contrast is the death of Massud Ali-Mohammadi, professor of nuclear physics at Teheran University, murdered on January 11, 2010 in the Iranian capital. Professor Ali-Mohammadi died in the explosion of a motorcycle-bomb detonated from a distance at the time the professor was leaving his home to go to work…”

An article published on the CubaDebate website informs:

“Israel acknowledges that it has murdered an Iranian scientist last week.”

“Mossad, the Israeli secret service, acknowledged that last week it murdered Majid Shahriari and wounded another physicist in Iran, according to Mossad sources, in an operation carried out in Teheran. ‘It is the latest operation by the head of the Mossad’, the people heading Israeli secret services state with satisfaction at a meeting in their Gelilot headquarters to the north of Tel Aviv.”

“Gordon Thomas, a British expert in the Mossad, confirmed in Britain’s Sunday Telegraph that Israel is responsible for this double murder destined to obstruct the Iranian nuclear program.”

“Thomas states that all the Israeli assassination attempts in the last few years against personalities associated with the Iranian nuclear project have been committed by the Kidon (bayonet) unit. According to the Jewish newspaper Yediot Ahronot this unit is made up of 38 agents. Five of them are women. They are all between 20 and 30 years old and they speak several languages – including Persian – and they are able to come and go from Iran with ease. They are based in the Negev Desert.”

In the days of the Diaspora, the left wing in the world united in solidarity with the people of Israel. Persecuted for their race and religion, many of them fought in the ranks of the revolutionary parties. The peoples condemned the concentration camps that the European and world bourgeoisie wanted to ignore.

Today the leaders of the State of Israel practice genocide and are associating themselves with the most reactionary forces on the planet.

The alliance between the leaders of that State and the South Africa of the hateful apartheid regime is still to be cleared up; in complicity with the United States they supplied the technology to develop the nuclear weapons directed towards striking at the Cuban troops which, in 1975, were confronting the invasion of racist South Africa, whose disdain and hatred of the African peoples was no different from the Nazi ideology which murdered millions of Jews, Russians, gypsies and other European nationalities in the concentration camps of Europe.

If it hadn’t been for the Iranian revolution – stripped of weapons it swept over the best-equipped ally of the United States on the flank of the Soviet super-power – today it would be the Shah of Iran, supplied with nuclear weapons, and not Israel, who would be the principal bulwark of the Yankee and NATO empire in that region that is so strategic and immensely rich in oil and gas for the sure supply of the most developed countries on the planet.

It is an almost inexhaustible subject.

Fidel Castro Ruz

January 6, 2011

The Guardian On Assange

2011-09-03T09:05:00.000-07:00

We are learning in numerous ways how hard it is, in a digital age, to keep control of information. Voice messages, emails, corporate documents, medical records, DNA, government secrets – all are vulnerable to hacking, snooping and simple spillage. From the moment a hacker (or, possibly, a whistleblower) passed a vast store of US government and military records to WikiLeaks it was always on the cards that this data would eventually spill out indiscriminately into the open. This week most of it has – accelerated by WikiLeaks itself, which chose to publish the state department cables in unredacted form.

This paper, and the four other news organisations involved in publishing heavily edited selections from the war logs and cables last year, are united in condemning this act. From the start of our collaboration, it was clear to the newspapers – and apparently accepted, if reluctantly, by WikiLeaks's founder, Julian Assange – that it was necessary to redact the material in order to minimise the potential risk to vulnerable people who might be placed in harm's way by publication. That joint exercise, which ended last December, has never been shown to have placed an individual's life at risk.

But, with the well-documented rifts in the original WikiLeaks team last year, the data was not secured. One copy was obtained by Heather Brooke, the freedom of information campaigner. It now appears that last December another WikiLeaks employee was responsible for a further leak when he placed the unredacted cables on a peer-to-peer site with an old password – motivated, it seems, by the arrest of Assange on allegations concerning his private life. It is not clear that even Assange – distracted by his legal actions over the Swedish sex allegations – knew of this act. This, to be clear, was not the original file accessed by the Guardian last year, which was, as agreed with WikiLeaks, removed from a secure file server after we had obtained a copy and never compromised.

A handful of people knew of the existence of this republished file and, realising its potential for harm, they did not publish any clues as to how it might be accessed. WikiLeaks, by contrast, tried to blame others for the leak, hinted at how it could be accessed, and then finally decided to publish it all to the world in an unredacted form.

Some WikiLeaks devotees and extreme freedom of information advocates will applaud this act. We don't. We join the New York Times, Der Speigel, Le Monde and El País in condemning it. Many of our newspapers' reporters and editors worked hard to publish material based on the cables in a responsible, comprehensible and contextualised form. We continue to believe in the validity and benefits of this collaboration in transparency. But we don't count ourselves in that tiny fringe of people who would regard themselves as information absolutists – people who believe it is right in all circumstances to make all information free to all. The public interest in all acts of disclosure has to be weighed against the potential harm that can result.

It had never been entirely clear whether Assange thought he had a consistent position on this issue. At various times he has scorned those who urged redaction; at others he has portrayed himself as an advocate of responsible redaction. He shows little or no understanding of the legal constraints facing less free souls than himself, often voicing contempt for publishers constrained by the laws of particular jurisdictions. At its best Wikileaks seemed to offer the hope of frustrating the most repressive and restrictive. But the organisation has dwindled to being the vehicle of one flawed individual – occasionally brilliant, but increasingly volatile and erratic. There was no compelling need, even with the recent disclosures of the internal leak, for WikiLeaks to publish all the material in the form in which it did. Julian Assange took a clear decision this week: he must take the responsibility for that.

Editorial of The Guardian

Stop The Fa(s)t Train (2)

2011-09-03T02:05:00.000-07:00

THE pound stores, factory seconds shops, bookies and boarded-up windows around Stoke-on-Trent railway station do not bespeak a thriving city. A meagre tourist trade to the home of England’s historic pottery industry has done little to lift its limp, post-industrial economy. And the Midlands city is expecting another blow: two direct trains an hour currently run between London and Stoke-on-Trent, but a planned new high-speed rail line is likely to bypass it. In the future the city might have fewer—and potentially slower—services to the capital.

Earlier this year the coalition government announced details of a £32 billion ($52 billion) super-fast railway line from London to Manchester and Leeds via Birmingham (see map). Philip Hammond, the transport secretary, claims it will be a “fast track” to prosperity. If the project goes ahead—and there is still, just, time to reconsider—the final route, and Stoke’s transport fate, will not be decided until 2012 at the earliest. The first trains won’t reach Birmingham until 2026, and Leeds and Manchester until 2032-3.

There are practical reasons to favour a new north-south line. Good infrastructure lasts a long time: Britain is still enjoying the fruits of Victorian railway investment. At some point in the next 20 years the existing west-coast main line will face a capacity crunch. Upgrading lines is disruptive and expensive, so constructing a new one appears sensible. The vision of a futuristic train scything across Britain at 250mph (400kph) is appealing.

But although the plan has cross-party support, the British public is not entirely convinced. Objections have so far focused on two concerns. First, the environmental damage, particularly to the Chilterns, an area of “outstanding natural beauty” and home to many well-off voters. Second, the business case for the line: the projected doubling of long-distance rail use by 2043 seems ambitious.

Less tested is the coalition’s assertion that the line will transform the prospects of the north of England, and ameliorate the north-south divide in Britain’s economy and prosperity. Mr Hammond says high-speed rail is a “once-in-a-generation” opportunity to reshape the country’s economic geography. Most of the other countries that have made big investments in high-speed lines, such as China, Italy and Spain, have likewise adduced the supposed benefits to regional development.

Yet Britain’s infrastructure demands are different from other countries’. Its regular trains are already faster than most other nations’ equivalents. Britain is sufficiently small that even without pricey futuristic technology, Manchester and Leeds are only just over two hours from London. And a greater proportion of the population is already connected to the road and rail network than elsewhere in Europe.

It is also doubtful whether the proposed link would do much to address regional variations. The effect of such projects in other countries has often been to strengthen the competitive advantage of an already dominant city. In France, more businesses have relocated their headquarters to the capital since the Paris-Lyon high-speed line opened in 1981. Since a new Spanish railroad opened in 1992, Madrid’s business population has swelled at the expense of Seville. Far from strengthening the north, then, a high-speed line might end up accentuating regional disparities. The government’s own analysis predicts that seven in ten of the new jobs the project helps to create will be in the South East.

A deeper, and mistaken, geographical belief may be at work in the minds of the Whitehall technocrats behind the venture. It is that “the north” is somehow a single, homogeneous place (a view encouraged by the signs to “The North” on motorways heading out of London). It isn’t.

In fact the putative link, designed to bridge the north-south divide, would barely even reach the north proper: Birmingham is in the Midlands; Manchester and Leeds are only around 170 miles from London; Britain stretches another 300-plus miles beyond them. And even if high-speed does boost the cities it connects, it won’t necessarily help the whole region.

The underlying assumption of high-speed rail is that proximity to London, measured in journey times, is key to regeneration. But some of those precious minutes would be saved by making fewer stops, while train frequency on the traditional west-coast main line will be cut. So for a number of places in the Midlands and the north, the new rail link will make London farther away by travel time.

It isn’t only Stoke-on-Trent that may suffer. Other places that are well-served by current timetables but which the new line would bypass, such as Crewe and Rugby, will also be hit. Trains on the old line might make more stops; passengers might be forced to take indirect routes. Coventry, for example, which currently has three fast trains to London an hour, expects to lose out on business travel, which accounts for nearly half of its visitors. The plans “send a message that Coventry is not a place to stop”, says George Duggins, deputy leader of the city’s council.

Municipal leaders in Stoke-on-Trent are already aggrieved that the new “enterprise zones” in Birmingham and Manchester, which enjoy preferential tax treatment, have drawn investment from their city. Some local businessmen are now lobbying for an additional stop on the high-speed route. For others, high-speed rail is a distraction from more urgent needs: regeneration of the local area cannot wait until its effects are felt in 20 years’ time, argues Mark Meredith, a local Labour councillor.

One-track mind

That such an infrastructure project would benefit over-mighty London and the South East is not necessarily a problem. In London GDP per head is 1.7 times the national average. If that grows, so does the economy as a whole. But this is not the government’s intended aim.

Sir Rod Eddington, a former boss of British Airways, argued in a 2006 review of Britain’s transport needs that mature economies rarely see huge benefits from a single project. “The risk is that transport policy can become the pursuit of icons,” Sir Rod warned. The government seems not to have listened. The £32 billion at its disposal might well yield a higher return if it were spent on less glitzy schemes, such as road improvements and intra-city transport initiatives. If the aim is to regenerate “the north”, the current plan might prove a high-speed route in the wrong direction.

Stop The Fa(s)t Train

2011-09-03T01:50:00.000-07:00

AT THE launch of the Liverpool-Manchester railway in 1830, a statesman was killed when he failed to spot an approaching train. That was not the last time a new train line has had unintended consequences. Victorian railways ushered in a golden age of prosperity; these days politicians across the developed world hope new rapid trains, which barrel along at over 250mph (400kph), can do the same. But high-speed rail rarely delivers the widespread economic benefits its boosters predict. The British government—the latest to be beguiled by this vision of modernity—should think again (see article).

High-speed talk is everywhere at the moment. Six countries have put large sums into “bullet” trains: Japan, France, Germany, Spain, and, more recently, Italy and China. Australia, Portugal and Indonesia are all considering new lines. And the British government is pondering plans for a £32 billion ($52 billion) link from London to the north of England. Ventures elsewhere have stumbled: China suspended new projects after a fatal collision of two high-speed trains in July; Brazil delayed plans for a rapid Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo link, after lack of interest from construction firms. Yet governments remain susceptible to the idea that such projects can help to diminish regional inequalities and promote growth.

In fact, in most developed economies high-speed railways fail to bridge regional divides and sometimes exacerbate them. Better connections strengthen the advantages of a rich city at the network’s hub: firms in wealthy regions can reach a bigger area, harming the prospects of poorer places. Even in Japan, home to the most commercially successful line, Tokyo continues to grow faster than Osaka. New Spanish rail lines have swelled Madrid’s business population to Seville’s loss. The trend in France has been for headquarters to move up the line to Paris and for fewer overnight stays elsewhere.

Even if some cities benefit, other places beyond the rail network may suffer: speed is attained partly at the cost of stops, so areas well served by existing services may find new lines bypass them. Parts of Britain, for example, fear that a new zippy railway will create a second tier of cities supplied by fewer and slower trains. High-speed lines, like other regeneration projects, often displace economic activity rather than create it.

The advantages, meanwhile, mostly accrue to business travellers. In China ticket prices are beyond the reach of most people, so new trains yawn with empty seats. Yet because high-speed lines require huge investments, usually by governments, ordinary taxpayers end up paying. So instead of redistributing wealth and opportunities, rich regions and individuals benefit at the expense of poorer ones.

Full steam ahead

Ultra-fast railways will have their day. They are a good way to cut air travel and carbon emissions, particularly where, as in China, they connect dense but distant population clusters. On shorter routes, their advantages dwindle: they can neither transform a region nor replicate the advantages of wider networks. And there is not yet such a thing as a cheap high-speed link: China’s safety failures have shown the perils of skimping in any way. At present, for most places, the marginal benefits of these fantastic feats of engineering, in terms of reduced journey times, are outweighed by the high costs.

And those costs sap funding from humbler but more efficient schemes. Especially in smaller countries, upgrading existing, slower networks often makes more sense. Capacity can be increased with longer trains and extended platforms. Some spacious first-class carriages could be converted to more compressed second-class ones; pricing may ration demand more effectively at busy times. Better signalling can increase the average speed of journeys. Britain’s non-high-speed trains, for example, are already quicker than most other countries’ equivalents. Some trains that currently run at 125mph could go faster if signals were upgraded—even if unveiling a new signal box might appeal less to politicians than inaugurating a futuristic new service.

Britain still has time to ditch this grand infrastructure project—and should. Other countries should also reconsider plans to expand or introduce such lines. A good infrastructure scheme has a long life. But a bad one can derail both the public finances and a country’s development ambitions.

Slavoj Žižek on the Riots (and everything else!)

2011-09-01T08:17:00.000-07:00

Repetition, according to Hegel, plays a crucial role in history: when something happens just once, it may be dismissed as an accident, something that might have been avoided if the situation had been handled differently; but when the same event repeats itself, it is a sign that a deeper historical process is unfolding. When Napoleon lost at Leipzig in 1813, it looked like bad luck; when he lost again at Waterloo, it was clear that his time was over. The same holds for the continuing financial crisis. In September 2008, it was presented by some as an anomaly that could be corrected through better regulations etc; now that signs of a repeated financial meltdown are gathering it is clear that we are dealing with a structural phenomenon.

We are told again and again that we are living through a debt crisis, and that we all have to share the burden and tighten our belts. All, that is, except the (very) rich. The idea of taxing them more is taboo: if we did, the argument runs, the rich would have no incentive to invest, fewer jobs would be created and we would all suffer. The only way to save ourselves from hard times is for the poor to get poorer and the rich to get richer. What should the poor do? What can they do?

Although the riots in the UK were triggered by the suspicious shooting of Mark Duggan, everyone agrees that they express a deeper unease – but of what kind? As with the car burnings in the Paris banlieues in 2005, the UK rioters had no message to deliver. (There is a clear contrast with the massive student demonstrations in November 2010, which also turned to violence. The students were making clear that they rejected the proposed reforms to higher education.) This is why it is difficult to conceive of the UK rioters in Marxist terms, as an instance of the emergence of the revolutionary subject; they fit much better the Hegelian notion of the ‘rabble’, those outside organised social space, who can express their discontent only through ‘irrational’ outbursts of destructive violence – what Hegel called ‘abstract negativity’.

There is an old story about a worker suspected of stealing: every evening, as he leaves the factory, the wheelbarrow he pushes in front of him is carefully inspected. The guards find nothing; it is always empty. Finally, the penny drops: what the worker is stealing are the wheelbarrows themselves. The guards were missing the obvious truth, just as the commentators on the riots have done. We are told that the disintegration of the Communist regimes in the early 1990s signalled the end of ideology: the time of large-scale ideological projects culminating in totalitarian catastrophe was over; we had entered a new era of rational, pragmatic politics. If the commonplace that we live in a post-ideological era is true in any sense, it can be seen in this recent outburst of violence. This was zero-degree protest, a violent action demanding nothing. In their desperate attempt to find meaning in the riots, the sociologists and editorial-writers obfuscated the enigma the riots presented.

The protesters, though underprivileged and de facto socially excluded, weren’t living on the edge of starvation. People in much worse material straits, let alone conditions of physical and ideological oppression, have been able to organise themselves into political forces with clear agendas. The fact that the rioters have no programme is therefore itself a fact to be interpreted: it tells us a great deal about our ideological-political predicament and about the kind of society we inhabit, a society which celebrates choice but in which the only available alternative to enforced democratic consensus is a blind acting out. Opposition to the system can no longer articulate itself in the form of a realistic alternative, or even as a utopian project, but can only take the shape of a meaningless outburst. What is the point of our celebrated freedom of choice when the only choice is between playing by the rules and (self-)destructive violence?

Alain Badiou has argued that we live in a social space which is increasingly experienced as ‘worldless’: in such a space, the only form protest can take is meaningless violence. Perhaps this is one of the main dangers of capitalism: although by virtue of being global it encompasses the whole world, it sustains a ‘worldless’ ideological constellation in which people are deprived of their ways of locating meaning. The fundamental lesson of globalisation is that capitalism can accommodate itself to all civilisations, from Christian to Hindu or Buddhist, from West to East: there is no global ‘capitalist worldview’, no ‘capitalist civilisation’ proper. The global dimension of capitalism represents truth without meaning.

The first conclusion to be drawn from the riots, therefore, is that both conservative and liberal reactions to the unrest are inadequate. The conservative reaction was predictable: there is no justification for such vandalism; one should use all necessary means to restore order; to prevent further explosions of this kind we need not more tolerance and social help but more discipline, hard work and a sense of responsibility. What’s wrong with this account is not only that it ignores the desperate social situation pushing young people towards violent outbursts but, perhaps more important, that it ignores the way these outbursts echo the hidden premises of conservative ideology itself. When, in the 1990s, the Conservatives launched their ‘back to basics’ campaign, its obscene complement was revealed by Norman Tebbit: ‘Man is not just a social but also a territorial animal; it must be part of our agenda to satisfy those basic instincts of tribalism and territoriality.’ This is what ‘back to basics’ was really about: the unleashing of the barbarian who lurked beneath our apparently civilised, bourgeois society, through the satisfying of the barbarian’s ‘basic instincts’. In the 1960s, Herbert Marcuse introduced the concept of ‘repressive desublimation’ to explain the ‘sexual revolution’: human drives could be desublimated, allowed free rein, and still be subject to capitalist control – viz, the porn industry. On British streets during the unrest, what we saw was not men reduced to ‘beasts’, but the stripped-down form of the ‘beast’ produced by capitalist ideology.

Meanwhile leftist liberals, no less predictably, stuck to their mantra about social programmes and integration initiatives, the neglect of which has deprived second and third-generation immigrants of their economic and social prospects: violent outbursts are the only means they have to articulate their dissatisfaction. Instead of indulging ourselves in revenge fantasies, we should make the effort to understand the deeper causes of the outbursts. Can we even imagine what it means to be a young man in a poor, racially mixed area, a priori suspected and harassed by the police, not only unemployed but often unemployable, with no hope of a future? The implication is that the conditions these people find themselves in make it inevitable that they will take to the streets. The problem with this account, though, is that it lists only the objective conditions for the riots. To riot is to make a subjective statement, implicitly to declare how one relates to one’s objective conditions.

We live in cynical times, and it’s easy to imagine a protester who, caught looting and burning a store and pressed for his reasons, would answer in the language used by social workers and sociologists, citing diminished social mobility, rising insecurity, the disintegration of paternal authority, the lack of maternal love in his early childhood. He knows what he is doing, then, but is doing it nonetheless.

It is meaningless to ponder which of these two reactions, conservative or liberal, is the worse: as Stalin would have put it, they are both worse, and that includes the warning given by both sides that the real danger of these outbursts resides in the predictable racist reaction of the ‘silent majority’. One of the forms this reaction took was the ‘tribal’ activity of the local (Turkish, Caribbean, Sikh) communities which quickly organised their own vigilante units to protect their property. Are the shopkeepers a small bourgeoisie defending their property against a genuine, if violent, protest against the system; or are they representatives of the working class, fighting the forces of social disintegration? Here too one should reject the demand to take sides. The truth is that the conflict was between two poles of the underprivileged: those who have succeeded in functioning within the system versus those who are too frustrated to go on trying. The rioters’ violence was almost exclusively directed against their own. The cars burned and the shops looted were not in rich neighbourhoods, but in the rioters’ own. The conflict is not between different parts of society; it is, at its most radical, the conflict between society and society, between those with everything, and those with nothing, to lose; between those with no stake in their community and those whose stakes are the highest.

Zygmunt Bauman characterised the riots as acts of ‘defective and disqualified consumers’: more than anything else, they were a manifestation of a consumerist desire violently enacted when unable to realise itself in the ‘proper’ way – by shopping. As such, they also contain a moment of genuine protest, in the form of an ironic response to consumerist ideology: ‘You call on us to consume while simultaneously depriving us of the means to do it properly – so here we are doing it the only way we can!’ The riots are a demonstration of the material force of ideology – so much, perhaps, for the ‘post-ideological society’. From a revolutionary point of view, the problem with the riots is not the violence as such, but the fact that the violence is not truly self-assertive. It is impotent rage and despair masked as a display of force; it is envy masked as triumphant carnival.

The riots should be situated in relation to another type of violence that the liberal majority today perceives as a threat to our way of life: terrorist attacks and suicide bombings. In both instances, violence and counter-violence are caught up in a vicious circle, each generating the forces it tries to combat. In both cases, we are dealing with blind passages à l’acte, in which violence is an implicit admission of impotence. The difference is that, in contrast to the riots in the UK or in Paris, terrorist attacks are carried out in service of the absolute Meaning provided by religion.

But weren’t the Arab uprisings a collective act of resistance that avoided the false alternative of self-destructive violence and religious fundamentalism? Unfortunately, the Egyptian summer of 2011 will be remembered as marking the end of revolution, a time when its emancipatory potential was suffocated. Its gravediggers are the army and the Islamists. The contours of the pact between the army (which is Mubarak’s army) and the Islamists (who were marginalised in the early months of the upheaval but are now gaining ground) are increasingly clear: the Islamists will tolerate the army’s material privileges and in exchange will secure ideological hegemony. The losers will be the pro-Western liberals, too weak – in spite of the CIA funding they are getting – to ‘promote democracy’, as well as the true agents of the spring events, the emerging secular left that has been trying to set up a network of civil society organisations, from trade unions to feminists. The rapidly worsening economic situation will sooner or later bring the poor, who were largely absent from the spring protests, onto the streets. There is likely to be a new explosion, and the difficult question for Egypt’s political subjects is who will succeed in directing the rage of the poor? Who will translate it into a political programme: the new secular left or the Islamists?

The predominant reaction of Western public opinion to the pact between Islamists and the army will no doubt be a triumphant display of cynical wisdom: we will be told that, as the case of (non-Arab) Iran made clear, popular upheavals in Arab countries always end in militant Islamism. Mubarak will appear as having been a much lesser evil – better to stick with the devil you know than to play around with emancipation. Against such cynicism, one should remain unconditionally faithful to the radical-emancipatory core of the Egypt uprising.

But one should also avoid the temptation of the narcissism of the lost cause: it’s too easy to admire the sublime beauty of uprisings doomed to fail. Today’s left faces the problem of ‘determinate negation’: what new order should replace the old one after the uprising, when the sublime enthusiasm of the first moment is over? In this context, the manifesto of the Spanish indignados, issued after their demonstrations in May, is revealing. The first thing that meets the eye is the pointedly apolitical tone: ‘Some of us consider ourselves progressive, others conservative. Some of us are believers, some not. Some of us have clearly defined ideologies, others are apolitical, but we are all concerned and angry about the political, economic and social outlook that we see around us: corruption among politicians, businessmen, bankers, leaving us helpless, without a voice.’ They make their protest on behalf of the ‘inalienable truths that we should abide by in our society: the right to housing, employment, culture, health, education, political participation, free personal development and consumer rights for a healthy and happy life.’ Rejecting violence, they call for an ‘ethical revolution. Instead of placing money above human beings, we shall put it back to our service. We are people, not products. I am not a product of what I buy, why I buy and who I buy from.’ Who will be the agents of this revolution? The indignados dismiss the entire political class, right and left, as corrupt and controlled by a lust for power, yet the manifesto nevertheless consists of a series of demands addressed at – whom? Not the people themselves: the indignados do not (yet) claim that no one else will do it for them, that they themselves have to be the change they want to see. And this is the fatal weakness of recent protests: they express an authentic rage which is not able to transform itself into a positive programme of sociopolitical change. They express a spirit of revolt without revolution.

The situation in Greece looks more promising, probably owing to the recent tradition of progressive self-organisation (which disappeared in Spain after the fall of the Franco regime). But even in Greece, the protest movement displays the limits of self-organisation: protesters sustain a space of egalitarian freedom with no central authority to regulate it, a public space where all are allotted the same amount of time to speak and so on. When the protesters started to debate what to do next, how to move beyond mere protest, the majority consensus was that what was needed was not a new party or a direct attempt to take state power, but a movement whose aim is to exert pressure on political parties. This is clearly not enough to impose a reorganisation of social life. To do that, one needs a strong body able to reach quick decisions and to implement them with all necessary harshness.

Sex & Zen

2011-09-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

By Invitation Only

2011-09-01T04:03:00.000-07:00

In a garden in a quiet cul-de-sac in north Armagh, a nondescript brown shed contains the Irish republican version of the Imperial War Museum.

The private collection contains the toilet-roll holder from the room where IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands died in May 1981, letters from supporters to Sands, an original rebel uniform from the 1916 Easter rising, secret communications smuggled out of the Maze prison and a 19th-century cell door from London's Pentonville jail where Irish republican prisoners were incarcerated. There are piles of original black rubber bullets fired during riots in the early 1970s. There are even Airfix-style models recreating the Maze prison.

Its owner – who lost close relatives during the Troubles – is so security-conscious he doesn't allow his name or the museum's address to be published. All visits are arranged quietly on the "republican grapevine", but have managed to bring together former republican rivals who were once deadly enemies. Former members of the Provisional and Official IRAs as well as the Irish National Liberation army have met again during private visits to the collection. Earlier this month the surviving "hooded men" – republican suspects used as "torture guinea-pigs" by the British army early in the Troubles in 1971 – gathered together for the first time in a reunion at the museum.

The Guardian was given access last week to the privately owned museum which also hosts visits by foreign tourists and even some Ulster loyalists. And the "curator" of the "History House" revealed that officials from the Republic's National Museum of Ireland in Dublin recently paid a visit.

"They wanted to buy some of the artefacts, but I wasn't for selling," the owner said. "I want this museum to remain private yet accessible and completely free. I would never charge a penny to those I allow to view it."

He said an Irish-American visitor this year at the end of a tour pulled out a chequebook. "He signed the cheque and left the amount in dollars blank and said I could put any figure down."

But the owner explained that he wouldn't "sell the artefacts either to rich private collectors or the state".

Over more than two decades he has amassed a vast array of flags, badges, posters, the casings of bullets fired from IRA rifles during the Troubles and even a crystal radio set smuggled into the Maze so that the H-Block prisoners could track the news of Sands's triumph in the Fermanagh and South Tyrone byelection the month before he died.

The collection also includes an original copy of the IRA's so-called Green Book, the code of practice for armed republicans drawn up in the 1950s. From the same era, the owner of the "History House" has put on display the steel cups IRA prisoners drank from inside the Victorian Crumlin Road jail in Belfast.

Among other artefacts are two Celtic-style crosses. Both were made from matchsticks because prison authorities denied the IRA inmates access to woodwork material. One comes from an IRA man held in Crumlin Road jail in the 1950s; the other is from the 21st century and was hand-crafted in his cell by a republican dissident prisoner.

"These crosses show how Irish republican history sometimes goes in circles," the owner said. "In the 50s, the authorities would not give republicans wood for them to make Celtic crosses, Irish harps and other Irish traditional crafts. They cited security reasons but the prisoners showed ingenuity by using matchsticks instead. They are citing the same reason today in Maghaberry jail [where prisoners are challenging conditions], and the dissident republicans are resorting back to the same tactics as their predecessors."

As if to underline his point, the owner displayed two more artefacts from his museum. They were a poster from the 1970s highlighting the case of Martin Corey, a Provisional IRA prisoner and Lurgan republican and a huge Irish Harp he made with his own hands while incarcerated in the Maze. He added that Corey is currently back in jail, locked up in Maghaberry, this time as a prisoner on the Continuity IRA wing.

More Hols Pics

2011-08-31T07:07:00.000-07:00

Picture Of The Day

2011-08-30T12:16:00.000-07:00

Integrate, Learn The Language

2011-08-29T03:18:00.000-07:00

Stroll around Carmarthen market and it quickly becomes clear how important the Welsh language is in this historic town. A young woman is discussing the price of lamb with a butcher in animated Welsh while a teenager in a hoodie is in the bookshop choosing a greetings card in the same language. At the cafe's busy tables there is little evidence of any English at all being spoken.

But language campaigners and many Welsh-speaking residents are warning such vibrancy could be lost if proposals to build thousands of new homes in Carmarthenshire go ahead.

The county council's local development plan makes the case that projected increases in population mean more than 11,000 new homes are needed in this corner of south-west Wales, including 1,200 on the edge of Carmarthen.

The fear among many proud locals is that the majority of the people moving in will not speak Welsh, a change that would pose a "huge threat" to the language.

Town councillor and sheriff Alun Lenny said the language was a fundamental part of Carmarthen life. "Thousands of people live their lives through the medium of Welsh," he said. "It's part of our being. People use Welsh when they shop, when they worship, when they socialise. Much of civic life is carried out in Welsh. It's not a superficial, quirky element."

Lenny says the plans could increase the size of the town, which has about 15,000 residents, by a fifth. "Since the 60s, there has been a constant battle to maintain the language as part of the fabric of present life and society," he said. "These plans threaten to throw all that out of kilter if many hundreds of people who don't speak Welsh – and don't wish to – suddenly move in."

Carmarthen has a wonderfully rich history. It claims to be the oldest town in Wales and the birthplace of Merlin (Myrddin in Welsh), the legendary Welsh prophet and wizard. The Romans and Normans built fortifications here and the Black Book of Carmarthen, a collection of poetry, is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts written solely in Welsh. Just over 50% of the county's population speak Welsh.

In the 1980s there was an influx of people looking to break away from English and Welsh cities, but they tended to be younger people with families who, if anything, gave the language a boost because they put children into the local schools, where they learnt Welsh.

The fear is that the next wave of new arrivals will be older people, retiring to Carmarthenshire, attracted by the relatively low property prices and the proximity of lovely countryside and beaches. But, it is felt, many of them will not bother to learn the language.

Sioned Elin, the Carmarthenshire chair of the Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, called for the south-west Wales development to be scrapped, claiming no thorough assessments had been made on the impact of housing developments on the language. "Such assessments would have almost certainly shown a huge threat," she said.

Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg says what is happening in Carmarthenshire is just one example of a "national crisis". Similar protests against developments are taking place in other areas, including Denbighshire in north-east Wales, where councillors have approved proposals for thousands of new homes. The fear there is that they will be grabbed by commuters from Cheshire and Liverpool.

The Plaid Cymru MEP Jill Evans has raised her concerns with the European Parliament about the Denbighshire plans and is backing the launch of a national movement – calling itself Waking the Dragon – against such developments.

Over the summer, the Welsh assembly government has consulted over new proposals to specify how the language issue should be factored into the local planning process. It accepts the impact of "demographic change" ought to be taken into account. The results of the consultation are being analysed and assembly members are expected to examine them in the autumn.

In its development plan, Carmarthenshire insists that any proposals will have to take the language issue into account. Developers, for example, will have to submit a "linguistic impact assessment or statement" as part of planning applications.

If problems are anticipated, "mitigation measures" such as making sure a number of homes are affordable to local people or providing "support for the language within the community" should be established.

But the plan says that it has to identify new sites for housing and businesses for the good of Carmarthenshire.

Clive Scourfield, the county council's executive board member for regeneration, accepted it was inevitable that many people arriving in the area would not speak Welsh. He urged communities to encourage newcomers to learn the language.

Back in Carmarthen market, Llio Silyn, who runs the Welsh bookshop, said she was worried that young people would not be able to afford the new homes and be squeezed out. "We haven't got anything against people from Cardiff or from England, but the worry is that they will come and push our young people out."

Silyn, who appeared in Hedd Wyn, an Oscar-nominated Welsh language film, said Welsh was vital to the area and its people: "It's a big part of who we are and our place in the world."

Language that refuses to die

• Welsh is a Celtic language, closely related to Cornish and Breton. The Welsh spoken today is directly descended from the language of the sixth century.

• The passing of the 1536 and 1542 Acts of Union made English the language of law and administration of government. Although the Welsh language was not banned, it lost its status and centuries of steady linguistic decline followed.

• Until the mid-19th century, the majority of the Welsh population could speak Welsh – more than 80%.

• The 2001 census showed that 20.8% of the population was able to speak Welsh (582,400 people), an increase compared to the 1991 census (18.7%).

• Welsh-speaking heartlands include Carmarthenshire in the south-west, Gwynedd, Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire in the north and Ceredigion in the west.

• The number of communities where more than 70% of the population was able to speak Welsh dropped to 54 according to the 2001 census, compared with 92 in 1991. It is argued that a high density of speakers is required for Welsh to be an everyday language of the community.

• Migration has had a profound effect on traditional heartlands, with many Welsh-speaking young people moving to urban areas to work, coupled with the arrival of people unable to speak Welsh.

Sources: Welsh Language Board; Welsh Assembly Government

Selling Content - That's a Job

2011-08-29T03:13:00.000-07:00

Ten years is, of course, a long time in media. Ten years ago, if you wanted to download some music, your best bet was Napster or one of the filesharing systems such as LimeWire or KaZaA. There were legal services, but they were so dire they wouldn't pass much muster today: there was PressPlay and MusicNet (from rival groups of record companies), which required $15 a month subscriptions for low-quality streaming (when most people had dialup connections, not today's broadband). You couldn't burn to CD. They were stuffed with restrictive software to prevent you sharing the songs.

What happened? Steve Jobs happened, mainly. The hardware and design team at Apple came up with the iPod (initially intended to be a way to sell more Macintosh computers), and then followed the iTunes Music Store – a great way to tie people to Apple by selling music. In 2003 Jobs persuaded the music companies – which wouldn't license their songs to bigger names like Microsoft – to go with him because, he said, Apple was tiny (which it was, at the time). The risk if people did start sharing songs from the store was minimal, he argued. The record labels looked at Apple's tiny market share (a few per cent of the PC market) and reckoned they'd sell about a million songs a year, so they signed up.

Apple sold a million in the first week of the iTunes Music Store being open (and only in the US). It sold 3m within a month. It's never looked back.

Nowadays Apple sells TV shows, films, books, apps, as well as music. We take the explosion in available content for granted. But without Jobs, it's likely we wouldn't be here at all; his negotiating skill is the thing that Apple, and possibly the media industry, will miss the most, because he got them to open up to new delivery mechanisms.

Content companies have been reluctant to let their products move to new formats if they aren't the inventors, or at least midwives. Witness Blu-ray, a Sony idea which wraps up the content so you can't ever get it off the disc (at least in theory); or 3D films. Yet neither is quite living up to its promise, and part of that comes down to people wanting to be able to move the content around – on an iPod, iPhone, iPad or even a computer – in ways the content doesn't allow. Apps downloaded directly to your mobile? Carriers would never have allowed it five years ago. Flat-rate data plans? Ditto. But all good for content creators.

Jobs pried open many content companies' thinking, because his focus was always on getting something great to the customer with as few obstacles as possible. In that sense, he was like a corporate embodiment of the internet; except he thought people should pay for what they got. He always, always insisted you should pay for value, and that extended to content too. The App and Music Store remains one of the biggest generators of purely digital revenue in the world, and certainly the most diverse; while Google's Android might be the fastest-selling smartphone mobile OS, its Market generates pitiful revenues, and I haven't heard of anyone proclaiming their successes from selling music, films or books through Google's offerings.

Jobs's resignation might look like the end of an era, and for certain parts of the technology industry it is. For the content industries, it's also a loss: Jobs was a champion of getting customers who would pay you for your stuff. The fact that magazine apps like The Daily haven't set the world alight (yet?) isn't a failure of the iPad (which is selling 9m a quarter while still only 15 months old; at the same point in the iPod's life, just 219,000 were sold in the financial quarter, compared with the 22m – 100 times more – of its peak). It's more like a reflection of our times.

So if you're wondering how Jobs's departure affects the media world, consider that it's the loss of one of the biggest boosters of paid-for content the business ever had. Who's going to replace that?

by Charles Arthur

The Press Pressed

2011-08-28T14:23:00.000-07:00

There's an awful doubt beginning to infect the media scene as autumn comes. It takes the most commonplace assumption of newspaper life and hangs a great question mark on it. We're constantly told that newspapers as we know them are in a period of transition, moving to become purely digital papers on the web, on tablets, on mobiles, on gadgets as yet uninvented. There is light at the end of a long tunnel of uncertainty, a vital transition. Yet suppose, just suppose, that there's not.

Readers who read the online runes will recognise some of the doubts involved here: advertisements priced much cheaper than print, because cyberspace is infinite and therefore infinitely available; paywalls that raise useful sums that aren't quite useful enough; tablet efforts such as Rupert Murdoch's the Daily, that begin in a blaze of publicity then disappear behind a veil of silence; phone applications that seem hugely promising until you try charging a regular rate for them.

None of this means there isn't good money to be made on the net. Some specialist sheets and smooth operators are doing that already. But your average, all-purpose paper on a standard path to survival? Forget it.

On the surface of things, cause and effect seem inexorably clear. Paid circulation of national papers slides down from 13m to 9m over a couple of decades. Internet usage for news balloons from nothing to nearly 4 million uniques a day (in the case of the Daily Mail, while the Guardian reaps the fruit of phone-hacking). One side goes up, one slips back. It's a simple equation, surely? But look closer.

Take free daily papers, the ones that, for instance, have contributed hugely to the great disaster of London circulation results. Take 750,000 Metros each morning, another 100,000 City AMs, plus 750,000 Evening Standards. Look at what's being read on your commuter train or bus. People aren't sitting with an iPad: they're turning pages of reading material that cost them nothing. This isn't the average death-of-newspapers lecture. This is free print taking over from expensive print.

And expense, of course, is another factor. A pound a day for your favourite morning read, a couple of quid on a Sunday, a magazine or two for the family? Say £600 or £700 a year. It's a big item in the midst of a big squeeze, as fewer copies sold – and disasters such as the News of the World – mean fewer and fewer newsagents can make a living. You can't easily buy something you can't easily find.

Figures that lump all newspapers together as though they're the same can be pretty misleading, too. Go back to a world before the internet. In August 1970, the Daily Mirror sold 4,486,693 a day and the Daily Express some 3,605,883. Ten years later that was down to 3,624,575 and 2,224,651 respectively. In August 1990 it was 3,121,050 and 1,608,361. Think 3.5m wiped from the two biggest titles of their day in a brutal 20 years, but don't think of the curse of the net. It didn't exist. And some papers – the Mail, the Mail on Sunday, the FT, the Times – are selling as many or more today as they were in 1990. So movements in "the sector" can be somewhat misleading.

This doesn't mean that the general sales trend isn't down, by 5% or 6% a year. But general is not particular – and neither is there any convincing correlation between individual swings and roundabouts. The Mail, with its potential 80 million unique visitors online, is holding its own in print circulation; the Express, with no web effort worth mentioning, is flaking away.

So any "transition", when and if it comes, looks patchy and unpredictable. Is the Mail in print dying? Not at all. Is the Mail online snapping at its heels? Not when all those unique visitors attract only £18m a year in advertising. Does the Daily Telegraph, for all its huge web investment, see a future without print? Specifically not. Every newspaper has a different take on things to come and a different prescription for survival (while old prescriptions based on political leanings – one left, one right etc – are surely not redundant either).

It's comforting to talk about industry tendencies and share of total audience. Trinity Mirror has been doing it for years, to convince investors that its nationals are doing better than average. But no one engaging brain needs to buy the whole story. On the contrary, there are other, simpler, consequences to consider here. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (to nominate one prize example) runs a bit short of resources. It cuts back on deliveries to outlying areas to save money. That means circulation falls faster than ever, which in turn lops away advertising cash. The old Constitution wasn't doing too badly until it decided to make things worse.

No: the supposed facts around transition can be misty going on mystic. More than that, the arithmetic doesn't always add up. If you're producing the New York Times with, say, 1,100 staff journalists (roughly double the Telegraph, Times or Guardian norm) then those reporters, commentators and correspondents – integrated to serve a print paper and a website interchangeably – are a vital expense. They bring the expertise you must have and can charge for. You need your foreign bureaus and specialists in any medium. You can't take a scythe to such costs.

The nominated nirvana of transition is an eventual digital-only operation with the heavy-industry costs of paper and presses – maybe 60% of the production bill – theoretically removed. But how does that work in an era where print and its price structures are history, and far cheaper ads and subscriptions bring in the money that's needed? Nothing you see around you anywhere in the world currently hints at revenues on the requisite scale. The Huffington Post, now beating the New York Times's numbers of unique visitors, can afford to employ only a 10th of its journalists – and still can't pay its contributors.

Free access helps ad revenue, but not enough; paid subscriptions make a contribution, but nowhere near enough. Even a profit-making news venture such as Politico, the trailblazing specialist site for US political wonks, relies on a print version and print ads to keep it in the black. And that, for all the hype, is also the case for splendidly successful specialist sites from the Wall Street Journal and FT. They prosper because they're tied to market-leading print newspapers. The two mediums can grow simultaneously, as they do at the WSJ.

Perhaps, on the Bloomberg or Thomson Reuters model, there is a life after print. But that's the weight you can place on particular services for particular audiences. A general daily paper – all-singing, all-dancing, all-providing – has a seemingly crippling cost structure to bear if it goes wholly online. One can talk, almost emotionally, about transition. But, coldly, the next generation of the news business may involve sweeping renewal instead.

Yes, you can make money from special services. Politico can do it by targeting powerful politicians. Forbes.com targets international conference organisers. Auto Trader in Britain has a vice-like grip on the used car market online (in straightforward transition from print). There are lots of good ideas; there is loads of opportunity.

But suppose – as many are beginning to do – that you look at the evolving digital landscape and ask the basic question the other way round. If you knew what you know now, would anyone have invented a newspaper in the first place, rather than news services that come free on the net (from the BBC for starters) and a myriad of separate specialist strands so that users can follow their driving interests, from hedge funds to celebrity couplings? And, in most though not all cases, the answer is no: you wouldn't have invented newspapers, with their inevitably wide spread of coverage and equally inevitable burdens of cost. Least of all – alas for Murdoch's doomed, depleted Daily – would you invent a quasi-newspaper for tablet users only?

Transition, in any comforting, life-goes-on sense, is probably an illusion. Think way outside the box instead. Think unpredictable upheaval, utter transformation, to no set timetable; a stuttering, deluding rate of change. Think of a revolution we've barely begun to glimpse as yet.

by Peter Preston

SanFran is not The Big Apple

2011-08-28T14:03:00.000-07:00

Steve Jobs in his Los Angeles office in 1981, five years after he co-founded Apple.
Photograph: Tony Korody/Corbis

Steve Jobs's resignation was the most discussed in corporate history. Because his illness has been public knowledge for so long, and because Wall Street and the commentariat viewed his health as being synonymous with that of his company, for years Apple share prices have fluctuated with its CEO's temperature. If all the "Whither Apple without Jobs?" articles were laid end to end, they would cover quite a distance – but they never reached a conclusion.

Still, you could understand the hysteria. After all, he's the man who rescued Apple from the near-death experience it underwent in the mid-1990s. When he came back in 1996, the company seemed headed for oblivion. Granted, it was a distinctive, quirky outfit, but one that had been run into the ground by mediocre executives who had no vision, no strategy – and no operating system to power its products into the future.

Jobs came back because Apple bought NeXT, the computer workstation company he had started after being ousted by the Apple board in 1985. By acquiring NeXT, Apple got two things: the operating system that became OS X, the software that underpinned everything Apple has made since; and Jobs as "interim CEO" at a salary of $1 a year. But it was still a corporate minnow: a BMW to Microsoft's Ford. Fifteen years later, Apple had become the most valuable company in the world.

It was the greatest comeback since Lazarus. Because only an obsessive, authoritarian, visionary genius could have achieved such a transformation, it's easy to see why Wall Street has had difficulty imagining Apple without Jobs. He was, after all, the only CEO in the world with rock star status. And Apple is a corporate extension of his remarkable personality, much as Microsoft was of Bill Gates's. But Jobs has something Gates never had – a reputation so powerful as to create a reality distortion field around him.

This field has blinded people to some under-appreciated facts. While it is true, for example, that Apple – under Jobs's influence – is probably the world's best industrial design outfit, it is also a phenomenally well-run company. Proof of that comes from various sources. For example, not only does it regularly dream up beautiful, functional and fantastically complex products, but it gets them to market in working order, on time and to budget; and it has continually done so despite exploding demand. Compare that with slow-motion car crashes such as Hewlett Packard's Touchpad, RIM's BlackBerry Playbook or Microsoft's Vista operating system.

Then there's the way that Apple – in the teeth of industry scepticism – made such an astonishing success of bricks-and-mortar retailing with its high-street stores. Or ponder the fact that it became the world's most valuable corporation without incurring a single cent of debt. Instead, it sits atop a $78bn (£48bn) cash mountain: enough to buy Tesco and BT and still have loose change. Compare that with the casino capitalism practised by so many MBA-educated company leaders in the US. And finally there is the stranglehold Apple now has on a number of crucial modern markets – computers, online music, mobile devices and smartphones.

If you ask people what Steve Jobs is best remembered for, most will name a particular product. If they're from my (baby boomer) generation, it will probably be the Apple Macintosh, a computer that changed many of our lives in the 1980s. Younger generations will credit him with the iMac, iTunes and the iPod. Today's teenagers will revere him for the iPhone. But there's a good argument that Jobs's greatest creation is Apple itself in its post-1996 incarnation. If that's true, the great test of his career legacy is whether the organisation he built around his values will endure and remain faithful to them.

What are those values? He usually expressed them as aphorisms and, as news of his resignation spread , people began raking through them for clues. Many focused on what he said to John Sculley, CEO of Pepsi, when he was trying to persuade him to run Apple.

"Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugar water," he asked, "or do you want to change the world?" (Sculley accepted the invitation, then presided over Jobs's expulsion.) But for Jobs it was a serious question. What he was asking, as the blogger Umair Haque put it, was: "Do you really want to spend your days slaving over work that fails to inspire, on stuff that fails to count, for reasons that fail to touch the soul of anyone?"

Jobs is famously fanatical about design. In part this is about how things look (though for him it also involves simplicity of use). When the rest of the industry was building computers as grey, rectangular metal boxes, for example, he was prowling department stores and streets looking for design metaphors. For a time he thought the Mac should be like a Porsche. At another stage he wanted it to be like the Cuisinart food-processor. When the machine finally appeared in 1984, Jack Tramiel, the grizzled macho-boss of Commodore, thought it looked like a girly device that would be best sold in boutiques. What Tramiel did not realise – and Jobs did – was that ultimately computers would be consumer products and people would pay a huge premium for classy design.

In that sense he is the polar opposite of the MBA-trained, bean-counting executive. "The cure for Apple is not cost-cutting," he said in 1996, when the company was on the rocks. "The cure for Apple is to innovate its way out of its current predicament." At another point he said: "When you're a carpenter making a beautiful chest of drawers, you're not going to use a piece of plywood on the back, even though it faces the wall and nobody will ever see it."

This delight in elegant work has always been the most striking aspect of Jobs's celebrated speeches introducing new Apple products in San Francisco. As he cooed over the iMac or the iPhone or the iPad, words like "beautiful", "amazing" and "awesome" tumbled out. For once they didn't sound like cynical, manipulative corporation-speak. He spoke from the heart.

It goes without saying that he is impossible to work with; most geniuses are. Yet he has built – and retained the respect of – the most remarkable design team in living memory, a group that has been responsible for more innovation than the rest of the computer industry put together. For that reason, when the time comes to sum up Jobs's achievements, most will portray him as a seminal figure in the computing industry. But Jobs is bigger than that.

To understand why, you have to look at the major communications industries of the 20th century – the telephone, radio and movies. As Tim Wu chronicles it in his remarkable book, The Master Switch, each of these industries started out as an open, irrationally exuberant, chaotic muddle of incompatible standards, crummy technology and chancers. The pivotal moment in the evolution of each industry came when a charismatic entrepreneur arrived to offer consumers better quality, higher production values and greater ease of use.

With the telephone it was Theodore Vail of AT&T, offering a unified nationwide network and a guarantee that when you picked up the phone you always got a dial tone. With radio it was David Sarnoff, who founded RCA. With movies it was Adolph Zukor, who created the Hollywood studio system.

Jobs is from the same mould. He believes that using a computer should be delightful, not painful; that it should be easy to seamlessly transfer music from a CD on to a hard drive and thence to an elegant portable player; that mobile phones should be powerful handheld computers that happen to make voice calls; and that a tablet computer is the device that is ushering us into a post-PC world. He has offered consumers a better proposition than the rest of the industry could – and they jumped at it. That's how he built Apple into the world's most valuable company. And it's why he is really the last of the media moguls.

by John Naughton

Picture Of The Day

2011-08-27T04:04:00.000-07:00

iResign

2011-08-25T05:53:00.000-07:00

2001-2011 by Jason Burke

2011-08-23T12:04:00.000-07:00

If, just over a decade ago, you had looked north through binoculars from frontline Taliban positions 30 miles north of Kabul, you would have seen an old Soviet-built airbase, little more than a cluster of ruined buildings, rusting metal stakes, a single battered jeep and no serviceable aircraft at all on the scarred strip of concrete shimmering in the Afghan sun. The group of scruffy Taliban fighters in filthy clothes who manned the makeshift trenches on the heights above it would probably have served grapes and tea to you as they did to the rare reporters who visited them.

If you had come back just a little later, say in the spring of 2002, you would have seen a startling difference. With the Taliban apparently defeated, the airstrip had become the fulcrum of a build-up of American and other international forces in the country that would continue inexorably over the next years. The feverish activity of the bulldozers, tents, jets and helicopters gave a sense that something extraordinary was happening. But its exact nature was still very unclear. Now, after a decade of conflict, a base the size of a small town has sprung up around the airstrip.

No soldiers at the battle of Castillon in 1453 knew they were fighting in the last major engagement of the hundred years war. No one fighting at Waterloo could have known they were taking part in what turned out to be the ultimate confrontation of the Napoleonic wars. The first world war was the great war until the second world war came along. Perhaps inevitably, then, the ongoing, interlinked and overlapping conflicts that have raged across the globe during the 10 years since 9/11 are currently without a name. In decades or centuries to come historians will no doubt find one – or several, as is usually the case. In the interim, given the one event that, in the western public consciousness at least, saw hostilities commence, "the 9/11 wars" seems an apt working title.

Al-Qaida has failed to achieve most of its key aims: there has been no global uprising of Muslim populations, no establishment of a new caliphate. Nor have changes in America's policy in the Islamic world been those desired by men such as the late Osama bin Laden. Does this mean the west has won the 9/11 wars? It has certainly avoided defeat. The power of terrorism lies in its ability to create a sense of fear far in excess of the actual threat posed to an individual. Here, governments have largely protected their citizens, and few inhabitants of western democracies today pass their lives genuinely concerned about being harmed in a radical militant attack. In July 2010, President Obama even spoke of how the US could "absorb" another 9/11, a statement that would have been inconceivable a few years before.

Despite significant damage to civil liberties in both Europe and America, institutional checks and balances appear to have worked on both sides of the Atlantic. In the face of a worrying militarisation and a commensurate growth in its offshoot, the "security" business, other forces have been strong enough to ensure that liberal democratic societies have kept their values more or less intact. The integration of minorities, always a delicate task, is generating significant tensions but is proceeding, albeit unevenly.

Even though now facing serious problems of debt, America has nonetheless been able to pay for the grotesque strategic error of the war in Iraq, at a total cost of up to a trillion dollars depending on how it is calculated, and a 10-year conflict in Afghanistan, all while financing a huge security industry at home. In 2009, American military expenditure was $661bn (£400bn), considerably more than double the total of 10 years previously, but still not enough, as Bin Laden had hoped, to fundamentally weaken the world's only true superpower. In Europe, supposedly creaking old democracies have reacted with a nimbleness and rapidity that few imagined they still possessed to counter domestic and international threats.

In short, western societies and political systems appear likely to digest this latest wave of radical violence as they have digested its predecessors. In 1911, British police reported that leftist and anarchist groups had "grown in number and size" and were "hardier than ever, now that the terrifying weapons created by modern science are available to them". The world was "threatened by forces which would be able to one day carry out its total destruction," the police warned. In the event, of course, it was gas, machine guns and artillery followed by disease that killed millions, not terrorism.

In the second decade of the 9/11 wars other gathering threats to the global commonwealth, such as climate change, will further oblige Islamic radical militants to cede much of the limelight, at least in the absence of a new, equally spectacular cycle of violence.

But if there has been no defeat for the west then there has been no victory either. Over the past 10 years, the limits of the ability of the US and its western allies to impose their will on parts of the world have been very publicly revealed. Though it is going too far to say that the first decade of the 9/11 wars saw the moment where the long decline of first Europe and perhaps America was made clear, the conflict certainly reinforced the sense that the tectonic plates of geopolitics are shifting. After its military and diplomatic checks in Iraq and Afghanistan, a chastened Britain may well have to finally renounce its inflated self-image as a power that "punches above its weight". The role of Nato in the 21st century is unclear. Above all, though the power, soft and hard, cultural and economic, military and political, of the US and Europe remains immense and often hugely underestimated, it is clear that this will not always be the case.

For many decades, the conventional wisdom has been that economic development around the globe would render liberal democracy and free-market capitalism more popular. One of the lessons of the 9/11 wars is that this optimism was misplaced. A sense of national or religious chauvinism appears often to be a corollary of a society getting richer rather than its opposite, and the search for dignity and authenticity is often defined by opposition to what is seen, rightly or wrongly, as foreign. In some places, the errors of western policy-makers over recent years have provoked a reaction that will last a long time. The socially conservative, moderately Islamist and strongly nationalist narrative that is being consolidated in Muslim countries from Morocco to Malaysia will pose a growing challenge to the ability of the US and European nations to pursue their interests on the global stage for many years to come. This, alongside the increasingly strident voices of China and other emerging nations, means a long period of instability and competition is likely.

American intelligence agencies reported in their four-yearly review in late 2008 that they judged that within a few decades the US would no longer be able to "call the shots". Instead, they predicted, America is likely to face the challenges of a fragmented planet, where conflict over scarce resources is on the rise, poorly contained by "ramshackle" international institutions. The previous review, published in December 2004, when George Bush had just been re-elected and was preparing his triumphal second inauguration, had foreseen "continued dominance" for many years to come. The difference is stark. If the years from 2004 to 2008 brought victory, then America and the west cannot afford many more victories like it.

If clear winners in the 9/11 wars are difficult to find, then the losers are not hard to identify. They are the huge numbers of men, women and children who have found themselves caught in multiple crossfires: the victims of the 9/11 strikes or of the 7/7 and Madrid bombings, of sectarian killings in Baghdad, badly aimed American drone strikes in Pakistan or attacks by teenage suicide bombers on crowds in Afghanistan. They are those executed by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qaida in Iraq until his death in 2006; those who died, sprayed with bullets by US Marines, at Haditha; those shot by private contractors careering in overpowered unmarked blacked-out four-wheel-drive vehicles through Baghdad. They are worshippers at Sufi shrines in the Punjab, local reporters trying to record what was happening to their home towns, policemen who happened to be on shift at the wrong time in the wrong place, unsuspecting tourists on summer holidays. They are the refugees who ran out of money and froze to death one by one in an Afghan winter, those many hundreds executed as "spies" by the Taliban, those gunned down as they waited for trains home at Mumbai's main railway station one autumn evening, those who died in cells in Bagram or elsewhere at the hands of their jailers, the provocative film-maker stabbed on an Amsterdam street, all the victims of this chaotic matrix of confused but always lethal wars.

The cumulative total of dead and wounded in this conflict so far is substantial, even if any estimates are necessarily very approximate.

The military dead are the best documented. Though some may have shown genuine enthusiasm for war, or even evidence of sadism, many western soldiers did not enlist with the primary motive of fighting and killing others. A significant number came from poor towns in the midwest of America or council estates in the UK and had joined up for a job, for adventure, to pay their way through college, to learn a craft. By the end of November 2010, the total of American soldiers who had died in Operation Iraqi Freedom and its successor, Operation New Dawn, was 4,409 with 31,395 wounded. More than 300 servicemen from other nations had been killed too and many more maimed, disabled or psychologically injured for life. In Afghanistan, well over 2,000 soldiers from 48 different countries had been killed in the first nine years of the conflict. These included 1,300 Americans, 340 Britons, 153 Canadians, 43 Frenchmen and 44 Germans.

Military casualties among western nations – predominantly American – in other theatres of Operation Enduring Freedom, from the Sudan to the Seychelles and from Tajikistan to Turkey, added another 100 or so. At least 1,500 private contractors died in Iraq alone.

Then there were the casualties sustained by local security forces. Around 12,000 police were killed in Iraq between 2003 and 2010. In Afghanistan, the number of dead policemen since 2002 had exceeded 3,000 by the middle of 2010. Many might have been venal, brutal and corrupt, but almost every dead Afghan policeman left a widow and children in a land where bereavement leads often to destitution. In Pakistan, somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 policemen have died in bombing or shooting attacks. As for local military personnel in the various theatres of conflict, there were up to 8,000 Iraqi combat deaths in the 2003 war, and another 3,000 Iraqi soldiers are thought to have died over the subsequent years. In Afghanistan, Afghan National Army casualties were running at 2,820 in August 2010, while in Pakistan, around 3,000 soldiers have been killed and at least twice as many wounded in the various campaigns internally since 2001. Across the Middle East and further afield in the other theatres that had become part of the 9/11 wars, local security forces paid a heavy price too. More than 150 Lebanese soldiers were killed fighting against radical "al-Qaida-ist" militants in the Nahr al-Bared refugee camp in Lebanon in 2007, for example. There were many others, in Saudi Arabia, in Algeria, in Indonesia. In all, adding these totals together, at least 40,000 or 50,000 soldiers and policemen have so far died.

Casualties among their enemies – the insurgents or the extremists – are clearly harder to establish. Successive western commanders said that they did not "do body counts", but most units kept a track of how many casualties they believed they had inflicted, and these totals were often high. At least 20,000 insurgents were probably killed in Iraq, roughly the same number in Pakistan, possibly more in Afghanistan. In all that makes at least 60,000, again many with wives and children.

Then, of course, there are those, neither insurgent nor soldier, neither terrorist nor policeman, who were caught in a war in which civilians were not just features of the "battle space" but very often targets. In 2001, there were the 9/11 attacks themselves, of course, with their near 3,000 dead. In 2002 alone, at least 1,000 people died in attacks organised or inspired by al-Qaida in Tunisia, Indonesia, Turkey and elsewhere.

The casualties from such strikes continued to mount through the middle years of the decade. One study estimates 3,013 dead in around 330 attacks between 2004 and 2008. By the end of the first 10 years of the 9/11 wars, the total of civilians killed in terrorist actions directly linked to the group, or to al-Qaida-affliated or inspired Islamic militants, was almost certainly in excess of 10,000, probably nearer 15,000, possibly up to 20,000. To this total must be added the cost to civilians of the central battles of the 9/11 wars. In Iraq generally, estimates vary, but a very conservative count puts violent civilian deaths (excluding police) from the eve of the invasion of 2003 to the end of 2010 at between 65,000 and 125,000. They included more than 400 assassinated Iraqi academics and almost 150 journalists killed on assignment. The true number may be many, many times greater. In Afghanistan, from 7 October 2001, the day the bombing started, to mid-October 2003, between 3,000 and 3,600 civilians were killed just by coalition air strikes. Many more have died in other "collateral damage" incidents or through the actions of insurgents. The toll has steadily risen. There were probably around 450 civilian casualties in 2005. From 2006 to 2010 between 7,000 and 9,000 civilian deaths were documented, depending on the source. In 2010 alone, more than 2,000 died. In all, between 11,000 and 14,000 civilians have been killed in Afghanistan, and at least three or four times that number wounded or permanently disabled. In Pakistan, which saw the first deaths outside America of these multiple conflicts when police shot into demonstrations in September 2001, the number of casualties is estimated at around 9,000 dead and between 10,000 and 15,000 injured.

Add these admittedly rough figures together and you reach a total of well over 150,000 civilians killed. The approximate overall figure for civilian and military dead is probably near 250,000. If the injured are included – even at a conservative ratio of one to three – the total number of casualties reaches 750,000 [see footnote]. This may be fewer than the losses inflicted on combatants and non-combatants during the murderous major conflicts of the 20th century but still constitutes a very large number of people. Add the bereaved and the displaced, let alone those who have been harmed through the indirect effects of the conflict, the infant mortality or malnutrition rates due to breakdown of basic services, and the scale of the violence that we have witnessed over the past 10 years is clear.

Some day the 9/11 wars will be remembered by another name. Most of the dead will not be remembered at all.

A Black And White Answer

2011-08-22T13:51:00.000-07:00

YOU might expect that science, particularly American science, would be colour-blind. Though fewer people from some of the country’s ethnic minorities are scientists than the proportions of those minorities in the population suggest should be the case, once someone has got bench space in a laboratory, he might reasonably expect to be treated on merit and nothing else.

Unfortunately, a study just published in Science by Donna Ginther of the University of Kansas suggests that is not true. Dr Ginther, who was working on behalf of America’s National Institutes of Health (NIH), looked at the pattern of research grants awarded by the NIH and found that race matters a lot. Moreover, it is not just a question of white supremacy. Asian and Hispanic scientists do just as well as white ones. Black scientists, however, do badly.

Dr Ginther and her colleagues analysed grants awarded by the NIH between 2000 and 2006, and correlated this information with the self-reported race of more than 40,000 applicants. Their results show that the chance of a black scientist receiving a grant was 17%. For Asians, Hispanics and whites the number was between 26% and 29%. Even when these figures were adjusted to take into account applicants’ prior education, awards, employment history and publications, a gap of ten percentage points remained.

This bias appears to arise in the NIH’s peer-review mechanism. Each application is reviewed by a panel of experts. These panels assign scores to about half the applications they receive (the others are rejected outright). Scored applications are then considered for grants by the various institutes that make up the NIH. The race of the applicant is not divulged to the panel. However, Dr Ginther found that applications from black scientists were less likely to be awarded a score than those from similarly qualified scientists of other races, and when they were awarded a score, that score was lower than the scores given to applicants of other races.

One possible explanation is that review panels are inferring applicants’ ethnic origins from their names, or the institutions they attended as students. Consciously or not, the reviewers may then be awarding less merit to those from people with “black-sounding” names, or who were educated at universities whose students are predominantly black. Indeed, a similar bias has been found in those recruiting for jobs in the commercial world. One well-known study, published in 2003 by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago, found that fictitious CVs with stereotypically white names elicited 50% more offers of interviews than did CVs with black names, even when the applicants’ stated qualifications were identical.

Another possible explanation is social networking. It is in the nature of groups of experts (which is precisely what peer-review panels are) to know both each other and each other’s most promising acolytes. Applicants outside this charmed circle might have less chance of favourable consideration. If the charmed circle itself were racially unrepresentative (if professors unconsciously preferred graduate students of their own race, for example), those excluded from the network because their racial group was under-represented in the first place would find it harder to break in.

Though Dr Ginther’s results are troubling, it is to the NIH’s credit that it has published her findings. The agency is also starting a programme intended to alter the composition of the review panels, and—appropriately for a scientific body—will conduct experiments to see whether excising potential racial cues from applications changes outcomes. Other agencies, and not just in America, should pay strict attention to all this, and ask themselves if they, too, are failing people of particular races. Such discrimination is not only disgraceful, but also a stupid waste of talent.

Pictures Of The Day

2011-08-22T07:42:00.000-07:00

Blair On The Riots

2011-08-22T02:36:00.000-07:00

Both David Cameron and Ed Miliband made excellent speeches last week and there was much to agree with in what they said. None the less, in the overall commentary on the riots, I think we are in danger of the wrong analysis leading to the wrong diagnosis, leading to the wrong prescription.

There were some proximate causes of what happened that are relatively easily dealt with. The police are under huge pressure. If they go in hard, they fear inquiry, disciplinary action and abuse. It's all very well to say that they should just follow the rules. The police need to know they have strong support from politicians and public. When the riots first occurred, they would have been naturally anxious as to how heavy to be. Once they saw the country behind them, they rallied.

But my experience with the police is they need 100% backing. Otherwise, you're asking a lot of the officer on the ground in a tough situation.

Then, some of the disorder was caused by rioters and looters who were otherwise ordinary young people who got caught in a life-changing mistake from which they will have to rebuild.

However, the big cause is the group of young, alienated, disaffected youth who are outside the social mainstream and who live in a culture at odds with any canons of proper behaviour. And here's where I don't agree with much of the commentary. In my experience, they are an absolutely specific problem that requires deeply specific solutions.

The left says they're victims of social deprivation, the right says they need to take personal responsibility for their actions; both just miss the point. A conventional social programme won't help them; neither – on their own – will tougher penalties.

The key is to understand that they aren't symptomatic of society at large. Failure to get this leads to a completely muddle-headed analysis.

Britain, as a whole, is not in the grip of some general "moral decline". I see young graduates struggling to find work today and persevering against all the odds. I see young people engaged as volunteers in the work I do in Africa, and in inter-faith projects. I meet youngsters who are from highly disadvantaged backgrounds where my Sports Foundation works in the north-east and I would say that today's generation is a) more respectable b) more responsible and c) more hard-working than mine was. The true face of Britain is not the tiny minority that looted, but the large majority that came out afterwards to help clean up.

I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations. One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class. Another is the paradigm shift in economic and political influence away from the west.

Each requires substantial change in the way we think and function.

However, I would be careful about drawing together the MPs' expenses row, bankers and phone-hackers in all this. We in politics love the grand philosophical common thread and I agree with Ed Miliband on the theme of responsibility.

I became an MP in 1983. Then, MPs were rarely full time, many didn't hold constituency surgeries and there were no rules of any bite governing expenses or political funding. So the idea that MPs today are a work-shy bunch of fraudsters, while back then they were high-minded public servants, is just rubbish: unfair, untrue and unhelpful.

Likewise with the boardroom. I agree totally with the criticisms of excess in pay and bonuses. But is this really the first time we have had people engaged in dubious financial practices or embracing greed, not good conduct? If anything, today's corporations are far more attuned to corporate social responsibility, far better in areas like the environment, far more aware of the need to be gender- and race-balanced in recruiting.

Britain gives generously to those in need abroad: faster and more than many other nations. At a time of cuts, our aid budget – which saves countless thousands of lives – is being protected. There is criticism but the remarkable thing is not how much but how little. The spirit that won the Olympic bid in 2005 – open, tolerant and optimistic – is far more representative of modern London than the criminality displayed by the people smashing shop windows.

And here is what I learned in 10 years of trying to deal with this issue. When I visited the so- called "bad areas", whether in Liverpool, Bristol, Birmingham, London or elsewhere, what I found was not a community out of control. What I found were individuals out of control in a community where the majority, even in the poorest of poor parts, was decent, law-abiding and actually desperate for action to correct the situation.

In witnessing the lifestyles these individuals have, I found two things came together. First, there was a legal system overwhelmed by the nature of the crime committed by these young people, buttressed as it is by gangs and organised crime.

Second, these individuals did not simply have an individual problem. They had a family problem. This is a hard thing to say and I am of course aware that this, too, is a generalisation. But many of these people are from families that are profoundly dysfunctional, operating on completely different terms from the rest of society, middle class or poor.

Most of them are shaping up that way by the time they are in primary school or even in nursery. They then grow up in circumstances where their role models are drug dealers, pimps, people with knives and guns, people who will exploit them and abuse them but with whom they feel a belonging. Hence the gang culture that is so destructive.

This is a phenomenon of the late 20th century. You find it in virtually every developed nation. Breaking it down isn't about general policy or traditional programmes of investment or treatment. The last government should take real pride in the reductions in inequality, the improvement in many inner-city schools and the big fall in overall crime. But none of these reaches this special group.

By the end of my time as prime minister, I concluded that the solution was specific and quite different from conventional policy. We had to be prepared to intervene literally family by family and at an early stage, even before any criminality had occurred. And we had to reform the laws around criminal justice, including on antisocial behaviour, organised crime and the treatment of persistent offenders. We had to treat the gangs in a completely different way to have any hope of success. The agenda that came out of this was conceived in my last years of office, but it had to be attempted against a constant backdrop of opposition, left and right, on civil liberty grounds and on the basis we were "stigmatising" young people. After I'd left, the agenda lost momentum. But the papers and the work are all there.

In 1993, following James Bulger's murder, I made a case in very similar terms to the one being heard today about moral breakdown in Britain. I now believe that speech was good politics but bad policy. Focus on the specific problem and we can begin on a proper solution. Elevate this into a high- faluting wail about a Britain that has lost its way morally and we will depress ourselves unnecessarily, trash our own reputation abroad and, worst of all, miss the chance to deal with the problem in the only way that will work.

The Berbers

2011-08-19T13:55:00.000-07:00

IN MOROCCO their language has been made official. In Algeria they lead protests against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s regime. In Tunisia they are rediscovering a long-suppressed identity. In Libya they man the rebels’ western front in the mountains south of the capital still held by Muammar Qaddafi. Even in Egypt’s oasis of Siwa, near Libya’s border, Berbers are finding that the revolution has given them a chance to revive their cultural rights.

“There is a Berber renaissance taking place across north Africa,” enthuses Mounir Kejji, a Moroccan Berber campaigner. In his country a new constitution, endorsed in a referendum on July 1st, officially recognises the Berber language for the first time, though parliament will decide what this means in practice; Arab nationalists and many Islamists have long demanded that Arabic be the sole language of administration and state education.

The authoritarian Arab nationalist regimes that dominated the region used to accuse the Berbers of threatening national cohesion. Now, shaken and in some cases overthrown, they have seen Berber activism take on a new lease of life. Even where they are a minority of only a few thousand, as in Egypt and Tunisia, Berbers have been able for the first time to form community associations.

Libya’s rebellion is fiercest in the Nafusa Mountains, a Berber heartland long neglected by the government. Colonel Qaddafi has refused to acknowledge Berber culture for most of his reign, describing it as “colonialism’s poison” intended to divide the country. Only in 2006, apparently after his son Seif al-Islam intervened, did he lift a ban on the use of Berber names.

Berbers make up about 5% of Libya’s 6m-7m people, though some activists put the figure higher. In recent weeks they have set up a radio station. The rebel-controlled Libya TV, based in Qatar, now broadcasts in Tamazight, the Berber tongue, for two hours a day. In June, says Mr Kejji, a delegation of Libyan Berbers affiliated to the rebels’ Transitional National Council put a linguistic query to their Moroccan counterparts: how should they write “army”and “national security” in Tamazight, so that Libyan uniforms could have a badge in their own language alongside Arabic?

A written script for the various Berber dialects was created only in the 20th century. Algeria’s Kabyles, a Berber people said to number 4m, have usually preferred the Latin alphabet, whereas a Tuareg alphabet, called Tifinagh, is now officially used in Morocco and has been adopted by Libyan Berbers who were banned from using it under the colonel. (The Tuareg are nomadic Berber pastoralists living mainly in southern Algeria, eastern Mali and western Niger.)

The Berber revival has rekindled enthusiasm for pan-Berber solidarity. “There’s an awareness among Berbers across north Africa of that element of their identity which they share,” says Hugh Roberts, an expert on the Maghreb. But each country in the region, he says, has its own particularities. The dream of creating a community of 20m-plus people (estimates of the total vary widely), stretching from Egypt’s western desert to the Atlantic, would be stymied by the multiplicity of Berber dialects and by the variety of political circumstances. “A single Berber identity exists only virtually—on the internet and among diaspora intellectuals,” says Mr Roberts.

Four Roses For Dad

2011-08-16T23:48:00.000-07:00

Video Of The Day

2011-08-16T23:45:00.000-07:00

Billionaire... And Progressive

2011-08-16T06:49:00.000-07:00

In the process of accumulating one of the greatest fortunes the world has ever seen, Warren Buffett stands apart from the average squillionaire. Not for him the clichés of lavish mansions and superyachts, preferring instead his modest home in Omaha, Nebraska and nights in with burger and cherry cola.

Now Buffett has added to his list of atypical pronouncements by saying that America's super-rich should pay more tax if the country's debt problems are ever to be solved.

Writing in the New York Times on Monday, Buffett argued that the richest members of US society are indulged with an unfairly generous tax regime and are not making a fair contribution to repairing the country's finances.

"While the poor and middle class fight for us in Afghanistan, and while most Americans struggle to make ends meet, we mega-rich continue to get our extraordinary tax breaks," wrote Buffett, whose personal fortune was estimated at $50bn (£30bn) by Forbes this year, making him the third richest person in the world behind Carlos Slim and Bill Gates.

"These and other blessings are showered upon us by legislators in Washington who feel compelled to protect us, much as if we were spotted owls or some other endangered species. It's nice to have friends in high places," the 80-year old investor added.

Buffett, known as the Sage of Omaha, built his fortune on a no-frills investment strategy and was a fierce critic of the exotic financial investments that brought the banking system to it knees in 2008, dubbing them instruments of financial mass destruction.

A long-time critic of the US tax system, he has calculated that he handed over 17.4% of his income as tax last year – a lower proportion than any of the 20 other people who work in his office.

Under the debt ceiling deal agreed in Washington, a "super committee" of 12 congressmen and senators must find $1.5tn worth of savings and cuts to help cut America's national debt. Tax rises are hugely unpopular with elements within the Republican party, with the Tea Party movement adamant that America should balance its books by cutting public spending.

Buffett argues that this super-committee should raise the tax rate paid by those earning more than $1m a year, including earnings from capital gains which are currently taxed at a lower rate than ordinary income. Those raking in upward of $10m a year could then pay even more.

The package of tax cuts brought in by President George W Bush are set to expire at the end of 2012, although they could be extended. Many of the leading Republicans who hope to challenge Barack Obama at the next presidential election have argued for lower taxation to stimulate the US economy.

On Saturday Rick Perry, the governor of Texas, argued that it was an "injustice" that almost a half of all Americans currently pay no federal income tax.

"Spreading the wealth punishes success while setting America on a course for greater dependency on government," Perry argued as he announced his bid for the 2012 Republican nomination.

Buffett argues that the US policymakers should be looking at the other end of the spectrum. As he put it: "My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It's time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice."

A Nice Video

2011-08-11T14:06:00.000-07:00