And Jesus Said Unto Paul of Ryan ...

Nicolas Kristof in The New York Times

A woman who had been bleeding for 12 years came up behind Jesus and touched his clothes in hope of a cure. Jesus turned to her and said: “Fear not. Because of your faith, you are now healed.”

Then spoke Pious Paul of Ryan: “But teacher, is that wise? When you cure her, she learns dependency. Then the poor won’t take care of themselves, knowing that you’ll always bail them out! You must teach them personal responsibility!”

They were interrupted by 10 lepers who stood at a distance and shouted, “Jesus, have pity on us.”

“NO!” shouted Pious Paul. “Jesus! You don’t have time. We have a cocktail party fund-raiser in the temple. And don’t worry about them — they’ve already got health care access.”

Jesus turned to Pious Paul, puzzled.

“Why, they can pray for a cure,” Pious Paul explained. “I call that universal health care access.”

Jesus turned to the 10 lepers. “Rise and go,” he told them. “Your faith has made you well.” Then he turned back to Pious Paul, saying, “Let me tell you the story of the good Samaritan.

“A man was attacked by robbers who stripped him of clothes, beat him and left him half dead. A minister passed down this same road, and when he saw the injured man, he crossed to the other side and hurried on. So did a rich man who claimed to serve God. But then a despised Samaritan came by and took pity on the injured man. He bandaged his wounds and put the man on his own donkey and paid an innkeeper to nurse him to health. So which of these three should we follow?”

“Those who had mercy on him,” Pious Paul said promptly.

Jesus nodded. “So go ——”

“I mean the first two,” Pious Paul interjected. “For the Samaritan’s work is unsustainable and sends the wrong message. It teaches travelers to take dangerous roads, knowing that others will rescue them from self-destructive behaviors. This Samaritan also seems to think it right to redistribute money from those who are successful and give it to losers. That’s socialism! Meanwhile, if the rich man keeps his money, he can invest it and create jobs. So it’s an act of mercy for the rich man to hurry on and ignore the robbery victim.”

 “How hard it is for the rich to enter the kingdom of Heaven,” Jesus mused to himself. “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter heaven.”

“Let me teach you about love, Jesus — tough love!” Pious Paul explained. “You need a sustainable pro-business model. And you need to give people freedom, Jesus, the freedom to suffer misery and poverty.”

“The Lord God has anointed me to bring good news to the poor,” Jesus replied, emphasizing the last two words. Then he turned to a paralyzed beggar at his feet. “Stand up!” Jesus told the man. “Pick up your mat and go home.” As the man danced about joyfully, Pious Paul rolled his eyes dismissively.

“Look, Jesus, you have rare talent, and it should be rewarded,” Pious Paul said. “I have a partner, The Donald, who would like to work with you: He’d set up a lovely hospital, and the rich would come and pay for you to heal them. You’d get a percentage, and it’d be a real money-spinner. Overhead would be minimal because every morning you could multiply some loaves and fishes. You could strike it rich!”

“Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of God,” Jesus said. “But woe to you who are rich, for you have already received comfort.”

“Oh, come on, Jesus,” Pious Paul protested. “Don’t go socialist on me again. Please don’t encourage class warfare. The best way to help the needy is to give public money to the rich. That then inspires the poor to work harder, galvanizes the sick to become healthy, forces the lepers to solve their own problems rather than kick back and depend on others. That’s why any realistic health plan has to focus on providing less coverage for the poor, and big tax benefits for the rich. When millions of people lose health care, that’s when a country is great again!”

“From everyone who has been given much,” Jesus told him, “much will be required.”

“Well, sure, this hospital would have a foundation to do some charity work. Maybe commissioning portraits of The Donald to hang in the entrance. But let’s drop this bleeding heart nonsense about health care as a human right, and see it as a financial opportunity to reward investors. In this partnership, 62 percent of the benefits would go to the top 0.6 percent — perfect for a health care plan.”

Jesus turned to Pious Paul on his left and said: “Be gone! For I was hungry and you gave me no food; I was thirsty, and you gave me no drink; and I was sick, and you did not help me.”127COMMENTS

“But, Lord,” protested Pious Paul of Ryan, “when did I see you hungry or thirsty or sick and refuse to help you? I drop your name everywhere. And I’m pro-life!”

“Truly, I say to you,” Jesus responded, “as you did not help the homeless, the sick — as you did not help the least of these, you did not help me.”

15 rules for creative success in the Internet age

Molly Crabapple in Boing Boing

Here's what I've learned.

1. The number one thing that would let more independent artists exists in America is a universal basic income. The number one thing that has a possibility of happening is single payer healthcare. This is because artists are humans who need to eat and live and get medical care, and our country punishes anyone who wants to go freelance and pursue their dream by telling them they might get cancer while uninsured, and then not be able to afford to treat it.

2. Companies are not loyal to you. Please never believe a company has your back. They are amoral by design and will discard you at a moment's notice. Negotiate aggressively, ask other freelancers what they're getting paid, and don't buy into the financial negging of some suit.

3. I've cobbled together many different streams of income, so that if the bottom falls out of one industry, I'm not ruined. My mom worked in packaging design. When computers fundamentally changed the field, she lost all her work. I learned from this.

4. Very often people who blow up and become famous fast already have some other sort of income, either parental money, spousal money, money saved from another job, or corporate backing behind the scenes. Other times they've actually been working for 10 years and no one noticed until suddenly they passed some threshold. Either way, its good to take a hard look- you'll learn from studying both types of people, and it will keep you from delusional myth-making.

5. I've never had a big break. I've just had tiny cracks in this wall of indifference until finally the wall wasn't there any more

6. Don't be a dick. Be nice to everyone who is also not a dick, help people who don't have the advantages you do, and never succumb to crabs in the barrel infighting.

7. Remember that most people who try to be artists are kind of lazy. Just by busting your ass, you're probably good enough to put yourself forward, so why not try?

8. Rejection is inevitable. Let it hit you hard for a moment, feel the hurt, and then move on.

9. Never trust some Silicon Valley douchebag who's flush with investors' money, but telling creators to post on their platform for free or for potential crumbs of cash. They're just using you to build their own thing, and they'll discard you when they sell the company a few years later.

10. Be a mercenary towards people with money. Be generous and giving to good people without it.

11. Working for free is only worth it if its with fellow artists or grassroots organizations you believe in, and only if they treat your respectfully and you get creative control.

12. Don't ever submit to contests where you have to do new work. They'll just waste your time, and again, only build the profile of the judges and the sponsoring company. Do not believe their lies about “exposure”. There is so much content online that just having your work posted in some massive image gallery is not exposure at all.

13. Don't work for free for rich people. Seriously. Don't don't don't. Even if you can afford to, you're fucking over the labor market for other creators. Haggling hard for money is actually a beneficial act for other freelancers, because it is a fight against the race to the bottom that's happening online.

14. If people love your work, treat them nice as long as they're nice to you.

15. Be massively idealistic about your art, dream big, open your heart and let the blood pour forth. Be utterly cynical about the business around your art.


Finally...

The Internet will not save creators.

Social media will not save us. Companies will not save us. Crowd-funding will not save us. Grants will not save us. Patrons will not save us.

Nothing will save us but ourselves and each other.

Now make some beautiful things.

Why failure is the key to flying high

 

If at first you don’t succeed: Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator. Photograph: Miramax/Everett/Rex/Shutterstock


Matthew Syed in The Guardian




We want our children to succeed, in school and, perhaps even more importantly, in life. But the paradox is that our children can only truly succeed if they first learn how to fail. Consider the finding that world-class figure skaters fall over more often in practice than low-level figure skaters. At first sight this seems contradictory. Why are the really good skaters falling over the most?

The reason is actually quite simple. Top skaters are constantly challenging themselves in practice, attempting jumps that stretch their limitations. This is why they fall over so often, but it is precisely why they learn so fast. Shizuka Arakawa of Japan estimates that she endured some 20,000 falls as she progressed from a beginner to an Olympic champion.

Lower-level skaters have a quite different approach. They are always attempting jumps they can already do very easily, remaining within their comfort zone. This is why they don’t fall over. In a superficial sense, they look successful, because they are always on their feet. The truth, however, is that by never failing, they never progress.
What is true of skating is also true of life. James Dyson worked through 5,126 failed prototypes for his dual cyclone vacuum before coming up with the design that made his fortune. These failures were essential to the pathway of learning. As Dyson put it: “You can’t develop new technology unless you test new ideas and learn when things go wrong. Failure is essential to invention.”

Even in areas of life where failure is potentially catastrophic, it is still vital to respond positively. In aviation, for example, every aircraft is equipped with two almost-indestructible black boxes: one records the electronic information from the on-board computers and the other records sounds in the cockpit. When there is a crash, these boxes are recovered and analysed so that enlightened changes can be enacted. This means that the same mistake never happens again. It is this constant willingness to learn from failure that means aviation has become one of the world’s safest forms of transportation. Last year the accident rate for major airlines was just one crash for every 8.3 million take-offs.

In healthcare, however, things are very different. Clinicians don’t like to admit to failure, partly because they have healthy egos (particularly the senior doctors) and partly because they fear litigation. The consequence is that instead of learning from failure, healthcare often covers up failure. The direct consequence is that the same mistakes are repeated. According to the Journal of Patient Safety, 400,000 people die every year in American hospitals alone due to preventable error. That is like two jumbo jets crashing every day or 9/11 happening every few days. In the UK, too, the numbers are shocking. Until healthcare learns to respond positively to failure, things will not improve.

But let us return to children. One of the seminal mistakes in education in the 1970s was the attempt to equip children with confidence by giving them lots of successes (setting the bar very low). The consequence was that the self-esteem of kids became bound up with success, and they became unable to take risks and crumpled as soon as they hit a proper challenge.

We need to flip this approach. In a complex world, failure is inevitable. It is those individuals and institutions that have the resilience and flexibility to face up to failure, learn the lessons and adapt which ultimately excel.

Time for a ‘Right to Healthcare’

RAGHUVIR SRINIVASAN in the hindu

   

The HinduTamil Nadu and Kerala defy the presumption taht the government can't do anything. Photo: V.V. Krishnan

 

Amartya Sen says India ranks alongside Haiti and Sierra Leone when it comes to government spending on health as a share of the total health expenditure of the people

Any self-respecting country has to regard provision of health-care to its citizens a primary responsibility and it’s amazing that the Indian government never thought of that, says Amartya Sen, Nobel Laureate and Thomas W. Lamont University Professor, and Professor of Economics and Philosophy at Harvard University. Excerpts from his interview with Raghuvir Srinivasan:

After Right to Work and Right to Food, do you think that the time has come for a Right to Healthcare legislation given the poor state of public healthcare infrastructure in this country?

Absolutely! Let me just say that it is incredible that we have got to this state. If you take any country in the world with the possible exception of the United States among the richer countries, they have always regarded it as absolutely elementary for people to have a right to healthcare. The fact that you have to do it through a separate Act itself indicates how backward we have been. Consider the history of the world.

With the end of the Second World War, European countries gave the right to healthcare to all residents and other countries, including in Asia, went in that direction. Japan already had a very well established medical system but they extended that. Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea and Taiwan also had it. China had healthcare for all but when it marketised in 1979, they made it necessary like in the U.S., which was affecting their thinking very much at that time, for the citizens to buy their insurance cover themselves. So the coverage of health insurance which was automatic until 1979 moved from 100 per cent to 12 per cent. It took them a quarter of a century from 1979 to 2004 to admit that they made an error. And they moved to cover everyone. Now, 96 per cent of the population is covered.

Basically any self-respecting country has regarded this to be a primary responsibility of the government. Therefore it is amazing that the government of India never thought of that. The whole engine of Asian economic development has been the expansion of human capability and the recognition that there is nothing as favourable not only for development but also for economic growth. Since this country is single-mindedly concerned with growth rate, to maintain high growth rate for a long time there is no better recipe than to have a healthy, educated population. So, coming back to your question, if the government won’t do it, will it be right to force the government to do it through a Right to Healthcare Act? Yes. But why shouldn’t the government do it? Why isn’t this a big public issue? Even the Aam Aadmi Party didn’t raise it. The media has a role to play here. In general, the Indian media, print and electronic, should pay much more attention on this subject.

That brings me to the next question. More than 85 per cent of the revenue of Indian publications comes from advertisements which are aimed at the affluent and middle-class readership. Therefore, its focus is on issues that concern this segment of the population rather than on the poor and the deprived. How do you get over this handicap?

I’ll say three things on that. One, yes, it is a problem. Two, is India unusual in depending on advertisement revenue? No, it is not. How come this is not a problem in say, South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Japan, Brazil or Mexico? We are not uniquely dependent on ads. It is a question of with what imagination and with what level of independent reasoning can newspapers, acting together, deal with advertisement revenue. There should be some convention on that. We have a vibrant media which has made many innovations. It can get more innovative on this. Third, the advertisers are competing with each other and they are playing one newspaper up against another. It should be possible for newspapers to have a code wherein certain types of news are covered and that code is important to seek.

This is about the two-way relationship between growth and enhancement of human capabilities. How do you break the chicken and egg situation of which comes first?

No, no, there is no chicken and egg situation at all. It is a win-win situation. Every bit of growth generates more revenue that you can spend on health and education. More spending on health and education solidifies the foundation of growth as well as development. You can start anywhere anytime and each of them will work. It’s not that you wait until one gets down and start working. Unfortunately I know that some economists talk like that but that’s a terrible way of thinking about economics. It is one of the things that Adam Smith said with absolute clarity in 1776.

Asked a question why is it that they want to go for a political economy, the answer he gives is that it makes an economy advanced. What is the advantage of that? First, it increases the people’s income. A higher income gives people the ability to do things which they value doing. And it increases public revenue which allows the government to do those things which governments alone can do such as education.

But you have this anomalous situation in India where the government is practically absent in areas such as education and health care leaving them to the private sector and is present in strength in manufacturing steel and refining oil which are better left to the private sector….

That’s just unclear thinking. You should clear out unclear thinking. Every time I come here, a lot of people tell me that the government cannot do anything at all and therefore education and healthcare should be left to the private sector. They don’t recognise, for example, that governmental share of health care in India as a percentage of total health expenditure that people make is one of the three lowest in the world. We are in the company of Haiti and Sierra Leone. We spend one quarter of what the Chinese government spends on health care. We spend 1.2 per cent of GDP while China spends close to 3 per cent. And there is no evidence for this idea that the private sector can do better.

At the level of basic health care it doesn’t work like that. Even the intervention schemes that exist don’t cover preventive medicine or preventive health care but if you become catastrophically ill then the government will pay the money, often to the private hospital, to treat you. That is no way of running public health care.

And this whole idea that the government cannot do anything, you have to look at the examples of Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh. When we discussed them a long time ago that they were doing well, I was told that they cannot sustain it because Kerala, for example, is a poor economy. But now it has the highest disposable income per capita in India. The same thing that improves the quality of your life also enhances the economic development. And that story you will not hear. You will hear that [Narendra] Modi has brought such transformation that his State’s growth rate is much higher than [that of] the others. We had a hurricane recently which was expected to be in the news for a month. But it ended the first day because the government could move a million people off the coast. And this was a hurricane five times bigger than Katrina. The problem is that we have convinced ourselves that the government cannot do anything and we give it to the private sector, provide additional money and tie ourselves into a knot from which we cannot exit.

There are some interesting developments in the recent elections. We have a party formed out of a civil society movement which has captured the imagination of the electorate and we are seeing a resurgence of centre-right politics manifested by the success of the BJP. How do you see these developments?

The practice of democracy depends very much on what kinds of issues are brought into the public domain and into the debate connected with elections. The Delhi election was the more interesting one because it brought in many issues which people had neglected in the past. It didn’t bring in all the issues that we want to emphasise as much. It didn’t talk so much about the neglect of education, the lack of public health care and so on. It was concerned more about the delivery of existing services in an efficient and non-corrupt way.

That is important too but I would have liked a broader agenda discussed. However, one cannot get everything and certainly not in one go. But I’m happy that the AAP did bring in some public concerns into the politics of the election. The fact that they could get the people to focus on these issues rather than on issues of religion or caste is also a very positive thing, as also the fact that they won the election in many areas of Delhi without getting into these issues.

The rest of the elections were not unpredictable. The results were connected with traditional politics where religion and caste have played a part. The BJP has been able to project the image of a party that led powerfully even though the nature of the leadership raises deep questions in people’s mind, including mine. The Congress has looked rudderless. So, there’s nothing terribly exciting. Is that an indicator of what’s going to happen in the general election? Is it a wake-up call for Congress? Well, it’s not clear that Congress can be woken up!

The Tea Party have successfully undermined everything Obama has attempted

Mark Steel in The Independent

Now the American government is open again, I wonder what tactic the Tea Party will try next to get their way. One favourite must be chilli powder down Barack Obama’s underpants. One of their senators will explain in a live interview from Washington, “We have no choice but to do this until the President shows he is willing to negotiate”, while in the background we can hear, “Yeaaagh they’re on fire”, and Michelle saying: “Don’t put your fingers in your eyes love or they’ll start stinging as well.”

Or they’ll set a leopard loose in the House of Representatives, as a legitimate means of expressing the will of the common man from Utah. Whatever they do, to them it seems utterly reasonable, so they make statements such as, “It’s the President who is causing this conflict, by insisting on implementing the policies he was elected on. So what choice did we have but to urinate over the Democrat senators in alphabetical order? It’s only what Abraham Lincoln would have done?”

The issue that’s angered them this time is Obama’s healthcare plan, designed to address the problem of millions of Americans having no access to healthcare. The Tea Party has a carefully considered objection to this policy, which is on the home page of its website. It’s worth repeating in full to do justice to the prose. It goes “Destroy Obamacare. This abomination from hell must be eradicated.”

As with all the best political writing, it’s the delicate details that make it so engaging. To start with, this displays an impressive knowledge of The Bible, as few people are aware of the section that goes, “And God saw that Satan had spread his wickedness among the people. And he did say unto Abraham ‘Eradicateth this abomination for they will burn in hellfire who are carried upon a stretcher with no charge’”.

John Culberson, a Tea Party spokesman from Texas, was slightly less subtle, declaring his support for the strategy of shutting down the country by saying, “Like on 9/11, let’s roll”, a reference to the passengers who said “Let’s roll” before confronting terrorists on their plane. This could be worrying if he visits an NHS surgery in Britain. He’ll stab all the doctors, and explain: “I could see one of them diagnosing gastro-enteritis without charging a fee and knew I had to act straight away.”

To be fair, the Tea Party takes up other issues as well as healthcare, employing the same subtle arguments. Their supporter Stephen Schwarzmann, a hedge-fund billionaire, contributed to the tax debate by saying: “Tax rises on equity firms is a signal for war, like when Hitler invaded Poland.” It could be argued it’s even worse, because at least when Hitler invaded Poland the casualties couldn’t run crying to the Third Reich for free medical care.

Maybe the reason they come up with minor exaggerations is they struggle without them. Tea Party senator Louis Gohmert was interviewed about whether the deal they've agreed to was a success. In his exact words, this is how he answered: “The fact is all those children gathered round by Nancy Pelosi and they weren’t of legal consent age and we’ve stolen $12bn dollars from those children and the least we can do and all we’re asking if we had leaders who do the right thing they look listen it’s illegal.”

I wonder how many people saw that and thought, “At last, someone who’s saying exactly what I’m thinking”. It appears they’re reasoning is the Republican Party lost the election because in crucial swing states such as Ohio, voters thought “the trouble with Mitt Romney and his supporters is they’re not do-lally enough”. In which case none of this matters, as it only ensures they’ll lose by even more next time.

But maybe there is logic to their strategy. Because since Obama became President, the Tea Party Republicans have been able to undermine everything he’s attempted. Even the budget following this agreement is seven per cent less than the amount Obama originally proposed. The healthcare plan will still leave around one fifth of the population with no care, and many of the promises, such as closing Guantanamo Bay or on gun control, have been abandoned altogether. Partly this has been a result of backing down to the constant niggling of the Tea Party.

Obama even had to spend much of his first year in office proving he was the President as they insisted he wasn’t born in America. So they can do that again. For example if Hillary Clinton wins they’ll say they’ve got evidence she’s Russian and fought at the Alamo on the side of the Mexicans, and her real name’s Hillary Mohammed Trotsky Lucifer Compulsory Free Liver Transplants For Everyone Even If You’re Completely Healthy Jihad Abortion Clinton.

They’ll say she was born under the sea, and they’ve got evidence she eats live squirrels, and it’s their constitutional duty to flood the Senate with mercury until she agrees to abolish tax for oil companies. Because for many of the rich and powerful, why bother going through all the hassle of winning an election to get your way, when it’s much easier and more fun to let the other side win, then refuse to accept the result and bring everything to a halt until they do as you want anyway.

Is this the loneliest generation?

The Government is trying to quantify social isolation amid health fears

Brian Brady

Sunday, 13 January 2013

Government officials have been ordered to find out exactly how lonely Britain's population is, amid concerns that "the most isolated generation ever" will overwhelm the NHS.

The Department of Health is attempting to measure the extent of "social isolation" in the UK, after warnings that it has sparked spiralling levels of illnesses including heart disease, high blood pressure, dementia and depression.

Research has revealed that loneliness is a growing problem in the UK – particularly among the elderly – with one in three admitting that they sometimes feel lonely. Among older people, more than half live alone, 17 per cent are in contact with family, friends and neighbours less than once a week, and almost five million say the television is their main form of company.

However, the trend is expected to worsen in the coming years. The Office for National Statistics disclosed last year that the number of Britons living alone has risen to a record 7.6 million – one million more than in 1996 and amounting to almost one in three households.

But beyond the personal problems the "loneliness epidemic" presents, ministers have been put on alert over its wider impact – and financial costs. Loneliness is blamed for piling more pressure on to health and social care services, because it can increase the risk of complaints including heart disease and blood clots. Experts also believe it encourages people to exercise less and drink more – and ultimately go to hospital more often and move into residential care at an earlier stage.

The Government's attempts to measure social isolation among people using health and social care will increase the pressure on the NHS and councils to tackle the problem now – to slash millions from their spending on the effects of loneliness in the future.

The care and support minister, Norman Lamb, said: "For the first time, we will be aiming to define the extent of the problem by introducing a national measure for loneliness. We will be encouraging local authorities, NHS organisations and others to get better at measuring the issue in their communities. Once they have this information, they can then come up with the right solutions to address loneliness and isolation."

It is the latest in a number of attempts to gauge, and change, the national mood: Tony Blair appointed the LSE academic Lord Layard as his "happiness tsar", while David Cameron has previously tried to measure people's well-being. In each case, the driving aim was to cut health and social welfare costs by making people feel better about their lot.

An official guide on combating isolation, issued to local authorities by the organisation Campaign to End Loneliness, says: "Tackling loneliness will reduce the demand for costly health care and, by reconnecting individuals to their communities, it will give renewed access to older people's economic and social capital." The guide points out that a scheme in Essex where lonely people were "befriended" by volunteers cost £80 per person but produced annual savings of £300 per person. Another project directing older people to local services cost £480 but realised savings of £900 per person.

Anne Hayden, a Dorset GP, saved more than £80,000 in costs for six patients who were "high users of NHS services" with a befriending scheme to boost their emotional well-being. David McCullough, chief executive of the WRVS (formerly the Women's Royal Voluntary Service), said: "It's to the benefit of not only the patient, but also the NHS as a whole, that GPs spot the early warning signs of isolation and refer patients to services such as befriending or community centres."

Case study

Win Noble was a nurse who had to give up work to care for her husband after he had a stroke and heart attack.

"It's not until you're on your own that you feel miserable. My husband died in 2001. I had nursed him for 20 years.

"In 2005, my next-to-oldest daughter died and then so did my youngest daughter. I was on my own because the rest of the family don't live in the area and I'm partially disabled, so I can't really socialise. One of my other daughters is housebound, one lives in Rhyl and one in Skegness and my only son is in Sleaford. I hadn't seen my son for five years but he rings me and came down this week.
"I don't see the others. I used to read a lot of books, from the mobile library, and I do a lot of puzzles just to keep occupied.

"Age Concern contacted me and suggested a craft class. After a few weeks they started to get a group together to play games like Scrabble and have quizzes. I got really involved and really enjoyed it. I became a volunteer and people needed me again."

Rachael Bentham

Sugar: it's time to get real and regulate

The consumption of fructose and sucrose is on the increase – and so are preventable diseases such as Type 2 diabetes

• 
• • Jacqueline Windh
  • guardian.co.uk, Monday 13 February 2012

Last week, a trio of American scientists led by Robert Lustig, professor of clinical paediatrics at the University of California, published an article in the journal Nature, outlining the toxic effects that sugar has on humans and arguing for governmental controls on its sale and distribution. While the authors come short of labelling sugar a "poison" outright, in a 2007 interview with ABC Radio about excess sugar consumption, Lustig said: "We're being poisoned to death. That's a very strong statement, but I think we can back it up with very clear scientific evidence."

That evidence has been growing – particularly in the western world, where consumption of sugar is increasing rapidly. Globally, sugar consumption has tripled in the past 50 years. But, it turns out, the greatest threat to human health is one type of sugar in particular: fructose.

In the US, per-capita consumption of fructose, a common food additive there – mainly in the form of high-fructose corn syrup – has increased more than 100-fold since 1970. Although fructose is not a common added sweetener in the UK and other countries, sucrose is; sucrose contains 50% fructose. Lustig and his co-authors note that last year, the United Nations announced that non-communicable diseases (NCDs) had, for the first time, overtaken infectious diseases in terms of the global health burden. Non-communicable diseases now account for 63% of all deaths, and that total is expected to increase by a further 17% over the next decade.

The scientists cite growing evidence that our increasing consumption of sugar is partly responsible for the growth of NCDs: diseases such as cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes and the suite of symptoms known as metabolic syndrome. And they argue that, as for substances known to cause NCDs such as tobacco and alcohol, sales and distribution of sugar should be controlled, and products with added sugar should be taxed.

I used to be a sugar addict. And yes, for those who haven't found out first-hand, sugar is addictive; perhaps not to the same degree as alcohol and tobacco, but a recent study has shown that sugary foods, or even just the expectation of eating sweets, can trick the brain into wanting more. When I decided to cut my sugar consumption 12 or so years ago, I had no idea of the serious health concerns that excess sugar consumption brings. I only wanted to avoid the so-called "empty calories" that sugar provides. I had noticed that eating cookies and desserts was making me feel lethargic.
Sugar, and in particular fructose, affects metabolism. Unlike glucose, fructose can only be metabolised in the liver. Some of its effects on the human body include increasing levels of uric acid, which raise blood pressure; increased fat deposition in the liver; and interference with the insulin receptor in the liver. This inhibits ability of the brain to detect the hormone leptin, which regulates appetite. So beyond the empty calories that fructose provides, eating it makes you want to eat more.

When I started reducing my sugar intake, I had no intention of cutting it out completely. Reducing my consumption was a gradual process, over many years. Sugar had been used as a reward when I was a child, and sweets were still a comfort food for me. But I found that the less of it I ate, the less I craved it. Today, I barely eat sweetened foods at all. If I were to eat what to most North Americans or Europeans is an "average" dessert serving, I would feel sick. Avoiding sugar is no longer an exercise in willpower; I have developed a revulsion for it. I feel that I have brought my body back to its original state. Sugar, in anything other than small quantities, feels like a poison to me.

Illnesses related to dietary choices do not affect only the individuals who become sick; they affect us all, as a society. The US alone spends $150bn on healthcare resources for illness related to metabolic syndrome. Of course, I would like to think that governmental regulation of a food-item such as sugar is not necessary. I do place value on an individual's right to choose, and on personal responsibility. But in the case of sugar, it's time to get real. The incidence of preventable diseases such as Type 2 diabetes is increasing and many health authorities have expressed concern that our current youth may be the first generation that does not live as long as their parents.

Most of us have known for some time that excess sugar is not good for us, but education and knowledge are clearly not enough. Regulation is required. This is no longer an issue of personal responsibility, but one of public expenditure and public health.

Huaxi: The socialist village where everyone is wealthy

Imagine a place where everyone is entitled to a free home, a free car and free healthcare. Clifford Coonan travelled to Huaxi to find out the secret of its success.

Clifford Coonan

Tuesday, 17 January 2012

The sort of oxen you expect to see in Chinese villages tend to be pulling carts or tilling fields, not a beasts made of a ton of gold. This precious cow is located on the 60th floor of a 328m-tall skyscraper in Huaxi, China's richest village, and building that juts out of the eastern landscape like a giant tripod topped by a golden ball.

Huaxi is a "model socialist village", according to local officials, and was founded by local Communist Party secretary Wu Renbao in 1961. His foresight was to transform a poor farming community into a super wealthy community, built on its clever adaptations of modern agribusiness methods, then its diversification into steel mills, its logistics firms, and its textile businesses.

The commune listed on the stock exchange in 1998 and is now a major corporation in its own right. Its subsidiary companies, built into something that resembles a modern-day conglomerate, exports to more than 40 countries around the world. Huaxi is where Chinese people come to learn how to get rich. At a time when the rest of the world, and indeed much of China, is trying to absorb an economic slowdown, Huaxi is like a parallel universe.

"This cow cost 300 million yuan (£31m), but now it's worth 500 million yuan," says our guide, Tina Yao, as she steers us from floor to floor in the Zengdi Kongzhong New Village Tower, which is taller than anything in London. "Zengdi" translates as "increase the land" and the skyscraper cost three billion yuan (£310m).

Other floors have giant animals of solid silver. Fearsomely bejewelled chandeliers hang over your head in banquet halls that hold thousands of people. You approach these glittering sites walking on gold-leaf marble, passing aquariums with sharks and stingrays.

Far below, you see the villas and theluxury cars. Every villager gets a share of the corporation's profits and is entitled to a car, a house, free healthcare and free cooking oil.

The village feels a little like Dubai. It is not big on charm – the replicas of the Arc de Triomphe and the Sydney Opera House – are of questionable taste, but where it is widely different is in how well it is able to meet its people's needs. Mr Wu is keen that Huaxi should showcase China's achievements and now some two million visitors come to Huaxi every year to gaze upon its splendour.

The original founding families, who are known as "stakeholders", number around 1,600 and the average household income is around £100,000 a year, once all the bonuses, pensions and wages are factored in. White BMWs are ubiquitous and the murals, instead of depicting socialist realist muscled workers in overalls, have pictures of happy families living in wealthy villas.

This is where Huaxi stands apart from so many other villages in China. While the rest of the country suffers from a yawning wealth gap between the rich cities of the eastern seaboard and southern coasts and the rural hamlets, Huaxi took the initiative, driven by Mr Wu's pragmatism, and headed its own way. It behaved like a city, even importing migrant labour.

"We only ever wanted what was good for our people," is a dictum of Mr Wu, who is now 86 years old and retired. His son has taken over as party secretary, but the father still gives lectures on socialism every day. He avoids allying himself too closely with either capitalism or communism, though his pragmatism has strong elements of the Chinese Communist Party about it.

No one doubts the wisdom of Mr Wu, and looking at the village's wealth, why would they? He broke up the collective system of farming and encouraged people to grow their own crops.

Below the stakeholders in the hierarchy come the residents from neighbouring villages that have been absorbed into Huaxi, and then tens of thousands of migrant workers who perform most of the rest of the work.

Work and wealth are the crowning ideologies. No one takes weekend breaks, and the streets tend to be deserted of residents because they are all off working. The hard work has clearly paid off and the money raised has helped the villagers diversify into other industry.

One of those areas is tourism – wealth tourism – and some of the locals help to meet and greet the two million tourists that come every year to see the village.

A new reason to come is to see the skyscraper, which is impressive, although as there is nothing even remotely as tall in the surrounding countryside, it looks strangely incongruous.

The reason it is so tall is a useful insight into the mindset of the people here. It is, as Mr Wu said in a recent interview, because the people Huaxi can compete with anyone in the country. "Beijing's tallest building is the 328m-tall World Trade Centre. Huaxi wants to maintain the same height with the Central Committee of the Communist Party," he said.

The village's total square area is a little less than one square kilometre, and there are barrack-style dormitories, factories, and pagoda style-buildings for local residents. The skyscraper houses the Longxi International Hotel, which has 2,000 beds and will employ 3,000 people eager to learn how to become wealthy, Huaxi-style.

Intriguingly, in the central village park, there are the statutes of five of the true icons of Communism in China, some more controversial than others. The panoply includes the former mayor of Beijing, Liu Shaoqi, who was purged in the period of ideological frenzy that was the Cultural Revolution and whom many believed Mao had murdered. He has never really been rehabilitated and remains outside the pantheon of true revolutionary heroes.

But then Mr Wu himself suffered during the Cultural Revolution. He set up factories but the Red Guards paraded him in the village as a "capitalist roader" and locked him up, much in the same way as Liu Shaoqi. Like Deng Xiaoping, who also suffered during the Cultural Revolution, Mr Wu bided his time and soon was back on his capitalist track after Mao died in 1976, except that these ideas became formulated as socialism with Chinese characteristics.

All over the village are megaphones blasting out the village anthem, which tells of how communist skies shine down Huaxi, a village of everyday miracles. "I have heard about Huaxi for many years. I have wanted to see it for many years," said one octogenarian visitor from Chengzhou.

Two men, both of them employed in security and not stakeholders in the village, say they love what is going on in Huaxi, but they admit they are a bit jealous of the shareholders who get a stake in the village's profits every year.

Certainly, there is a lot of bluster in the way Huaxi markets itself. The divisions between the stakeholders and the migrants on the streets are large. But no one in China doubts its importance as a model for the success of the nation. And deny at your peril the wisdom of Mr Wu and of the wider Chinese psyche: The song from the public address system says it proud: "Socialism is best."

China's richest keep firm eye on exit door

By Olivia Chung

HONG KONG - "Get rich - then get out" is the life message being grasped by China's wealthiest citizens two decades after former leader Deng Xiaoping supposedly declared that "to get rich is glorious".

About 60% of rich Chinese people intend to migrate from China, according to a report jointly released by the Hurun Report, which also publishes an annual China rich list, and the Bank of China. A separate study by US-based Bain & Company and China Merchants Bank in April of 2,600 high-net worth individuals - those who hold more than 10 million yuan (US$1.6 million) in individual investable assets (excluding primary residences and assets of poor liquidity) - found that about 60% of those interviewed had completed immigration applications to other countries or had plans to do so.

About 14% of the rich Chinese people, each of whom has a net asset of more than 60 million yuan, said they had either already moved overseas or applied to do so, according to the Hurun findings, which were based on one-on-one interviews with 980 rich Chinese people in 18 mainland cities from May to September.

Another 46% said they planned to emigrate within three years, variously citing higher-quality education available for their children overseas, better healthcare, concerns about the security of their assets on the mainland and hopes for a better life in retirement.

The most favorable destinations by rich Chinese is the US, with 40% of respondents claiming it was their first choice, followed by Canada and Singapore. Encouraging them in their quest, the United States continues to lower its threshold for businesspersons’ immigration.

Some 70% of the 4,218 visas issued under the US Immigrant Investor Program, known as EB-5 visas, issued in 2009 were applicants from China, data from the US Department of State show. In 2010, more than 70,000 Chinese applicants obtained permanent residency in the US, accounting for 7% of total applicants, placing second behind only Mexican applicants, according to the US Department of Homeland Security.

Canada allocated more than 1,000 of its targeted 2,055 immigrant investors to Chinese people in 2009 and last year, 2,020 Chinese applicants obtained permanent residency in Canada through investment, accounting for 62.6% of the total immigrant investors to Canada, data from Citizenship and Immigration Canada showed.

Kathy Cheng, an investment immigration consultant based in Shenzhen, next to Hong Kong, attributed the popularity of the US to it not having a cap on its investment visa program. The minimum amount required for investment immigration to the US is $500,000, and among all destinations that offer investment immigration, the US is alone in not imposing a quota.

“Recently, the US is trying to overhaul the immigration laws to attract rich or high-skilled foreigners. The moves have attracted the attention of some wealthy Chinese, who can afford to live elsewhere," she said to Asia Times Online by telephone.

Two US senators, Democratic Chuck Schumer and Republican Mike Lee, last month introduced a bill that would give residence visas to foreigners who spend at least US$500,000 to buy houses in the country. The proposal would allow foreigners immigrating to the United States to bring a spouse and any children under the age of 18. The provision would create visas that are separate from current programs so as to not displace anyone waiting for other visas.

The US Ambassador to China, Gary Locke, the former US commerce secretary who took on his latest post in August, said the US will make its investment and commercial environment as open and appealing as possible to increase Chinese investment in the US to create more jobs for Americans, which is the foremost priority of the Barack Obama administration.

"We will help Chinese companies and entrepreneurs better understand the benefits and ease of investing in the US by establishing factories, facilities, operations and offices," Locke told US business leaders in Beijing in September.

In May, President Obama said the US needs to overhaul its immigration laws to secure high-tech foreign talent to address a shortages of scientists and experts in the high-technology sector. In the same month, the Obama administration extended the Optional Practical Training program to allow students graduating in fields that include soil microbiology, pharmaceuticals and medical informatics, to be able to find a job or work in the US for up to 29 months (instead of 12) after graduation.

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said recently at a Council on Foreign Relations event in Washington, that to spur job growth, the US should allow foreign graduates from US universities to obtain green cards (permanent residency), ending caps on visas for highly skilled workers, and setting green-card limits based on the country's economic needs not an immigrant's family ties.

Of the 980 people interviewed by Hurun Report and the BOC, about 35% said they have assets overseas, which on an average accounted for 19% of their total assets; 32% of those surveyed said they have invested overseas with a view to emigrate and half said they did so mainly for the sake of their children's education.

A mainlander who has manganese mines in his home province of Guangxi said he was applying to emigrate to Canada from his home region in southeast Guangxi, mainly due to take advantage of better education overseas for his two-year-old son.

"An increasing number of parents in China prefer their children to receive education overseas instead of with the examination-oriented education system in China," said the mine owner, who asked not to be identified.

However, a source close to him said the mine owner had assets worth millions of dollars and "underground" businesses; given changeable government policies, emigration was the best way of protecting some of this wealth.

"Despite Beijing's currency rules, the wealthy have many ways to move their money out of the country. Besides, part of his money comes from smuggling, though his business is far smaller than Lai Changxing," said the source.

Lai Changxing was extradited to China from Canada in July after a 12-year exile there. He is expected to face charges for smuggling to a value of US$10 billion, bribery and tax evasion.

Under Beijing's capital rules, anyone leaving China can carry with them a maximum of 20,000 yuan (US$3,100) or the equivalent of US$5,000 in foreign currency. However, it is commonly known that wealthy Chinese are free to leave the country with briefcases full of cash.

Ye Tan, an independent economist and commentator in Beijing, said the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the mainland, which has aroused discontent among the less well off, has made some of the wealthy feel uncomfortable.

"The lack of security sense about the safety of their assets among Chinese wealthy is like a huge black cloud hanging over their heads," Ye was quoted as saying in the Hurun survey report.
China has 960,000 "yuan millionaires" with personal wealth of 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million) or more, according to the GroupM Knowledge - Hurun Wealth Report 2011. The figure is up 9.7% from a year earlier. China has 60,000 "super rich' with 100 million yuan or more, up 9% on a year earlier.

Average monthly income in China is only about 2,000 yuan, despite double-digit economic growth for about the past three decades.

China's Gini coefficient, a commonly used measure of wealth inequality, reached 0.47 in China last year, according to the National Development and Reform Commission, above the international warning level of 0.4, which is considered to be the level that could trigger social unrest.