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Wednesday 13 May 2009

A head start for India’s next premier

 

 

By Aravind Adiga
Published: May 12 2009 20:01 | Last updated: May 12 2009 20:01
 
Visitors to India are dazzled by the chaos and unpredictability of life here, but those who observe its politics are bewildered by the opposite. Crises are visible from a distance and grow to size in full public view, yet still seem to catch the government by absolute surprise. We have to wait until May 16 – or perhaps even longer – to know whether India's next prime minister will be the incumbent, Manmohan Singh, or his Hindu nationalist rival, L.K. Advani, or someone from a smaller party. But this much is already clear: the new prime minister will almost certainly have to deal with four emergencies in the course of his term.
 
Emergency One: Terrorism is a part of daily life in India now, but at some point during the new prime minister's term there will be a spectacular strike – on a plane, temple, parliament or nuclear installation. When the strike takes place, it will be found that the local police did not have enough guns, walkie-talkies, training or manpower to fight back quickly. Co-ordination between local security agencies and elite commando forces in Delhi will prove to be poor. When the terrorists are overpowered, they will probably say that they received training and assistance from jihadists in Pakistan; they may even be Pakistani nationals.
 
The government will immediately threaten to attack Pakistan, then realise that it cannot do so without risking nuclear war, and finally beg the US to do something. Once it is clear that the government has failed on every front – military, tactical and diplomatic – against the terrorists, senior ministers will appear on television and promise that, next time, they will be prepared. They should start preparing right now.
 
Two: The extent to which the global recession has hurt India's economy has been masked by a government stimulus package. This spending has come at a cost – India's fiscal deficit has shot up – and cannot be sustained after the elections, yet few observers within the country seem worried. There are signs of a nascent recovery and Mr Singh recently sounded almost gung-ho when he said that his government could improve the economy in just 100 days of a new term.
 
International analysts worry about India's fiscal health and are much less sanguine about the country's prospects in the near future. Many young urban Indians have known nothing but a booming economy; the prospect of long-term unemployment could confuse and inflame them. Perhaps the economy will indeed return to robust growth. But the wise thing would be to prepare for a painful slowdown.
 
Three: In the past few weeks, the Naxals – Maoist guerrillas who operate in the desperately poor states of north and central India – have attacked a major aluminium mine, killed voters and policemen, and disrupted trains. The Naxal insurgency, which taps into the resentment of those left out or threatened by the economic boom, has grown steadily in the past five years. Yet most urban Indians still think of it as an obscure menace that is "out there" – far from the cities and towns.
 
This is likely to change. The emboldened guerillas look set to escalate their war against the Indian state in the months ahead. Attacks on industries, mines, police stations and trains are likely to rise; a spectacular strike that grabs national and international attention is on the cards. Understaffed local police and corrupt regional politicians will not be able to deal with the Naxals without significantly greater assistance from New Delhi.
 
Four: India's population continues to grow and demand for water – for irrigation, industrial and personal consumption – keeps mounting; yet no government has given enough thought to husbanding the country's water resources. Tensions over the use of water simmer across India. Sooner or later, they will explode. In the months after a bad monsoon, for example, there could be a flare-up between neighbouring regions over the use of a shared river; this could lead to strikes and protests that paralyse parts of the country.
 
There are, of course, many other emergencies that will confront the new prime minister – such as the children who die every day of malnutrition and the relentless spread of corruption – but these are not going to make the evening news, unless Danny Boyle is preparing a sequel to Slumdog Millionaire. But the four crises outlined here are likely to cause the next prime minister a few sleepless nights. He could make things easier on himself by planning for them right now.



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Tuesday 12 May 2009

These men would've stopped Darwin


 

 

Science research in Britain is now all about turning knowledge into business, rather than the beauty of exploration

 

Why is the Medical Research Council run by an arms manufacturer? Why is the Natural Environment Research Council run by the head of a construction company? Why is the chairman of a real estate firm in charge of higher education funding for England?
Because our universities are being turned into corporate research departments. No longer may they pursue knowledge for its own sake: the highest ambition to which they must aspire is finding better ways to make money.
 
Last month, unremarked by the media, a quiet intellectual revolution took place. The research councils, which provide 90% of the funding for acad­em­ic research, introduced a requirement for those seeking grants: they must describe the economic impact of the work they want to conduct. The councils define impact as the "demonstrable contribution" research can make to society and the economy. But how do you demonstrate the impact of blue skies research before it has been conducted?
 
The idea, the government says, is to transfer knowledge from the universities to industry, boosting the economy and helping to lift us out of recession. There's nothing wrong, in principle, with commercialising scientific discoveries. But imposing this condition on the pursuit of all knowledge does not enrich us; it impoverishes us, reducing the wonders of the universe to figures in an accountant's ledger.
 
Picture Charles Darwin trying to fill out his application form before embarking on the Beagle. "Explain how the research has the potential to impact on the nation's health, wealth or culture. For example: fostering global economic performance, and specifically the economic competitiveness of the United Kingdom … What are the realistic time­scales for the benefits to be realised?" If Darwin had been dependent on a grant from a British research council, he would never have set sail.
 
The government insists that nothing fundamental has changed; that the Haldane principle, which states that the government should not interfere in research decisions, still holds. Only the research councils, ministers say, should decide what gets funded.
 
This is the sort of humbug newspaper proprietors use. Some of them insist that they never interfere in the decisions their editors make. But they appoint editors who share their views and know exactly what is expected of them. All the chairs of the five research councils funding science, and of the three higher education funding councils (which provide core funding for universities), are or were senior corporate executives. These men are overseen by the minister for science and innovation, Lord Drayson. Before he became a minister, Paul Drayson was chief executive of the pharmaceutical company PowderJect. He was involved in a controversy that many feel symbolises the absence of effective barriers between government and commerce.
 
On 30 November 2001 the ­British ­government decided to buy large ­quantities of a variant of the smallpox vaccine called the Lister strain. The only company that possessed enough was a firm called Bavarian Nordic. On 6 December 2001, Drayson was among a small group of businessmen who took breakfast with the then prime minister, Tony Blair. At about the same time Drayson gave a donation of £50,000 to Labour. Soon afterwards, government officials sought to buy the vaccine from Bavarian Nordic. They were told that they were too late: PowderJect had just bought the exclusive distribution rights for the UK. So the government had to buy it from Drayson's company. It paid PowderJect £32m: £20m more than PowderJect had paid Bavarian Nordic. The prime minister's office and Drayson both refused to answer questions about whether the Lister strain was discussed at the breakfast in Downing Street. It is not clear if Drayson was aware at that time of the government's decision to choose the Lister strain.
 
Drayson doubtless rubs along well with the chairman of the Medical Research Council, Sir John Chisholm. He founded a military software company before becoming head of the government's Defence Research Agency (DRA). He was in charge of turning it into the commercial company QinetiQ, through a privatisation process that was completed while Drayson was minister for defence procurement. During this process, Chisholm paid £129,000 for a stake in the company. The stake's value rose to £26m when QinetiQ was floated. A former managing director of the DRA described this as "greed of the highest order". Lord Gilbert, a former minister of defence procurement, remarked that "frankly the money made by the leading civil servants was obscene … They did not contribute anything to the turnaround of the company, it was the work of the research staff that made the difference." Chisholm remains chairman of QinetiQ. Is there anyone outside government who believes that these people should be overseeing scientific research in this country?
 
In March Drayson told the Royal Society that "the science budget is safe … there will be no retreat from pure ­science". A month later this promise was broken, when the budget transferred £106m from the research councils "to support key areas of economic potential": which means exchanges of staff and research with industry.
 
Science policy in the UK is now governed by the Sainsbury review, which the government says it will implement in full. It was written by the Labour donor, former science minister and former supermarket chief executive, Lord Sainsbury. The research councils, the review says, should "be measured against firm knowledge transfer targets" to show that they are turning enough science into business. They have been told to fund £120m of research in collaboration with industry. This has been topped up with £180m from the regional development agencies. The government is also spending £150m "to change the culture in universities: boosting the work they do with a whole range of businesses and increasing commercial activity". All this is another covert bailout, relieving companies of the need to fund their own research.

 
The economic impact summaries they now write ensure that all researchers will be aware that the business of universities is business. As the white paper points out, universities are already "providing incentives (for example promotion assessment)" to persuade researchers to engage with business. If your research doesn't make someone money, you're not likely to get very far.
Even judged by its own objectives, this policy makes no sense. The long-term health of the knowledge economy depends on blue skies research that answers only to itself: when scientists are free to pursue their passions they are more likely to make those serendipitous discoveries whose impacts on society and the economy are both vast and impossible to predict. Forced to collaborate with industry, they are more likely to pursue applications of existing knowledge than to seek to extend the frontiers of the known world.
 
Knowledge is not just about impacts. It is about wonder and insight and beauty. Much might never have an application, but it makes the world a richer place, in ways that the likes of Lord Drayson would struggle to perceive.




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Saturday 9 May 2009

Dear God, stop brainwashing children


 

Johann Hari: 

 

Worship is forced on 99 per cent of children without even asking what they think

 
Let us now put our hands together and pray. O God, we gather here today to ask you to free our schoolchildren from being forced to go through this charade every day. As you know, O Lord, because You see all, British law requires every schoolchild to participate in "an act of collective worship" every 24 hours. Irrespective of what the child thinks or believes, they are shepherded into a hall, silenced, and forced to pray – or pretend to.
 
If they refuse to bow their heads to You, they are punished. This happened to me, because I protested that there is no evidence whatsoever that You exist, and plenty of proof that shows the texts describing You are filled with falsehoods. When I pointed this out, I was told to stop being "blasphemous" and threatened with detention. "Shut up and pray," a teacher told me on one occasion. Are you proud, O Lord?
 
Forcing children to take part in religious worship every day is a law worthy of a theocracy, not a liberal democracy where 70 per cent of adults never attend a religious ceremony. That's why the Association of Teachers and Lecturers – one of the teachers' unions – has recently moved to ask the Government to stop forcing its members to take part in this practice.
 
Why does this anachronism persist in this blessedly irreligious country? For all their whining that they are "persecuted", the religious minority in Britain are in fact accorded remarkable privileges. They are given a bench-full of unelected positions in the legislature, protection from criticism in the law, and vast amounts of public money to indoctrinate children into their belief systems in every school in the land.
 
I can understand why the unelected, faltering religious institutions cling to this law so tightly. When it comes to "faith", if you don't get people young, you probably won't ever get them. Very few people are, as adults, persuaded of the idea that (say) a Messiah was born to a virgin and managed to bend the laws of physics, or that we should revere a man who at the age of 53 had sex with a nine-year-old girl. You can usually only persuade people of this when they are very young – a time when their critical and rational faculties have not yet been developed – and hope it becomes a rock in their psychological make-up they dare not pull out.
But why do the rest of us allow this fervent 5 per cent of the population to force the rest of our kids to follow their superstitions?
 
Parents can withdraw their children if they choose – but that often means separating the child in an embarrassing way from her friends and exposing them to criticisms from the school, so only 1 per cent do it. Most don't even know it is an option.
More importantly still, why is worship forced on 99 per cent of children without their own consent or even asking what they think?
 
As the author Richard Dawkins has pointed out many times, there are no "Christian children" or "Muslim children". I was classed as "Christian" because my mother is vaguely culturally Christian, although at every opportunity I protested that I didn't believe any of it. Children are not born with these beliefs, as they are born with a particular pigmentation or height or eye colour. Indeed, if you watch children being taught about religion, you will see most of them instinctively laugh and ask perfectly sensible sceptical questions that are swatted away – or punished – by religious instructors.
 
I am genuinely surprised that no moderate religious people have, to my knowledge, joined the campaign to stop this compelled prayer. What pleasure or pride can you possibly feel in knowing that children are compelled to worship your God? Why are you silent?
 
The prayer-enforcers offer a few arguments in their defence. At first, they claim it instils "moral values" in children. The scientist Gregory S Paul produced a detailed study in 2005 to find out if rates of murder and rape went up as levels of religion went down. He found the exact opposite. On detailed international comparisons, the more religious a country is, the more likely you are to be stabbed or raped there. There isn't necessarily a causal relationship – but it blasts a bloody hole in this claim.
 
Of course, if you actually followed the morality explicitly commanded by the Bible, Torah and Koran, you would kill adulterers, gay people, apostates, and disobedient children and be sent to prison. Thankfully, the vast majority of religious believers long since decided to disregard much of "God's word", because it is manifestly appalling, and read it metaphorically. But you have to strip away an awful lot of the texts as metaphor before you get to a few bland lessons about being nice to each other. Can't we get the lessons about niceness from somewhere else, without the bogus metaphysics and endless injunctions to kill our friends?
 
Once the morality defence dissolves, the religious switch tack, and claim that children indoctrinated into religion perform better academically. As "proof", they point to the fact that faith schools perform somewhat better on league tables. It's true – but look a little deeper.
 
There have been two detailed studies of this, by the conservative think tank Civitas, and the Welsh Assembly. They found faith schools get better results for one simple reason: they use selection to cream off highly motivated children of the wealthy and weed out difficult, poor or unmotivated students who would require more work. Once you take into account their "better" intakes, faith schools actually underperform academically by 5 per cent (and that's before you factor in all the other problems they cause).
 
I am absolutely not saying that schools should teach children to be atheists. No. Schools should take no position on religion. They should be neutral, and equip children with the thinking skills – asking for evidence, and knowing how to analyse it rationally – that will enable them to make up their own minds, when they wish, beyond the school gates. How can a religious person object to that, without admitting that open-minded, evidence-seeking adults would see through their claims in a second?
And so, O Lord, I ask you – and the British Government – to set our children free, at last, from being forced to worship You. Amen – and hallelujah.




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Sunday 3 May 2009

Fake Faith And Epic Crimes


 

 

By John Pilger

02 April 2009
Johnpilger.com

 

These are extraordinary times. With the United States and Britain on the verge of bankruptcy and committing to an endless colonial war, pressure is building for their crimes to be prosecuted at a tribunal similar to that which tried the Nazis at Nuremberg. This defined rapacious invasion as "the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes [sic] in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole". International law would be mere farce, said the chief US chief prosecutor at Nuremberg, the Supreme Court justice Robert Jackson, "if, in future, we do not apply its principles to ourselves".

 

That is now happening. Spain, Germany, Belgium, France and Britain have long had "universal jurisdiction" statutes, which allow their national courts to pursue and prosecute prima facie war criminals. What has changed is an unspoken rule never to use international law against "ourselves", or "our" allies or clients. In 1998, Spain, supported by France, Switzerland and Belgium, indicted the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, client and executioner of the west, and sought his extradition from Britain, where he happened to be at the time. Had he been sent for trial, he almost certainly would have implicated at least one British prime minister and two US presidents in crimes against humanity. The then home secretary, Jack Straw, let him escape back to Chile.

 

The Pinochet case was the ignition. On 19 January, the George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley compared the status of George W Bush with that of Pinochet. "Outside [the United States] there is no longer the ambiguity about what to do about a war crime," he said. "So if you try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as 'former president George Bush' [but] as a current war criminal." For this reason, Bush's first defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who demanded an invasion of Iraq in 2001 and personally approved torture techniques for use in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, no longer travels. Rumsfeld has twice been indicted for war crimes in Germany. On 26 January, the UN special rapporteur on torture, Manfred Nowak, said: "We have clear evidence that Mr Rumsfeld knew what he was doing but nevertheless he ordered torture."

 

The Spanish high court is currently investigating a former Israeli defence minister and six other top Israeli officials for their role in the killing of civilians, mostly children, in Gaza. Henry Kissinger, who was largely responsible for bombing 600,000 peasants to death in Cambodia in 1969-73, is wanted for questioning in France, Chile and Argentina. Yet, on 8 February, as if demonstrating the continuity of American power, President Barack Obama's national security adviser, James Jones, said: "I take my daily orders from Dr Kissinger."

 

Like them, Tony Blair may soon be a fugitive. The International Criminal Court, to which Britain is a signatory, has received a record number of petitions relating to Blair's wars. Spain's celebrated judge Baltasar Garzón, who indicted Pinochet and the leaders of the Argentinian military junta, has called for George W Bush, Blair and the former Spanish prime minister José María Aznar to be prosecuted for the invasion of Iraq – "one of the most sordid and unjustifiable episodes in recent human history – a devastating attack on the rule of law" that had left the UN "in tatters". He said: "There is enough of an argument in 650,000 deaths for this investigation to start without delay."

 

This is not to say Blair is about to be collared and marched to The Hague, where Serbs and Sudanese dictators are far more likely to face a political court set up by the west. However, an international agenda is forming and a process has begun which is as much about legitimacy as the letter of the law, and a reminder from history that the powerful lose wars and empires when legitimacy evaporates. This can happen quickly, as in the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of apartheid South Africa – the latter a spectre for apartheid Israel.

 

Today, the unreported "good news" is that a worldwide movement is challenging the once-sacrosanct notion that imperial politicians can destroy countless lives in the cause of an ancient piracy, often at a remove in distance and culture, and retain their respectability and immunity from justice. In his masterly Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, R L Stevenson writes in the character of Jekyll: "Men have before hired bravos to transact their crimes, while their own person and reputation sat under shelter . . . I could thus plod in the public eye with a load of genial respectability, and, in a moment, like a schoolboy, strip off these lendings and spring headlong into the sea of liberty. But for me, in my impenetrable mantle, the safety was complete."

 

Blair, too, is safe – but for how long? He and his collaborators face a new determination on the part of tenacious non-government bodies that are amassing "an impressive documentary record as to criminal charges", according to the international law authority Richard Falk. He cites the World Tribunal on Iraq, held in Istanbul in 2005, which heard evidence from 54 witnesses and published rigorous indictments against Blair, Bush and others. At present, the Brussels War Crimes Tribunal and the newly established Blair War Crimes Foundation are building a case for the former prime minister's prosecution under the Nuremberg Principle and the 1949 Geneva Convention. In a separate indictment, a former judge of the New Zealand Supreme Court, E W Thomas, wrote: "My predisposition was to believe that Mr Blair was deluded, but sincere in his belief. After considerable reading and much reflection, however, my final conclusion is that Mr Blair deliberately and repeatedly misled cabinet, the British Labour Party and the people in a number of respects. It is not possible to hold that he was simply deluded but sincere: a victim of his own self-deception. His deception was deliberate."

 

Protected by the fake sinecure of Middle East envoy for the Quartet (the US, EU, UN and Russia), Blair operates largely from a small fortress in the American Colony Hotel in Jerusalem, where he is an apologist for the US in the Middle East and Israel, a difficult task following the bloodbath in Gaza. To assist his mortgages, he recently received an Israeli "peace prize" worth $1m. He, too, is careful where he travels; and it is instructive to watch how he now uses the media. Having concentrated his post-Downing Street apologetics on a BBC series of obsequious interviews with David Aaronovitch, Blair has all but slipped from view in Britain, where polls have long exposed a remarkable loathing for a former prime minister – a sentiment now shared by those in the liberal media elite whose previous promotion of his "project" and crimes is an embarrassment, and preferably forgotten.

 

On 8 February, Andrew Rawnsley, the Observer's former leading Blair fan, declared that "this shameful period will not be so smoothly and simply buried". He demanded, "Did Blair never ask what was going on?" This is an excellent question made relevant with a slight word change: "Did the Andrew Rawnsleys never ask what was going on?" In 2001, Rawnsley alerted his readers to Saddam Hussein's "contribution to international terrorism" and his "frightening appetite to possess weapons of mass destruction". Both assertions were false and echoed official Anglo-American propaganda. In 2003, when the destruction of Iraq was launched, Rawnsley described it as a "point of principle" for Blair who, he later wrote, was "fated to be right". He lamented, "Yes, too many people died in the war. Too many people always die in war. War is nasty and brutish, but at least this conflict was mercifully short."

 

In the subsequent six years, at least a million people have been killed. According to the Red Cross, Iraq is now a country of widows and orphans. Yes, war is nasty and brutish, but never for the Blairs and the Rawnsleys.

 

Far from the carping turncoats at home, Blair has lately found a safe media harbour – in Australia, the original Murdochracy. His interviewers exude an unction reminiscent of the promoters of the "mystical" Blair in the Guardian of more than a decade ago, though they also bring to mind Geoffrey Dawson, editor of the Times during the 1930s, who wrote of his infamous grovelling to the Nazis: "I spend my nights taking out anything which will hurt their susceptibilities and dropping in little things which are intended to soothe them."

 

With his words as a citation, the finalists for the Geoffrey Dawson Prize for Journalism (Antipodes) are announced. On 8 February, in an interview on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Geraldine Doogue described Blair as "a man who brought religion into power and is now bringing power to religion". She asked him: "What would the perception be that faith would bring towards a greater stability . . . [sic]?"

 

A bemused and clearly delighted Blair was allowed to waffle about "values". Doogue said to him that "it was the bifurcation about right and wrong, that's what I thought the British found really hard [sic]", to which Blair replied that "in relation to Iraq I tried every other option [to invasion] there was". It was his classic lie, and it passed unchallenged.

 

However, the clear winner of the Geoffrey Dawson Prize is Ginny Dougary of the Sydney Morning Herald and the Times. Dougary recently accompanied Blair on what she described as his "James Bond-ish Gulfstream" where she was privy to his "bionic energy levels". She wrote: "I ask him the childlike question: does he want to save the world?" Blair replied, well, more or less, aw shucks, yes. The murderous assault on Gaza, which was under way during the interview, was mentioned in passing. "That is war, I'm afraid," said Blair, "and war is horrible." No counter came that Gaza was not a war, but a massacre by any measure. As for the Palestinians, noted Dougary, it was Blair's task "to prepare them for statehood". The Palestinians will be surprised to hear that. But enough gravitas; her man "has the glow of the newly-in-love: in love with the world and, for the most part, the feeling is reciprocated". The evidence she offered for this absurdity was that "women from both sides of politics have confessed to me to having the hots for him".

 

These are extraordinary times. Blair, a perpetrator of the epic crime of the 21st century, shares a "prayer breakfast" with President Obama, the yes-we-can man now launching more war.

 

"We pray," said Blair, "that in acting we do God's work and follow God's will."

 

To decent people, such pronouncements about Blair's "faith" represent a contortion of morality and intellect that is a profanation of the basic teachings of Christianity. Those who aided and abetted his great crime and now wish the rest of us to forget their part – or who, like Alastair Campbell, offer their bloody notoriety for the vicarious pleasure of some – might read the first indictment proposed by the Blair War Crimes Foundation: "Deceit and conspiracy for war, and providing false news to incite passions for war, causing in the order of one million deaths, four million refugees, countless maimings and traumas."

 

These are indeed extraordinary times.





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Life may not be fair, but that's still no excuse for an unjust society.

 

Life may not be fair, but that's still no excuse for an unjust society

 

What's "fair"? Well, it's a concept that is horribly abused. Almost everybody seems to be complaining that they are the victims of some gross injustice, showing little sense of what fairness really means. It could be Michael Caine crying out that it's not fair that he has to pay a 50p tax rate to keep some layabout in bed. Or it could be working-class voters tempted to vote BNP because they are outraged so many immigrants allegedly have automatic access to schools, housing and hospitals for which they haven't paid. Oh, it's all so unfair.

 
To those who believe fairness is a liberal value, here it is being hijacked against progressive taxation on the one hand and reasonable immigration on the other. Meanwhile, the government is so blind to the popular ideal of fairness that it tried to stop Gurkhas who had fought for Britain from settling here.
 
What is fair is difficult territory. Too many on the left assume that preferences for more equity and proportionality are so widely shared that support for liberal policies is semi-automatic. Higher rates of income tax for the better-off, Harriet Harman's Equality Bill or making public services available to everyone on the basis of need are so self-evidently the right thing to do that the mass of popular opinion will rally to one's side.
 
But it doesn't - and it won't. Fairness can be used to justify any position on the political spectrum. One of the reasons the Labour party is facing a rout at the next general election is that it has not managed to build a consensus over what is fair. The gap has been filled by a cacophony of self-interested voices insisting that the dice are loaded against them, reinforcing the sense of a government that has run out of moral authority.
 
Fairness, I think, has four dimensions and none of them is automatically liberal-left territory. There is the fairness of equity, so embedded in our DNA that four-year-olds protest at the lack of justice in not being treated as well as their brothers and sisters. There is the fairness of need: I should be helped or compensated for the bad luck of life. So if I am born into a poor family, suffer heart disease or am thrown out my job through no fault of my own I deserve your support.
 
There is the fairness of efficiency and merit: I worked really hard to get this job and I do it well; it is only fair that I should be paid more than you. The economy needs me to be given that incentive because such an expenditure of effort needs to be fairly rewarded. Lastly, there is the fairness of proportionality: I can be paid more than you for doing the same job because I am more productive.
 
This is a political minefield and unless parties of the left walk carefully, they soon find that ideas of fairness are deployed against them. And New Labour has believed in the political value of ambiguity. Thus it can appease the tabloids without being accused of inconsistency. No leadership over what's fair has been offered nor serious thought put into how these dimensions of fairness might consistently be put into action.
 
Now the party and wider society are suffering the consequences. The BNP's position is that Britain should be for the British and British means being white. Even if it formally repudiates racism, its core philosophy is about identity politics, which it masks by appeals to fairness. It argues that economic migrants can access British public services instantly on the basis of need. Although some of the wilder stories are apocryphal, there are enough real instances of housing being allocated to new immigrant families and non-English speaking children making classrooms hard to manage and so on for a growing minority of working-class families to believe that the principle of proportionality is being abused. In other words, people should only be allowed to use and consume public services in proportion to what they've paid in, rather than enjoy the benefits the instant they settle here.
 
As former Labour minister Margaret Hodge says about potential BNP voters in her Dagenham constituency, what tempts them to vote far right is not racism, but unfairness. If economic migrants were welcomed but had to wait for a phased period before they could claim the full array of benefits, as Prospect editor David Goodhart has proposed, the excuse of unfair abuse would be lifted. All that would remain would be racism.
 
Meanwhile, Michael Caine should feel embarrassed about his remark. I am sure if he were asked whether it was fair for the rich to contribute more to the public purse in times of need, the fishmarket porter's son would answer yes, along with the overwhelming majority of Britons. In the same way, even BNP voters would endorse the overwhelming majority view that Gurkhas should have the right to live in Britain, complete with unqualified access to public services. That is the proportionate and equitable bargain, given their willingness to fight and die for Britain.
 
What provides the opening to Caine and the BNP is being able to jump, with too little challenge, to a different context in which one fairness principle can trump another. Keep out immigrants who haven't paid for public services! Proportionality trumps need. Similarly, Caine uses the fairness of merit to trump the fairness of need and proportionality. It is unfair for a hard-working, merit-worthy man like him to have to pay disproportionately more for layabouts who aren't really needy.
 
It is a view echoed by much of the right-of-centre press and by popular opinion. People hate cheats, even while they consistently vote in hypothetical tests in favour of assuring the disadvantaged a surprisingly high basic income. They will support the unemployed, but only if they are unemployed through no fault of their own.
 
To get out the trap, the left has to have a clear grip on the four fairness principles, argue for them and then make sure that policy and outcomes offer critics as little chance for one fairness principle to be used as an ace against others. For 12 years, the opportunity has gone begging. Blair did try to make access to benefits tougher for perceived cheats, but he never did it as part of a wider quest for fairness. Rather, it was sold as a social crackdown. Equally, he tried to toughen the rules on immigration, but not in the name of fairness, rather in the cause of keeping foreigners out to appease the right-of-centre press.
 
Brown is no more secure about fairness, for all his anxiety to present himself as its champion. If he understood the proportionality principle better, he would be more willing to clamp down on bankers' bonuses. Equally, if he understood how ready people are to pay for generous benefits as long as there is tough action on cheats, he could have reshaped the benefits system. And a politician who understood equity could never have made such a mistake over the Gurkhas.
 
There is a consensus on fairness waiting to be built. The majority of people believe in the principles of equity, proportionality and merit and are prepared to support the needy as long as they don't cheat their way to benefits. Get the story right and the British will back progressive taxation, universal benefits and even fair immigration and we would be quicker to see Michael Caine's arguments for what they really are - self-interested and delusional.


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Saturday 2 May 2009

Knowledge and genius

 

Intelligence is about creativity and wit, not scoring well in tests – as Einstein, a poor student but a brilliant thinker, shows.

 

It is a common presumption that if people know a lot, they must be intelligent. Anyone who can reel off capital cities or count to 10 in several languages – or, in the case of a two-year-old girl heralded in newspapers this week, tell an ­apple from a banana early enough – is counted a bright spark. And often enough intelligence, a good memory and a well-informed mind go together because intelligence prompts curiosity, curiosity results in knowledge, and memory keeps the knowledge available.
 
But there is no automatic connection between knowledge and intelligence. There are plenty of very bright people who do not know the world's capitals and cannot count in other languages, because they have never had a chance to learn them. In rural Africa there must be millions of smart kids who know nothing but local lore; they are Thomas Grey's "village Hampdens" and "mute inglorious Miltons".
 
By the same token plenty of people know lots of facts without being creative, thoughtful, quick-witted, humorous and perceptive – the marks of true intelligence. Sometimes an overload of facts is the mark of a dull and pedestrian mind, the antithesis of intelligence.
 
Moreover, there are different kinds of intelligence, better described as different gifts of mind, so that a person can be wonderfully talented in one respect and hopeless in another. It is misleading to describe anyone as intelligent without specifying what form the intelligence takes. Some mental aptitudes are hard-wired: gifts for maths and music (which often go together) require no knowledge, and manifest themselves early in life. So does artistic ability. Many autists have extremely high-order talents in these respects without acquiring any knowledge, or even interacting much with other people.
 
But other aptitudes require training, data, experience and practice. Here intelligence and a body of knowledge meet, and the former acts on the latter in productive ways. One can train a parrot to reel off English kings and queens, but it takes an accomplished historian to tell us insightful things about them.
 
"Intelligence tests" have always been a matter of controversy. Practice improves scores, which raises a ­question mark over whether they capture ­anything objective. If someone scores high on verbal tests and low on spatial ones, what does that overall score tell us about the individual in question? ­Nothing very informative.
 
There are many "high IQ" societies, the best-known being Mensa, which admits people with IQs in the top 2% of the population. At Mensa's 50th anniversary in 1996 one of the founders, Lancelot Ware, said he regretted the fact that members devoted far more time to puzzles than improving the world.
 
That prompts a thought: intelligence is a matter of output, not scores in a test. Einstein was unsuccessful at school and no great shakes as a mathematician, but he was creative and insightful, and saw a whole new way of thinking about gravity and the structure of space-time. A vivid interest in things, and an active desire to understand more about them, is a major characteristic of intelligence. When this leads to great creativity and important discoveries, we call it genius.
 
In the ancient world a genius was a creature who whispered ideas, ambitions and insights into your ear. The Romantics internalised genius, identifying it with their own inner selves – what Proust called le moi profond, the deepest me. As there are many kinds of achievement, so there are many kinds of genius suited to them. To all, the wonderful old cliche about 99% perspiration applies.
IQ tests rarely predict achievement or correlate with knowledge, and they are too blunt an instrument to capture the variety of human gifts. The latter are what matter. As with everything else, we know these gifts by their fruits, not by artificial ways of defining them.


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Friday 1 May 2009

Life-threatening disease is the price we pay for cheap meat


 

Johann Hari: 

 

Modern factory farms have created a 'perfect storm' environment for powerful viruses

 
A swelling number of scientists believe swine flu has not happened by accident. No: they argue that this global pandemic – and all the deaths we are about to see – is the direct result of our demand for cheap meat. So is the way we produce our food really making us sick as a pig?
 
At first glance, this seems wrong. All through history, viruses have mutated, and sometimes they have taken nasty forms that scythe through the human population. This is an inescapable reality we just have to live with, like earthquakes and tsunamis. But the scientific evidence increasingly suggests that we have unwittingly invented an artificial way to accelerate the evolution of these deadly viruses – and pump them out across the world. They are called factory farms. They manufacture low-cost flesh, with a side-dish of viruses to go.
 
To understand how this might happen, you have to compare two farms. My grandparents had a pig farm in the Swiss mountains, with around 20 swine at any one time. What happened there if, in the bowels of one of their pigs, a virus mutated and took on a deadlier form? At every stage, the virus would meet stiff resistance from the pigs' immune systems. They were living in fresh air, on the diet they evolved with, and without stress – so they had a robust ability to fight back. If the virus did take hold, it would travel only as far as the sick hog could walk. So if the virus would then have around 20 other pigs to spread and mutate in – before it would hit the end of its own evolutionary path, and die off. If it was a really lucky, plucky virus, it might make it to market – where it would come up against more healthy pigs living in small herds. It had little opportunity to fan out across a large population of pigs or evolve a strain that could be transmitted to humans.
 
Now compare this to what happens when a virus evolves in a modern factory farm. In most swine farms today, 6,000 pigs are crammed snout-to-snout in tiny cages where they can barely move, and are fed for life on an artificial pulp, while living on top of cess-pools of their own stale faeces.
 
Instead of having just 20 pigs to experiment and evolve in, the virus now has a pool of thousands, constantly infecting and reinfecting each other. The virus can combine and recombine again and again. The ammonium from the waste they live above burns the pigs' respiratory tracts, making it easier yet for viruses to enter them. Better still, the pigs' immune systems are in free-fall. They are stressed, depressed, and permanently in panic, making them far easier to infect. There is no fresh air or sunlight to bolster their natural powers of resistance. They live in air thick with viral loads, and they are exposed every time they breathe in.
As Dr Michael Greger, director of Public Health and Animal Agriculture at the Humane Society of the United States, explains: "Put all this together, and you have a perfect storm environment for these super-strains. If you wanted to create global pandemics, you'd build as many of these factory farms as possible. That's why the development of swine flu isn't a surprise to those in the public health community. In 2003, the American Public Health Association – the oldest and largest in world – called for a moratorium of factory farming because they saw something like this would happen. It may take something as serious as a pandemic to make us realise the real cost of factory farming."
 
Many of the detailed studies of factory farms that have been emerging in the past few years reinforce this argument. Dr Ellen Silbergeld is Professor of Environmental Health Sciences at Johns Hopkins University. She tells me that her detailed, on-the-ground studies led her to conclude that there is "very much" a link from factory farms to the new, more powerful forms of flu we are experiencing. "Instead of a virus only having one spin of the roulette wheel, it has thousands and thousands of spins, for no extra cost. It drives the evolution of new diseases."
 
Until yesterday, we could only speculate about the origins of the current H1N1 virus killing human beings – but now we know more. The Centre for Computational Biology at Columbia University has studied the virus and now believes that it is not a new emergence of a triple human-swine-bird flu virus. It is a slight variant on a virus we have seen before. We can see its family tree – and its daddy was a virus that evolved in the artificial breeding ground of a vast factory farm in North Carolina.
 
Did this strain evolve, too, in the same circumstances? Already, the evidence is suggestive, although far from conclusive. We know that the city where this swine flu first emerged – Perote, Mexico – contains a massive industrial pig farm, and houses 950,000 pigs. Dr Silbergeld adds: "Factory farms are not biosecure at all. People are going in and out all the time. If you stand a few miles down-wind from a factory farm, you can pick up the pathogens easily. And manure from these farms isn't always disposed of."
 
It's no coincidence that we have seen a sudden surge of new viruses in the past decade at precisely the moment when factory farming has intensified so dramatically. For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of American pigs that live and die in vast industrial farms in the US spiked from 10 per cent to 72 per cent. Swine flu had been stable since 1918 – and then suddenly, in this period, went super-charged.
 
How much harm will we do to ourselves in the name of cheap meat? We know that bird flu developed in the world's vast poultry farms. And we know that pumping animal feed full of antibiotics in factory farms has given us a new strain of MRSA. It's a simple, horrible process. The only way to keep animals alive in such conditions is to pump their feed full of antibiotics. But this has triggered an arms race with bacteria, which start evolving to beat the antibiotics – and emerge as in the end as pumped-up, super-charged viruses invulnerable to our medical weapons. This system gave birth to a new kind of MRSA that now makes up 20 per cent of all human infections with the virus. Sir Liam Donaldson, the British government's Chief Medical Officer, warns: "Every inappropriate use in animals or agriculture [of antibiotics] is potentially a death warrant for a future patient."
 
Of course, agribusinesses is desperate to deny all this is happening: their bottom line depends on keeping this model on its shaky trotters. But once you factor in the cost of all these diseases and pandemics, cheap meat suddenly looks like an illusion.
We always knew that factory farms were a scar on humanity's conscience – but now we fear they are a scar on our health. If we carry on like this, bird flu and swine flu will be just the beginning of a century of viral outbreaks. As we witness a global pandemic washing across the world, we need to shut down these virus factories – before they shut down even more human lives.



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