Welcome to the World of Life Enrichment, Growth and Personal Fulfilment

Fatty Livers: A Silent Cause of Premature Death

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 10:56:26 +0000

The liver is the largest, and most under-rated, organ in the human body. It’s often described as the body’s chemical factory, since it’s responsible for at least five hundred vital human functions. These include cleansing the blood; detoxifying poisons, fighting infections, manufacturing proteins and processing digested foods. The importance of these life-preserving tasks was recognized by our ancestors, who called the liver ‘the seat of life’. In fact, that’s how it gained its name, which comes from the Anglo-Saxon word libban meaning ‘to live.’

Owing to its importance, the liver is provided with amazing powers of regeneration. If 90 per cent of a dog’s liver is excised, it will regain its full size within six to eight weeks. This remarkable resilience was recognized by the Greeks in their legend of Prometheus, the mortal who stole fire from the gods and brought it back to earth. He was punished by Zeus who had him tied to a rock, where a giant eagle ate his liver every day, only to have it re-grow during the hours of darkness. In recent years, something has happened to impair these astonishing powers of regeneration. Statistics show that liver disease is now the fifth major cause of death in the United Kingdom, and experts warn that unless preventive measures are taken in the next ten to twenty years it could well overtake coronary disease and stroke as England’s major cause of death. What’s more alarming, many of these fatalities will arise when people are relatively young, for the average age of death from liver disease is 59, compared with 82 for someone who dies of a stroke. But the news is not all bad, for it’s estimated that 95 per cent of these deaths are preventable. At one time they were associated with excess consumption of alcohol, virus infections and toxic reaction to drugs like paracetamol. Now they’re increasingly linked with obesity.

One of the liver’s key functions is to process, manufacture and regulate the supply of triglycerides, which are the body’s major sources of fat. This is a self regulating function, and in a state of health there should be little or no residual fat accumulating in the liver. But this can change if the blood stream is overloaded with fat. This was discovered by the Egyptians in 2500BC, who found that they could enlarge the livers of geese by restricting their activities and force feeding them at regular intervals. Their livers became swollen with fat, which made a delightful paté known as foie gras or ‘fat liver’. We’re doing the same thing, the only difference being that the geese were killed to obtain their livers, whereas we’re being slain by our diseased livers which have no use as foods and are too damaged to be used for liver transplants.

Today, as a direct effect of the obesity plague, it’s reckoned that one in five British adults is now suffering from fatty liver disease, unconnected with virus infections or heavy drinking. This malady, known medically as steatosis, is believed to affect 90 per cent of morbidly obese patients, in whom it may remain totally symptomless for many years. During this time it causes inflammation in the tissues surrounding the fat-filled cells which, if prolonged, can give rise to cirrhosis and premature death, unless its victims are given the benefit of a liver transplant, an operation which has practically doubled in recent years in England and Wales. If forecasts prove to be correct, half a million obese children in England could be at risk of developing fatty liver disease. This means that many will die in their 50s and 60s unless they’re encouraged to shed their excess pounds. For safety’s sake, Mother Nature has provided us with two eyes and two kidneys. But we’re born with only one liver, which has to work night and day to preserve our vitality and health. So, if you want to lead a long and vigorous life, take steps to protect your liver. This can be done by following the tips given regularly on this website, which will enable you to make the life style changes needed to achieve – and effortlessly maintain – a healthy weight.

Compost Awareness Week: Everyone’s Guide to Organic Gardening

admin — Fri, 04 May 2012 09:26:59 +0000

No garden, however small, should be without a compost heap. We’ve learnt to recycle glass and tins, now we must learn to reuse surplus vegetation. The household compost heap serves two vital functions. In the first place it generates a supply of organic mulch to feed the land. This is essential, because the soil in a garden is more intensively cultivated than any other plot of agricultural land. Unlike a farmer’s field, it never lies fallow, nor is it a feeding ground for cows and sheep, which fertilize it with their dung. Unless it’s given some form of nitrate enrichment, garden soil must inevitably become impoverished. This warning was first sounded by Theophrastus, who wrote the world’s first gardening book over two thousand years ago, in which he recommended that plants should be regularly fed with liquid manure. The same message was proclaimed by Lady Eve Balfour towards the end of WW2, in her seminal book The Living Soil, which led to the formation of Britain’s highly influential Soil Association. But as well as its biological function, the family compost heap also act at a deeper, symbolic level, providing a daily reminder of the endless cycle of birth, decay, death and rebirth. The lifespan of individual organisms – whether buttercups, bees or human beings – is brief. But life itself is eternal. That’s the lesson we learn every time we tend a compost heap, the very heat of which demonstrates that even in the midst of death there vigorous life exists. Through the activity of countless micro-organisms, we witness the endless transformation of useless rubbish into vital nourishment. Prince Charles is a passionate advocate of organic gardening, and tells how amazed he was as a novice horticulturist to find that his yew hedge grew about a foot a year, when the saplings were planted in well-rotted manure. ‘Witnessing the efficiency of muck was a very important lesson in my gardening education,’ he writes, ‘and I can safely say that whatever has been achieved at Highgrove has been done through well-rotted manure.’ Today his compost heaps have been described as ‘models of sweet-smelling perfection’, by Prue Leith, the cookery guru, who visited the Prince while researching a book about gardening.

The basic principles which must be followed when making an ideal compost heap are relatively few and easily followed. The process of organic decay needs warmth, oxygen, a modest degree of moisture and a mass of worms and bacteria. To provide the necessary organisms, the heap must be built on naked earth rather than on concrete slabs or wooden planks. And no chemicals, such as weekkillers, should be allowed to enter the pile. The heap should be contained in a perforated frame, most commonly made from wooden slats, to allow the ingress of air. For the same reason the stack should be made up of alternate layers of fine and coarse material, maybe grass cuttings interspersed with stalks and screwed up newspaper, so that air can permeate through the heap. If compacting occurs, a light forking can be used to aerate the congealed clods. On the other hand, too much air can slow down the process of decomposition, which may make it necessary from time to time to compress the heap. An old rug placed over the top of the pile can help retain the heat, and prevent excess soaking from rain showers. This is vital, since temperatures of up to 49 degrees C may be generated within a well stacked compost heap, which speeds the process of decomposition and helps to kill weed seeds and destroy the organisms which give rise to plant disease. Nitrogenous accelerators can be used to increase the speed of bio-degeneration, and the cheapest of these is human urine, which is a rich source of nitrogenous waste. (In 1625 no home in England was immune from inspections by government officers – sometimes called the piddle police – who came round to make sure that all households were collecting animal and human urine which was required then to make gunpowder.) However, even without these aids, the mere action of bacterial decomposition will increase the nitrogen content of the soil by up to 25 per cent. After six to eighteen months of careful tending the compost will be ready for spreading. At this time it should crumble freely in the hand and be like centuries-old peat, rich, dark, sweet smelling, moist and friable. Every time we carry out this ancient process we’re reminded that the earth is not dead but pulsating with life. This is a liminal rite which celebrates the threshold between life and death, and transforms uselessness into value.

How to Look Good in Jeans and Win the ‘Rear of the Year’ Award

admin — Tue, 01 May 2012 15:59:31 +0000

More the half the adults in Britain are overweight. Knowing the risks this entails, some are earnestly trying to get in shape. But surveys reveal that fully a quarter are refusing to admit that they have a problem. If these deniers are to avoid a life marred by obesity-related ailments they must stop fooling themselves. They must have the courage to face reality, however shame-making that might be. The easiest way of doing this is to follow the advice of Robert Burns and try to see yourself as others see you. Strip off, and with your back to a full-length mirror turn your head and examine the shape and firmness of your derrière, which is a favoured site for storing excess flab. Is it pretty sight, or a vision of overindulgence and self-neglect? Study the early Greek statues and you’ll see that a shapely butt has always been regarded as an object of beauty and sexual attraction in the Western world. Victorian women wore bustles and tightly laced corsets to narrow their waists and exaggerate their butts. This sent out a coded sexual signal, since the amount of fat deposited in a woman’s rump is increased the more oestrogen she manufactures, which also makes her more fertile and therefore more attractive to the opposite sex. Similarly, the more testosterone a man secretes the firmer and more muscular his buttocks become. That’s why matinée idol male stars have tight bums. Only comic character actors like Oliver Hardy are allowed to be steatopygious, the technical term for animals carrying an excess of fat in their rear ends. And Hardy paid the price for his rotund figure, suffering a mild heart attack when he was 62, followed by a severe stroke two years later which left him paralysed and unable to speak until his death a few months later. For him, his bow fronted belly and bulging butt was no laughing matter.

Now that jeans have become the trendy wear for middle and upper class men and women, the shapely bum has become the pinnacle of fashion. This was recognized by Tony Edwards, an astute London PR consultant who started a ‘Rear of the Year’ competition in 1976 when he was hired to boost the sales of Wizard Jeans. The winners of this award, presented each year at a celebrity shindig at the Dorchester Hotel, have included Barbara Windsor, Lulu and Felicity Kendal. From 1986 awards have also been made to male celebrities such as Anton du Beke and Michael Barrymore. Many consumers now resort to subterfuge to obtain an elegant tail. Some men go to Asda to buy elasticated boxer shorts, designed to hide their bulging bellies and flabby backsides; while their partners snap up Debenhams’ ‘Invisible Shaping Bum Boosters’ sold under the trade name Pippa Pants. But the worldwide marvel of them all is surely Spanx, the control panties which have made their American inventor Sara Blakely the youngest self-made female billionaire of all time. (One wonders if the phenomenal success of these garments might be due in part to their name, since bottom spanking has long been a popular form of sexual titillation.)

Others resort to plastic surgeons who offer women whatever they desire, whether butt enhancement or bum reduction. In the first case they augment the contours with silicone implants or slabs of unwanted fat removed from other parts of the patient’s body. In the second, they employ liposuction to remove the unwanted flab followed up by a few nips and tucks to tighten up the sagging skin. These operations carry risks, and in any case do no more than treat superficial symptoms rather than underlying causes. People have slack, adipose tissue in their buttocks, arms and bellies they’re eating too much and exercising too little. The only satisfactory, long-term solution is, not to wear control clothing or undergo plastic surgery, but to adopt a healthy life style, as I outline in my recently published book More or Less?

Blobbies on the Beat: The Shocking Facts

admin — Fri, 06 Apr 2012 08:05:13 +0000

Britain has one of the fattest labour forces in Europe, with well over half its workers overweight and fully a quarter clinically obese. This physical debility may not impair the working efficiency of lorry drivers, providing they’re able to clamber in and out of their cabs, but it can be a matter of life and death when it spreads to afflict the country’s police force. This it has done, to an extent which poses a serious threat to the nation’s security and safety. Surveys taken last year showed that only a quarter of male officers serving with the Metropolitan police force in London were of a healthy weight. The others were unfit for active service, since just over half were overweight and the remainder clinically obese. In this state they were unable to operate at peak efficiency when tackling a rioting mob, and totally incapable of chasing a cat burglar over a three-story roof. At one time a bobby on the beat might walk twenty miles in a single stint of duty. Today most of that time is spent sitting in a patrol car, or behind a desk filling forms. This decline in physical activity is leading to a drop in fitness levels, an increase in obesity and a doubling of the number of police officers placed on ‘restricted duties’ during the last decade. In the face of this debacle, the government commissioned an investigative study, which led to the recently published Winsor Report. This recommended the introduction of annual fitness tests, with salary cuts for those who repeatedly fail to meet the grade. In addition, it suggested that those whose poor health confines them to ‘restricted duties’ for more than a year should lose eight per cent of their salaries, and after two years be required to take ill-health retirement. These measures would serve as a wake-up call and also help cut the high rates of sickness absenteeism. A survey carried out by the Suffolk Constabulary showed that its officers and civilian staff had an average of seventy days off work a year, compared with under ten days a year for other public sector workers. The powers that be blamed this failure on stress, high alcohol usage and even drug dependency, but didn’t suggest than obesity could be a major contributing factor.

One website has criticised the Winsor report on the grounds that it exceeds the boundaries of political correctness. ‘In a world where referring to a person in any way other than just a human being could possibly label you as a racist, bigot or the perpetrator of a hate crime, millions of fat people every day are being discriminated against and openly abused just because of their weight.’ Others argue that sacking an overweight policeman would be a contravention of the 1995 Disability Discrimination Act, conveniently forgetting that this law was so flawed that it was amended the following year by the Employment Right Act, which makes it clear that people can be sacked if they become incapable of carrying out their statutory duties. If airlines can sack air hostesses who are too fat to squeeze down the aisles, why on earth should the British taxpayer be expected to tolerate policeman who are no longer fit for purpose?

Without delay, each of the 43 police forces in England and Wales should employ private occupational consultants to help their staff lose weight. This recommendation is expected to be a key measure in the Frost Report, which will be published later this year by an advisory team set up by the Coalition government to investigate the predicament of mounting workplace sickness. This would be a major advance, for a review of thirty workplace health interventions, carried out by a team of Danish researchers at the University of Copenhagen, showed that worksite fitness programmes not only helped the staff get fit and lose weight, but also improved corporate morale, boosted productivity and reduced sickness absenteeism. This made the regimes highly cost effective, the gains in the companies’ bottom line exceeding the cost of the health promotion programmes by a factor of three to five. Until these programmes are introduced, every individual police officer in Britain must take responsibility for losing their excess avoirdupois. To help them achieve this goal, the Self Help Alliance is offering them a fifty-per cent reduction in the cost of purchasing a copy of More or Less?, which provides a 39-step programme of healthy lifetime weight control achieved, not by crash dieting, but by healthy life style change. To take advantage of this offer all they need do is visit the Alliance website – www.selfhelpalliance.co.uk – and enter the code word ‘Copper’.

Spring Fever: The Lethargy Which Many Suffer at this Time of the Year

admin — Tue, 20 Mar 2012 14:20:24 +0000

Today is the Vernal Equinox. This astronomical event has been celebrated for thousands of years because in the northern hemisphere it marks the beginning of spring and is one of only two days in the calendar when the lengths of the day and night are equal. (The term equinox meaning ‘equal night’.) This is a season of cosmic renewal. It signals the end of the earth’s ‘dead’ season, when the countryside suddenly bursts into resplendent life. Buds appear on the bushes and trees. The fields display their embroidered carpet of wild flowers, and the birds begin their mating calls. But the rejuvenation of the biosphere doesn’t always provide an equal boost for the naked ape. While new born lambs skip and jump, and March hares gambol, the human animal often sinks into a state of lethargy known as ‘Spring Fever’, a malady that dictionaries describe as the listlessness that people often feel with the rapid arrival of hotter weather. The major symptoms of this complaint are irritability, lack of drive, mild headaches and persistent weariness. Germans call this syndrome fruhjahrsmudigkeit, which literally translated means ‘spring tiredness’ . My Auntie Ethel suffered from this malaise every year, and like others of her generation was convinced that her problems arose because the sudden blossoming of leaves on trees and shrubs soaked up so much oxygen from the air that she was left in a state of mild anoxia. This subject receives no mention in medical textbooks, but is thought to arise when an increase in environmental temperature leads to a sudden expansion of the vast network of blood vessels in the skin. Since nature abhors a vacuum, more blood is needed to fill the dilated plexus of blood vessel. Initially this increased volume can only be supplied by drawing fluids from elsewhere in the body. This means that until fresh blood corpuscles can be manufactured, there must be a temporary decrease in the concentration of red blood cells. Since these cells are responsible for transporting oxygen around the body, there may well be some substance in the old belief that springtime fatigue is due to a ‘thinning’ of the blood.
Springtime also heralds a number of important hormonal changes, some of which are related to the increased length of the day, which stimulates the activity of the pineal gland. Gradually there is an increase in the levels of sex hormones and also of serotonin, the ‘happiness hormone’. This increases the sexual activity of most creatures. Birds normally breed only in the spring, but some have been induced to produce a second batch of eggs in the winter by exposing them to repeated doses of artificial light. Things work differently for us, for contrary to popular belief, human libido appears to be stronger in the autumn than in the spring. This was shown by a massive seven-year survey of over a million births carried out by health authorities in New York City. This revealed that most babies are conceived in the autumn, rather than the spring, which proved to be the slackest time of the year for human conceptions. So maybe we should revise our old idea that it’s in the spring that young men lightly turn their thoughts to love. At that time they may be so exhausted that the best they can do is post a ‘see you soon’ message on Friends Reunited. However, while many of us may be a trifle enervated by the arrival of the warm weather, it’s a propitious time for DIY retailers, since its appears to boost the nesting urge of many home owners, who feel a primordial urge to embark on a round of spring cleaning and general household improvements. Market reports show that at this time of the year the sale of paints and household cleaners rises by as much as a fifth.

Make Full Use of The Healing Power of Nature

admin — Thu, 15 Mar 2012 09:43:17 +0000

Sometimes we try too hard to control our fate. Astrophysicists estimate that planet earth was formed well over four billion years ago. For most of that time it was just a barren wilderness of water and rocks. Fossil records show that conditions eventually became ripe for primitive life forms to be created out of the primeval slime. This was about 530 million years ago. Darwin showed that these simple, prokaryotic cells gradually evolved into more complex organisms. After countless millennia tiny rodent mammals were formed, and these over time gave rise to tree living primates. Homo sapiens only appeared on the scene when our simian ancestors learnt to leave the safety of the trees, adopt the upright posture and develop the skill of chasing game on the open savannah. That was no more than three or four million years ago. This is a mere blink in the annals of geological time.

How on earth did life proceed before we arrogant naked apes arrived, and imagined ourselves to be the lords and masters of all creation? Creationists and neo-Darwinists may argue over the exact timing of our arrival – whether on the sixth day or after four billion years – but both factions agree that the world and everything in it is ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’. Its powers of self-regulation are awesome. This marvel of auto-adjustment was investigated by James Lovelock, the English chemist and polymath, who chronicled it in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. In this seminal work he marshaled evidence to show that the earth’s biosphere acts as a single, integrated system with extensive powers of self-management. He called this super-organism Gaia, because this was the name of the Greek goddess of the earth. Whatever catastrophes our planet suffers – whether volcanoes, tornadoes, floods, meteor impacts or changes in the level of sun spot activity – Lovelock showed how Gaia works to maintain the stability of the chemistry of the cosmic environment, including the oxygen concentration of the air and the salinity of the sea.
A century or so earlier the French physician Claude Bernard had made a similar observation regarding the human body. Like Gaia, we too are capable of maintaining the fixity of our ‘milieu intérieur’. Without any conscious effort on our part, our bodies are capable of regulating their core temperature, heart rate, oxygen intake and blood pressure according to the needs of the moment. This constant balancing act was later referred to as ‘homeostasis’, a term devised by the American physician Walter Cannon in 1922. Bernard’s discoveries led to the formulation of the principle of the ‘vis medicatrix naturae’, the healing power of nature. This concept had been around for many years, but now took on a new life as the foundation stone of the emerging nature cure movement. Most weeks we suffer damage to some part of our bodily framework. We bruise a knee, burn a hand or sprain an ankle. Each time the wound heals, whether or not we apply poultices, plasters and antiseptic dressings. This was recognized by Ambroise Paré, the famous sixteenth century French surgeon who, despite being the official surgeon to three French kings, had the modesty to admit: ‘I dressed the wound, God healed the patient.’
Today we face a totally different problem. Now we have the benefit of a medical profession which commands the powers of life and death. Doctors, by virtue of their training, are interventionists. We, their patients, have also been brought up to believe that there’s a pill for every ill. That’s a dangerous combination, because there are many times when the correct medical prescription is reassurance, advice and masterful inactivity. We must accept that most disorders are self-limiting. If left alone, they disappear like snowflakes on a heated window pane. If we become dependent on regular medication – tranquillisers, sleeping pills, statins and anti-hypertensive drugs – we run the risk of treating symptoms when we should be tackling underlying causes. We also negate the body’s powers of instantaneous self regulation. To be autonomous, self-regulating individuals we must become less reliant on long term medication, and more reliant on the vis medicatrix naturae. That was the message of Milton, who wrote: ‘Accuse not Nature, she has done her part, do thou but thine.’

House of Lords: Time Not for Change but for Total Abolition

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:03:56 +0000

A week is said to be a long time in politics. Yet five thousand weeks, and countless debates, white papers, Royal commissions and public consultations, have not enabled British parliamentarians to carry out much needed reforms to its upper chamber. The problem was highlighted in 1911 by the Liberal Government of Lloyd George, which passed a Parliament Act which said ‘it is intended to substitute for the House of Lords as it at present exists a Second Chamber constituted on a popular instead of a hereditary basis.’ The same pledge was made by the Labour party when it came to power in 1997 on the manifesto promise that it would reform the House of Lords by ending hereditary peerages and creating a democratically elected upper chamber. When it came to power the government led by Tony Blair reneged on this promise and decided that life peerages should be offered to people chosen by the government rather than elected by the people. This scheme was wide open to corruption, since people who contributed to party funds could buy a seat in the House of Lords, thereby getting a title and membership of one of London’s most exclusive clubs, which was heavily subsided from the national exchequer. Again, in the 2010 general election, all three parties promised to take action to bring about Lords reform, the Coalition government promising ‘to bring forward proposals for a wholly or mainly elected upper chamber on the basis of proportional representation.’ These changes have still not been made, making the House of Lords what the Guardian newspaper has described as ‘the laughing stock of the western world.’

This is a tragedy, since the upper chamber had a propitious start in 1275 when Edward I, in desperate need of cash, called a meeting of both the barons and the representatives of the common people. The convention, which was called a Parliament from the French word parler. agreed to meet his need by raising taxes levied largely on their property holdings. Years later Henry VIII gave the two groups permission to hold regular meetings in the royal Palace of Westminster. This led to the establishment of the House of Lords and the House of Commons, which was created in what was originally St Stephen’s Chapel. Now there seems little doubt that the House of Lords has passed its sell-by-date. It’s an expensive anachronism which no longer serves a useful purpose. Its original raison d’etre was to supervise and amend the legislation carried out in the commons. That function has long since been superseded. In 1911 a Parliament Act was passed which removed the power of the Lords to veto money bills, a term which might be stretched to include most legislation. As the Guardian newspaper concluded earlier this month, ‘the upper house provides no reliable protection against mad, bad or dangerous laws’. As it stands today the ‘other place’ is a liability. Its members are now divided along party lines. They’re chosen by the party bosses and responsive to the party whip. This introduces the risk of cronyism and, worst still, the threat that life peerages will be sold for party donations or phoney ‘loans’. The solution is simple. The upper house must be abolished. There’s nothing sacred about the system of bi-cameral government. Many legislatures, such as the parliaments of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Israel and New Zealand are unicameral. Likewise the Scottish parliament and Welsh Assembly. According to the latest official estimates, the members expenses and general costs of running the House of Lords is well over £80 billion a year. In a recession this money could be far better spent in other ways. No institution has a divine right to exist when it ceases to serve a useful purpose. The House of Lords should be abolished without delay and turned into a five-star heritage hotel. The necessary act of dissolution has already been written. ‘The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued, have thought fit to ordain and enact ….that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be ….wholly abolished’. It beggars belief, but that edict was in fact was written on the 19th March 1649.

Power to the People: The UK’s Faltering Attempt to Create a ‘Big Society’

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:02:14 +0000

We live in a global world where nations, to an ever increasing extent, are being dominated by political juntas. To escape the stranglehold of these centralised power blocs, people are now taking to the streets to demand their historic rights and freedoms. Historians have no doubt that when Ronald Reagan won the race to the White House in 1980 he did so by promising that he ‘would get the government off the backs of the people.’ Margaret Thatcher made a similar pledge in her bid for power. She did so with the full support of her close advisor and friend Sir Keith Joseph, who gave a seminal lecture in 1976 in which he characterised private business as a horse which had to carry the national economy to failure or success. In the mid 1950s the equine beast of burden was just about able to carry the government rider, which was consuming two thirds of the Gross National Product. But by the time he gave his famous Stockton Lecture, two decades later, the welfare state was consuming a third more than the private sector could produce. ‘The rider, ‘he warned, ‘is now twice as heavy as the horse.’ The books could only be balanced by heavy state borrowing. This was the disaster the current coalition government has inherited and is trying to solve by creating a ‘big society’ in which power is transferred from Westminster to the regions. To achieve this switch, David Cameron has appointed not one, but two government ministers, a Minister for Civil Society and a Minister for Decentralisation. Both recognize the quandary they face. At a public meeting in October 2011 Nick Hurd, the Minister for Civil Society, said the government was ‘absolutely serious’ about creating a Big Society by devolving power to the regions, but openly confessed that there’s ‘something Governments aren’t good at, and that’s giving up power.’ Speaking at the same meeting Micah Gold, of the Big Society, referred to the same failure of central government. ‘Notoriously they don’t tend to give up power or trust people.’ Unlike water, which naturally flows downstream, political power is a force which always travels uphill to the very centre and pinnacle of government control. Its flow is centripetal rather than centrifugal. What’s more, once political power is acquired, it’s never easily relinquished.

One of the most serious long-term effects of war is that it increases the power of central government. A country that has rallied behind a government that has conducted a successful war is normally quite willing for it to carry on running the nation’s affairs when peace is declared. It doesn’t expect private companies to be able to run the heavy industries that were nationalised during the war, forgetting that during the conflict it was private enterprise that built the battleships, tanks and planes, and it’s those same companies that will be called upon to build the peace by manufacturing computers, hovercrafts and high-speed railways. No government in the world has ever created a single inventor, composer, painter or successful entrepreneur. Nationalised industries fail, and while they exist they paralyse private enterprise by making it conform to its own bureaucratic ethos of grants, permits, licences, planning permissions and health and safety regulations. If the Coalition government genuinely wants to create a Big Society in need do no more than make a drastic reduction in the level of taxes it raises. At present, three quarters of the activities carried out by local authorities are determined by Westminster and, in turn, three quarters of what they have to spend is provided by central government. In future local governments must set their own agendas, and raise their own finances. This would make them both more accountable, and more responsive, to local needs. The great free market economist Friedrich von Hayek wrote: ‘Nobody has yet succeeded in deliberately arranging all the activities that go on in a complex society. If anyone did ever succeed in fully organising such a society, it would no longer make use of many minds, but would be altogether dependent on one mind.’ It’s said that after the collapse of the Soviet Union, a Russian planner came to the US and asked who was responsible for the supply of bread to New York. He was amazed to find that this happened spontaneously and operated far better than that provided in the USSR. There will be infinitely more freedom, variety and growth, and less risk of corruption and lobbying, if power is widely distributed rather than centrally held. The economic risk will also be reduced, for while central banks can fail, a million small businesses will provide some success stories even during times of economic gloom. It will also be more fun, for as the late Steve Jobs, founder of the highly successful and innovative Apple corporation, said ‘It’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the navy.’

Arthritis Knees: Another Disease Closely Linked to the Obesity Epidemic

admin — Tue, 13 Mar 2012 20:01:16 +0000

Today, very few people walk well, which is particularly true of the elderly and obese. Sit on a park bench and watch the world and his wife walk by and you’ll see how very badly they do it. You’ll see hobblers, waddlers, mincers and strutters, but very few people who walk with elegance and grace. This is not surprising, for human gait is basically an unstable affair. Every time we take a take a step forward we have to perform the difficult task of balancing a ganging body of five feet or more on a shifting base which at times is no larger that a milk bottle top. Ideally the legs should swing easily from the hips, in a direct line with the direction of travel. But this elegant, narrow gauge way of walking can never be achieved by anyone who carries excess weight. They can’t balance on one leg while they swing the other forward, so they’re forced to rock and roll from side to make sure they’ve always got a solid base. For safety’s sake, they mimic the ungainly nautical roll of a sailor on a tossing ship, just as women do in the later stages of their pregnancies. People who put on weight don’t walk, they waddle. Ergonomic studies show that a force of nearly three to six times body weight is imposed on each knee during walking. This means that a person who is just a stone overweight subjects their knees to an extra loading of sixty or more pounds with every step they take, which in time renders them prone to arthritic change because of the imperfect way their knees are used. Surveys show that if people are divided by weight into five categories, those in the heaviest group have ten times the risk of developing arthritis of their knees as those in the lightest group. This makes them prime candidates for knee replacement operations, which now take place in Britain at the rate of 77,500 a year. The same applies in America, where researchers at Harvard University have found that the percentages of cases of arthritis attributable to obesity has increased six-fold during the thirty year period from 1971-2002. That’s the bad news. The good news, revealed in a recent American survey, is that if the prevalence of obesity among 50-84 year-olds could be returned to the level it was ten years ago, a total of well over 100,000 knee replacement operations would be saved. As a study carried out at the Boston University Arthritic Centre showed, women who shed just 11 lb of excess weight halve their risk of developing knee arthritis over the next ten years. Arthritic pain and stiffness in the knees is common, – afflicting six out of every ten women in Britain over the age of fifty – but it’s not obligatory. .

Obesity increases the risk of premature death, from diseases like heart attacks, strokes and cancer. But an even greater tragedy, numerically, is that it also impairs the quality of life of countless senior citizens, whose declining years are wracked with needless invalidism and pain. For them the great misfortune is not an early demise, but what dies within them while they still live. This fate is often self-inflicted, as was shown in the case of William Banting, the English undertaker who in 1863 wrote the world’s first slimming booklet Letter on Corpulence. He weighed 202lbs by the time he was 65 and was compelled to go backwards down stairs to avoid the jarring of his knees and ankles. Once he’d shed 46 lbs he was able to come down the stairs naturally with perfect ease. That remedy is available to all, so there’s no reason to shelter behind the old excuse that osteoarthritis is due to ‘fair wear and tear’. That fallacy is dismissed in the blog I posted on this site a few months ago which you read by asking any search engine to find ‘Obesity: It’s a Dog’s Life and a Major Cause of Nobbly Knees.’ .

Britain: A Nation Strangled by Red Tape

admin — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 11:08:22 +0000

The function of a government is to provide the conditions in which its people can flourish with the minimum supervision and control. The more invisible its guiding hand, the greater its effectiveness and success. In essence all the state needs to do is to defend the realm against outside aggression, preserve internal law and order, and maintain a stable currency. Any activities carried out beyond these parameters will curb the liberty of the people and restrict their opportunities for free development and growth. This threshold has long since been breached. According to Eamonn Butler, head of the Adam Smith Institute, at least 3,609 new criminal offences have been introduced since 1997. These petty restrictions and ludicrous health and safety rules mean that we can no longer ‘give our customers a glass of mulled wine, cuddle a crying child, enjoy a violinist at our restaurant table, organize children’s outings, smoke in a private club, feed the dog grapes, or sing a song at a pub piano without their permission.’ This is death by bureaucratic strangulation. What’s rotten in Britain is certainly not its people’, concludes Butler in the final pages of his anguished diatribe The Rotten State of Britain.(2010) ‘They are as proud, inventive, outgoing, fair-minded, tolerant and enterprising as they have ever been. What’s rotten is a system of government that has concentrated power at the centre so comprehensively that these virtues can no longer flourish.’

History reveals that it’s far safer to put one’s faith in private enterprise than in government promotions, because their success rate is higher and their failures less severe and easier to contain. Nevertheless we’ve allowed successive governments to take increasing control of our daily comings and goings. Even though taxes have risen by more than half since 1997, Britain has amassed one of the world’s highest mountains of sovereign debt, the interest payments on which will cripple our children for years to come. To settle the nation bills, the Treasury is indulging in various acts of ‘quantitative easing’, printing bank notes with a profligacy which is causing inflation to rise to more than twice the accepted safety level. Each year we now have to work until June to meet the tax man’s demands. Yet despite this crass economic ineptitude, successive governments have made laughing stocks of themselves by trying to compete with privately funded entrepreneurs.

One Friday afternoon in 1999, when MPs were safely back in their constituencies, Gordon Brown surprised the world by announcing that he was going to sell half Britain’s gold reserves, seemingly without any prior consultation with the Bank of England. Since he wasn’t an experienced currency dealer he probably didn’t realise that he was selling at the very bottom of the bullion market, getting nearly three times less per ounce than in 1980 and considerably more than half less that on offer in 2007. That one exploratory gamble cost the British taxpayer £2billion, and enabled the far wiser traders at the Bank of China to make £1 billion, by purchasing our grossly undervalued family jewels. Another fiasco occurred when the British government decided to exceed its brief and assume the role of a commercial impresario by building an exhibition hall to celebrate the advent of the new millennium. Its totally unrealistic expectation was that it would raise private capital to cover the construction costs. When this failed, it repeatedly plundered the charitable Lottery Fund to pay the developers as their bills rose inexorably to four times the original estimate. The project quickly became a subject of public ridicule, the makers of Wonderbra running an opportunistic advertising campaign: ‘Not all domes lack public support.’ On the day of the ceremonial opening hundreds of VIPs were kept waiting for hours because of ticketing problems. Attendance figures were half those expected. After a month the CEO was sacked. When the year ended it was clear that the organisers had no preconceived exit strategy. For a while the tented space was used to hold free music festivals, and then during the 2004 Xmas period as a refuge for the homeless. For a time there was a suggestion that the arena might be used as an enclosed football stadium. Unfortunately, the only interested team was a local club called Fisher Athletic, which couldn’t afford the million pounds a month the doomed dome was costing to maintain. Eventually the government had to admit defeat, and sell the complex to a private American company, who turned it into the highly successful O2 entertainment’s centre. Something similar happened with an earlier government venture into industrial farming, when two-and-a-half million acres of central Africa (an area equivalent to that of Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and Kent) were purchased, cleared and planted with ground nuts. The scheme was expected to provide a third of Britain’s fats as well as provide work for the local population. It didn’t work, and had to be abandoned, because nobody realised that the area was prone to prolonged droughts and was populated by troops of ravenous baboons which dug up the nuts by night. With such an appalling record of mismanagement, perhaps it’s time we slashed the range of central government activities and allowed the country’s economy to be run in a democratic fashion – by the people, for the people.