Why walking in the woods is good for you
It's one of the most enjoyable activities imaginable - and it might also be one of the most beneficial
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2010/jul/27/walking-in-the-woods-health
According to the Finnish Forest Research Institute, one of the most enjoyable activities around can reduce stress and depression, ease muscle tension, counter attention deficit disorder, even calm an erratic heart. What is this wonder therapy? A walk in the woods. As Karjalainen puts it, "Many people feel relaxed and good when they are out in nature. But not many of us know there is also scientific evidence about the healing effects of nature."
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All Work and No Play
Given the levels of debt and the low wages in our society, flat-out full time working seems like the only option for most people trying to stay alive and make a decent life for themselves and their families.
The ants march on, but we'd be happier as grasshoppers
The idea that work is the meaning of existence has little basis in biology. Let us guiltlessly enjoy the sweet idleness of summer
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/01/ants-march-grasshoppers-happier
Of course, work is a good and necessary thing in its place. It stops you from starving, directs your energies and can even offer friendship and community. But nature writers like Mabey have pointed out that seeing work as the meaning of life is a human, metaphysical invention; it has little basis in biology. Play, not work, seems to be the defining essence of life on earth.
While the new austerity requires us to put a price on everything, play remains priceless precisely because it is pointless: a way of simply enjoying and celebrating life when life is all we have. Play is also free, egalitarian and equilibrium-loving: it costs nothing and asks for nothing in return and is therefore an excellent model for sustainable living with scarce resources.
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Angus Macqueen is the guy who made the four-part series on drugs policy, which I commented on yesterday. This is an article he wrote about drugs in last Sunday's Observer:
Why do we so wilfully cover up the failure of the war on drugs?
The vulnerable are left unprotected by our attitudes to substance abuse, argues a leading documentary maker
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/aug/01/angus-macqueen-drugs-trade-policy
Drugs policies have little to do with science, health risk or harm. They have been hijacked by the emotive rhetoric of moralists.
This fear of the Daily Mail is a dishonest excuse – the truth is that there is a collective lack of will to address one of our major social problems. We bury our heads and pretend that banning drugs equals regulation. Quite the reverse; driving drugs underground leaves them unregulated and consumers unprotected.
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The Shock Doctrine
Coalition is more radical than Thatcher government, says senior Tory minister
Francis Maude defends scope and speed of reforms with claim earlier governments have not pushed ahead vigorously enough
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2010/jul/30/coalition-government-reforms-francis-maude
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Former MI5 chief delivers damning verdict on Iraq invasion
Lady Eliza Manningham-Buller tells Chilcot that invasion increased terrorist threat and radicalised young British Muslims
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jul/20/chilcot-mi5-boss-iraq-war
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Polly Toymbee was on form with this piece on the government's intentions for the NHS:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/17/tories-are-demolishing-the-nhs
This is no careful plan: the NHS is being wired for demolition at breakneck speed............................................
Analysts are aghast at the sheer recklessness of the proposals. Yet the Tories proceed with no answers to the basic questions
Simon Jenkins has been keeping up his relentless attacks on our follies in the Middle East:
A history of folly, from the Trojan horse to Afghanistan
By recording failure in meticulous detail, the leaked war logs bear devastating witness to our incompetence
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/27/folly-war-wikileaks-afghanistan
I cannot avoid the conclusion that, just as the Pashtun are said to be "hardwired to fight", so now are certain western regimes. War is about sating the military-security-industrial complex, a lobby so potent that, long after the cold war ended, it can induce democratic leaders to expend quantities of blood and money on such specious pretexts as suppressing dictators in one country and terror in another...................................
Like puppets dancing to manufactured fears and dreams of glory, these leaders have lost their grip on Plato's "sacred golden cord of reason". Until that grip is restored, the folly revealed by the war logs will continue.
Clegg told the truth on Iraq. It's for Cameron to end a decade of pretence
The coalition inherited a mendacious foreign policy, leading to two disastrous wars. Time now for an honourable peace
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/22/clegg-truth-iraq
Commentators are often asked to predict history's verdict on a particular era, and are well advised to decline. But it is hard not to see western policy in the first decade of the 21st century as sunk in a morass of folly. It was subcontracted to a defence lobby desperate for a role, which it found in exploiting weak leaders by playing on the ideology of fear.
It has led the US and Britain into contentious relations with the entire Muslim world, fuelling anti-western sentiment not only across Asia but, as Manningham-Buller pointed out, among Muslim populations within the west. The last decade has seen an entire foreign policy elite lose the art of friendship. Bred under the communist threat, the west's leaders craved a mighty enemy and found it by exaggerating the threat from militant Islam and elevating terrorist gangs to the status of state enemies.
As a result, British policy has relied on one outdated premise after another.
Foreign policy lurched into paranoid mode. Guantánamo filled with victims and ludicrous sums were spent on security. The world responded in kind. Airports became nests of xenophobia.
This was nowhere better demonstrated than in Blair's dreadful January appearance before the Chilcot inquiry, which now meekly claims to be unconcerned with the legality of the Iraq war (so what is it concerned with?). All evidence has testified that the war was a mistake and undermined Britain's security. Blair's contradictory display of pro-war self-delusion, arrogance and folly should be a textbook video for any school of 21st-century statesmanship.
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Seamus Milne pitched in with this:
Now Afghanistan too shows the limits of American power
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/jul/21/now-afghanistan-shows-limit-american-power
The catastrophic illusions and acts of official betrayal at the heart of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being progressively exposed, one after another. In London, the former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Iraq inquiry this week that the security service had indeed warned Tony Blair's government that aggression against Iraq, "on top of our involvement in Afghanistan", would violently radicalise a generation of young Muslims and "substantially" increase the threat of terror attacks in Britain.
And so it came to pass. A few days earlier, Carne Ross, Britain's former representative at the UN responsible for Iraq before the invasion, told the inquiry that the British government's statements about its assessment of the threat from Saddam Hussein "were, in their totality, lies". In due course, those lies were brutally exposed.
It's easy to be inured to the power of such indictments after nine years of the war on terror and its litany of torture, kidnapping, atrocities and mass killing. But together with a string of earlier revelations they do combine to highlight the utter disgrace of the British political and security establishment, which deceived the public about a war it was well aware in advance would expose them to great danger.
The reason for such official dissembling and recklessness is also now clear enough. The British commitment to join the attack on Iraq was transparently never driven by the supposed menace of Saddam or the legal casuistry advanced at the time, but by an overriding commitment to put Britain at the service of US power, under whoever's leadership and wherever that might take it at any particular time. The "blood price", as Blair called it, for this – David Cameron made explicit last week – subservient relationship had to be paid.
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It's good to see Susie Orbach writing again in the Guardian:
Ad men today are wrong on body size
Why Lynne Featherstone was right to celebrate curvaceous Christina Hendricks as a role model
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/jul/31/susie-orbach-ad-men-wrong-on-body-size
http://anybody.squarespace.com/anybody_vent/2009/2/8/susie-orbach-on-bodies.html
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/non-fiction/article5661153.ece
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