Billionaires, house prices, NHS, carers and a beauty tip

15 April 2023

Some billionaires are apparently getting irritated when they’re called “billionaires” and Jay-Z, the rapper and businessman, has said “they started inventing words like ‘capitalist’ and things like that”.  If he actually believes ‘capitalist’ was invented to insult billionaires, there’s proof you don’t have to be clever to make money.

Elon Musk provided further evidence this week in an interview with the BBC’s James Clayton.  Musk had asked Twitterers if he should stand down as its CEO and they said yes, he should.  When asked about this by Clayton, Musk said “I did stand down, I keep telling you I’m not the CEO of Twitter, my dog is the CEO of Twitter.” 

Even back in 2019, before Russia’s war on Ukraine and covid had made even more billionaires, the former Starbuck CEO Howard Schultz thought the word was “unfair” and wanted people to call them ‘people of means’ or ‘people of wealth’.  It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that, if they shared their wealth with those who need it, they could avoid the entire problem.  After all, who can possibly ‘need’ a billion?

Darren Woods might be one.  As CEO of Exxon, he’s just raked in nearly £29m, 52% more than the previous year, because Russia’s war on Ukraine increased oil prices.  The company confirmed the war had “delivered exceptional business results” for the company under Woods’ leadership.  Talk about damning with faint praise.

Our local newspaper reported that new census figures show the number of empty homes hereabouts has risen in the last decade.  We have a lot of ghost villages where a large proportion of the houses are used as holiday homes by people who honour us with their presence and large bags of shopping from Islington’s Sainsburys from time to time.  All of which means that local shops, post offices, pubs and other facilities lose the business they used to get from residents and are forced to close.

Meanwhile the Institute of Public Policy Research said that the shortage of homes has led to increases in rent, as if there were some sort of connection.  Surely if I’ve bought a property and want a return of x% on what I paid for it, I fix the rent to give me that and don’t need to increase the rent as windfall gains increase the property’s value?

The NHS 111 helpline is a great headline for politicians but (spoiler alert) it’s underfunded.  Analysis by the House of Commons library, commissioned by the Liberal Democrats, has shown that more than 10,000 calls to the helpline were abandoned every day in 2022 because people got fed up with hanging on.  And, after seven years’ training, junior doctors get £14 an hour.  After rather less training, our gardener gets £22 an hour.

People who think being rich is important are now running private care companies because the state doesn’t support older people needing care.  Let’s face it, they know for 90 years exactly when somebody is going to be 90 and likely to need extra care, and the chances they will live to be 90.  But it’s expensive and no government of any colour seems willing to start funding so carers’ savings have to be transferred to privateers.

To make my bias clear, I must declare a personal interest here:  today is the 10^th anniversary of my wife’s stroke. We pay for a carer to come in for ¾ hour every morning to help me get her up and I do everything else. 

The NHS does provide very good short-term emergency support but not ongoing care so we have to use a private agency and, from the £30 they charge us for that 45 minutes, £10 goes straight into the owners’ pockets.  The same sort of money goes to the owners of residential homes for respite care and I’m now looking for a good residential home run by a charity so at least the money goes back into the service.

During normal lives, private healthcare is a choice (for some people), not a necessity.  If you are suddenly disabled by, say, a stroke, there is no choice and you have to pay through the nose.

We’re lucky because we can afford it, at least while we’ve still got some savings left, but what about the families who can’t?  Let’s nationalise all homecare and residential care companies and feed profits back into the service.

Suella Braverman’s racism has finally been called out by the Tory peer Sayeeda Warsi who said on Thursday “Whether this consistent use of racist rhetoric is strategy or incompetence, however, doesn’t matter. Both show she is not fit to hold high office.”

For obvious reasons, white Tory grandees had been reluctant to accuse Braverman of racism but, once Warsi had opened the door, it became clear how many friends Braverman hasn’t got.

And here’s a beauty tip from the model Bella Hadid: “If you remove eyebrowswith something like a razor, the rumours are true – it’s really unlikely that they will fully grow back.”  Ho yerss?  Doesn’t work on my chin.

Therapeutic uses of hallucinogens

1 August 2021

I told my children that I had nothing against drugs in principle but I’d prefer it if they didn’t take anything requiring a needle because of the risks of infection and because some of the nastier, more contaminated drugs were injected.  I also said that some street drugs are often cut with quite unpleasant substances to make them go further and increase the dealers’ profits.

And yes, I told them that some drugs were illegal but that the two drugs that killed by far the most people*, alcohol and nicotine, were legal, and that some of the drugs classified as class A are prescribed by doctors, so the classification of drugs as A, B or C is influenced more by politics than science.

In recent decades, cannabis was demoted from class B to class C but was later returned to class B and, as drugmeisters stayed ahead of the game, other stuff that had previously been freely available and sold as ‘legal highs’ was classified as illegal.

Cannabis itself had been used for centuries both for pleasure and as an analgesic but I only became aware of it when I discovered the American beat poets of the 1950s.  I also read Aldous Huxley’s ‘The Doors of Perception’ about his experiences of mescaline, a natural hallucinogen derived from various species of cactus which had been used ceremonially in Central and South America for millennia, whose effects are similar to those of LSD and psilocybin (derived from ‘magic mushrooms’).

LSD was first synthesised in 1938 and research into its medical applications took place into the 1960s, the most famous probably being those of the psychologist Dr Timothy Leary, but as life became more tight-arsed in the 1970s, it became more difficult to fund research. 

However, the older generation that disapproved back then has now died and been replaced by people who might even have taken it themselves in the past and many countries are now licensing and funding clinical research into the medicinal value of ‘illegal’ drugs in treating medical conditions, from using cannabis to ease the pain of multiple sclerosis to using LSD to treat mental health problems such as anxiety and depression, addiction and PTSD.

Having written regularly on our relationships with food and farming for the ‘New York Times’, Michael Pollan got interested in psychedelics and, in 2018, published ‘This is Your Mind on Plants’, a personal report on the renewed scientific interest in LSD and Ayahuasca (a psychoactive tea that originates from the Amazon region).

Pollan also reports on our relationships with three other plant-based substances – opium, mescaline and coffee – and, having tried each of them, he considers the way in which each has been adopted by different cultures and why humans need to use these consciousness-changing substances, and why some societies are so paranoid about them.

I suspect part of the answer to the last question is that pharmaceutical companies have a vested interest in suppressing private experimentation while they make profits from mass-producing addictive opiate painkillers such as OxyContin and Tramadol which have been involved in many deaths and the creation of millions more addicts (addiction, of course, helps increase pharma’s profits at minimal extra cost).

I find it interesting that he included coffee in his trials.  I have fond memories of breakfasts in roadside cafés in France consisting of large bowls of strong, bitter coffee accompanied by Gauloises or Gitanes cigarettes containing caporal tobacco, a strong black tobacco which, with what would now be called ‘pre-loved’ garlic, helped to give Paris’s Métro stations their own distinctive odour.

Many years later, my secretary kept a percolator on the go and I’d drink about 8 cups during the day as a matter of course.  Then, one day, while I was waiting for another car to come through some roadworks towards me, somebody who’d just come out of the pub up the road drove into the back of my car at about 50.

I didn’t feel very well for several days so I took time off work and didn’t eat or drink anything but, when I returned to work, my first act was naturally to fire up the percolator.  After sinking the first cup, I realised that my hands were shaking and my mind was racing so I started to drink water instead and now only have a couple of coffees a month.

Pollan looks at coffee’s place in history and how the social and business gatherings that took place in coffee houses from the 16^th century onwards helped to create the financial world we now have to suffer (and, arguably, contributed to the creation of the first futures market – for Dutch tulips – and the ensuing crash in 1637).

We now also know that some plants give their pollinators a shot of caffeine to encourage their efforts …

In the late 19^th century, the drugs of choice in the west were opium and its close relation, morphine.  Opium ‘dens’ offered people places where they could smoke and dream and doctors would inject morphine to relieve the pain caused by everything from war wounds to menstrual cramps.  It wasn’t until the start of the 20^th century that people realised how addictive these opiates are and how their effect is rather like several large gin and tonics taken in quick succession:  they don’t actually cure anything but you no longer care.  (Remember how disapproving Dr Watson was of Sherlock Holmes’ habit, and that their creator was a doctor?)

One open-source publisher has collated, sieved and compared the results of various peer-reviewed research into LSD carried out in different countries and found a clear consensus that showed “the therapeutic potential of LSD to reduce psychiatric symptomology, mainly in alcoholism”.  It was also clear that LSD rarely showed any physiological toxicity and no organic or neurological damage was associated with its use, leading to the conclusion that LSD is actually one of the safest recreational drugs.

Some contraindications have been identified, including severe cardio-vascular disease, pregnancy, epilepsy and pre-existing tendencies to paranoia, which can lead to bad trips involving acute anxiety, and confusion that can lead to unpredictable behaviour in the absence of a ‘babysitter’ but, for healthy, not-pregnant people, it just tends to expand their horizons.

The effects of LSD generally include a distortion in our usual understanding of time, a loss of interest in personal identity, enhanced perception of shape, size, sounds and colour, synaesthesia and a general sense of the completeness and inter-relatedness of everything.

(Other studies have shown similar benefits from psilocybin and that brain scans after its use show reduced activity in parts of the brain that are believed to direct one’s attention, which is consistent with users’ subjective reports of a reduced sense of self and feelings of ‘oneness’ with everything.)

My only experience with LSD was one of the formative experiences of my life;  it made everything fascinating and hypnotically beautiful and left me with an abiding sense of peace and comfort, but certainly the passing of time became spasmodic and unpredictable and I remember being able to see time, blowing like smoke across a field.

My unscientific, subjective feeling was that it weakened the barriers between one’s conscious and subconscious memories and my enhanced peacefulness and recognition of beauty were because there’s nothing in my head I don’t know about;  but I could imagine that, if one had buried unpleasant events, they might exhume themselves and freak you out.

Other drugs can have similar effects and, of course, cocaine was in common use until early in the last century (hence the ‘coke’ in Coca Cola, which contained cocaine until as late as 1929).

Queen Victoria would take laudanum, an opiate-derived drug, and I remember my parents treating tummy upsets with a few drops of chlorodyne, a mixture of laudanum, cannabis and cocaine, which was delicious and worked wonders.  It’s inventor’s name, J Collis Browne, is still borne by a medicine that contains a small amount of morphine and still helps tummy upsets.

Because so many mind-altering substances are currently classified as illegal in most countries, multi-million pound growing, processing and distribution criminal industries have filled the gap, leading to efficient smuggling and ‘county lines’ networks that border controls and the police can’t realistically hope to stop, even if they occasionally succeed in closing down individual operations.

Just imagine if, like alcohol and tobacco, all such drugs were legalised, their manufacture and processing were subject to strict quality controls and they were heavily taxed and freely available.  It would free up a lot of police time to follow the government’s latest – and utterly pointless – decision to increase SASs to take a few more knives off the street, the government would gather the taxes and big pharma would have a field day.

*          Figures just released for Scotland show another increase in annual drug-related deaths to more than 1,300, around one in every 50 deaths;  according to the Scottish Public Health Observatory, deaths from alcohol- and tobacco-related conditions exceeded 10,000 in 2019 (pre-Covid) and accounted for more than one in every six deaths (18% of all deaths).

More unmarked graves, kindness, face masks, the mind, neuroscience and tree-hugging

4 July 2021

The number of unmarked graves at the sites of church-run residential schools in Canada is now around 1,000;  that’s 1,000 children who just happened to be born to Indigenous parents who died in the care of a church that dumped their bodies in unmarked graves. 

These children were abducted from their families so they could be “civilised”.  If that’s civilisation, give me the wild.  The whole thing makes the Ku Klux Klan look like the Women’s Institute making strawberry jam flambée.

Having originally said they wouldn’t release the information they hold, the Catholic Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate said on Friday they will now release all their documents.  The change of heart might just be related to four Catholic churches being destroyed by fire in the last two weeks which, in turn, might just be related to the grief and rage felt by the people of the First Nations, many of whose children had just been disappeared.  Statues of Queens Victoria and Elizabeth in Winnipeg have been toppled. 

But things are moving forward there, which is more than can be said for Britain which has reverted to the ancient tradition of abusing the messenger who brings bad news.  Professor Chris Whitty, England’s chief medical officer, has provided a refreshingly factual balance to the dithering of politicians since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic but is now being harassed by thickos.

Last weekend, a couple of young men filmed themselves assaulting him and then posted the video online.  The police spoke afterwards to Whitty who apparently didn’t want to take the matter any further. 

Why can’t people be kinder to each other?  Why don’t we think more about how other people might be feeling than how we are?  Let’s spread kindness around.

Despite their subsequent claim only to want a selfie with Whitty, the young men were warned off and ordered to leave the area by police who had witnessed the attack.  One of them, Lewis Hughes, lost his job as an estate agent as a result of the incident.

Whitty’s not even a politician, just doing a job giving politicians the facts and his best advice, from vaccinations to social distancing and masks.

Face masks have one great advantage even if they do hoick glasses and hearing aids out of place when you try to remove them:  you realise just what beautiful eyes so many people have when you aren’t distracted by broken noses and wrinkles, in the same way that the niqab proves just how many Muslim women have beautiful eyes.

Surely we can learn from this:  whatever imperfections other people may have, let’s concentrate on the beautiful bits and realise how lovely they are. 

Think of the joy that Emma Raducanu is bringing to people.  She’s 18, awaiting her A level results and a wildcard player at Wimbledon this year and has, so far, reached the fourth round.  She’s now playing Ajla Tomljanovic tomorrow for a place in the quarter-finals.  She’s said she wants to “stay [in the tournament] as long as possible” and is “having a blast”.  Doesn’t that lift all our spirits?

The human mind has a need to see patterns where there aren’t any and hear words that aren’t spoken, and it’s susceptible to optical illusions.  In days of old, people looked up at the night skies and saw bulls and crabs and scorpions and fish and invented astrology.  This is fair enough – many of us have in our time been drunk and/or stoned enough to see star patterns shifting and changing without actually moving – but we’re now so advanced (ahem) that we don’t try to tell people’s fortunes from them.

There’s a famous picture of apparently random blotches that reveal a cowboy sitting on a horse if you stare at it for long enough, and there are those coloured ‘abstract’ posters from the 1980s which reveal pictures.  Or if you listen closely to the sound of water, such as a tap splashing into a bath, the mind will turn it into random words and phrases.  I used to know somebody who talked like that – I understood all of the words separately, but not what the sentence meant.

It’s also fascinating to see the changes in how your mind works when your chosen hallucinogen is coursing through your system (and, before we write these off as the imaginings of people with too much spare time, we need to remember that scientists are once again using hallucinogens to help people with mental health problems).  It is, for example, possible to see a lump on the trunk of a tree, formed where a branch has been cut off, both as a distortion in the bark and a koala hugging the tree;  or to see a twisted mass of roots under a beech tree both as roots and intertwined snakes, both at the same time;  or a mountain chain in the dust in the bottom of a teacup.  We see faces and dragons in clouds but, curiously, the extra dimension isn’t frightening, it’s fascinating, and beautiful.

Synaesthesia is another example of what the brain is capable of with some chemical assistance.  If you listen with your eyes shut, music can produce brilliantly coloured and ever-changing pictures in your head which are just as fascinating and just as beautiful.

Karl Deisseroth, a neuroscientist at Stanford University has also infected the brains of mice with light-sensitive algae and fired lasers into their brains through tiny fibre-optic cables, recording what happens when he turns neurons on or off.  He discovered that individual brain cells can be activated / deactivated in this way and the possibilities seem endless.  For example, in May this year, the Swiss neurologist Botond Toska showed how he’d used these optogenetic principles to partially restore the sight of a blind person.

This all seems quite important but if we put it in the context of our sub-microscopic existences in an unimaginably vast universe where space and time and energy interact even though nobody here knows how it works, we can imagine all sorts of possibilities that make fantasy fiction look as unimaginative and limited as a Jeffrey Archer novel.

We know that honey bees can tell others in the hive where there’s a good source of food, in which direction and how far and (for all we know) what colour it is.  We also know that insectivorous plants have a memory:  they don’t snap shut when they’re touched by a passing breeze or even brushed by an inspect but if an inspect lands on them and moves around, there’s a second movement that triggers the ‘catch’ response which captures their next meal, which means they must ‘remember’ there was a first touch to recognise the second.

I’ve mentioned trees communicating before, but biologists are now discovering that their actions and reactions are much more complex than they’d thought, just extremely slow (rather like slo-mo versions of Tolkien’s ents).  Branches will lift and fall during the day and they can warn other trees of invasions by bugs and disease so they can prepare their own defences and it’s possible that, if we hug a tree, they might respond to this, but probably not until next week so don’t wait.

I’m now off to swear at some bindweed.