Outsider Insight

What a coincidence! Just days after the US administration agreed to raise their country's debt ceiling and let the global consumption party go on for a few more months or maybe years, In London marauding mobs run riot, loot retail outlets and set commercial and residential buildings on fire. Reportedly it all started in Tottenham Hale, North East, on Saturday evening when demonstration against the police shooting of a minicab driver and alleged drug dealer, Mark Duggan, descended into violence, just four miles from my bedsit.

Every day we experience hundreds of near misses, accidents waiting to happen unless we take the right precautions and pay constant attention to all potential dangers. Yet the human brain can only actively focus on one event at a time, switching our attention to monitor the progress of other concomitant events. Some of us can switch between events better than others, but then some key tasks require much more intense concentration.

TV programmes promote agendas behind of smokescreen of wishful thinking. Waterloo Road is no exception. ... Over the last three years Waterloo Road has sought to raise awareness about certain social issues with varying degrees of success and misinterpretation. Considering the programme's main appeal is to teenagers, it comes as a shock, but sadly not a surprise, that the last episode focussed the attention of millions of youngsters on one of the most poorly misunderstood psychiatric...

I refer to your piece (IoS 20/04/08) about Depression Awareness Week. We all know Alastair Campbell sold his soul to the military-industrial complex by playing a key role in preparing public opinion for the Iraqi oil grab and acting as spin-doctor-in-chief for one of this country's most mendacious administrations, now apparently he has sold out to big pharma too. Depression Awareness Week will do nothing to tackle the root causes of the misery and lack of self worth millions of us suffer day in day out. It ...

What is in your genes and what is not? ...
The nature versus nurture debate has long presented us with a false dichotomy as nurture, i.e socio-environmental influences, is very much part of nature. But many commentators have narrowed the definition of nature to refer only to genes, the mere blueprint or genotype that determines our potential subsequent development. To simplify matters, consider a newborn girl. Assuming she does not have pervasive brain damage, her future depends in large part on her...

Someone queried the other day whether any evidence linked Stanley Feldman, co-author of Panic Nation , with Spiked Online. A quick Web search reveals a number of his articles and references in the infamous GMO-promoting, pro-Nuclear, pro-Drug and pseudo-libertarian Web site. But then something caught my attention, right on the front page. Spiked Online are running a What Inspired You? event, purportedly to raise awareness of scientific innovators, but conspicuously sponsored by Pfizer, manufacturer of...

One well-designed Website, http://www.anxietyculture.com
seemed worthy of a link exchange request as it was publicised in the forum of another site I respect Medialens .
It claims to offer an antidote to the mainstream media with a special focus on the left's favourite bête noire The Daily Mail . I particularly liked the article on ' Team spirit Means Mob Mentality ', but took issue with the site's general dislike for the work ethic, while agreeing wholeheartedly that probably way over half...

Over the last week the mainstream media in the UK have focused on two moral issues. The first concerned the televised racial slurs of a working class Londoner raised in a Bermondsey council estate who made her name on Channel Four's Big Brother against a multi-millionaire Bollywood diva. The second drew our attention to the unwillingness of the Catholic and other religious adoption agencies to place children with same sex couples. Campaigns against discrimination on grounds of race or sexual orientation...

On the surface there seems nothing wrong with bringing people's attention to the plight of other human beings. As a concept awareness raising began life in political activism, but was soon embraced by the advertising industry. It does not take a huge leap of faith to conclude that National Smile Week , as delightful and charming as we may find smiles, was sponsored by the British Dental Association and not by an independent group of well-intentioned philanthropists. When the instigators of various...