Subject: Dementia.


There are a few subjects which frighten us more than dementia since we are all largely at risk of dementia  in some form or other. The most known symptoms are, loss of memory but the outward manifestation can reveal themselves as mood changes and the apparent disconnect in personal response. Anger is one of the manifestations, anger on all sides, both the sufferers and the people left behind by the departing person who are angry about their inability to cope and having to rejig their thought processes to compensate. Children of a dementia parent fear their inability  to cope often at a time when they themselves are at a crossroad and worry a great deal about their own children’s path through a rapidly changing world.
When I was growing up dementia was almost unknown, people died before dementia manifest itself but today, with modern medicine people live into old age with little if any realisation that aging itself kills by small cuts and in many ways.
Perhaps we have pushed the medical ‘can do’ envelope too far without looking at a plausible end to life condition for people to discover for themselves
The artificiality  of body and mind, prolonged after its course has run but which medical science insists isn't a problem so long as there is a heart beat.
I’m of the opinion that the person suffering dementia is far less aware of their condition than we, the non dementia observer, whilst we try to judge them as if they still had those faculties which we measure a person by.   It’s the family and friends who suffer as they try to adapt to the ghost of the person they once knew.
If your surroundings become enveloped in mist then the dimension of your reality is reduced to what you can see and given that this reality becomes the norm, like deafness or limits to mobility then the adaption to dementia is in the eye of the beholder.
End of life pain relief has to be a critical red line and we should all make preparation to take matters in our own hand and not leave it in the hand of the doctor.
Society is coming to terms with death being as natural as life and the heavy hand of religion is slowly being prised away from our understanding of ethics. The secret service agent was reputed to carry a pill if caught, not for his avoidance of the horror of torture but for the information he/she might reveal. The essence is therefore not the individuals salvation but the groups salvation, a group think as self-centred  as we can conceive but also in line with humanities lack of understanding.
So in line with death, dementia is another phase of the unknown, to be more precise the ‘unknowable’ since we are both the observer and the observed.

 

 

As the population of the world expands to 8.3 billion from 1 billion in 1800 it's obvious that given the constraints of the globe to feed us that we are on a calamitous trajectory.
The World Health Authority have warned of pandemics, the scientists have projected glockenspiel warming and crop failures and yet we still continue to worry about the immediate future and who will win the League this year.
Child mortality is outpaced by child birth and the resultant call for aid from the rich to the poor. The Web has brought it all into our living rooms with calls for charity ranging from child impoverishment to maimed donkeys all whilst the same old malcontents try to eradicate each other.
Perhaps the only true humanitarian cause is to limit population, much as the Chinese tried to do but with more finesse. Can it still be a right to have a child if you don't have the means, these fundamental rights that were never fundamental but rather selfish and self serving ( perhaps the proper meaning of fundamental)
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous prejudice or, take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end it".
Listening to Elon Musk pronounce his fear over the uncontrolled growth of Artificial Intelligence, his acknowledgement, that the gene is out of the bottle and that's it's only a matter of time before we humans are relegated and made subservient.
My question is that given the poor job we have made of our opportunities, other than the odd epoch here and there do we not deserve to be superseded even if the new category of human doesn't have the collective ideals we are supposed to have, morality, ethics and philosophical reasoning. These yardsticks will have been replaced with a google type question and answer system with reasoning based on enormous experience recall and a cognitive reasoning based on trillions of experiences which are being gathered each second we are on the Internet to become billions of artificial doppelgänger of ourselves.
The link between our cortex which reflects the body we carry around with us and we recognise as our human identity and that amorphous mass of information we currently carry around in our heads is in the process of being transferred onto hard drives which will then reflect our total knowledge. The processors will then be free to develop thought in conjunction with the stored knowledge and fathom new ways of thinking and doing without human input.
Perhaps the bright side of all this is that AI will have routed out our obsession with celebrity and the ghost of Oasis will be no more.

 

Subject: “Division Clear the lobby”

As the parliamentarians troop off to vote on the controversial move by the newly elected Labour Party to limit the winter heating subsidy to those in receipt of Pension Credit which, was meant to be a top up if the normal pension doesn’t reach the threshold of a living income.
Successive governments were happy to pump up the receipts of the poor who work for low wages, rental/housing support and child support boost the pay of the under paid which inadvertently brings the. tax payer  into a sort of partnership with so many businesses in this country, but please don't expect any dividends.
Our national 'expenditure' bill is too high and the the tax receipts too low from the 'multi -national' conglomerates and the Accountant  protected wealth  of Middle England.
The financial system in this country has always favoured the rich, London after all is the financial capital of the Russian Oligarch and their under the counter dealings whilst promoting a plethora of 'off shore tax havens' and understated wealth income.
Is it part of our DNA that the power will always lie with the rich, I suppose so given they accumulate the tools to maintain their wealth and position, perhaps only a Revolutionary such Jeremy Corbyn who threatened the very status quo of our society here but don't hold your breath given how the ' wealth press' vilified his very existence.
Only from a war torn, shell shattered country could a truly socialistic government be brought into existence and each government since, (including Labour) has failed to face up to the iniquity.

 

Subject: Population growth the true conundrum

As the population of the world expands to 8.3 billion from 1 billion in 1800 it's obvious that given the constraints of the globe to feed us that we are on a calamitous trajectory.
The Wold Health Authority have warned of pandemics, the scientists have projected glockenspiel warming and crop failures and yet we still continue to worry about the immediate future and who will win the League this year.
Child mortality is outpaced by child birth and the resultant call for aid from the rich to the poor. The Web has brought it all into our living rooms with calls for charity ranging from child impoverishment to maimed donkeys all whilst the same old malcontents try to eradicate each other.
Perhaps the only true humanitarian cause is to limit population, much as the Chinese tried to do but with more finesse. Can it still be a right to have a child if you don't have the means, these fundamental rights that were never fundamental but rather selfish and self serving ( perhaps the proper meaning of fundamental)
"To be or not to be, that is the question. Whether it is nobler to bear the slings and arrows of outrageous prejudice or, take arms against a sea of troubles and by opposing end it".
Listening to Elon Musk pronounce his fear over the uncontrolled growth of Artificial Intelligence, his acknowledgement, that the gene is out of the bottle and that's it's only a matter of time before we humans are relegated and made subservient.
My question is that given the poor job we have made of our opportunities, other than the odd epoch here and there do we not deserve to be superseded even if the new category of human doesn't have the collective ideals we are supposed to have, morality, ethics and philosophical reasoning. These yardsticks will have been replaced with a google type question and answer system with reasoning based on enormous experience recall and a cognitive reasoning based on trillions of experiences which are being gathered each second we are on the Internet to become billions of artificial doppelgänger of ourselves.
The link between our cortex which reflects the body we carry around with us and we recognise as our human identity and that amorphous mass of information we currently carry around in our heads is in the process of being transferred onto hard drives which will then reflect our total knowledge. The processors will then be free to develop thought in conjunction with the stored knowledge and fathom new ways of thinking and doing without human input.
Perhaps the bright side of all this is that AI will have routed out our obsession with celebrity and the ghost of Oasis will be no more.
Staring into our smart phone we listen to a Palestinian man standing on the streets of war torn Gaza describing his feelings and in a Nano second, then to a Chinese diplomat or Russian oligarch, an Aussie Opal miner, or the MP for Basildon each is as different as chalk is from cheese, each convinced in his or her understanding of their particular situation but each bearing no relation to mine. A cacophony of issues tied together by the binding of human rights legislation.
The  uproar over  the PMs decision to withhold winter fuel payments to pensioners who don't qualify as needy has set fire to the undergrowth we call informed opinion. The issue of ‘need’ rather than ‘a right’ has turned our national finances into a mess. People who don't need help and can easily meet the cost themselves are breathlessly up in arms on the assumption that the winter payment, which is there to help pay for heating bills, is a right and one they equate with clawing back some of the tax they have already paid. Those on 'Pension Credit' will get it by right (as a need) and those who don't, don't need it.
One of the drawbacks of the socialised state hand out is that it pidgin holes thinking, it induces in both the recipient and non recipient, one of entitlement.

 

Subject: The ‘now’.


Has the immediacy of news made us reject the ‘personal now’. As we walk around with our heads parked into our phone travelling the super highway instead of the suburban road, we start to loose our identity in exchange for an overview of everyone else’s experience.
The ‘chaos theory’ which makes up the natural world and the natural disasters which break out seemingly mimicking the human disasters, (for which we are often the authors). The buzz we feel by prying into everyone else’s world instead of valuing our own, of envying what others are doing rather than our own achievements.  Why didn’t I start to play golf or ask Mary Jane on that date all those years ago.  The ‘what ifs’ in life which are pointless since we are where we are.
If we were lucky and I know we largely make are own luck, we look back on possibly small successes each at the time significant but perhaps in comparison to say your friends and contemporaries small beer. Success often comes at a price of time and effort and the exclusion of people who didn’t fit your plan,( that’s if you had one). The exclusion of people who didn’t fit the stereotype of your lifestyle and the uniformity which that causes with the danger of the sterility of ‘group think’, so evident today as people choose their ‘news source’ to the exclusion of all else. The way these choices bind our thinking often into taking extreme positions, where views are more hostile and not supportive of society as a whole.
How do we cultivate a more beguine culture where even hostility can be picked apart and seen as nothing much more than frustration. Why have we become so demonstrably demanding, so irritated by the other persons viewpoint, is it due to the irredeemable breadth of cultural diversity in the county now turned into a hot house of new species where interbreeding has thrown up irreconcilable people.

 

Subject: No pontificating at the pearly gates

Cut price funeral’s are all the rage these days, in what has become an inhospitable cost conscious end to life. There was a time when only the more ostentatious the funeral was the more society felt you cared, the culmination being the, horse drawn carriage decked in flowers and tributes the sombre men padding around, the one in front measuring the journey with his staff. Today a phone call will do to engage a collection of the body, its transport to the crematorium and the deposit back of a simple box of ashes. What could be simpler, no interplay with the deceased than necessary, no mawkish hymns and obituaries, no long faces, no tears. Here today gone  tomorrow and only one moderate invoice to pay.
Will we seen as cheap skate towards we buried, will we not have invested enough glory in their memory, a poor return for all theirs if we were married to them. How will it look to others if we only assemble for tea and cake. As human beings  we trade on our appearance, we often run our lives on what others think of us and dread a poor report.
And yet we also know that once the coffin has been despatched so has the memory and current affairs resume as normal.
The cut price funeral. The green site burial. The civic non denominational burial. A burial at sea are all the smorgasbord options available today including a burial in the back garden which could nock a few bob off the house price.
Of course if I am nothing more than a Buddhist transient, a concept in the making waiting to be transformed into something very different from the form I now have will their be an audience in the next life to reflect on my parsimony.

 

Subject: Swearing in.

There seems to have been a glitch in proceedings.
As the House Master awaits, his pupils there is no sight. Have they absconded, or simply retired to the pub, it’s the oath taking ceremony in the House of Commons which has been proceeding slowly for 5 or more days since parliament was dissolved and a new government took its place. The clerks like commuters waiting for a missing bus stare hopefully across the Commons looking for sight of the recalcitrant MPs whose oath has to be taken and their name entered into the ledger.
It’s interesting to see the breadth of religious choice as each MP is offered the choice of which religious document they swear by. The King James Bible, vies with the Hindu Veda, the Koran with the Torah, it all reflects the diversity of our country. Every religious text was on display, Jeremy Corbyn was heard to say “it’s all a lot of non sense”whilst the clerks were off scurrying to find a Book of Mormon. Are we still allowed to ask “who are we”, or has diversity ruled out such a question, we certainly are not allowed to complain and must kneel to the throne of ‘inclusion’.
All these variations on the rights of representational politics, each fundamentally separate and each a challenge to the other. If it came to conflict who would they support or more importantly, undermine, the body of Parliament or their particular cohort.
It’s all a far cry from the USA where Donald Trump seems certain to win in the Presidential  Election. His Make America Great Again nearly came unstuck as  the constitutional act on the right to ‘bare arms’ nearly put a bullet in his brain. His running mate has suggested that Islam is having such an impact on this country, perhaps the geometry of their rockets might need tweaking to include us if the Islamic threat grows.
The power of the ballot box is brought into focus if, as seems likely, Trump defeats Biden. A man who few outside America respect is set to become the protector of these people and his distain must make Putin, Xi Jinping, and Kim Jong Un wring their hands in anticipation as fascism is reborn and Trump labelled a fascist since his profile fits.
With totalitarianism in full swing and Trumps disdain for democratic values the world is in for a rocky ride