Subject: Darwinism writ large.



I’m lucky, as my legs slowly fail me my brain roars ahead pondering the complexities of people and their actions. I tap away on the iPad to let off steam by creating a different world, a world of sentences and ethical meaning. It’s not the same as doing a stint in a hostelry or providing food in a soup kitchen but it helps to fend off the despair which according to the media  surrounds me.  The lack of affordable homes, the inadequacy of the education system and the implausibility of medical treatment free at the point of need when many can afford to pay
Why don’t the well off pay for their Tailer Swift concert seats, why are so many things tax deductible through the companies accounting system, freebies galore “put it down to ‘expenses”.
Why do women continue to bear children when it’s beyond their individual sustainability, or is it yet another right, this need for power over the child.
Which ever way we look there are multiple inequalities, crazy religious groups who demand a hearing at the point of rebellion. Executive reward and pampered life styles, irreconcilable class divergence and political posturing, crimes which go unpunished and are swept under the carpet as being of too large a cohort to challenge.
The list goes on and for many they do not get a mention in their neuro plasticity, so involved in the shallow end of life and protected from their stupidity by a society which professes compassion but are NIMBIES at heart.
So where are the “upland lawns”, they can only come from our own mind and it’s decoupling from actual events as being non personal but that’s not to say we don’t observe them
The term ‘wholistic’ symbolises the bringing together and interplay of everything each having a part in the life of another. To grasp what it means to be and share the ‘wholistic’ view one has to share your ideas with others and whilst the internet is ideally the perfect tool for that task it is also used as a device to disrupt people through virulent argument. The media channels where guests are brought on to define their thoughts about incompatible subject matter and pit their opinions which of course only leads to confusion. There are so many ill defined concepts such as right and wrong now that the ‘religious message’ has been dumped for pragmatism.
The high priests of religious dogma have been shown to base their opinions on a surety which does not fit the accuracy demanded in the world of today. The mysticism of ‘hand me down story telling’ has no place when set against the accuracy of carbon dating, the moralistic definitions don’t cover so much of our real life, even our definition of life itself is being challenged, not in a superstitious way by ethical and moralistic teaching but by the conclusion that we are not special instead we are ‘Darwinism writ large’ with all the flaws which “natural selection” brings.

 Work shy and disillusioned with life.



I’m from the school who believed that a large proportion of the people who search out a doctor for anti depressants and need a doctors note to have time off work,  are, to some degree suffering from hypochondria and exhibiting an example of being work shy.  The Secretary of State for Work and Pensions has been complaining that too many people are having a “sickie” by taking too much time off work or refusing to rejoin the work force because they don’t feel up to it. Their claim for a sick note is backed up by the increase in the evidence for a rise in reported general mental illness amongst the population at large. Apparently in this world of stress and strain which contributes to some mental conditions which would have made Fraud blush, the more we discover about the working of the mind the more cause we have for reflecting on the  aberrations to arise due to our psych being constantly needing to deal with a messy world.  This morning there have been a plethora of callers describing their stressful condition brought on, either by an abnormality in the way their brain functions or by conditions in the workspace/home-place where bullying and the expectation from work colleagues and family as to the role they play in the success, or otherwise and their life’s  attainment and success.
Of course ‘it were ever thus’ but we never had the narrative or the definition to enable us to find common ground with other mental sufferers. Our aches and pains like our hopes and fears were ours and not often shared. Today we head straight for Google for a broad analysis and find reams of information to categorise us into one psychological camp or other. A trip to the doctors surgery and we have our fears confirmed and, with the prescription in hand we join the queue at the chemist for this or that chemical powder.
The cause and effect of our malady has their source elsewhere and in that sense we search answers elsewhere. The stoicism of the past in which you constantly upbraided yourself to “get a grip” is missing and help is continually sort from the therapist, (the shrink), a prop in what ever form it takes as the mind reveals itself to be inherently unstable. The instability is due in large part to the complexity of the daily, hourly, minute by minute, second by second input it receives, tuned into the smartphone we sidestep the reality and scratch around us for the immensity of everyone else’s problems, is it any wonder we hobble ourselves like donkey's to one crisis after another and so become one ourselves.

 Greed is inherently human, so long as there  are no consequences


if  there are no consequence wouldn't we do many more things for which the outcome would be to our own favour. Our rational of good and evil is powerful because it's built on our life experience which is as least as strong as is the opinion of others. The often outlandish comments made daily from certain popular media platforms and which sow seeds of confusion in the common mind is the source of a great deal of instability and much unhappiness’s
The BBC, assailed these days by so many if they misquote or under value the opinions of often extreme views are themselves castigated for trying to be even handed and dare to the give another point of view. The ideological surety of societal positioning, even posturing becomes our fall back option in this conflicted world we live in, where truth wears so many clothes and we develop a need not to be seen naked.
I am at a loss to hear arguments in favour of Donald Trump for instance but to some (close to me) he sounds to them literate and persuasive, how can this be. Hitler was able to convince a large section of his people that what he intended to do was acceptable. Stalin’s aggression towards his own people was. tolerated in the 20s 30s and 40s  and even defended by many Russians living today in Putin’s Russia.
The understanding of power and its symbolic effect on the individuals psyche  is a conundrum, as is the excitement of popular culture and the icons churned out in sport. People seeking their own sense of fame through others or through a football club have, in my opinion, less sense of their own self worth and their own heroics of getting through the week or year with their values intact.
We live in a cauldron of competing interests with a multitude of conflicting opinions, is it any wonder we seek shelter under the guise of success but a success which has to be bought in terms of the star players in a team or the lives on the battlefield, the unhealthy conditions of a factory is no genuine success since every individual maimed is one too many.
Always be your own person. Never shy away from disagreement if it confirms your ethical position and never ditch that position for populism and a quiet life.

Subject: Image is everything.

 

There is no avoiding the fact that women are overtaking men in the media arena.
Watching the boat race, a race between the universities of Oxford and Cambridge on the river Themes was,  when I was growing up, the outside broadcast of the year, an example not only of the physical endurance between the crews but also a view into the elitism of university life and one of the traditional markers in our society. These young men paraded in front of us were doing esoteric studies such as the classics which meant that they had to master Greek and Latin.
In our everyday lives language was limited to our own version of English, some versions were just as foreign sounding  and the mystery of learning a language which was no longer used other than being able to translate directly the documents written in the age of Greek and Roman achievement and had become the foundation of of modern philosophical reasoning and as an offshoot a foundation for a modern language, Latin was the basis for much of the structure of modern thought.
Academic achievement was also the foundation of these amateur rowers and the early seed of BBC outside broadcasting somehow leant an allure to these slim boats buffeted as they were by the river currents and tidal waves created by the current as the tide turned. John Snagg was the voice in those days of the boat race as he counted the stroke pattern of each boat. On one memorable occasion, his unflustered voice described the sinking of one boat as the crew and boat went underwater with its crew still rowing.
It was not until the 1960s that women began to share the day with the men and in their own way enlivened the racing with the contrast. So what in my day was a men's race has turned around into being for all intents and purposes a women's day with media coverage now being predominantly brought to us by women.
It's the same in football and in rugby, motorcycling, horse racing the and athletics females on the touch line and in the studio  commentary box have taken over. The panels who group together in the studio to give their post mortem on the game are now pre-eminently women even though there is no contest in the game on the field. It's as though in our desire to level up we have felt the need to dissuade the men of the need for their presence even when only men are playing.
Some would say this opinion is based on misogyny or an unwillingness to move with the times but as with any change there are winners and losers and seeing great players flanked by women who would not have made the team but now are accepted as pundits with equal say.

Is it all a matter of glamour and sex appeal and where content takes second place to presentation. If that’s the case we men are on a hiding to nothing. 

 

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.