The Government have a duty of care

Subject: The Government have a duty of care.

"The Government have a duty of care". How often do we hear this mantra and how often do individuals take advantage of it.
Do people who are grossly overweight through their own lifestyle decisions bear any responsibility and presumably a proportional cost of treatment under the National Health motto, "free at the point of need", or should they get the same treatment as someone who fits the spectra of being 'normal'.
It's the same with alcohol should a person who drinks like a fish (a misnomer since I don't think fish drink) and has to go into hospital for an operation on an organ wasted by alcohol.
Smoking another no no when it comes to health but there seems no prohibition on a heavy smoker receiving lung surgery.
Free at the point of need was a slogan to rid ourselves as a nation where, before the war healthcare was rationed, not by self indulgence but by the class you were born into.

With the NHS nearly grinding to a halt because of the pressures of massive immigration, (not withstanding that many of the people who staff the NHS are from abroad) and the longevity of people living well beyond the age when they were expected to die, plus the increase in the cost of drugs which are horrendously expensive as they become more and more tailored to specific diseases, undiscovered when the NHS was first promulgated.

The word "free" has an unsettling effect since it encourages use whilst hiding the fact that nothing is free. Its part of the human condition to properly evaluate our need when presented with a bill. No bill, no evaluation.
Of course the genuinely poor and needy should be covered but with the caveat that if their lifestyle is contributing to their need for treatment then it's only fair to ask them to contribute by at least modifying their lifestyle. The better off you are, a small premium should be charged to cover some of the cost whilst the wealthy usually have private medical aid which largely covers them.
The question of paying for medical treatment is not an ogreish suggestion, it's not a case of hitting people when they are at their most vulnerable, it's a question of balancing the books.
The image of self responsibility has to re-emerge in our society which has got used to blaming everything on 'someone else' and rarely holding up their hands to say "fair cop gov"

You can always put a book down

Subject: You can always set the book down.

The Jane Austen Book Club is one of those schmaltzy films about five attractive women and one young attractive (rich) young man who are drawn together into a book club to discuss their individual conclusions after reading each of Austen's books.
The film draws parallels with the actual lives of the women and the implications of Austen's characters with the subtle interplay which men evoke on the lives of the women in comparison to the modern complexities of their own lives.
The persuasive argument that relationships are nothing without shared interests, the intellectual spike when, as the metaphor goes "both people are on the same page".
Books are but manifestations of someone else's story but a story which you can identify with and travel the same road. Sometimes it's a story which is so well written that the language takes hold of you and you elevate the substance to mean even more than the author intended. This is no bad thing since, like my previous blog it's about stimulants which boost our perception. A good book, either fiction or non fiction can transport us from the mundane and ordinary to another level because we feel commonality with 'someone else'. It's this commonality which releases us from the enormity of doing the journey on ones own.
Music, books, cinema, are all substitutes for the real thing but if the real thing is not available it's better than nothing and at least you have the option of putting the book down, at least you are in control.

The moral high ground

Subject: The moral high ground

If we applied a moral aspect to all our relationships with countries throughout the world we will fast reduce the number of countries we can do business.
The latest is the "hit" on the Russian spy and his daughter is believed to trace back to the Russians and Mr Putin. Putin had famously decried the people who had been released in a spy swap (which included the man who was poisoned)  where he said Russians who had betrayed their country for "pieces of gold" and could expect to  meet their end in ways they would not envisage.
What ever the outcome of the investigation the use of assassination to get rid of people who oppose Putin is an open secret. As a Mafia boss he would rank with the best and yet we are unable, because of the economic situation we find ourselves, to raise other than the most benign condemnation.

Today the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia is to pay a fully sanctioned visit with the highest protocol' a meeting with the Queen, the chattering classes including, Mr Corbyn have been inflamed by the visit. Yemen, the latest human atrocity to unfurl in the Middle East is being blamed on The Saudi House whilst my own reading of the conflict is that the uprising in the north was led by a group promoted by the Iran. Iran seem to be a far greater candidate to have blood on their hands with their proxy Hezbollah, the Shia religions private army, who are in conflict all over the place. Non of these 'patriarchal religious ideologies' seem to have much of a civilising agenda and therefore we should in theory step away from the lot of them. Unfortunately they represent a sizeable segment of the Muslim Diaspora, probably getting on for a quarter of the worlds population and now a days a significant section of our own population in this country as well. How do we differentiate our trade from our morals or do we simply close our eyes or worse, sell them arms each to obliterate the other.

If we hold the moral high ground, which of course we don't then we will soon find ourselves in a right pickle. The religious conflicts have been pursued since antiquity and there is nothing we can do to stop the deep religious contempt each side feels for each other.
Whether we should pour fuel onto the conflict is relevant but in the long run we seem to be running out of mainstream trading blocks to trade with and the scraps which are left are mainly all we have.

The International Woman's Day

Subject: International Women's Day

My head is reeling with the continuous babble of "International Woman's Day". The continuous claim of injustice and abasement by men. The insistence that "they" are being treated unfairly.
Of course one could look at the gender stereotypes and claim that the pay gap which certainly exists is purely originated by gender. That it has nothing to do with any other cause and that the equality drive will lead us to parity.
I have mentioned in the past that in these islands, the Prime Minister in two of the three countries is a woman. That the political leader of the segment which sees itself as part of the British Isles, Northern Ireland is also a woman. That in those bastions of male endeavour The Police and the Fire Service is each led by a woman, even though by far the largest part of the workforce are men.
The changing face of society in which the woman used to stay at home to bring up the children (perhaps the most responsible job society can task anyone) has been replaced by either women hurrying back to work with their pregnancy barely over or single parenthood with all the selfish claim most, if not all, this situation places on both the State and I would contend, the child.
The drive to have it all inevitably means that something or someone loses but in the shrill innuendo, if one were to question this state of affairs, men have become frightened mute, incapable of raising the rational that "the movement" is led by wealthy
individualistic women who have gained the very system they decry.
Girls are out performing boys at school and in university and yet their position in the boardroom does not reflect that success. Is it that the male preserve in big business is based on the 'old school tie' and patronage. Does this patronage not also impinge on the career paths of boys from less privileged backgrounds. Isn't privilege largely gender blind.
Women are becoming ever more fixated on their gender as the 21st century progresses.
The Me Too # has gained tremendous traction especially across the media as abuse against women is adjudicated by headline assassination. The ins and outs of who did what to whom and the suggestion that "power" lies at the base of all these claims by women of abuse the event stretching back 30 years and more, has at its core the determination of power. But power comes in many forms and women have held tremendous power over men since evolutionary time began.
The woman's  power is if not more potent, their inalienable rights over children, their voice in court, heard with far more sympathy than men and their sentence when found guilty strongly mitigated by their sex.
We are of course talking of the West, not Africa or Asia where Patriarchalism is as strong as ever. Patriarchal societies where woman really are chattels with no future.
This is not to say that women don't have a story to tell but in every story there is always two sides and 'today' we have only heard one.

Freedom of speech

Subject: Freedom of speech

Is it right that the so called "right to freedom of speech" has, in a perverse way, cast out words which, in the past denigrate people because of their colour, culture, gender, ethnicity, sexual preference, the list goes on. Have we in the past terrorised people for being different to ourselves. Clearly the answer is yes. Was this done because we were ignorant or was it because we were fearful of the changes to our society, changes which we imagined would somehow diminish our role in the society, and take away our control of the leavers of power.

I am reading a series of articles about "freedom of speech". From our indignation at the "Snowflake" mentality which seeks to shut down university debate making some subjects taboo, racist, misogynistic, inappropriate, plain unhelpful, as we seek to meld a new society out of a multicultural hotchpotch which we are busy evolving into. 

Viewed from the position of a person who in the past held less power to have their say, people of colour, women, homosexual and transgender, then the past was a dark place. It can't be argued that oppression was ever a good thing and yet we did and still do as we try to come to terms with the fact that people who appear unlike us have much in common. Their needs are the same, respect, tolerance and understanding.

Under perfect circumstances these intolerances should be banished but laying in and amongst this tolerance of difference for the sake of unity lies the unpalatable fact that unity often means recognising something which we are not, that is, we are not all the same. 

Dictating a common agenda, that of seeing all people as the same flesh and blood is an etherial view much favoured by religious teaching because of an understanding that we were created by the hand of God and therefore must be in essence the same. But hiding amongst the remarkable likenesses there are a number of cultural dislikenesses  and if there are traits of activity which distort our sense of right and wrong how are we to square the circle.

To close down the freedom to say you don't like such and such a thing for the sake of an accord which is only tenuously growing, since at the same time our sense  of taste and acceptance is being eroded by the bombardment by a politically correct elite who wish to round us all into some sort of amenable shape, a smooth exterior to silence, once and for all people who do not accept that the world, its people and customs are anything but uniform.

It's hard to disagree with the young black woman who clearly has faced a great deal of prejudice in her life and wishes simply to be recognised for who she is and not branded by the colour of her skin. 

Historically the Seafaring Explorers. European white man denigrated the people  they conquered as being savages. These seafarers were of course much more benign than than say Genghis Khan who routinely butchered those he conquered and saw as savages,  but the mindset of the "reformers" is singleminded in blaming all intolerant history on white men. 

Rewriting history and taking out the context (Genghis was a traveling man and didn't want to be weighed down with a baggage train of defeated slaves) is a deceit that all modern day socio commentary writers fall into. As the song says, "times they are a changing" and it was ever so. Our present is not the same as our past even though many of the problems remain the same.

'Fear of difference' is countered by 'there is no difference' and yet we would be fools if we didn't recognise that the bonds formed by difference are as strong as they ever were. The collegiate bond, be it Etonian or Religious, be it cultural or linguistic is so elementally strong that the human rights logic of Aufa Hersch, as much as I would wish to embrace it, is not true to the evidence of realpolitik.

A funny old world

Subject: A funny old world

The word "false" is well and truly in vogue right now. Fake news is the current media speculation with information being beamed 24/7 aimed at distorting actual facts, what ever that may mean. Facts are hard to pin down at the best of times and in the murky world of politics, almost impossible.
The question of who is doing the beaming and who is at the receiving end of the beam, has its usual culprits, Russia being one. the actuality of what we call facts, controlled as we are by a self serving political system, telling the truth, is just plain difficult.

 Mrs May bangs the lecture, Mr Putin gives his icy stare and the Russian public lap it up, inthralled to the will of an inflexible ringmaster.

With the poisoning of the ex Russian spy the spotlight has also turned on RT the external media service of the Russian State. People here have been getting very huffy over the opportunity for the Russian State to portray the West in a poor light and therefore use the channel as a propaganda tool to undermine Western democracies. This along with the claims that the Russians interfered with the democratic process which enabled Donald Trump to defeat Hillary Clinton in the Presidential Election. Cyber Space and the use of targeted media messages which were used to sow seeds of doubt in the minds of gullible voters has in some quarters been proved and therefore the claims against RT have gained traction.
My own experience of using RT as an alternative to the domestic news programs is always with a measure of scepticism just as is the news one gets through Fox News or the local variant, Sky. Even the BBCs editorial staff will pick and choose as which media story to broadcast.
There are always some 'unpalatable truths' as one knows, or believe you know (accepting the version of truth you are happiest with)  but it is useful to see the alternative view displayed since one has to acknowledge, from ones own experience,  there is always an alternative viewpoint.
The more we listen to both sides of any argument the clearer will be our own ability to understand any situation but in the end you are faced with the sad fact that you can't do anything about it anyway.
On a completely different tack but also inclusive of the word "fake".
I was listening to a program in which women were encouraged to phone in and describe the the procedures they had gone through to enhance their features. Botox, breast enhancement, lip injections, eyelid injections, and this includes the normal cosmetics such as false eyelashes, eyeliner lipstick, and the powders to enhance or hide a woman's normal complexion. The list goes on and one has to wonder what is the reality of a woman who has to undergo all this, each morning before she ventures out into the real world. Is their world so full of "wishes" that facts are blown away. Is the necessity to deceive themselves healthy. Does the time spent, (never mind the money) not leave them open to the claim that they spend this inordinate amount of time and money only to decry men when they get wolf whistles from the guys. Can their be any sense in being beholden to how they appear to the opposite sex only to decry that sex when it responds.
It really is becoming a funny old world.

Time passes

Subject: Time passes.

The concept of an ethical progression from childhood into old age and tying that progression into our sense of being isolated in infancy (the mothers love is taken for granted) with 'individual self awareness' which progresses as we grow into and through the other phases of our lives. Are there characteristics where narcissistic tendencies are more prevalent as we seek to set our own seal of who we are on those around us. The game of finding a mate is specifically a torturous time of assessment, of fitting ones own cultured idea of oneself into an amalgam of another's likes and dislikes. We contrive to possess the gilded cloak of attractiveness, (like the birds strutting  around the female, puffing ourselves up) with what we conceive is what the other party desires and ultimately we often make a fool of ourselves.
Move on a few years and we learn that the deceit is revealed and one begins years of often painfully accommodation trying to find sufficient common ground, to begin again with a more honest assembly of facts.
The years advance, the accommodation begins to loose its poignancy and is replaced sometimes with anger at missed opportunities for real personal growth but in the end there is a quietus, a resolve that life is what it is and that our character played such a large part in its success or failure.