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given the poor job we have made of our opportunities, other than the odd epoch here and there do we not deserve to be superseded even if the new category of human doesn't have the collective ideals we are supposed to have, morality, ethics and philosophical reasoning.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

Mankind its own worst enemy.

 Subject: Mankind its own worst enemy.

 The blight in our public services is being laid bare more and more each day as the progressive cutbacks and the slashing of budgets has left all public services bereft of their purpose and unable to carry out all but a minimum. The councils are bankrupt, the hospitals, the schools, infrastructure (replacement and repair) are all perilously underfunded. 

If we were in Africa the hotchpotch of tarmac in the Main Street would flow no further than the chiefs kraal and be accepted as the bounty the chief demanded for his position but in democratically elected Britain each man or women is “chief” and in some way demands their slice of the cake.

The deliberate cutting back of public services and supplanting them with privately owned ones, a plan instituted by Thatcher and accelerated by Osbourne, leaving the patient without hospital care, hollowed and frail like a person emerging from surgery with half his inner‘s removed they are expected to resume work the following day.

The latest wheeze is that all patients are better off at home with a prescription for the chemist, it’s better after all, to die in your own bed so the argument goes surrounded by friends and family. But what if dying takes a year, two years what then as the ambulance makes repeated calls to A&E to boost the system with a saline drip. 

It’s macabre stringing out living with dying so the patient doesn’t know what stage they are at. 

The indignation at “assisted dying” for patients with acute and painful conditions, by parliamentarians who can afford the Dignitas Clinic, is I submit hypocrisy at the highest level.

The Rail Unions are once again clamouring for pay increase’s, that is the ones who were not included in the current settlement and are promising to go out on strike if they don’t get parity.

Is there a line in the sand which says the past is past and the future dependent on how we earn and spend our money. Do we not have to dial down on expectations and rein in the fat cats and reintroduce social aspirations by binning financial liberalism.

Of course in any contractual arrangement there is a price to pay for the service. If the price is too high the service either doesn’t get done or is rationed. If we were to continue rationing services so that only the wealthy could pay and the case made out for that fact to become the status quo, then the Thatcher/ Osbourne/ Cameron plan to reverse the Clement Attlee plan would have succeeded. 

As usual, mankind is his/her own worst enemy.

Out of step.

 Subject: Out of step.

It amazes me that the authorities in this land seem to be so out of tune with their electorate and human kind in general. Of course they don’t hold a candle to the authority in some nations. The Israeli blindness to what has become genocide in Gaza, a genocide which started as retaliation for the attack on the young enjoying a music festival, youngsters massacred as they fled the Hamas armed killers. The revolting scene of terrified Jewish teenagers as they fled across the field was startling and as the Israelis turned their army on the civilians of Gaza  we understood their need for retribution. Retribution has become something else by the continuation of the bombing and the ordering of the civilian population from one so called safe areas only to be killed in another area. The pinpointing of schools and hospitals as targets for their drones is without question a crime even if their claim that Hamas hide behind the sick and children is true this type of warfare particularly by a national which itself has suffered so much in the ghettos of Europe. It’s not as if their claim to only target the political/armed concentrations of the enemy but the skill and political will required to take out the leadership of Hamas or Hezbollah with such pinpoint accuracy means they have the means if not the will.

Whilst politicians here are too timid to speak out given they feel any disruption to our localised social and political set up is significantly far into the future, they would rather obscure the stated objective of some countries hoping the threat will dissipate as we the public acclimatise to change.  We are famous for falling into line, is it any wonder “the queue” is one of the things we are known for. The sight of the thugs taunting the police, the police backed up against a wall as the mob throw what ever they can lay their hands on at them, the bobbies virtually unarmed was sickening.

Rubber bullets, water cannon, pepper spray, tear gas would readdress the balance but we are still under the illusion that people are inherently peace abiding.

The internet and its trumpet call to action across the country is a game changer and whilst the willingness to throw the activists in prison seems to have had some effect it doesn’t give any attention to the underlying causes of disharmony.

Conciliatory words for some are the order of the day and Keir Starmer has weighed in against the far lefts old adversary, the far right. His inability to acknowledge any of the fears vocalised by the far right is a missed opportunity.

The social embroidery looked at from a distance

 Subject: The social embroidery looked at from a distance



Are the forces we see at play around us progressive or reactionary. Do they seek to progress human-kind or inhibit it with opposition to progress or reform and why for many is reform a dirty word.

People fear change especially if the change leads you into unknown territory and taking you out of your comfort zone can act as a stimulant, particularly in the way you conceptualise things. The social embroidery we carry with us from childhood comes under stress as our environment changes and pressure grows to re-examine previously un questioned beliefs. Some would call it a learning curve others the ever changing process of selling out of our values.

With the news this morning that funding has been withdrawn from a number of projects including developing an artificial intelligence hub in Edinburgh for which £32 million has already been spent on a building to house the computers.

The growth of AI is one of the key areas to sharpen our research capacity but  once more we have failed at the last hurdle to define whether we continue to spend on the social burden we have or change the emphasis on where we spend our limited resources.

Perhaps given the complexity and expense  of present day medicine we have to consider charging those who can pay. As  nation we are in a very different place from when the NHS was conceived to treated people in 1947 (when it came into being) and the present day. The diagnostic tools including AI have become so sophisticated and costly that a charge might be necessary to offset the spiralling cost of the overall medical package. The Pharmaceutical industry for-instance  is wholly run by private enterprise for gain with shareholders who expect a handsome return by exacting a high charge for drugs and is a major component in the final account.

For those with “the ability to pay” it covers most things in life. The comfort of your long distance flight, to the comfort and opulence of your hotel. The size and splendour of your home, to the food on your table are all a direct function of your disposable income.

Why should medical  treatment be different, should your life chances, when, you are sick be different to everything else which rates the depth of your pocket as the most important element.

Means tested medicine would drastically reduce our national imbalance to income, even a small charge to perhaps a larger one if treatment is self induced. In every other area of our lives we pay appropriately but it’s not considered appropriate if a person is struck down with cancer or hit by a car. You have to have insurance to cover others if you have an accident, why not a small insurance premium if you set off to climb or walk in a remote part of the country. The protesters would claim it’s a tax on the universality of our open spaces but at least it would fund and equip those who we rely on to come out for free when we get into trouble. From lifeboats to helicopters we assume a deaf ear for the service we receive and it’s part of growth in the number who now flock out each weekend the extra stress we place on rescue. When it was a small group of people who experienced and properly equipped and responsible the cost was minimal.

The growth in identifiable disease and mental disorders has expanded the diagnostic range for which the medical practitioners try to treat and clearly “free at the point of need” is unaffordable.