Damned by Our Own DNA.

I read today that the NHS is to start mapping the DNA of every baby born in the UK, and I’m not happy about it. They say it’s so they can forecast everybody’s susceptibility to particular conditions. That way they can be ready for it, treat it earlier, and in so doing increase longevity and general health. The Health Secretary says it will change the NHS from ‘a service which diagnoses and treats ill health to one that predicts and prevents it.’ Sounds good, doesn’t it? It’s a nice bit of writing, too, and if there’s one thing which attracts my favour it’s a nice bit of writing. This one sounds like something a good scriptwriter might have written (and probably did.) But I’m still not happy about it.

It feels to me like just another way for the system to keep tabs on us. A person’s DNA is their own affair, so it’s another invasion of privacy. If you commit a crime you can expect to have your DNA mapped. That’s reasonable. And there might be other reasons to have it done, such as searching for you ancestry. That’s voluntary. But a blanket process applied to every baby born in the UK? Extend that to its inevitable conclusion and one day every citizen of the land will be trapped on a database controlled by an unsavoury partnership of artificial intelligence and the Establishment. That’s going too far because surely people don’t expect that it’s only the NHS that will be using it. It has more than a whiff of excessive state control about it.

It surprises me that nobody mentioned the security aspect. Having everybody’s DNA on the database will make the police’s job easier, won’t it? The reason I’m surprised is that the politicians only have to play the security card these days and the denizens of Middle England, who mostly have trouble seeing beyond their garden gate, fall to their knees and beg for the benefit. But what happens when the state decides to look for signs of criminal proclivity in this all-encompassing DNA record, and choose to lock the potentially guilty ones behind bars before they can commit a crime. I believe there’s a film based on just such an eventuality.

*  *  *

Today is the summer equinox – Midsummer’s Night. I didn’t see any moths and Titania hasn’t called on me yet, but I suppose there’s still time.

The Problem With Winning.

When I was younger I was quite keen on playing sport – rugby and cricket mainly with a little basketball and football thrown in. The odd thing is, however, I found winning difficult to enjoy because I was always aware that a winner’s pleasure is inevitably reflected back as a loser’s pain. Even as a youngster I baulked at causing pain unless I truly thought it warranted. And so I played for the pleasure of playing and developed a sense that winning should only be enjoyed as long as it is accompanied by humility.

And that’s why I so hate to see aggressive, triumphalist gestures made by a player who has just scored a point against an opponent he or she has left floundering. To me it suggests strong psychopathic leanings. I don’t think I could ever have had a top sportsperson as a friend. I doubt that he or she would have been the sort of person to whom I could get close, even though I know that there are other ways of seeing it.

I suppose I’m just a bit of a Corinthian at heart, so whenever I hear a sports player being interviewed and trotting out the same old mantra time after time – ‘winning is everything’ – I groan because to me it isn’t.

The Dominance of White.

I’ve lived in the English countryside for about 40% of my life, and yet there’s something about it I’ve never fully noticed until this year – the fact that the colour white dominates and decorates all expressions of the landscape from late winter until the end of summer.

It starts with the regiments of snowdrops which remind you that the darkness and drabness of winter is beginning to lift and the season will end as all seasons do. And as they return to the earth and sleep, copious white blossom clothes the blackthorn trees in March. As that fades in April, the even more copious hawthorn blossom begins to show itself, soon leaving the landscape dotted with giant ice cream cones as the world grows white with May.

The white umbrellas of the cow parsley come next, competing with the wild garlic flowers to ensure that white is never out of sight on the field margins and embankments of our precious piece of earth. They don’t last long, but before they fade away the cow parsley’s more robust cousin, the even bigger umbrellas topping the hogweed plants, take over the duty. And they have a competitor, too. As the sharp-white hogweed blooms strut their presence in the fields and lane verges, the creamy elder flowers display their more sedate presence from the hedgerows bordering every field, copse, and wood. And as their presence becomes more pronounced, the furry, white, and highly scented flowers of meadowsweet open to join them.

It doesn’t end there, either. Convolvulus – the bane of gardeners everywhere in its feral state – shows scant regard for prissy human concerns. They colonise hedgerows at the edges of fields and produce the biggest white flowers of all. They’re bell shaped, and almost as big as a hand bell. They’re prolific too, and last until nearly everything else is preparing for its winter sleep in the autumn.

All these years and I never noticed, but now I have.

Brand Trump and Other Questions.

I read yesterday that lucky Americans who have $500 dollars to spare on something really worth having can now obtain a gold (painted) smart phone on which is printed:

 

TRUMP

 Make America Great Again

I thought it pretty amusing – just the latest reason for the world to laugh at America, especially when it came to the bit about Trump insisting they be made in the USA while the tech boys politely informed him that the USA doesn’t possess the means to do so

But then I came to the more serious aspect. This is an American President to whom holding the highest position in the land isn’t enough. Now he wants to be a brand as well. I’ve never known this before in my lifetime, and it’s another reason to ask: ‘What on earth is going on over there?’ Is it simply what happens when you allow a businessman to take over the reins of politics? Is it another step along the road towards making America a dictatorship, in spite of banner-wielding crowds explaining that America is not a monarchy – constitutional or any other sort – and they’d prefer to keep it that way? I’m curious.

I’m also led to wonder whether an American President should really be acting as a disinterested intermediary in the Israel/Iran affair, not as a partisan authority figure ordering Iran to surrender unconditionally.

And on a slightly connected theme: is it true, as was written in a BBC news feature recently, that the IDF has developed the habit of shooting near-starving Palestinian civilians queuing for flour at aid centres? If so, I’m naturally curious to know what orders Trump has given to Israel on the matter.

You know, my head is shaking so much these days that I sometimes wonder why it doesn’t fall off.

PDA Revealed at Last.

Readers of longstanding might remember a post I made some years ago in which I jokingly tried to invent some psychological condition which I could have printed up to wear as a badge. Well, it seems I needn’t have bothered because I think I’ve now discovered a real one.

It’s called PDA, which stands for Pathological Demand Avoidance. I don’t claim to understand the symptoms in great depth, but they appear to run along the lines of:

A fear or hatred of being required by a second party to do something, no matter what that something might be.

In serious cases, I’m reliably informed, it can be highly debilitating and cause high levels of anxiety. And it’s included in the catalogue of conditions associated with autism.

I’ve been experiencing this all my life, you know. Most recently it’s manifested in appointment letters from the hospital. Your next appointment is on Friday 13^th of June at 11.30. I wilt almost visibly when I get one of those. I groan and start to consider whether I can think of a credible reason to refuse, even though the nature of the procedure or interview or whatever it might be is not at all taxing. And they’re doing it for my benefit. And it’s free. So what am I complaining about? The fact that I didn’t decide to go somewhere at a certain time, date, and place myself, that’s what. They were given to me by somebody else, and amounted therefore – in my mind at least – to a demand. I can’t tolerate demands, even small, innocent, or helpful ones. The foot goes down and the cry goes up: No!

That was how I felt for the whole of my school years and the jobs I did for employers. It’s one of the reasons why freelance photography was so amenable to me. For as much as my working trips were controlled to some extent by nature and the weather, I was still free to chose the date, time, and place in between the natural strictures.

And maybe this explains why my daughter has the same difficulties, as did Emily Brontë. I regard that as quite an exclusive little club.

(Add this to being an HSP, a sigma male, and an INFJ, and I really do wonder why I bother to stay here. To learn things, I suppose.)

Keeping It Short.

Something caused me to consider the subject of ambition again earlier. I have no time for it, you know. I believed in it as a callow youth, but as soon as I had climbed enough of ambition’s ladder I was kicked off it again by an enemy who was one of my greatest teachers. It hurt at the time but it was a good lesson.

Yet still the human race regards it highly, failing to see that ambition is one of the factors keeping people walking the well trodden path between the tram lines. It’s very evident that the majority of people are easily fooled, and those who are both ambitious and clever know this and use it to hold and exercise power over the population. The Churches and the great dictators have always used it, and today it’s the main tool of the advertisers.

(But I mustn’t go on. The last thing the Illustrious One said to Siddhartha before they parted was: ‘You are very clever, Siddhartha. Avoid being too clever.’)

I was never clever, you know. For all my elevated IQ score in the good old days before my brain began to fade, cleverness was never my strong suit. Maybe it’s fortunate that I never felt the inclination to hold power over people, and I never really wanted to either lead or be led.

(But I mustn’t go on…)

On Vendeta and a Simple Mind.

Let’s see whether I’ve got this right. Netanyahu launches a pre-emptive strike against Iran without any direct provocation (a reason of sorts, maybe, but no direct provocation.) It kills some military leaders, some scientists, and some innocent bystanders. Iran strikes back and some innocent bystanders in Israel also get killed. This is tragic, but the cycle is complete.

Not according to Mr Netanyahu, it isn’t. He’s outraged and swears massive revenge against Iran. How can revenge be justified against retaliation? It can’t; it’s irrational; it’s the stupidity of vendetta taking hold of a simple mind.

I did suggest in a recent post that Mr N is lacking natural intelligence, didn’t I? People lacking intelligence do have an unfortunate habit of putting carts before horses. If I were Israeli, I think I would be feeling frighteningly insecure under such leadership.

Is This What Really Happened to Galahad?

I recently included a link to a YouTube video which posited that the relationship between the brain and consciousness is completely misunderstood. The received presumption is that the brain creates, feeds, and operates our consciousness, but the alternative view is quite different.

This view maintains that every individual consciousness is a tiny fragment of the universal consciousness which holds all knowledge. In this view, the brain does not operate our consciousness at all, but instead acts as a ‘restricting valve’ to keep us from accessing all but a small and simple amount of experience and knowledge. And the reason it performs such a function is that to be made aware of everything there is to be aware of would be far too heavy for the simple human animal to bear. In short, it would kill us.

So let’s turn this theory to the search for the Holy Grail, and let’s remind ourselves that the meaning of the Holy Grail has never been known. It was first mentioned in a work by Chretien de Troyes in the 12^th century in one of several Arthurian romances, but Chretien died before the work was complete and he never said what the Holy Grail actually was.

Mediaeval Christianity was quick to seize upon it and invent the notion that it was either the cup from which Jesus drank at the last supper, or a cup in which Joseph of Arimathea caught some of Jesus’s blood as he was dying in the cross. Such speculation was readily accepted and has been the received view ever since.

Now let’s make another big leap to Malory’s collection of the Arthurian romances in his book Le Morte D’Arthur. According to that source, several knights undertook the quest for the Grail, and as I said in post some year ago there was:

Lancelot, who searched for the Grail but didn’t find it, Perceval, who saw the Grail but didn’t recognise it, and Galahad, who found the Grail, recognised its significance, and then died almost immediately from a surfeit of ecstasy?

I don’t know whether this story of the three knights was taken from Chretien’s original or whether it was added by Mallory, but I’m now tempted to wonder whether somebody knew the true nature of the relationship between the brain and consciousness, and that he also knew the true meaning of the Grail.

The Pull of Siddhartha.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wanted to read the novel Siddhartha again. Something in my mind suggested it was important that I should do so, and that I would understand it better than when I last read it many years ago.

I wondered how I would find a copy since there are no book shops in either of the towns I frequent. I supposed I would have to seek a copy online, consciously avoiding both Amazon and eBay of whom I’m not the greatest of admirers. And so I thought I’d begin a probably fruitless search of the charity shops. I didn’t relish the effort and had little confidence of success; most of the novels in charity shops are either of the populist variety or at least the more popular and well known classics. I also considered that the sort of person who would happen to have a copy of Siddhartha was also the sort likely to want to keep it with them for multiple readings.

But I decided to try anyway and began the search yesterday in one of the Ashbourne shops. I went straight to the second hand book section and saw a small wire carousel-style display unit – the sort that has books stacked from the outside to the inside and swivels. And there on the outside and directly facing me was a second hand copy of Siddhartha. It was a little shabby but entirely readable, and what else did I need? I think I might be forgiven the fancifully self-indulgent suspicion that it was put there for me to find. By whom is a mystery (for now, maybe.)

On the inside of the front cover is a handwritten note which says:

To Emily

This book is my all time favourite, and I wanted you to read it too. You will probably best be able to read it, though, in another ten years time, so keep it safe eh?

Lots of love

Uncle Steve.

ps I’ve given you a £10 book token so you can buy a book to read now!

There’s that name again: Emily – much mentioned, and fondly so, on this blog. And I do hope that Uncle Steve and Emily were well worthy of one another.

On Birds, Bees, and a Bit on Blood.

The grass on my lawn has been growing strongly this year and needing frequent cuts. I’ve been unable to mow it for several days because the occasional rain showers have been keeping the grass damp and my mower doesn’t work too well on damp grass. But yesterday we’d had a long enough break from the showers to leave the grass dry enough to mow, and so I got all the equipment out of the shed and was ready to do the job.

And then I noticed something incongruous on the path beside the lawn. It was a baby blue tit – looked fresh out of the nest – sitting there looking confused and unsteady, so I performed my duty. I picked it up and cradled in both hands to keep it warm while it rested uncomplaining, occasionally blinking at me and looking around. We stayed like that for about ten minutes until I felt some movement. Five minutes later the movement grew into something like a struggle, so I opened my hand. The bird perched on my finger for another five minutes, still regarding me with apparent interest and blinking a lot. I began to wonder whether it simply didn’t know how to fly and considered throwing it up into the air, but decided that was risky and so I kept my patience. And then, in little more than an instant, it was gone – into the branches of a nearby tree.

Good. Job done. Now to get on with mowing the lawn. Problem: one of the blades of grass on the lawn had a bee on it looking (yep) confused and unsteady, and there’s no way I would mow over a bee. Another rescue was called for, but this one was easy – encourage the little creature onto my finger and place it on a leaf. It seems that bees are much easier to rescue than blue tits.

Now to get on with mowing the lawn…

*  *  *

Remember my post offering the opinion that nurses should be regarded as equal partners with doctors? Well, yesterday I met the new nurse at my GP’s practice when I went for my blood letting (which wasn’t ‘blood letting’ at all – I just like being melodramatic sometimes. It was to have a blood sample taken in preparation for my next CT scans. It appears they have to check the condition of my liver so they can be reasonably confident that it won’t explode and cover the walls in yellow matter when the contrast dye is injected. Or something like that.)

Anyway, I related my opinion to the new nurse and she said ‘Ahhh, thank you.’ She was quite lovely, actually. And my only reservation was that she has some way to go in learning how to insert needles without causing a sharp pain (which the best nurses are very good at.) And then she told me that I have ‘good veins, but they’re a bit wiggly.’ I suppose if she can tell the difference between wiggly and non-wiggly veins, she’s doing OK.

So what did I see on the BBC News when I came back? A news report to the effect that NHS nurses are currently voting on the latest pay offer from the bounders in government. The junior doctors have been offered the highest percentage rise, the senior doctors and consultants a little lower, and nurses the lowest of all. Maybe I should send my blog post to the Chancellor.

Suffocating in a Fog of Wrongness.

For some time now I’ve been wilting under the growing yet foggy sense that there’s something very wrong with the world and the human condition. It seems to be getting worse, and this morning there were two photographs on the BBC News page: one of Greta Thunberg after she’d been turned away from the Gaza carnage, and another of Ben-Gvir. Greta looked sad; Butcher Ben was smiling and looked happy. Their juxtaposition lifted the fog just a little.

Even the purportedly peaceful USA is having its crises. A worldwide poll was conducted recently in which people from twenty five (I think) countries were asked whether they had a positive or negative view of other countries and their leaders. The USA got a seriously negative score, and so did Trump. Trump’s negative score was even higher than Putin’s. Hey, ho. There goes America’s ‘soft power’ down the drain. As for sending the marines into California to quell the left wing ‘scum’ fomenting trouble, that raises its own issue. Has nobody noticed that Trump will stop at nothing to crush left wing protests, but when right wing protesters violently storm Capitol Hill he cheers them and waves them forwards? Hey, ho again. There goes democracy.

And this is being played out against the background of a world more and more geared to serve the greed of the bankers, the billionaire entrepreneurs, and the corporate world in general. Seems to me that capitalism is doing its best to destroy itself through its own greed, as Marx predicted it eventually would. If and when that happens, the very root of how human society functions will have to undergo radical change, and it won’t be comfortable.

That’s if WWIII doesn’t happen first. The west is gearing up to increase its percentage of GDP spent on arms production because someone in the know has forecast that Russia will attack a NATO country some time in the next four years. He might be wrong, of course. He might be giving vent to some partisan agenda of one sort or another. We really can’t tell in this post-truth age, can we?

Anti the Anti.

I gather one of Mr Netanyahu’s so-called reasons for disallowing Greta Thunberg entry to Gaza is that she is anti-Semitic. Is she? I couldn’t honestly claim to know because I don’t know the woman personally. I’ve never had the impression that she was prejudiced against Jews, I’ve never heard her say anything to give rise to such a suspicion, and from what I’ve seen of her she doesn’t seem the type. So where is the evidence? I’m interested.

But herein lies an example of the wider problem. The term ‘anti-Semitism’ has become so misused and overused in the past few years that it has become effectively meaningless. Maybe Mr Netanyahu has generated a self-motivated and self-interested definition of his own, quite separate from any appeal to logic which normally accompanies a universal expression. Or maybe not. I can’t know that either.

But I also have to say this: It has been evident for a long time that Mr N is a dark-hearted individual and I see little point in trying to manufacture any defence against the charge of genocide levelled at him by the ICC and most fair minded people around the world. What I’m only now coming strongly to suspect is that he is also of low intelligence. That surprises me and makes me wonder why he’s there.

Doctors and Nurses.

No, this isn’t about shenanigans in the playground. It’s about real doctors, real nurses, and their relative merits.

We think of doctors as superior to nurses, don’t we? Their training takes longer; they get paid more; they’re the bosses while the nurses assist. It’s an acceptable and inevitable view, but I’m not so sure that it’s wholly reasonable.

When all’s said and done, doctors are fundamentally mechanics whose tools are the stethoscope and scalpel rather than the spanner and screwdriver. They’re highly trained and highly skilled, certainly. They need to know the function and interrelation of every aspect of the physical body. But ‘physical’ is the operative word. They don’t need a good bedside manner, however laudable one might be. I seem to recall Gregory House once saying something to the effect that the business of doctoring is not about curing conditions, but about solving puzzles. He didn’t have much of a bedside manner, did he, for all his genius. And I’ve had personal experience of other doctors who didn’t have much of a bedside manner either.

Nurses, on the other hand, are the care givers. They’re more highly trained technically than they used to be, although not to the level of doctors, obviously. But they still need to understand how people – as opposed to merely the constructions we call bodies – function. This is a vital skill which nurses need but doctors don’t. A good nurse needs an innate understanding of psychology while the good doctor gets on with solving the puzzle and mending the broken bits.

And that’s why I think they should be regarded as equal partners.

Remember that student nurse I mentioned on this blog back in 2018 – a young Pakistani girl called Sabs? She was around twenty years old and not yet fully qualified, but as she went off duty at 7pm she turned to the ward full of elderly men and said ‘goodnight boys.’ I’ll lay odds that she’s now a very valuable nurse. And we hadn’t seen a doctor for hours.

Educating the Non-English.

Since the garden has been constantly challenging me to keep up with its growth imperative for the past few weeks, the inside of my house has been largely ignored. In consequence, this afternoon I gave my full attention to the bathroom which was looking a bit grotty.

Now, there’s an interesting word which might be unknown to non-native English speakers. It’s an English colloquialism freely used by people of all classes, and means dirty, dishevelled, or sometimes as a derogatory opinion. And there are few, if any, situations where it might be inappropriate. The matter of my unkempt bathroom is a typical example, or it might be used to describe a coffee mug which hasn’t been washed for the last two or three months of daily use (which used to be a habit of mine when I worked in an office. The women used to tut at me and insist on correcting the issue.) Then again, a person of even moderately elevated class might address a peasant like me as ‘you grotty little man.’ It has been known.

So now I’m wondering whether the Chinese have a pictogram approximating to the word ‘grotty.’ I expect they probably do.

The word ‘tatty’ is similar, but is used to describe things which are not only unkempt, but generally cheap and of low quality. (Unless you happen to be from the north of England where ‘tatty’ is a noun synonymous with potato.)

Have you got that?

The Reaction Formula.

Yesterday was one of those days which start off badly shortly after you’ve climbed out of bed. Something goes wrong, and then things continue to go wrong with disturbing regularity right up to bedtime sixteen hours later. The whole day is one long progression of malfunctions, outright breakdowns, and various forms of mishap.

Initial reaction to this is mild irritation. That gives way to the second stage which is serious annoyance. The third stage is the point at which you turn your eyes skyward, searching for any god which might be peeking over the top of Mount Olympus so you can demand to know what the hell is going on today. And then, just as you’re dropping off to sleep, the mind settles and you regard the whole things as an Interesting Phenomenon.

Pity we can’t skip the first three stages, isn’t it?

The Reducing Valve.

I want to commend this YouTube video to anybody interested in the relationship between the brain and consciousness. I found it very compelling because it explained – if right – a problem I’ve had throughout the second half of my life. Make of it what you will.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOdk1rb5mZc&t=604s 

Blogger won't allow me to upload the thumbnails of YouTube videos any longer. Just another example of the modern techno world becoming more fascist. I'm uploading this in the hope that the URL will act as s hyperlink. If not, copy and paste.