A recent trip to physiotherapy to speed recovery from trauma showed me how much can be done to joints with prophylactic training. Similar exercises may well apply to say
+the venous system. How many old folk with swollen ankles ever held or even hold their feet up in the air before getting up in the mornings?)
+the brain, like a new trick a day as in a deep conversation with a random street contact.
+joints where the first thing an osteopath does is to stretch for ten seconds or so each joint in the whole skeleton.
+hearts where just imagining speaking into a media microphone can boost the heart beat.
+the gut, where a three day break from milk in coffee, or from caffeine itself, can revive peristalsis. Likewise a break from any of the pure, white and deadlies.
+the physical immune system, where a change of air really just sharpens the reactors.
+the mental immune system, where the most vicarious challenge engages the reflexes.
+physical decays that accompany Parkinson and Alzheimers, which may just be linked to the physical - ?and even mental? - nodules caused by some sweeteners.
And this is just a quick top of head list.
Suspect we will realise over a few decades that the rate and depth of aging, like the rate and depth of learning, is largely in our own attitudes and hands. Anecdotally, three oldsters I knew well died rich in years but still vital in every mental faculty the week the body stopped.
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( 3 / 485 )Dear Sergei Brin,
Congratulations on google’s tough decision about China. Like you said, you all discussed it first, thoroughly. Hang in there. America has two million problem citizens in jail and as bad many millions of wealthy in denial, Mao killed 70 million, Stalin 35 million, post Mao China another 10 million and counting, Putin’s Russia after Western capitalist advice is letting millions starve. UK has we know not how many lost ones in sink estates and breeding, with a ridiculous standard of life and education for the plutocrats. Perhaps banning nicotine and the reality-blanking drugs like UK is trying is a partial answer, so we can face our problems. Who knows who is right?
Only by being online in the Chinas can we, through people like you, learn what is happening there and how we can do some good or at least minimise the bad.
Ignore the Western media when they slag you off for being there. Keep your people honest, not profit-at-all-costs motivated, so we can trust them. Keep us informed please, that way we can help fend off the fud of the green-eyed hacks.
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( 2.9 / 474 )In the last century, one good school motto was light, life and love. Lux, vita, caritas in Latin.
A modern translation might be understanding, energy and compassion.
The changes are cosmetic, but the need is keener this millennium. We have seen the effects of trying only two of the three. The lamp of liberal learning has burnt low, except perhaps in some of the collegiate ivy leagues. Jealousy of outsiders in some societies causes the rejection of educated opinion, because the opiner is educated.
Without transmitting such goals, education is hollow. The products of education come to revere capital and control to the exclusion of society. An elected global leader said there is no such thing. Unsurprisingly, when her ministers said ‘on yer bike’ it was interpreted as ‘push off’ or worse. Public trust of institution has also plummeted over the century. Never again will the US and the UK follow their leaders proudly and trustingly into war. We are not just seeing the news from the battlefront, we are hearing the daily injustices from the mobile phones of the soldiers on both sides. And we do not like the given reasons, real motives, collateral tactics or body bags we are told to accept.
Understanding of the facts leads to understanding of motives. Energetic thinking to head the militarists off at the pass is not a common human skill. Caring about the people who would be damaged is vital to minimise their and our trauma. ‘We killed ten thousand’ is not a winner for the next election. Conservative parties, long linked to strong arm tactics to preserve security, may well follow the English Whigs into the wilderness. Their use of non-understanding is fading as the number of media-savvy carers rises, while their nastier policies have left generational scars on their own morale.
The code needs expanding, expounding by pupils and students, accepting and development. Bullying, pecking order, and the like need analysis in its light. So do all global issues and their suggested solutions.
Not least because without trust, education fails. If the teachers are not seen to be debating and developing the code their school espouses, they are hollow, and their teachings so much mumbo.
A simpler version of our little code might be called the martian test: would an alien determiner of our fate be impressed or puzzled by what we use to educate? For surely the latent niceness of every mother’s child would wish and encourage our species to pass that test.
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( 2.9 / 469 )Guardian 4th June re G8 2007
President Lula said the decisive moment in the current "Doha round" of talks would come in the next few weeks, with the G8 summit at a trade ministers' meeting due in mid-June.
"I think that this month something has to happen. If nothing happens, we will go into history as a generation of politicians that failed humanity, especially the poor," the president said. "If there is no agreement on Doha round, it's useless to talk about fighting terrorism, its useless to fight organised crime because poverty is the principal seed for the growth of terrorism."
The only more important issue in the world than trade, President Lula said, is climate change, and both are nearing a potential turning point.
+++
So Lula of Brazil and Mbeki of South Africa share a point: address nurture and many problems will be solved. A bit like the old adage of marry for intelligence, and the rest will follow. The underlying issue is that the third world wants first world living quality. Until that arrives, displacement or genocide are the only rational courses.
Public and even private corporate morality is shifting positively. As positively as shareholder morality will allow. State morality may be doing so in several countries. Murder as state policy is still used locally and condoned by silence globally. though. Leaks by internet are helping fear of justice spread, especially when governments are seen trying to plug them.
Understandably the survival and growth of the state are seen as paramount over individual rights and lives in knife-edge countries. Now we need ways of sharing technology and the good will to use it well. Do the western corporates have the bottle to get it right for all of us? Perhaps do-no-evil google rather than bottom-line Microsoft is the ambassador I would still trust for now. National ambassadors are too well known as honest men sent abroad to lie for their country.
Rendering unto Mammon is the hard part to swallow, when you have little faith that the institutions of mammon can turn away from their historic evils. At this point, for me, denial reigns. Would I could tame it.
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( 3 / 258 )The graces were listed early in western cultures, and much later extended to the Victorian virtues that decorate London’s embankment.
Eight vices were forbidden in the early mosaic code, which wisely watered them down to where they permitted society to survive. How much lying is permitted? All but false witness against actual neighbours. How much killing?
The evidence for the success of the judao-christian codes includes eight thousand years of cultural survival, and counting.
The enlightenment brought new freedoms for those who could afford them. Including the freedom of Gibbon to explore the rapid corruption of every Christian state.
The late nineteenth century realisation that science is not intuitive mechanisms – relativity and quantum theory knocked that one – brought in the vultures of unreason. Warhol and Jackson and Hollywood epitomize for me the lost twentieth century of reason. There is the underlying suspicion that the doctrines of nihilism and agnosticism, fascism and dada would not have spread without commercial pushes: there was money to be made in using them or countering them. Similarly grantology and well-funded drug research today corral the best brains.
Perhaps the only virtue is the understanding that leads to deeper understanding. A problem with this is insanity: remove the props of childhood, and most adults wobble. This limits deep thinking to those who are both outside the canon of their society, and either very private or very unpublished. Any support group dilutes by spin the message of the prophet. The mafia of the capitalist convergency would not have its foundations rattled. Spies are the best paid of all soldiers.
Newton and Darwin waited decades before publishing their pivotal theories, for good reasons. Electronic publishing achieves the same effect by a different route. The meat is lost in the mist. But there is a difference: resonance used by the search engines tells intelligent seekers what is happening. The new enlightenment is for those who can escape the cake and circuses. And there are enough of them for their new species to take losses and to thrive. In this war the brown shirts will be pilloried, the Gestapo punished, by their own more moral children. Youtube is hard to refute at breakfast.
And for the masses? For them mental euthanasia, the tat of democracy, and the hypermarket temple. Can we fix this? Prehistoric and historic slavery say no: co-evolution was built on entrapment. Are we big enough to escape this paradigm? Mentally, yes, we know we need to. Capitalism says no, the system depends on it. Spiritually, the arguments for a new system abound. Electronically, we have no choice: surveillance of individual and group mental patterns will revoke the privacy of the cranium. Just as forensic DNA use can place a criminal at the place and soon the time of a crime, so will mobile dynamic brainscans identify pre-crime deviant thoughts by mental body-language.
The race between conservative control and genuine democratic freedom is as ever too close to call. The division of the species looms as never before. To the barricades! But remember that last century Paris replaced all cobblestones with tarmac to remove the weapon of the barricaders. So the republic will have to come from within. Over the discoverers and revealers of spirit.
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