Like Maxwell’s daemon in physics, many control gateways at the particle level. In people especially sick people, we have daemons that we call demons: my voices, my nasty thoughts, my bad dreams, my wicked demons. These too are programs, mental programs, that are not friendly housekeepers. They are likely hangovers from early sentience or reptile phases of brain evolution, survival mechanisms from a grimmer past. Damage or die was the survival strategy in the reptile ages, none of your warm and cuddly stuff. Now hard wired into us, deep in the limbic system around the brain stem.
With evolving internal gestation and motherhood as a new strategy, new service programs were needed to replace the reptile demons: calling them damons for now, the new damons reacted well to symmetry and big wide eyes, feeding needs in the young, to virtue and beauty in all their growing forms. Those with strong damons thrived, those without languished and still languish: the poor ye will always have with you, unless fMRI-type scans can diagnose weaknesses and omega three and cousins can reach them.
In sleeptime, the housekeeping daemons refurbish, clearing out, storing and resetting. They can do it in eight hours of darkness, or in catnaps for the tree dwellers whose enemies include gravity, snakes and nocturnal predators. Thinking prime ministers and professors, catnaps are a survival strength.
There are few mental processes, aptitudes, attitudes and personality traits that cannot be explained by this daemon hypothesis. If not for the negative hooks in the name, we could call it daemon theory.
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( 2.9 / 96 )Why pay Bloomberg and friends when a simple letter to the damage inflictor, inviting them to discuss with one rep max each of equivalent legal standing, in front of a good-will local arbitrator, a street judge.
Whose judgement is not binding, but indicative of likely result or damages, and more important, can say clearly who is on the moral high ground and ask the hard questions of both parties, on the record for future litigation. Which with luck would become minimal.
An initial online skype conference might just set the scene nicely, and maybe even prevent the meeting hassles.
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( 2.9 / 100 )Spare a thought for rewards for carers like nurses, junior therapists, cleaner-carers, classroom assistants, nursery nurses, home visitors, street wardens, an unsung myriad.
OK so our accountants claim we cant pay ‘em. But we cant afford not to reward them. The damage an unhappy carer does to the vulnerable is incalculable, most of it lifelong. Macpherson definitions apply in spades.
We could do the rewards in many ways that are genuine: tax rebates, tesco vouchers, free travel, council tax rebates, leisure status. From experience, the geriatric travel pass has given me more loyalty to government than I ever dreamt possible. A caring loyalty too.
Electronic check up in the caring environment including feedback from the recipient - ok big brotherish but less subject to abuse than today's inspections - would help to keep service levels high.
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( 2.9 / 107 )Easy, ennit? They are the front line in picking up mass medical problems which will make them invaluable to our masters for expert advice fast in crises before they hit the press.
They also do it comfortably, with practised bedside manner, bringing cure or rumour of cure for the problem, which is probably why doctors are the only scientists in the House. Not a bad thing either to have these technically skilled and constructive people near the centre of government until they are asked as they will be to prescribe outside their skill zone.
The other downside is that your average patient now lumps the doctors with them not with us, and knows that different levels in society will get different treatment no matter how hard the individual doc tries.
One solution is of course to pay the teachers as much, which is what is already happening at Head Teacher level, so that they too can radiate the positive vibes and encouragement needed to inspire all our young to aspire to being quality, rewarded, therapists. Or at least to feel good about nurturing such aspirations in their own offspring.
Could this be a plank in a new morality?
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( 3.1 / 95 )Lovelock says yes to fission right now urgently, and that’s enough for me. In the teeth of greens and media saying no nuclear ever, the cleanest safest and only effective reliable method is being done down by the same good guys who would save the planet.
How else will China stop opening one dirty fossil-burning plant a week?
How else will the wealthy West monitor by UN inspection all the nuclear plants of the world?
How else will the march of the hungry to the lands of the better off be stilled?
How else will the currently under-educated and pension-breeders find peace?
How else than by adequate energy will we evolve a globally fair society?
It probably won’t be while the current head of state in UK knows he will be attacked for everything he says. A nice example of a chain reaction going badly wrong. And a chance for the chattering, cheating, anti-scientific classes in Britland to mature in political thinking.
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