Pleas for a Jubilee year will go unmade except by the TUC and unheard. Reasons such as poor people breed too fast will be adduced. Perhaps our best hope is that a Mandela we can trust will become a global celeb, show us a viable promised continent, and learn how to pass the parcel to another while a team we can trust keeps the music going.
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3.1 / 153 )Whoever repeats things valuable to life thrives and breeds truer. In physics a repeatable process often involves pleasing resonance as in musical notes, in yoga a repeated posture brings repose, in many buddhisms a mantra develops oneness, in western religion a repeated prayer brings holiness, team skills are built on communal exercise, and practice makes perfect. To paraphrase Gary Player of the golf world: I win on luck, but the more I practise, the better my luck.
From the repeats in molecules and DNA which gave evolutionary advantage to the cells they control, to the learners of medical terms, repeats are us.
Google repeat behaviour gives causes from Behaviourism (Pavlov’s dog salivating, and Skinner’s Given time, I can teach any child to do any thing) to ..
My sixpence today is from the history of Egypt and Istanbul: to understand it, think, overlay. Our brain overlays run from brainstem through split reptile mind, early mammal layers with their family structures in the limbic system, then the outer cortex of the higher apes to our pre-frontal cortex for emotions, decisions and finer feelings.
Easy to explain is the ref’s inability to spot offside while he focuses on other things: survival bred for the main chance by shutting down the higher functions. Altruism is a higher function: if my child is on the road, I’ll run through traffic to save it.
The same model works for repeated and neurotic behaviours like denial and smoking. Once the pattern embeds, it is hard to shift. Doubly so when triggered by glossy advertisement.
The mind model that best fits this is serotonin reuptake and inhibitors. The best tool at present is fMRI looking at blood flows to bits of the brain as they are used, or just after they are used.
Perhaps understanding these things is what lets hypno-therapists channel thoughts away from the unwanted. Replacement therapy needs no therapist: imagine a television screen with an empty frame on it, think a bad thought in the frame, then shrink the frame to zero. At the same time imagine a garden of delights in another but tiny frame. Expand this to fill the screen fully, over-placing the evil image. Repeat until fully cured, topping up the cure at the slightest recurrence.
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3 / 157 )The effect of legally carrying a weapon, as enshrined in say the American constitution or urban guerrilla code, is very similar to that of drugs: mind control by part per trillion quantities of happy brain chemicals. To cope with stress, we need a powerful useable tool. If the pen-pushers are right, the mind is the most powerful tool of all, but that thought is suspect as just another opium for the intellectual bourgeoisie. While we are a species of rampant individuals, this paradox will rule. One way out is to accept a more collective nature, as a Nordic social state. Ruled by those of mental ability. Like the body, ruled by immune system and nerve system from the extremities, voting by the daily email of those prepared to nudge and hassle government. No longer the nine wise men of the bank, we are the nine million or so who like voting every day. Transparency guaranteed by leak. Follow up guaranteed by public analysis of reasons behind policy change, an electronic private eye available by google to all online.
So the development of this tool for all of us becomes an issue as divisive as giving women the vote, freeing slaves, and public education for all. We’ve made it, so let the trailer trash and the gypsies, the untermensch and the immigrants co-exist by all means, and join us in control if they can and wish to, but give ‘em too much and they exert a disastrous control. Our American English will remain the state language even when the majority speak Spanish. Is this why state schooling makes the grade as political battleground but never yet as leader of society for greatness. Until the humblest college becomes as well endowed as Oxbridge, that is.
Then every graduate might just be armed and enabled to solve the other problems.
[ 1 comment ] ( 7 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3.1 / 111 )The best memorial to the teenagers killed in London this month would be peace rampant in their schools so that a culture of work and success could be established. The chaos around just one difficult teenager struggling with street cred problems in a your-mum diss-me-not culture cannot be imagined by the average Times, Guardian or Telegraph reader. The friend who blames on tv the school from which the last victim was transferred is unaware to put it kindly of the chaos and pressure on teacher idealism that must have swirled around the third dead young man for the years or months before his transfer.
Sadly a more likely memorial is that some bottom line moralists will see the demise of expensive and perhaps even impossible troublemakers as a Good Thing, and will condone reduction of the problem for the rest of us. As one hears the Crays did to baddies in their day, with police knowledge. At £40 000 pa for jail for 50 years, each hit would save us cool two million before crime damage, suffering and justice costs. Hopefully, enlightenment thinking will prevent this. But what’s to do?
Smaller better schools catering for each child are essential. Perhaps the independent school system of houses, with a celeb housemaster the kids are loyal to (an MU player, DJ, rapper or converted poacher, all CRB checked – ah, that’s a PC rub) backed up by a form tutor in groups of twelve. The tutor ideally would have the first lesson free to handle lates and issues, instead of having to rush off to teach or to assembly. And the houseperson would have time to visit the afterschool extension school, to commend the homework done before hometime, and set the pace for the evening’s reading and study. The cost of all this would still be less than the two million a head of the present system. And it might just produce taxpayers capable of raising a balanced family.
Postscript
The hard bit of writing this piece was all the omitted issues. If it’s a problem in a blog, spare a thought for the mainstream hack trying to say all within the few words of a tabloid piece or three soundbytes. No wonder, like our transatlantic cousins, we are tempted to marinade our educare in prozac.
[ 1 comment ] ( 15 views ) | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3 / 88 )I note that education, medicine, cabinet politics and the great families are not there. But then she is looking at the effect of modern slavery from what it does to the root tips, the little people. On direct causes, like bailiff bullying, councillor attitudes, and treasury influence, she is solid. The interlocking network of real causes are another battle, perhaps enlightenment's greatest war. And for now in her career she can’t afford to really bite the hands that feed aunty.
[ add comment ] | [ 0 trackbacks ] | permalink |
( 3 / 93 )
Calendar
