I had a surgical procedure, but I was very impressed with the obvious excellence of the St George Public Hospital in that department.  It is likely that I will have to go back for more, although I hope they do not put a stent in me as proposed.

I feel very fortunate and undeserving, and I hope that treatment is continued for all people regardless.

In the meantime, I am not able to take Dexter and Hannah out for a walk. I will have to wait for things to work out.

Postscript: 04/05/19

As required, I went to Wollongong Hospital to get a tap to remove the excess fluid in the cavitity of my abdomen. The very competent nurse who attended me came from Tokyo and the doctor was from Hanoi. I could not but reflect that those two places were subject to indiscriminate bombing by our allies the Americans, and here I am receiving very good medical care from them.

Democratic governance appears to be be either undermined, by the refusal to address structural problems, or to be openly despised. Clearly to ignore the threat of Climate Change is to enage in a deadly political diversion.

I wonder whether the national state makes sense, or at least needs to be transformed. The American Hegemon ignores the rights of nation states. Why, for example, do not the Kurds have thier own state? The Hazaras have the same idea. Who protects the rights of Yazidis, or for that matter, the Uyghurs(and other ethnic minorities in China)?

Yanis Varoufakis, attempts to explain Brexit, in terms of “looney economics”:

The presenting symptom was a phenomena called ascites, in which “fuids build up in the abdominal (peritoneal) cavity”. On taking fuid tablets, I had swelling in my legs. I declined eating, had trouble taking drugs – one of which with recommended dosages led to high potassium – and, in retrospect, I couls not taste anything. My response was to try to overcome the problem and push through – probably not recommended as the best course.

I would not have sought a second opinion, had members of my family insisted on it. I accepted the diagnosis, without question. It turns out that I was very wrong and they were very right. Furthermore, I was told that there was nothing that could be done.

I was fortunate that the physician I went to see was an excellent doctor. She actually had me lie down and exam me. She noted the variale pulse im my neck and among other things examined the palams of my hands. The result of the exaination was admission to St George Public Hospital.

Almost immediately, the next day, a tube was placed inside my abdomin, and I had a green albumin drip, while the ascites fluid was drained. I had to sign consent forms for this procedure. After about two hours or more, I had lost 7.7 litres of fluid and lost 6 kilograms in weight. Since then I have recovered two kilos. The consequence of losing that fluid was that I could eat freely again.

Other medical procedures are pretty amazaing. In particular, the liver biopsy in which samples are extracted by means of a wire passing through the veins in the neck, as occurred in my case. For this procedure, I was on the operating table with anaesthics, and was aware of everything that was said. In terms of pain it was bearable. I later told the other patients in my ward it was a near death experience. I may be wrong about this, but it may be necessary to go to a major metropolitian hospital to have this procedure. I was totally in the hands of the surgeon and the medical team.

The other biopsy, for which the results are not known to me, required drawing clear fluid (I was surprised by this)from my bone marrow. This procedure was carried out in the ward, by a doctor under the supervision her professor who was assessing her. There was a bit of pain, but like what I had imagined.

I had other procedures, including a Trump cognitive test. It turns out I am not a stable genius. I have to keep away from the horses. I had a brain scan. It turns there is nothing there carrying with explanatory power. I also had a full skeletal survey.

At this point the diagnosis is incomplete.

Given my “near death experience”, the underestimated song written by Rodney Crowell and sung by Emmylou Harris, Higher Mountains, might be appropriate:

Postscript:

I was speaking to a nurse, at the renal specialist, who said in her experience people with liver cirrhosis were given up on. I have been extremely fortunate, espcially although it was most likely given the symptoms, I do not have cirrhosis. Of course, the something else could be worse.

Much like Galileo’s interaction with the doctors of the Church, the Federal Government, once called a coalition of Liberal and Country parties, have cast science aside. Apparently they will not look at evidence. Interestingly, it proposed that churchs were in effect astromical observatories. For reasons of stupid expediency – and I wonder about that innocence, which otherwise would be clear criminal negligence – any attempt to frame a national energy policy with emissions reduction and water policy is to be confounded with venial distractions. Withdrwing fossil fuels and their pollution is naturally not easy matter for fossil fuel corporations to swallow – and it seems they have decisive political influence.

It is depressing to reflect on the political process, in which policy is at best secondary. I suggest it necessary to address the Constition, in particular democratizing the referenda process. Why do marginal senators, with tirvial persaon supprt just an influence? Oh that is the nexus. In turn that is why Federal Divisions are progressively incrasing in size, so that they effectively begin too large for a single member. Of course, multi-member elections would introduce a whole new ball game and end marginal seat campaigning. Of course, the electorate do not have the wit to understand any of this, so that political donations to political parties -perhaps from fossil fuel companies – go unaccounted for.

My hypothesis is that external, unaccountable funding is the death of political parties, who cease to democratic political actors, but the charatans of special interests. The Demos have sharper perceptions about these matters than their bettors are prepared to credit. Why not then become a bitch and bully storefront? Propaganda will be both salve and lead to succuess in meaningless elections. Elections destined to be a contrived fraca of division, rather than constructive policy with common cause.

All of us must die, to quote the cliche and a truth that is not fake news.Some of us are given a prognosis. That is we get time to prepare. Of course, we may die in the meantime – just to stuff up the timeline and the strategic horizon. Now this has happened to me, I think this is a tremendous advantage – tough luck about the mental deterioation that accompanies the final exit. I would prefer to consscious to the end. Who knows whether it will be a journey of discovery or simply a carcass of irrelevant, inert mortal remains destined for pollution, that sidestepped the worst ramifications of climate change, not to mention the trails of the nursing home.

One thing that I have learnt to my surprise is that our moral obligations to others extends beyond our lifespan. This is brought home to me when I discuss what is happening at school with my seven year old neighbour. He teaches me about jump strategies and discusses onomatopoeia. I did not ask Herbie to spell it because I couldn’t. He assures me that wow! is not in the category. What kind of world does he live in?

One of my most important duties is to take the bow wows out. Fortunately, we have been blessed with rain, which perversely keeps to the coast, and which gives an excuse not to go. The other thing was I fell over. My feet got caught in vines. I hurt my chest – more cause for whingeing, self-oncern, and depression about the political game. Anyway, you don’t always get to look up at the sky, and it was unplanned. The dogs do take notice and do comprehend what is going on, despite appearances. I wonder how to prepare Hannah for my absence, if I predecease her.

Here is the video:

And the Travelling Wilburys – interesting role played by George Harrison:

My life has been all about self, and that turns out – as the Buddha is a constant reminder – is not a good way to live. I need to get the life expectancy forecast more defined. I have to engage in contingency planning for others, who will be directly affected by my passing on, either to oblivion, or somewhere more interesting.

While, I did not expect to hear this news, neigher was I shocked by it. I heard that some neighbours were discussing the problem of entering a nursing home. I believe I might be able to avoid that problem. The thing that distressed me most was my GP’s failure to recognize the need for contingency planning, particularly at the terminal stage when it is to be expected that severe mental deterioration will set in.

Whereas I might be going to hell, it is quite clear that, without a radical change, that is where the world is heading. One of the most telling indicators is the suggestion that night time temperatures are increasing and reaching record levels. We forget that Climate Change is a moral problem and transcends our desire to have electricity when we wish for it. Similarly, the problems with water will not go away.

When that set of human beings have finished the job of destroying the ecosystem, they might have their Buddha moment, and reflect on what was wrecked, wasted and pillaged.

If the fires in NSW continue as they have begun over the fire season, my circumstances may be very different than what I expect them to be. We all supposed to have a fire plan, by which we identify our most important possessions and decide whether to stay or leave. The car will be a bit crowded if we have take Dexter and Hannah – but we could not leave them.

I wonder what the animals think. Recently, a gathering of scientist signed The
Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.

What has also been found is very interesting. It has been shown consciousness can emerge in those animals that are very much unlike humans, including those that evolved along different evolutionary tracks, namely birds and some encephalopods. The group of scientists have stated, “The absence of a neocortex does not appear to preclude an organism from experiencing affective states. Convergent evidence indicates that non-human animals have the neuroanatomical, neurochemical, and neurophysiological substrates of conscious states along with the capacity to exhibit intentional behaviors.”

I have not got any music for the Dog Blog. On this day, I actually went out and took the long way:

Some of the time on our walks is spent waiting. Muford and Sons had the song:

Postscript:

My family insisted on a second opinion. I was prepared to go along with the opinion of the hospital doctor. So I now have a second opinion. This specialist actually examined me and suggested that I go for hospital for various tests, as distinct from scaans. Bugger, the prognosis may be wrong!

August 10
“Teaming up”–Daily Metta

“If it is [our] privilege to be independent, it is equally [our] duty to be interdependent.”
-–Gandhi (Young India, April 25 1929)

A friend recently offered an approach to peacebuilding and nonviolent resistance that I thought fascinating: working together in teams of two. The idea is ancient, he said, thinking about the Jewish fathers who would study in the sacred Torah in pairs as one example. In many ways, he believes, the effectiveness of “teams of two” is hardwired into our brains as an alliance of power. Think of it as having an exercise buddy–people know that exercise can be more effective when we have someone else to go with us. And we also know that when we are alone in a large group, we don’t always tend to feel we fully belong or that we can fully express ourselves. Just one other person, however, changes the whole dynamic.

For years at Metta Center we have been talking about Gandhi’s “charkha,” the spinning wheel, and how everyone in the Indian Freedom Struggle spun and wove, so what would be the “charkha” of today? One hypothesis is that we are vying not for our basic needs anymore; rather, we are struggling to raise the human image at its core. Raise the human image. What would happen if everyone who committed themselves to nonviolence began their work by finding a buddy and practised raising the image of the human being through that person, and slowly, purposefully began to spread it outward through there? The image of the all contained in the one, and the one in the all.

When we go at nonviolence alone, we can find ourselves in very murky waters rather quickly, i.e. I was just nice to him and he still treated me like that. A partner for the work would be able very quickly to offer you empathy, understanding and conversation about nonviolence working at a deeper level. Not another group, just one other person who is committed to our well-being and us to theirs in an agreed-upon context, whether it be resisting nuclear weapons or deepening our commitment to daily meditation. And we can have multiple teams of two for the various issues we work on. No one person has to be our everything for everything we care about and dream about! It’s revolutionary…

My friend had a point: whatever we do, peace work should not be something we try doing alone. It can be physically, emotionally and at times spiritually challenging, and we can only do this work responsibly with other people. Gandhi would say that such an interdependent approach is our duty.

Experiment in Non-violence
Invite a friend to join you as a team of two for a study of Daily Metta, or to address a big issue about which you feel passionate.

Violence, in any form does not do us any good in either the short or long term. Ahimsa (Sanskrit “nonviolence”) is difficult. I had not realized that it was impossible to achieve as an individual, such are my ingrained cultural presumptions.

Despite allegations of Russian interference – and why would not there be given the situation on the Ukraine border – the real issues arise from the American electoral system, including simple plurality and voter suppression, and not excluding the Electoral College, which if the allegations are correct was subject to very clever manipulation through Facebook and Cambridge Analytica that turned 77,000 key votes. It is interesting to reflect that 27.2% of recorded voters voted for Trump and 28.5% for Clinton, which probably means that about 43% of potential voters failed to cast a ballot.

So that is the surface of the problem. What is really going on? Chris Hedges is pausible in suggesting an answer:

Once democratic institutions are hollowed out, a process begun before the election of Trump, despotism is inevitable. The press is shackled. Corruption and theft take place on a massive scale. The rights and needs of citizens are irrelevant. Dissent is criminalized. Militarized police monitor, seize and detain Americans without probable cause. The rituals of democracy become farce. This is the road we are traveling. It is a road that leads to internal collapse and tyranny, and we are very far down it.

The elites’ moral and intellectual vacuum produced Trump. They too are con artists. They are slicker than he at selling the lies and more adept at disguising their greed through absurd ideologies such as neoliberalism and globalization, but they belong to the same criminal class and share many of the pathologies that characterize Trump. The grotesque visage of Trump is the true face of politicians such as George W. Bush, Bill and Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The Clintons and Obama, unlike Bush and Trump, are self-aware and therefore cynical, but all lack a moral compass. As Michael Wolff writes in “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House,” the president has “no scruples.” He lives “outside the rules” and is “contemptuous of them.” And this makes him identical to those he has replaced, not different. “A close Trump friend who was also a good Bill Clinton friend found them eerily similar—except that Clinton had a respectable front and Trump did not,” Wolff writes.

Trump, backed by the most retrograde elements of corporate capitalism, including Robert and Rebekah Mercer, Sheldon Adelson and Carl Icahn, is the fool who prances at the front of our death march. As natural resources become scarce and the wealth of the empire evaporates, a shackled population will be forced to work harder for less. State revenues will be squandered in grandiose projects and futile wars in an attempt to return the empire to a mythical golden age. The decision to slash corporate tax rates for the rich while increasing an already bloated military budget by $54 billion is typical of decayed civilizations. Empires expand beyond their capacity to sustain themselves and then go bankrupt. The Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Mayan, Khmer, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires all imploded in a similar fashion. The lessons of history are clear. But the illiterate charlatans who seize power in the dying days of empire know nothing of history. They are driven by a primal and inchoate lust for wealth, one that is never satisfied no matter how many billions they possess.

The elites in dying cultures turn everything into a commodity. Human beings are commodities. The natural world is a commodity. Government and democratic institutions are commodities. All are mined and wrecked for profit. Nothing has an intrinsic value. Nothing is sacred. The relentless and suicidal drive to accumulate greater and greater wealth by destroying the systems that sustain life is idolatry. It ignores the biblical injunction that idols always begin by demanding human sacrifice and end by demanding self-sacrifice. The elites are not only building our funeral pyre, they are building their own.

The elites, lacking a vision beyond satiating their own greed, revel in the intoxicating power to destroy. They confuse destruction with creation. They are agents of what Sigmund Freud calls the death instinct. They find in acts of national self-immolation a godlike power. They denigrate empathy, intellectual curiosity, artistic expression and the common good, virtues that sustain life. They celebrate a hyper-individualism embodied in celebrity, wealth, hedonism, manipulation and the ability to dominate others. They know nothing of the past. They do not think about the future. Those around them are temporarily useful to their aims and must be flattered and rewarded but in the end are ruthlessly cast aside. There is no human connection. This emotional numbness lies at the core of Trump’s personality.

“[Stephen] Bannon described Trump as a simple machine,” Wolff writes. “The On switch was full of flattery, the Off switch full of calumny. The flattery was dripping, slavish, cast in ultimate superlatives, and entirely disconnected from reality: so-and-so was the best, the most incredible, the ne plus ultra, the eternal. The calumny was angry, bitter, resentful, ever a casting out and closing of the iron door.”

The elites in a dying culture confuse what the economist Karl Polanyi calls “real” and “fictitious” commodities. A commodity is a product manufactured for sale. The ecosystem, labor and money, therefore, are not commodities. Once these fictitious commodities are treated as real ones for exploitation and manipulation, Polanyi writes, human society devours itself. Workers become dehumanized cogs. Currency and trade are manipulated by speculators, wreaking havoc with the economy and leading to financial collapse. The natural world is turned into a toxic wasteland. The elites, as the society breaks down, retreat into protected enclaves where they have access to security and services denied to the wider population. They last longer than those outside their gates, but the tsunami of destruction they orchestrate does not spare them.

As long as Trump serves the interests of the elites he will remain president. If, for some reason, he is unable to serve these interests he will disappear. Wolff notes in the book that after his election there was “a surprising and sudden business and Wall Street affinity for Trump.” He went on: “An antiregulatory White House and the promise of tax reform outweighed the prospect of disruptive tweeting and other forms of Trump chaos; besides, the market had not stopped climbing since November 9, the day after the election.”

The worst thing to do is look at what is happening in the US and believe that it is not possible, that same forces are not in play. This analysis does not specifically mention media. Traditional media concentration is a characteristic of the Australian political landscape, and is increasing. Paradoxically, despite the many problems of social media, it may be a saving factor. We have the same elite behavior, exemplified by the criminal neglience with regard to climate change.

We have the same inertia regarding Constitutional Change, although the founders left the referendum mechanism, which might be significantly improved. The recent election on Super Saturday were evidence of profound democratic failure rather than democratic realization. Let us not forget, while it may be elected by the very democratic proportional representation system, is not by that reason a democratic body representing the plurality of the voters of Australia. Still, at least in NSW, there is hope on the Local Government level.

Since, as Chris Hedges would have it, we cannot trust the elites, we will just have to trust the common citizens – what an idea! Although, in fairness, the notion of elite has been used prejoratively.

The dogs spent extra time exploring every smell they came across.  Just before I entered the bush I did experience a very positive feeling. I do not have the reference but there is the suggestion that been among the trees does have a calming effect.

So here are the photos, sequenced serially and indiscriminately:

I could not remember how to do this. Now that Picasa is mostly a deadletter I could not add music to video.

Recnt events may give occasion to remember more distant events, via Mark Knopfler performing “Done with Bonaparte”:

Went to the hospital today. I am not sure that the doctor was listening to my hypothesis about my condition. Nonetheless the outcome was more blood tests and scans.

Specifically he writes:

There is a growing “representativeness gap” in Australian politics, for instance, with major parties organised around narrow, ideologically driven policy and “culture war” debates.

These parties are increasingly dominated by former political advisers and career party functionaries with comparatively little life experience. This comes at a time when occupational, gender and life-experience diversity is increasing in society at a rapid rate.

A recipe for disaster. However the embedded video goes further suggesting that citizenship (called activism) cannot  address the unresolved problems.  This is the video called “Democracy in Crisis”:

vimeo.com/211293981

The following problems have been solved, or so it is claimed:

1. Slavery.
2. Serfdom.
3. Civil Rights.
4. Colonialism.
5. Women’s Suffrage.
6. Russian Communism.

A laughable list of problems purportedly solved by democracy.

The unresolved problems is more interesting:

1.  Poverty.
2. War (including nuclear weapon disarmament).
3. Corruption.
4. Discrimination.
5. Large Recessions.
6. High Economic Inequality.
7. Environmental sustainability.
8. Climate Change.

These problems are not being solved with Nation States and the international order established following World War II, including the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the Nuremberg Judgement and the Rights of the Child, seems to have broken down. The solution may be in part a democracy that extends beyond the borders of the nation state? That might be wishful thinking. The Chinese, for example, are unlikely to adopt democracy any time some, other than in Hong Kong. Still we are world citizens, and should not we act like it?

Reference:

The prevasice social media, in its various forms is impacting the political landscape. However, as he usually does, George Monbiot in The Guardian (via Blogtariat), makes a good case in relation to dark money. I regard the attack on climate science as scandalous and criminal. If the choice is coal or electricity, we have to go without electricity. There are viable renewable energy options.

2. Nonviolence does not seek to defeat or humiliate the opponent, but to win his or her friendship and understanding.

3. The nonviolent attack is directed at forces of evil rather than against persons who happen to be doing the evil. It is the evil that the nonviolent resister seeks to defeat, not the persons perpetrating the evil.

4. Nonviolent resistance is a willingness to accept suffering without striking back. Suffering, the nonviolent resister realizes, has tremendous educational and transforming possibilities.

5. Nonviolent resistance avoids not only external physical violence but also internal violence of the spirit.

6. Nonviolent resistance is based on the conviction that the universe is on the side of justice. Consequently, the believer in nonviolence has deep faith in the future.

(Source: Campaign Nonviolence)

Martin Luther King is a far more radical thinker than he is usually given credit.