f the match is level after 12 games there will be a 4-game rapid match tie-break at 25 minutes per game plus 10 second increment. If scores are still level a 2-game blitz match will be played at 5 minutes plus 3 second increment.
If the deadlock is not broken, there can be up to 5 of the these 2-game blitz matches before a sudden-death blitz game will decide the winner (5 minutes for white, 4 minutes for black, and a 3 second increment from move 61)
So the finally Egypt is in the thralls of their election. I do hope it all goes well. But there are so many pitfalls on the road to wherever, socialism, democracy, self-determination. At the moment Egypt is ruled by the military. The military have vetted the candidates. Some have been disqualified for being imprisoned by the Mubarak régime for political offences. Many of the candidates are indeed muslim fundamentalists, many are ex-Mubarak people. They are people who served in his cabinet.
We in the West have tended to view the various forms of dictatorship in the Middle East & North Africa as set in stone. It was as though because of the threat & the fear of Islamic fundamentalists taking over. After all the excitement, the euphoria even, of the events in Tahir Square, the hopes of the demonstrators have been disappointed or at least they have not been justified. Tahir Square was a great outburst of people power which saw the downfall of Mubarak & hopefully the onset of a type of western liberal democracy.
We will see.
Democracy does have many problems. One of them is that the people in new democracies have such high hopes of a new system that they imagine that anything, indeed everything, is possible. But politics is the art of the possible & often very little is possible.
How long will it be before few people are interested in voting because they feel it makes no difference?
The main advantages of democracy lie elsewhere; they lie with separation of powers, with an independant judiciary, with freedom of speech, association & religion.
Alzheimer’s is a disease of which we all afraid. Looking at sufferers, we realise that it could be us. We empathise. We know, with good luck or with bad luck, we could live a long time& it could be us. There are at present more than 100,000 sufferers in the UK or so it is said; in 20 years time it is projected that there will more than a million sufferers.
We all wonder if a cure is around the corner & we wonder if it can be prevented. In Alzheimer’s & dementia, the brain shrinks. We, the human race, believe, rightly or wrongly, that what distinguishes us from the other species is our brain. We do not have biggest brain on the planet, elephants & whales have bigger brains, nor can we fly without the aid of an aircraft. We live longer these days than would be expected in a strictly evolutionary sense & thus we become more prone to diseases such as Alzheimer’s & cancer.
In the end, it is up to us. We as individuals make choices about our lifestyles, about what we eat, what drink, to smoke or not to smoke, to exercise or not. Much is out of hands, the genetics, the environmental causes, often the stress we endure is not our fault. Most of the people on the planet do not have the privileges which we in the West enjoy. But in the West, it behoves us to live sensibly to avoid these terrible diseases. Disease is not inevitable, not very often, at any rate.
Prevention is better than cure. When a cure is talked about, what is meant, on the whole, is medication – drugs. Sometimes tweaking the genes is talked about, which sounds dangerous. But through diet & meditation & maybe yoga & other such practices, most diseases can be avoided.
The question arises, what is government for? In theory governments in a western liberal society govern out of concern for the citizens. But in practise they are more concerned about controlling society either by repressing the people through prisons & so on or what is called repressive tolerance by which a certain amount of dissent is allowed so that citizens are fooled into thinking that they have freedom. Citizens think that happiness is money but everybody knows it isn’t. At times we do all think; money is happiness.
There has been much talk lately about the breakdown of society & about how everything has a financial value. There has been talk about measuring happiness in society, the so-called happiness index. This has on the whole been greeted with scepticism & it is just assumed that what brings happiness is material prosperity.
Elected politicians are no less prone to corruption than are political leaders in a non-democratic form of government as has been witnessed in the recent expenses scandal.
People are controlled through education & the press, TV & radio, the internet. People don’t know what they think about an issue until they hear what someone in authority or more generally in the public eye tells them.
Institutions are the family, schools, prisons, the press, Parliament, the church.
We are all supposed to respect them, to listen to them to be afraid of them. We all collude in going along with what they do & what they say.
But most of all it is the family. People are encouraged to procreate, to bring into the World new people to be controlled & made subservient to the system in the way that everybody else is. Those who deviate from what is expected are excoriated, made to feel as though they are of no worth. People have to have jobs, have ambition, to hate losing, to do this, to do that, to fulfil their potential (a totally meaningless phrase) yet in the end we all die & life turns out to be a tale told by idiots full of sound & fury, as Shakespeare said in Macbeth. Life is pointless as I have often said. Institutions purport to regulate society & make life bearable & even bring about happiness. In fact institutions generally but especially the family simply control & make people unhappy.
So 4 out of 5 people over the age 60 suffer from arthritis. Can this be true? I am 66 & I don’t have any at all. I have had problems with my knees. In my thirties at one time I had tenosynovitis. But in the end these problems sorted themselves out. All these diseases; are they real or they the domain of the hypochondriac. I know people in their fifties who look as though they are in their twenties. There seems to be a discrepancy between the super healthy & the super unhealthy.
Arthritis can be a crippling disease in fact. Sufferers sometimes end up not being able to walk.
It is caused by diet. Too much acid including orange juice & tea contribute towards arthritis. Arthritis is the disease of the joints. Personally I don’t have any problems with any of my joints & do know many people who are getting on a bit who similarly don’t have any joint problems. The figure of 4 out 5 is a bit hard to believe.
But it is old age; old age; that is all. Everything wears out; it is the natural order of things. The body wears out & then we die. Only the young die in perfect health & then not always.
Old age isn’t so bad. Mostly we who are not young any more have learned to cope with problems & internalise them without worrying too much about them. When you grow old, your memory isn’t as good as it was but you worry less. Older people are not so prone to highs, lows & mood swings. With depression, it is easier to take it in your stride, easier to take it in. Depression is a mechanism which helps to make death easier, so is the body being worn out.
Arthritis in the hands, the knees, the hips, anywhere in the body. It is just the body aging. It isn’t cancer, it isn’t Alzheimer’s. It is just old age.
In a dictatorship it is normally a serious crime to ridicule a dictator. They take special offence at it. Often such a crime is punished by many years in a prison. Gaddafi’s prisons were full of people who had expressed mild disapproval of him. For others it has been worse. Dictators have statues of themselves erected.
Comedy is often a mild expression of shadenfreude. We are laughing at those less fortunate than ourselves maybe. Maybe we are laughing at ourselves. The poor, the helpless, the elderly, the mentally infirm. All these people have suffered ridicule at the hands of comedy. They are the butt of comedians. Comedy makes light of their suffering.
There has been a comedy about London buses, spies, holiday camps, office work, factory work, name it & someone has laughed at it. Are we laughing with the characters or against them? Are we ridiculing people or showing sympathy for them. Comedy relies on stereotypes; it doesn’t seek redemption.
I went to see my aunt last Saturday. She has Alzheimer’s. It is terrible disease because it takes a away a person’s humanity. When I visited her last; on Good Friday, she seemed more lucid inasmuch as she did seem to know who I was & she did seem to be able to read. Indeed, although she is by 96 – a great age, even in these days of increased longevity – in some – & she has been afflicted with Alzheimer’s for several years, she is still healthy & feisty. She was always a woman with attitude. She still is. She seems to have some delusions. She seems to have some odd attitudes. We all do.
The big question is, how close we are to a cure?
When I went to see her on Good Friday, I did wonder if she was being given a new secret drug which was helping to alleviate her condition. It may be for all anyone knows, that the answer lies in food; in diet. It is known that eating the wrong foods is one of the causes of diseases generally, certainly Alzheimer’s but it doesn’t seem clear really whether or not eating the right foods can cure Alzheimer’s.
I don’t think my aunt is so badly afflicted that she couldn’t in fact be cured. In fact she always strikes me as being more compo mentis than most of the other residents.
Brain cells do regenerate, one question is how, another is why? There are other questions relating to Alzheimer’s, how close we are to a cure, whether diet affects the condition, whether it comes & goes, whether it is necessarily progressive. Whether right handed people get it more than the left handed or ambidextrous are more prone to the disease.
I have been reading Jean Carper’s 100 Simple Things you can do to prevent Alzheimer’s & age related memory loss.
It is quite cliché ridden & badly written but readable for all that. It is full of generalisations which are almost certainly not true. But nevertheless the message that Alzheimer’s is preventable is I one that I agree with. When you see young people smoking, you know they are storing up trouble for themselves. Smoking used to be endemic. These days obesity caused by eating wrong foods is endemic. Smoking, taking drugs, eating the wrong food, lack of exercise, alcoholism, too much time spent in front of a computer screen are all causes of disease generally. Games of all kinds, even bingo I suppose, keep the brain active. Meditation helps still the mind. Organic vegetables, eaten raw, vitamin C tablets can all help to prevent Alzheimer’s.
Alzheimer’s is an industry. Were it to disappear as a disease & I predict that it will, it will put out of business many money making enterprises, homes for the elderly suffering from dementia & Alzheimer’s. And all the fat research grants for Alzheimer’s would come to an end.
In the meantime, this disease is on the increase & the confused sufferers continue to be unable to do much that prior to acquiring the disease, they were able to do.
