Epilepsy

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Sufferers of epilepsy suffer disgusting attacks.  Trolls are targeted people with epilepsy on Twitter with seizure-inducing videos, flashing and strobing Gifs and videos, according to the Epilepsy Foundation.

Legal advocacy director Allison Nichol said: “These attacks are no different than a person carrying a strobe light into a convention of people with epilepsy and seizures, with the intention of inducing seizures. 

About 20,000 people with epilepsy have photosensitive epilepsy, which makes them susceptible to flashing lights at certain intensities or certain visual patterns. It is most common among children and teenagers. Although smartphone displays, modern computer monitors and TV screens are somewhat less likely to trigger seizures than older equipment with a slower screen-refresh rate, a growing number of people are having seizures triggered by flashing images on Twitter and Facebook.

“When it comes to deliberately targeting people with epilepsy with the intention of causing a seizure, we need to call that behaviour what it is – a pre-meditated and pre-planned intention to assault,” said chief executive Clare Pelham said. (BBC News 18 Dec 2019)

My comment:  What sort of person gets up in the morning and decides to go to the trouble of persecuting a harmless group of (mostly young) people highly susceptible to flashing and strobing lights that bring on seizures?   I doubt the proportion of sick, cruel bullies in any population has increased, but as the overall population increases so does the proportion of the weirdos and the deliberately cruel, I suppose.  We should bring them to account and, preferably lock them up.

Young adults need a home of their own

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“Home ownership is in steep decline, but don’t let it bother you, declared The Economist recently: the British need to get over their property “fetish”. I beg to disagree, says Liam Halligan. The fact that well over half of 25- to 34-year-olds today are locked out of the property market should concern us deeply. Only 41% of those in this “crucial family-forming age” are property owners, compared to 67% in 1991. Even many professional couples in that age group, people who as children grew up in leafy suburbs, now find it impossible to get on the property ladder. And almost a third of 20- to 34-year-old men are still, amazingly, sleeping in their childhood bedrooms. “Such a sudden reversal in generational fortunes, on such a large scale, tears at the social fabric.”

“It’s not just that owning your own home is cheaper and more secure than renting it. It’s that it roots people in their local community; it gives them a stake in the economy through their ownership of capital. A society loses its cohesion when these benefits are concentrated in the hands of an ever more exclusive class of property owners.  (Liam Halligan, The Sunday Telegraph and The Week, 1 Feb 2020)

The same problem applies to the US.  Yes, in due course parents die and bequeath pleasant homes to their children.  But by that time the offspring are in their fifties.  The price of housing is a huge problem, and it is unacceptable that younger people should either have to live with their parents for years on end, or pay sky-high, ever-increasing rents on (often) insecure incomes that barely increase year on year.   The rich have contrived to inflate land and house prices for their own benefit.  Developers in England have been sitting on land formerly public ally owned, now zoned for housing for years, pushing up the value for their own benefit.  The government does nothing.  No wonder some young people feel their future has been stolen.

I am old myself and ashamed of the inequality and unfairness of a rigged system. No good will come of it.  This is a matter both of common sense and equity.

Follow Epicurus

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They peddle fear here:

They peddle fear of terrorists and sudden death,

They peddle fear of rapists and angry drivers,

They peddle fear of government and paying tax,

Of deer ticks, butter, sugar, fat, untested drugs;

Of unknown visitors and dark-skinned men,

Of invasion, war and sudden death,

Of gunmen holding up cashiers,

Of bombs in culverts, school kids murdered with guns.

They peddle inquietudes, nervousness, distrust,

And to the terrified, apprehensive, cowed,

They preach damnation, hellfire in the afterlife.

The more they frighten us the more it gains the vote.

 

And the opinion-makers drivel on in biased turpitude,

Yapping in support of party, church and power.

Command, empire, sway, rule, dominion, supremacy

All depend on mongering fear and bald mendacity.

 

But then there is Epicurus,

His character assassinated by the church,

Maligned, misrepresented, damned by rote.

He only sought a tranquil mind, a life of peace,

Fearing nothing.  For fear, he said, brings pain.

As for politics?  Striving, ambition, restlessness.

There are no active gods, said he, no afterlife,

No spirit out there, evil or benign,

Rewarding, punishing, damning you to hell,

No trumpets, choirs, or seats of the almighty.

Just atoms, molecules, and, in them, everlasting life.

No devils, angels, harps, or golden cities;

No god resembling, oh!, coincidence! a man!

No omniscient god who reads your thoughts,

Or manages the minutiae of your life.

Your life, indeed! Your life it is, subject to fortune,

Tribulations, ups and downs, but in the end just yours.

 

Try not to chafe and fret, but seek a mental peace.

Pursue the arts, activities you love.

Don’t worry over things you can’t affect.

Seek simple pleasures, food and friends.

Forsake consumerism, shops and malls,

Buying only what you really need.

Do no harm. Mend fences where required.

Cultivate  your garden and your peace,

Or get a dog.

All to be done in moderation and with joie de vivre,

For simple pleasures trump all wild excess.

Be fun, be smiling, for life is to be lived –  –

What follows lasts a long, long time,

Should some abuse you as an atheist,

Remember! it is a propaganda word, and just a word,

Spoken by people with their own agenda

 

Follow Epicurus! Till your garden, walk your dog,

Enjoy Nature while we have it still.

Reject all superstition, think for yourself

Believe not the religious memes of modern life.

Be gentle, thoughtful and and ask yourself…

Why do they peddle fear here?

(Written in January 2006 by Robert Hanrott)

The American preoccupation with bathrooms

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“Why does America have “so many damn bathrooms”? It’s a question many foreign visitors ask themselves, and with good reason. Over the past half century, the number of bathrooms per person in the US has doubled, to a 1:1 ratio, and these rooms are continuing to multiply. They’re getting bigger, too: the typical size of a bathroom in a new family home in the US has doubled since the 1970s, from 35sq ft to 70sq ft.

“The obsession with what used to be the smallest room in the house has reached particularly insane levels among the super-rich. Last year, it was reported that a $49.9m mansion in Bel Air, California had eight bedrooms – and 20 bathrooms. Across the nation, the share of houses with ten or more bathrooms has almost doubled in the past decade. This is partly down to America’s abundant space, but it’s also a matter of fashion. With their Jacuzzis, steam showers, rainfall heads and other “gizmos”, bathrooms have become status symbols, but they’ve also acquired a new role as sanctuaries where people, in today’s constantly connected world, can luxuriate in seclusion. The bath, originally conceived by the Romans as a space to “convene with the world, has become one of the last places where we can truly disappear from it”.  (Derek Thompson, The Atlantic)

Weird.  It must be mainly a Californian thing.  In twenty-five years I have never heard a single person talking about bathrooms or the number of them they have.  Maybe that’s because they think it is a bit silly and over-the-top?    Or maybe our neighbors are already extraordinarily clean and don’t need multiple bathrooms?

If some people have all this money to throw away, perhaps they might use it instead on donations to charity.  There are folk out there who could use the help.

As the U.K. shuffles out of the EU, a revealing letter

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To The Economist:

“So, three-and-a-half years after the Brexit referendum, Britain is leaving the European Union on 31 January. For millions of people, particularly in eastern Europe, the country we tend to call “Anglia” has been a benchmark of nobility, of spirit and excellence. Britain is deeply embedded in our cultural make-up. During the War, our grandparents listened to Winston Churchill on the wireless, grateful to know that there was a place in this world where the bad guys’ writ did not run. For our generation, literature from an early age consisted mostly of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Treasure Island, Winnie-the-Pooh and The Wind in the Willows. Later, the explosion of the Beatles, Rolling Stones, The Who, the Kinks, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and the rest blew the cobwebs of communist propaganda out of our souls. The Beatles made us, as New Wave, New Metal and the New Romantics were to make our children.

”When the propagandists railed against the “Iron Lady of imperialism”, we would say to each other, “Iron Lady? Sounds promising”. As Margaret Thatcher defeated tin-pot dictators on the other side of the world, we were wishing she would do something about our lot over here. As she later did.

”In the 1990s, we were fully aware that France and Germany wanted no truck with us east Europeans, and it was Britain that ultimately engineered our entry into the EU. It is our EU membership that has kept us away both from the clutches of Russian imperialism and from the temptation to revive the ideology of provincial fascism we experienced before the War.

”Tens of millions of us are grateful that Britain has always been there for us. Which is why we watch Brexit with great sadness, feeling a wrenching sense of loss. Originally, we thought that the results of that wretched referendum were some kind of cosmic joke. Now we have become reconciled to the fact that the British are, indeed, leaving us, much as we would wish it otherwise.”

Evgenii Dainov, professor of politics, New Bulgarian University, Sofia

Well, it’s done now.  In a year’s time we will begin to see the full effects on the lives of millions of people, and the EU can no longer be blamed.  Current events have massively disturbed my own ataraxia, but then I won’t have to live with all these changes for a full lifetime, as will my younger family members, bless them.