Anyone for Foreplay?

I’m guessing that many guys have, at some point, been told by their partners that ‘Foreplay doesn’t begin in the bedroom’. As with colonies of wild bees, there are guards which fly hard into people approaching in warning that to continue on their present course will lead to pain. I’ve experienced this pain; it’s very real. (One day I disturbed a wasps nest). All around us we see the way of nature is one of balance. We’re told that opposites attract. We learn of Yin and Yang, Male and Female, Differentiation and Integration, Fear and Love etc. Unfortunately, our world seems to be dominated at present by fear and differentiation, ‘boys with their toys’ and darkness. The danger is that we will drift for too long and go too far in the wrong direction, ignoring the warnings, until we bring great pain on ourselves. Evidence is all around us and the warnings are clear yet mankind continues on a road to annihilation. Under the label of ‘progress’ we drive developments for financial gain, not because mankind needs them, but because we can and ‘money talks’. We have reduced our concept of God to one of superstition so that respect for others and our environment doesn’t get in the way of ‘wealth creation’. Scientism, the new religion, demands conformance, destroys diversity and imposes a ‘One size fits all’ mentality, which doesn’t work. The idea that ‘Your Health IS Your Wealth’ only makes sense to those who’ve already lost it. Then, to their dismay, they find they cannot buy it back. Imagine instead a world in balance. In such a place everyone has clean water, real food, abundant energy, free education, shelter, music and joy, companionship and love. This is the world I’m living in; it’s great. Come and join me. Let's get the foreplay right so that together we can experience a Divine ecstasy and pass on this beautiful world to our children.

Existential Crisis

The world is watching developments on the Korean Peninsula with trepidation and disbelief. How could we have come so close to a nuclear war? The time has come for an imaginative solution and a massive step forward in human consciousness. Researchers in the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Tennessee in the 1960s ran a Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) for almost five years before the experiment was terminated. It proved however, that nuclear power could be derived from a Thorium fuel cycle that has many potential advantages over the water cooled reactors which were chosen. • Much higher efficiencies are achievable – approximately 50% fuel burn rather than the 0.7% being achieved by conventional uranium fuel rods. • Operation at high temperature but ambient pressure – so no danger of melt down and explosion as at Fukushima or Chernobyl; a truly fail-safe arrangement. • Relatively low radiation waste products with much lower isolation periods – 300 years rather than 100,000. • Potential for true reprocessing of spent nuclear materials and redundant warheads into isotopes requiring reduced isolation periods. • No easily fissionable products for use in nuclear weapons – which renders the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty obsolete. The availability of Plutonium from the Uranium cycle was a major factor to the US Navy when choosing which technology to fund. So now we have an opportunity to show a world response to a global crisis. Instead of imposing ever tighter sanctions on North Korea, let’s invite the US government to donate engineering expertise to an international MSR research project that will de-escalate military tensions and effectively provide limitless, pollution-free energy to the world. If they wish, the US could limit their expenditure to the sums annually spent on their military exercises in the Pacific. China, as North Korea’s key ally, is well advanced in its MSR research and has a pressing need to lower air pollution in its major cities. We already have a motivated and trusted broker. Let’s strengthen their hand and replace this macho posturing with something of true value to humanity. In addition to avoiding immediate nuclear annihilation, a bonus outcome is an end to power generation from fossil fuels and emission of greenhouse gases. So we get to keep the polar ice caps, our Pacific islands and the major port cities in every part of the world. Like good health, peace has no downside. Human progress is possible if enough of us want it.

Breast Screening Services

Yesterday I attended a public meeting of the HSCNI Local Commissioning Group, which was presenting a ‘Pre-consultation, consultation’ on the provision of breast screening services in Northern Ireland. The presentation included a slide showing a >30% increase in breast cancer deaths since 2011 yet the presenter made it clear that the intention was to address only how increased numbers of people seeking screening services were to be provided for. This struck me as a wonderful problem for a manager tasked with planning how to increase the capacity of a railway network but completely inappropriate for a branch of the National Health Service whose central function is to protect our citizens, not to ignore the reasons for their illness and the ineffectiveness of the treatment protocols provided. She then explained the complexity of the clinical teams that are assembled to support the screening programmes and how services can be disrupted when team members, with multiple commitments, are unable to attend. One possible solution being tabled was to reduce the number of specialist centres in Northern Ireland where breast screening services are provided, from the current five, so that larger numbers of staff can be trained to increase flexibility for the clinics. Cancer cells produce energy through the inefficient fermentation of glucose in the mitochondria rather than the normal process of ‘fuel and air combustion’ used by healthy cells. One of the observable hallmarks of cancer is that of ever-increasing demands for the limited resources available to the body. Metastasis in Stage 4 cancers spreads the malignancy through the body and is generally regarded as terminal. The NHS might choose to revisit the proposed concentration of ever more of their activities in fewer hospital centres as this appears to mirror the cancer process itself. An alternative proposal could be to actually increase the number of centres providing breast screening services and to lower clinical costs by simplifying the service provided. This could be done using relatively low-cost Thermograhic imaging to search for temperature differences between the breasts. Temperature differences arise as the network of blood vessels grows to support tumour development and such changes can be observed several years before a tumour has become visible on conventional mammograms. On detecting a temperature difference the patient can be presented with evidence of the need to adopt lifestyle changes that improve the capacity of the body’s immune system to prevent disease. This reinforces the understanding that we are individually responsible for our health and that it should not be abdicated to others. Our National Health Service could then engage proactively in Health Protection rather than limiting its concerns to disease management.