Thursday is usually the best day of the week at gym. The attendance falls off steadily as the week progresses from Monday. This being a good moral organized religion community the facility is closed on Sunday but open on Shabat. And I am not sure whether the progression is linear or (negative) exponential; there is a cyclic effect as I have previously described.
Anyway the only nuisances today were the representatives of the local constabulary who lift (and bounce) weights to strengthen their stolid limbs and nothing to reduce the two-and-a-half-trimester appearance of their abdomens, and a pair of young women who seem to believe their conversation is of interest to everyone in the facility, given the volume they use in carrying on their conversation. Sadly they are not even drowned out by the brief passage of the custodial support armed with industrial strength vacuum cleaner. I am seriously considering reverting to the clunky noise canceling earphones so I can hear the podcast without being distracted by thrilling tidbits of their boggish lives.
Those podcasts this morning were Melvyn, Lord Bragg’s “In Our Time” and Jesse Brown’s “Search Engine”. The former’s thread the morning was the set to between Newton and Leibniz over the calculus. The discussion was enthralling mostly because of my background; the only thing I garnered that seemed worth blogging was an observation, not explicitly drawn by the academics, that geniuses are highly different and tend to fight with heart thrusts. Given that fighting is a waste of their time, that latter is hardly surprising, except maybe to bogs?
More appetizing was a discussion on the latter about Internet Addiction Disease (or Disorder.) Attempts to classify this officially as a disease here in the Yankee republic have been declined by the Imperial Apparat of Medicine on the grounds that there are already several authorized official diseases that could be applied. Perhaps the most chilling of this was the reminder that one cannot be actually ill in the Yankee republic any more without whatever it is you are suffering from being granted official status by the high priests of health. Of course the second thought was that this state of affairs not be made known to the Yankee government lest Congress Critters see pruning of the list of official maladies as a means of effecting heath care revision. Think how much cheaper health insurance would be if cancer and other expensive treatment diseases were removed from the list? And politicians could tell their usual prevarications of how they made things better?
On the other hand, China has officially approved Internet Addiction Disease and are treating it in standard social/political deviant fashion with electro-convulsive shock treatment, physical browbeating and just plain beating, and joy-labor camps. The only standard tactic of political and social correction not mentioned was mandatory readings from a little red book. Somehow the lessons of how not to do social engineering will not be brought home to the politicians here in the Yankee republic.
But the question I would really ask is if the symptomatology described as being part of the disease are so bad, why is society continuing to foster them? If people are taking refuge in the not-mundanity of the internet in preference to the “real” world of society, why are we not altering society to make it more satisfying instead of driving them into an artificial refuge?
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