Photo Of The Day - The Jaguarandi (Herpailurus Yagouaroundi)

Jaguarandi (Herpaillurus yagouaroundi.
This species is highly adaptable, this low-slung feline
inhabits many different envronments, from southern North America
through to Central and South America. It is also known as the Otter Cat
for it's uncanny likeness to the otter. The Jaguarandi is a very vocal species
This cat thriteen distinct calls from purring to a whistling and chattering
It lives on a variety of prey including small mammals ranging from
armadillos, birds and even fish.

Photo: Deograndi, istock
Credit: American Museum of Natural History   

 

The Grace Of Slaves

Slavery is an ancient and evolving economic system,
that every empire in history has made itself great on.
Systems of slavery are about money, power, and markets
-how else were domestic slaves to be acquired and sold?
Nowadays slavery is perpetuated by theft of the person
through the already diminished civil liberties of those
about to become enslaved: The levels of domedtic slavery
are the measure of the inequality, within any given society.
In ancient times, with domestic slavery, the proximity of slave
to owner within the same dwelling made many masters
who thought well of themselves think well of thier servant,
whom they had to trust when the task was important enough.   

Industrial slavery, like the trade in slaves as commodities
from the sixteenth century onward by European countries
was spectacularly amoral in robbing the slaves of the names
their tribe gave them, as slavemasters sold them on.
By then slaves were a currency to be sold and bought
by the masters of the slave trade who set the calendar 
slaves lived by, and printed Bibles for mission societies
to give to the slaves who could read that made the slaves
even more submissive, because with what they read
what they did not know was that their Bible had been edited
to remove from it any section that made rebellion from slavery
part of human history. Finally slave owner were responcible
for making thier slaves have sex and breed to create more owned
human beings, whilst upholding the superiority of having a white skin
also having coercive sex with slaves which perpetuated the paradoxical position
of creating many children where the colour of their skin varied awayt from white,
thus multiplying between white people the shame and fear of misceganation.

All this and much more could be filed under the confusion St Paul
admitted to where in Romans he wrote 'I do not understand what I do/
For what I want to do I do not do/but [I do] what I hate I do',
where he was writing about sin, not about the hubris of slavery
or the history of sorely mistaken race relations, through which,
still we seek some enobling grace by which to live beyond conflict.

The War On Hope

I was not there when 'freedom of speech',
always an uncertain and incomplete ideal 
slowly became monetised, a licence to hate.
Where media balance went out the window.
And the most cohesive communities were built
on cycles of delusion and disappointment.

But here we are, in the latest war on hope,
hoping that whoever loses will be there
to start another war on hope, many wars later. 

A Book Is Not A Lifebelt

As the statue of this man surely proves. I am unsure even that this reader
is where facebook says he in, somewhere in Finland. But books,
and being widely read, is a reassuuring lifebelt for a better life
in a world all at sea, if not awash, with language, particu;arly
 when our media shares with us about how the unread we are
and unready to know how to act before the storms of poor planning
that can asssail them, where we get as careless with our words
as we get with the people whose lives depend on them.     

 

A Worms Tale

The world is one big can of worms,
where all too many of them
have too many stories to tell
to grab other worm's attentions.

I share mine and you tell yours
whilst the wealthiest worms
gain more traction for further wealth
by selling their stories in media time,
in media which they own, whilst
formatting other worm's stories
tc provide the worms of the world
with far more words to digest, and feed off,
before like many stories we all get recycled.  

When To Become A Better Listener

From the days of the printed press,
my days started with reading the morning paper
my world still started with 'the media',
though such talk was way too posh
for the people I knew, noshing down
their reduced vocabulary, where
we did not recognise as 'reduced'
the words we used to seem normal.

Five decades on from the Red Top press
as my daily diet of once new information,
the landscape I now track has changed,
beyond all ability to comprehend how it is different.

The media before me divides the world it presents
between people who 'emit' who they are that day,
and people who 'receive' who other people are.
With little awareness that that is the role they are cast in,
in a media world of where one sided communications
are misdescribed  as weak attempts at reciprocity.

When power is the fact that we all acknowledge
the weak become the audience for the powerful
who hold court on the world as if that is their role.

What the weak have to decide is when the strong
are talking to themselves more than anyone else.
Having decided that, they can end the audience,
and spend more time listen better to each other.

'The Rubbish Season'

In IIndonesia the season of 'Musim Sampar' is approaching,
which translates as 'the rubbish season', when the monsoon rains
flush the plastic waste off the land, into the inland rivers and streams
where further water pressure pushes the waste towards the beaches
and into the seas.There the rubbish diisrupts the tourist experience
of clean beaches sparkling waterfalls and seas where what is meant
to move most are the multi coloured fish, when you can see them
through tides of plastic rubbish being taken further out to the sea.

There was a time when Indonesians lived less by convenience values,
 and produced less waste which was more biodegradable. But the plastics
manufacturers have taken to making purchaces more convenient for the tourist
which spoils their journeys the tourists take. Manufacturers have no interest
in an economy of recycled waste, where for a little less luxury tourists
amd manufacturers coiuld do a lot more to defend the non-human diversity.