Can You Hear The Disappearing Birdsong?

It has long been known that birds that fly
within thirty yards either side of a motorway
are deafened bythe noise of the traffic,
and have to concentrate their numbers
farther away to hear each others' songs.

Now the birds have a new land based enemy,
the 509 UK data centres of Amazon and Microsoft
that keep the.information super highways moving
which produce extremes of heat, light, and noise,
that deafen birds up to a fiftth a mile around them.

So whether it is the old roads or the new digital highways
we do more to cut down nature as we travel than we realise.

Welcome To Your New Triple Action Government

When intelligence gathered by a government
tells them to not act without a firmer foundation
for what they seek to achieve against their enemies,
who are more entrenched than the government admits,  
then as the government acts we have to consider,
and then reassess, who are they really acting for?

It is more than likely the government want the war,
and why they want it most as a lever for changes
in the markets for products, and public services,
in a move that they can blame their enemies for.

This way the gov't can blacken
the reputations of their enemies,
price-gouge for the profit of their friends,
who can afford to wait for the rewards,
whilst cuttting the political ground from under the opposition
 - all in one single three pronged, long term, operattion.

On Choosing My Own Labels To Live By

It had taken me over six decades of living
around people who only gradually did I chose
the greater distance I needed from them, their values,
for them to give up giving me their hand-me-downs
which still had wear in them where the wear was enough
for me to be richer for having these things,
than they were poorer for passing these things down to me.

Six decades in which it took me that long to recognise
what 'landing on my feet', rather than landing in the feet
of other people, meant. Now I need less the sense of regret
as others who tell me I need the help, when how they help me
even more helps them help themselves without me seeing it.

With famly like that, I did not know which I needed most.
Friends with whom I  had values in common? Or the isolation
enough for the old clinginess I had been taught to leave me?
I now want to enjoy life without the hand-me-down hopes
being wished on me, as if a life without them was not life at all.
All that can fall away of its own accord whilst I choose my own labels.    

Think, It Ain't Illegal Yet.....

Guantanamo Bay is the most famous
nearly empty legally absolute cul-de-sac,
that has no exit, in the world. 15 prisoners
live there as of Donald Trump's return to power.

What is less well known is how many
ICE internment camps exist in the USA:
the figure seems to be, 224, holding 70,000 people,
all of the camps surely run to profit the shareholders
who are publicity-shy, except when shaming the inmates.

Within the modern EU, as of 2020, some 47,000 people
were interned in an unknown number of camps, most of them
in Bulgaria and the Czech Republic. Smaller internment sites
are run in third world coutries where many migrants to the EU
set out from, for a life better than the life on offer where they are.
These camps try to divert the activities of the people traffickers
and corrrupt police, who make profits that make them immune
from the process of the law, as applied to other, poorer, citizens.

Lawlessness in the name of the law for profit is nothing new.
New wars, in which costly armaments are fired across the world
depend on broken rules, and broken down diplomatic routes,
to break the rules further. To ask how far these camps and wars
might be enabled before a reversal of the process is necessary
is not just an ontological 'how far can this go' question.

The numbers and types of camps run by Russia and China
are a question for another time, and another study,
but for each the numbers of camps run into the hundreds,
and the populations of them run into tens of thousands. 

Life, and the quality of life we offer others,
is an ongoing question for everyone who thinks.  

When Self Comfort Is At Its Most Deceptive....

 

On Being 'In Recovery'

of enjoying reading once again, after over a year
where I was able to read just a few pages of a book,
and would then fall asleep and forget whati I'd read,
as if the point of reading was to prompt me
to some increasingly forgetful horisontality
where if I remember my dreams, it is only
because my medication was light enough
to allow me to focus on my thoughts
in the immiediate time before I awoke.

Now I am back and reading whole books
and, mostly. remembering what I have read
after I read it, and when the algorithms
of what I watch on the internet go too fast
I change what I give my attention to,
to something slower that enhances the pleasure
in what I read, rather than diminshing my attention span. 

Picture Of The Day: Black Swan

Black swan. Picture Credit: Donna Crandall