Waiting For The World To Resolve Itself

Reading detective fiction is very different
is very different from trying to follow politics
via the running commentaries of the pundits.

What both share is an interest in what makes
readers and followers care about what they follow,
and goads both further, leading them to who did the deed, 
how it was done, and why they did it. With a cast
of engaging side characters who act as collaborators
who aid and abet the lead character on their journey.

Political pundits today have quite the battle
with many world leaders who occupy prime place,
in making their deeds, their wealth, and the way
they lead their country, seems mysterious.

Wrong footing the pundits tracking them,
both when the pundit offers soft ball questions
 that flatter the leader's profile, or when the journalist
finding villainy in the leaders errant accountability,
is easy when the man with power hides how he got it.

It is at times like these that the reliability of fiction,
a good murder story, seems all the more attractive:
the author has a much firmer control of the narrative
than the political pundit who is struggling to discover
where the bodies are buried, and who put them there.
Although the pundit is dealing with real life, and death,
they have a harder time making the reader care
about futures that they can't make any clearer.  

The Dangerous Gods Act

has never been part of international law.

If it were, then I have to ask who would embrace
being seen as the most litigious person to use the act?
And on what grounds, theologicially speaking?
And for what levels of compensation? And last,
but not least, how much are the lawyers going to make?

But we already have enough disreputabe and secretive
international law courts to guide us
as to how such a law might operate.

One of them is the called
The Investor-State-Dispute-Settlement court,
a secretive court that is now in international law
through it being embeded in the small print
of an unknown number of trade deals
between nations, signed over the decades.

There, only the wealthiest private investors
and the biggest trans-national corporations, 
and their lawyers, can contact this secret court,
to sue some community poorer than than their own,
if they have one, for thwarting some major investment
they sought to make, where the population living close
to where the investment was planned have petitioned
their government on grounds that the investment
will destroy habitats that supported life for all, 
or some other ecological, or public health, threat.

The legislation for the ISDS court
could easily be nicknamed
The Dangerous Money Act,
for how unaccountably it defends
the wealthy in the pursuit of ruining other people's back yards.

The United Nations, started in 1948
as an organisation full of victor's hope, and idealism.
By 1959 it had been being undermined from within
by the CIA on manoeuvres. As America pursued
uranium the way it now pursues rare earth metals
but back then the pursuit came fresh after WW2.

Read my review of the documentary film
about that long, sad and sordid episode of history here. 

with which to 'win' the cold war.  it was soon diverted by the Cold War n 1948,
which s

I can imagine it being used
like some international corporate court,
where the corporation   would
t  be the courts that ruled on it

they would be inundated with law suits
between countries where sharp suited lawyers
press law suits where claims are made
'Your country's God damaged my people',
accompanied by unfeasible demands for compensation.

The nearest the world has got to such an act,
and set of courts with punishments,
is The United Nations, an organisation
-started on victors hope and idealism in 1948,
which since 1959 has been being undermined
 consistently by the CIA on manoeuvres
and post WW2 claims on uranium
with which to 'win' the cold war.  

Passsing The Time

Reading a book is a fine way to the pass the day,
perticularly when what we read proves informative,
as is listenng to speech radio when the news cycle
is not saturated with events that are trailed that often
that the viewer can no longer cope with being told
the news story as is finally digested by the news cyle.

What both share is that they address the past,
whether recently or long ago, which we reread
as something to what we once thought it to be,
that gets us as close as we dare place ourselves
towards imagining what the future might be. 

The Slow Decay Of Democracy

will not be noticed when it happens.
Citizens will be far too taken up
by the effusive greetings, flummery
and shiny new statesmanship, before
becoming aghast at how amateurish
and undiplomatic diplomacy has become
for them to notice when the state
they used to support has been subsumed
into being the coterie of male billionaires
who see their wealth and gender
as the qualifier for all future leadership,
when what their wealth actually proves
is how monoplies can de-nature the talent
and vitality of a democratic system
and devalue the vote to make it worth
less than the paper the ballot is written on.

If this has nor happened in your country yet,
then watch for the early signs of it happening.

It is difficult to reverse the process when it takes hold.

Between Despair And Insanity.

When is it right to despar
of the country you live in?
When you can't tell the difference
between the local sewage industry
and campaigns to renew local democracy:
both have heavily broken delivery systems
that leak very badly. Both smell 'off', toxic.

Particularly when the democracy smells of money,
particularly crypto currency, and presents itself
as the kind of near future many people can read
as long as they think it is that future is for somebody
they don't know of, to live out. There the future
is a lengthy science fiction dystopia, or the despair
of a one of the fourt major Old Testsament prophets.

Whoever follows the sense of loss 
has to choose what distance to keep from it,
to preserve their sense of their sanity.   

The Scale Of My Ambitions

was set so low they did not seem like ambition
at all: I was meant to imitate my parents, and live
within the material means they provided,
accept as a given the second hand uniforms,
and inatentively accept my inatentive schooling.

There it did not matter if I, or anyone else,
'did badly', the teachers got jobs out of it,
parents got their children minded, whilst
the pretence was they were being taught.
The parents could work and live less impeded
by them being parents. My invite was more
to be ignored, then to be valued, anyway. 

Through being me, I failed even the low level
of attemtion/expected achievement expected of me:
to slot myself into place underneath my parents
as part of local life , as a pre-shrunk ready fit adult.

By the time I was set to seek work,
training had been separated from jobs,
employers were paid to train trainees,
but did not employ those they trained,
who nobody wanted. When I applied for local jobs
I stood no chance: employers wanted married women
who would work for less, and stay, however bored
they might get. They had children to clothe and feed,
the way I had been, indifferently, over the last decade.

I was expected to apply for jobs
I was unlikely to get, with alacrity.

Since I had none, I thought education was the ecsape route.
It seemed like a good thing for keeping me occupied,
even if it did not do for me what it was said to do for others: 
make the educated more trainable/employable.

'Too little effort applied too late' would be what employers
thought when I applied for jobs with what I'd learned. 
What that really meant was that I, or my parents, 
had not been competitive enough to demand for me
what employers wanted: I had the wrong family background.

I escaped this catch 22 situation when I found temporary work
in another town. and worked until the temp work ran dry.
With my time being my own I did personal development work,
where in my isolation I improvised who I thought I wanted to be.

If I had understood what the word 'lossleader' meant
-a thing is sold for much less than it is worth, to inspire
cheap grace in future-I would have written myself off,
by agreement with those whp mis-sold the future
to who they felt they needed to sell it to, far far earlier.

What did not kill me made me stranger.

Hubris Heights

From Pharoahs Egypt to modern times,
authoritarian government is the oldest form
of government we know of, though experiments
like democracy were tried, and have been revived.
Key to any government from Theocracy, military state,
to democratic experiment central to them all
is how centralised via bureaucracy is the state?

The pharaohs of Egypt were among the earliest
that achieved high degrees of centalisation.
It is an irony of history that their fame
comes from their former slaves, the Jews.
Who had refined their own centralised
contradictions, on their own, as if how detached
the Jews were from their own internal mechanics
could be disguised, whateve the centralisation
of later empires in Babylon, Greece, Rome, even Islam,
each has left their mark on a world history, the Jews
have unexpectaedly outlived all but one of them.

But  the bigger any human hierarchy gets
the less humane, it becomes, and bigger
the memory of their empires remains,
but as a graveyard  of dimished civilations past.

And even the Jews,
as they embrace Hubris,
may yet join them.