Concentration

We are the sum of our words;
when we say less we are more because of  it;
who we are is becomes more defined by our actions. 

Democracy In The Home?

Before certain television entertainments,
where violence is staged for the viewer's pleasure
there is always the strong spoken warning/request
that 'the following is arranged to entertain viewers
and is strictly not to be copied in the home.'.

With all the dazzle and misinformation
how long will it be before such warnings
become a neccesity before the daily news
which briefs us about the the next U.S. Election?

The Pyrrhic Triumph Of Technology

Humans are the agents of global warming.

We shrank the ozone layer  
because we thought the planet
was a rocket with a destination,
rather than a place for ourselves
and other creatures to be left to be.

Since then the market has moved on
from burning all the fossil fuels
that can be found at the right price
and with cheap labour.
But still it wants to help;
with the increased heat
coming through the gap in the ozone,
and before all life becomes extinct,
human beings are being cajoled
to see in the future with solar panels.

Markets have always been about managing myopia.  

This Blog Is Going On A Holiday

Please enjoy the interval music, at your leisure and repeatedly....

Lessons In Avoidance?

As school pupils how were we meant
to separate the crude authoritariansim
that was rife throughout all of society
(including systems of education)
from the free access to the information
that leads to choice and self knowledge?

Existential Threat

Given time he might also explain how the comforts money brings can rob life of meaning, thus he is selflessly sacrificing his own life and enriching hers by making her bank and her work poorer.... 

Only Dimly

did I understand the phrase 'friends with benefits',
and by then I was past middle age. By then I was old enough
to look back at what the phrase might have meant in my youth
when the benefits were secretive; hostilities smuggled through sex
where every man and all of their acts seemed alike in nature.
They made unfriendliness as normal as insobriety.

I never knew that I was being distant, or how secretive I was
from those in every day life who really tried to be my real friends,
but in whom I could never confide or unburden the weight upon me.

Now I know the best friendship and the best benefits
are much nearer sharing a good meal, a laugh. And honesty.  

Shifting And Fading Circles?

My health makes me isolated;
to be at my most functional
I have to be alone quite a lot
But when I am alone I do less;
I have to be around other people
to do things for and with them
and to get done the deeds
that will help me to live well.

Comensality is a neccesity for life.
I never know until long after the time
what the right quantity of human company
should have been to find me at my most humane.   

Let's Be Lunch

Though what we look like after is better not asked.....

How The Power Of Speech Breeds The Ego

'Survival of the fittest' was a phrase coined by Francis Galton,  
a cousin of Charles Darwin to summarise Darwin's ideas.

Alas Galton missed the point of Darwin's science.
Survival by adaption, via co-dependence, 
is far more positive as proof of fitness
than being, or believing your species to be, 
the apogee of a hierarchy. 
Saying you are fitter than everyone else is ego,
which is something animals don't do.

But Galton's world was built on ego.
Through coining his phrase he advanced the Eugenics Movement.
Galton's science was the competitive [mis]breeding of cattle,
then dogs for display, and making his profit from the shows.
What in the 1870's started out as selective breeding in animals
had by the 1920's became the mass sterilisation of the human poor
and thousands of women concidered to be mental defectives.
The idea would cause a world war before it was halted. 

False states of human superiority long predate Galton,
he just their latest servant. But even now many Capitalists
in their detachment see those whose labour they profit  from
as sub-human-the way Galton saw his animals. The main problem
for those who recognise their being seen as sub-human have
is deciding, as they vocally resist, 'Are we as egotistal as our accusers?'.

The Biggest Ghost Of All

From whales to plankton, lions to flies,
nature has always had it's economies,
which we understand as mechanisms
and then only in the barest of outlines.

The more complex the connection
between insect and beast the more we see
hierarchies we can dimly begin to respect.
This helps us to know to leave nature
as the fleshly but ghostly machinery
it is best left to be.

If we retrained ourselves enough
from harming others we'd prove
to ourselves that all the time
we were the hollowest
of all of natures fleshly ghosts.

The More Laws Multiply

they more they divide those they rule over.
The more one party or gender decides for all.
The more they will normalise exempting themselves
from the rules they make. The more they reduce
the the respect that the law would afford if equally applied.
But in an indifferent world none of us can know
how much law matters; human history is a dustbin,
full of how we misdescribe and are misremembered.
 

A Recent Example Of English Contrarianism

In 2009 our wonderful government
planned a major scheme down the finest detail.
At great cost to taxpayers and tax dodgers alike
it had to be cancelled, computer systems and all.

It was for a national identity card.
The Opposition to it said it was cost too much,
was too European (and therefore foriegn) and Orwellian,
and finally many too many people feared that the security
of the computer systems would eventually prove corrupt.
The memory of the failure of that scheme
may well have helped make the Brexiteers win.

But the more abstract huge corporations make money
appear to be, the more they make us dependent on them.
This makes us more dependent on using proofs of identity
that favor these corporations. Thus passports with us not smiling inside,
and the plastic cards in driving licenses are now used much more
to help money and goods travel between humans, than ever
they are used to validate humans travelling to different places.
 

How To Start A Cartel Without Being Seen To

Once the chain is started there is no stopping the end result that is not horribly authoritarian. 

Tokens Of Tolerance

When it happened, my 'coming out' to the straight folk
in my shared house was easier for them than it was for me.
They could take a break from my struggle to find my new self
in ways that I could not, but I liked their acceptance.
Their apparent ease was a tonic when I needed one.
My struggle was partly against how little I knew
of the minority community attached to my new choice of self.

When the worst of my struggle was over
it was clear that I had been a token of liberal tolerance
for those apparently welcoming straight folk;
any human token would have done for them.
The further I got into being 'out' the more I found
that real diversity lay in freedom from being judged;
real life was as far beyond the tokenism of tolerance
as the deficient community of my new identity.

I had to just trust that who I was would carry me through.

The Less That Was Said The Better Off We Were...

To paraphrase a soundbite from The Gospels,
'It is not what goes into a country that makes it unclean
but what comes out of that country'*.
What goes into a country is the mix of people,
money, food, drugs, and other vices and services.
What comes out of a country is the discussion
the nation has when it calls itself a democracy
and demands it's citizens take part in a popular vote
 'to settle matters X, Y and Z once, and for all.'.
In the UK it is always 'for all'; we decide by simple majority.
And it seems said majority are simple enough in themselves
to be unable to appreciate the power of the bile and hatred
which when properly articulated destroy all reason.


*Mathew Ch 15 Verse 11 -
'A man is not defiled by what enters his mouth, but by what comes out of it.'

Ho Humbug

When friendships stretch us
and we still find the flow
then we really will know
who we are, and might be.
 

Philosophical Super-Heroes

Not quoting Neitzche as you'd expect ubermench would, but Dostoyevsky.

This Sporting Life?

Sport is probably as old as human competition,
which dates it to, who know? 3000 years B.C.?
It was meant to entertain, whilst proving
the difference between losers and winners
for the given society it was part of.
Sport was also bound to militarism.

And yet sport has been very creative;
it was responcible for many human activities,
many of them positive. Each with it's own rules
through which players engaged with each other,
and bond with/coach each other too. Amazing.

The rot sets in when observers only look for winners
and care less about the rules by which the game is played.
This is where school and television comes in.
All I know about sport is via both of them;
neither inspired me. What school taught me
was how wealth begat confidence, both of whom
spoke louder than words and had the final say.

What television taught me about sport
is how it makes tense and drunk men
even more tense and more controlling,
to the anxiety of all around them.
The real winners were advertising.
There was no such thing as mentoring.
Only men getting more drunk, more tense,
and blind to effects of their testosterone.

The Temptation That Never Dies

The older I get the more
I see in handsome young men
the opportunites I could never get,
for myself. And the more I know
such choices were never going
to be mine to recieve in the first place.

The Recipe For Life

We must eat our cake to have it,
and even more we must be sure,
to stop the seed therin seathing
as undigested slivers of it
come to rest between our teeth.
Nor let the egg, which makes the cake
so fertile, so tempting and rich, corrupt us.

Popular Recipes For Hypocrisy

After the majority vote to leave the E.U. I have grown. 
I now understand the British approach to hypocrisy,
they want to be in but not of that which they live by,
they want to be wrong without being seen to be,
and they like being right using all the wrong reasons.
They also enjoy comfort at expense of their neighbours
without concidering what neighbourliness actually means. 

I am one of them and I now understand; our vice-de-jour
is the yearning and desire to be both right and popular;
a better recipe for hypocricy has yet to be devised.