I would like, when I was younger, to have been a kind of modern luddite. That is to say I would like to have had a skill, a trade, a means of remuneration to defend, if required with violence, in which the skill itself had proven valuable and had served me and many I knew well.
But from the start of my education, onward, what I learnt would limit what more I could learn so that I could never query any deal for work that was set me up to be the latest youth employment loss-leader.
I could do nothing to stop M. Thatcher becoming the biggest luddite of all, with how she restructured work so that it paid the few at the top to make sure those beneath them expected less, until they expected nothing.
The more I learned how to submit to being a broken unit of production, the cheaper I lived, until living the cheap life was the greatest skill I had. I had no other.
Is a thirty mins documentary about the balance of nature on the land, and in the depths, around Lake Prespa, Northern Macedonia. An eco-system which shifts over time and with the evolution, if that be the word, of industrial farming on the shores of the lake's and it's tributaries. Where the application of a lot of government and EU sponsored science is required to teach the farmers how to apply some longer term thinking to their farming methods for life well beyond the thinking to flourish.
From abstruse post-modern atheism to reports of the flights of angels where the details are so scant our modern minds can't know what to make of them, the world we live in today relies on either witnesses to worlds so long gone it is folly to think to rebuild them, or we accept some void or absence that gives us nothing to believe in.
So believe in the world around you, particularly the non-electronic bits, the slow decay you see will give you a world that you can believe in.
The 1975 film 'The Stepford Wives' was one of many films I watched when television was my window on the wider world, that my parents told me that I was never going to reach. With this film I understood the 'us' the 'them' and how immersive manipulation, of a rather forced sort, could be made clear.
In a fictional wealthy American monoculture, far away, wealth was the property of husbands, and was measured by the beauty of their wives, in which the husbands, all plastic surgeons, who competed with each other, for who had the most controlled wife. On their own, the wives competed with each other with how submissive they could be, under the surgical knives of their husbands.
But, secretly at first one, wife resisted....
Aside from the idea of a utopian economy built on the plastic surgery skills of omniscient males, which with hindsight seems somewhat unlikely, I liked the film for how it ended - with disaster.
I understood the film the way I was meant to, when family promoted the idea of 'the model child', as if all children should enjoy being immersed in them being watched, but living unlistened to, by the teachers and parents who paid for their lives.
Thus, unwittingly, television taught me more about the world than my parents could admit to.
for the coming year, if not my hereafter, is to learn to live better in my own skin, and learn how not to live under anyone else's. I used to be a good trier at relationships, and I was modest with my ambitions for whoever I was with, particularly family where how I did not fit had to hidden.
Now with less to not fit in with, and friends more in name than person I still have something to work on the choice of skin I should live in, the better to be grateful, whilst distant from the pasts I have left behind me.
The old disapproved of way of dropping out from the reality of the everyday, and schedules, of discovering your own sense of time, used to be the consumption of mildly recreational drugs the effects of which wore off after a few short hours.
Cannabis and magic mushrooms were the easy routes for those in the know, which when taken with an awareness of 'set and setting', allowed for the change in awareness, the giggles that flowed where we can't explain why a comment seems so funny, but the release is cathartic.
Nowadays it takes much less to drop out and it has to be done all on our own. All anyone has to do is have a landline, that works but does not ring very often, have a smartphone for emergencies only, which otherwise they don't know how to use, and confine their listening to terrestrial speech radio. Shun television as slow and cumbersome as a means of conveying information, and the internet as being full of rumours.
The information in the slow lane is all we need. Will you be better informed about the world? Probably not, but it least you can be more sure about your own sense of time, your situation.
If life is about relationships, then life is about change as well, change is part of how we relate, one to another. Until, very much alive, we come to nurture rest in ourselves more than finding calm through other people.
For some this means pretending, and projecting life as before but with the content diminished hidden in pro-forma chores like sending Christmas cards.
For me this change marks the 'no return' point, in the season of good will. Where I stop responding to the empty, synthetically generated, custom of greetings and meetings empty of intent. For both good or ill.
Finding the still point in the emptiness of human business is not the end. Seeking stillness, amid the busyness, is where to seek to Be, beyond definition.
Please left click to enlarge the text, to more fully enjoy the unsentimental generosity of spirit that Quentin exemplified as much towards Christmas day as the other 364 days of the year.
As the dates amble, then slouch, towards the birth of the special child, who bisects human history - at least across the Christian world, I cannot avoid seeing the anonymity of my family reflected back at me with the cards we sign and send each other where we say nothing special because there is so little left to say.
I am one of many for whom the siren call of a family Xmas is a well worn refrain of unwelcome.
I wish my fellow waifs and strays, and family rejects, an honest joy from obscurity that they would never expect to find.
I was slow to grow up when I was a child. Too slow to realise that when the adverts on television showed toys, those adverts presented toys being played with in large spaces, very different to the home that the advert was beamed into. There the space portrayed in the advert was part of what was being advertised, and the children on show were well paid child actors.
In the room the television was in, the inactivity of watching television would be all there was room to do, there would be no room for anything else. Least of all for a child to imagine the grown up they might turn out to be.
'Pillion' is the story of a gay young man, Colin, who lives in greater London with his family who accept him as being gay as long as the version of 'being gay' he lives out is an extension of their family life where his mother wears the trousers in the house. They are presented as living a comfortable, stable, suburban, life. Colin is a self effacing traffic warden, and has never had a boyfriend, but he has looked for one. His mother chooses dates for him, and he lets her choose them. One night in a straight/mixed pub at the end of another failed date he meets the man his mother never told him about and never knew existed. She is so well insulated in her own world from the definition of homosexuality that Ray represents that Colin is intrigued. For the first time Colin sets up a date of his own with Ray in which Ray proves to not only to be handsome but in need of somebody to control who is amenable to him controlling them. Colin seems unaware that he has been controlled all his life by his mother. Now for the acronym that child-centred family values would deny exists, but is definitely a dish many adults will serve up, or expect, of each other under many different labels. BDSM stands for Bondage, Domination, Submission, Sadism and Masochism. Colin finds an apparently fulfilling life outside of his family that he would never have guessed existed. The life Colin has in Ray's flat, and with Ray's friends, is an education for Colin that he could never have otherwise been offered.
Will the relationship last? Will Colin change as a person? Did Ray have a less detached, softer, side? Watch the film to find out what bumps in the road they both encounter. What I will say, from experience, is that to recognise our free will, and what defines what controls us, we often have to experience over control as something fresh and new to realise that we have to negotiate our own boundaries to recognise who we, and other people, actually are.
What we believe as how life should be always depends on the first impressions that replace what was intended to happen, where we see shadow of a life that was there.
The more we live on these sloppy seconds, occasionally glimpsing what should have been, the less we have to worry about leading parodies of the lives that we were meant to live, where promise becomes more and more the script of what could not be delivered until we tire of the latest salesmen's rattle bag of stale tricks.
Ask for less whilst you can.
From glory to parody is a shorter journey than we think. Only by promising ourselves less can deliver we deliver each other a life that leans towards a sustainable sufficiency.
When I was a child I listened as a child. Selectively, I could quote what I heard, not knowing how to ask, and being unsure whether what I remembered was accurate to the facts. My mind could easily wander.
A few of the phrases my mother often used stuck with me, one of them was 'Don't have children, have grandchildren', a phrase that to my easily scattered mind became 'Being a grandparent is better than being a parent', and implied criticism of me being a child.
As if I had the choice of being an adult. I did not know, but have learned since that my Mother was quoting Gore Vidal, who was partly raised in great privilege by his grandfather, Senator Thomas Gore, who, though blind, encouraged a love books, whilst he served in the US senate.
It would have been a better for me if the quote ran 'Don't get born into penury where there are no books.'. So much of the original context was lost to me.
Another quote that got truly mangled in how it was handed down to me became 'Great minds think alike, and mediocre minds seldom differ.'. A comment about quote false agreement. Or so I thought. Knowing no better.
Today I found the original quote 'Great minds have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.'. As quoted at about the six mins 50 second mark in the fourth of The Reith Lectures, as said by Albert Einstein in support of Bertrand Russell circa 1940, as Russell was being cancelled as lecturer.
It hard to imagine how the quote got converted to what Mother said, who to be kind to her, found fighting her corner in life difficult.
Whether I agreed with my Mother or didn't, she made my fight for my own corner in life hard enough, but still a seek a space of my own in which I can be agreeable and modest.
Today many Americans get labelled 'violent and wrong', by their government, as if violence is at it's most right only when the government organises it.
The oldest human wars were singular and simple. Armies aimed at each other where the limits of the weaponry were more than made up for, by the enmities between the rulers of different sides who were more alike than either side dared recognise.
Such times now seem improbably quaint. Modern peace, like modern war, is hybrid, and complex.
When modern states start modern wars the front line is the civil life of the enemy state. The weaponry is long range and can be military, economic, or electronic, including false information. The most concentrated of which leaders will serve up to civil life on their own side, to disable all opposition.
What efforts should we make to sustain our hybrid, complex. peace in the the face of powers unable to think outside of themselves?
That America offers the world where the world is be lead to believe that it could have it's cake or communion wafer, so to speak, and eat it too. Via the manufacture, refinement, promotion and use of guns to break the sixth commandment as part of 20th/21st century capitalist expansion as if there was no other explanation need be offered.
With America in the grip of a myopia so bracing that it does not recognise where it's present elite mis-leadership has sprung from, what are the countries once supported by it to do to replace and replenish their no absent support?
The first point for the world to observe is that there is no golden era to look back on, nor did any such invented era begat the world an elite from which White America's leadership descends from, and from which White America can look down on all it surveys, as nothing it sees is as good as it is today, or in the mooted hereafter.
'Path under the Rain' or 'Landscape in Regen' as painted in 1914 by Felix Vallotton (1865 – 1925) a Swiss/French painter and printmaker associated with the group of artists known as Les Nabis.
It used to be joked about Richard M. Nixon
'How can you tell he is lying? His lips move!'.
I suspect that many modern leaders have gone
several times better than this quaint humour.
They can tell more lies with fewer lip movements,
they can lie without their lips moving,
by getting proxies to tell lies for them.
They can lie in their sleep by making their lies
a currency all their own. There the language
becomes an invisible crypto currency where
we only pretend to follow the exchange rate.
How ceaselessly and infinitely these leaders
might lie in his next life have yet to be proven.
Who, right now, wants to witness,
and echo, such an unbelievable eternity?
was 'friends, good books, and an easy conscience'. Where the more all three decay the less the individual knows what to do about it.
For books we can return to pasts that predate electronic media, where radio was the first step into transient media futures, and tape could save a lot but equally deceive the listener. But for friendships and conscience I see no future. Friends define each other by how fixed the media are that friends share - how well I remember friendship being defined by quietly listening to the radio where conversations better than I could muster on my own ruled the airwaves - where I failed to foresee how time evaporates friendships into the ether.
And in a political world where leaders seek obedience without thoughtful self examination, an easy conscience will be prone to changes where it is right to fear will be for the worse that it is right to fear will be irreversible.
I have tried to understand the issues connected with modern migration, where certain wealthy public speakers say 'the country is over-full already, what the rich need is to send the poor abroad to work hard in remittance economies, or as pirates, to make more money for us.'. As if money were the be all and end all of their nation state. When money is only the palest representation of personhood anyone could fantasise of as real.
But to understand the migrant issue, I blame the arms industry for enriching itself at the expense of human life and AI creating an alternative government that nobody can make any sense of.
A quiet part of me knew all along that anyone who lives long enough, and remains in good physical health will outlive all their old friendships, and often hear words that used to carry some depth of meaning shallow out into thoughtless repetition.
What does that quiet part of me have to say now the moment has arrived when all human connection lacks substance? Nothing much with me having nobody to say it to in person, though I can say that nothing here, online.
How does time pass with nothing, no mechanism or social calendar, to mark it's passage into eternity?
Time passes the same way it would with days and other markers to follow, let life prove times passage is the same whether it is marked by activity, as much as when it is not.
Christmas does not just knock on the door, but presses on the doorbell until you respond and leaves messages for you on your answerphone for you to respond to whoever you faintly connect with.
We can escape, to where the season of goodwill has no reach. A true holiday, away from it all, would be to stay in an Islamic country, as long as you are comfortable with their police state/human rights record.
Is the day, in this digital age, that is meant to be the counterpart to the mass corporate temptations of Black Friday that fuels the adverts that the likes of YouTube could not do without.
The biggest downside of Giving Tuesday is how much the adverts for the charities that try to take advantage of the event look like every advert you have ever seen, where the gloss put on what is on display as 'needy' undercuts the idea of giving to charity. .
Stork, Maguar stork, as created in 1914 by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944).
'Parakeets' as created in 1927 by Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita (1868 - 1944).
'Heron in a Cage' as created in 1915 by Dutch artist Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita, lest we forget, was a man who died in Auschwitz.
Galah cockatoo. or Roseate cockatoo, as presented in this lino cut style drawing bySamuel Jessurun de Mesquita. This is one of many works rescued from the home of the ailing Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita by his pupil M. C. Escher and others immediately after the arrest of Mesquita, his wife and son by the Nazi invaders of Amsterdam.
In flat times when the news cycle slows to linger on old stories rather than spike and peak with changes that come around like perennials, the same time every year.
As the media aligns with peaks in the cycles of popular consumerism, as if by itself us buying more stuff would warm us more in winter than it does any other season I can't help but think as we endure the flatness of the news we must try harder to resist lapsing from the levels of watchfulness with which we attempt to care about for the rest of year.
In the present history of mass entertainment nothing is bigger than the games industry, whether financially, or whether in terms of the number of programmers it employs. Gaming dwarfs television, film and live music combined. All to produce ever more 'realistic' and enticing images out of electricity, meant to make the viewer forget they are manufactured, particularly when they use human likeness but invent different worlds that are run by rules that nobody would dream of making a reality.
I don't play video games but I do 'get the point' of them, when the mind is tempted to idle then it will idle, but woe betide the mind that is pushed to idle too long, and lets relationships slide to where 'there is nothing to do', that is where the point of being who we are will be tested.
On this day of peak sale upon all-year-round nearly peak sale of the year, the item that is going cheapest is faith in the commander chief in 'the greatest democracy in the world', and 'the greatest economy in world', the USA.
Where as age increasingly shrinks all previous perceptions of competence and the generosity of the country all the commander in chief can do is berate the logic and reasoning of those who question his memory.
When students use AI to take exams not thinking that they will, eventually, have to back up the knowledge the results say they were steeped in, they don't realise that their papers may have been marked using AI as a shortcut to give them grades.
Add to this employers using AI to speed up how to choose who will make the new team, and the process of getting gainful employment will become so riddled with error, as AI becomes the short cut du jour by which all will pass on more ignorance to each other than they ever thought existed.
I ask myself if I was born into the wrong species: I would like to have been born as a dog, a working animal, a lurcher or a sheep dog with a master to be loyal to, in which my loyalty was not blind but built on how we knew each other, however many dogs he had knew before.
Alas I have nobody to be loyal to now, and night and day, life is long and only fleetingly amusing.
But when you are the wrong species -particularly when that means being human -it is missing much more than your vocation.
This documentary is 100% worth seeing. The film was built on a simple premise: Testimony is evidence, Evidence is what forms a legal case in a court. The film started with a shocking testimony. In 2003 The Catholic Church tried to sell what was soon proven to be a cemetery for a former mother and baby home in central Dublin to a developer, for them to build a hotel on the site.
The last Magdalene Laundry was closed in November 1996. Across Ireland and outside Ireland the victims were presumed to 'statistical' and represented of a past that modern Ireland thought it could avoid. The victims were 'safe' and 'forgotten'. The shock was on the living victims, when in 2003 the Catholic Church sought to sell the plot of land which was discovered to be the graveyard of the former occupants of the Mother And Baby unit. To speed up the clearing of the land the Catholic Church found in it had record of the deaths of over 790 people for whom there were no burial records. The church proceeded to disinter the bones from the plot of land that was for sale, leaving the burial site of former nuns intact. Without regard to any possible relatives of those buried, the church cremate the bones, fill urns with the ash and reburied the ashes in impersonal site with little to say who was buried there. All with no notice given to those who might have been interested in those whose remains were so processed.
Admin around matters to do with death and burial would become a strong feature of the account of those anonymised by the grossly unfair characterisation of them, for the living survivors of Magdalene Laundries, the mothers separated from their children and those punished by incarceration/unpaid work. What stirred those living after time imprisoned to anger was how detached and secretive the Church was when it behaved the way it did.
From there onward, the film was a matter of the victims finding their voice, finding each other, and navigating the present day Ireland to retrieve what was left of the past that had mis-shaped them w when they found that they had no say in the matter of what shaped them. To find a voice they had to find intelligent allies. This they did and to retrieve the narrative was a long struggle that is still ongoing. First there were the young women who were shut up in the laundries late in their operation, who were kept doing laundry year on year. Then there were the babies sold in adoption schemes to rich Americans when money was the only point, but it was a point well hidden by a flummery about morality the did not withstand detailed examination. When the adopted children became adults and understood their adoption they were dissuaded by as much bluff and sincere dishonesty as could be generated by the nuns from from finding records of who their birth mothers were. Likewise mothers seeking children they unwillingly given up for adopting not knowing what money the Catholic Church made from the process, amongst many other things.
Then there was the collection of the accounts of beatings and punishments issued by the monks and nuns, where even when the collection of the Testimony proved to be a critical mass as a body of evidence, the state would push back against witnesses individually where the Irish state's defence against accepting that the beatings was two fold 1-we would have to corroborate with the long dead nuns that they did it before we could believe you 2-even if the state accepts that it colluded with such cruelty then accepting that it did is not enough cause for a compensation scheme, which would need witnesses and paperwork from the Catholic Church for it to work.
It was an enthralling film which often had me in tears, it was wonderfully well made. There were no clunky edits. I am sure the film could be the centre of a website that could expand and expand more. For example try https://jfmresearch.com/testimony/. The film stopped at ongoing matters, The website will explore further research of the subject.
The point is the victims voices were recovered-most by the victims themselves and through the help on offer to them, which they were not expecting to find. The Irish state is still resistant to accepting it's role in colluding with the Catholic Church. I can guess the indifference shown to the public, by both the Irish State and The Catholic Church whilst legally each shielded the other, and tried to play off and divide public opinion to dilute the public's revulsion at the whole authoritarian and falsely moral edifice that The Industrial Schools and The Magdalene Laundries represented.
P.s. I say this film was about the victims being seen to recover their voices.I want to mention this film's well intentioned opposite. 'The Magdalene Sisters', a 2002 fictional film made by actor/director Peter Mullan. It depicted three teenage girls trapped in the punishment/laundry system run by the nuns. I heard about it at the time but felt disinclined to go anywhere near the film when I found out how much those drawn towards it were drawn by the depiction of the violence by the nuns on the teenage girls who were looking for their way out. Recycling anger by drawing the public's attention to it might seem cathartic, but it will also leave more scars, for viewing it, than the process of exploring loss the way 'Testimony' does.... ....seeing faces creased by time and suffering, for waiting for the audience with which to be believed spoke most clearly to me.
Just as there are burner phones, devices for staying in touch with others that are meant to be used for only one job, so there burner relationships where one or both parties seeks to make the other disposable to them without appearing to do so.
I was in one such relationship unawares that who I thought of as 'my friend' wanted rid of me, whist appearing to be pleasant.
For twenty years we knew each other, where we disagreed and agreed by turns until one crucial day he visited me and did not ring back after the visit, or message me, ever again.
I know how much we are capable of being double minded, where we think one thing say something contrary to it, and then act contrary to how we have spoken.
However much I accept that, I still don't understand what prompted him act that way, that last day, and never darkening my life again.
The past is always stretched between faith and fear as we recollect it, where the faith of those in power came from their belief in having the means of tipping the balance of probabilities in favour of old rhetorical answers.
The fear of the weak was that they could not argue their way out the rhetoric that left them so many ideas that the rhetoric denied them the expression of.
Whether you are on the side of power, or the side of weakness, I wish you endurance, and endurance for those you are opposed to, that we may each endure one another better.
In these days that we could fairly describe as 'times of war and rumour', where any sense of central authority seems to be AWOL, and the media narratives that we used to reassure each other with have lost their shape, from too many actors of state thrusting themselves onto the world stage before they got their lines I find myself patient as I wait for the narrative that explains what is actually changing, what the world is changing to - where the present more resembles past, better managed war and rumour, that is more clearly resolved by recent goings on.
Are legendary entertainers still legends when their adoring public sees them live, decades after their prime? Or does the status of the performer shrink in the eyes of those who built up the myth when the cold light of day exposes them, as ageing, and far more human, than they were previously allowed to be?
Extroverts are acknowledged by the company they maintain-that is part of their nature.
Beyond the space they live at from other people, what affirms an introvert to themselves?
'Coming out' to myself as an introvert I find that I repeatedly locate myself at a distance from other people I did not intend to - because of who they were and who I am. Where that distance between us is all there is left for me to hold on to.
So here's to the space apart from other people that I did not set out to live at being the place that holds me in a way that I can live with.
I have not heard much about COP 30. On my radio the present day White House madness that is American Politics has taken up more space on the airwaves than they deserve. But I know COP 30 has had some effect, not least on UK advertising campaigns.
In the latest adverts for cat food on UK YouTube, some cat food corporations have been buffing up their greenwash credentials by reminding viewers that if they buy the latest in highly packaged and over processed cat food the manufacturers will salve the consciences of the cat owners by investing in some small acts that attempt to preserve small tropical islands at risk of sinking beneath the rising sea levels.
Such surreal promises of perverse intent are how green wash dishonours the point of COP 30, for the most credulous consumers.
In the analogue life, a home owner's identity was made secure by the strength of their front door. Where, when television tried to instruct citizens on who to let through that door, and who to block, television presenters found they were stuck.
When they wanted to show the public the genuine identity card of a gas, or electricity, board man (they were always men, and such boards were all there were) the television presenters could not show what such a card should look like. Criminals watched television too: anything that television showed could be adapted by those who it was unadvisable to let through door.
Fast forward forty years, and life is now online, with pale echoes of it so many places digitally, everywhere except where that life started. Criminality is now mobile and international, it flows from country to country, and is impossible to stop.
Even the digitally savvy are ripe for being easily mislead. What value identity when who we are is more about us being a target for theft, than us being who we say we are?
I would have been in my thirties when I first recognised the nature of one peculiar modern narrative furnished by different branches of the many governments in the world at the time. In this narrative, a branch of government we were not meant know existed does something where all proof that the deed was done exist solely in the denial of the deed.
In this narrative the public are told about some event that could have happened, but due to the actions of the government agency we are not allowed to ask about, the event never did happen and the lack of evidence is due to both the secretive government agency thwarting the event and how, because of the event being thwarted, there is now no evidence of what was stopped from happening, happening.
The 2020's version of this non-news news is some publicity hungry popular entertainer 'coming out' as having survived some peculiar drama, where some minor symptom of the drama left them with minor trauma, after which there was some minor hurt, but talk about it on chat shows on light entertainment television has done wonders for their public recognition. .
Here, today I am in not in 'emit' mode, I find I have little to say. Nor am I in 'receive' mode, though I have done what I can to follow the headlines of the day, until their absurdity defeated me.
When we are not in 'emit' mode, and 'not receiving', we are in retreat and we don't know how to describe it.
The ultra wealthy of today have wealth enough to treat the law courts as their personal casinos, where the lawyers there act as their ushers the losses can be written off comfortably: whatever the law that the wealthy are testing, it was always somebody else's money before they got their hands on it, where the somebody else never knew the money should have been theirs, to own until other people lost it, at random.
The poor, who can't afford lawyers and don't do visits to casinos, seek cheaper ways to experience risk - as - life, in which they can withstand the losses.
There, money might well be involved, but the currency of personal experience of each other, which can vary more than anyone may know, is valued more and is often harder to put into words that the poor present to each other as a stable currency.
I have written a lot about the follies of my youth, the misdirection of my childhood, even writing about how I attempted to 'come out' as 'gay' on my own, not knowing of any 'gay community' to join when I 'came out' to myself. Not knowing where the writing was going until it got there.
Coming out, what I found most was a lot of isolated men, for whom 'family had not worked' who were attempting to make a virtue of working their way out of their isolation.
Most of my writings had some minor therapeutic value, where a therapist, and a community to form an attachment to, would have served me better. No matter, as I inherit my present in the age of digital media, where neighbours use WhatsApp to avoid giving each other eye contact whilst talking to each other, my poor man's therapy seems to be very popular variant of the sort of avoidance that has stalked the ages.
It not that older people think less when they appear to have less to say. What older people have to say seems briefer because the are used to speaking that way, and living at a pace that was slower when they were young.
Whereas the new electronic media can edit what the young have to say to deliver it at speeds unheard of, the young not realising that with their ideas being so raw, so unprocessed, what they share will go out on hyper-fast media, un-listened to, also.
That venerable news organisation, the BBC, 'is now being sued by Donald Trump', for something he said where they reported his words slightly differently to how he said them.
It is old news for Trump to find somebody new to throw lawyers at in the pursuit of wealth. He has done that for longer, and more often, than statisticians have been prepared to count.
Trump has always been a 'throw the stone then hide the hand' sort of politician. What the BBC is being sued for is editing 'the stone' and 'the hand' in his words to make them appear as if they were part of one continuous well thought out movement.
The law is not on Trump's side, but that is something which he has often found advantage in, making the publicity on the world stage to be worth more to him than the court's time.
The BBC is a media minnow compared with the American tech giants who are courtesans in Trump's court, Amazon, YouTube, Instagram, X, Google, Microsoft and Apple. The BBC will outlast being noticed by Trump and his army of lawyers. The case is weak. Where American television networks have paid Trump in lawsuits when sued in America, the sums has been a payment to ensure their latest corporate mergers are passed by the government, there is no such agenda with the BBC.
In the meanwhile watch the Whitehouse, to see an executive where the overreach stretches towards infinity, and then beyond....
I saw from the notice for the latest local meeting for the u3a, University of the Third Age (Open University as it used to be), an open meeting with the title 'Great Women in Irish History', the lecturer was a male. I wondered, where are the women historians, who can explain women's history, and men's history, from a female perspective? Was this mansplaining in disguise? Or more localised, and unintended, irony?
I observed no remembrance of the dead of I-don't-know-how-many wars this Sunday, since the war the remembrance was meant to commemorate most ended 117 years ago.
The Imperial War Museum website lists 33 wars that have started since 1900. That is surely a conservative estimate, 6 of the wars are listed as 'ongoing' - most of them have been ongoing since 2014.
The oldest ongoing conflict started in 1948. If it is ever settled, then how it is settled will be the cause more regret than the world is prepared to admit to, or rebuild from.
We may as well call Remembrance Day 'World Rearmament Day' for all that we are capable of changing what we see as our nature, and think of the day as a breather from the cycle in which the arms industries across the world become the source of an ever increasing wealth for the few, increasing the misery of the many.
The weapons will be sold 'to renew the worlds defences'. The stated aim will be peace, as part of cycles of rest from war - the lull before the next storm - where war becomes sold as 'justified'. Again, and again, and again....
In these Trumpian days for the world, where power and wealth are more concentrated into the hands of fewer and fewer individuals, such that we have to relearn the real-politic lessons about how empires restructure themselves that George Orwell once made cogent and clear, because the world seems to has forgotten them, I think of how Czar Nicholas II once accrued that much power around himself that in the chaos of his court he became incapable of making clear decisions.
There, in those times those he made decisions for asked themselves Should we blame the Czar? Or blame his ministers for this indecision?
What they could not ask, which we can, because history has given us the answer, is 'Will the next regime centralise power even more than the present president? And be even more secretive/opaque?
I don't count the number of claims that my government is incompetent, I accept that such claims are part of the price of being a grown up and being able to vote, that I will be advised by a diversity of opinion.
I have to trust that whatever the opinion is, something like it has been said before and it was no more accurate then than now. But I will read and listen, in spite of the uniformity of mediocrity that I find often surrounds me. I remain hopeful of something fresher on the horizon.
I was not 'born political', like some are. The house I was born into avoided politics. The adult take on politics was expressed as a code, where all cynicism was hidden from the children, lest the child openly by cynical toward their parents.
I was one such child. What Politics meant was also obscured by the tabloid press that my parents subscribed to, there any political narrative in the news had to be rewritten as an illiterate joke with a banal punchline, for the adverts that made the paper's profits to seem half truthful.
Nowadays YouTube brings me my world news, which is to say I watch how America's sees itself, and I know that it takes a lot of money to make the events it portrays seem like a soap opera set mostly in a casino, whilst presenting what appears to be a truthy explanation.
My mother might have been less cynical, and more engaged with the television news, had she seen how reports and Party Politics could be remade as a kind of soap opera for export.
I don't mind being raised in the cheap, Mother scrimping and saving every penny she could find, to cut the corners to the future with.
Somebody has to live that cheap for others to set up the waste-for-profit schemes that are modern Capitalism.
Where cheap living gets difficult for me is the isolation and lack of skills that comes from me living within my means.
When grown up friendships cost money, and a social capital that I was raised to live without, then a cheaper past means a cheaper future, where the most I am to aspire to is that my cheapness 'is sustainable'.....
It is a recent trend in the media for adverts for popular products to talk about 'making memories', as if families did not do this before, whether with or without the assistance of the technologies of their day.
How much is the spread this phrase a reaction against the new awareness of dementia? It seems that way to me, much more than it is about the unity of family, when previously memory was a given, regardless of how generous, how mean, or merely banal, the events were, that created the memory of family.
Back then a memory of an unhappy family was better then having no recollection of family at all, and whoever in the family got away with the most wrong doing, buried that in how family was misremembered and made the greatest social capital they could out of what would otherwise have been, as an adult, memories of a misery laden childhood.
'The Bridge', a 1990s painting Australian painter Rick Amor (born 1948) a scene he revisited in several published sketches.
'Evening on the Ti-Tree Shore', a 2018 landscape painted by Rick Amor (born 1948). I accept that these paintings will seem much more impressive when they take up the width of a gallery wall.
'Terraced House by The Garden' a 2022 painting painted by Rick Amor, an artist drawn to atmospheric landscapes, of which Australia has many.
'The Shore' as painted by Rick Armour (born 1948) here is the artists website.
Who knew that World War Three was going to start with the 2014 Russian reclamation of The Crimea from modern Ukraine, a mere 70 years after Russians reclaimed all Ukraine from Nazi Germany who invaded Ukraine between 1941- 1944. Russia got their third bite at Ukraine from 2022, where they propaganda/excuse became that they were seeking to de-Nazify Ukraine, as if they had failed to de-Nazify Ukraine nearly eighty years before and had to hide their previous failure.
Now the third world war is being extended as a cyber war in European air and airport control, and drones that make the skies unsafe for planes to the point where plans for peacetime civil travel is getting disrupted, before it gets totally discontinued.
We can measure how much thicker blood is than water when we compare how money and power are shared out.
When elections are well regulated, the ballot is confidential, and changes of government are both fluid and light, a peaceable transfer, who complains about that?
Whereas in a kleptocracy that denies how bloody and thick it's self interest is, whilst the first family decide how national and local government decline, and what sort of media smoke and mirrors seems right to mis-explain all this to the masses.
To see how the regimes with the one of the worst human rights records in the world inspires their most creative citizens to make such inventive, and easy to understand, world cinema. Proving that the power of the image, and good editing, are a craft to cherish forever.
Would that other countries too poor and too easily unsettled to have civil rights records that withstood close scrutiny had the history of the creative arts that Iran has, with which to contribute to world culture in spite of their absence of stable laws, and other hallmarks that are the pride of wealthy, more equitable, societies.
Truth is a necessity, as much as sanity. Both are in short supply.
What truth should I hold on to today? To imagine that I am grounded, from the dazzling array of insanities that the world, the heavens, and the expanding mass media, that offers me as a choice today.
Perhaps the weather will look after me better than most human language.
I have an appreciation of science, even though it is a subject in which I was bad by design through how I was taught it.
One reason I like my science is because, absurd as it might be, it has units of measurement for things that public can be told about where they will never see, directly, the thing in itself. Only it's effect.
Science has built those units of measurement into it's vocabulary which helps people believe in what scientists can never directly see, and yet make seem rational in conversations.
I can't say that holiness and eternity 'don't exist', nor can I say that whether, if those concepts had units of measurement more people would place more store by them than they did before when they believed without measure.
All I know is that in so far as they are known to exist their existence is defined by how they defy language.
And what is most on show in the media we know is a double strength double standard of such blatancy that it has to be presented as 'the new integrity', then we can only guess at the size of the lie before it multiplied, who the liar told first, and who was made to swallow the lies, after that...
The long chain of command that chose to accept the task of vomiting this propaganda as far around a fractured world as a global media could project it.
How do you make a narcissist laugh? Feed him a line about the weakness of those he affects to despise. A line that makes their perceived character a joke that does not need a punchline.
Only don't make the description of weakness in others too truthful, it might reveal to the recipient the truth about their vanity.
Buying time to lay waste to the future, using pointless speculation, is the popular way for the few to make the many live out pasts that cut them off from seeing the past as an invention, where if those times were examined with a little rigour they would fall apart the instant they were recognised.
The smaller and neater modern technology becomes the easier it is to sell in adverts and the less I like it. Screens I can't read and keypads with buttons too small and sensitive for me to use them, doth not a happy consumer make.
Was the 300th person in 2025 to be executed in Saudi-Arabia for protesting against a regime that he could not see clearly enough in advance of his becoming an adult would punish him.
His family were never told of his imminent death, they were never going to say 'Goodbye' to him, nor will they be given the body for burial, where Saudi Arabia likes to punish the family as much as they like to criminalise individual.
Abdullah Al-Derazi enjoyed raising birds by hand No more will he hand-rear birds and nurture them, the way he long dreamed of doing with his father.
Saudi Arabia ranks at no 36 out of 172 countries in the ranking of the worst civil rights records, between Turkey and Pakistan, with Azerbaijan close behind. At no 1, the worst country in the world to live in is Iran.
Expect more executions to be announced soon, or left click here.
Because the simple life will be the repetitive life. But when living within our means is what we repeat there is practicality and virtue in such repetition.
In the accepted explanation of the Boston Tea Party, the tea in the port was thrown into the sea by rebels, rebelling against the high taxes imposed by George III, on the British colony where those who told the story try to present the idea that the colonised would have accepted being an under-represented, were they charged far less tax.
Whereas the true story was that those who threw the tea into the sea were rebelling against both the British and the colonial authorities. They did not want to be taxed and felt no need of representation, before any authority, refusing even the policing of the colony. They wanted to be the pirate-government that others would defer to, they wanted to be the authority that taxed and subordinated others.
Pirate kings in and of their own lawless domain.
This idea is being tested to the max with the Trump system of tariffs, where many feel the boats, their booty, and the trade are all intact, and have long left the harbour for other markets.
Some prayers are just words some words can be more than they seem. Other words are less than their presenters present those words as being. On the whole I prefer the silences that lead to the thoughts that open us up to the choice of change for the better, that cannot be reversed by circumstance when adopted.
The longer I live alone, when the landline does not ring, the better I feel about the silence.
The isolation began when neighbours who I thought wanted to know me encouraged contact via facebook, rather than conversing in person.
Then we moved to message by whatsapp when they began to have even less to say than they had when they had me use facebook.
It felt to me like they had moved away, perhaps in their heads they had, when they found a freer life in video games where they met better neighbours and went to live on La-La-Land.
I used to believe that I was not part of my birth family -that they only wanted me when I was of material use to them, and called it 'cupboard love' when I sought acceptance.
In my utopianism I imagined that I could choose who I might be liked by, who would accept me, no question asked. But Covid severed too many connections....
Looking back at the time I still lived in hope. There were many hopes that made me feel better, they extended to use of words like 'homophobia', with the many variants, where it's sponsors hoped the changes they fostered were positive and permanent, A reset of reality that could not be reversed.
I was almost convinced that through language alone the world might be changed forever. But not quite.
Part of me knew that government is a matter of legal mechanisms, 'Levers of power' where such levers can be used in different combinations, to different effects, regarding wealth, choice, and power across the strata of society.
But everyone in my chosen family avoided asking what might happen when an unrepentant fascist grasped the use of state power and spoke and acted with no sense of being even slightly capable of error, or in need of the need to seek forgiveness.
In such times every statement from every 'great leader', take your pick from Trump, Sisi, Putin, Orban, many others, is more right because of whoever the speaker is, than wrong and damning with their crude and weak grasp of the details.
In a new world built on shoutiness where the loudest world leaders cut through the most, using propaganda to promote the newest weapons of war, when we can't trust a word they tell us - particularly when they speak in the tongues of hybrid warfare, I find my best thoughts in firm retreat from the noise of warfare that surrounds me.
President Trump essentially stated the destination, but he did not state how to get there. That seems to be his style.
It is important to get some clarity about what the deal is and what it isn't.
It is not a peace deal. It is not a peace process. It is a ceasefire and hostage agreement.
That is a considerable achievement in itself, and it tries to go on to state where it wants to go on to, but it does get there. And that is the real problem.
I listened to every word Trump had to say yesterday and it was like the process had not been even started.
And Trump, I listened to all he said yesterday, Trump is talking as if the deal is done when it has not even started. At Sharm El-Sheikh [in Egypt] they* signed something they called The Trump Declaration For Enduring Peace and Prosperity. It is full of aspirations [Bowen audibly swerved his way past the word 'waffle' before he said 'aspirations'] but once again it is almost devoid of content.'.
- Jeremy Bowen, international editor for the BBC, summarizing the biggest world news story of the last few days.
*Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, U.S. President Donald Trump, Qatari Emir Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad Al Thani, and Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan
