The Each Way Bet

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. 

 

America Vs The World

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. 
  

My Third Advent Card Of 2025

'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.

 

The Preview For The Unbelievable Afterlife

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?

Mark Twain's Idea Of The Good Life

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.  

Inhuman Values

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.

Life Without Friends

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.

Hopeful Travel

What do I hope for when I am unsure
that my life is being drained of purpose
and that I can't stop it going that way?

That the time spent getting there
will be much longer than the arrival.  

Time Outside Of Time

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.   

My Second Advent Card Of 2025

Ruined Country: Old Battlefield, Vimy, near La Folie Wood, 1918
by British landscape painter Paul Nash (1889 - 1946).

 

Like Temptation

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. 

Signs Of Greater Age (43)

1-The necessity of an electric under blanket in winter,
over which to make sure of a good nights sleep. Along with....

2-A 'big foot' in which your feet may rest whilst at the table
when the rest of the house is enduring the winter chills.  

2-For those with online lives that never stop
a heated mouse mat in which to warm the hands
whilst clicking forward with your life.  

Giving Tuesday

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.
 . 

Picture Set Of The Month - December - Samuel Jessurun de Mesquita - Pictures Of Birds

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
by Samuel 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. 

Watchfulness Lapses

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. 

Testing Times

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. 

Black Friday Special

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.  

Artifice Of Intelligence Extended

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. 

My First Advent Card of 2025

'Sartartia' as painted in 1985 by American artist Valerie Jaudon (born 1945).

 

In My Most Lucid Moments

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.  

Film Review - 'Testimony'

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. 

 

Burnt!

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.     

Surviving Faith And Fear

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.   

War And Rumour Management

 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.  

Signs Of Greater Age (42)

When we are older,
lips become much more
for watching when they move
than they are for kissing,
which they used to be.

When we watch it is because 
we no longer hear the speaker
the way we used to, without hearing aids.

Which when we see fewer people
we have to remember to put in, before speaking.

More Or Less Human

 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? 

Note To Self

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.

Perverse Incentives

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.  

The More Times Change Us, The More The Domestic Threats Remain

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?        

When Being Told And Not Seeing Is Believing

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. .  

Commentary On Absurdity

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 Currency Of Personal Experience

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.

The Loneliness Of A Long Distance Writer

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.

The Speed Of Thought

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.  

Buzz Lightyear For President

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....

Further Education Required?

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?     

Another Quiet Sunday Amid A Noisy World

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....

  

The Last Czar: A Warning From History

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?

Who knows is how much opacity we can live with?

In/Competence

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.  

Warning

Reporters report
that government kites in flight
can easily frighten
publicly nervous horses.   

Clean News?

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.

Cheapness Now For The Future

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'..... 
 

Signs Of Greater Age (63)

The older I get the less I can find to say,
and the more I find myself caught up
in the minutia of grammar, and punctuation! 

Memories Are Made Of.....

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.     

Picture Set Of The Month - November - Paintings By Australian Painter Rick Amor

'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. 

  

World War Three

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.

   

Re:Tired

I was tired yesterday
I will be tired tomorrow,
I will be tired the day after.

I am fine with that: I was born tired.
Feeling tired is my proof that I am alive. 

First Family Values

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.   

 

It Is A Pleasant Surprise To Me

 

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.  

A Question Of Truth

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.    

What We Can't See And Why It Matters

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.   

When Blatancy Is The New Integrity

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.   

The Truth About Vanity

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. 

The Recognition

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.  

When Small Is Not Beautiful

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.  

Abdullah Al-Derazi

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.

It's Okay

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. 

 

The True Story Of The Boston Tea Party

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.

Thoughts And Prayers

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. 

La-La-Land

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.  

False/True Negatives

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.

Thoughts In Retreat

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. 

Such Economy With Language

'There is actually almost no detail about how it [the twenty point peace plan] is going to be implemented.

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

  

   

  

World Mis-Leadership Made Personal

It is strange how much I try to keep faith
with the worlds of language, news, and politics
when so many weak world leaders remain in power
because they disappoint-as if if they led from the front
they might show others how to lead and be ejected
from their role in a shot. They remind me of my father,
a man who had far more right to ownership
and far more choice in law and custom
than I would ever have, both as a child and adult.
Such that what he mentored me in most was error
hidden and sustained by anonymity, more than I knew.

I don't blame him for not wanting to be parent,
any more than I blame world leaders for leading
their countries astray. The news still interests me
through it I see more clearly how the world is misled. 

  

Grief Is A Road Some Navigate More Than Others

After the scorched earth war policy
comes the self congratulatory ceasefire
where nobody knows how long the arms
will remain silent, but everyone hopes
it will be long enough for the living
who investigate, to clear away the rubble
that was once housing and retrieve the dead
from where they were crushed and died instantly,
so the living can own their sense of loss with dignity.  

The Common Currency

Overstating the case, or the argument,
is the common currency in modern politics,
where, aided by an overspun media,
there is no opposite to being 'in emit mode',
where in person, people might speak, think,
and listen - all at once - to make a conversation.

Thus 'A peace plan', as it fills the news,
is much nearer being 'A framework for a ceasefire'
than it's planners can admit, and 'a 20 point peace plan'
where 19 of the points remain bare outlines
for future government actions
that are not even at the planning stage. 

Thus who speaks to who
and what they might say to each other,
and who might chair such meetings, 
remains unimagined and unexplained.

The Common Currency remains
the ability to speak about the future
without listening for where it will start from,
where people wish that their leaders lead
through listening to their people instead. 

The Last Gasp Of Pink Floyd

was released 29 years ago this week when keyboard
player and writer of the band, Richard Wright,
released his second solo album 'Broken China'
to acclaim from fans of the band, with none of hyper
-promotion of the last full band album
'The Division Bell', but an EPK and interview.
Please left click here to hear 'Broken China'
in all it's chilly electronica-style grandeur for yourself.    
     

 

If A.I. Was Your Girlfriend

Elon Musk and every other billionaire tech bro
have redesigned human relationships as the best
a man's money can buy, with the available technology.

Their new fashion for avowedly heterosexual men,
who fantasize about real women, the reality of whom
ensures that the unreality of the men do not stand a chance,  
is the ever amenable and always changeable A.I. girlfriend.

There the man chooses her design, based in real life models
he has met where men can think once, twice, and think again,
about the design of the ideal A.I. woman of their choice
who will never complain that the man is a fantasist: if she did
then the A.I. woman would cease to exist as the man's fantasy.

  

Competitive Insanity

As The Autocrats Club selects new members
from across the world, neighbour of Russia -
Georgia - is the latest where the vote has been counted,
and consensus as evidenced with the shrunken freedom
of the press in the reports that do get released, the competition
for the most destructive and insane leadership of the year
still remains a hot race between the hidden hand of Hamas,
the military and propaganda power of Likud, and the lameness
of The Republican Party in America. There, for all three,
every reason why they can't do exactly what they want
is somebody else's fault, for anyone other than them to fix. 

Between Words And Actions

As world leaders pronounce
about the world they want to see,
putting the 'me' into the media 
before an audience that is tailored
by the advertising revenue their words earn,
we should note that whilst speeches
start and stop on television, the wars
that are started by all these words 
take a lot more than mere speech
to stop once the arms are taken up.     

Ineffective Democracy

We have a choice of reasons for being shocked
by modern politics, we can be appalled
by people who register to vote but refuse
to enter the polling booth and make use of it,
not even to invalidate their ballot card, or be appalled
by people voting in their thousands. But by the nature
of the list of candidates, whoever the voters choose,
their vote makes no difference to the overall result.

It Is Being So Contrary

That keeps me most consistent.

Here's Looking At You, Kid

 Jane Goodall with Tess, a female chimpanzee
at the Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary, North Nairobi,
 in 1997. Photograph: Jean-Marc Bouju. For contact
that is more human to human with/from Jane Goodall
please left click here. She was a true prophetess
of our times, as is the way with all these things, 
far more than we realise....  

 

Picture Set Of The Month - October - Pointillist Landscapes By Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig

'View of Zoutelande on the Island of Walcheren'
an isthmus close the southern border of The Netherlands  
as painted by Dutch neo-impressionist painter
Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915). 

'Bulbfields in Bennebroek' in the North West
of The Netherlands as painted in 1900 by Dutch painter
and sometime theosophist Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915).

'Spring in Blaricum', a pointillist painting depicting
Northern Holland by the Dutch artist
Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915). 

'Landscape in the Eifel' a pointillist painting
of a region of Germany, as painted by the Dutch
neo impressionist artist Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig. 

'A View of Vlieland', a pointillist landscape of one
of the West Fresian Islands off the coast of The Netherlands
as painted  by the Dutch artist Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 - 1915).

'Landscape in the Eifel' by the Dutch painter, lithographer,
and illustrator who was known for his pointillist and divisionist
style, Ferdinand Hart Nibbrig (1866 -1915). 

 

World War III

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 before and had to hide their failure.

Presently the third world war is being extended as a cyber war
over European air space, and airport control, where drones
are making the skies unsafe, for planes to the degree
where the public's plans for peacetime travel are being increasingly disrupted.

How Anonymous Can Authority Get ?

'Who's image is on the coin*?'
is an increasingly unanswerable question,
for ascertaining who is in actual authority,
when over seventy years, money has gone
from paper and coins, through to cheques
and then credit cards through to being an app
that now stands in for all that stood before it
in situations that are so far beyond counting
that we hardly know who is in authority
at all, never mind where our taxes go.

*Jesus answer to the trick question
about who to pay taxes to in Israel
when it was a Roman province,
Matthew 22:15-22; Luke 20:19-26.  

When The Hand Connects...

    ...to the mouth that is hungry for food,
for the belly further down to grumble less, 
then that meal saves the day that day, at least.

There are many days when provision for the least
is yet more poverty, when want is left unmet. 
Whilst across a world, wars fill the news
that is self supporting from advertising
where wealth increases by unearned means,
whilst hiding from taxation, via schemes
out of reach of government regulations.

Where the hand connects to the mouth
I am grateful, but I have to learn to live
with feeling that I must live un-listened to.

The Vanity Of Optimism

works best when the optimist
is at their least reflective,
when they are at their vainest,
and their most deceptive
in such a flattering media. 

1939 Syndrome

I used to measure my happiness
by the length of time I was at ease
with listening to the serious news
in the mornings, the worse the events
reported and the more smarmy
the 'strong man' political acts
the shorter my tolerance of them.

Particularly Margaret Thatcher.
Nowadays I think of this measure
of un/happiness as '1939 syndrome',
since that is what such news reminds me of. 

Great Turn Offs Of Our Time (41)

When we hear the latest outlandish
public statement from public figures
known for their way with monetising
their lack of vigour towards the truth,
and making lies sound so entertaining
then the obvious thing to do is turn them off.

But when life repeats itself that often,
and that objectionably, what are we left with?