No Easy Exit

I have lost count of the number
of world leaders who have dominated
the media that I have found acceptable
to me, that edits the news well.

As soon as these leaders have started wars
they have found they could only end them
through being far more brutal than they suggested
they would be, which is when they put the 'bullet'
into 'bulletin' with the aggression with which
they speak to a media they have made pliant
to their message, their personal echo chamber
which I only recieve selectively, second hand.

The wars continue without any prospect
of a clean, or even acceptably dirty, exit. 

I know what comes next.

Economic displacement in countries at peace,
at home at least. They won't want the refugees
who are fleeing the wars that they have started,
with allies they have backed who consider it
to be beneath them to sort out the mess,
and consequences of what they started..... 

The Sky Is The Limit

for World War III - the sky
is where the war will start from
and as the weather rains bombs
onto every inhabitant of distant lands
we will soon understand how man-made
global warming was always going to be
and how lethal man-made heat will remain,
long after there is no-one left to witness it.

So much time will have to pass for the humans,
along with so many fewer species that are left,
to survey the damage and so how to be at home with it.

Full Moon

A worm moon* in the water,
but how to pluck it out.... 


*The named given to a March moon by native Americans. 

 

The Ontological* Approach To War

As World War III, the new war from the air,
lands on the ground below in many countries,
using AI supported drones where no human
that we know of is in control of where they land,
and where there was no declaration of intent,
because such clarity might limit AI's ambitions,
the world is facing hitherto unknown unknowns
on scales where we don't know how to calculate.
What is real that the common citizen cannot be told:
The point of the war, if it has any point at all,
is that it is an exercise with advanced new weaponry
that exceeds all previous limits on warfare
more than all previous total wars combined,
more totally than the starters of the war understand.

*Ontological meaning taking an argument
further than it has gone before, as far as it
will go, to see how far it can be made to go.  

Picture Set Of The Month - March - Iranian Rugs

Baluchi rug - Baluchistan is a region of Iran, a country
far more known across the world for its rugs
and traditional arts like music, than for it's
reputation and arguments over oil since the 1920's.  

BP, British Petroleum had a controlling stake
in Iranian oil fields from the 1920s onward,
meanwhile most Iranians remained poor.   

 

But with Iran's contribution to world culture being 
 like this Kashkuli Gabbeh Hand-knotted Wool Rug,
so slow, with so much attention put into making it,
compared with American inattention forming media
of today I know who I would look at most the long run,

The Old Familiar Script

For a government, an empire, to have the power
to destroy another (smaller) government,
but have no interest in what replaces
what they destroy, beyond wanting it
to be a weaker, vainer, version
of the destroying government is a familiar script.

from the Boer War of 1900, when the British
opened the first concentration camp, which indirectly
led to state sponsored apartheid (1948 - 1994)
through to the USA in its Anti-Communist zeal
knowing more what it did not want from, Iran,
from the 1951 onward, when elected Prime Minister
of Mohamed Mossadegh ousted British Petroleum 
by fiat, the British cried 'foul' and blocked Iranian oil.

MI6 and the CIA did not want Iranian autonomy,
and overthrew his government, which was caught
between different cold war and anti-cold war influences.
The Americans backed a weaker Shah, and a form of rule
they surely knew could not last, and instructed him badly
on how to make his regime more sustainable with the people.

Will the next leaders of Iran be a tougher bunch of thugs
than the last lot? And the lot before them? 
Tougher than the present day lethal Israeli and American weaponry
presently razing Iran's ability to form a government to the ground?

The new Iranian government will have to be tough to withstand all that.

And Iran's necessary toughness will be a problem
for all future anti-communist tough guys,
who with their short term memory media,
have no sense of history, or of how
long term government takes to be rebuilt
with the co-operation of the citizen.

Photograph Of The Day

Amy Kierstead, The Eye of the Forest, a photograph possibly taken in 2023.

 

Truth, Power, And Deference

Who is there to tell the UK Royal family
and all the other world heads of state
who lead top down hierarchies
'Respect the staff who are paid far less
than you are, to advise you how to be
the wise leader than you might not be
without them: their relative modesty,
and wisdom,  should be your lesson
in how far different fortunes can fall and rise'?

I don't know who can cut through
the many P. R. inspired false presentations
of Noblesse Oblige, but whoever's job it is,
I wish then courage to speak truth to power. 

Rueful Predictions

I am sure that I have used the line
'given a choice of dictator' recently,
when WW3 seemed to be at a safer distance
than it is now that it seems we have one less dictator,
and the world body politic is feeding on the political corpse
of yet another collapsing dictatorship,
enriching themselves further, hoping
to both exploit the political vacuum
that the death of the Ayatollah leaves behind,
whilst distancing themselves from causing it.

I predict a rise in in the value in shares
in high powered arms industries linked
to remote controlled artificial intelligence,
and a rise in predictions of a new artifice of peace
supported by an increase in hostage-taking politics.   

In Beckett We Trust.....

With so many states and empires in the world,
including the old and emerging superpowers,
fail in their duties towards their citizens
and in the wars so many declare on each other
in pursuit of covering up older failures with new,
the wisest advice that the citizens of the world
can reassure each other, and their government,
with is to quote Samuel Beckett to each other

'Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.'.  

When Metaphors 'Get Political'.....

When is a swamp not a swamp?
When it is a tempting metaphor,
dangled before a public who see politics
as recently made corrupt, where their reaction
is to scan the media for the political simile,
sold to them by the party of their choice,
who can persuade them to see politics
as cleansed by some newly clean slate
that is harder to make dirty again than the last one.

On The Nature Of The Soil We Are Grounded In

A mother planted a garden to feed her children
through the seasons, so her family were self reliant
for as long as her children were dependent on her. 

This garden was not like the one in The Bible,
it had no tree of the knowledge of good and evil
planted at the centre of it, to draw it to the children's attention.
The mother, herself, was the source of all wisdom.
She was never to be lightly asked the serious questions
about life outside the garden, or inside Mother herself, 
where such queries were left to multiply, unanswered.

The children grew up well nourished but ignorant,
their living so well reinforced their collective ignorance,
if they sought life outside of who they were dependent on
it was there to be found - but how to tell good from evil,
assuming they existed? Mother was no guide to them....

She forbade her children from asking her
how she too was caught between good and evil,
like the children would be when they left,
to raise their own vegetables on their own patch,
when they left her.....

The nature of good and evil lived on,
unobserved, on in the soil of the garden.....

On The Twelfth Anniversary Of Russia's Invasion Of Ukraine

  As Russia's appetite for conquest is presented as inexhaustible, practically infinite, I present to the world a the trailer for a film that I have watched several times where as appetite thrives, and the carers are unaware they are feeding a monster that makes them monsters by proxy. It is a dark parable of a film where the morality of it is like the humour, cautionary, sharp, and biting. In America the film is called 'Greedy Guts'. The rest of the word calls the film 'Little Otik'. It was made in the year 2000. Jan Svankmajer, who crafted this film is 90 years old and the leading, perhaps the only, Czech Surrealist film maker in the world, the language  spoken is Czech the subtitles are in English where the visuals and the soundtrack, including some sounds of eating, lead the viewer through the story. 

Please left click here for the full film which rated 'adult' by Youtube, Bon appetite....

The Fall Of Mr Nobody

  Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor became an adult well after the mania in the British tabloid press for the family he was born into had lapsed, Andrew was a teenager when the funeral of Edward VII reminded the public of the family PR feet of clay for the first time since WW1, when they changed their name from the German Battenberg to the British Windsor. Andrew's adult career in the public spotlight, a few years later always seemed to be too obviously manufactured, more designed to sell merch, plates, mugs, biscuit tins, and all sorts of tat, and grab the tabloid column inches than be based in any sort of reality. Was it with his hollow marriage and his wife proving obviously inept at the PR game, by royal standards, that he found Jeffery Epstein and sex with girls the wrong side of the legal age of consent that fed his sense of privilege? There will be a lot of digging into his background. There will be a biography of Andrew published well after all the legal work is done. What the death of Edward VII did to rub the shine off royal mythmaking will look like child's play compared with the damage any thorough biography of Andrew will do the edifice of the royal family. 

  The sad thing we will find will be that he had so little personality that by the time we get to understand why and how it all went wrong with him we will wonder why we ever wanted to know about him. 

The Currency Of Courtesy

If 'Thank You' Is as near an irreligious society
gets to saying 'Amen' or 'Inshalah' or any other
similar religious expression with any feeling, then sobeit.

The currency of courtesy should never
be so undervalued that we can't find it in us
to use the words because with the hierarchy
we have to speak the words into we have no choice,
now or in future, about where our words place us
we can't change our place in where we live. 

Involuntary gratitude always hide humiliation.

Who Is My Neighbour?*

Nimbyism always starts at home
and never cares about the back yards
that other people have to live in,
or those with no backyard of their own.

Thus nimbyism means living
as if we have no neighbour,
there is no neighbourhood, and,
exceptionally, we all live on our own.

*A quote from the gospel of Luke Ch 10 verse 25-37

Henry Now (Once Henry Cow) In Concert

Because free jazz improvisation is alive and well, as long as long-in-the-tooth musicians who have learned how to play it can find the venues in which to play it, and make it seem natural.  

Hollowness Rules

When our choice is which autocrat
to take most literally, or disbelieve,
according to the media open to us,
the choice is somewhat rhetorical:
the winner will be the public speaker
whoever can fake sincerity the best,
whilst bluring the edges of gov't consent
being built on clear consulting citizens
is going to be the winner.

But in a world built on entertainment
it will be increasingly the case that politics
remains religion with no interest in the soul,
showbiz for ugly people; vanity is the currency
that waives the rules, in it's inconsistency.

I Am Avoiding News Bulletins At Present

Less because what we are being told
redefines 'doom scrolling' better
than reading the book of Job, whole
and considering the effects on his life
from his listening to so many false comforters,
and more because, well....
What I read most, and wish it were different,
is a few rich men in hyper wealthy America
fighting each other to wrest control over,
an extortionate prostitution charter,
where each of them wants to smear their enemies
with, and keep their own name out of,
as if managing an sextortion racket
was a natural extension of 21st century capitalism.

If only that was the worst of their meanness...

A Choice Of Artifice

I worry less about AI (artificial intelligence),
one the world media's favoured talking points 
and much more about an older problem
that is runs the world: artificial honesty,
where the artifice hides the dishonesty
it promotes in such a way that we misread
where it starts and make the disguised mistrust
hidden from us the foundation for daily living.    

Where Are You Flo? How Do I find You?

Having recently survived a minor stroke,
with my sense of humour and proportion
left intact, thanks to that modern wonder,
the NHS, a health service free for most
at the point of need where the intelligent will
to good will worked very well in hospital.

But I find their lack of intelligence,
their investment in AI peculiarly pointless,
their bot nurse is called Flo, and she wants me
to send her readings of my blood pressure,
as if they were proof of my affection
for the NHS, without her providing me
with the machine with which to do the tests,
or the location to send the results to if I collected them.

AI - how much can we live better with it?

How much more effective could we be
putting the creativity it takes to set up AI
to more connected, more analogue, usage?       

Distance And Thought

In countries with an open media
politics will always be divided by diversity. 
Citizens can use any political label they like
to describe themselves and other people,
though it might help for them to find
a choice of words that does not sound
so defensive as to shut down all argument.

In societies that defend the right
to carry a gun, the distance in thought
from words that can trigger further,
less healthy and more illogical, arguments, 
and words that can trigger lethal actions
is shorter than many people discover.

I Used To Be Relatively Comfortable

ignoring virtue signalling:
It was a media fad backed up
by a catch phrase where whoever
was sending the signal, the point
was they were not backing it up.

What was more interesting
was the content of the message
that was actually sent, decoupled
from any gussied up 'virtue'.

In this new age of nastiness,
we are getting the opposite
and it is far more dangerous:
vice signalling where the message
implies a real but unspecified threat
where the less accurately
the vice or threat is interpreted
the more lethal the hidden intent
inside the signal becomes
when made impossible to retreat from. 

Professional Or Amateur?

When I was aspiring to be a grown up
in the 1970s the adults whose example
it was left unsaid I should emulate
presented themselves as if they were
born professional adults, who had never
had a childhood and never been anything
other than the apex characters
they presented themselves as
to who they brought into the world.

Whoever they brought into the world
could only ever be amateurish, children,
even when they were capable, well formed, individuals.

I remember feeling repelled
by this locked in professional view
of what parenting ought to produce:
a replication of itself from different circumstances.
Where what parents held onto most
 was how amateurish children
would never relive the past
to be anything like them. 

Have You Ever Been Sold Cynicism?

Not knowing while you were sold it
that your salesman was even more
cynical than their salesmanship
was leading you to believe? 

Then don't be ashamed.
That is how these people work!
The cynic uses how you don't know
to deepen the depth their cynicism
puts you into, with them.

So you don't know who else
to turn to when you need help.

We can all learn, particularly 
when we start with learning
what we don't know before
and have to understand now.

Cynicism teaches everyone it touches
both impatience and contempt.
The more the pupil unlearns them
the more they will improve
on what their teacher taught them.

Americaphobia

Right now and for the foreseeable future
a phobic and critical response to all news
coming out of America will seem natural.

There capitalist opportunism has taken
a new, more toxic, turn where the wealthy
and powerful are playing 'chicken'. There one
of them tries to 'out' another for their name
being one of many in The Epstein Files,
whilst hiding that their own name is there.
Whoever's name is in the files, who can hide it,
they will maintain its high value. Like a unit
of currency in some hidden crypto currency.

The defensive hysteria with which America politicians
approach The Epstein Files reminds of McCarthyite America
but unlike the 1950s, which was an attempt at smearing many,
those in the files were there and are finding their former,
seemingly rational, self interest hard to explain with hindsight.

Perhaps money, power, and secrecy have always been like that.
Those who have invested, and made such things their treasure
 have good reason to hide the nature of their investment. 

And investments in secretive and abusive sex are similar. 

Signs Of Greater Age (44)

You go to the supermarket less often 
than you used to: diminished taste buds
eating alone so much of the time,
and a shrinking appetite lengthen
the times between each visit you make.

And when you go your knees and hips
don't work as smoothly as they used to.
For what you want to buy you don't need
a trolley but where you have a handle
to grip and press down on, holding it
is more of a comfort than you at first realise.

The last time I was in the queue to pay for my food
the retired woman in front of me told me about
what a friend of hers saw last week: Her friend
saw man die whilst in a queue almost in front of her.

I had to ask the lady in front of me
'Did he choose the wrong checkout?' 

Everything You Did Not Need To Know About 'Melania'

 

Thank you to film critic Mark Kermode, for daring to pay to watch, and report back, on what it was clearly an act of sacrifice for him to pay to see and choose to watch. He watched this film so that we could know what was in it, without us ever having to go anywhere near this gilded and poisonous trash.   

Confession Of A Former Book Reader

I first enjoyed the mysteries of reading books
aged thirteen, when I first joined a public library.
My membership had to be counter-signed
by a staff member in the discouraging care home
my parents assigned me to live in for five years.

High on their list of things to be discouraged
was being reflective, and enjoying reading.

I will save you the horrors of being made to play sport
whilst being so inept and uncoordinated. Sport was torture.

My adult reading started, aged seventeen when I first read '1984',
when I was way too young to understand it, and peaked
when I read 'Zen and The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance'
five times over ten years, the structure of which I still marvel at.
Even two years ago I would read up to thirty books a year,
and hard books at that, memoirs of surviving Auschwitz.

But with fewer friends, and more time spent in my own
or online I have tired since the days of 'Always having a book,
if not several, to read', I still read. But now I no longer write
reviews of the books to express my enjoyment of them.

Over thirty years ago reading was a thrill.
I did not know what new literary joy
I might find in the next book. Now I don't know
what will engage with me, and refresh
my attention span. It could well be silence.

Exclusion

The above is a cartoon, some minor humour
about exclusion being off the scale. Exclusion
happens to many people, whether the excluded
did not recognise their expulsion until the process
 is complete, or whether after some contemplation,
where hindsight can make you more whole, 
and more reconciled to being an outsider.

Wherever you are on the scale of exclusion,
look after it. It may be all you have to hang on to.   

 

The Pleasure In Language

There are many vain and inept world leaders
running banana republics across the world,
where with the limits on their temporal power
some of these men have to choose between
which to claim the most control over,
the security of the state or the freedom of press. 

Where the leader retreats from public debate
they leave to others the pleasure in language
as critics who dare, bend and stretch words
into new shapes in the guise of public journalism,
or simply satire, as those who dislike government
describe in disfavour and despair how their government is run.    

The Disgrace

of cheap grace, where at first
the cheapness of it seems to be hidden,
should never be underestimated.
Least of all when we set our pitch
to be present in other peoples lives
as part of their future.

Picture Set of The Month - February - Seven Moons, One Sun.

Solar eclipse from the space station.
Photographer unknown.

But the moon in the water..  How can one pluck it out?
Yongjia Xuanjue (665-713 AD).
  

The Moon meets the seven sisters
Photo by Ceyetana Siaz.
  

Crescent Moon over kissing camels, garden of the Gods, Colorado.
 Photo Lars Leber.

Super-moon rise over Wizard Island, at Crater Lake, Oregon.
Photo Chaz Shand. 

Blood moon over Egyptian pyramids.
Photographer unknown.
 

Sturgeon Moon setting over Cathedral Rock, Sedona.
Photo Heber Lopez. 

Double Solar Halo appears above the shores
of Split Rock Lighthouse State Park Beach
casting a surreal glow over Lake Superior, Minnesota.
Photo Joemare Sombero.   

 

More Or Less Human?

So often people put one another under stress,
where the one who demands more of another
expects a better performance for less support,
less input for more output than before,
where they help others less
than they expect help for themselves.

Thus the finitude for being more human is stretched
by the demands made upon it, whilst the means
required for being fully human shrink, to be
even less than the sum of their parts once again.

And pointing out how this works becomes impossible. 

Food For Thought

The processed language of advertising
is a natural corollary to the food
such advertising supports:
the lack of substance in both
normalises a lack of content in life.

In The Land Where Work Makes People Free....

Where ever freedom leads, it seems to lead
to where liberty is sorely lacking. 

 

A Choice Of Slippery Slope

The Doomsday Clock is less a clock
more a report of the deliberations
of a committee of scientists that reports
every January, where the communique
is called The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 
and this year the report for the choice
of slippery slopes seems particularly wide
and vertiginous as world leaders choose
how much they can push each other closer
towards disaster not knowing how much
they may well be being pushed further
towards catastrophe, unaware of it, themselves.

From this years report our choice of slippery slopes,
down which we might all disappear forever, is wider
and more precipitous than all the previous reckonings
set since 1947. The clock is now set at 89 seconds,
when in times past maximum safety from nuclear annihilation
was set at 17 minutes in 1991. With the end of the Soviet Union.

With President Putin seeking the return of the Soviet Empire
in some new Trump approved hegemony, we are nearer
to perilous times than we have ever been before.  

Back To The Future

I predict that the future
is going to be like the past
where what intelligence there is,
or lack of same, will be analogue,
rather than digital, the better 
to be limited and self contained
in an era when AI requires levels
of electrical energy to support it 
that may not be available.

Political Distance

It used to be thought 'wisdom'
for managing disagreements
to say 'keep your friends close
and keep your enemies closer.'.

With political differences peaking
afresh across 'the free world'
and distances between nations
being reset with varying levels
of agreement it remains unknown
how much the new distances
countries keep from each other,
with their diplomacy, are proof
of friendship, or of a new enmity. 

Misapplied Science

When naturalist/natural scientist Charles Darwin
inferred the theory of evolution from his observations
of the animal specimens he collected on his journeys
he was being entirely logical about what he observed,
and postulated about the scale of the planet's history.

But he was less logical about the human hierarchies
created by Adam Smith's theories about markets,
and the migrations of financial and political capital
to the levels of inequality that remade a feudal order
which meant only 10 % of males could vote for
the 1 % of males who owned the most property.

There the vast majority of the population, men
women and children worked the textile machines
until their wages were reduced. As power looms
replaced handlooms, so many highly skilled men
took revenge against the machines that made them
unemployed, by destroying them.

In evolution no animal had even been given the power
over other animals on the scale that factory owners
had over the girls and boys who worked the machines
the factory owner owned, all for such a petty pittance.

Meanwhile distant figures wrung their hands
over the suffering of those they had power over,
whilst offering no sense of respite.

Darwin, his cousin Herbert Spencer could live in the luxury
of the inherited wealth of their extended family  As males
they inherited so much because inheritance laws disinheriting so many.
They could proclaim their superiority, and profit much from the workers
the family employed much more than said labour could negotiate a life
away from labour for itself, away from the reach of the factory.

Such accumulated wealth, and insulating material comfort,
was just as much accumulated avarice as anything else.
Caught up in the social and physical mechanisms
that enclosed them, they disguised their lack of feeling towards others,

Grifting From The Grave

Egyptian royals of old were known
in the 20th century for their lavish abodes.
In their deaths the beliefs they sustained
such amazing dwelling places as the pyramids,
where they could stay there. Because their souls
weighted less than the weight of a feather.

But with the present post modern capitalism,
still developing, the rich are working towards
a new theology of money. Where the eternity
of the richest in the world will to be sustained
by new, more sustainable, mechanisms of inequality.

There Trump and other vampires of finance may well
be dead. But will keep on grifting from the grave,
via financial instruments of arcane design
that they believe will drain those living long after them.

It will be less them living in pyramids amid servants
and great bling, and much more them living on
in more abstract form through their pyramid selling
where for all eternity the poor will keep being bankrupted.

Life In A Vacuum Requires Strength

Protesting against leaders they cannot reach,
because they live amid 'emit, don't receive'
media regulations that only the leaders control
requires those who still seek to understand
said media that allows them only to listen
to bear witness to such entrenched inequalities
requires a strength of character, to withstand
the forces of the immoral vacuum
the great leader's create for others, beneath them.     

In The Scale Of Knowledge

the more we claim to know,
the more we have to admit that the sum
of what we will never know is far greater.
 

Too Much News Is Bad For Your Insight

I did not realise that I had soaked up
too much news about too many wars
until in a shop I made a purchase.
When I looked at the electronic till.
Waiting for the print out I thought it read
'Your transgression is being processed now'.  

As The Political Clock Winds Back To 1938

And countries get closer to reviving
old trade wars, where neighbours withhold,
and ransom, emblems of neighbourliness,
goods that were once thought basic to survival.
Instead we get closer to the remoteness
where arms and drones are what we exchange,
in wars that offer no escape from conflict.

There our former stance of holding tight
to our allies, whilst keeping a closely watch
on our enemies, all in the hope of unity,
now seems somewhat pointless.
  

Happy Martin Luther King Day

                                        And for the 2026 BBC contribution 

                                           to Martin Luther King Day 

                                               please left click here. 

How To Measure A Life?

The attention span economy
is a much used phrase nowadays,
what the phrase measures out first
is the amount of time we spend online
clicking in and out of sites that entertain us
until we can take no more in. Then the clickbait
invites us to agree to something that costs us money
that we did not want, so we scurry to the bank
to save it costing us more than we can commit to.

The attention span economy is one
of time first, seeking that endorphin hit
from watching and hearing something
well beyond what we could make without assistance. 

Until the unit of currency becomes money,
which happens when we lose our focus
whilst idly browsing a website where we
did not read the small print that tells us
'this will cost you'. That wakes us up.

Where terrestrial analogue television was slow,
and lacked nuance but was good for embedding habits
the way people used to time their lives to radio schedules,
YouTube is now there all the time, and is edited
much tighter, its algorithms move much faster,
so we have to decide for ourselves when to leave:
before the clickbait becomes rage bait I suggest.

    

Out Through The In* Door

I have been very slow to choose
a resolution for the coming new year
that I might be able to sustain. 
But over two weeks after others
have made all their decisions,
I may have found one.

I am going to come out, late in life,
as an introvert and forget the alphabet
of mental health labels by which others
define and redefine themselves.
If a lack the words in the middle
of an attempted conversation
it is because I am 'an introvert' coping
with a world set to 'extrovert' terms
of change, need, and want, and grabbing attention.

*here 'In' is short for 'introvert'.      

Cheap News, Cheaper Comment

Thoughts and prayers are like public apologies
by media figures, the more detached the presentation
of the speaker, as they retreat from the specifics of the matter,
the more the speaker devalues themselves
and the public space they are occupying. 

Namibia

An image captured by photographer Sol Levi.
Images of nature are vital for us to balance against
the political and human and other clickbait.  
 

 

The World Cup Own Goal

I never liked football as a child,
but still I tried to understand life.
I disliked how easily football
used to as fill television screens.

Sport on television was more about television
than ever it was about sport. The alternative
was that television was about  advertising.

I would have liked to be on the stands
and joined in the roar of the crowd.
but I could not find local matches
and from them, pick a side I liked.

Now the new American Empire has ended
legal visits to it from seventy five countries
across Africa, Latin America, the Middle East,
Asia, and Eastern Europe. This dictum excludes
citizens from across large parts of the world 
from attending World Cup matches in person,
as part of their planned summer holiday.

Countries whose citizens are not banned
from visiting America may well discourage
their citizens from attending the event.
On the grounds that the World Cup
was meant solely meant as an own-goal
scored by, and for, American democracy.

American exceptionalism wins/defeats itself again.....

I Dream

of a world where politics, power games,
and other dialogues of the deaf
leave the oxygen in normal conversation,
and where the silence does not roar or deafen.
Where every day life has its own flow
and presence. Everything is in its place:
nothing seems like it is missing.

Then I wake up to where I am,
wishing I lived somewhere else,
or, somehow, another person. 

I cannot escape, or embrace, who I used to be. 

The Monroe Doctrine

Is over 200 years old, marginally younger
then the Republic of America, itself.
This doctrine is as definitively American
as Mom and apple pie, but is far less innocent.

It proclaims the rights for presidents of the USA
too rule the roost, as they choose,
in the smaller countries that make up 
the continent to the south of them.

Initially it was written to keep Europe
out of South America, and it was not a doctrine.
It became a doctrine in 1846 when James Polk,
then President of the USA, upgraded Monroe's statement,
by invading Mexico to nearly double the size of America,
only for a civil war to be started about the right to keep slaves,
versus ending the trade and keeping of slaves, fifteen years later.

Every geographic expansion had it's price.
Ending slavery was the big change, where
the descendants of slaves still pay the cost.  

Fast forward to the 1904 when Teddy Roosevelt
added his corollary of taking pre-emptive action
to the countries in South America that he thought
needed American reform from Cuba (from 1898), Haiti (1915),
Nicaragua (from 1912), Dominican Republic (1916),
Guatemala (1954), Chile (1973), and Panama (1989)
are among the many countries whose governments
have been modified by updates of American Capitalism
where The Monroe Doctrine is a political instrument
of uncertain long term political effect, beyond the world
expecting further lectures to be presented 
from the American Bully Pulpit of History.

Please left click here for 30 mins of audio which
investigates one of the over eighty USA interventions
in the name of what started as the Monroe Proclamation.        

The Appetite For Entertainment

AI, when applied to science, to reading X rays,
and other types of scans of the human body
is truly intelligent and reveals what humans
cannot divine without the help to see it.

But like every other computer based prosthesis,
when is applied to the appetite for entertainment,
in a world reprogramed for maximum patriarchy,
it multiplies the male appetite for the works of the flesh,
and other imaginary relationships, until what it feeds 
will run away with itself and take its followers with it.

Only when we take back our previous sense of self,
and reclaim a human sense of proportion, can we
better sustain what follows on from a limited intent.      

The Future

Could go in several directions,
and may even go into reverse,
but it can't go into more than
 one direction at once.

Only In America

The history of empire is the history of time,
The earliest empires invented calendars
that were pegged to the reign of the emperor
or the founding of the city state that becomes
the centre of empire. Egypt, Greece and Babylon
were exemplars of this, all three relied for growth
on enslaved labour which varied and could be benign
according to the skills the empire needed, on the day.

In all these empires slavery was a way
of organising large scale labour,
as much as creating social control.

Rome was last empire of the ancient world,
and into it Christianity was born and took root
in a way that was beyond rational explanation.
Rome later made churches the backbone of the state,
the place where citizens eventually paid their taxes.

Islam came after and became a faith built around empire,
built around externalising mass conflict management,
making their homegrown troublemakers trouble for their enemies.
None of these empires started with founding documents
of statehood, or constitutions that sought to define 'freedom'
or what freedom, or purpose, might be for, or against.

America was the empire that inherited both slavery
and the word 'freedom' from the English, to free itself
of England. Whilst keeping hold of a rampant, Capitalist,
model by which to conduct modern industrial slavery.
All whilst claiming to be Christian whilst being unaware
of how many of the earliest Christians were Roman slaves,
who found a balm in Christianity that made slavery endurable,
their faith unrecognised by their superstitious, grasping, masters. 

   

Restful Competition

English quirkiness has rarely found a more peaceable competitiveness
than with The Good Funeral Awards, an annual competition
run by The Good Funeral Guide, The Natural Death Centre 
and The Association of Green Funeral Directors. The winners
of the awards for their 2025 competition can be found here.

But the winner of the award for Gravedigger of the Year
has already found his moment in the national spotlight.
Please mark, read, and inwardly digest the news,
of who won this award, and admire the trees
that have replaced the memorial gravestones, here.

The trees celebrate life past, life present,
and life in the future...  

  

New Year, New War

And newer excuses for the three superpowers
for each to encourage each other to backslide
to the foreign office position of their choice
as they divide the world into spheres of influence
I recall afresh why the USA was first created.

In the 1770s the American colonies could see
The British East India Company eyeing them up
and decided, for all sorts of myths and false excuses
rebellion from British rule was the better option.

Now America is playing a part akin to the role
its old nemesis that made the colony-states stop
wanting to live under the old country's rules.

The plunderer has changed his face, but remains
the same corporate liar and thief, underneath
the new skin lives a renewed vigour for destruction.

Welcome To The New Optimism

The last eighty years have not been peaceful.
Where countries have declared 'peace',
it has been by masking how their military
and intelligence services have operated,
and making their armament industries
'for export' and 'for defensive use' only.

But with new technology, old alliances
weakened, and weaponry that could never
be purely defensive now setting the agenda
the world is turning to a new darkness,
that we now realise never went away.

So watch out for a new NATO where America
has no allies and share no values with anyone else.
And its near neighbours, Cuba and Mexico have
no safe distance from an enmity they can't control.
Ukraine and other states that border other empires
inclined over-reach themselves will seek out
a frame of mind more cautious, than enlightened.

With the world as we once knew it ending....   

Wealth In Want

Even the poor in our society
have six times more than it's sane to desire 

And the rich everywhere are always wanting
something for nothing, as if they deserve it.

When wanting less means less want,
how to make sure of our sense of sanity? 

This Is Not My New Year Resolution

But it it will happen to me one day,
in the meanwhile I can live and wait.

 

An Ordinary Afterlife

Hope comes to me,
from the belief that when I am long gone, 
there will be more of life to come after me
than there was when I was there to share in it.  

New Year Aims

To simplify what I have,
who I know, and what I know them for,
so that the next time the next word
or idea won't come to me in conversation
I can reassure myself that I am missing less.
Because time shrinks all things, anyway.

My First New Year Card

                  

Bonne année, Frohes Neues Jahr, Gelukkig nieuwjaar, Buon Anno, Feliz año nuevo, Gezuar vitin e ri, Kαλή χρονιά, Cреќна нова година.

 

The Unbelievable Life

In the 1970s, as I reached toward
what 'being a grown up' appeared to be,
and as my hopes of mature choice
kept retreating from me, one phrase 
that I found to convey how I felt
repeated itself ad nauseam,
and took on a life of it's own.

I wrote about 'having mixed feelings',
to spare the shame of my family.
until I almost believed it.

Adding the word 'mixed' to 'feelings'
meant to me that what I felt was complex,
and explainable. 'Mixed' gave me a pivot
away from how impossible it was
to explain to myself, then family and friends
that surrounded me who always denied
that anyone's life could be that awful. 

Decades later, through several therapists, 
I found the words it was previously
impossible to spit out, and they cleansed me.
The unbelievable life became not only credible
but disposable as well, with sympathetic company. 

Picture Set Of The Month - January 2026 - The Astronomical Drawings Of Étienne Trouvelot

Étienne Trouvelot (1827 – 1895) was a French
painter, astronomer and entomologist.

In his youth he lived in France, as an adult,
for political reasons, he lived in America.  

These water colour paintings are now remembered
as the peak of his creative life. 

 

The precision of them speaks of many hours
at the telescope, and slow resolve of memory
to recall the images seen afterward.

There are 14 of these images in total.
Please left click here for an image
 of the man himself and a link to all the images.