Guantanamo Bay

Is not just still open, but fifteen men are captive there,
caught in the legal limbo that the US has set for them
one of them have been captive for nearly twenty five years.

The first category: Approved for release

Muieen Abd al-Sattar

Guled Hassan Dourad

Ishmael Ali Bakushmael

The second catgory: Not charged, not cleared

Abu Zubaydah (24 years in prison)

Abu Faraj al-Libi

Mohamed Rahim

The third catgory: Charged or Convicted in Military Commission

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Ramzi bin al-Shibh

Walid bin Attash

Mustapha al-Hawsawi

Amar al-Baluchi

Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri

Riduan Isamuddin 

Ali Hamza al-Bahlul

Abd al-hadi al-Iraqi

To comprehend how Guantamo Bay started,
and why it is still open, please left click here
to hear the first part of a three part podcast.   

From Democratic To Imperial Measure

One of many books that helped me mature
in the 1980s was 'Money, Sex, and Power',
by Richard Foster, a book about their opposites:
the choices that come from managing (relative) poverty,
chastity, and obedience to the powers that be,
which together give society and the individual
the widest choice for greatest nunber of people. 

For a long while it made a lot of sense to me.

Forty years on from what taught me more
how to make my way through the world,
I have seen this sage advice turned inside out.

Politics has gone from democratic to imperial,
the men who have the most have to have more
-to the point where no-one is allowed to count it.
Power is held more absolutely, money is controlled
by fewer and fewer corporations, the lies that sell sex
make it not worth taking at anything like face value. 

For those with the most, whatever they have
whether money, sex or power, enough is never enough.
Least of all when they combine into one big addiction
fueled by denial, broadcast across th4e world
as if such a depth of vice was actually a virtue.

The Biggest Rogue Is The One We Are Last To Recognise

The world is full of leaders
who when their enemies fail
blame the enemies for their failure,
as if the leader has either done nothing,
or had done nothing to cause the downfall
of another. Their leadership was omniscient
-proof of how perfect they always were. 

Such partisan presentations of leadership
and power are now so routine and protected
from all media enquiry about what makes
the leadership tick, they make being a sceptic
a necessary sign for showing intelligence.

There the allies of the surviving enemies
prove stronger when they act together,
in league with each other, against the leader
who cannot recognise how rogue he's become.   

Change And Choice With Jeanette Winterson

'Don't you ever think of going back?' Silly question.
There are threads that help you find your way back,
and there are threads that intend to bring you back.

Mind turns to the pull, it's hard to pull away.
I'm always thinking of going back.
When Lot's wife looked over her shoulder, she turned into a pillar of salt.
Pillars hold things up, and salt keeps things clean,
but it's a poor exchange for losing your self.

People do go back, but they don't survive,
because two realities are claiming them
at the same time. Such things are too much. 

You can salt your heart, or kill your heart,
or you can choose between two realities.
There is much pain here.

Some people think you can have your cake and eat it.
The cake goes mouldy and they choke on what's left.
Going back after a long time will make you mad,
because the people you left behind do not like
to think of you changed, will treat you as they always did,
accuse you of being indifferent, when you are only different.”

Keeping House Of Commons Rules

One of the motives for owning property
for people who rent and find they dislike it,
is what they dislike is not choosing who rents
the space alongside them. They think....
'When I buy where I live then I will keep
my neighbours at a distance that suits me.',
as if money by itself could cover for a will
that lacks the power to change how we live.
But willpower gets a person only so far
in choosing who they keep a distance from
and the distance at which to keep them.

Nowadays I find the people I need to keep
my distance from, and set it firm, are family.
I don't own property like they do, I knew how much 
they were disappointed with how they made me,
where all that was left was cover up how it happened.

That distance I now keep from my family
is much farther than the physical distance
between the front benches in House of Commons
-two swords distance. 

The distance I now keep from family
is more like distance between the values
each side of The House of Commons keeps
-universes, multiverses, farther apart.   

Modern Living

is all style and no life, an art form
that is accessorised by its makers
-who change the name of the product 
to sell it, before the public fully grasp
what the change is about, the manufacrtured life,
and change the names again to stay ahead
of their manufactrured competitors...

Caught In The Echo

Infinite scroll is nothing new,
though presently Youtube
are its greatest champions.

Commercial television first got there
sixty years ago. I remember my dad
being so impressed by the schedules
that he refused to let the set turned off,
or even acccept a change of channel.
Whatever was on when he was home
was right by him, even the adverts.

He screened us and reality out of his life
in the house, until he could get to the pub.
There his chosen family were the people he drank with.

I don't know how I survived those times,
particularly when the entertainment
was some alpha male being so alpha,
that nothing else around him mattered.

That was when the content of the screen
taught me what 'rhetorical' meant. Part of me
still feels caught in the echo of such self importance.   

Nature Special: The Marvelous Spatuletail

The Marvelous Spatuletail (Loddigesia mirabilis) is an endangered hummingbird endemic to northern Peru. It is famous for the male's spectacular tail feathers, featuring two long, wire-like feathers with large, iridescent "spatules", (discs) at the end. They are used in elaborate courtship displays. Males have a blue crown, turquoise throat, and a black stripe down their white chest, while females are less colourful. And have shorter tails with smaller spatules. They inhabit cloud forest edges and scrublands, feeding on nectar from specific flowers, and are a major draw for birdwatchers, with conservation efforts focused on protecting their habitat. Photograph taken by Carlos Altamirano.

 

In The Blink Of An Eye

 Another eye was taken,
the better for the half sighted
to more dimly recognise each other.

The Less Eventful Life

I no longer wish time to go faster or slower
than it is presently does, second by second,
calibrated more by my choice of talk radio
than anything else. I am now more setttled
into the lack of events that extends my days
than I was in a previous  life.

I am grateful for how I have endured
the old, undealt with, losses and wounds
that now slow me down, to live like this.

I would not seek for life to go any faster.

The Streets Of Central Belfast

Seem curioiusly non-descript nowadays,
about a fifth full with the public, at most,
most of them looking for somewhere
worth going to, that they can't see there.

Add to that the street preachers filling the air
with noise about The Bible being pounded,
and I wonder what they are all doing there,
nobody adressing anyone else in particular. 

Are they all there to enjoy being ignored?
Maybe the preachers would attract more attention 
if they started preaching Hell and Vengeance
to all around, seeking to offend their listeners ears.

We know what happens with such provocations
-the public will tell the preacher in terms
he understands that he is being cheap
with his language and he should confine
such sermons to condemning members
of his own church who have signed up for the abuse.     

The Pretender No More

For anyone who lives long enough
one of the more positive effects of ageing
is that we rememeber what we grew up through,
better than people younger than us can realise,
and more than that memory is dynamic,
not static, the details that come back to us
change in line with our age, as we remember.

One of the recent memories that returned to me,
age adjusted, is Margaret Thatcher declaring
through 1988 legislation that a gay relationship
is 'a pretend family relationship', a declaration
that at the time shocked gay men and lesbians
as they saw those younger than them trapped
by regulations about family they would not choose.

This legislation was eventually reversed in 2003.
But what comes back to me is how the phrase 
'pretend family relatiohship' has changed.
Pretend family relationships were actually
universal in the blessed Margaret's day.
Any child who had been raised in a care home
lived with this pretense, as did adopted children,
in other state arranged pretend family relationships.

After having been there, and done that,
and found that I did not want that T shirt
of state arranged pretend family relationships
I chose a relationship my pretend family
dissaproved of, thus exposing the pretense
I had lived with for thirtry years, though
it would take me the same length of time again
for me to realise how pretend family had been.

Margaret Thatcher was right, children should be
allowed better than pretend family relatioships
which hid in plain sight all along.-In particular
better thanthe self serving heterosexual monoculture
who would claim that they are all of human history.  

Rare Birds

Do cuckoos know they are cuckoos,
more than other bird species know themselves?
Even as cuckoos lay their eggs in other birds nests?

Of course not! Not that scientists have to know
all the mechanisms by which the cuckoo fools
the bird of a different breed, in whose nest
the cuckoo lays its own, rather larger, egg.

So it is for humans who are born to parents
who when their child becomes an adult
finds the idea of being a parent repugnant,
such that should they ever become parents,
their child may be safer removed from them.

Whilst in their own terms many non-parents
have different energies and skills, and are fine
as participants in their own communities,
they should be treasured, like rare birds:
whilst they are relieved of the pressure
to join the common herd of parenthood.     

The Trouble With Modern Absurdity

Is that those who embrace it,
to make themselves well known
and become exemplars of it,
are the last, and least willing,
to recognise how others see them,  
for what they have become.

Royalty Ancient And Modern

In medievil times, and long after,
absolute rulers and their favourites
used to rule through incurring debts
they would delay paying off, until close
to their death-tying their successors
to limits the departing leader has set.

Nowadays absolute rulers rule through
breaking as many rules as the nations
they lead have ever set up. For an encore
-and to prove their popularity-they refuse
to observe any ruling from even the highest courts
that the land have set, believing themselves
and their followers to be so exceptional
as to be above law. They see it as their duty
to defile regulations they make their enemies follow.

Common Sense Disbelief

That gives nonsense short shrift
with affirmative humour
is an understanding of life
that is in sorely short supply.

Who Was August West?

 As made famous in the 1971 Grateful Dead song 'Wharf Rat'?

Augustus West (1814 - 1887) was a real life runaway slave who in 1837 arrived in the area of Greenfield are of Fayette, County Ohio. With local farmer Alexander Beatty, West co-authored a story that has become a part of local history, and later part of the history of the underground railway, which undermined slavery from inside the USA. The story they co-authered was that to raise money for West to purchase his own land, West and Beatty devised a scheme to take West back south, sell West back into slavery, and then Beatty would help West escape. The pair would split the profits. The laws that regulated the slave markets were lax enough for them to run this scam on Southern slave owners a minimum of three recorded times before deciding not to repeat the scam any further. Their story became the foundation for a 1971 alternaive Hollywood cowboy film, 'The Skin Game', starring James Gardner and Louis Gossett, Jr.

West used his share of the profits to purchase land near the intersection of Bonner and Barrett Roads, in Fayette County, in the state of Ohio. Some distance from the road West built a big house, The dirt road leading up to his front door became known as Abolition Lane.

In the years that followed, at least twelve cabins were constructed on West's land. They became temporary residences for other runaway slaves who needed a place to live and work as they stole their way further north, to a sustainable freedom away from them and their decendents being the property of slave owners.

But in the Garcia/Hunter song 'Wharf Rat' what Augustus West could do for others, be a staging post for their route away from slavery into liberty, August West could not do for himself. He became dependent on the drink. Enter real life Methodist minister Purley Baker who was the head of the Anti-Saloon League, a temperance organization based in the U.S.A. until shortly before his death in 1924, aged 65. Illegal bars were sometimes named 'Purley Baker's', to give alcohol consumption a double false identity.

Who knew that in the 1971 song lyic that Purley Baker's was both the underground name for a bar, and name of the dry house where drinkers could feel they were a safe distance from the temptations of the alcohol, that they needed to avoid?

In the lyric August West expresses this confusion so neatly most listeners would not notice how well their ambivalence towards the lyriccould be made part of the scene that the song describes. From the underground railways that helped slaves escape to double identity of a Purley Baker's, the double identity of seeking to do good unseen, and unintentionally being exposed to disguised temptation has never been bettered.

Amongst followers of The Grateful Dead, Deadheads, a fanbase who were perhaps more in danger of falling victim of their addictions than fans of more mainstream music, there is a 12 step support group called 'Wharf Rats', who exist to be ready to help whoever needs the assistance and the time to clean up/dry out, and restart life 'clean from addiction', though temptation will remain.

The Less Attractive Face Of Traddition

could not look less welcoming than in recent updates
by The Taliban in  Afghan marriage laws, that in the process
give men, and the groom's family, even more power
over who they can choose to marry than they had before.
And give women even less choice when they are chosen
 in arranged marraiges than they have had in all previous
Taliban-legislated marriage rules, designed to make women
invisible in an already severly imbabanced male-led society.
 

 

The Restless Reader

When did you last buy a newspaper? 
Yes, buy, rather than read, a newspaper?

Newsprint, and it's corollary advertising,
are now much more consumed online,
than they are in physical print. On the screen
the proprietors of print can make what they own
sing and dance in front of readers, making it harder
for readers to focus on what is being said.
Harder to remember what was written after,

particularly the screen automatically scrolls
to the next item, all too soon immediately after. 

If you are going to be a restless reader
give your eyes the breaks they need
and take a rest from all the media filler
the better to remember what you have read after.

The Old Quandary

is what to think and say
when cynicism wins the day,
and reality outruns you
as people you once admired 
show the way forward
in ways that you could not imagine .......   

A Former Ghost Writes

In former times I half-knew it, when I went to places
where conversation did not happen, no words described
what I, and others who were present, were there to find. 
My itch was observed, and reduced in the sharing of it.
Silently, for the duration of each frequent short visit. 

The place I went to quietly passed itself off
as a place of temporary mutuality
of a type I, otherwise, could not find. 

Even as I knew there were names for where I went
and what I did there, the blanket of silence fell heavy
on those I lived with who bade the words not be spoken.
Which was why I had the itch that made me seek such respite.
The life I led using the apporved of unhelpful language
could be survived but would not cure me of my itch,
where the lack of words made me seek temporary relief,
and left me seeking temporary relief seemingly forever.

After over a decade in this silence, and a few years
away from family, I started writing to myself - to ask
where the blanket of silence began, tracking it back
near and nearer to where it started, along with how
different absences of words meant different things.

From a place of unconscious isolation
I wrote about my then present situation
to find, for seemngly the first time,
a wider conscious sense of choice.

What I did then is now called Journaling
When I was writing I called it scribbling.
Over eighteen intense months the weight
of the blanket of silence slowly lifted from me, 
revealing the language of taboo underneath
most of  which began with a new reading of my family.

Was I any less of a ghost at the end? Sort of.
I was not the ghost my family wanted me to be.

The old itch pressed far less,
such that I felt nearly no need
for the silent/secretive respite
I had needed in the past.

But I did not feel complete as a person
in average ordinary, inclusive, conversations.
I was also slow to grasp that 'restored' as I was
there was no compensation for where the silence,
and the years of seeking relief from the itch, had left me.

The best I can say is that I have a renewed respect
for those whose sense of care for others extends
to mental health and personal development matters,
shared in taboo-free vernacular terms: a wide field
of care that I now see as being sorely neglected. 

Picture Set Of The Month - July - The Paintings Of Gerard Dillon

'The Table in The Blue Room' an early painting
by Irish painter Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971).
The seated man is most likely a self portrait.   

'Tory Island' as painted in 1947 by Irish painter
Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971) from a sketch made
on holiday with his friend, fellow artist Daniel O'Niell.

  

'The Fisherman's Cottage' as painted in 1951
by Irish painter Gerard Dillon (1916 - 1971)
when Conamarra was a thriving place. 

'The Little Green Fields' as painted in 1945
by Irish painter Gerard Dillon (q1916 - 1971)

At The International Conference

for the unecessary experts
for how the next world war
would be run, the argument
was a simple enough to engage with:
'How vital are we going to be in this war
for the future when the wealth of the few
being only for the few depends so much on us playing our part?'

The consensus was with the chair
when the proposition was put to a vote:
'We must be central to this new war,
our future wealth depends upon it,
And the longer the war can prolonged
the more we frame the future that follows after.

Gentlemen here's to our future uselessness.'.

Moon Of The Month - June - Strawberry Moon

The moon that is named after the fruit that is at
its most ripe, naturally, when the moon is full.
It is also the first full moon of the summer 
in the northern hemisphere, it will hang lower
in the sky than any other moon, and it will be
the second smallest full moon this year. 

 

This Blog Is Taking A Break - Enjoy The Intermission Entertainment

 

People Are Strange

In what they will excuse and what they will abhor
in their leaders-who to lead have to learn to ignore
their own weaknesses. Particularly when they know
how others will seek to draw attention to them.

In these technologically advanced times the skill set
for renewed military leaderhip is increasingly select,
transfering more rarely from one generation to the next
as the weaponry behind it becomes ever more complex,
whilst the morality of world leaders becomes opacity.

Between the jargon of the military hardware
and the morality of our war leaders,
it is right to be confused. That is when
to remember the history lesson that holds:
a people will forgive any effective military
leaders for their amorality in the civil life
of their country as long they seem to be
achieving the country's military aims.

Which is why modern wars don't end,
instead the modern media presents
the latest progress in ongoing wars
and failed negotiations for peace
as partial victories for self renewing propaganda.....  

Anti-Social Media

The more I see the personal agenda
of the new political class brought about
by the new parties in multi-party politics,
the more I notice that the new leaders
grift to raise funds for their lifestyles
via their higher social media profiles
the more the wealth they create comes
at the price of the social inclusivity
they deride for presenting as too much
like 'community', and neighbourliness.
Whist they make more money from
boxing people in with false identities.

Me? I blame the social media.....

Between Dreams And Reality

 'Over time you have to know who you are, who you think you are, who your neighbors think you are. [And know] what you are, in reality?

You must not pass into a dream, but accept your limitations and then express them in your life, in your behavior, your identity.

You must talk the truth about yourself.

Otherwise, life is just a waste of time, isn’t it?” ~ Quentin Crisp

I Am Pleased That Spelling Standards Have Been Maintained

Even as so many other marks of civilisation
and empathy towards others have fallen
by the wayside on the decades since
Margaret Thatcher left office.

 

No Bids

What if the US Government held an auction
for oil rights on land it historically held in trust? 

But no bids were entered?

Because, it is suspected, that extracting
the energy and delivering it to customers
in cities far away would cost companies more
then the present oil market says the energy is worth?

Native Alaskan communities like the Tyonek,
Dena'ina, the Suqpaig(Alutiq) and the Seldovia
who make up the diaspora of the 400,000 folk,
who live off the land, and along the coast,
of the Cook Inlet might well be glad
of the land being left intact at present.

But what will happen when the first bid is accepted....

Not Since.....

   ....the days of the slave trade being legal,
and more profitable than the dreams of Croesus
has so much recent American wealth,
and once-prized scientific resources,
been laid waste to so casually by so few,
and all to such devastating world effect.

The Video Game For One

The story goes that in 1925 Sigmund Freud, sent his book
'The Interpreation of Dreams' to America to be translated
from German to English by his nephew, Edward Bernays.
Whilst he was translating it, Bernays had his Eureka! Idea.

As he rewrote what his uncle had sent from German
into American Englsih, to explain how the dreams
of individuals could be coded, and commonly understood,
so an individual's dreams were seen as less than unique.
Bernays thought about how to recode mass communications,  
to make people live in dream-like states, beyond their means,
acting on signals only he controlled, that they misunderstood.    

The century that followed has been led by consumption levels
more conspicuous than could be dreamed by wealthy America,
for whom recrational drugs used to be part of the journey.
And it has been quite a journey, led by more changes
in technology than anyone could dare to imagine.

From the silent films of the 1920s thru the earliest television,
to the modern day mushy fantasies common to AI animation
is quite some set of changes in presentation for anyone to process. 

Now America has a president, who when he is beset
by unwelcome economic realities makes them go away,
through a media only he controls, thru which the public
can find the full measure of how much he is the ultimate
in being a controlling fantasist. The images he puts there 
exist to obliterate reality, as if American life is a video game
that he sets the rules for, where he is the only player.

Where we can read the results, in our news feeds.

'Remember Your Dreams'

the sign above my head said,
where by my bed I was also left
the means of writing them down,
before the day's thoughts erased them.

Music filled so many of those dreams,
most of it I'd shared with friends but some
fresh from my head, tunes I'd heard nowhere else.
Other times what came back was news reports
I'd read, on line or in the papers, when they were
the main way for me to learn about the world.

The best dreams would feature my truest lost love,
my one time dog Oscar, who in the short years 
I and my buddy cared for him we were the happiest 
three people could imagine being together. 
We made each other complete and content.

Now my days seem less engaged,
in a daze I do what must be done,
amiably but with less exitement. 

In This Age Of Overstatement

Where does truth have to go,
to be found, away from the shadows
of exaggeration, open evasion, cliches
that so easily block listeners ears,
and the wholely centralised media ownership
where the buck used to stop has disappeared?

I don't know, but seeking that place
starts with believing the place exists,
both in my times and in other peoples,
along with accepting, as we have to,
all days of wading through all that is not
the place seek, and slowly letting it pass,
leaving our search for rest in acceptance
intact. Whilst we seek the same for others.

The Poor Man's Work Ethic

When I was young the values I lived out
were the poor mans' work ethic of working hard 
to stay poor, and when work failed completely
doing government paid for displacement activities,
including further education, to remain active.
Whilst making my acquired cheapness work for me.

There the main purpose of my activities
was to keep me reaching towards the horisons
I could see, that retreated, the nearer I got to them.

I found my way out of this grown up version
of smothercare when I going nowhere slowly
by my being accepted by a world with no family
behind me, where my main experience of work
was the catch 22 logic of not getting jobs
from a market that was set to refuse me.

Nowadays I don't scrabble after money with any effort.
I live within my means and my greatest sense of reward
comes from having survived long term unemployment,
and the poor man's work ethic, with my mind intact.

Film Of The Day - 'My Dog Tulip' (2009)

 

This fine feature length animation is a film you can sink into, as I did when I read the book long enugh ago to be unable to say now when I read it. If you like dogs, and include in your likes unruly dogs, then enjoy with the certain charm this film presents, as man and dog find companionship in each other, against the odds, when both are rejects from normal society.

And please excuse the subtitles being in a language you don't speak, that is a small price to pay for having the original, English speech based, soundtrack......  

The Power Of A Handshake

Of all the devils whose hand, if I were offered it,
I would offer them mine to shake I don't know which
I would trust most. Which I might wash my hands clean of,
after, and whose hand I would set in a queue to make wait
for some distant ocasion where nothing rode on shaking it.

But my discernment tells me that he could present
himself as being of any nationality, any empire,
and could quote any government from world history
from the past to the present, that matched his bona-fides
with his verisimisitilude. Therein lies the problem.

When lies are made to seem so beleivable, and our media
buy into the pride of those who insist on being believed
-no fact checking allowed-then what can the public do?

They have to choose a side, and choose a media
in which their choice includes explanations, aplologies,
and asides that explain when their media will fall in error.
But apologies will be made promptly, to reset where truth rests,
so that same point can be found again later.

I will shake the hand of whoever apologises
in good time, and changes their stance,
after, longterm, we have had enough chance
for opinions to differ with honour. 

Know Yourself Whilst You Can

  This cartoon is from the mid-1970s and is either a tame satire on the ease of corner shop shopping out-of-daytime-business-hours where 'instant coffee' etc seemed new, a satire on the title of the John Lennon song 'Instant Karma', or a satire on the slow collapse of the values and cogency of the then Labour government. Any values that you had to 'just add water' to could not taste of much in the longer term. 

But I put this cartoon here because with the internet we have, fifty years since it made cynical young readers laugh, because in the 2020s our media is caught up in the midst of its own ever shifting fever dreams, where it focuses on one idea then another so fast that readers can't keep up with what is presently promoted as the next trend/the next leader, as the latest dream is paid for by advertisers seeking to sell the latest wares as if they were created - instantly! 

There is a better life to be had by knowing your own mind and knowing where, and what, it should not be led to accept. No product or idea is instant, particularly when we trace how it was developed. Yes, information is relative, and the relativity that informs it tells me that space/time gives us a choice of which space/time from the past to recognise. But space/time cannot be sure of the future: do your best to live in the present, as near as you are able.      

The Ignorance Economy

Is as popular as it possible to be,
just ask advertisers selling products
that are as familiar to consumers
as to make advertising rhetorical,
then view the progress of the gaslighting industry
as it eats through the media - where interviewers
on old media lob softball questions at leaders
who need to hide how old and tired they are,
along with their wealth and where it comes from,
as they seek to sideline all the questions
about popular on-line fraud, 'media influencers', 
cronyisn, spreaders of invisible crypto currencies, 
and popular white collar criminality that the public
endure as new gov't policy becomes, effectively, inaction.

How far does each of us have to go
to reach the bottom of this rabbit hole,
before we getting lost in our search?

Before we give up seeking
what we once thought, and reverse
our journey to where our bearings
were firmer, and we knew where we were?

How else are we to set a safe distance from the ignorance economy?

Picture Set Of The Month - June - Landscapes By Stanley Soencer

'Landscape, Gloucestershire', painted in 1940
by Englsih Sir Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959).

'Beacon Hill near Burghclere' painted in 1927
as painted by English painter Sir Stanley Spencer
(1891 - 1959).

"Panorama, Wangford Marsh near Southwold, Suffolk"
by English painter Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959).

'The Cottages at Burghclere' painted between 1927
and 1930 by Stanley Spencer (1891 - 1959).

 

Moon Of The Month (2) - The Blue Moon

Is the moon that gives it's name to a lot of human activity,
films, songs, the names humans give to brands of beer,
and much more besides. Last but not least this moon
givies its name to that favourite human activity,
repetition. When within this calendar month,
it is the second time a full moon appears. 

 

How Did Hope Become Hubris?

The new First World hyper-Capitalism
has been confirmed as a form of gambling,
built on long-suspected insider trading,
markets rigged for the benfit of the 1%:
who's wealth is greater than the banks,
and who's power is greater than the courts
in which they fight each other.

In courts the main point of the wealth
being fought over is the dispay of entitlement
which the rich want the poor to see as 'entertainment'.
where oaths mean little to lawyers who in court
will argue that black is white and vice versa,
whilst rich rub the noses of the poor in the debts
they havce to run up to watch the spectacle.

The wealth of the 1% is above all accurate examination.

Commentators fight shy of reversing the equation,
and suggesting that gambling is Capitalism run amok. 

It is easy to see why. Present day Capitalism
bets on future technologies controlled by the few,
particularly through AI, where before the tech
have been tested as 'safe for the public to adopt',
the few use it to maximum conrol and profit
making government pay for with public money
that is more than the riches Croesus* ever dreamed of.

Meanwhile the public get used to not trusting
their own senses whilst being used as human loss leaders
to work out how best test to sustain the use such technology.

*The legend of Croesus (595 - 546 BC) king of Lydia, was that his wealth
was beyond countng. Croesus was the first ruler in the world to mint gold and silver coins.

  

'Be Yourself Everyone Else Is Taken'

Was a fine aphorism, and a bold expression
of the idea of individuality, in Oscar Wilde's times.
Not that anyone has yet found the quote in his writings.
And as Oscar proved, being yourself could lead
to folly and loss of liberty, depending on the company.

But nowadays being yourself online requires security
that is double, triple, lock and with that a knowledge
of how your security works where you have to believe
your expertise is superior to that of other people,
for you to feel secure enough for you to be happy
in seeking the online life of your choice.

Because, to be clear about this, there is a trade
for material gain in stolen online identities,
where the value of the identity stolen is personal,
but the value of the contraband that can be extracted
through the identity being misused, in this modern,
highly value brand aware society is a lot more
than we can confidently ask. Where the brand
that has the highest value is going to be the trashiest,
and the money it sells at has to be seen to be disbelieved.

More thieves, blackmailers,
and other criminal ne'r do wells
find their vocations online,
than anywhere else in the world. 

It is a good job nobody lives there,
though we may admire how those
with the tightest security make it
the right place to leave the remains
of themselves, for others to find.

Miseducation, Miseducation, Miseducation.....

And he would have been vomiting up all
the homophobia, the racisn and both combined,
along with all the short term coping mechanisms
he ever had to rely upon to keep on writing
until he could stand, talk and trust that he knew
his listener believed him and took him at face value.

 

The Circle Of Life

We don't how circular a life can be made to be,
through habit and vice, as we set out to live it.

But what we can kmow is that when we make
other people's lives even more circular than our own,
even more repetitive they need to be,
they are likely to inflict the same to us, unawares.

We find out, too late, we are going round
in smaller circles than we expected to be
and to break out of circle is doable,
but involves changes we can't repeat. 

Picture Of The Day - The Grey Headed Flying Fox Bat

This is a Grey-headed Flying Fox Bat (Pteropuscpoiocephalus)

                   which is the largest species of bat native to Australia.

               This image shows the bat with her pup clining to her belly.

Never Mind The Quality Feel The Advertising

So far, I have found no interest
in the widely distributed wares
of the many infomedia platforms 
that stream images everywhere
that are supported by adverts
for companies I have never heard of.
Where I wonder why they pay so much
when with the advert they have no point
of contact with so many who are advertised to.

What good reason do they have to be that ubuitious
whilst being otherwise so competely anonymous?

What I do understand is that the adverts exist
to make the programmes seem less like moving wallpaper.  
 

Were You Thinking Of Dropping Out?

It can still be done. Indeed, it is
probably easier in some places
in the world now than it used to be,
though in the midst of diversity
it is harder to be clearer
about what it is sustainable to drop put from.

The approved way of dropping out
used to be getting drunk and forming part
of your local alcohol culture, particularly
polular among maried men who resisted
the full companionship of marriaage.

The disapproved of way to drop out
from the way everyday time was used
- getting money via a job in a factory- 
used to be recreational drugs. But now
both work and drugs have changed,
beyond all recognition. For some dealers,
drugs are both work and pleasure,
and make htem watchful of authority.

The drugs used to be grown naturally, cannabis
and magic mushrooms were the primorose path
to the easier life, supporting the back economy,
where time and profit run on different lines,
and many of the drugs are now synthetic.

The natural drugs were best taken in times
set aside for allowing the changed awareness,
the giggles and the munchies etc that follow
when life seems to be absurdly happily
and nobody at the time know quite why. 

Nowadays the demarcation of a time to drop out
to drop out for a shirt while is more diffficult,
work and leasure intersect in ways that they
never used to. With the 24/7 city-based lives
and our continuous partial attention span,
the drop out life is just not what it used to be.....

Waiting For The World To Resolve Itself

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

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

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

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

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

The Dangerous Gods Act

has never been part of international law.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Passsing The Time

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

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

The Slow Decay Of Democracy

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

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

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

Between Despair And Insanity.

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

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

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

The Scale Of My Ambitions

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What did not kill me made me stranger.

Hubris Heights

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

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

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

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

Signs Of Greater Age (45)

1-Getting a sense of Deja-vu
when looking through the books
in charity and second hand shops
because the best titles you find
are books you read when younger,
and bought at a higher price, prior
to seeing them for less elswhere
not thinking the book might appear
in places you did not expect them to.

2-Still having heroes when you are older
but the older you get the more your heroes
who are alive, and older than yourself
are harder to find, and the most sustainable
heroes exist outside of time-in myth and history. 

3-Unthinkingly thanking Alexa
and those like her after they have done
something you asked them to do:
forgetting that 'she' does not have a gender,
is not human, and grattitude is wasted on her.
But even misplaced grattitude lifts you up
when it helps you forgive mistakes better.      

Formula For The Future

for humans will soon be fore-shortened
as global warming + AI = mass extinction
followed by mass unemployment,
world poverty, and the end of human reason.

Fight Or Flight

is a phrase that needs no explanation in any society
where bullying and being bullied are recognised
as unattractive behaviour that ought to be stopped,
when stopping it is harder than it seems.
The gain the bully gets through his hold
over the situation is hard to dismamtle.

Less recognised where agression is normalised
is one consequence of being bullied: being frozen,
from the bullying that goes on, unrecognised,
unti it all ends where the thought is....
'This behaviour does not have any consequences'.

Frozen agreements look like normal agreements,
informed by consent, but agreements that come
from a lack of presonal space,or choice, are in fact
frozen lives acted out when whoever cares for the result
cares enough that appearances hide what they are not presented as. 

Policeman Quits Job: Shock Headline

When I was seven I asked my dad
at the dinner table, the only time
he was there to be asked anything, 
a sensible adult 'real life' question.

His reply stunned me to an awkward silence.

I asked my dad about how to deal
with bullies [in primary school].
His reply to me was brief, simple,
and indegestible: 'Hit them first'.

I could not process what he said.
I'd seen him angrily throttle my mother
last Christmas, not that I was meant
to have seen that. It all happened
too fast to move me to where I
might not have watched it happen.

I was too young to know how Christmas
was oversold, or how the expectations it raised
created a discontent that could not be quenched, 
once ingited, much less that dad was an alcoholic.

The argument between them blew up,
without warning, right in frront of me.
Following dad's logic I could not see
how he saw my mother as the bully
who he had to hit before she hit him.

She made his meals, washed his clothes,
looked  after his money, and saved him
from a lot of the duties of being a parent. 

How was I meant to process this violence
between adults, when reparations were so private? 
How was I to follow his advice in school,
where the logic behind rules was so much
more complicated than I could explain to myself? 

Fast forward over fifty years, and ordinary Americans
scratch their heads, much the way I once did,
to share their incomprehension at the new
'hit then first, partially explain later' foriegn policy,
where change is heaped on change, until there are
too many wars in the world to explain their origins.

And the former world policeman
has changed sides and quit his job,
signaling he wants to join in with the enmity.    

The Fog Of Post War Rationing

Post war rationing after WW2 ended in 1954,
but a new rationale was ushered in after that:
men were heroes because they 'won the war',
where children were taught to not ask
why their dads were so often absent,
and their mothers were firmly tied to the kitchen,
and could not work, even though, previously,
when single, they had been required to work
in munitions factories and do the jobs for half the pay
that men had done before those better paid men
were trained by the government for life on the war front.

Being a bully was what reinforced
the fog of post WW2 rationing best,
not just in the 1960s, but for many decades after. 

Nobody bullied other people better
back then, and lied about it to themselves
to those around them, than the alpha male
heads of households who measured out
their sense of entitlement in the units of alcohol
they consumed with their equals in the pub,
each night, where with the alcohol induced psychosis
and depressions they doled out on their family,
the family submitted to the head who 'keep order'. 

Everyone could see how those
who the male heads of households froze,
removed all fight and flight from, but....
nobody could not put into words
how the freezing worked, the language
that put the controlling male in charge
was frozen, along with the family.

The result was labelled 'acceptance'.

Anyone who defrosts themselves much later
through sober, mature, and co-equal company
can wonder at who they might have been
and where they might have gone in the world 
had their parenting been more actively helpful.

From The Energy Of Slaves To The Latest Energy War

If in it's first phase, American wealth
was built on the energy of black African slaves,
which like industrial slavery across the world
had to be euphemised after it was ended,
to dignify a history that were it honestly told,
and accounted for fully, quoting the accountant's ledgers
it would be a self perpetuating cause for eternal shame.

The accounts of the discovery of coal, morse telegraphy,
and railways, though the American civil wars,
was the biggest demonstration of their uses
these three major new discoveries could be put to.

Where civil wars led, American corporations
led later where the imitation of life through peace,
but even more for indiviual profit, resided ever after.

Fracking for oil had barely been discovered
in America, so the civil war was the last war
where the control of oil was not
what the war fought over. That said....

The precedent of oil being the reason for the war,
the control of the energy the world  relied on,
had been set by arguments that justifying slavery
being at the core of why America went to civil war,
and the reason behind the Jim Crow laws after.

Fast forward umpteen wars over oil later,
and whilst oil is still the root cause
behind every global conflict in the world,
the world is now divided by digital conflicts.

There data is the new energy and and the more
data individuals put on line for the Tech Bros
to own, the more like the economic systems
of ownership that that once made slavery
the acme of Hellish levels of inequality 
the use of the internet is returning us to.

When we don't own what we write,
we are free to write what we want,
from '***k you' to 'I'm glad we agree',
but getting cotrol of the medium
you write it on has to be the aim.   

Anything else is being dishonest
about how little you/we all own
when we don't own our language.

Citizens of totalitarian countries
and empires already know this
and find it amost existentialist
to find how behind every fascade
and screen of their county's internet
it leads them back to their government,
from which they can never exit.  

Reasons For Disbelieving A.I. Pt 3

This advert on an electronic billboard in Bristol
Airport compounds everything about A.I. I distrust.
It is glossy and slick, it is for a service where the need
is less than the advertisers think, and the male minds
behind it have not thought further than female=cheaap
and practically infinite. When in the real world
 real women want men, want everyone to be real.
 Not fantasists mislead by the doom loops they create
       with technology they don't know they don't have control of.     

 

Money May Talk

And find an easy audience
for what it has to say, 
when it may well talk.

But it does not listen.

Is that why humans
so readily follow
where money goes:
to find the currency
of intentionally avoiding
listening to themselves?  

In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism

It is not the done thing to look too closely
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.

To modern minds those pagan gods,
with their complicated families lines
and love lives and erratic behaviour
have a lot to hide, seemed grotesque,
and lived lives as they were living out
some absurd revenge-driven soap opera.

But those old gods were not created out of nothing,
and were not created to merely amuse their followers.
The old gods were more than figures from history
where history was a hall of mirrors that was so ancient
and distorted we can't see from it what humans believed
about each other for how the gods were depicted as being.

There was an economic playbook that polytheism came with.

Statues and altars require skilled workmen to create them,
people who claim to prophesy the future require being paid.
Belief systems have to be integrated with economic systems,
and such integration required a playbook, to express in theatrical terms
the currency of belief. We ignore this playbook at our peril.

For when some modern demagogue rediscovers this playbook,
and reshapes how political power and modern finance works
according to it, the time for being reminded of the past will be gone:
we will be living it, barely recognising the we are the echo
of how it once worked. The near future of reliving the past
will be closer to us, and more part of how we live, than we thought it was.

Ars Longa Est, Vita Brevis Est

Cave art from caves in Spain.

Where we can't know when or how
the images became depicted on the cave walls

Or even the species that created them.

What we can guess is that the images they left were
what they might have dreamt about.

 If only our dreams could be made that simple
-then the future of the panet might be more assured.....