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.