Sunday, 31 May 2026
Saturday, 30 May 2026
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.
Friday, 29 May 2026
'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.
Thursday, 28 May 2026
Miseducation, Miseducation, Miseducation.....
Wednesday, 27 May 2026
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.
Tuesday, 26 May 2026
Picture Of The Day - The Grey Headed Flying Fox Bat
Monday, 25 May 2026
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.
Sunday, 24 May 2026
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.....
Saturday, 23 May 2026
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.
Friday, 22 May 2026
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.
Thursday, 21 May 2026
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.
Wednesday, 20 May 2026
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.
Tuesday, 19 May 2026
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.
Monday, 18 May 2026
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.
Sunday, 17 May 2026
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.
Saturday, 16 May 2026
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.
Friday, 15 May 2026
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.
Thursday, 14 May 2026
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.
Wednesday, 13 May 2026
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.
Tuesday, 12 May 2026
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.
Monday, 11 May 2026
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.
Sunday, 10 May 2026
Reasons For Disbelieving A.I. Pt 3
Saturday, 9 May 2026
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?
Friday, 8 May 2026
In These Days Of Post Modern Atheism
at what Romans, Greeks, and Egytpians
might have believed, or the processes
by which those beliefs were made
to seem entirely natural and logical.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Thursday, 7 May 2026
Ars Longa Est, Vita Brevis Est
Wednesday, 6 May 2026
Dante's Guide To The Internet
Tuesday, 5 May 2026
The Misleader Of The Free World
and his friends, the tech billionaires,
may own nearly everything a billionaire
could think to want. But what this new
hyper-weathy generation do not have
is the what Roman Generals and Emperors
knew was very necessary: their persomal auriga,
the servant who was trusted to follow
the leaders as they were cheered on
by the crowds to whisper in their ears
phrases like 'Remember you are not a god',
'Look behind you remember you are a man',
You are not Jupiter*', 'Fame is fleeting'
and finally 'Momento mori', to remind
the great to limit how they were worshiped
by the masses from making them delusional.
*Jupiter was the Supreme Roman deity
for the sky, light, and for thunder.
He oversaw the laws, and social order.
He protected the Roman state.
and was depicted carrying a thunderbolt.
He was associated with the eagle.
As the Son of Saturn and Ops,
he was brother to Juno (his consort),
Vesta, Ceres, Neptune, and Pluto.
He overthrew his father, Saturn, to lead the Pantheon.
Monday, 4 May 2026
Persecution And Sufffering
Will come to us all as individuals
from around the globe and across the earth
as life breathes through us. The persecutiions
that seem the worst disguise themselves
until they are recognised being calibrated
through calendars, and set to time limits,
throuhg which they burn out, in real time.
Until real time becomes a history by which,
if we can recall it accurately, we may measure
some of the possible suffering and reward to come.
Some suffer knowing their suffering is finite
though they can't know how it will end
or what their reward for enduring it will be.
Other people suffer and project that their suffering
will be the sole cause of the end of the world
something that they tell one and all is imminent.
I understand suffering and privatiion well enough.
I also appreciate that it can seem disporportionate
but I simply don't 'get' how the suffering of anyone
alive now, or in recent or modern times, can say
that their suffering is that central to the future
of all time and space throughout the universe,
such that they should command the collective attention
of the billions alive of that apex species: Homo Sapiens.
That self absorbed path leads one way only: towards insanity.
Sunday, 3 May 2026
Saturday, 2 May 2026
In The Alphabet Of Unrecognised Neglect
'A' stood for abandonment-the rupture children felt
when they were taken to school and left with strangers.
'B' stood for bereavement and the sudden loss of the familiar:
family surroundings, friends, toys, routine, even home food.
Teacheers and carers called this “homesickness” and trusted
that it would pass when the children had no such sense of certainty.
'C' stood for captivity, the realisation that there was no way out
from rigid and often punishing routines, no escape, though some tried it.
This often lead to 'D', dissociation and the development of a false self
that the child felt helped them appear be brave, and survive the situation
whilst cutting them off from their truer self without them realising it.
And so this alphabet goes on whilst the author of the theory behind it,
Joy Schaverien (1943 - 2025) outlines the theory of 'Boarding School Syndrome',
where what is presented as a materially privileged life hides from parents,
puupils, and the staff who ran boarding schools a multi-generatonal sense of loss
where difficulties with intimacy are passed of as 'normal'. The recognition
of life-long mental health problems is slow to arrise, waiting until adulthood
for the neccesity of therapy to be clear, where the syndrome gets easier to use
as an excuse to explain away previoiusly unexplained offhand behaviour.
But that is the world some people, lots of people, live in.
Some of my best friends might recognise this picture
and remember how I used to behave, without knowing
that I grew up in a care home for five yearss, where I
saw my parents for thirteen weeks of the year. When I left
the home I had no close friends: I left who I knew behind.
I have survived: in a country with the safety net
of a welfare state and a strong charity sector
people will. But I find thatt the safety nett
for retrospectivle repairing my mental health,
and the family the helps indiduals connect for life
are harder to recognise and find. I have what is left
of my true self, which the care home cared enough
to not touch, when with hindsight it easily could have.
For a fuller explanation
of Boarding School Syndrome
than what I have room for
on this blog please left click here.
Friday, 1 May 2026
No Mow May
Is the time to not mow the grass
if Britsh gardeners can bare to watch
as the grass grows, and insterad comfort
themselves by the lives of the insects
living in the grass being extended,
by their now quiet lawnmowers.
Picture Set Of The Month - May - The Oil Paintings Of Ray Lowry
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| 'Early Evenng', capturing two friends and a mother with her chidren crossing each others paths outside the Coach and Horses in Cadishead. Early 1970s. |
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| 'Bus Stop - Manchester' as painted in the early 1970s by Ray Lowry. A Summer street scene set in suburban Manchester. . |
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| 'Road Sweeper' - Ray Lowry, early 1970s. I discovered the creativity of Ray through his satirical cartoons that punctured the pomp of the music industry, in the New Musical Express. |













