My Favourite Time To Be Half Awake

is breakfast because it time for strong coffee, or magic.

Modesty Publishing

is when we publish what we think
to the world without ever expecting
our thoughts to be acknowledged,
respected very much, or acted upon.
Something like this blog really.....

Patriotism Is The Opiate Of The people

Black red and yellow were the colours of the stripes
of the flag on the shoulder of the shirts I bought
from on Army Surplus stores when I was in my 20's,
when I was living in Poor Town, North Lincolnshire.
I knew they were the colours of the East German flag.
In the limits of my education I thought they meant
'Through the night and the blood comes the light',
though I have no idea where the phrase came from.

I am sure East Germans were told until it was ground into them
that the black in their flag represented the Nazi past,
and growing malign power of the united German States
from 1870 onward. The red represented the Soviet Socialist army
who rescued them from Hitler, Roosevelt and Churchill,
in what they were taught to call 'The Great Patriotic War'.
And the yellow was the light of the GDR, the state
that succeeded after the war. Little could they, or I, know
that a truer light was yet to come, within a very different Europe.

The Electoral Process

I can't mind 'free thinking'.
But I worry when the thoughts
which gain the greatest public praise
appear to be free of all internal process and logic
-particularly when they deny all the consequences
of what might happen if their thoughts were enacted.

Southern Accents?

For as long as state schooling has been mandatory
adults have suspected that what schools teach children
is 'How to not be yourself for the benefit of other people'.
What many adults realize less is the role of accent in the process.

People from every region in the UK train to become teachers,
and the more Northern, Scottish, Welsh, or Irish their accent
the more they are pushed through training and job interviews
to speak in Southern English tones, as if such speech patterns
were the accent of the self elect, who pupils should aspire to join.

If in the UK division is by social class and region
then in America it is the patterns of black speech
which stand in for 'working class' and 'uneducated'.
The whiter the manner of speech the more
socially successful the speaker will surely be.

And probably the less you would trust them with your money.

Be Careful What You Listen To

Softly spoken magic spells
may assuage any number of ills
but they will not help us face reality.

Out With The Old, In With The Looks-Like-New

Much of the Atheism I have failed to understand
owes far more to folks dumping pasts they believe
they never lived - back yards full of metaphors -
only to find said back yards refilling with something
less coherent. As these changing pasts repeat on them
the repeats prove that what they threw out was stronger.

For when folks pass of some shiny new ignorance
as the latest wisdom the pretense becomes all too clear
-they have been where many others have been before, 
and deny the route back is still there, all too close behind them.