On The Internet

But what you download is only a small part of what you are.

For Best Effect

don't be mean with it, but use sparingly-
a little goes a long way to lubricating life.

Why, To Save Something,

do we always have to put a value on it first?
Every time we put a price on a preservation
whether in nature or as part of the human environment.
We thrust the impetus for the preservation to the richest,
when those that have the most never have it through altruism.
Quite the opposite. Their wealth is built on thrift at the expense
of the lives of others, human and non-human
and in one way or another their accumulated wealth
is what caused the original decline.
Money needs nature far more than nature ever wanted the economy.

In The Food Chain All Flesh Is Grass

India annually produces about 12 million tonnes
of flesh unfit for human consumption, which is left
to rot in the open air of the countryside.
Vultures used find what humans left behind a peculiar treat,
and consumed what was rotten.
Between 1992 and 2002 the Indian vulture population
from 40,000,000 birds to about 20,000 due to poisoning
from anticoagulant chemicals left in dead cattle.
Wild dogs replaced the vultures in the revised food chain,
and increased their numbers increased by 7 million.
In addition to tidying up the fleshly detritus humans left behind
the dogs were repositories for diseases humans could get
and now every year 5000 people who lived
when the vultures had pride of place die of dog bites.
In the food chain all flesh is grass, food for others to eat.
Even human flesh will get cheaper for those who can think
for others being less thoughtful,
as the pecking order in the food chain collapses.
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Divided By Grammar

In the 1940s George Bernard Shaw
said 'England and America are two nations
divided by a common language'. Every time
I hear this quote I reacquaint myself
with that he missed;a much older, closer
and deeper division of country by language.
One that we enjoy avoiding. Bisected by history in 1453,
the English and the French continue to share
so much of each others language. But each divides,
one against the other by each country changing the meanings
of words they share, and adopting different grammar.

In Bars And Airports

life is what is goes on around people
who spend too long, being distracted
by their advanced mobile phones
because the device attached to them
is the ultimate in-between space distraction.

A Meditation For Holocaust Day

Given a choice of histories that normalise dystopia
I would take eugenics over slavery every time.
Through an overwhelming inequality
both ideas have generated a lot of suffering.
Where governments have found the resolve
to prove both ideas immoral they have both
been legislated out of sight but not out of existence.
Neither idea is totally gone. Slavery is as old as property,
and is as self regenerating as property rights too.
It has been part of the human economy since the end
of hunter/gatherer societies, over 8000 years ago. 
Eugenics is a now discredited science,
destroyed by its links to the Nazi Party
and their scapegoating of jews, gypsies, homosexuals,
communists, Jehovahs witnesses, and others.
As a failed theory I like it because it was proved
to be spectacularly flawed and rigged science.
Since 1948 anyone who has tried to re-start
the science of superiority has been laughed out of their laboratory.
Hubris has had to revise slavery, to create new inequalities behind which to hide.