It’s only been a short time line.

 Subject: It’s only been a short time line.

Our personal priorities are not always aligned with our national priority, and as a nation we have changed out of all recognition from the one which had shakily emerged from the Second World War. The population in the 1940s was more subservient and more easily manipulated because people were largely individualised within by their cohort (class) and neighbourhood, today with  the ability to belong to a wider community through the internet and to identify ourselves with people of a like mind and interest whilst at the same time learning that so many people have a different mind set and therefore we are surrounded predominantly by difference.

The subtly of being able to equate difference and yet realise, or at least rationalise the danger of that difference to a  functioning society is paramount to our mental wellbeing. Today there seem so many subclasses from the simplified gender relevant construction we grew up with to the racial mix on our doorstep. The rough hewn self confident identity of 1945 to the intricate delicacy of 2024 were every year we find another descriptive sub set to consider as being on a par with what we considered normal. Everyone's normal has become equal and prescriptive and in a sense they are since there is no social template any more, only bias and bigotry.

Justification, which used to hinge on history and the ethnicity of the society around have now been replaced with a hippies tolerance such that, 'anything goes'.  This boundless freedom to fit into any cause simply distills who you are into a caste of misfits each yelling, "I am right".

Where we go from here is perhaps a prescription only AI will offer a solution since the confusion of a society our leaders have no knowledge of and still less care about leaves us stranded. Worker bees dedicated to the hive and the queen, warrior bees sacrificing their lives for the common good, and behind it all, the beekeeper hidden in his protective clothing, anonymous under the hat and suitably vailed for anonymity.

It’s all a long way from Constables Hay Wain painted in 1821 it still had relevance in 1921 and to some extent also when I appeared on the scene in 1940 where the rural setting around our village, the dray horses pulling the plow the children in the field around harvest time, the Maypole celebrations, the tight knit village community dancing in the community hall and the annual one day exodus to the seaside by many of the villagers in a charabanc. The society was free to engage with each other without the engagement of the smart phone and all its preemptive commitment. Of course the smartphone casts a wider net but like many a fisherman will tell you the catch is diminished by the holes in the net were a significant quota got away. At least with Doris by my side the catch was still within reach on the back seat.

The world has changed like never before and is accelerating ever faster. The link with your past is rapidly becoming irrelevant and with it the structure and values you formed over that passage of time. It’s not actually that the values have disappeared rather its the ability to articulate that value to those living in the current mode.

Poverty

 Subject: Poverty

How do we define poverty. As a personal experience, as something we have read about, was it the deep lines written on the face of an old African or Indian who we observed on our travels, lines left behind by years of just existing after decades  of toil and deprivation.

The poverty in Mumbai is of a different scale and texture to my childhood in Bradford but you don’t have to look far to imagine the impoverishment of Glasgow described in harrowing detail in the book Angela’s Ashes. The touch and go existence of a Brazilian Favela or a shack in one of the South Africa’s shanti towns, each made much more tricky by the violence perpetrated just to survive.

For some poverty is a binding force, a sort of badge of belonging to a society who know each other and understand, rather than judge. Poverty not only defines you it forms you through childhood on a diet of deprivation which stunts people in all kinds of ways. Compare the troops in the Second World War. The British,  short in stature, poor teeth, prone to fatigue and the Americans, fighting along side, inches taller and physically much stronger, no wonder the girls chose the Yank over the Pom.

Shortened longevity could be measured in years when raised in Blackpool and not in Boston and yet fancifully the pride of a Lancastrian, with their historical past seemed to compensate for all the woes of birthplace and even provided a gallows humour which in part ruled out the obvious disadvantages. The commonality factor, the fact that we were all in the same boat lent a camaraderie to our lives, mutual trust and friendship and an abiding sense of fellowship was evident in even the poorest parts of the country. Sadly today the evils of consumerism have demolished much of what we had and in its place the evil of avarice, the desire for wealth or gain and the inability to measure others by the yardstick of humanitarian deeds of which simple friendship is highly valued.

My most treasured memories were meeting cycling friends at the Lister Park Gates at 8.00am on a Sunday morning for a day out zooming around the then empty lanes of the Dales. Poor weather was set aside as something you couldn’t control and it makes me smile at today’s insistence of checking the weather before setting out, even when enclosed in the sanitised confines of a car. It would have to be very bleak not to turn up and set off towards Skipton the gateway to the Dales. Up and down, the road swept us along winding between the dry stone walls which  stretched this way and that, across the fields as far as the eye could see, the 20 of us chattering like starlings, we were in every way happy. The camping holidays with chums in the Lake District were primitive affairs, the cheap canvas tent which leaked like a sieve when it rained, as it often did, was no obstacle to our get up and go mentality. The rye comments of a disturbed night were the grist of our breakfast conversation as we looked around to see where our pitch the night before had brought us. No camp site, no ablution block, no shop only a field just off the road where, tired out we put up the tent and slept the sleep of angles. There was no rules and regulations other than to leave the site as tidy as you found it. No money changed hands for the privilege of laying down with the sheep, we were encouraged by a mug of tea and a bacon and egg breakfast, the content of the fry up having to be scraped off the bottom of aluminium pan which served as a pan and plate. Simple does as simple is and we were blissfully simple in those days.

It’s a habit which has stayed with me all these years, putting up with simplicity rather than spending money on the latest gadget. The kitchen shelves are adorned with things bought by ‘others’ which never get used, partly because of ignorance but mostly through the habit of sticking to well tried custom. I’m the caveman who sees only the shadow on the wall.

Simplicity has allowed me to stay with the tried and trusted method which then allows connectivity to one’s past and frees one from the fear of the future. Simplicity gives one perspective, a sense of surety in a world which craves for the untested new without first evaluating need.  In our bewildering computer driven existence which dissolves most of us the responsibility of knowing and for which we turn to the prognosticators that new breed “ the enabler” the focus group which provides you with the ability to think and reason in a way which “group think” prospers and independence withers on the vine.

The advantage of a watertight tent is obvious but it fosters the assumption that security is something you can carry around with you because someone else has catered for your needs. It removes the responsibility to be able to cope with the unexpected and substantiates the ‘blame culture’ which is pulling society apart. The cry is for compensation for everything is but an example of not doing one’s own homework and thinking through the eventualities of failure.

Questions but few answers

 Subject: Questions but few answers

There are a growing list of questions which we can't ask in public. There is the old legal question of not shouting "Fire" in a theatre for fear of creating panic and then there are the limits imposed on not calling someone something which is provably untrue for which the courts on deformation and libel may be called upon to rule but there is today an audience waiting to be upset on your use of language. That undistinguished group of self sympathetic, hard done by under achievers who wish for sympathetic  acknowledgement , mainly for themselves, who see slights all around in a world of their making, a world of perpetual dissatisfaction not only with their gender allocation but their need to play the innocent when the stakes are high. The motion of the stars used to proclaim the infinite direction mankind would take, we were a projection of our star sign, Scorpio for single mindedness, Libra for honesty, Aquarius for high intellect as we assumed our celestial calling, but the question "what does it mean to be human" and how do we define being human without trying to imagine what it's like to be a horse or a dog, still less an ant is clearly beyond most of us. Narcissism  inflicts upon us a self centred identity in which  we largely only identify, like with like in a world which is jam full of prognosticators many of whom I personally do not wish to identify with.

Aristotle defined democracy as the “ability to discuss and consider views other than their own” but in this over sensitive world, all too willing to take umbrage when using over simplified  communication systems without the self control of how to read between the lines.

Much of the anger is false, or at least generated to signal a response for which we hope to be counted as a member. For instance many of the marchers on our streets would be hard pressed to give a rational explanation 'not to why they are there' but rather the reason for the history which brought the dilemma in the first place. During the support for Palestine, many of the street marchers in this country when interviewed were very sketchy about the history of Palatine vis a vis Israel.

It's the same with religious bias which becomes racial when juxtaposing east and west and it doesn't help to describe the friction away by saying we are all the same. Of course in many ways we are but our cultures make us different, in some cases almost pathologically so. Even simple matters such as potty training are different with religious laws dating back hundreds of years proclaiming  edicts from god and which, intolerant of the other person, provide the tinder for religious wars to be fought.

Holding your nose to truth.

 Subject: Holding your nose to truth.





It’s 3am and my mind is a whirl of thoughts, it’s like a dog howling to be let out for a pee or better still defecating on the pages of my blog the simple unpleasant truths of which most people wish to ignore or hold their nose as if it weren’t true. At 3 in the morning  the world is more in-focus and not confused by the 'things to do' only the 'things to think'.

The tussle in our courts, not only of the Post masters/mistresses seeking justice from the Post Office but today, the sentence of manslaughter handed down to a deranged man who armed himself with a knife and violently stabbed three people in a rampage on the streets of Nottingham. His plea was that he heard voices which convinced him to kill and in law, if the balance of your mind has become unbalanced then you can't be held accountable for your actions. It reminded me of talking to a psychiatrist in one of the secure mental hospitals in East London where I had a contract to install some electronic equipment I asked "aren't you concerned working in the hospital amongst potentially dangerous people.  No was his reply, I know these people here in the hospital and can read the signs, out on the street moving amongst the public I have no way of telling if the man or woman approaching me is due for a breakdown and could become deranged but I wasn't convinced that the professional psychiatrist is up to the task of judging the mind with any degree of certainty and their decision to hold or release a person is pretty arbitrary.

The mind has many routes to travel in its circlular-combobulation from morning to night, even in our sleep it slithers and slides, it trips and stumbles but only rarely defines its objective. Recently I have tried to follow the implications of a multi universe seen through the actions of string theory, vibrating energy strings which define the essence of energy. Surprisingly I've become a fan of 'You Tube', a place where these elemental multi universe theories are argued in some detail and, along with my political interests, is a place to hear reasoned argument from the likes of Rory Stewart and Yanis Veriakis. It’s rapidly becoming an essential waterhole to go to and seek some sort of mental refreshment.

The arguments are speculative but since there is no way to verify the speculation we are left wondering, much as we were before we started but at least as a exercise in mental acuity it doesn’t take the old religious hypothesis for granted and makes the ideas which flow from non religious speculation to a new level.

The sound of the wind rattling  the glass in the window ties one’s sense of security down to a fairly small compass, your home but in the sub molecular world in which we are founded security takes on a whole different meaning. Our sense of being hinges on our comprehension that we are real even if that reality is largely in the mind and part of our consciousness but that state of consciousness still relies on the chemical and electrical interactions in the brain. So we have to have this sense of the me tied to synapse’s activity before I can think thoughts to describe the me. Without that activity I am dead and being dead I cease to be, other than a meme of someone else’s synapse activity

Logging in to life

 Subject: Logging in  to life

It is no longer sufficient to be me, I have to answer to a doppelgänger me, an electronic web based me who requires passwords, and email addresses to sustain his or her identity. The heart that pushes blood through my veins is not enough anymore to signal I am alive but instead I need a code to acknowledge it. This wouldn’t be so bad if the code was forgiving, if it had human empathy but it’s founded on the bytes of a program which is impervious to the frailties of a brain of an 83 year old man who has managed many things in his rich and varied life but is now flummoxed by the insensitivity of the log in procedure.

How bewildering to be asked again and again for the same set of digits, a mixture of numerals’s plus a high and lower case set of letters which are rated highly if they don’t mean anything. Perhaps that’s the answer, none of us mean anything any more we are just computer code sitting inside a mainstream computer manufactured by Fujitsu, a postmaster perhaps who’s fallibility against the computer is questioned and he or she is jailed on the computers say so. What happens when we add to the mix “AI” which not only determines the rules but the sentence.

We are in a pickle as we try to cut costs by cutting out the human interface in fact making the human interface more obscene by the humans total reliance on what the computer spews out. The frustration in not being able to have a face to face conversation where the conversation blends human cognisance  with tolerance and finds a way towards understanding. The websites which lend you alternatives to questions you wish to ask but non to the actual question you asked leading you down blind alleys into a frustrating loss of the will to live in this dystopian world. Now whilst  I know this is an age thing it’s also the substance of who we are. The answer to most non mathematical questions are many sided and perhaps it’s the herding of people into binary answers, yes or no that bedevils us into making concessions, substituting our truth for the popular truth.

The Donald Trump’s and Boris Johnson’s of this world would rather do away with the nuanced assumptions of our particular truths and inflict theirs with a mendacity of lies and deceit so popular in our media. There is no shame any longer in being caught lying, it’s part of the political landscape, the lingua franca of politics which shames the rest of us for putting up with it. How do we shame them if they are incapable of one of the most basic responses known to man. The rules in Parliament that it’s inadmissible to stand up in the House Of Commons and tell a lie to Parliament ‘intentionally misleading Parliament’ is a serious sackable event for a minister but is circumvented by bluster and innuendo. It brings Prime Ministers Question Time close to farce as the government and the opposition trade verbal blows at the dispatch box each out bidding the other in point scoring with little attempt at telling the truth. As role models they are a sorry lot to follow and much of our social decline can be traced back this lack of honesty which if not evident in our superiors places less and less value across society as a whole.

Who is right and who is wrong and who’s to say.

Subject: Who is right and who is wrong and who’s to say.





The issue of ‘Hate Speech’ and its effect on ‘Free Speech’ has serious implications not only on what we say, how we say it and to whom but how we think. The act of having an opinion which differs from a minority opinions, no matter how well intentioned and held by an unelected, shadowy but media savvy cohort acting within society can and does lead to demonising and the use of ‘cancel culture’ to isolate opinion.

All opinion should be challenged in a healthy society but the use of psychological force where deliberate mis-information is used and published to diminish opinion is very  dangerous. The governments continuous attack on the BBC is an example of the drip drip undermining of this great institution and this at a time when news channels such as GBNews and Talk TV, both new arrives, both openly controversial and each fulfilling a purpose by airing not only right wing views but fathering  head to head debate on difficult subject matter where organisations such as the BBC is afraid to venture for fear of being accused of being racist, homophobic and intolerant of the populist view. I think it’s healthy to have your own prejudice challenged and your views re-articulated,  if for no other reason than it forces you to evaluate opinions formed in different times and under different pressure.

Opinion after all is simply that, an opinion, it’s not a law of physics with a need to test its provenance and its attraction to you is based on your life experience and a willingness to consider the alternative. How often we are forced by opinion to change ours is not to often if our opinion is based on the needs of mankind in general and not the specific need of a minority who wish to exercise power. Opinion is not ‘fact’ it’s an amalgam of views which can eventually homogenise into a cultural acceptance which then begin to form as a norm. The test of acceptance is critical but one of the imponderable difficulties of a multicultural society like ours is finding acceptable norms amongst people who have different cultures and religions. Without an overall common acceptance the difficulties of religious acceptance and cultural mores will be a fault line and lead to a destabilised society.

Exposures and education to other opinions and especially to their actual practice in the society is foremost in understanding our differences but that’s not to say because we understand that we agree and our disagreement must be heard without being tarred with the term prejudice. Our entitlement to be different is what marks us out as a nation but the difficulty of acknowledging difference in others, especially since they have become an integral part of our society leads to  great deal of soul searching especially when, for religious conformity on the the other side can not give an inch.

Tolerance is key with some religions but with others religion is unforgiving in its teaching and the observance of strict rules and our non religious based tolerance is stretched to breaking point

The future is in heaven.

 Subject: The future is in heaven.

Currently the Chancellor of the Exchequer is holding out the prospect of tax cuts in a bid to entice voters to vote for the Conservative Party, is this responsible or reprehensible given we already are over three trillion pounds in debt and tax cuts are simply designed to encourage the recipient of the cut to go out and spend in an attempt to generate the ‘tax take’ from the extra spending.

As we teeter towards recession which will inevitably encourage a hike in the cost of borrowing we continue our whack a mole politics with no clear plan other than to respond to crisis with popular slogans designed to deflect critics when questioning “how will we get there”, but the how is always lost in the reasoning since politically it’s unpleasant medicine and democracy is not designed for unpleasantness.

How they must long for Putins totalitarian approach or Xi Jinping's absolute authority in Whitehall, no balancing public opinion or the rights of minorities, just the cane if anyone steps out of line.

Has democracy seen its day in our troubled world. The surety of capitalisms financial gains and what it should have meant to the masses, now scooped up into smaller and smaller pots with the financially bloated recipients unable to comprehend their wealth in terms of ordinary people. The ambition of the people now swallowed up in jackpot mysticism instead of rational goals on which a persons sense of self worth is founded.

As war becomes a topic in the vein of that at the turn of the 19th century and with leaders such as Kim Jong Un or Ruhollah Khomeini holding a nuclear option over our heads, the talk of placing the country on a war footing, at least logistically is doing the rounds once more. But this time we are emotionally so much more unprepared after years of pronouncing on ‘our rights’ how will conscription and a call to arms be accepted. Perhaps in a nuclear war it will all be over ‘in a flash’ before there is a call to arms to man the barricades since the barricades are vaporised along with us and only a specialised group will have survived. Everything will be contaminated, except perhaps the oceans, all the petty ills we suffer will be as nothing in our brave new world order, our sons and daughters and our grandchildren will be wasted by some megalomaniac who believes the future is in heaven.  

Two wrongs don’t make a right.

 Subject: Two wrongs don’t make a right.

Al Jazeera appears to have been taken off air and none of our local news channels see fit to report it.

Israel had threatened to impede the broadcast of any of what it sees as biased, misinformed news that misrepresents the ongoing war in Gaza.

Remember RT the broadcast arm of the Russian state which was shut down in this country and robbed us of insights into Russian thinking if not so much investigating the conditions in Russia.

Al Jazeera is a 24/7 day broadcaster with its head office in Quatar it also broadcasts an English language service from London. This morning as I went for my News round up the screen where I usually tune into Al Jazeera was blank and when I searched Google for a reason it said that Isreal’s were finalising the plans to shut down Al Jazeera’s Gaza office from where we gain most footage of what’s going on there.

There is always the issue of bias in reporting any story but unless Al Jazeera have replicated some sort of Hollywood style screen set  the pictures of bombed out neighbourhoods or the constant stream of wounded people, particularly innocent children rushed into partially destroyed hospitals then we must be allowed to believe our eyes, no matter how disturbing it is.

I always believe on making up my own mind by simply watching and listening to the full range of media outlets, some you weight with more prejudice than others. The new kids on our block, ‘Talk TV’ and its competitor GB News which started about the same time both encourage the political right wing  and are not limited, as the BBC is in remaining factually impartial with both reporters and presenters inhibited in expressing their own view. Some high profile BBC veteran presenters have been fired for appearing to support a political opinion, unlike their adversaries on GB News and Talk TV the who openly criticise the news depending on their own bias. It’s part of a move to emulate media channels, such as X by encouraging  a free-for- all by bringing commentary from every spectrum irrespective of how disabling it is ‘in the cause of freedom of speech.

“Al Jazeera has just come on air” so I don’t know what happened but there was a significant break in service and my twitchy antenna feared the worst.

The channel resumes its expose of this humanitarian disaster, especially in the hospitals but also in the deprivation of food and water to the Gaza population as a whole.

Your mindset must allow, historically the sympathetic cultivation of support for Isreal as a state for beleaguered Jews to settle in after their terrible experience as nation which experienced the Holocaust but in allowing Isreal to break international conventions in its fight for survival it risks losing that support.

Thats not to condone Muslim extremist’s, such as Hamas, Hizballah, Boko Haram, ISIS and many other groups who commit atrocities in the name of Allah. But the old adage “two wrongs don’t make a right” is never more important than now.  

Interpretation

 Subject: Interpretation

Tuning in to the opening evidence given to the enquiry into the interrogation of the Post Masters and Mistresses who were being accused of theft from the system one is struck by the whiles of barristers to lay emphasis on a single sentences taken out of context and is to my mind  prejudicial to the search for truth.

The enquiry is interrogating a member of the POs security team who on the one hand seems something of a rough diamond but also a person who might be termed a 'jobs worth' in that as long as he followed the rules as set out by the PO he was very reluctant to look elsewhere as to why the mismatch in accounting process arose.

My own reminiscence of people performing the job behind the counter was that they had to cope with a whole array of procedure from the issue of selling stamps to the issue of motor vehicle taxation, acting as intermediary in passport procurement, a whole array of government processes including pension payments and so much more, each system with its own intricacies and the information required to fill in the documentation and the personal accountability was to my mind quite complicated and each stood alone according to the service offered.

Listening to the interrogation one is struck by the reliance of the PO accounting team on the system rather than drawing conclusions which should have been considered by the sheer number of alleged misappropriation. Psychological compartmentalism is a term which comes to mind. Firms which employ homegrown investigators rather the professional auditors run the invariable risk  of employing people who are blind to associating the issues to a wider auditing process, they install a 'company-man first and foremost' which is a weakness and leads to undermining the core values a company should be founded on. Also the legal companies employed by the PO seem to cozily underperform their own accountability by injecting statements which purport to come from the PO investigatory team but are cut and paste statements to avoid culpability.

The investigation leaves a sour taste in the mouth that this is the way business is done in this country and it's taken a drama/documentary to push the button and get people in parliament to get off their customary high horse and at least take time off their attention to preserving the status quo.

The Post Office and the government in the dock

 Subject: The Post Office and the government in the dock

How can one of the doyens of British public life, the Post Office which has been shamed by the ITV broadcast drama revealing not only the shortcomings but the shameful disregard by government of the plight of sub postmasters and mistresses wrongly accused of filching money into their own accounts because of the malfunctioning of the Post Office computer which is supposed to account for money transactions. Over two decades this crisis where the sub postmaster/mistress were accused by the post office of being unable to balance their book and being made to find the shortfall out of their own pocket, to the tune of thousands of pounds and in some cases face prison sentences for wrong doing is close to barbaric. It is claimed that this is the greatest travesty of justice ever recorded in Britain and yet it still continues with the post office dragging its feet to remunerate the personal loss never mind the turmoil of being accused when innocent.

The Post Office has a quasi relationship with the government. In an effort to privatise the PO they were set up as a private company with a board chief exec and chairman but the sole shareholder was the government. When it came to judging the people who ran each post office their legal position and their right of an unbiased hearing it seems that the PO executive were judge and jury and the claims that the problems in the book keeping system were due to the Horizon computer system, not the staff in the sub post offices were rubbished. People committed suicide due to the inequity of their position and whilst slowly the picture emerged of a great wrong the post office, to this day fight each claim for compensation as if their flawed system might not be to blame and therefore a legal case is presented by well paid barristers on the basis that you have to prove your innocence and not that you are innocent until proven guilty.

The whole sorry episode reveals a fundamental fault line between the ordinary person in this country when seeking justice and the power of the executive, be it the Post Office or the Government. The scales have been skewed by the removal of legal aid such that expensive defence against litigation is out of reach for the ordinary person and the unnecessary travesty of justice is becoming more the norm.

It's taken a television drama to wake up public sentiment and rough the feathers of our political class who were, as in so many areas of our public life, simply asleep at the wheel. The ministerial avoidance of this problem has been woeful as has the opposition parties reluctance to force the government to take action.

The Special One

Antiquity has many dependants. The tribes and civilisations traipsing across the expense of time each claiming eminence, each with proud descendants who base their linage to be considered special.

Egyptians,Persians, Greeks , Hebrew tautology, Aryan/Davidian mysticism, the Renaissance in Italy and France, the British Empire, the Teutonic influence in Europe, Marxism, each has had its adherents in the sense that history defined them and gives them the opportunity feel special.

This sense of identity through a tribal attachment and the achievement born of intellectual, military and economic might makes us speak highly of ourselves irrespective of the fact  we are a poor image of the original.

Having arrived in the 21st century, economic influence set about the business of creating global markets and dissolving tribal affinity for the sake of consumerism. No longer in many senses are we different. Coke is a universal beverage, Apple and Nike are  worn and paraded everywhere, the American  influence, internationally, means that you can get by with English, at least through the airport. The emotional freeze as you recognise your  reliance on English as your lingua franca doesn’t carry you far in a bazaar in the Middle East or in the domestic affairs of Afghanistan or upper Mongolia when western influence is at a minimum and possibly counter effective, then your historical preeminence worthless.

And yet we persist in inflating our sense of worth, we insist in punching above our weight sending warships into potential war zone situations when in reality we can't fix the potholes in our roads. Is it possible with our history to down size our psych to be a onlooker not a combatant. I'm not talking of our valour in standing up to fascism but nations like Sweden who were a force to be reckoned with in the 17th/18th century learnt to accommodate the world as it was and not try to mould it into what it thought it should be. We can never break the back of religious intolerance or a secular ideology, nor should we want to unless they threaten us and what we believe is just and fair.

Even the might of the American fighting machine is being questioned as the worlds policeman, not least by its own people who question the economic cost and the relevance of nations who it is being asked to defend. The move away from the compartmentalisation of nationhood towards the assumption of commonality in practice and purpose has lead to a distortion of the aims and needs of countries who have not thrown out traditionalism for consumerism. The mullahs of Iran for instance are not at all convinced by western symbolism, their history goes back  through the brilliance of academic achievement known as the Persian Empire. The tolerance of American capitalism, a very recent event, is as hard to swallow as the brash GI was on the streets of London during the war. The phenomenon of the Trump supporter gives credence to the claim that the American mentality is a cut and paste character, more tied to Hollywood than the reality of the world we live in.

Public opinion 2024/25

Subject: Public opinion 2024/25

 

So how are we to look forward to the new year, the following one and the one after that with so much of our overall security in disarray. It's not only the wars which are horrible enough now brought into focus through the lens of thousands of a publicly enterprising cameras ready and waiting to capture the mayhem and publish their efforts on the web
but the solemnity of a private life is becoming more difficult year by year as we take on the plight of a donkey, a caged bear or the dreadful carnage, not only in Gaza or Mariupol but the economic disparity in Mumbai or Bangladesh, the economic cloning of its citizens in China and the severity of displacement around the world as people are primed to look for new pastures and this is my latest offering on our diet of 24/7 news gathering and non stop punditry.
Of course a well tried antidote to the mayhem is the fresh air of a camping holiday well away from any WiFi signal, a reconnect with ones personal world unabashed by ideological criticism in a world which we ourself own and defend.
The compilation of insightful thoughts which arise in our own heads, without the precursor of hysterical noise brought about by others is a wonder to behold. Thoughts which arise in the dead of night or as you awake before the clutter of the first news broadcast breaks through and destroys the crystal clear thoughts that you had assembled in the wee small hours. An array of words and descriptive prose built in an attempt to separate the complexity of the human condition into boxes each box containing a set of parameters not outlandish supposition. Wonderful words with their equally wonderful ability to allow a shift of a few degrees in meaning. It's like painting as the artist mixes his colours to change the temperature of the portraiture  by melding a little aqua blue into the storm clouds building on the horizon.  

We are currently being seduced to drive at 20mph, perhaps tomorrow at 15mph, a slow drip drip incursion into having to give way to the 'big brother' of government or special interest opinion which now govern our lives.