when wars begin and as they roll forward, people take sides and do not see the same value of a life taken in the enemy as worth as much as a life on their side. It is almost as if we are all no longer quite human – either in this sentiment or in the…
People Management
What is it with ego and power plays? from the smallest groups to the largest people think they have such importance they can dictate what all the others have to agree with. You can set a goal you are all supposed to be aiming for and they will compromise it for petty power. Their name…
When Academics Stoop to Folly
Bonesteel was a tutor in the history of cartoons when a young student decided to complain that the subject matter in his class was offensive. He lost his job. There is an amusing song my Flanders and Swann about a cannibal child who doesn’t want to eat people. The father is appalled and there ensues…
George Byron
So we’ll go no more a roving’ So we’ll go no more a roving So late into the night, Though the heart be still as loving, And the moon be still as bright. For the sword outwears its sheath, And the soul wears out the breast, And the heart must pause to breathe, And Love…
Celebrations
As everyone around gets ready for Christmas and Channukah thinking they deserve a break from all the bad and sad news and a little light relief there is no relief fro the planet or the terrible things we have done to the environment. There is no end to the suffering of animals and civilians in…
Political wings
The entire framing of left and right wing, which derives from the French Revolution with the royalist leaning delegates sitting on the right and the anti-royalists sitting on the left. But the idea of population control, of laws drafted to suit one’s own constituency, or media control cross over. The right allows more freedoms today…
Old Roads
I found myself having to deliver a small present for someone from someone else and taking a road I used to travel semi-regularly but had not been on for some twenty years. Knowing the road well and meeting again those houses on corners and sharp turns it was not the road itself I found myself…
Is Death So Much To Fear
I was reading about Comfort women in the wars in the Pacific and was surprised to learn there were many in the Korean war. I should not have been surprised because sex can make people unsavoury and brutal faster than bigotry. Or maybe in this instance, sex becomes a form of bigotry. In any case…
Constitutions
Constitutions are strange beasts – they have the language of law but the framework they encode is ethical. And the ethics they attempt to construct are supposed to have a very long life and martial millions of people who will not have the same ethics as each other. By their very nature they need to…
Cultural Ethics
Recently we encountered a well know retired editor seeking $1000 from an artist to mention them in an article to be published in the New Art Examiner. Needless to say we will not be using him or his work. A New Zealand artist I was talking to in London was not even surprised she said…