Is the world really changing? Do we now believe and accept that all war no matter how carried on, is not mass murder but legal genocide? So the wars of Turkey on the Kurds, Russia on the Ukrainians, in Congo and Sudan are all genocides? Are we now in a space where any war carried…
It’s a little bit funny
how easy it is for phrases to cover the vast distance between one person and another. I hear everyone invited into a news show saying ‘thank you for having me’ when they mean ‘thank you for inviting me’. Thank you for having me is something a staying guest might say or as slang a lover. …
Sonnet
As a decrepit father takes delight To see his active child do deeds of youth, So I, made lame by fortune’s dearest spite, Take all my comfort of thy worth and truth. For whether beauty, birth, or wealth, or wit, Or any of these all, or all, or more, Entitled in thy parts do crownèd sit, I make my love engrafted to this store. So then I am not lame, poor, nor despised Whilst that this shadow doth such substance give That I in thy abundance am sufficed 12And by a part of all thy glory live. Look what is best, that best I wish in thee. This wish I have, then ten times happy me. William Shakespeare Praeterea, puto arma nuclearia Persiae delenda esse
Devolution
I actually wonder why the essence of culture has to bend the knee to money – and I know that, of course, it does not but the artists do. Why would you begin an examination of the human condition, which is the essence of all art, and limit yourself immediately to the diktats of a…
Let’s Talk Genocide
We know that the Arabs believe that Israel exists because of the holocaust and European guilt. Perversely ever since 1948 they have attempted to dress is the clothes of Jewish suffering claiming Israelis are racist, apartheid loving nazis. Most recently they claim genocide – a wartime crime codified because of the plans of the nazis….
The Unexpected
I spent the day at the printers and was expecting to do some finishing work and I did get some blocking done but then the staple/fold and cut machine broke. So from about 10.30am to 3pm we were taking sections apart, fitting canalised parts to it, refitting and testing. Importantly I handed Jukes the relevant…
Other Wars
The media war has always been with us. In the UK we all see at school the cartoon of Napoleon in George 3rd’s hand which has given rise to 200 years of Napoleon being small. Or of Hitler being a vegetarian despite his own cook saying he was a finick but never refused the meat…
What Books Tell Us
I was reading Paul Valéry the French thinker and critic, and who said the historian and the prophet are in the same boat – there is so much information needed to explain why things happened and why things will happen – that no one can imbibe it all. Modern life is not made so much by inventions…
Foretelling
There is a very interesting theory that the further you look back in history the further forward you can see. It is based on two thing: the first is we have had the same size brains for 200,00 years so the pool of new ways of doing things to create nations and societies is not…
Intersex Exists
Male and Female are no longer enough choices on official forms and haven’t been for twenty years when I first read that the cells in the embryo which make gonads are the same cells that make ovaries. That the determinants of gender – chromosomes, hormones glands etc do not all make the same admixture in…