A Worrying Political Muse.

Would I be guilty of a silly flight of fancy if I look at the recent German election results and wonder whether one in five Germans want to welcome Adolf Hitler home? I suppose I probably would because I’m sure that it’s not so simple and not so extreme – yet.

And now we have indisputable signs that Trump wants to put distance between the US and Europe (he wants to do lots of other unsavoury things as well, but let’s keep it simple for now.) The old post-1945 security connection between the two is seriously under threat and might soon be a thing of the past.

One result of this is that the British Prime Minister has now undertaken to increase defence spending and says that it will be funded by a reduction in international aid. Just when the world seems to have entered a phase in which the common humanity of people everywhere is recognised – and the rich and powerful undertake to help the poor and vulnerable – it is being thrown out of the window. Mr Starmer justifies this – and it does have logic to commend it – by saying ‘the British people must come first.’ But isn’t there an unholy whiff here of ‘America first’ and ‘Germany first’ and ‘Italy first’? It seems that the fires of dangerous nationalism are being stoked in the whole western world by Trump’s complete disregard for humanitarian values.

But let’s accept for the moment that this is simply a major shift in the prevailing political wind. Increasing defence spending to build up and train an increased military profile will take several years to make a substantial difference. So what happens if Trump’s new best buddy Putin decides to start reviving the Soviet bloc by invading one or all of the Baltic States next week and Trump says ‘Tough’? That would certainly test America’s commitment to NATO, wouldn’t it? Might we then witness what would effectively be the start of WWIII, and might it lead to America (and presumably China) remaining aloof and picking the best bones off the battlefield? (That’s as long as the losers don’t unleash the N word, of course.)

Is this Trump’s big stratagem? Is Trump capable of thinking that far ahead? Or is it all just me giving vent to wild fantasies again? I certainly hope so.

The Blog as Travelogue.

If somebody were to ask me: ‘What is your blog about?’ I suppose the easiest answer would be to categorise it as a sort of travelogue. It’s a running commentary on the myriad things I see, experience, and comment upon as I walk the road of my life. In short, it’s a description of the scenery that I walk through.

But now there’s a problem; my life has become a wasteland of late and so there’s no scenery to describe. About the only thing which catches my eye at the moment is the incomprehensible behaviour of Trump and his fairy godfather, the mega-rich South African, and I’ve become a little weary of that so I shut it out. Otherwise, there’s nothing to observe, experience, and comment upon (unless you count the ever-present depression and I’ve done that one to death.) So what should I do about it?

I began countering this state of affairs by searching for alternate worlds to briefly inhabit, and found a most engaging BBC series based on a well known trilogy of books here in the UK. Watching one hour-long episode a night for the last two weeks kept me well engaged, until last night when a bombshell exploded. I suddenly developed a profound dislike for the main protagonist, and accompanying her was my principle reason for being there. I no longer find her company acceptable, you see, so that’s one alternate reality gone. Maybe I’ll find another one soon.

(I suppose I might mention that I feel ill tonight – sore chest, light headedness, fatigue, and an odd taste in my mouth. I expect it’s down to the changeable weather we’re having at the moment. It usually is.)

So now I ask myself whether this is worth posting. Why not? It’ll keep the little counter ticking over and I doubt I shall die of it. Sorry about the tedium.

The Worm Turns.

Given the nature of international relations over the past eighty years, I find it somewhat odd to witness the President of the USA clearly siding with transparently guilty Russia, while exchanging childish insults with the President of the equally transparently wronged party. He even goes so far as to label Zelensky ‘a dictator.’ And Putin isn’t?

I could go on to speculate on the dubious state of Trump’s mind and the questionable nature of American ‘diplomacy’ over the years, but more fruitful duties call so I won’t bother. (And then there’s the fact that my outcries and asides don’t amount to a hill o’ beans in this crazy world anyway.)

The Question of Trump and Appeasement.

I read today that Mr Lavrov, the Russian Foreign Minister, says there would be no point inviting Europe to take part in the discussions over Ukraine because Europe just wants to prolong the war. This sounds farcical on first reading, but I assume that what he meant was that Europe doesn’t want Putin to come out of the conflict with a substantial land grab. Trump, on the other hand, is now putting distance between America and Europe and probably doesn’t give a monkey’s toss if Ukraine loses some of its territory. Trump is, therefore, the one the Russians want to deal with rather than Ukraine or any other representative of Europe.

And Trump’s own position would appear to be very simple. If he can get a deal – by hook or by crook – in which Russia withdraws but keeps some prime real estate close to the warmer parts of the Black Sea, he can then present himself to the world as a peacemaker. (He could even come up with some pathetic, fallacious sound bite as he did when he said ‘I took a bullet for democracy.’ And he would be more easily able to save billions of dollars in military aid to Ukraine, which would be more acceptable to the folks at home than firing half the American civil service.) Some people would no doubt see Trump’s position as appeasement and draw parallels with Anthony Eden’s response to Nazi aggression in 1939, but probably not enough to count for very much.

And I might be completely wrong, of course. Time will tell, won’t it?

(But do I detect a slight whiff of the potential for a much bigger conflict here, one which I expect America would watch from the sidelines? I hope not.)

The Lady B's Letter and the Wishing of Luck.

The weather here has been unremittingly dull and cold for the last week, and such conditions are unfavourable to my perceptions of life and the human condition. I’m tired of one and dismissive of the other. I’ve fallen into a state of mind comprising a sour cocktail of apathy, relentless musing, and the seeking of alternate worlds in which to immerse myself. Hence no blog posts.

Much of that musing has concerned the remote figure of the Lady B. She follows me as the scent of a tropical island might follow the lonely sailor heading west long after the fruits and flowers and seductive palms have sunk beneath the eastern horizon. Her physical presence is still in this world, but the phantasm lives only in a veiled place and out of reach.

Five and a half years ago I wrote her story down and settled it in an envelope. I asked my ex, Mel, to give it to her I’ve gone, but tonight I considered destroying it since what purpose would be served by her reading it? None at all, I suppose, but I’d still like her to read it anyway (although whether I shall care when the time comes remains to be seen – or not, of course.) I didn’t destroy it.

*  *  *

I wrote most of that last night until it began to bore me. Today has been dull and cold again with occasional drizzle, but we’re forecast to have higher temperatures and a little sunshine from Wednesday on.

Tonight I feel I should mention the big news from across the water. It appears that the USA – at least in the guise of Messrs Trump and Vance – is tired of playing Europe’s older and bigger brother who occasionally steps in to help when the latest bully is going around biffing everybody. America wants to stand aloof now, still being the Big Boss when it suits, but declining to spend dollars on the ne’er-do-wells over there. That way, Mr Donald can add 'Charity Begins at Home' to 'God Bless America' as he stands with hand on heart planning how to cement his position at the head of the table for the long haul. And more middle class Americans will get jacuzzis, and the truly rich will become truly richer, and America really will be great again. And can you blame him? (Whether it will work or not is part of a different argument.)

But what about us Brits? We gave up being part of Europe with the Brexit vote, didn’t we, and Donald has real estate over here. So will he make an exception for us? Well, whether he does or not, I think we might have to decide whether we want to be the obedient lap dog tucked securely in Donald’s folded arm, or go cap in hand back to the EU and build a bigger army.

And do I really care? No, I don’t really care, at least not for my own sake because my time is nearly up. Tomorrow is the business of today’s young, and it’s for them to deal with. I wish them the best of luck.

Trump and the Grabbing of Gaza.

Now let me see whether I’ve got this right. My understanding of the Israeli hardliners’ attitude towards the Palestinians runs roughly thus:

This whole land is our land. God gave it to us thousands of years ago and so it is scared ground. That being the case, only we have the right to occupy it; you have none. That’s why we’re forcibly evicting you from the place you have called home for many centuries and making it available to proper Jews. (If I’m in error, please feel free to correct me.)

If I’m right – or even approximately so – I wonder how the hardliners will feel about having part of their sacred ground owned by America and developed into yet another Mediterranean playground for wealthy westerners. I wonder whether this was the reason for Mr Netanyahu’s visit to his pal Trump a few days ago. I suppose Mr N might well be in favour of allowing a part of what he considers to be Israeli territory to become American-owned because Israel will then have another level of security against the dastardly Muslims. And so maybe he can persuade the hardliners to agree to having part of God’s own country swallowed up by American capital. Strange world, isn’t it?

But what about Hamas and other dissident groups in the Middle East? How would they feel about it? I can’t imagine they’d be too pleased, and I feel it would be logical to expect deaths and bloodshed to follow in the wake of such a project. If Israel really wants to take the steam out of Hamas, surely it needs to reach an acceptable accord with the Palestinians, not throw stinking mud in the faces of the armed wing.

And what of the Gazans themselves? I gather tens of thousands of them died in the recent ‘war’, and those that are left are now trying to rebuild their lives. How must they feel about somebody living over 4,000 miles away seriously threatening to relocate them and turn their homes and homeland into an investment opportunity? (It’s interesting that I haven’t yet heard anybody in the media use the term ‘diaspora.’)

I think it must be obvious that this plan of Trump’s is both heartless and the height of disrespect, but that’s just the nature of Trump. I’m quite sure that he has no heart, and I doubt he could even spell the word ‘disrespect.’

And another point occurs to me: For nearly forty years I’ve been complaining about the despoliation of the Mediterranean coastline by the tourist industry, especially the northern part fringing Europe. Even the locals are now complaining about it. They want tourism rationed there, and a return to something like sanity. Now Trump wants to do the same thing in the eastern Med, just as he took part of the wild Scottish coastline and built commercially attractive golf courses on it.

But will he succeed? Personally I doubt it, but Big Capitalism is a powerful enemy so maybe he will.

Taking the Wrong Line.

There’s a piece on the BBC sports website about Kadeja ‘Bunny’ Shaw, the Manchester City striker who is widely recognised as one of the best strikers in the women’s game, receiving ‘racist and misogynistic’ abuse on social media. The piece carries a statement from the Man City management expressing the usual outrage in the usual predictable terms: ‘There is no place for racism in our beautiful game and we will take all necessary steps to identify the culprits and punish them!’ and other similar platitudes. We’re seeing this kind of thing all the time now.

When are they going to realise that by taking this line they are only making matters worse because they’re letting the perpetrators know that their vomitous bile is having an effect? Social media has become huge now, and trolling comes with the territory. It’s as common as cow dung in the farmyard. So what can the players do about it?

Simple. They need to realise – and it shouldn’t take too much effort – that the women’s game has grown immensely and the top players are now basking in the limelight of celebrity. They are, by the societal perceptions of the day, highly successful people in their chosen field, whereas the perpetrators of abuse are sad little nobodies with nothing better to do. The perpetrators are also very much in the minority among the people who follow the sport.

So don’t publicise the abuse. Ignore it. And if they can’t ignore it, come off social media because it isn’t going to stop while it continues to be given big publicity and made to seem important.

The New Cold War.

Well, what a turn up. The old Cold War was a nice tidy business between, principally, the USA and the Soviet Union. The new Cold War is between the USA and Canada/Mexico. What fun. I wonder whether the fact that Canada is still part of the British Commonwealth of Nations has been given any consideration. Not that it would matter, I suppose. Maybe the French Canadians would even welcome being part of the 51^st state, although I somehow doubt it. Yes, fun indeed.

But I gather there’s a bigger concern – the effect of Trump’s Tariffs on the global macro economy. I remember it being said during Donald’s last occupation of the hot seat that, being a businessman rather than an economist, he understands micro economics but not the macro variety. I don’t suppose we need worry, though. I’m sure there are much bigger fish in the global economic sea than Mr Trump, and I expect they’ll be able to put him firmly in his place if the situation becomes too turbulent.

(Although I have been saying for many years that I can’t see big capitalism lasting forever - so did Karl Marx. It seems to me – and I admit that I know nothing about the intricacies of macro economics – that it’s all based on money, and we all know that money doesn’t exist in an objective sense. It’s all about trust and consensus, and those two pillars of support can be a little fragile when the waves of turbulence swell.)

*  *  *

By the way, my computer is following my lead. It really, really doesn’t like getting up in the morning. Neither does it like being given too much work to do. I apologise to him frequently, but just in case you hear never more of me…

Imbolc Oddities.

Soon after the clock struck 12 last night…

(What’s brown and sounds like a bell? Du-u-u-ng. I like that one.)

… I remembered that it was the start of the Celtic season of Imbolc, and so I did my usual ‘white rabbits-plus-two-repetitions’ thing as I always do at the start of every month. (Imbolc is a particularly propitious time, you see, because spring is when rabbits are known to multiply. And it’s impossible to know whether superstitions have any effect or not. It’s no good saying ‘I did the white-rabbits-with-two-repetitions thing and nothing good happened’, but you can never know whether something bad would have happened if you hadn’t. See?) And then I listened to lots of Celtic music on YouTube before going to bed.

Now, it is a fact that most of the odd things that happen to me happen in bed. Last night I was dreaming that I belonged to some sort of organisation which was twinned with a German organisation of like mind, and we came by the intelligence that our German friends had made us some soup. The problem was that we were unaware of how much soup they’d made, and so we didn’t know whether there would be enough to go around and that was causing consternation. In fact, so much consternation was being caused that it woke me up, and guess what – I felt chilled. There was no obvious reason to feel that way because it wasn’t a particularly cold night, the bedroom heater was working perfectly, and I was covered with a good quality flannel sheet and a 17 tog duvet. But chilled was what I felt, so I pulled the covers around my head and began to feel my whole body warming up rapidly. That was reassuring until I noticed that my hands were warming to an alarming degree, so alarming that I began to fear that they were about to burn. Seriously! And then they returned to normal.

So what was that all about? The German connection was probably the result of having read about the spat between Mrs Merkel and Mr Merz over the AfD thing (I did say I was keeping an eye on German nationalism, didn’t I?) Maybe the desire for soup was engendered by the fact of feeling chilled. But what about the burning hands? Was that biological, psychological, or paranormal? It’s never happened before so how can I know? But I might add that I’ve started to get intermittent sharp pains at the base of my fingers when I grip things, so maybe there’s a connection.

All I did today was pay my electric bill, which hopefully should ensure that I’ll have a functioning heater in my bedroom for at least another month. And this morning’s walk was uneventful, being entirely devoid of rabbits, Germans, or creatures with flaming talons.

And I know this post is tedious, but I wanted to get something on the blog to mark the start of Imbolc. Such things matter to a mind which spends most of its energy on the question of whether there’s anything meaningful about living a life.

Contrasting Fortunes.

A strange week, this. On the downside have been the aching legs, the tight chest, the usual depressions, and meeting the replacement dentist (who’s actually the practice owner) now that my dear Ms Medeea has sailed away to far off shores. On the upside were the dog fixes, the cow fixes (Mr Robinson’s new, all black bullocks), and the lady fixes courtesy of the coffee shop.

There’s a new one, you see – lady that is. Ellie by name. Yesterday she was on with the established Sarah who appeared to be in charge for once, even though I always feel she should be revising for her A-levels rather than skipping around doing the barista thing more expertly than any others of my acquaintance. Ellie is even younger.

So, in order to break the ice and not appear gloomy in the face of such shining young stars, I offered to recite one of my ditties. Sarah gave Ellie a look which I’m still trying to interpret thirty hours later. I think it was meant to convey: ‘I’ll bet this is going to be a right load of old crap, but he is a customer so I suppose we’d better humour him.’ I warned them that it would be one of my darker efforts (I had just been to the dentist after all.)

And then I began:

As Tom lay sleeping in his bed

A lady came and crushed his head

With talons sharp and molars red

Then sucked his brains ’till he was dead

‘Ooh,’ said Ellie, ‘that is dark. Thank you.’ I told her I would recite a more wholesome one next time, and so I will. Meanwhile, Sarah had walked off to clear and clean some tables. (As much as I do so enjoy the vibrant energy of young women, I suspect I might have lost the ability to impress them. I suppose that’s as it should be.)

And tonight I read the Wiki article on Sylvia Plath. It appears there’s some dispute as to whether she definitely intended to commit suicide that day, and I was reminded again that the gas which now comes through domestic pipes is no longer fatal. Modern times, eh.

Becoming a Reluctant Bad Guy.

Every night I play one game of chess against the computer, and every night I lose. I’ve said before that I simply don’t have the mind of a chess player. I’m too straight thinking and straight dealing for the Machiavellian process of preparing to outwit someone in a process of perpetual threat and counter threat. And since I see it as Machiavellian, I’ve even been led to consider that maybe all good chess players must have a dark and dubious side to their natures.

Tonight I won. Congratulations, proclaimed the little dialogue box, you have won by checkmate. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen that. So here’s the question:

Should my self-image rise a little on the occasion of such a red letter day, or should it slip further than it already is? Whatever the answer to that, I feel I should treat myself to a Bushmills Irish whiskey tonight. It’s rather splendid.

(Incidentally, I was also treated to both a dog fix and a cow fix this morning. Does that settle the question?)

The Leaf and the Lady.

As I was walking through Uttoxeter this morning, well huddled in winter coat, muffler, hat, and gloves, my mood was sombre. The high street was sparsely occupied as it usually is on a Sunday, and the two charity shops which open on the sabbath had offered nothing of interest. The dark sky glowered and the cold, damp wind had a most inhospitable feel. I caught sight of my reflection in a shop window, and saw there a parallel with a fallen, withered leaf rustling mindlessly along a kerb towards the nearest road grid and oblivion. Advancing age sometimes encourages the perception of such a parallel.

I walked down the hill and crossed the road into the retail park, and there I met a young woman with whom I felt an immediate connection. Though not classically pretty, she was certainly fair of face. Much more than that, however, was the air of affability and authenticity which shone from her to an extent which is most unusual. We talked for all of two minutes about the reason for my approaching her in the first place: I’d seen her driving into the car park in an early 90s vintage VW Golf, the like of which I haven’t seen in several decades. (I thought it was a Mk1, but she informed me that it was actually a Mk2.)

The image of the shrivelled leaf disappeared, and it never occurred to me to peruse my image in any further shop windows. But the thought was not lost on me that mood can be so radically lifted by the merest pressure of just the right nature.

America and a Dubious Road.

I watched a YouTube video last night made by an American woman currently living in the UK who raised the question: ‘Will American Patriotism Be Its Downfall?’

She began by citing the fact that American children are spoon fed masses of patriotic conditioning from a very early age, referring to school children being required to swear the Oath of Allegiance every morning, the singing of the national anthem, and the proliferation of Star and Stripes on nearly every spare piece of ground; features which most of the rest of the world find pretty damn silly because they’re just not necessary.

She had a lot to say about this – and did so with a commendable sense of balance, I might add – including the fact that she saw nothing wrong with patriotism as long as it doesn’t step over the line into the area of nationalism. There’s a difference between the two, and nationalism – especially when embraced by a country as powerful as the US – can be very dangerous to everybody else in the world and even to itself. (Inevitably, I suppose, Hitler and Nazi Germany was quoted as an example.)

At this point the post could become very long, but I’m too lazy and tired of life to write lengthy tomes these days so I’ll just mention one thing she included in her argument. She pointed out that the USA is very powerful – possibly the most powerful country in the world – but that, with power comes responsibility. It’s another way of saying that if we want the world to be a reasonably sane place, self-interest has to be tempered with an ethical dimension. To any right-minded person, it’s entirely wrong for a country to use its excessive wealth and power only for its own benefit.

This morning I read that Trump has suspended overseas aid (apart from military aid to Israel and Egypt apparently.) That surprised even me.

And so I wonder again where Trump and his cohorts are going to take the US over the next four years. And I’m tempted to think that the much-vaunted ‘special relationship’ between the US and UK is doomed to become an object of faded regard (with thanks to an American called Zoe who coined the phrase.) It certainly sheds new light on the decision to take the UK out of the EU nine years ago.

On the Trump Card and New Rules.

I gather Donald Trump is promising America a ‘golden age’ now that he’s back in charge. And his best buddy, Elon Musk, said at a post-inauguration rally that ‘the future of civilisation is assured’, before giving what is clearly a Nazi-style salute.

There’s a scary vibe coming out of the US at the moment, but I suppose we need to see what the next twelve months bring in their wake rather than succumb to a knee jerk reaction. And I imagine the less right-leaning European states will adopt a more guarded approach in dealings with America while attempting to keep something of the status quo intact. America does, after all, hold NATO over our heads like a sword of Damocles. (Or maybe it would be more fitting to suggest the analogy of holding the trump card. Isn’t that nicely ironic?)

I’m going to be watching Germany where the far right is clearly gaining ground in the national consciousness. Italy (home of Mussolini, don’t forget) and Hungary have already gone some way along that road, and the whole picture is starting to look a bit messy. And then there’s the possibility of a Russia-China-North Korea axis taking shape in the not-too-distant future. As for the UK, Mrs Thatcher more or less slipped us into America’s back pocket forty years ago, so maybe we have nowhere to run.

But back to American internal politics. Even if nothing particularly drastic happens over the next five years, I find it hard to believe that Trump will simply walk away from the White House quietly in 2029 just because the rules don’t allow a third term. I imagine he will certainly want to be the puppet master if not the actual puppet. And rules can be changed anyway. And what about Mr Musk? He seems to be positioning himself to play Warwick the Kingmaker at least, and maybe even take the crown himself. I know the rules don’t allow that possibility at the moment because he wasn’t born in the USA, but rules can be changed…

Sit!

When the Brexit argument was going on in Britain I argued that if we left the EU we would come increasingly under the influence of America. (Oddly enough, so did Noam Chomsky.) It seemed to me that it was better to be an equal member of a powerful club than be the lapdog of the latest American president. The mostly aged little Englanders disagreed. They were still labouring under the delusion that Britain was a major world power which could stand alone and meet any other power on at least equal terms.

And now there appears to be a bit of a panic going on. The media are wondering how long it will be before Donald Trump consents to a meeting with our Prime Minister, Keir Starmer. There is talk of Trump disliking Starmer, and being bent on keeping the little guy trembling in the corner for a while. That would be typical of Trump’s mindset after all. And then there is the matter of our increasing economic reliance on the US…

And now I’m trying to conjure an appropriate metaphor – something to do with rescue centres, or dog training facilities, something like that. I’ve already used to term ‘America’s poodle’ in an earlier post and repetition won’t do. I suspect it might prove more serious this time. Trump seems to me to be more emboldened than he was last time out.

In any event, my brain is in no fit state to come up with something pithy, so this will have to do.

The Matter of Breath.

Tonight I watched an episode of the BBC dark comedy series Inside Number 9. It was the one in which guests at a dinner party are playing ‘sardines’ – one person hides and the others have to find him/her, and then stay there gathering together until they’re all squashed into a confined space. In this case, it was a double wardrobe in one of the bedrooms.

I found it disturbing because it reminded me that in such a situation the people would be so close that they would be able to smell each other’s breath, and that’s something I’ve always found odious even if the breath has been sweet. I feel the same way if I watch a film or drama in which two people are talking to one another close up and face to face.

I’ve examined this strange aspect of my nature and can only put it down to the fact that when you smell somebody else’s breath, it means you’re taking into your body something that has just come out of somebody else’s body. That strikes me as utterly revolting, and probably stems from my lifelong disquiet with all matters corporeal. I wonder where it comes from.

Separating God and Religion.

An ex-neighbour of mine once asked me to talk to her about religion because, she said, she wanted to ‘find a faith.’ Well now, the concept of ‘finding’ a faith raises serious considerations of its own, but that can be left to another time. What interests me for present purposes is the fact that I thought about her request this morning (heaven knows why) and I was suddenly struck by a notion of no known provenance:

God and religion are not inseparable. Neither needs the other.

Since I wasn’t at all sure that I’d originated this notion, I thought it would be fun to examine the concept and see whether I could make sense of it. This is what I’ve come up with so far:

Religions have two functions. The first is to address a fundamental suspicion (for which read ‘belief’) that material reality is only one part of a wider span of existence, and that the human animal, at least, contains an invisible presence which is capable of experiencing the wider reality. Further, that this invisible reality, usually referred to as the soul, continues to exist and be sentient after the material body has ceased to function. I see no reason to have a God as part of that function, and indeed Buddhism doesn’t include one.

But religions are also systems of life management, and I think we can be fairly sure that they were formulated by humans in far off times as a way of providing structure and stability to ancient civilisations. I’m prepared to accept that the sages who devised the systems might well have had a level of knowledge which later generations lost, but it doesn’t alter the fact that the systems themselves were man-made. (‘Man’ being non-gender specific, of course.) And so the rules and the protocols and the practices were laid down and the less enlightened beings who formed the majority of the population learned to follow them slavishly.

But in order to have sufficient authority, these systems needed a distant and all-powerful chief who was omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent, indefatigable, and unquenchable. In other words, the ultimate embodiment of the supreme leader whose will was absolute and could not be challenged. And this is where it gets interesting.

I suspect that the early sages were aware of the notion that reality was created by some supreme, unfathomable intelligence who (or which, if you prefer) decided one day to create light, sound, and the energy on which to build individualised expressions of itself (I gather that ancient Hindu scriptures referred to what we now call sub atomic particles thousands of years before modern science discovered them, and their creation ‘myth’ is much closer to the view of Universal Consciousness than people are routinely taught today, at least in the exoteric Judaic tradition to which we in the west have become habituated.) And so they would have held the view that every fragment of material reality was a fragment of the creator who created it in order to observe itself. So I am part of God, you are part of God, every tree, every stone, every animal, every blade of grass, is part of God. Forget the ‘transcendent’ in ‘Immanent and Transcendent’. God is not a separate being, but rather we are God, all of us right down to the tiniest grain of sand on Blackpool beach. The ancient sages probably saw it that way.

But this didn’t quite fit certain practical considerations with regard to the mass of the great unwashed who simply wanted to know the best way of killing a mastodon and a reason not to fear death while making the attempt. And so they encouraged the notion that up there somewhere was a divine and all powerful being who watched and made rules and judged and punished the transgressor and rewarded the virtuous and demanded to be worshipped unquestioningly. And they gave It a name which varies from tradition to tradition. And when the time came to fight wars and grab land, this supreme and separate being was the ultimate in convenient scapegoats. Do whatever you want to suit the exigencies of the tribe, no matter what level of depravity, cruelty, and abuse may thus be occasioned, and justify it on the grounds that you are acting in accordance with God’s will. And that, it appears to me, is a major component of what religion has become. It’s evident that such an organisation needs no concept in God, only a convenient, conditioned belief in such a being.

(And if you choose to believe that the earth was seeded by beings created by a superior race of aliens, the argument still holds because the aliens are also fragments of It.)

And I’m sure I’m saying nothing entirely new here, but it’s as far as I’ve got off he top of my head.

Does that explain the sudden thought that God and religion are not mutually inclusive? I have no idea. It’s just a ramble that spilled out of my ageing brain, and I’m sure it doesn’t matter a jot what I think anyway.

*  *  *

I’m a tiny bit preoccupied at the moment, having just read that David Lynch died today. I think I would have liked to know him.

On Two Notable Shifts.

A unique and most notable event took place today. A situation arose in which the Lady B saw me, but I didn’t see her. It’s always been the other way round before. It made me wonder whether the tilt of the earth’s axis is undergoing a change.

And on that note, it occurs to me that it wouldn’t take too much of a shift and we in the more northerly latitudes would be living in a polar wasteland. A similar shift the other way and we would be living in the tropics.

It’s interesting and a little scary to realise just what a delicate road we’re treading on this little planet of ours.

The Perils of AI and the New Magic Words.

Our esteemed fuehrer, Mr Starmer, says he’s now on a mission to make the UK the world leader in the development of AI. He says it will boost the economy and create jobs. Sounds grand, doesn’t it, and yet I have my reservations.

At first I thought I was simply falling prey to a condition which creeps up on people as they’re getting older. They become more conservative; they want everything to remain the same because they like the comfort of familiarity, and I’m no exception. I’ve learned that as the brain ages it slows down and becomes less adventurous, and so it finds new equipment and methodology increasingly difficult to learn.

I told myself that I was, therefore, simply being unduly reactionary. I reminded myself that technology has been becoming increasingly influential in our lives since at least the invention of the steam engine. But then I thought a little further and realised that, until now, people have been controlling the machines, whereas with AI there’s the likelihood that that the machines will come increasingly to control the humans. I didn’t like the sound of that. And I’ve heard experts in the field forecast that AI will eventually develop a faculty which we may reasonably call sentience, and will begin to run matters based on their own desires and perceptions rather than for the benefit of their creators. They add the frightening prospect that AI will have no moral compass. Science fiction literature has been forecasting it for some time.

And then I thought a little further again and realised that Mr Starmer sometimes reminds me of an advanced android.

Oh dear…

Footnote

Have you noticed that when politicians and the corporate world want to win over public opinion to serve their often nefarious and always self-serving agendas, all they have to do is invoke the magic words ‘economy’ and ‘jobs’ and the road ahead is built in an instant? Abracadabra and Open Sesame cut no ice these days, but these two precious bits of magic work wonders.

A Fine Day for a Juvenile Loner.

I live close to one of the UK's leading theme parks. It's called Alton Towers and I've been there only once, on a sunny summer's day when I was 10. It wasn't a theme park then, though, but just a grand country house surrounded by gardens and parkland. I was thinking about it today for some reason and realised that it was the first notable expression of my loner gene.

I often played alone during the school holidays and so on, but this was different. This was an excursion organised by the cub scout troop to which I belonged. I knew all the other kids perfectly well and got on with them, but when they got off the bus I wandered away on my own. I spent much of the day sitting on a grassy bank with my mother-prepared provisions, watching the water fowl on the lake and the people passing by. And then I explored the parkland and gardens before returning to the bus at the appointed time. And I never did get to learn what the rest of the kids had been doing. I wasn't interested.

 

 

This is a picture of the very boy on the very day, and shows the point in my life when I was expanding into the role of school fat kid. It got worse before it got better at age 14, but by then I'd been marked to play in the front row of the rugby scrum and never managed to escape.

(I remember the day very well, surprisingly, and also feel a little sad when I see masses of traffic lined up nose to tail on the main road leading to Alton. Where there was once peaceful parkland and gardens, there now stands a forest of white knuckle rides making an awful lot of noise. And I expect the rank odour of mindless capitalism hangs like a leering ne'er-do-well in the once-pure air. But then I suppose it could be said that it has merely replaced the rank odour of class consciousness. So be it.)

On Molars and the Dreaded Mask.

I occasionally think of how dental practice has changed since I was a boy. I used to get toothache quite a lot back then, and if the application of clove oil failed to cure the condition I was simply taken to the dentist and the offending tooth was extracted. I never had a filling. None of my friends had fillings either because it seems that teeth were not afforded the respect they now attract. My mother was even persuaded by one dentist to have all her perfectly good teeth taken out and replaced with dentures because plastic teeth gave less trouble. She was in her early to mid thirties at the time.

What most intrigues me, however, is that all my extractions were performed under a general anaesthetic administered by a lone dentist without the assistance of a qualified anaesthetist or even a nurse. I’m not sure how standard that practice was because I remember conversations with other kids when the question was asked: ‘Did you have gas or cocaine?’ (Cocaine!?) But it was certainly true in my case.

And sometimes I wonder whether this commonly used procedure ever produced seriously deleterious side effects, which I assume is likely and the reason for not doing it any more. So how many people suffered life-changing conditions, and did anybody ever fail to wake up? I’ve never seen any statistics on that question, but I’d love to know whether any exist and, if so, what they reveal.

(I might add as a minor footnote that I was always taken to the nearest Woolworths store after an extraction and bought a small toy by way of recompense. I suppose it went some way to ameliorate the fear and the unpleasantness of having the taste of blood in my mouth for the rest of the day.)

The Story of the Mini-Eons.

Every day my Blogger stats show me a number of the posts which have been accessed over the past 24 hours. It’s become a favourite habit to read them late every night while I’m listening to a mix of favourite music on YouTube, and when I do I become increasingly aware that my life since moving to this house can be divided into three fairly distinct periods.

The first was the six years up to May 2012. I call it my golden period. A few unsightly scratches were in evidence, but mostly it was about the end of my fiction writing, the start of the blog, and the making of connections with a number of people who enlivened my life most wonderfully.

The second was the six years between May 2012 and March 2018. I call that one my brown period. Many of the special connections, in particular the most notable of all at the start of the period, fell away and a sense of loss began to impose itself on my perceptions. The unsightly scratches developed into sore and engorged weals for a time, and then along came the cancer culminating in the big operation which brought substantial amounts of pain, inconvenience and distress in its wake.

The third consists of the six years and a bit from March 2018 to the present. That’s the grey period. All the special connections formed in the first period faded away, several new health issues – some connected and some not – added layers of concern and inconvenience, and my general physical condition is undergoing the gradual drip of degeneration commonly associated with advancing years. The one bright star to have risen in the sky is the fact that my relationship with my daughter and her family has strengthened a great deal. That’s very welcome of course, but the sky remains a dull and wintry grey.

It’s odd that these ‘eons’ should have fallen fairly neatly into six-yearly periods, so what’s next I wonder. More of the same? Time will tell. What I can say is that my awareness of these delineations has coloured my view of the posts I made at the various times, and that’s interesting.

For now, though, it’s time to start preparing dinner in a kitchen which is little warmer than a fridge. Back soon.

Observing Dear Mama.

The Lady B’s dear mama ghosted me in Ashbourne this morning . That’s never happened before and I’m sure it wasn’t intentional. She just looked a little rapt withal (that’s a bit of Shakespeare in case you didn’t know.) Later I saw her talking to a shop assistant in Sainsbury’s, and thought that odd too.

‘My word,’ I thought, ‘dear mama engaging with one of the lesser classes. Maybe she’s on a mission to examine the workings of the peasant mind in order to achieve a more universal level of erudition.’

That last comment is, of course, made entirely in jest. I like dear mama, as I’ve said several times on this blog. I’ve known her for about eighteen years and have never detected the slightest whiff of snobbery in her mindset. She’s the classiest person I’ve ever known, and I’ve often observed through my own extended life that the absence of snobbery is one of the markers of a truly classy person.

Snobbery is largely the preserve of the upwardly mobile in our highly materialistic society, and especially notable among the self-made wealthy people who still preach the American Dream in spite of being the very embodiment of the lie.

Humanity at a Crossroads.

I watched a documentary last night around what Noam Chomsky, one of the world’s leading thinkers, had to say about the impending catastrophic decline of civilisation. He gave his reasons for it happening and his suggestions as to the changes we need to make in order to arrest it. The reasons came as a moderate boost to my ego because they were all the same things I’ve been saying for years, but the solutions only left me more pessimistic.

In order to arrest the decline, he said, there needs to be a major universal shift in consciousness among the people of all nations. I agree, but that seems most unlikely to happen. As long as the affairs of the world continue to be ordered by a tiny minority of rich and powerful people and institutions – the bankers, the entrepreneurs, the power hungry politicians, and the self-serving imperative of the corporate world – the majority of humanity will continue to be either conditioned unquestioningly to follow the prescribed road or too isolated and powerless to get it changed.

People, especially in the ‘developed’ world, are manically resistant to change unless it brings greater prospect of lifestyle-oriented consumption. That’s the position we’re conditioned to take now: lifestyle and consumption are the whole foundation for a happy and successful life. A few people realise that this is a trick to keep the rich getting richer while the rest labour on the treadmill, but I’m quite sure they’re too few in number. I used to hope that one day their number would achieve critical mass and the shift would be seismic, but I see no sign of it. And the same is true of the world’s leaders. I don’t see many politicians or potentates whose motivation is to make the world and its human societies genuinely better. Politics are still all about swelling the personal power base and maintaining the status quo. (Look what happened to that benighted genius Nikola Tesla, for example.)

And that’s why I think we’re heading for a cataclysm – maybe tomorrow, maybe next year, maybe in a hundred years, for who knows? Maybe Marx will be proved right when he prophesied that capitalism will one day destroy itself through its own greed. That would produce quite a cataclysm. Or maybe it will be climate change, or a nuclear war, or some other form of economic meltdown.

It is interesting that the mythologies of ancient peoples throughout the world carry a common message: that when humans reach a crossroads and take the wrong road through greed, selfishness, aggression, and disregard for the natural order, something comes along to bring them to their knees. Maybe this is the universal consciousness at work. In any event, I think we’re at a crossroads.

Two Notes on the Reckless Tendency.

I had a little adventure this morning. I decided to do my Uttoxeter shop today, since yesterday was so foul, and was quite shocked by the amount of water flowing off the fields and onto the bottom lane which runs for about two miles beyond the Shire. This turned out to be a relatively minor inconvenience, however, because as I approached the river bridge outside the village of Rocester (Roman name, note; they had a garrison there a long time ago) I saw that the whole of the road on my side of the bridge was under a substantial depth of water for a distance of fifty or sixty feet.

I should have turned around at that point and taken the longer, higher route to Uttoxeter, but I didn’t because I’m subject to the occasional reckless streak. And as Macbeth said: to return were as tedious as go o’er and so go o’er was what I did – slowly. I felt the front of the car pushing the water aside and considered how silly I would feel if I didn’t make it. (You occasionally hear of cars getting stranded in fords and floods, don’t you, and it’s always tempting to think ‘what a prat!’) But fortune was on my side and my precious little French princess took me through, giving me no more than a sharp rap on the knuckles by way of a soft brake and a juddering clutch which she relinquished after an hour’s rest in the town car park. (My little Clio is a real heroine, you know. I love her to bits.)

*  *  *

And talking of heroines, I decided today that the woman who runs the British Heart Foundation charity shop in Uttoxeter is really rather handsome. She also has a voice redolent of the Lady B’s dear mama, which is an added bonus of no little merit. In short, she has class. And so now I’m seriously – or maybe only temporarily, for who can tell? – considering donning my Sherlock hat and engaging her in conversation to find out more.

I probably won’t because she’s middle aged (although not by much) and a lot of middle aged women scare me witless. But you never know. Maybe one day my occasional reckless tendency will come to the fore at an opportune moment and my latest case will begin.

Don’t bother watching this space, though. I doubt it will be worth the effort.

A Flaw in the System.

I was reading an article on the BBC News website this morning about something unsavoury going on in the cesspit that it is American politics. It reminded me that the world is generally run by a bunch of thieves, liars, abusers, and other rank opportunists who will do whatever’s necessary to gain power and bask in the glory of their achievement. Some of them simply take power and hold onto it, of course – people like Putin, Assad (until recently), the little fat guy who runs North Korea, and so on. But America is a democracy, right?

Indeed, and democracy has much to commend it, but it also has a few loopholes. One of them is that if you want one of the august body mentioned above to get the reins of power, all you have to do is surreptitiously engineer the situation so that the people are offered a choice of two bad guys. And then the majority of the population will turn out and vote for one of them. Job done. Or so it seems to a cynic like me (and cynics are sometimes right, don’t forget.)

And so it amuses me to imagine that, given the techno savvy there now is in the world, the next Presidential election might be able to be punctuated several times a day by subliminal mind control on every TV station in the nation. The people must be instructed to stay home and put out signs at the front of their properties which read:

GIVE ME SOMEONE WORTH VOTING FOR AND THEN I’LL VOTE

Maybe I can manage to arrange to be the world’s best hacker in my next life.

And here’s what’s fascinating me at the moment: I have a suspicion that Elon Musk has designs on using his wealth and influence to be the next President of the good ol’ US of A. Imagine that, or don’t if you value your sanity.