American Oligarchy

The now clichéd "of the people, by the people, for the people" mantra has been reduced to shitting ON the people. How? Just by the fact that, today, more people's lives are ultimately in the grip of some private company, not the government (tho reps can squeal, they can't act).

Haiku #375

Observe that small mouse 

It can't produce all it needs 

Much to its chagrin 

What is Russia? (External View)

Today Russia is trying to make themselves the defenders of the "ethnic Russian-speakers" who have lived for ages within what we understand to be the geopolitical area dubbed the Ukraine. But when you begin playing with/depending on history, you are on a slippery slope. 

Go back in time to well before the end of the first millennium C.E. and you will be looking at a large area centred on Kiev (old spelling; sorry) that was first ruled and then settled by a people known historically as the Kievan Rus. The situation rose out of what was first a trading relationship between the locals and those who we would end up calling Vikings. Even way back then the critically located Kiev was a major node on the trading map between east and west. This is but a crude sketch but if Putin wants to establish an historical hegemony over Ukraine, he would be acting more historically accurately if he handed the rule of western Russia and the Ukraine to Denmark.

Pax Atomica

Maybe a war with nuclear weapons is just what we need. Wipe the chalk off the blackboard. Go back to square one. Hit that big RESET button and start over again. Would that new world be different? Probably. Would it be better? We'll never know unless we try.

Nuclear weapons are weird. Humanity created a super weapon, the most destructive device we knew how to build. The result? The end of very large scale wars. But we kill as well as we can with "conventional" weapons. Nukes may have prevented their own use but they certainly didn't bring peace. Yes, it's a radical idea but since nukes did not bring peace, what they assuredly can do is end humanity's ability to fight wars right across the board. That would be the Pax Atomica. Amen.…

After The Alphabet

After The Alphabet 

Rhetoric, 

The caustic sauce 

That forges words 

Into swords, shields,

Weapons for the 

Wily to wield.

Lacking kennings

Or couplets,

Metres or feet,

Jests for jousts

Then do without.

Seldom are the 

Silent trumped in 

Eloquence or 

Accused of sitting 

On the fence. 

Alternative Lifetimes

If I could have chosen when and where I was born, it would have been in one of five (or four of five, if it could have been gotten away with) chrono-geographic locations. Actually, I'm not going to list the birth years but, instead, the years that I would like to have been 18 years of age in. 1) London, 1818, in about the middle of the Romantic period of the arts. 2) London, 1850, in the full flowering of the Industrial Revolution, when change, innovation and exploration were at a peak and your local chemist had all manner of nifty substances for sale OTC. 3) Paris, Left Bank, 1927, among the artists of the Lost Generation. 4) San Francisco, 1948, as part of the Beat Generation. 5) Toronto, 1965, just 10 years prior to my "real" year, in order to take the fullest advantage of the "hippie era."

Now, I'm not saying that coming of age in the first half of the 70's was unfortunate, just that there have been other eras in which the possibilities for intellectual stimulation, as well as a wider range of planes of pleasure, were more abundant.

End The Debate Already!!

Ok! Enough already! Stop the crap! We don't have to stop global warming in order to save the planet, we want to save OURSELVES. Earth did just fine when the only life was plankton, and it'll keep revolving with or without us until the sun explodes. Earth isn't in danger, WE ARE!!