image by AI; my own somewhat hyperbolic prompt Reconnaissance The ravens come to feast upon the deer. Their talons are too dull to tear like claws. They smartly team with wolves, as hunting peers And point the way to road kill with their caws. These creatures love to play, nurse others’ chicks, Do barrel-rolls and…
Image of wildfires in Montana comes from rawpixel.com, and is labeled Public Domain. The media are full of ‘explanations’ (opinions) about what is going on in the world. What is Trump thinking. What does country X ‘want’. Why is this the way it is. What will happen next. Why does the Epstein Class behave like…
AI image, my own prompt; text screenshot from the website of Soundraw music software. All music lovers who perform others’ work are constantly walking a line between plagiarism (stealing music from other artists without acknowledgement) and appropriate use (eg singing in choirs, or building on others’ musical compositions and ‘ideas’). This line has become murkier…
In a recent interview by Chris Hedges, XR founder Roger Hallam, recovering from a series of imprisonments for protest activities in increasingly repressive and struggling post-Brexit Britain, talks about what we can do, and what we are likely to do, as collapse deepens. We are already responding, largely subconsciously, to the horrifying reality that our…
This is #56 in a series of month-end reflections on the state of the world, and other things that come to mind, as I walk and hike in my local community. Two teenagers, possibly a younger brother and older sister, are sitting opposite each other at the café at the table beside mine. They are playing a…
This is a work of fiction. “So there’s no self, no ‘I’ or ‘you’, just bodies conditioning each other. And those bodies ‘decide’ everything we do, based on that conditioning. And then our brains get to work, after the fact, to rationalize those decisions, to ‘make sense’ of them and integrate that knowledge into their…
Now that the collapse of our political, economic, social and ecological systems is accelerating, the signs of this collapse, including scapegoating, corruption, and social disorder are becoming more obvious. This is the seventeenth of a series of articles on some of these signposts. In the “old days” when I was growing up (the 1960s) we started…
image by AI; my own prompt Earlier this month, I was looking at my ‘upcoming blog post ideas’ list just before going into my bathroom for my morning shower. I was lamenting that none of the subjects on my list were very interesting, and contemplating skipping a couple of posts until there was something I…
image by Layers on Pixabay (please check out the rest of her extraordinary and anonymous work at the same link) I’m in the process of writing an essay, and a song, about how, when it hurts too much, we reach the point we have to stop reading, stop watching, and even stop caring ‘too much’…
It hardly needs to be said, but one of the most nefarious activities of the corporate oligarchs and their fellow Epstein Class tech bros is trying to get us all to use ‘apps’ for everything online, instead of the open World Wide Web. Apps are simply a covert attempt at privatization of the commons of…
