A poetic prophecy for our time.

AUGUST 1968 The Ogre does what ogres can, Deeds quite impossible for Man, But one prize is beyond his reach, The Ogre cannot master Speech: About a subjugated plain, Among its desperate and slain, The Ogre stalks with hands on hips, While drivel gushes from his lips. W. H. Auden Rings a few bells. ( Blogger can't do line breaks. Sorry.)

Trump has done his work.

The hostages are free. Now the genocide can move up a gear with no bargaining chips for the Gazans. Two million Gazans to be processed. Israelis seem to have learnt from experience. Or have they. We need to ensure they understand the inevitable fates of mass murderers. Germany can tell it's tale.

"Love is not" all by Edna St Vincent Millay

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution's power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

Says it all. 

October Flower

A little poetry.

dawn songs in the dews of young orange trees;

and raging orisons; and wordless longings;

sung in tranquility's waters sliding in sun's

 light;

and benisons sung in these trees . . . 

From "In England's Green &

by

Jonathan Williams. 1929-2008

Simple Delights

Walking along a path with small dog on a dry calm morning when the dog stops to sniff forcing me to stop and stand gazing vacantly into the hedgerow. Then a tiny flicker of movement, whatch closely and there is a long tailed tit on a branch. It quickly flies away unable to be captured on camera. Further along a small path stright ahead if me in the middle of the path apparently floating freely in mid-air I see a single withered leaf fluttering close up apparently unsuspended in mid-air attached to nothing. it was fluttering gently on the breeze can't get camera to focus on it. No sign of how it was suspended but presumably a spiders web. Utterly delightful. And free. At the point of consumption. As they say. Which opens many a can of worms.

They made a desert and called it peace.

So said some ancient sage. The celebration of this "peace" in Gaza is grotesque. The international community should demand the arrest and trial of the Hamas Leaders who triggered the disaster, the Israeli leaders whose response wa unutterably disproportionate and Trump just for being what he is. 

Look at the pictures. 

Count the dead diseases and downtrodden.

Listen to the genocidal rhetoric and feel the pain of  the Palestinians suffering endlessly from a failed experiment by global powers in the wake of the Nazis. 

Normal humane people cannot accept this as grounds for celebration! 

Saving the USA

USA as it is at its core is an essential global resource. We all depend on it in innumerable ways. It has however made an unwise choice which is proving catastrophic both for us and for Americans. Time up. Trump has to be removed. Those who can do it are only senior figures in the Republican party some of whom must be hurting by now. Quiet words in his ear and the support of any half decent yet well respected psychiatrist and he should be quietly escorted out the side door into suitably air brushed retirement. Vance is a horror but would surely be chastened  by this unusual event. You know who you are, you know who they are, you may read this. Do your duty. 

Sociology of Science 101

There was a sociological history of science and it got it all wrong. The sociologists seemed to think that what mattered was a sociologically informed account of "what happened" It wasn't. What mattered was and is "what was happening", a totally different issue, and one only a scientist could discern. The thread of thought which has brought us the benefits we as a species enjoy over the experiences of our ancestors runs through science from the beginning. It starts well before there was anything called science. What it was called endlessly fascinates the sociologist and is endlessly irrelevant. The sociologists, and those historians affected by the sociological turn, share a compulsion to never come to a conclusion but to write endlessly about the minutiae of individual experience. History of something. But not of science. Quote from Euler Letters to a Princess The three classes of truths which I have now un-folded are the only sources of all our knowledge; all being derived from our own experience, from reasoning, or from the report of others. Letters to a Princess. https://archive.org/details/lettersofeuleron01eule/page/448/mode/2up AKA Personal Experience, Rationale, and Established Public Knowledge.

Second attempt.

Haven't written for ages uncertain if anyone was out there reading it. Apologies if you were. Decided to use this as a platform to write for myself. What did I think about xyz a year ago? Memory not what is was. And even then distorted by nostalgia and suchlike.