I cannot help but feel if the Syrian Government had been responsible for blowing up an airliner with a load of Americans in it above a Scottish town today, the revolt in Syria would have the support of NATO’s command and control structure. I am not a friend to Syria nor am I unwise enough to forget for one second both sides would happily tear me to pieces with their bare hands as a common enemy, but that cannot prevent me from knowing the suffering on the streets today and yesterday and tomorrow would have been answered by the Western powers in tandem with Arab countries if they had any other excuse above people suffering.
So tightly have our destinies been wound-up with suffering, so much struggle has gone on in every human settlement since humans came into being, we cannot act for suffering’s sake alone. We see it as our heritage and more than that, we know from history all nations are born in suffering and war.
So it is easy enough to stand back and let the blood flow but why we wring our hands, shake our heads and ‘look for answers’ when the answers are standing on a thousand airfields across Europe and the Middle East baffles me. I am reminded of a speech in a film where the actor declares all his life he knew what the right thing to do was, without fail he knew, but he was too scared to do it.
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged Syria |
There are quite a few investors looking at their reduced Greek Government bonds wondering where they went wrong. On the other hand they may have enough money left to be looking at Greece as an investment opportunity for she will be the cheap avenue into a skilled workforce in Europe for the next decade. The duality of loss and profit reminds me of the opening of Upton Sinclair’s series of books about Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. There we see men profiting from reusing the armaments that were left over from The Great War for more mundane purposes ( I think they hollowed out grenades and used them for day-to-day purposes.)
Of course the Greeks cannot be too pleased about what has happened and yet they have only themselves to blame, as do we all for all that has gone on the past years stretching back to Thatcher in the UK and beyond. The working practices of the 1970s that upset the rich, the rich kick-back with Thatcher and her rampant, resourceful and unforgiving capitalism, and the greed she unleashed. A greed we all longed to feed upon.
But, as the Greek are learning and the rest of the world has yet to learn, capitalism is cannibalistic and eats us as we feed upon it. Wealth is never created but built upon resources laid down on the Earth millions of years ago.
The richer we become, the poorer nature becomes. We are lining coffins of misery with silk.
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged Greece, Thatcher |
Music is immensely evocative of time and place. It is interesting, is it not, that very few nations growing in isolation from each other, came up with the same forms and sounds in their music. Lead to a large degree by the natural woods and reeds from which they fashioned their musical instruments but also by different ways of viewing and intellectualizing the world around them. Once the basic forms were created they were passed onto the children and any idea of breaking out to create from anew was gone – which is the way of the world in all things.
What we teach is everything we are and everything we will allow our children to make of themselves; like music, they will follow the songs we put into their heads. Just as a particular song hold significance for us all our lives because it holds with it memory, place and emotion, so the things we learn from our parents define us – even when we reject them for in the rejection is an even greater significance as to how we have grown to think.
This is not to lay the blame for anything at anyone’s feet, but merely to show how attached we are to the imagination of tribesmen and women who wandered the plains of Africa for just as language can be traced back thousands of years, so too is how we think.
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged ancestry |
Everyone brought up in Christian countries, and many another who bothers to read widely, will know of the saying that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than to get into Heaven. A saying that for generations has left people arguing about the godliness of wealth. Many years ago I saw a magazine advert, full page, in which a camel was depicted walking through the eye of a needle and I passed the comment that it wasn’t so impossible after all.
The art of lateral thinking is one of the joys of having a brain, not only because it gives us great games to play, but because it helps us solve problems. Mathematics is the result of thinking and might not even have started as just counting, but as abstractions to try to explain how nature worked in the lives of tribal mankind with painted charts on walls showing weather patterns, or the angles of hunting.
Religion is the same, the result of thinking and coming up with an idea that explains the unexplainable.
But what happens when the unexplainable finds an explanation? That’s when we become the conservative, animal self clinging to what we know in the face of the obvious.
Still, a man is pushing a car towards a hotel. Why? He has not run out of fuel. 
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged lateral thinking |
I used to love going to fairs when I was a kid, especially the Dodgem cars and watching candy-floss being made that was a very satisfying sweet for a child when the sweet ended up almost as tall as you are. I remember the silly air gun games where I nearly always won a goldfish – how cruel is that – and one year my mother actually managed to keep the goldfish alive for four years and he grew so strong he leapt out of the water tank.
I wonder where those days went as I rarely see fairs here. The cities and larger towns still attracts them though nowadays they are always on tarmac and not in fields. I know the village here had a carnival every year until the insurance rose steeply due to fatal accidents in other parts of the country, and the whole enterprise vanished. Even Guy Fawkes night is relegated to a few individuals setting off as many fireworks as they can afford.
I can see the coming Olympics being an excuse for people to have parties and enjoy themselves because they need to. In times of austerity the ability to go somewhere for a laugh become paramount to maintain mental health. Save a friendly game for me.
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged Olympics |
I heard professor Steve Jones on radio 3 this morning suggesting that science is about not knowing, about having theories overturned, and religion is about certainty and as such he could not see how scientists could be religious.
I can though. Science is all about nature whereas religions suggests there is something more than nature. I am not religious but I can see how a scientist in their minds can understand string theory, and then say how much more about the mind of god they understand. Professor Jones said Keats thought scientists unravelled in some perceptible way the world of nature but that is because Keats was not a good scientists and he could not see how greater knowledge can also impart deep love and feeling.
This doesn’t mean to say that in some recognisable way a scientist’s religious faith is different from a non-scientists. I am reminded of the philosophers from Descartes to Hume and beyond who would not allow the logic their brains were very good at, denying a god and spent a long time trying to weave god into their philosophical treatise, even making god its foundation. It took a mind like Spinoza to live with the consequence of his own mind.
I would agree with any professor who said scientists are far more willing to live with the consequences of their discoveries about nature, than religious folk.
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged Dr.Steve Jones, religion, science |
There has been much on the news this week about drug taking and the lifestyle of celebrities. There have been members of my own family who have had a history of problems with drug taking and they are not celebrities.
I recall watching teenagers getting drunk at school and being sick in public and not understanding at all how anyone would willingly do that to themselves, and much more do that to their brains. For that is what is really going on here, a manipulation of the brain. Some drug taking was by very intelligent people who were obviously bored by school but that does not explain to much of what we see, society allowing people to run away from themselves because we have no deep, community based relationships where people can go when they feel alone.
A child abused, a mind unable to cope, cannot turn to other people who will show them love without long searching and it is that lack of love which undermines one’s idea of self and allows the torture of drug taking admittance to one’s brain. And anyone who says they were loving to a drug abuser, should look again and try to understand that a dog that is loved is a very peaceful and relaxed animal and so is a human being who is loved.
Without that inner peace and relaxation, the self continually screams.
Posted in Quotidial | Tagged drug abuse |
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