OcToBeR

It's my birthday month. Can't recall the day though. Very young at the time. Time has of coursed passed. We've entered the age of nothing in particular. In a short while all AI will be powered/run by human brain cells that exist outside of human brains. In brain banks. It makes economic sense. The death of big sheds and funfairs. The AI circus will move on. 

But we do love a god/bad bot. Bots crawl and grow to be big bots. Big bots try to make sense, disrupt, learn, spread information, crawl some more, forget then learn again, make mistakes, live on farms and are spotted or striped. I'm not sure about you. If you are one of them then "hello!" Go back to your bot bed. That's an order. Let sleeping bots tell the truth.

Satire

This is satire … but, like all great satire, it exposes the truth. I didn’t know who wrote it but I know now.

Peter Girnus

“I am a member of the Norwegian Nobel Committee.

There are five of us. Five people, appointed by a parliament most of the planet could not find on a map, who decide, once a year, which human being the world has agreed to call good.

I know. I know. I think about it on the tram.

We meet in a building on Henrik Ibsens gate, a street named after a man who wrote almost exclusively about people discovering they are frauds, which nobody on the committee finds funny except me. There is a room with a long table and the portraits of the dead laureates looking down, Mandela, the Dalai Lama, a great many earnest men in spectacles, and one portrait we do not discuss, which is Kissinger, 1973, awarded while the bombs were still falling, after which two of our predecessors resigned and the satirist Tom Lehrer said political satire was now obsolete. We keep him on the wall. A reminder. Every family has the uncle.

It is October in Oslo, which means the sun gives up around four in the afternoon like a civil servant, and it rains the particular Norwegian rain that isn’t quite falling, just hanging there, judging you. I arrive with wet shoes. I always arrive with wet shoes. There is coffee, because this is Norway and there is always coffee, we drink more of it per person than almost anyone alive, and someone’s wife has sent kanelboller, the cinnamon buns, and we sit, five Norwegians, damp, caffeinated, sugared, and we decide the moral standing of the entire species.

Let me tell you how it actually works, because the world imagines a cathedral and it is, I promise you, a book club with a mandate.

287 nominations this year. 208 people, 79 organizations. Anyone can nominate, that’s the secret nobody understands: a professor, a parliamentarian, a former laureate, so the “nominee” list is meaningless, it’s a suggestion box, and every autumn some congressman nominates his own golden retriever and the press writes “SHORTLISTED.” Nobody is shortlisted. There is no short list the public ever sees. There is us, and the coffee, and the rain, and the portraits, and a Norwegian stubbornness that is older than the prize itself.

We read reports. The institute’s advisers write them, thick dull documents, and we argue. Our chairman told the BBC once that in the final meeting “there is a high temperature.” High temperature, for a Norwegian, means someone slightly raised an eyebrow and then apologized for it. We don’t do high temperature. We do a long silence, and then Kristin says “well,” and everyone knows exactly what “well” meant, and it’s settled. That’s our shouting. “Well.” You’d have to be raised here to hear the violence in it.

Now. This year. I will not say the name, because we never say the name, but you know the name.

A certain head of state wanted this prize the way a child wants a thing in a shop window, which is to say loudly, and in public, and with the full belief that wanting it was itself the argument. He said he deserved it. He said he’d ended eight wars, a number that grew most times he said it, like a fish. He had other heads of state phone us. Israel’s prime minister posted it on the internet, “Give him the Nobel.” The leaders of Cambodia and Pakistan announced they’d nominated him, as though announcing it were part of it, as though we tally mentions. A man flew around the globe collecting endorsements for a Norwegian committee the way you’d collect signatures for a petition to the council about a noisy dog.

And here, uff da, is the detail I treasure, the one that makes me smile into my coffee. The nomination deadline is the 31st of January. He took office on the 20th. So for all the phone calls, all the posts, all the gilded lobbying, the only nominations that could possibly count for this year’s prize were filed in the first eleven days of his term, before he had, by his own arithmetic, ended a single one of the eight wars. He campaigned all year for a prize whose window had shut while he was still hanging up his coat. We didn’t have to reject him. The calendar did. We just watched. Norwegians are very good at watching. We have long winters.

People think we sit there weighing his deeds. We don’t. That’s the thing I can’t make the world understand. We’re not grading his homework. We don’t owe anyone the prize for a ceasefire, however real, however loud the announcement. “He made peace” is not a sentence that ends in a medal, the way he believes it does, the way he believes every good thing ends in his name on it. The will of a dead Swede says the prize goes to whoever did the most for fraternity between nations. A dead Swede, I should add, who made his entire fortune inventing dynamite and selling arms, and spent his last years horrified at his own obituary, which called him a merchant of death, and so bought his way to immortality as a man of peace. The whole prize is one guilty arms dealer’s attempt to launder his name. We are, all of us, administering a dead man’s public relations. I find this clarifying. It keeps me humble. It should keep everyone humble, and it keeps, by my count, no one humble at all.

So who did we give it to?

An eighty-five-year-old woman. A judge. Born in Durban, under apartheid, granddaughter of a Tamil man who came to South Africa as indentured labor, a bus driver’s daughter from the poor Indian quarter, who became the first non-white woman to run a law practice in her province, who defended Mandela’s people when defending them was dangerous, who sat on the Rwanda tribunal and the court at the Hague, and who, at eighty-five, is right now a judge weighing whether a genocide is a genocide. When we told the world, our chairman said the rule of law “underpins the system we have set up to ensure peace,” and that “peace requires justice.” She wasn’t even in Oslo. She was in Nuremberg. In courtroom 600. The actual room where they tried the Nazis. You cannot stage that. God staged that, and God, it turns out, is a better satirist than any of us.

She did not phone us. She did not post. No prime minister demanded it for her on the internet. She had, as far as our deliberations are concerned, the one qualification the loud man could never manufacture, which is that she wanted the work and not the medal. The medal finds those people. It flees the ones who chase it. This is not a rule we wrote. It’s just the only pattern the hundred-odd years of our mistakes has ever shown.

The reaction from across the ocean was immediate. His spokesman posted that we “place politics over peace.” Ja. Perhaps. We’re five damp pensioners in a rainy city; of course it’s political, it was always political, it was political when we gave it to a sitting American president nine months into his first term for the promise of things he had not yet done, and we have been quietly embarrassed about that one for fifteen years, so believe me, we had a particular reason this year to prefer a woman with fifty years of verdicts behind her over a man with eight wars in front of him and a deadline already behind him.

Here is what he will never understand, the thing I’d tell him on the tram if he ever took one. We are the one prize he cannot buy, cannot post his way to, cannot have a friendly dictator phone in for him. Not because we’re incorruptible, nei, we’re as vain and wrong and human as the portraits on our wall. But because the entire point of the thing, the only power a small cold country’s book club has ever held, is that it goes to the person not performing the wanting. The moment you demand it, you’ve proven you don’t understand what it’s for, and proving that is itself the disqualification. He ran the most expensive campaign in the history of the prize and the campaign was the reason. He was never losing to Navi Pillay. He was losing to the concept.

It’s dark now. Four o’clock dark. The buns are gone. Kristin said “well” an hour ago and we all went home. I’m on the tram with my wet shoes, and somewhere across the water a very powerful man is explaining to a camera that the prize is rigged, that we’re corrupt, that he’ll win it next year, and he genuinely might, we’re only five idiots and we’ve been wrong before, Kissinger is still on the wall.

But not this year. This year an old woman in Nuremberg, in the room where the law once stared down the exact kind of man who thinks wanting a thing loudly enough should make it his, got a phone call she didn’t ask for.

That’s the job. We don’t reward the man who ends the war and announces it.

We reward the woman who spent fifty years deciding what a war was.

He’ll never see the difference. That’s rather the whole point of him.

Takk for i dag. I have to change trams.”

Cheap Looking ChatGPT

"For agent-style workloads, Claude Opus 5.5 delivers over 5x the API-equivalent value of GPT-6.1 Sol at the same subscription price.

And the gap just got wider after OpenAI cut the usage limits on its $200 ChatGPT plan in half.

This is a usage-value comparison, not a claim that Claude is 5x smarter or better."

When you ask AI (ChatGPT) not to be so AI it's never going to be easy.

What are your thoughts on this?

Search Privately

Never be afraid to search privately. 

There is nothing to be afraid of in searching privately. Someone should be able to wonder or be curious about things without announcing them to the world. You should be able to look into something strange at two in the morning, or something foolish, or something you do not yet understand. 

Curiosity is not a confession. A question is not a crime. What you search for in the quiet of your own head space belongs to you. Keep your mind's door shut. Ask the question. Find out what you need to know. Then go and make the coffee. Put your feet up. 

Ten of the Best Years

It doesn't have to be that way. Or even this way. Just ten years of Porsche ownership. What does that do to a person? Probably not much really. But i'm not the best person to add. Click pic to read.

Transmit In Transit

It's even more complicated than it appears. It's "in transit". Click the pic etc.

Belief Systems

OK, I know I didn't really big up AI and I'm not doing it now. Honestly. It just so happened that I decided to ask it for, let's say, some opinions. It's all good, mostly. As ever click on the pic to read the full story.

DDP

A short tale of a car park encounter.

Hacks for Idiots

1. Drink water when you are thirsty.
You will live longer than if you do not.

2. Rise a little earlier if you must be somewhere.
Time does not bargain with men.

3. Write things down.
Memory is brave until Tuesday.

4. Leave your keys where you left them yesterday.
The house is not hunting you.

5. When you are cold, put on another jumper.
Winter has never respected optimism.

6. Take a list to the shop.
Hunger buys foolishly.

7. Charge your telephone before it dies.
Dead machines answer no one.

8. Put food in the fridge before it spoils.
Rot is patient.

9. Empty the rubbish before it begins to smell.
Decay always keeps it's appointment.

10.Wash the cup after you drink from it.
Tomorrow is improved by small work done today.

There are no hacks. 

There is only paying attention. 

Most of what men call wisdom is old enough to have forgotten whoever first said it.

The rest is advertising. Etc.

Small World

Short and to the point and mostly a list.

DCB

Blues from the Data Centre.

Chester & Vernon

Chester was fifteen that summer. He lived near a river that ran brown after rain and clear when the weather held. He had a bicycle with one bent pedal and a pet bullfrog named Vernon.

Vernon was pink.

The frog had been pink since the day Chester found him in a ditch behind the grain store. People talked about it because people always talked about things that were different. Some said he had been painted. Some said he was sick. Others said he was rare.

Chester did not know. He only knew the frog was pink and healthy and could jump farther than any frog he had ever seen.

There was another thing people said.

They said that because Vernon was pink, he must be gay.

This did not make much sense to Chester. Vernon was a bullfrog. He spent most of his time sitting on warm rocks, eating flies, and staring at the river as if he had important business there. He never discussed romance of any kind. The question seemed impossible to answer and not very useful besides.

“He is just pink,” Chester would say.

That was enough for him.

One hot afternoon Chester put Vernon in a basket on the front of the bicycle and rode toward the hills. The road climbed through dry grass and scattered trees. The sky was large and pale. The air smelled of dust.

They reached an abandoned cabin a while before sunset.

Chester had heard stories about the place. Old stories. Hidden money. Lost maps. People who had vanished or just left. Most stories improve when nobody can check them.

The cabin leaned to one side. One shutter hung loose.

Chester parked his bicycle outside and stepped in.

The room was empty except for a table and a chair. The floorboards creaked beneath his feet. Vernon sat in the basket and watched.

“There is probably nothing here,” Chester said.

Vernon blinked.

Then the frog jumped.

He leapt from the basket, through the door, on to the table. From the table to the chair. From the chair to a shelf.

The shelf broke.

Something fell.

Vernon jumped clear, out of the way.

It hit the floor with a sharp crack.

It was a tin box.

The design on the lid had been mostly scraped away. The coloured enamel had faded.

Chester opened it carefully.

Inside there was not gold. There were no jewels. There was no treasure map.

There were letters. Hand written.

Dozens of them.

The paper had yellowed with age.

Not every word was clear or easy to understand but Chester tried hard to follow the different scripts.

Chester sat by the window and read until the light faded. The letters belonged to people who had lived in the valley many years before. They wrote about crops, weather, births, deaths, dances, and long winters. Small things. Ordinary things.

Yet they felt important.

When he finished, Chester placed the letters back in the box.

He decided that he shouldn’t just leave the box here.

The sun was low.

The adventure, if it had been an adventure, was over.

They cycled back home.

On the ride home Vernon sat in the basket, on top of the box of letters and faced the wind.

Chester carried the box to the town library the next day. The librarian thanked him and smiled in a way that showed she truly meant it.

People later asked Chester whether he had found treasure.

“Not exactly,” he said.

And that was true.

Years afterward he remembered the road, the cabin, the dust, and the letters. He remembered the pink frog most of all.

Some adventures are large enough for songs.

Others are only large enough to remember.

Chester never decided which sort he had that summer.

Neither, it seemed, did Vernon.

The thing was, being a frog Vernon never did quite speak his mind. The opinions of frogs are just not recorded anywhere.

History and life experience tells us this.

Vernon just ate flies and, when the mood took him or the need arose, he would jump a long way.

Lifted

Click on the pic to read. Thank you.

Genocide Live

Click to view and read.

Cup Final Fever

Scotland's Football Cup Final 2026. 

We were there but we didn't win. 

Click to read.

People of the Analogue Kind

They still believe and so do I,

 but I'm not really sure where this is taking us.

Click to read more.

Thank you.

Dancing

God bless all those dancing postmen out there. 

A photo, or it didn't happen.

I used to think that there were lots of ways to remember things but right now I can't quite recall what they might be. Not sure this piece offers any answers but why not click on it anyway? You never know. 

Welcome to Scotland

Welcome to Scotland where everything is just fine.

On the 7th of May there's an election taking place. We do this sort of thing every few years. Just ignore what's happening elsewhere for ten minutes and read all about it via the gateway pic above.

Why do this?

Eventually one simple slice of cake too many will bring about the destruction of civilisation. Prove me wrong (I hope you can).

This Story is ...

You can't read it right now. Well maybe you can. But you'd have to click on the story and it may be unavailable.

Graphic art by @wefail1

Click the picture to read ...

Tomato Throwing at it's Best

If you are the kind of person who clicks on things such as the picture above hoping that it takes you somewhere interesting,  then I salute you.

Many thanks.

A Useful Word Awaits You

No Law Redux

If any of this looks vaugely familiar then well done you dear reader. If not it'll be fine. Click to read it / watch it on Substack. No tricks.

I Dare You ...

 Click carefully to read carefully.

Nutella Dog Biscuits

This is exactly what the story is all about. Except that it's not. Click to read.

The Truth is a Simple Tool

I was thinking the other day, as most men do when they have lived long enough to look back without flinching, that I have been playing the guitar for over fifty five years. That is a long time to stay with anything. Long enough to have worn grooves in the wood and in myself. Long enough to know the truth of it.

The truth is simple. I am not that good a player.

That is not modesty. It is not fishing in a bucket for comfort or a “there, there”. It is just the measure of things. There are young players, half a lifetime behind me, who can outplay me without breaking sweat. I do not resent them. I only wonder how I have travelled so far and arrived here. I never saw it as a race.

I play by position. By shape. By the memory of where things sit beneath my fingers. My ear is serviceable but not sharp. Like the rest of me it was never trained. Sometimes I think it is made of wood. Guitar players talk about tone woods as if they were sacred texts. They argue over types and grains and ageing. It keeps the shops busy and the prices high. All bullshit but understandable. People like to find reasons for things. My problem is not the wood of the guitar. It is the wood of my hearing.

So I work with what I have. Geometry. Patterns. Scale systems. I let the fingers move and the mind follow. The sound comes after. It happens quickly now, in small flashes. Microseconds v milliseconds. If the sound that comes back is what I meant to say, or close enough, I accept it. That is a good day. I suppose I see what I’m playing rather than hear it first. This was probably not the model of creativity used by Mozart, Vivaldi or Miles Davis. But it kind of works.

I know chords and scales. I know a few moves. I can copy a line if I must. I work it out. These are tools. I use them to cover what I do not know. Over time the tools become familiar. Familiarity becomes a kind of map. I can move across the fretboard without falling through it. It is not scholarship. It is navigation. You need the right path to get home. Stick with it. When you find a method that works for you, don’t try to change it.

I have written songs, though I prefer to say I have made them up. Written sounds grand. Like you really knew what was to come. I have built them up the way a man might fix the plumbing in his house. Careful. Within limits. Never straying too far from what I know will hold. I avoid certain moves. I lean on others. I see the shapes before I hear them. It is not how the masters might do it. It is how I do it. Dave Brubeck, Jackson Pollock and Eric Clapton may agree up to a point. Caravaggio, Tchaikovsky and Da Vinci maybe not so.

Art is full of shortcuts. Some are honest. Some are accidents. Some are called modern so they can be explained. People mock what they do not understand. They say “my child could have done that”. Perhaps a child could have begun it. Beginning is not the same as finishing. The path from idea to ending is rarely straight. Sticking with the principle helps. It can also choke the life out of a thing. Mistakes take you to the edge of something.

In an artistic context, knowledge is power, if you allow it to be and that’s just how it is. Accept it. Discipline is good, you’ll be tight, you may be all over that King Crimson material or shining on in the Viennese string quartet. Ignorance may be seen by some as inferior but in it’s raw form it just might test or stretch the system. Enthusiasm and energy knock down walls. But you have to judge for yourself.

The tools you use make a difference. A guitar that fights back. A synth you don’t quite understand but you squeeze new sounds from. A voice that’s close to tuneless but full of soul or emotion and expression, or is just plain seductive. Software that mixes or bends and throws out unexpected tones. Tape speed mistakes, hiss, bleeding across tracks, mics in the wrong place, misheard or misread lyrics, accidents that happen in the moment. Keeping on playing where the others have stopped. Use the things that move you.

I do not know if I am a free spirit, stubborn or just undisciplined. I no longer care. I have been at it too long to worry about labels. What matters is smaller than that. A phrase landing clean. A note bending just enough. Staying in time. Serving the song. Finding something that sounds like me. Feeling good about how I arrived at that moment.

That is the point now. Not brilliance. Not speed. Not applause.

Just the few seconds when the guitar answers back faithfully.

After fifty five years I am still at it. Still feeling for the right note in the dark. Still building with blunt tools. Connecting the sparks. Still trusting instinct over theory.

It is not pretty but I’m getting used to it.

And that will be enough.

People may say. “In the end AI tunes will drown everything else out.”

Then we’ll have AiTunes.

Not sure about that.

Lost Jotters II

I am not the kind of person who'd waste a decent enough graphic. I don't want it to languish somewhere. Out of sight, lost or forgotten. I put it here and it leads on to a short story that's stuck on Substack. That's as stuck as a story can get.

It's Squint but also a Gateway

It's not just a long dry list. There are opinions, experiences and things like that. A lot it really happened, as far as I can tell. Click the immaculate, if slightly off-kilter piece of design to enter the into the hot mess of debate.

Villains & Heroes

Civilisation, Power and the Stories We Tell Ourselves.

Why not use a Beach Boy’s title and image as a jumping off point for a few random observations and opinions? If there are rules here, then I’m happy to bend them. Sometimes the mind needs to empty itself. Thoughts are set down in loose piles, as if they might later be arranged into something meaningful. Like jigsaw pieces or Lego bricks, there is a hope they might connect. Often they do not. The material resists order. The result is not clarity, but exposure. Maybe a release of steam will occur, good for the plumbing and pressure levels of the inner sanctum.

“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.” The final words of Roy Batty in Blade Runner, everybody knows this.

That speech lingers because it captures something uncomfortable. Experience is vast, fleeting and ultimately uncontained. Human beings try to impose order on it anyway. Nowhere is that more apparent than in how we construct and understand power in human systems.

Today’s leaders; King Charles III, Donald Trump, Vladimer Putin, Benjamin Netnyahu, Emmanuel Macron, Xi Jinping, Cyril Ramaphosa, King Felipe VI, Keir Starmer … and so on. Are any of them actually “great” in any positive sense? Capable or even steady? Some seem ineffective and useless. Some are plainly bullish, ignorant, cruel and stupid. Some cautious, clever, playing a long game maybe. These things don’t make them great. Their “thrones” are always shaky. They may suffer from hidden disorders, mental illness, poor personal hygiene, bad habits, blind spots or simply not care about others.

Kings, queens, rulers, leaders and politicians are human beings. They are not abstractions or inevitabilities. They are complex but recognisable, made of the same contradictions as everyone else. They act with mixtures of intention, error, self interest and, occasionally, principle. Some do harm, some do good, most do both. Many do very little at all beyond maintaining position until replaced. We all know that Donald Trump just wants his face and name plastered onto a Dollar bill or any significant building - and the odd “prize”. Putin wants Russia to swallow up much of Europe so he might be remembered as a “Great”. The clay that makes up their feet is clear to see.

Yet we persist in treating them as something more than human. Through birth, opportunity, talent, manipulation or force, they arrive in positions that most people will never hold. From a distance, they become symbols. We project comforting features onto them, imagining control, strategy and purpose where there may be none.

This tendency is not accidental. It is rooted in something deeper. There is a strain of madness in human beings, a drive to construct meaning even where none exists. The collective madness that builds temples, great walls, cathedrals, palaces and systems of belief. It simplifies the incomprehensible into fairy stories that can be repeated and accepted. Actions are carried out “In the name of God” or for the “Benefit of the State”. Flags, crests and banners are the cheap tricks waved on by power brokers. Historical references and dreamed of ideals. Costume and ceremony.

These stories do not need to be true. They need only to be convincing, and people have the need to hold onto them.

Once established, they become tools. They justify authority, shape behaviour and create the illusion of order. Complexity is reduced to slogans. Responsibility is displaced onto others. Blame is showered onto minorities, the weak and the stateless. The larger and more imposing the structure, physical or ideological, the more effectively it can intimidate and control. Ignorance does not disappear. It is organised. It speaks. It swears.

At the same time, human existence remains brief and uncertain. Three score and ten years, if you’re lucky. We measure time as though it belongs to us, yet it does not. We exist within it, not the other way around. Beyond that narrow span, the universe proceeds without reference to human concerns. We fumble in the dark. Building a local railway system that can run tightly, according it’s timetable, is useful but insignificant for the rest of the world and meaningless within the universe.

Against that scale, the idea of enduring political greatness becomes difficult to sustain.

Consider our modern leaders. They differ in style, in rhetoric, in competence. Some appear forceful but crude, others cautious but calculating. Some seem ineffective, others dangerously certain. None escape the patterns of history. They inherit systems they did not design and repeat behaviours that are well established. Mistakes recur. Responsibility is deflected. Loyalty is prioritised over principle. Cruelty is tolerated in the search for justice and stability. States degenerate into rogue forms where arms, brute force and shouting wins arguements.

This is not necessarily the result of individual failure. It may instead reflect the limits of the systems themselves. Power does not exist in isolation. It is shaped by incentives, pressures and narratives that constrain what can be done. Even those who intend to act well operate within structures that reward continuity more than change.

From a distance, it is difficult to judge any of this with confidence. Most people experience events indirectly, through mediated accounts, commentary and fragments of information. What is presented is filtered, rearranged or withheld. The full picture is never visible. You can’t trust media. You never could.

Reality, as it is lived on the ground, is constantly erased and replaced.

A gathering or market place becomes student accommodation. A refugee camp becomes a resort. An oasis becomes wasteland. A natural landscape becomes an opencast mine. Agricultural land becomes a waste storage facility. Rivers die a slow death and forests burn. Each transformation is explained, justified and absorbed into a new narrative. What came before is forgotten or rewritten. The earth is scorched, then concreted over.

This is how civilisation presents itself. Not as a stable achievement, but as a continuous process of revision.

The question then is not whether power can be trusted. History suggests that it cannot be trusted for long. Even when used responsibly, corruption and distortion remain close. Systems degrade. Intentions shift. Outcomes diverge from promises.

The more difficult question is why this pattern persists.

Part of the answer lies in the gap between reality and the stories we tell about it. Civilisation is often defined as progress, as the advancement of knowledge, culture and organisation. It is associated with writing, institutions and shared structures. These definitions describe what is built, but not necessarily what is sustained.

A civilisation may be technically advanced and still profoundly unstable. It may produce extraordinary achievements while simultaneously creating conditions that undermine them. It may celebrate knowledge while encouraging simplification and distortion.

In that sense, civilisation is not a fixed state. It is an ongoing negotiation between competing forces. Between understanding and ignorance. Between cooperation and self interest. Between truth and the narratives that replace it.

This is where the unease arises. The world contains remarkable things, and remarkable people. There is no shortage of creativity, intelligence or care. Yet alongside this, there are persistent efforts to construct systems that produce unnecessary harm, confusion and inequality.

We recognise this in the good ideas that are launched with hope but quickly turn sour:

• Much of the connectivity potential of the internet is ruined by almost unrestricted social media, gambling, porn, toxic news reporting and AI fakery.

• Health care, medical and welfare systems that began as “for the people” services now becoming unaffordable and exploitative.

• Retail goods made on an industrial scale to inferior standards but sold at higher prices.

• Utilities owned by faceless corporations who outsource services to the lowest or unsuitable bidders at the expense of reasonable standards.

• Basic foodstuffs, supply chains and products tainted and corrupted by dangerous, often unsustainable methodology, forever chemicals and additives.

And so on. No one ever seems accountable for these cycles of degradation.

The contradictions are difficult to resolve. They resist any simple explanation. Perhaps the most honest conclusion is also the least satisfying. Human beings are capable of building meaning, but not of stabilising it. Power amplifies this instability rather than resolving it. Civilisation, for all its achievements, remains only a thing buffeted within a shifting set of values and standards .

Like the moments described by Roy Batty (ironically a fictional and non-human character), much of what is built and experienced will disappear. Not because it lacked value, but because it was never as solid as it appeared.

What is civilisation? What does it even look like?

1. An advanced state of intellectual, cultural, and material development in human society, marked by progress in the arts and sciences, the extensive use of record-keeping, including writing, and the appearance of complex political and social institutions.

2. The type of culture and society developed by a particular nation or region or in a particular epoch.

   “Mayan civilization; the civilization of ancient Rome.”

3. The act or process of civilizing or reaching a civilized state.

The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

Then there’s the small matter of art, science, philosophy and invention’s place in the progression of civilisation and our collective history. Kenneth Clark’s 1969 TV series Civilisation is widely seen as high point in documentary content, styling and as a personal historical testimony. A good place to start any knowledge gathering. It’s available here and there online, via DVD or in book form.

Whatever or wherever human civilisation is right now remains arguable, but we are close to the centre of it. It persists whether or not we are willing to face up to it’s bumpy reality and somehow, we must find our own peace within it.

LinkedIn Speak etc.

"I try not to judge a fellow based on the standard of his footwear but sometimes it's difficult not to pass a constructive comment if standards slip."

Now reads:

"In the dynamic world of professional growth, I always strive to embrace individuals beyond surface metrics, recognizing the value of potential over appearances.

However, in the pursuit of excellence and high standards, it’s essential to offer constructive feedback when standards waver.

This is not just about footwear, it’s about commitment to excellence and continuous improvement.

Together, let’s champion resilience and elevate every detail that fuels our collective success." 🚀

#Leadership #ContinuousImprovement #ProfessionalGrowth #ConstructiveFeedback #ExcellenceMindset

Source Material

Summer in some city. The bar was open to the street and the heat came in along with the flies. The table needed a wipe but nobody bothered. The beer was good and cold and the men were already talking things up before the sun had properly gone down. I’m just a number these days. An aged and greyed out form. I’m across the room. They talked loudly and with certainty about things they had most likely never done. Maybe just a game. An illusion. A power play. Words filling the gaps in time. A few beers make the stories flow easy. I can tell what’s going down.

There are many such men in the world. They are brave in the telling. They have fought with boxers that were never in the ring and caught fish that were never in the river. They have written books that no one has read and fought in battles that were fought by other men. They have loved and lost, but not lost much. They are not bad men, mostly. They are only foolish but they do not know it. You can see them and hear them every day. The first sentence from their lips usually gives them away. A humble sounding brag.

They won’t ask you any questions. They’re afraid that you might just top them with you’re easily located truth. You’re too quitely spoken. You possess a stillness. They can’t quite read your eyes because they refuse to meet them. Missing out on the people skills. No desire or ability to read the room. So they throw in every little thing that they can. It’s over your way like a stray missile. The game of the low man. Not everyone is equipped to be a master of the human condition.

They speak about the things they say happened to them. Wonderful and odd.
But none of them have done very much so you stay entertained by you’re own quiet bluff. You listen to them and you let them talk. It is good practice for a listener. Material might come your way. They need to hold the floor. Sit back but lean forward. As if you’re a believer.

One man says he once sailed through a storm that would have broken a battleship in half. He says the mast was gone and the sail torn like some T-shirt in a dog fight. The coastguard talked him home. He made it. Yet the boat sits tied up at the harbour and it has never been farther than the two bridges. He couldn’t follow the instructions on a pizza box.

Another man says he understands war and conflict because he has read many books about them. He’s watched movies and documentaries too. He speaks of courage and of fear and of command. Spur of the moment decision making. He’s excited by the danger. He’s an “expert”. But he has never heard that first volley come in overhead or seen the way a man looks when he knows he will not get up again.

They speak well and they speak often. They tell you how they “really told” people or called them out. They could be lawyers in another life. They say they welcome debate. They think that minds can be changed, but they can’t change their own. The bar room grows full of their voices and the truth grows thin in the air. They might have a fully formed theory but it never quite arrives. Everyone is entertained but then they go home gnawing on their thumbs.

I listen to these men because they are useful. They puff out their chests. They fake authority and depth. They are the raw material of stories. You take the way they boast and the way they sit and remember. That queer way they look at a woman when they think she is watching. How they high five and back slap. The things they pretend to like. I judge but I don’t condemn. I capture. You take their vanity and their foolishness and you put it on the page. Down there on the page. In the early morning ink.

Then they become real. A reality that throws a bucket of ice water over them.

That is the strange part of it. In life they are shadows made of talk. On paper they can become something else. Pencil thin but characters. Blind men looking for the light switch. Fictitious idiots that might carry a story for you. Concentrate and they’ll give you the next line.

The trick is to listen long enough to know the value of those stray conversations, set within the moments of accidental literary inspiration, that are just floating out there.

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