Myanmar’s descent into hell by Mary Long

There are moments when the language of international diplomacy becomes almost offensively inadequate. “Concern.” “Deeply troubling.” “Grave violations.” Such phrases have been repeated about Myanmar for years, as if sufficiently solemn adjectives might somehow stop bombs, halt torture or persuade armed men that civilians are human beings.

Now the United Nations says Myanmar’s human-rights situation has reached a “new low”. That should not merely produce another round of diplomatic statements. It should produce embarrassment, especially among those governments that have watched this catastrophe deepen while treating Myanmar as an unfortunate regional problem best managed at arm’s length.

The Rohingya remain at the centre of this moral failure. Nine years after hundreds of thousands were driven from their homes, their suffering has not become history. It has become a permanent condition. The remarkable cruelty is not simply that the Rohingya were persecuted; it is that persecution has become so normalised that another generation is growing up knowing displacement, discrimination and violence as ordinary facts of existence.

And the grim absurdity is that even Myanmar’s civil war has not liberated them from their old tormentors. The military has continued its brutal campaign, while the Arakan Army has also been accused of serious abuses against Rohingya communities. For civilians trapped between armed forces, ethnic militias and collapsing institutions, the distinction between liberation and oppression can become tragically theoretical.

This is what happens when the rule of law disappears. Violence stops being an aberration and becomes an economic model. Myanmar’s unregulated economy is flourishing precisely because the state has ceased to function as a state should. Illegal mining, exploitation of natural resources and other illicit businesses thrive in the vacuum. Conflict generates money; money finances conflict; and civilians pay the bill. It is a particularly ugly version of capitalism, one in which the commodity being extracted is not merely rare earths or minerals but human misery.

Meanwhile, millions are displaced and millions more face hunger. A country can survive political disagreement. It can survive economic hardship. It can even survive governments it dislikes. What it cannot easily survive is the systematic destruction of trust, law and the basic expectation that tomorrow will be safer than today.

Myanmar’s tragedy is therefore larger than the junta, larger than the Rohingya and larger than the civil war. It is the destruction of the idea of citizenship itself.

The military has repeatedly demonstrated that elections without freedom, institutions without independence and constitutions without accountability are little more than stage props. But armed opposition groups cannot escape scrutiny simply because they oppose an abhorrent regime. Human rights are not a political reward reserved for whichever side appears more sympathetic.

The international community also needs to confront an uncomfortable truth: statements are not policy. Condemnations are not protection. And remembering Myanmar only when another horrific report is published is not solidarity.

The people of Myanmar do not need another expression of “grave concern”. They need pressure on those responsible, humanitarian access, accountability, protection for minorities and sustained international attention.

Otherwise the phrase “new low” will become what diplomatic language has so often become, a temporary description of a catastrophe that everyone knows will eventually sink even lower.

Democracy discount by Mia Rodríguez

There is a revealing contradiction at the heart of Donald Trump’s Venezuela policy, Washington says it wants democracy, while constructing an economic arrangement that may give powerful Venezuelans a very good reason to postpone it. That is not a minor diplomatic inconsistency. It is the sort of contradiction that can quietly become policy.

Oil has always been Venezuela’s blessing and curse. It made governments rich enough to avoid accountability and created fortunes large enough to purchase influence, loyalty and silence. Now Washington appears to be building a new political economy around that same resource. If the oil money begins flowing before Venezuelans have freely chosen their government, the people benefiting from the arrangement will have a powerful interest in keeping the political system exactly as it is.

This is where Alejandro Betancourt matters. He is not merely an oil businessman who happened to win a remarkable contract. He has emerged as an intermediary between Caracas and Washington, with connections valuable enough to make him central to the new arrangement. That creates an obvious danger: when access to billions of barrels depends on political relationships, democracy becomes an inconvenient variable.

Imagine the conversation in a private room. Nobody needs to say, “Stop the elections.” They only need to say, “Not yet. The country needs stability. The institutions are fragile. Investors require certainty. We should not rush.” Those arguments can sound reasonable. They can also become the vocabulary of indefinite postponement.

Delcy Rodríguez has her own incentive to embrace that logic. Her government can present economic recovery and oil investment as evidence that political change can wait. Washington, meanwhile, can point to rising production and strategic energy gains and declare that Venezuela is moving toward normality.

But normality is not democracy. The most dangerous political arrangements are not always dictatorships announced with tanks in the streets. Sometimes they are systems in which economic interests become so deeply entangled with political power that everyone benefiting from the arrangement discovers a reason to fear elections.

Free elections introduce uncertainty. A new government might review contracts, investigate corruption, renegotiate concessions or demand a larger share of national wealth. Investors dislike that uncertainty. Oligarchs dislike it even more. Governments that depend on those oligarchs can begin to dislike elections too.

And suddenly democracy becomes the problem to be managed. That is precisely what Washington should avoid creating. If Trump genuinely wants Venezuela to become democratic, the sequence should be obvious: establish transparent institutions, protect political competition, hold credible elections and then allow elected Venezuelan governments to determine how their oil resources are developed. Instead, the oil arrangement risks turning the sequence upside down, money first, accountability later.

Oil can finance schools and hospitals, rebuild infrastructure and restore livelihoods. But without democratic oversight, the same wealth can finance something else: political permanence.

The irony is painful. The United States has spent years denouncing Venezuela’s authoritarian political economy, only to risk helping construct another version of it, this time with different beneficiaries and American fingerprints.

Venezuela does not need another elite bargain disguised as national salvation. It needs a political settlement in which Venezuelans, not businessmen, interim officials or foreign presidents, decide who governs them. Otherwise the greatest threat to Venezuela’s democratic transition may not be the old regime. It may be the new oil boom.

#eBook Hilma af Klint: The forgotten pioneer by Ovi Art eBooks

Hilma af Klint was born in 1862 into a Swedish naval family, a child of mathematical precision and scientific curiosity. She was one of the first women to be admitted to the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm, where she excelled in portraiture and botanical illustration.

On the surface, she was a conventional, academically trained artist. Beneath it, she was something far more radical: a medium, a spiritualist, a woman who believed that she could communicate with higher intelligences through her paintings.

From 1896, she and four other women formed a group they called "The Five." They held séances, recorded automatic drawings, and sought contact with spiritual guides they called "the High Masters." It was through this practice that af Klint came to understand her purpose: she was to paint "the great images of existence," not for public display, but as a message for a future humanity that might finally be able to receive it.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Hilma af Klint:
The forgotten pioneer

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Carpond #020 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

A cacophony of singalongs, stifled yawns,
and surprisingly insightful debates
on the existential dread of a four wheeler vacuum

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The ghost they fed by Thanos Kalamidas

Germany has spent thirty-six years telling itself a comforting story, reunification healed the wound, democracy absorbed the East and the ghosts of the twentieth century had been safely locked away in the museum of national memory. On Sunday, Saxony-Anhalt offered a rather less comforting interpretation. The Alternative for Germany, the AfD, won 43.8 percent of the vote, more than twice its 2021 result and emerged as the strongest political force in the state. Nationally, it is already Germany’s second-largest party.

This was not an accident. It was the bill arriving at the table. The German political establishment has spent decades treating the far right partly as an electoral nuisance and partly as something that could be domesticated. Immigration could be discussed more harshly. National identity could be wrapped in respectable conservative language. Cultural anxieties could be acknowledged, sometimes amplified, and then supposedly absorbed by the traditional parties. The calculation was simple: steal enough votes from the extremists and the extremists will eventually disappear.

Instead, the extremists learned to steal the language. The tragedy is not that Germany suddenly discovered an appetite for authoritarian nationalism in 2026. The tragedy is that much of the political class repeatedly underestimated how deeply resentment, humiliation and regional alienation could become political capital. Eastern Germany entered reunification not simply as a geographical territory but as a society undergoing an extraordinary psychological and economic shock. Factories vanished. Communities shrank. Careers disappeared. Institutions were replaced. People who had spent decades being told that their country was the wrong Germany suddenly found themselves being told that their experience was largely the wrong history.

That does not make eastern Germans fascists. Nor does poverty automatically produce extremism. But political abandonment creates an empty room and somebody eventually walks into it. The AfD did.

It understood something the respectable parties often did not: people do not vote only with spreadsheets. They vote with memories, grievances, fears, pride and the intoxicating sensation of finally being noticed. The party has been particularly effective at converting legitimate frustrations, about stagnant regions, declining services, immigration, housing, bureaucracy and political incompetence, into a larger story about national betrayal.

That is where the danger lies. A democracy does not become illiberal merely because angry people vote. It becomes vulnerable when legitimate anger is deliberately attached to ethnic hierarchy, historical revisionism, hostility toward minorities and contempt for democratic restraints. The AfD has repeatedly moved in that direction, while its opponents have sometimes behaved as though the principal problem were the party's public-relations strategy rather than its political substance.

And there is an uncomfortable irony here. Every time mainstream parties imitate the far right in the hope of making it unnecessary, they validate the far right's diagnosis. If immigration is suddenly treated as the explanation for every social failure, voters naturally wonder why they should choose the copy rather than the original.

The firewall, meanwhile, is becoming less like a fortress and more like a political Maginot Line: impressive in principle, increasingly awkward in practice. You can refuse to cooperate with the AfD. You cannot refuse to acknowledge that millions of voters have chosen it.

Saxony-Anhalt therefore matters far beyond Saxony-Anhalt. The AfD fell three seats short of an outright parliamentary majority, but the psychological threshold has already been crossed. A far-right party has demonstrated that it can dominate an election in modern Germany without hiding what it is.

That should frighten Europe, not because Germany is about to become Nazi Germany again, but because history almost never repeats itself with the courtesy of wearing the same uniform.

The real lesson of reunification is therefore not that Germany defeated its past. It is that democracy cannot permanently outsource its unfinished business to elections. The ghost was never gone. Germany simply stopped looking under the bed.

The woman who would fix FIFA by Kasie Hewitt

She appears to believe that institutions should be run by rules, that power should have limits, and that football might actually belong to the people who play it, watch it and pay for it.

Klaveness has spent years discovering that the easiest way to annoy powerful men is to ask them questions in public. It exposed a larger disagreement about what FIFA is for. Is it a federation of national associations, serving the game, or a commercial machine whose president acquires the instincts of a sovereign?

Klaveness seems to have made her choice. That does not necessarily mean she wants Infantino's chair. Her greatest asset may be that she treats the presidency as less important than the institution.

Her argument is essentially impolite, replacing one president with another is not reform. It is musical chairs. FIFA does not need a new face. It needs fewer opportunities for the person at the top to behave as though FIFA were a personal kingdom. Decisions need scrutiny. Commercial ambitions need institutional checks. National associations need consultation. Conflicts of interest need consequences rather than press releases. And the presidency needs to become a job, not a geopolitical lifestyle.

This is why Klaveness is dangerous to FIFA culture. She is not proposing a Scandinavian utopia in which everybody holds hands around a conference table. She is proposing something much more threatening: boring accountability.

The irony is that football's governing institutions have become sophisticated at producing spectacle while remaining primitive about governance. The World Cup is a cultural phenomenon; FIFA can negotiate billions in commercial revenue; presidents can speak to heads of government. Yet the democratic question remains medieval: who watches the people who run the game?

Klaveness's appeal lies in her refusal to separate football from politics, because football has never been separate from politics. Stadiums, money, migration, human rights, national identity and diplomacy walk onto the pitch. Pretending otherwise leaves political decisions to people who prefer not to discuss them.

That distinction matters because FIFA's problem has never been a shortage of executives. It has been the temptation to confuse charisma with legitimacy, influence with accountability, and success with institutional health. A reformer entering that palace can easily discover that the furniture is more comfortable than the principles.

Klaveness seems alert to the trap. Would she be a good FIFA president? Perhaps. She has the legal background, football experience and political nerve. More importantly, she has demonstrated something rarer: a willingness to spend political capital without knowing what she will receive in return.

But should she become president? Only if she can resist becoming the kind of president she has spent years criticising. That is the test. FIFA does not need another saviour. It needs an institution capable of surviving its saviours.

Klaveness may therefore be the future of FIFA precisely because she understands that the future cannot sensibly belong to one person. If she wants the presidency, she will have to convince the world that she wants to change the office more than she wants the office itself.

And if she does not want it? That may be the most encouraging possibility of all. Perhaps the person FIFA needs most is the one willing to rebuild the house without insisting on sleeping in the biggest bedroom today.

The passwords we leave behind by Jiro Lambert

Death used to leave behind boxes of photographs, letters, diaries and perhaps a cupboard full of things nobody quite knew what to do with. Now it leaves behind something far more complicated: a digital version of ourselves scattered across servers, clouds, social networks, gaming platforms and forgotten passwords.

The strange thing is that the digital self does not understand death. Your body stops. Your Facebook profile may not. Your iCloud library certainly does not suddenly vanish because a heart has stopped beating. Your gaming avatar can remain running around a virtual universe long after the person controlling it has gone. The internet, unlike a cemetery, has remarkably little understanding of finality.

That makes digital inheritance one of the great neglected problems of modern life. We prepare wills for houses, savings, jewellery and cars. We discuss who gets the family photographs. Yet increasingly those photographs are not in an album. They are in a cloud account protected by two-factor authentication on a phone that may be locked in a drawer.

And that is where the trouble begins. Social-media accounts generally do not simply disappear when somebody dies. Depending on the platform, an account may be memorialised, deleted or left sitting there indefinitely. Some services allow designated legacy contacts or relatives to request changes; others impose considerable restrictions. The dead person may become a digital ghost: still tagged in photographs, still appearing in memories, still occupying a little corner of the internet while everyone who knew them has moved on.

There is something simultaneously comforting and disturbing about that. A memorialised profile can become a kind of digital gravestone. Friends can leave messages. Family members can return to photographs. Birthdays can become moments of remembrance rather than occasions for an algorithm to awkwardly suggest sending greetings to someone who is no longer alive.

But preservation should be a choice, not an accident. The same applies to photographs. iCloud, Google Photos and other cloud services are effectively enormous digital attics. They may contain thirty years of family life, including pictures nobody else remembers exist. Losing access to them can mean losing an irreplaceable historical record.

The obvious solution is depressingly unglamorous: plan. Download important photographs. Keep sensible backups. Decide which accounts should be deleted and which should survive. Nominate appropriate legacy or trusted contacts where services allow it. Keep an inventory of important accounts. Make sure somebody you trust knows where the instructions are kept.

And, crucially, do not confuse giving somebody your password with giving them unlimited permission to become you. The same question becomes even stranger with gaming. Millions of people now possess digital identities that may be more elaborate than anything they own physically. Avatars have costumes, achievements, virtual houses, inventories, friendships and histories. Some contain items acquired over years and sometimes significant sums of money. Yet a gaming avatar is generally not treated like a painting hanging in a house. It exists because a company permits it to exist. That should make us uncomfortable. We have created digital lives without establishing universally understood rules for digital death.

Perhaps the most important lesson is that a digital legacy is not merely about property. It is about memory, privacy and dignity. Your family may desperately want your photographs but have no business reading every private message you ever sent. Your friends may treasure your gaming avatar while you would have hated the idea of somebody continuing to use it.

So the digital will should contain more than passwords. It should contain wishes. What should remain? What should disappear? Who should receive the photographs? Who should manage the accounts? Which parts of your digital life are private even after death?

We have spent decades teaching technology how to remember everything. Perhaps it is time to teach ourselves how to forget deliberately. Because when we die, our digital selves may remain. The sensible thing is to decide what kind of ghost we want to leave behind.

Me My Mind & I #21: Sticks & Stones #Cartoon by Patrick McWade

A different way to check internal and external ...thoughts!
'Me My Mind & I' is a cartoon series by Patrick McWade.
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Sceptic feathers #135 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Cynicism with feathers on thin wires.

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The blame machine by Sabine Fischer

The most dangerous sentence in the age of autonomous warfare may be: the machine made a mistake. It sounds innocent enough. A software anomaly. A corrupted data stream. A sensor misclassification. An unforeseen interaction between algorithms. The drone was not ordered to kill civilians; it simply interpreted the world incorrectly and acted upon that interpretation.

But war crimes do not become less terrible because the trigger was digital. The arrival of fully autonomous weapons threatens to create something more troubling than a new class of battlefield technology. It threatens to fracture the moral architecture of jus in bello, the rules governing how war may be fought by separating the act of killing from the human being who consciously performs it.

A soldier who deliberately fires on civilians can be held responsible. A commander who orders an unlawful attack can be prosecuted. A state can be held internationally responsible for the conduct of its armed forces. But what happens when a drone, operating independently, identifies a civilian vehicle as a military target because an unpredictable data anomaly causes its targeting system to malfunction?

The machine cannot stand trial. It cannot express remorse. It cannot understand a charge. It cannot be imprisoned. And, crucially, it cannot be morally guilty. That leaves the humans who created, purchased, programmed, approved, deployed and supervised it.

The temptation will be to search for one guilty individual: the programmer who wrote the defective code, the commander who authorised deployment, or the operator who pressed the activation button. But that may be precisely the wrong way to think about autonomous warfare.

Responsibility should not disappear into the circuitry. It should travel backward through the entire chain of decisions. If a military knows that a weapon can behave unpredictably and deploys it anyway, the anomaly is not an excuse. It may be evidence of negligence. If commanders knowingly use a system whose reliability is inadequate for distinguishing civilians from combatants, responsibility cannot simply evaporate when the algorithm behaves unexpectedly.

There is, however, an uncomfortable distinction between responsibility and culpability. A state may bear responsibility for an unlawful attack without every individual involved being personally guilty of a war crime. Criminal law normally requires a particular mental element. That is where autonomous weapons create their most disturbing legal fog.

And this is precisely why the technology should not be allowed to outrun accountability. The fashionable argument is that machines could eventually make warfare more precise than humans. Perhaps. Humans are spectacularly capable of making mistakes, particularly under fear, exhaustion, anger and confusion. A sufficiently sophisticated machine might one day distinguish targets better than a frightened soldier.

But accuracy is not the same thing as morality. A machine can calculate probability. It cannot understand the meaning of a child standing beside a supposed target. It cannot comprehend surrender, mercy or dignity. And if its designers cannot reliably explain why it reached a lethal conclusion, handing it authority over life and death is not technological sophistication. It is moral outsourcing.

The answer, therefore, should be brutally simple: no autonomous weapon should be deployed in circumstances where its behaviour is sufficiently unpredictable that responsibility for an unlawful attack cannot be meaningfully assigned beforehand.

If nobody can credibly say who answers for the machine, the machine should not be authorised to kill. Otherwise, the battlefield acquires the perfect criminal: a weapon without a conscience, a crime without a willing perpetrator and a chain of command conveniently pointing at the computer. That is not the future of warfare we should fear most. It is the future in which everyone responsible insists that nobody was.

The illiteracy of power by Melina Barnett

International Literacy Day comes nowadays the uncomfortable question, what happens when governments begin travelling in the opposite direction?

The irony of our age is extraordinary. UNESCO describes literacy as a fundamental human right, yet hundreds of millions of adults still lack basic literacy skills, while millions of children remain outside school. In 2026, as International Literacy Day marks its 60th anniversary, the world is still arguing about something that should have been settled generations ago: whether every child deserves an education.

And increasingly, the argument is not simply about poverty or war. It is also about politics. In the United States, the world's self-appointed champion of freedom, public education has increasingly become a battlefield. Schools are dragged into ideological wars over history, books, race, gender, religion, science and what children should be permitted to know. Education is treated less as a public good than as territory to be conquered.

This is not merely an American problem. Across wealthy democracies, public education is being squeezed by austerity, privatisation, political interference and the growing conviction that anything publicly funded must somehow justify its existence to people who would rather sell it.

There is something profoundly absurd about this. A government can spend billions on weapons, subsidies, infrastructure and tax arrangements, but somehow a properly funded school becomes an extravagance. A library is described as a burden. A teacher's salary becomes a political argument. A child's access to a decent education becomes dependent upon the postcode into which that child happened to be born.

We should call this what it is: the privatisation of opportunity. Education was never simply about producing workers who could read instructions. It was about producing citizens capable of questioning them. That distinction matters enormously.

An authoritarian government does not particularly fear an educated population because educated people know Shakespeare, algebra or chemistry. It fears them because educated people are harder to deceive. They ask inconvenient questions. They compare promises with results. They recognise propaganda. They understand history sufficiently to notice when politicians begin recycling its darkest chapters.

Literacy, therefore, is political power. That is why the modern assault on education should concern everybody, including those who never intend to enter a classroom again. When schools are weakened, democracy itself becomes weaker. When reading declines, manipulation becomes easier. When critical thinking is treated as ideological contamination, nonsense acquires political value.

And now literacy means more than reading a printed sentence. In a digital world, people must also be able to navigate algorithms, misinformation, artificial intelligence, manipulated images and oceans of deliberately manufactured nonsense. UNESCO itself increasingly frames literacy as involving the ability to access, understand, evaluate and create information responsibly.

The irony is almost unbearable: humanity has created more information than any previous civilisation, while some politicians appear determined to create citizens less capable of understanding it.

International Literacy Day should therefore not be another ceremonial occasion for politicians to photograph themselves beside children holding books. It should be an accusation. If education is a right, fund it. If literacy is essential to democracy, protect it.

If children are the future, stop treating their schools as convenient places to conduct today's culture wars. A society that deliberately makes education harder to access should not be surprised when ignorance becomes easier to govern. The greatest danger is not that people cannot read. It is that those in power discover how useful that can be.