The war we forgot by Brea Willis

There is something revealing about the way modern governments prepare for catastrophe. They spend fortunes rehearsing wars that may never happen while quietly neglecting disasters that almost certainly will.

The distinction is politically convenient. War has uniforms, maps, enemies and ceremonies. It produces budgets with impressive names: missiles, drones, submarines, command systems. Earthquakes, floods, fires and landslides have none of these. They arrive without passports, ideology or diplomatic warning. They simply interrupt the morning.

Colombia’s earthquake is a brutal reminder of this asymmetry. A powerful tremor struck western Colombia on August 10, turning buildings into traps and exposing the fragile distance between a functioning society and a humanitarian emergency. Rescue workers now confront rubble, damaged infrastructure, disrupted communications and communities that cannot wait patiently for bureaucracy to catch up.

The uncomfortable lesson is not that earthquakes are unpredictable. It is that their consequences are often remarkably predictable. We know which buildings are vulnerable. We know that hospitals need backup power that communications fail, that roads can become useless, that water systems break, that emergency services become overwhelmed and that poor communities suffer first and longest. We know, too, that the first hours matter enormously. Yet preparedness remains the sort of policy that politicians praise after a disaster and postpone before one.

There is a reason for this. Prevention is politically invisible. A reinforced bridge does not make a dramatic television image. A school that does not collapse is not celebrated as a political triumph. Money spent strengthening hospitals, training volunteers or maintaining emergency stockpiles produces no ribbon-cutting spectacle comparable with a new military aircraft.

But the arithmetic of national security is changing. Security should not mean merely protecting a country from hostile governments. It should mean protecting citizens from whatever can destroy the functioning of their society.

A city without water is insecure. A hospital without electricity is insecure. A communications network that collapses during a crisis is insecure. A government unable to distribute food after a flood is insecure. These are not softer versions of defence. They are defence.

The obsession with hypothetical enemies has also encouraged a dangerous illusion: that sophisticated states can engineer their way out of vulnerability. They cannot. Technology can detect, warn, model and coordinate. It cannot repeal geology. Nor can artificial intelligence persuade a badly constructed building to remain standing.

The sensible response is not to abandon military preparedness. Nations need armies, deterrence and resilient defence. But resilience should be treated as one system rather than two competing worlds. The engineer reinforcing a hospital and the soldier protecting its emergency generator are working on the same problem: keeping society alive when normality disappears.

Colombia should therefore be understood not as an isolated tragedy but as a warning about priorities. The next great disaster may be an earthquake, a flood, a wildfire, a volcanic eruption or something we have not named. Nature does not consult strategic planners. It does not care whether a government is conservative or progressive, rich or poor, popular or exhausted. The tectonic plate has no interest in polling numbers, parliamentary majorities or election calendars. It simply waits, then moves without permission.

We keep preparing for the war we fear and postponing the disaster we know will come. That is not prudence. It is procrastination wearing a uniform.

This Concert Of Contours #Poem by Strider Marcus Jones

 

ear nibbles
neck kisses
sex ripples
mouth wishes
to arms and legs
with minds and heads
is a body ballet
of rock and sway.
this concert
of contours
that squirts
mine and yours
is never too far away
from broken loneliness to play.
your beauty's blushes
colour in my years
and time's rushes
are hands that paint like soft brushes
so unwanted darkness disappears.

---

Strider Marcus Jones – is a poet, law graduate and former civil servant from Salford, England with proud Celtic roots in Ireland and Wales. He is the editor and publisher of Lothlorien Poetry Journal https://lothlorienpoetryjournal.blogspot.com/. A member of The Poetry Society, nominated for the Pushcart Prize x4 and Best of the Net x3, his five published books of poetry https://stridermarcusjonespoetry.wordpress.com/ reveal a maverick, moving between cities, playing his saxophone in smoky rooms.

The outfit that refuses to die by Marissa Washington

Fashion has always loved reinvention, but TikTok has turned reinvention into an industrial process. One week you are a Tomato Girl, radiating Mediterranean summer fantasies in linen and red; the next you are dressing for Corpcore, apparently on your way to fire somebody in a glass office tower. Then comes balletcore, coastal grandmother, mob wife, office siren, quiet luxury and whatever freshly minted “core” is waiting around the algorithmic corner.

The problem is not that these aesthetics are silly. Fashion has always been a little silly. The problem is that they are arriving and disappearing so quickly that dressing oneself increasingly resembles maintaining a subscription service. TikTok has compressed fashion cycles to the point where an outfit can become passé before it has even survived a wash.

And this is producing an intriguing rebellion; people are repeating their clothes on purpose. Radical outfit repeating may be the most quietly subversive fashion movement of the moment.

For decades, repeating an outfit could carry a faint social stigma. Celebrities were expected to appear in something new. Influencers built entire careers around the implication that there was always another parcel arriving. Fashion's traditional message was simple: novelty equals relevance.

TikTok has taken that message and multiplied it until it becomes absurd. If every aesthetic has a shelf life shorter than a carton of milk, then constantly participating becomes exhausting and expensive. The Tomato Girl needs the linen dress. Corpcore requires the pencil skirt. Balletcore wants the wrap cardigan. Suddenly a perfectly good wardrobe has become a graveyard of former identities.

The natural response is not necessarily to buy better. It is to buy less. Outfit repeating therefore becomes more than thriftiness. It becomes refusal. There is something wonderfully insolent about wearing the same jacket three days apart when the internet insists that your followers require a new personality every morning. The repeated garment says: I liked this yesterday. I still like it today. Deal with it.

More importantly, repetition restores something fashion has been losing, personal style. A genuine personal style is supposed to emerge from familiarity. You wear the same boots until they acquire your walk. You discover that one jacket works with almost everything. You learn that a particular pair of trousers makes you feel confident. Clothes become part of a biography rather than disposable props in a content strategy.

The irony is delicious. TikTok has made aesthetics more powerful than ever while simultaneously making many people suspicious of aesthetics altogether. When every look comes with a name, a shopping list and an expiration date, refusing the name becomes liberating.

The fashion industry, naturally, will try to monetise this rebellion. There will be “capsule wardrobe” trends, “rewear” influencers and probably a $300 cardigan marketed as an act of anti-consumerist resistance. Capitalism is remarkably talented at selling people the means of escaping capitalism.

But the impulse itself is real. Perhaps the next great fashion statement is not looking like the newest aesthetic. Perhaps it is looking unmistakably like yourself and wearing the same thing often enough that nobody can mistake it for a trend. The ultimate luxury may be owning an outfit that does not need replacing simply because TikTok has found something else to talk about.

2nd opinion! 26#14 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Seriously, a human hater self-centred agoraphobic in quarantine!
I think you’ll need a second opinion after this.

For more 2nd opinion, quarantined!, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The skepticism trap by Jennifer Stephenson

Modern conspiracy theorists like to imagine themselves as the last adults in the room. While everyone else is supposedly swallowing official narratives, they are asking questions, connecting dots and refusing to believe what they are told. There is something flattering about this self-image. It is also profoundly misleading.

The problem with much contemporary conspiracy thinking is not an absence of scepticism. It is scepticism with the brakes removed.

Healthy scepticism asks: What is the evidence? What would prove me wrong? How reliable is the source? Are there simpler explanations? Toxic scepticism asks only: What if they are lying? The first is an intellectual method. The second is an attitude and attitudes are remarkably good at disguising themselves as intelligence.

The conspiracy theorist begins with suspicion and then treats suspicion as evidence. An unexplained event becomes proof of concealment. A contradiction becomes proof of deception. Missing information becomes proof that something is being hidden. And when evidence appears to contradict the theory, that evidence is absorbed into the theory itself. The more vigorously authorities deny it, the more convinced the believer becomes that the authorities must be involved.

This is not critical thinking. It is a closed circuit. There is, of course, a legitimate reason to distrust institutions. Governments lie. Corporations conceal wrongdoing. Intelligence agencies conduct secret operations. Powerful people collude. History is littered with genuine conspiracies. Scepticism is therefore not merely permissible; it is indispensable to a functioning democracy.

But precisely because conspiracies sometimes happen, the existence of one possible conspiracy cannot become a licence to believe every conceivable one. The great trick of conspiratorial thinking is that it converts uncertainty into certainty. Reality is messy, accidental and frequently boring. Institutions make mistakes. Bureaucracies contradict themselves. Politicians say stupid things. Scientists revise conclusions. Newspapers get stories wrong. Markets behave irrationally. Human beings are chaotic creatures.

The conspiracy offers something much tidier: somebody did it. That simplicity is intoxicating. Social media has turned this intellectual bad habit into an industrial product. Every coincidence can be assembled into a thread; every anonymous account can become an insider; every photograph can acquire a sinister caption. Algorithms reward emotional certainty, not intellectual humility. The result is a strange new hierarchy in which knowing less can produce greater confidence.

And confidence is increasingly mistaken for courage. The genuine sceptic must possess an unfashionable quality: the willingness to be disappointed. If the evidence destroys a cherished suspicion, the sceptic changes his mind. The conspiracist changes the explanation.

This distinction matters enormously. A person who questions authority can strengthen democracy. A person who regards every authority as inherently fraudulent eventually destroys the possibility of shared knowledge altogether.

The irony is delicious. Conspiracy theorists often accuse everyone else of being sheep. Yet they can become remarkably obedient to the narrative of their own tribe, repeating its vocabulary, accepting its authorities and dismissing outsiders without examination.

Critical thinking is not believing the opposite of what you are told. It is having no predetermined opposite. That is the harder discipline and the one modern conspiracy culture desperately needs.

Fortune cookie #Poem by Abigail George

 

Today I write about forgiveness, about having a forgiving heart

My mother
has turned into
a fire hydrant

She waters
the garden
with a boomslang
in her hand

Charles Bukowski
watches her
His eyes, two brown cells

He smiles at my mother, the fire hydrant
But she just ignores him
as if he isn’t standing there

He dips
a rusk
into the tea

There’s a tiny earthquake in the cup
Waves across the saucer

The tea spills into the verdant-green silence
Its perfume

The sound of the hosepipe, water gushing
out of it
Birdsong

We’re all free now, says Chris Hani
Bukowski nods

I don’t agree
But I don’t say anything

George Botha
and Stephen Bantu Biko
play a game of chess

If philosophy is medicine, what is poetry?
Albert Camus remarks

Frantz Fanon
turns his head
in the direction
of the cacti and says,

Philosophy is philosophy is philosophy
Fanon, who am I to disagree, says Camus

There’s a knock
at the front door

It’s another pilgrim
on a spiritual mission

They want to meet
The other pilgrims present

I make more tea
Bukowski says
that he wishes
he had been happier

I remark, how well I know that feeling

Anna Akhmatova
and I spoke about the men
that we had loved and adored,
and the men who had left us
We spoke about the women we became
as we lost our innocence
as we grew older
and the springtime
of our youth
faded away

Petya Dubarova is quiet
You’re a rebel, Hani says
She’s a poetess, Camus says

She’s a teenager
She wants to be left alone,
I want to holler
But I can’t seem to find the words

Petya stares into the distance
as if there are mountains gazing back at her

Look! The roses
The parsley, the mint
The flowers sparkling

Their mouths, rainbows
No spoiled identity here

No stigma
No fractured sensibility
Yes, no stigma

Look! Look!
There’s Patrice Lumumba
under the shade
of the guava tree
dancing
cheek-to-cheek
with his wife

Look! Look!
My father, my father!
A young man
before he had me

before my sister came along
then his namesake

He puts his arms around my mother
And kisses her cheek
And she laughs

She laughs
While I hand out fortune cookies

And the earth is still round
The glaciers are melting in the North Pole
There is still a hole in the ozone layer
They want to colonise Mars
They still send rockets to space
Babies are still being born in refugee camps

But my mother is laughing
My mother is happy
And my father is a young man
in the prime of his life

It is not too late to forgive you
No, it is not too late to forgive you my brother
It is like the feverish habitat of mitochondria
The primordial soup of forgiveness is a work in progress
It is a process that has the neverending potential
to die in the half-light
at the end of the day.

Classified, except for …democracy by Markus Gibbons

There is something almost quaint about the idea that the Pentagon might regard Congress as a team sport. One can imagine the scene: Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth arrives on Capitol Hill carrying the usual Washington mixture of charts, talking points and an appetite for an enormous cheque. The number is extraordinary, $1.5 trillion in proposed defence spending. The briefing room, apparently, is where the truly extraordinary part begins, some members of Congress are invited in, others are left outside.

This is not merely bad manners. It is a peculiar misunderstanding of what Congress is. The Constitution did not create a legislative majority and a legislative minority so that one could be treated as the government and the other as a hostile foreign power. Democrats in Congress may be political opponents of the administration. They are not foreign agents. They are not an inconvenient press corps. And they certainly do not stop being representatives of American citizens when they walk through the doors of a classified briefing room.

Hegseth's defenders can invoke leaks, distrust, security concerns and the familiar Washington argument that discretion is sometimes necessary. Fine. Classified information should be protected. But classification is supposed to protect national security, not provide a convenient adjective for political exclusion.

That distinction matters enormously when the department seeking congressional approval is asking for a sum so large that it could make even Washington's accustomed relationship with the word “trillion” seem slightly embarrassed. Hegseth is not asking Congress merely to admire his budget. He needs Congress to authorise, appropriate and ultimately legitimise it.

And yet the Pentagon appears increasingly comfortable treating congressional oversight as something to be managed rather than something to be respected.

The irony is almost too perfect. An administration demanding extraordinary military power is simultaneously narrowing the circle of lawmakers permitted to scrutinise it. The larger the budget becomes, the smaller the audience apparently gets.

Even Republicans have begun to object. That should make everyone nervous, because when members of the governing party start complaining that their own secretary of defence is turning national security into partisan property, the problem has moved beyond ordinary Washington tribalism.

There is a deeper danger here. Institutions acquire habits long before they acquire names. Today it is Democrats excluded from a briefing. Tomorrow it could be Republicans who have fallen out of favour with the president. Eventually Congress discovers that the executive branch has quietly decided which legislators deserve information and which deserve explanations after the fact.

That is how democratic erosion tends to work: rarely with a dramatic announcement, usually through administrative decisions that are defended as temporary, practical or necessary.

The Pentagon is not a political campaign office. The Secretary of Defence is not the president's partisan enforcer. Classified briefings are not rewards handed to friends.

America's military strength ultimately depends on something less glamorous than missiles, drones or aircraft carriers: constitutional trust.

A Pentagon that cannot distinguish between secrecy and partisan loyalty risks weakening precisely the institution it claims to defend. The most alarming secret in Washington may therefore be the one nobody is bothering to classify: democracy requires witnesses.

The Greeks we refuse to see by Thanos Kalamidas

Lisa Itoya is sixteen years old. She is Greek-Nigerian, a basketball player and now a member of Greece’s under-16 women’s national team. One might imagine that representing your country at sixteen would be the sort of achievement that produces congratulations, awkward television interviews and perhaps a few proud grandparents. Instead, Itoya has been greeted online by the familiar Greek cocktail of nationalism, racism and the peculiar conviction that someone else is somehow less Greek.

The reaction is depressingly predictable. Every time a Greek athlete with immigrant roots succeeds, a certain section of the country appears to discover that the Greek nation has an immigration policy after all, citizenship may be tolerated, excellence may be applauded but belonging remains conditional.

The usual response is to blame the far right, the Nazis of Golden Dawn, the assorted professional patriots who spend their evenings measuring the ethnic purity of strangers on social media. They certainly deserve the blame when they hurl racial abuse. But blaming only the far right is too comfortable. It allows everyone else to wash their hands.

Greek racism is older, broader and more ordinary than the extremists who advertise it most loudly.

There is a particularly stubborn mythology at work here, Greece as the beginning of everything that matters. Democracy began here. Philosophy began here. Theatre began here. Western civilisation supposedly walked out of ancient Athens carrying a torch and politely handed it to Europe. The mythology is so deeply embedded that it can become something more than pride. It can become entitlement.

If we invented democracy, the reasoning goes, surely we must also possess an unusually democratic soul. If we produced Aristotle, surely our descendants inherited his wisdom. If the Parthenon represents civilisation, then the people living beneath it must somehow be civilisation’s natural custodians.

History, unfortunately, is rarely that generous.

Modern Greece is a complicated society shaped by invasions, occupations, migrations, refugees, empires, intermarriage, economic upheavals and enormous movements of people. Yet popular nationalism often prefers an immaculate family tree. It turns history into a flattering portrait rather than a messy photograph.

That is why the appearance of a black Greek athlete can provoke such extraordinary anxiety. She is not merely a young woman playing basketball. To some people, she is an argument against their mythology.

Giannis Antetokounmpo has already become the great contradiction. A child of Nigerian parents became one of the most recognisable Greek athletes on Earth. His success made Greece proud, while his very existence once made parts of Greece uncomfortable. Emmanouil Karalis has encountered similar ugliness. Now Itoya has entered the same arena, except that she is sixteen and should not have to develop the emotional armour of an adult simply to wear the national jersey.

And there is an amusing historical irony in all this obsession with purity. Greek nationalists who imagine themselves racially exceptional might discover that the European far right often does not regard Greeks as the ideal Europeans at all. To many northern European supremacists, Greeks have long been stereotyped as southern, unreliable, lazy, corrupt or vaguely exotic. The people shouting about who is Greek enough may themselves fail somebody else’s imaginary racial examination.

That should be funny. It is actually tragic.

Because the real question is not what happens when a celebrated athlete encounters racism. Athletes have microphones, sponsors, lawyers, clubs and public visibility. Their suffering can become a national conversation.

What happens to the ordinary black Greek who has none of those things?

What happens to the teenager insulted on the street, the worker followed in a shop, the child mocked at school, the family treated as permanently foreign despite having lived in Greece for generations? Who notices them? Who intervenes? Who pays the price when politicians and public figures flirt openly with racial contempt and discover that the consequences are minimal?

This is where Greece needs to stop congratulating itself.

Racism is not defeated when the national team selects a black player. It is defeated when nobody thinks her selection requires an explanation.

Itoya does not need to prove that she is Greek. Greece needs to prove that it deserves her.

Fika bonding! #127 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

Fika is a state of mind and an important part of Swedish culture. It means making time for friends and colleagues to share a cup of coffee and a little something to eat.

For more Fika bonding!, HERE!
For more Ovi Cartoons, HERE!

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The best-friend family by Paula Bartlett

For generations, society sold adults a remarkably simple proposition, fall in love, get married, buy a house and have children. The sequence was presented less as one possible route through life than as the route. Yet increasingly, people are looking at the entire arrangement and asking a rather inconvenient question: why must romance be the foundation of a family at all?

The answer emerging in some households is surprisingly old-fashioned. Friendship. Across affluent societies, adults are experimenting with buying homes with their closest friends, sharing domestic responsibilities and, in some cases, raising children together without being romantically involved. Platonic life partnerships and co-parenting arrangements are becoming more visible, while the financial realities of housing have made friendship a surprisingly practical economic alliance.

This is not necessarily the death of romance. It is the end of romance's monopoly. The modern romantic relationship has been asked to do an extraordinary amount of work. One person is expected to be lover, best friend, financial partner, emotional therapist, co-parent, housemate, holiday companion and retirement plan. No wonder so many relationships buckle under the weight. We have turned the romantic partner into an entire social infrastructure.

Friendship, meanwhile, has been treated as the supporting cast. Perhaps that hierarchy was always backwards. A good friend may know your weaknesses without exploiting them, understand your irritating habits without pretending they are charming and remain beside you after the romance has lost its chemical fireworks. Friendship can be remarkably durable precisely because it does not require the permanent maintenance of sexual attraction.

Then there is money, that unromantic little tyrant. Buying a home alone has become increasingly difficult in many places. Pooling two incomes, sharing a mortgage and dividing household expenses can turn an impossible aspiration into a manageable one. For adults who have no interest in waiting indefinitely for Prince Charming or who have discovered that Prince Charming is financially useless, friendship can become a practical route to stability.

Children may make the argument even stronger. Parenthood is not fundamentally a romantic activity. It is a long-term exercise in cooperation, patience, reliability and sacrifice. A child needs adults who show up. Whether those adults kiss each other goodnight is rather less important than whether they turn up at the school gate, remember the doctor's appointment and remain calm when the child has painted the dog purple.

Platonic co-parenting challenges precisely this old assumption, that a child's family must originate in a love affair. Of course, friendship does not magically eliminate conflict. Quite the opposite. Property disputes, different parenting philosophies, new romantic partners, jealousy and changing ambitions can make these arrangements complicated. A friendship can survive a disastrous holiday; surviving a mortgage and eighteen years of childcare is another matter.

Yet the broader cultural shift deserves attention. People are increasingly separating the things previous generations bundled together: love, sex, companionship, property, parenthood and family.

That may ultimately be healthier. The family of tomorrow may not be defined by who sleeps together, but by who turns up for one another. And perhaps the most radical family revolution is not abolishing commitment. It is choosing it deliberately.

The dictator in absentia by Fahad Kline

There is a somewhat almost theatrically appropriate about Bashar al-Assad being sentenced to death in a courtroom he did not have the courage to enter. The dictator who spent years insisting that Syria was too complicated to be governed by anyone but him has discovered the simplest political lesson of all, regimes end, palaces empty, statues fall and eventually the paperwork catches up. A Damascus court has now convicted Assad of murder, torture, arbitrary detention and crimes against humanity, imposing the death penalty in absentia. He remains safely in Moscow, where Russia has given him the kind of sanctuary that dictators have historically mistaken for immortality.

The comparison with Nuremberg is tempting, though it should be handled carefully. Nuremberg was not merely punishment. It was an attempt to establish a principle: that sovereignty is not a licence to murder one's citizens, and that “I was only following orders” is not a sufficient moral defence when the orders themselves are criminal. Syria needs something similar—not because Assad is uniquely monstrous, but because the machinery that sustained him was extraordinarily ordinary. Ministries signed papers. Officers followed commands. Prison guards turned keys. Propagandists explained away the dead. Bureaucrats learned to make atrocity look administrative.

That is the real significance of the verdict. Assad's greatest achievement was not that he remained in power for twenty-four years. It was that he transformed brutality into routine. The Assad system did not depend upon one man personally torturing every prisoner or ordering every killing. It depended upon thousands of people understanding what was expected of them and discovering that obedience was safer than conscience.

A death sentence, therefore, is emotionally satisfying but politically incomplete. Indeed, the awkward irony is that Assad's punishment may never actually occur. He is in Russia. Moscow has little reason to hand over a former client whose survival remains useful as a symbol of its influence and as a reminder of what happens to those who challenge authoritarian power. The Syrian court can sentence Assad; it cannot presently reach him.

But justice is not entirely measured in handcuffs. A verdict creates a record. It gives names to crimes and responsibility to perpetrators. It tells survivors that what happened to them was not merely the unfortunate turbulence of a civil war, not an inevitable consequence of sectarian hatred, and not the unfortunate collateral damage of a government defending itself. It says, instead, that a state crossed a line and that somebody was responsible.

That distinction matters enormously. Yet Syria's new rulers should resist the intoxicating temptation to turn justice into revenge. A country emerging from dictatorship does not become democratic merely because yesterday's prisoners become today's judges. Nor does justice become more legitimate because its verdict is popular. The new Syria will be judged not only by how firmly it condemns Assad, but by whether it can construct institutions capable of judging everyone, including its own allies.

That is the difficult part. Nuremberg mattered because it attempted to establish law above political convenience. Syria now faces the same test. If the court becomes merely an instrument for settling the accounts of one victorious faction, the Assad verdict will eventually look less like the birth of justice than the opening act of another political cycle.

The dead deserve better than that. For years Assad behaved as though Syria belonged to him. His final humiliation is that Syria has now put his name into a court record as a defendant rather than a president. He may remain in Moscow. His regime does not. And history, at last, has started taking attendance.