Orbit of one by Gabriele Schmitt

There is something quietly unsettling about how much of humanity’s future now bends around the ambitions of a single individual. Not in the theatrical, science-fiction sense of a villain stroking a cat atop a lunar fortress, but in the far subtler reality of infrastructure, rockets, satellites, communications systems, becoming extensions of one man’s will. The modern space age, once the domain of nations and collective aspiration is increasingly a private project, shaped not by public consensus but by personal temperament.

The promise, of course, is dazzling. Reusable rockets lowering the cost of access to space. A satellite network that beams internet to the most remote corners of the planet. A long-term vision of becoming a multi-planetary species, hedging against extinction. These are not trivial achievements or trivial dreams. They speak to humanity’s oldest instinct, to explore, to survive, to transcend limits.

But ambition, when concentrated, acquires a different gravity. The infrastructure being built today is not merely technological, it is civilizational. A privately controlled satellite constellation can influence communication during wars, elections, and crises. It can decide who stays connected and who falls silent. The line between service provider and geopolitical actor becomes blurred, then erased. And unlike traditional institutions, these systems are not governed by transparent processes or democratic oversight. They are subject, ultimately, to the impulses of their architect.

That would be less concerning if the architect embodied consistency, restraint, and a respect for institutional boundaries. Instead, what we often see is volatility, a public persona that veers between visionary and provocateur, between thoughtful commentary and impulsive pronouncement. The erratic tone is not just a quirk; it raises serious questions about judgment. When decisions about global infrastructure can hinge on personal moods or ideological leanings, unpredictability becomes a structural risk.

Equally troubling are the faint but persistent echoes of authoritarian thinking that sometimes surface. Not always explicitly, not always coherently, but enough to suggest a worldview that is impatient with democratic friction and drawn to decisive, centralized control. Paired with occasional rhetoric that flirts with exclusionary or regressive ideas, it creates a dissonance: the future of humanity being shaped by someone whose vision of humanity itself may not be entirely inclusive.

History offers a cautionary pattern. Technological revolutions often begin with liberation and end with consolidation. Railroads, telegraphs, oil, the internet, each expanded human possibility while also concentrating power in new and sometimes dangerous ways. What feels different now is the speed and scale. Space, once a commons governed by treaties and shared imagination, is being rapidly privatized, not just in ownership, but in direction.

To question this trajectory is not to reject innovation or ambition. It is to insist that the systems underpinning our collective future remain accountable to more than one mind. The dream of reaching Mars should not come bundled with the quiet normalization of unilateral influence over Earth.

The real issue is not whether one individual can build extraordinary things. Clearly, he can. The issue is whether extraordinary power should ever be allowed to orbit so closely around a single, unpredictable center.

Fragility Of Notion #Poem by Jan Sand

 

No doubt there are scratchings
On dark walls of hidden caves
Where ancient fleeing slaves have crouched
In misery and fright to write
Of being here.

This here where we each reside
With reality by our side
May be cozened
By our dreams
Of what seems to be true.

But actualities are fabricated
To cohere.
What appears into
Recognizable patternings –
The sounds and sights we discern
Can burn in temporal immolation.

Information abides in marks,
Lines of rise and fall of tides
Of memories,
Traces in the sands where time
Has wash away.

Today is always here.
It awakens with the Sun
To disappear In night’s descent
When the firmamental cosmos appears
Where yesterdays have fled
At lightning speed beyond our galaxy.

It seeks the edge if time itself
Where even nothing cannot exist.

Our scratchings mark on
These walls of black infinity
Upon which knowingness can barely show.
Bats may descend in silent screams
To discern what we may be
But hey! No one knows the way,
No matter what they say.

We are defined, confined
By touch and sight
Sound and hate
Love and delight
To outline a hand on blacknesses,
Define our lacks.

#eBook The tiger in the chapel of roses by Manisha Yadav

 

It was near evening when the cloisters began to empty. The priory’s bell tolled low, heavy in the smoky air of May, and the shadows inside the stone corridors deepened like spilled ink.

Soldiers wandered among the walled gardens, laughing too loudly, sword belts clinking against armour ill-fitted to the task of war. One youth, little more than a boy, ran his blade down a hedge, shearing fresh leaves until a steward barked at him. The war was here. And it was coming for all of them.

Queen Margaret stood alone by the chapel window, watching. Her fingers, delicate and ringed, clutched at the carved stone like claws on prey. Below her, the banners of the House of Lancaster flapped in nervous rhythm. She did not blink.

“Curses on this place,” she whispered. “Even the wind stinks of treachery.”

Manisha Devi. A California mom of two whirlwind daughters, spends her days dodging Lego bricks and deciphering the intricate social dramas unfolding at the park. Fueled by caffeine and a healthy dose of cynicism, she channels her observations into witty short stories about the eccentric characters she encounters in her daily life, from the overly-enthusiastic dog walker to the woman who whispers secrets to her bonsai tree.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

The tiger in the chapel of roses

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2nd opinion! 26#07 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

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

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The long game in black robes by Timothy Davies

There is something almost theatrical, Shakespearean even about the idea of timing one’s exit for maximum political consequence. In Washington where power is rarely surrendered without calculation, the Supreme Court has increasingly come to resemble not just a judicial body, but a stage on which legacy, ideology, and strategy are carefully choreographed. The notion that a second Trump administration might quietly anticipate, or even encourage, the timely retirements of its most reliable conservative justices is less conspiracy than it is continuity.

After all, the modern Court is already the product of deliberate engineering. What was once framed as the slow drift of constitutional interpretation now feels more like a project with milestones. The appointments of recent years were not merely about filling vacancies, they were about locking in a worldview. A judiciary that once prided itself on insulation from politics has, paradoxically, become one of its most enduring prizes.

If Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were to step down before the 2026 midterms, it would not simply be a matter of age or fatigue. It would be, unmistakably, a strategic withdrawal, an effort to ensure that their replacements are chosen under the most ideologically favorable conditions. The logic is straightforward: better to pass the torch while the Senate remains amenable than to risk the unpredictability of electoral cycles. It is the judicial equivalent of retiring at halftime while your team still leads.

Critics will argue that such maneuvering erodes the Court’s legitimacy, transforming lifetime appointments into something resembling renewable political terms. They are not wrong to worry. The image of impartial arbiters begins to blur when justices appear to time their departures with partisan precision. Yet defenders might counter that this is simply realism catching up with tradition. The Court has always been political in consequence, if not in posture. What has changed is the candor.

What makes this moment particularly striking is the long horizon. This is not about the next case or even the next term. It is about decades. A justice appointed in their forties or fifties today could plausibly shape the law well into the 2050s. In that sense, the stakes are not merely generational, they are epochal. The Constitution, interpreted through such a lens, becomes less a fixed document than a living instrument tuned by those who hold the bench at just the right moment.

There is also an irony in the rhetoric that surrounds this strategy. The language of restoration, of returning to foundational principles, sits uneasily alongside the meticulous planning required to secure those outcomes. It suggests that what is being preserved is not simply the Constitution as written, but a particular vision of it, carefully curated and fiercely protected.

Still, one cannot help but admire the discipline of the approach. In a political culture often defined by short-term thinking and reactive decision-making, this is something else entirely: patient, methodical and unapologetically ambitious. It treats the judiciary not as an afterthought, but as the central battleground.

Whether one views this as prudent stewardship or calculated opportunism likely depends on where one stands. But the broader implication is harder to dismiss. The Supreme Court, once imagined as the final check on political excess, is now deeply enmeshed in the very currents it was designed to resist. And as the next potential retirements loom, the question is no longer whether politics shapes the Court but how openly, and how far into the future, that shaping is intended to reach.

The cloud has a body by Brea Willis

We still speak of “the cloud” as if our photos, emails, and idle late-night searches drift somewhere above us, weightless and benign. It’s a linguistic sleight of hand, equal parts poetry and misdirection. The cloud sounds like weather ephemeral, natural, even cleansing. But the truth, increasingly difficult to ignore, is that the cloud has a body. And that body is sprawling, power-hungry and planted firmly on the ground.

Data centers, those windowless, warehouse-sized fortresses, are multiplying with quiet urgency across rural landscapes and urban fringes alike. They do not announce themselves with smokestacks or dramatic skylines. Instead, they hum. A constant, low-grade vibration of servers processing our digital lives at a scale that defies intuition. The hum is the sound of convenience, of frictionless modernity. It is also the sound of consumption.

The mythology of the cloud has always depended on distance. If the infrastructure is out of sight, it becomes easier to imagine it as immaterial. But there is nothing immaterial about a data center that requires vast quantities of electricity to operate and astonishing volumes of water to stay cool. In some regions, these facilities compete directly with local communities for already strained resources. The cloud, it turns out, drinks.

What’s particularly striking is how this expansion has been framed, not as a necessary compromise, but as an inevitability. We are told that our appetite for streaming, storage, and artificial intelligence demands it. And perhaps it does. But inevitability is a convenient narrative. It absolves us of scrutiny. It turns a series of choices, corporate, political, personal, into something resembling fate.

The environmental cost is not abstract. Forests are cleared. Land is rezoned. Energy grids are stretched to accommodate buildings that, from the outside, appear inert but inside are in a state of perpetual exertion. Even as companies pledge carbon neutrality, the sheer scale of growth raises uncomfortable questions about whether efficiency gains can keep pace with demand. It is the classic paradox of modern technology: the more efficient it becomes, the more we use it.

There is also a cultural dimension to this illusion. The cloud has enabled a kind of digital amnesia, encouraging us to hoard data with little regard for its physical footprint. Thousands of photos we will never revisit. Emails we will never delete. Entire archives of forgotten intentions. Storage feels infinite because someone else is paying the visible price.

To question the cloud is not to romanticize a pre-digital past or to suggest we abandon the tools that have reshaped how we live and work. It is, however, to insist on clarity. Language matters. When we call something a cloud, we obscure its consequences. When we see it for what it is, a network of machines rooted in land, powered by energy, cooled by water, we are forced to confront the trade-offs.

The challenge, then, is not merely technological but moral. How much infrastructure are we willing to build in the name of convenience? How much landscape are we willing to sacrifice for latency measured in milliseconds? And perhaps most importantly, can we imagine a digital future that is not predicated on endless, invisible expansion?

The cloud is no longer a metaphor we can afford. It is a structure, a system, a presence. And like all presences, it leaves a mark.

The quiet squeeze on American art by Felix Laursen

There is a particular kind of pressure that doesn’t arrive with sirens or declarations. It hums instead, low, persistent, and deniable. In recent years, that hum has settled over American art, not as outright censorship but as something subtler and, in some ways, more corrosive, a climate of intimidation, suspicion and ideological sorting that has grown louder in the wake of Donald Trump’s political movement and its cultural orbit.

To say that art is “suffering” may sound dramatic. After all, artists are still producing; galleries still open, films still premiere, and novels still find their way onto nightstands. But the question isn’t whether art exists; it’s whether it breathes freely. Increasingly, the answer feels complicated.

The modern American artist now creates under a peculiar double gaze. On one side, there is the familiar marketplace pressure, what sells, what trends, what algorithms favour. On the other, a more politicized scrutiny has taken hold, fueled in part by a populist rhetoric that casts artists, institutions, and cultural elites as adversaries to “real” America. This framing, amplified over years, has consequences. It encourages audiences to approach art not with curiosity but with suspicion, as if every painting, lyric, or script is a coded attack.

The chilling effect is not always visible, but it is real. It lives in the hesitation before tackling a controversial subject, in the quiet decision to soften an edge, in the calculation of how a work might be weaponized in a culture war that thrives on outrage. Artists have always faced backlash, this is hardly new, but the scale and speed of modern political amplification change the equation. A single work can be pulled into a national firestorm overnight, its nuances flattened into talking points.

What distinguishes this moment is the normalization of hostility toward cultural production itself. When political rhetoric routinely dismisses journalists, academics, and artists as untrustworthy or subversive, it erodes the shared ground on which art depends: the assumption that creative expression is not a threat but a conversation. Instead, art becomes evidence, either of loyalty or betrayal.

There is also the matter of institutional pressure. Museums, schools, and funding bodies operate within the same charged environment. Decisions about exhibitions, programming, and grants are no longer insulated from political narratives. Even the perception of bias can trigger backlash, leading to pre-emptive caution. This is how pressure works best, not through bans, but through anticipation of consequences.

And yet, art is stubborn. It has survived worse climates than this. If anything, constraint often sharpens expression. The most compelling work emerging now frequently engages directly with the tension, refusing neutrality and exposing the mechanics of power, identity, and belonging. Artists are not retreating so much as recalibrating, finding new languages to navigate a landscape where every statement risks misinterpretation.

Still, something is lost when the baseline shifts from openness to defensiveness. Art thrives on risk, ambiguity, and the freedom to offend without being reduced to an enemy. When that freedom feels conditional, even the boldest voices must spend energy managing perception rather than pursuing vision.

The pressure, then, is not a single force but an atmosphere. It doesn’t silence art outright; it bends it, nudges it, and occasionally distorts it. Whether that pressure will ultimately constrict American creativity or provoke a new, defiant renaissance remains an open question. But it would be naïve to pretend it isn’t there, humming just beneath the surface, shaping what gets made and what doesn’t.

Fika bonding! #120 #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.

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Caresse Crosby: A World Citizens' Passionate Years by René Wadlow

Caresse Crosby (April 20, 1891 – January 24, 1970) was one of the more colorful figures of the early world citizens movement, heading the World Citizen Information Center in Washington, D. C. Her autobiography The Passionate Years was first published in 1953 and more recently republished by the Southern Illinois University Press in 1968. The Southern Illinois University Library holds her papers.

Most of The Passionate Years concerns Caresse Crosby’s life in Paris as the publisher of the Black Sun Press, at the center of the United States (U. S.) writers living in Paris in the 1920s – what has been called the Lost Generation – Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish. She had moved to Paris in 1922 from Boston with her then husband, Harry Crosby. Harry Crosby was a nephew of J. P. Morgan, the banker. Harry had a short-term job at the Paris branch of the Morgan Bank, but he was not interested in banking and had a reasonable income from a trust fund. Thus, he started a small publishing house to publish in fine but limited editions books of his own poems and those of his friends. Harry Crosby was always preoccupied with the idea of death, having seen it closely as a medical worker in France during the last part of the First World War. Hence the name of Black Sun, a symbol of death overcoming the light of the Sun for the publishing house. On a trip back to New York in 1929 in what may have been a suicide pact, Harry Crosby first shot a woman friend and then himself with her in his arms. (1)

Caresse stayed on in Paris to continue the Black Sun publishing house, opening it also to French writers she liked such as Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. In 1936, seeing the clouds of tensions growing in Europe, she moved back to the USA, living in New York City and Washington, D. C. It was at this time that she began promoting the idea of world citizenship to counter the narrow nationalism she had seen firsthand in visits to Italy and Germany.

Right at the end of the Second World War, she wanted to create a Center for World Peace at Delphi, Greece – a place of inspiration from the Greek gods. However, the Greek Government still weak from the German occupation and the anti-Communist civil war did not want such a center with an ideology that it did not understand. The Greek Government refused the visas. Caresse then moved the idea to Cyprus and created the World Man Center with a geodesic dome designed by Buckminster Fuller, who had become her lover at the time. Cyprus, then under British control, was somewhat out of the way for the sort of visiting writers, painters, and intellectuals that Caresse usually attracted. Thus, she bought a castle north of Rome, the Castello di Rocca Sinibalda, and established an artists’ colony for young artists. She divided her time between this Rome area and her New York and Washington quarters.

For Caresse Crosby, World Citizenship was an aesthetic rather than a political concept, but she did plant seeds in the minds of people largely untouched by geopolitical considerations.

Notes:
1) See Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003).

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Rene Wadlow, President, Association of World Citizens

When exploitation becomes ammunition by Marja Heikkinen

There is a particular kind of damage that doesn’t come from numbers, but from narrative. It only takes a small fraction of people bending the rules to reshape how millions are perceived. Recent revelations that some migrants have falsely claimed domestic abuse to secure residency are not just a legal issue, they are a political accelerant.

Let’s be clear about two things at once, because both are true and neither cancels the other out. Fraud should be addressed firmly. Systems built to protect vulnerable people, especially survivors of domestic abuse, cannot function if they are exploited. At the same time, the overwhelming majority of migrants are not gaming the system. They are navigating it, often under immense pressure, with far more to lose than to gain.

But nuance is rarely what spreads. What spreads is the headline, the anecdote, the story that confirms suspicion. And in today’s climate, those stories don’t remain isolated. They are lifted, repeated and weaponized, especially by those already inclined to see immigration not as a policy challenge, but as a cultural threat.

This is where the real damage unfolds. Not in the individual cases of deception, but in the collective punishment that follows. A handful of fraudulent claims quickly morph, in public discourse, into a sweeping indictment: they’re all doing it. It’s an old pattern, and an effective one. Complexity is inconvenient; generalization is powerful.

And so, a policy loophole becomes a talking point. A talking point becomes a rallying cry. A rallying cry becomes justification, for tighter restrictions, harsher rhetoric and often less empathy.

The tragedy is that those most harmed by this chain reaction are often the very people these systems were designed to protect. Real victims of domestic abuse, many of whom already face cultural, linguistic, and legal barriers, now encounter an added layer of scepticism. Their stories are questioned not on their merits, but through the shadow cast by unrelated fraud.

At the same time, migrants more broadly find themselves navigating a landscape increasingly shaped by suspicion. Every dishonest claim becomes a multiplier, feeding a perception that is difficult to reverse. Trust, once eroded, is slow to rebuild—and in the meantime, it reshapes policy and public sentiment alike.

None of this suggests that wrongdoing should be ignored or minimized. On the contrary, it should be investigated and addressed with precision. But precision is the key word. A targeted problem demands a targeted response, not a broad-brush reaction that sweeps up innocent people along with the guilty.

There is also a deeper question worth asking: why do such loopholes exist in the first place, and what conditions make them attractive to exploit? Immigration systems are often complex, slow, and unforgiving. When legal pathways are narrow, some will inevitably look for alternative routes. That doesn’t excuse deception but it does contextualize it.

Still, context is often the first casualty in public debate. What remains is a simplified story, migrants exploiting compassion, systems being abused, trust being broken. It’s a story that travels well, especially in an era where outrage is currency. And once it takes hold, it doesn’t just shape opinions it shapes outcomes.

If there is a lesson here, it’s not that immigration systems are uniquely vulnerable to abuse. Every system is. The real test is how societies respond: whether they correct flaws without amplifying fear, whether they enforce rules without eroding fairness, whether they resist the urge to let the actions of a few define the many.

Because when exploitation becomes ammunition, the target is rarely limited to those who pulled the trigger.

ARMAGEDDON Poem by David Sparenberg

 

“A whole civilization will die tonight.”
President Donald J. Trump *

The howling of hatred
And the madness of contagious war
Spreads over the earth.
In heaven
The wrath of God panics.
The Hour of Armageddon.

May a meteor
Crash into your privates.
May a volcano erupt
In the crater of your heart.
May the fiery fall of Lucifer
Forever ending in ashes
Land on your face, melting
The jelly of your eyes.

We have become
In our dunce caps of stupidity
Destroyer of world.

A black sun lurks
-a leering death’s head metal-
Behind the mushroom
Clouds of war.
The Minute of Armageddon.

*Of course PONTUS was bluffing, the same way Putin bluffed with the threat of nuclear war over Ukraine. But such statements by leaders with access to nuclear arsenals are expressions of the propaganda of global terrorism. It is past due time for Earth to be made a Nuclear Free Zone and the planet rendered free of tyrants and political mass murderers. No more “deals” with business as usual. Earth’s human population needs a new Global Bill of Rights. Better to weave the impossible dream into the fabric of possibilities than to continue planning the nightmare of annihilation. No one in political office should ever again menace the citizens of creation by saying, “A whole civilization will die tonight.” And the joker who spoke those words—one humorless clown in the international circus ofnihilism and power—has the nuclear codes in his suit pocket.

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David Sparenberg is a humanitarian and eco poet, an international essayist and storyteller. He published four eBooks with OVI Books (Sweden) and the Word Press in 2025, the fourth of which was TROUBADOUR & the Earth on Fire. David will have a fifth OVI eBook, MANIFESTO: Ecology, Spirituality & Politics in a Higher Octave, published in April 2026. David Sparenberg lives in Seattle, WA in the Pacific Northwest of the United States but identifies as an Ecotopian Citizen of Creation.

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