The politics of “thoughts and prayers” by Sidney Shelton

There is something ritualistic about the response to a mass shooting. First comes shock. Then condolences and then invariably the sentence, “Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims.”

Thailand has apparently decided to experiment with another sentence: “Let’s change the law.” After a 14-year-old boy killed his grandparents before going to school and shooting six people there, Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul moved to tighten the country’s gun controls. New firearm purchase licences have been suspended, existing licences are being reviewed, and the government says it wants tougher rules governing guns and their circulation.

This is not revolutionary. It is, however, unfashionable in certain countries. The United States, in particular, has perfected political choreography in which the dead are mourned with eloquence while the living are left to negotiate lethal machinery. The country has produced a vocabulary for this performance: thoughts and prayers, healing, heroes, evil, mental health, “now is not the time.” The vocabulary is expansive; legislative results are often less so.

The peculiar achievement is that nobody has to admit nothing will change. Thoughts are wonderfully adaptable. They require no committee hearings, no votes, no constitutional arguments, no confrontation with a gun lobby, no examination of licensing systems, storage requirements or the difference between owning a weapon and carrying one into a crowded public place. Prayers have an administrative advantage. They can be dispatched immediately, require no budget allocation and cannot be accused of infringing anyone’s rights.

But a prayer cannot lock a gun in a safe. Nor can a candlelight vigil determine whether a teenager can obtain a firearm, whether an adult who owns one stores it responsibly, whether authorities know how many weapons are circulating illegally, or whether a licence should ever have been granted in the first place.

Thailand’s response deserves attention precisely because it is imperfect. No law will abolish violence, madness, despair or human cruelty. A determined killer will always look for another route. But this is a remarkably poor argument against making the easiest route harder.

There is also an uncomfortable lesson in the age of the perpetrator. Fourteen. A child old enough to kill, but still young enough to be legally incapable of many adult decisions. Yet the weapon was available. That should provoke questions about the adults, systems and assumptions surrounding the weapon.

Gun control is not really simply about guns. It is about deciding what a society considers an acceptable level of preventable risk.

Every society makes such calculations. We require seat belts. We regulate medicines. We inspect buildings. We license drivers. We put fences around dangerous machinery. We do not describe these measures as an attack on freedom because freedom without rules eventually becomes merely the freedom to be injured by someone else's negligence.

So when Thailand responds to a massacre with legislation rather than exclusively with lamentation, the rest of the world should watch. Especially those countries where the tragedy can happen again, the same flowers can be placed outside another school, the same flags can be lowered, and the same politicians can solemnly promise that they are praying. Perhaps, after enough funerals, prayer should be permitted to take a day off. Action could use the microphone.

The politics of the dry tap by Solomon Mensah

Johannesburg has discovered an unusually effective way of turning water into a political weapon, stop delivering it. For a city accustomed to the grand language of African urban ambition, the indignity is almost comically basic. The skyscrapers remain. The shopping centres glitter. The highways crawl with expensive cars. Yet behind the gates and apartment doors, residents are increasingly learning to regard the household tap with the suspicion normally reserved for a politician's promise.

More than a third of Johannesburg's water supply is reportedly disappearing through leaks and bursts, an astonishing 655m litres a day. That is not merely an engineering problem. It is a civic insult. Water is one of those services whose importance becomes apparent precisely when government fails to provide it. Electricity can be replaced, briefly, with batteries and solar panels. A rubbish collection can be postponed. Water cannot be negotiated with.

The political consequences are therefore predictable. South Africans have become veterans of infrastructure failure. Power cuts taught households to buy inverters. Now water shortages are teaching them to buy tanks, filters and boreholes. The wealthy are constructing private versions of the public utility they have stopped trusting.

This is perhaps the most dangerous feature of Johannesburg's crisis. The rich are not merely suffering less from municipal failure; they are acquiring the means to escape it. Once a household has its own borehole, storage tanks and filtration system, the condition of the municipal network becomes an abstraction. The city may be collapsing next door, but the swimming pool remains full.

That creates a vicious economic circle. Those most capable of withdrawing from the public system have the strongest incentive to do so. Those left behind are poorer residents who cannot drill their way out of a crisis. The public utility consequently becomes more concentrated among people with fewer resources, while its political and financial foundations weaken.

It is difficult to imagine a better recipe for inequality. The Johannesburg water crisis should therefore not be understood simply as a drought story, nor as another chapter in the familiar catalogue of South African infrastructure woes. It is a story about the slow privatisation of citizenship. The affluent citizen becomes a customer of private solutions; the poor citizen remains a captive of public failure.

That distinction matters electorally. Local elections are usually fought over potholes, refuse collection, housing and electricity. Water is different. A pothole damages a car. A dry tap reorganises an entire household's day. Children cannot wash. Toilets become unusable. Cooking becomes complicated. Elderly people and vulnerable residents must depend on tankers or neighbours. The inconvenience becomes intimate.

And intimacy is what turns administrative incompetence into political anger. The governing African National Congress has particular reason to worry. Its long dominance has increasingly been tested by voters who no longer regard liberation credentials as an adequate substitute for competent municipal government. Johannesburg's water failures offer opposition parties a brutally simple argument: forget ideology; look at the tap.

Yet blaming politicians alone would be too comfortable. Johannesburg inherited old pipes, rising demand, urban expansion and enormous maintenance requirements. Climate change adds another layer of difficulty. But these facts explain the problem; they do not excuse the failure to anticipate it. Infrastructure does not collapse overnight. Pipes spend decades announcing their age.

Maintenance is politically dull because successful maintenance produces nothing photogenic. There is no ribbon-cutting ceremony for a pipe that does not burst. Politicians naturally prefer visible projects. Voters, however, eventually become interested in the invisible ones when the visible city can no longer function.

Johannesburg is approaching that moment. The great irony is that the city's wealth, which should make reliable water easier to provide, may instead make collective failure easier to tolerate, for some. Private boreholes, tanks and filtration systems can conceal a public crisis long enough for it to become permanent.

That is the real warning from the dry tap. A city does not need to run completely out of water to experience a Day Zero. It merely needs enough citizens to stop believing that the

The Muslim NATO question by Mira Radulova

Three countries have signed what may eventually prove to be more consequential than the diplomatic language surrounding it suggests. Pakistan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have agreed that an armed attack on one of them will be regarded as an attack on all three, a formula deliberately reminiscent of NATO’s Article 5. The Mecca Joint Defence Agreement is not NATO, and nobody should mistake a communiqué for an integrated military machine. But history has a habit of beginning with paperwork.

The interesting question is not whether this is an “Islamic NATO” today. It plainly is not. The interesting question is whether it could become one tomorrow. The ingredients are unusually potent. Turkey brings a substantial conventional military, a growing defence industry and increasingly sophisticated drones. Pakistan brings a large, battle-tested armed force and the world’s only Muslim nuclear arsenal. Saudi Arabia brings money, strategic geography and the ability to finance the machinery that ambitious alliances invariably require. Put together, they form something considerably more interesting than another ceremonial friendship among governments.

And the choice of Mecca was hardly accidental. The symbolism practically writes its own editorial. Yet the alliance also contains a magnificent complication: its members do not agree on everything. They have different relationships with Washington, Moscow, Beijing, Tehran and Jerusalem. Their strategic priorities overlap without being identical. Turkey remains a NATO member. Pakistan has deep military ties with China. Saudi Arabia has spent decades relying on American security architecture while simultaneously attempting to diversify its strategic partnerships.

That is precisely why the pact matters. It is less the birth certificate of an Islamic NATO than a declaration that the old security order is no longer sufficiently reassuring. For years, Washington was the indispensable security broker of the Middle East. Now its partners are discovering the unpleasant truth of dependency: a security guarantee is only as convincing as the political will behind it. The result is not necessarily an anti-American revolt. It is something more practical and potentially more consequential: insurance.

And once countries start buying insurance, they tend to discover that collective insurance is cheaper. The obvious candidates for a wider arrangement are intriguing. Egypt has already been mentioned as a possible future participant. Indonesia and Malaysia would bring something entirely different: enormous populations, strategic maritime geography and substantial political weight in Southeast Asia. Add Egypt, perhaps Qatar or other Gulf states, and eventually Indonesia or Malaysia, and the three-country experiment begins looking less like an eccentric triangle and more like the skeleton of a wider security organisation.

But here lies the danger. An alliance built around shared Muslim identity could easily become a security organisation in which religion substitutes for strategy. That would be a mistake. The most durable alliance is not one in which everyone believes the same things; it is one in which everyone understands exactly what happens when somebody is attacked.

NATO survived because Article 5 acquired credibility through institutions, planning, interoperability and decades of military integration. Three governments signing a document is the beginning of that process, not its conclusion.

Still, beginnings matter. The Middle East has spent decades importing its security architecture from elsewhere. The Mecca pact suggests that some of its powers now want to manufacture their own.

If that ambition spreads, the next map of the Muslim world may be drawn less by borders, sectarian arguments or oil fields and more by mutual defence commitments. That would not yet be an Islamic NATO. But it would be the moment when someone finally started building one.

Screws & Chips #131 #Cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

In a galaxy far, far away, intelligence demonstrated by screws and chips,
boldly gone where no robot has gone before!

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The cloud has a floor by Jiro Lambert

We speak about “the cloud” as though our data has escaped the physical world and floated into some weightless digital heaven. Photos, emails, bank records, films, medical files and the accumulated debris of modern life are said to be “in the cloud”. The phrase is wonderfully convenient and almost completely misleading.

There is no cloud. There are buildings, cables, cooling systems, electricity grids, processors, storage devices and an astonishing quantity of machinery. What we call cloud storage is not an ethereal place but a vast physical infrastructure distributed across the planet. Your holiday photograph may feel weightless when summoned from a phone, but somewhere it exists as a pattern of electrical states inside physical storage hardware. The photograph has not ceased to be matter. It has merely become extraordinarily easy to move.

This distinction matters because we have allowed the language of technology to obscure its material consequences. Digital data is best understood as information represented physically. A file is not a little object sitting inside a computer like a document in a filing cabinet. It is a pattern encoded in changing physical states electrical charges, magnetic orientations, microscopic structures or other forms of measurable difference. The software interprets those differences as words, photographs, music or spreadsheets.

So is data an object? Not quite. The storage medium is physical; the information represented by that medium is more elusive. It resembles a pattern rather than a thing. A book is physical, but its meaning is not identical to the ink and paper. Burn the book and the particular copy disappears, yet the words may survive in another copy. Digital information behaves similarly, except that copying can be almost instantaneous and virtually perfect.

Nor is data simply a process. Processes move, transform and interpret information, while storage preserves a particular physical representation of it. The cloud is therefore better understood as a system: information encoded in physical devices, maintained by machines, transported through networks and interpreted by software.

That system is remarkably impressive and remarkably hungry. Every supposedly invisible photograph requires infrastructure. Every streamed film requires data centres and communications networks. Every artificial-intelligence query requires computation somewhere. Servers need electricity; electricity produces heat; heat requires cooling. Buildings need land, equipment needs manufacturing, and hardware eventually becomes waste.

The great trick of the phrase “cloud” is therefore psychological. It makes infrastructure disappear.

This is not merely a semantic complaint. When something appears immaterial, we are less inclined to ask who owns it, where it is stored, how much energy it consumes, what happens when the machinery fails, or what legal authority governs it. “The cloud” sounds almost natural, like weather. In reality, it is an industrial achievement on a planetary scale.

And yet there is something genuinely strange about digital information. Unlike an ordinary physical object, it can be copied without the original being diminished. Move a photograph across the world and the photograph remains. Duplicate a file a million times and the information itself does not become thinner.

Perhaps that is why the metaphor persists. Digital data feels almost supernatural because it occupies an unusual territory between object and idea.

But the next time someone says your data is “in the cloud”, imagine the servers humming in the dark. The cloud has a floor. And it is made of metal, silicon, cables, concrete and electricity.

Humanitarianism in the age of the billionaire by Shanna Shepard

World Humanitarian Day arrives each year with the uncomfortable timing of an alarm clock nobody wants to hear. On 19 August, the world pauses to honour those who carry food into war zones, rescue children from rubble, treat the wounded and remain beside communities after the television cameras have moved on. It is a noble occasion. It is also an increasingly damning indictment of the world that requires such people in the first place.

Humanitarian workers are asked to perform miracles in places where governments, armies and international institutions have failed catastrophically. They enter Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Myanmar and countless forgotten crises carrying medicine rather than weapons, compassion rather than ideology. Increasingly, they do so at enormous personal risk. The very people trying to preserve human life are becoming targets in wars where the distinction between civilian and combatant is treated as an inconvenience.

And then there is the extraordinary spectacle of our age: the humanitarian crisis on one side of the planet, the billionaire spectacle on the other.

We live in a world capable of producing private fortunes so enormous that a single individual can accumulate wealth beyond the annual budgets of entire countries. Billionaires can spend fortunes on rockets, superyachts, private islands, vanity projects and the technological equivalent of medieval castles while humanitarian agencies struggle to finance food, shelter, vaccines and clean water.

There is something morally grotesque about this contrast. This is not an argument against wealth, entrepreneurship or technological ambition. It is an argument against a civilisation that has somehow decided that sending a billionaire into space is easier than ensuring a child on Earth has enough to eat.

The defenders of this system will insist that billionaires are not responsible for the world's wars. Fair enough. But responsibility is not confined to pulling a trigger. It also concerns what societies choose to value, reward and tolerate.

We have created an economic culture in which extraordinary accumulation is celebrated as evidence of genius, while humanitarian need is treated as an unfortunate expense. Governments announce vast military budgets with remarkable speed, yet humanitarian appeals are routinely underfunded. The weapons arrive. The food trucks wait.

That is not simply an economic contradiction. It is a political choice. Humanitarianism therefore deserves more than applause. It deserves anger. Anger at governments that invoke international law when convenient and ignore it when inconvenient. Anger at leaders who speak grandly about human dignity while civilians become statistics. Anger at wealthy societies that can mobilise billions for destruction but plead poverty when asked to finance survival.

Most importantly, World Humanitarian Day should remind us that humanitarian workers are not the solution to humanity's failures. They are the people trying to clean up after them.

The ultimate humanitarian achievement would be a world in which fewer people need humanitarian assistance.

Until then, we should honour those who enter the fire. But perhaps we should spend rather less time praising their courage and rather more time asking why we keep setting the world ablaze.

#eBook Dissociative identity disorder by Julia A. Girard

 

Adam woke to the sound of a door creaking. It was faint at first, like the whisper of an old hinge fighting against the weight of silence. His eyes blinked open, adjusting to the dim light of his bedroom.

Shadows stretched across the walls, long and twisted. The room felt strange. As if the air itself had thickened, pressing in on him. A suffocating stillness filled the space, so heavy that it made his breath feel shallow.

His heart was racing, thudding against his chest like something trying to claw its way out. He could almost hear it, a hollow drumbeat pounding in his ears. Sweat pooled at the back of his neck, his skin clammy.

"Not again," Adam whispered, half to himself, half to the darkness that seemed to choke the air around him.

Julia A. Girard is a writer who'd rather be caught dead than serious. Her stories and books are a delightful blend of witty observations, quirky characters, and laugh-out-scary moments that will have you hooked from the first page.

Ovi eBook Publishing 2026

Dissociative identity disorder

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Puppi & Caesar #50 #cartoon by Thanos Kalamidas

 

Another cartoon with a mean and know-all of a bully cat, Puppi and her intellectual, pompous companion categorically-I-know-all, Caesar the squirrel!  

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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.

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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.